Terra Nova

The Tyranny of Emergence: Modernity's Romance of the Game

It's been some time since I haunted the distinguished halls of TN, but after some tumultuous times that got me out of the habit of putting my working papers up on ssrn and pointing to them here (and at my own blog), I do have a piece that I wanted to share (and I'll be cross-posting this to Doubt is an Art, as I do with all game-related stuff). I'm sure my skin has grown thin from all this time away from the rough-and-tumble world of collaborative blogging. Be gentle. ;)

Last year I had the opportunity to give the keynote address in February at the Ray Browne Conference on Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, as well as to participate in a symposium in April convened by the Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity on Modernity and Chance. Both venues seemed apt arenas for developing some ideas about game as a cultural form, one that we could place alongside ritual and bureaucracy in our understanding of institutions and the techniques for control at their disposal. The core question I'm asking is: What might we learn by examining the increasing use of games by modern institutions in the digital age as analogous to their longstanding and effective use of rituals and bureaucracy? 

Social Value

Deep in our underground hollowed-out volcanic lair, ninja scientists have developed an algorithm that I think will have a large impact on both science and commerce. We call it "Social Value."

Social Value is the amount of behavior that one person generates among their friends. An anology might be the ripple on the social pond. Let's say this person goes to see a movie, listens to a song, or plays a game. Now let's say that this person is influential. How much more likely are their friends to go see the movie, hear the song, or play the game?

Each person has a unique amount of influence in their social network, and on each friend. Maybe you are highly influential on Bob, but Steve doesn't care what you do. What the Social Value algorithm does is to add up all of your influence and put it in units we care about--like sessions, time, or dollars.

Fun with mapping

Holy smokes, but someone did a real Mapping test using SimCity and his hometown's traffic. It's not exactly rigid science, but this is the sort of application I've been hoping to see since writing this thing.

"Not OK: 'GET THE FUCKING CAVERN SCUTTER ENERGIES YOU FUCKASSES.'"

Following up on my recent cri d'coeur about the misanthropy of multiplayer gamer culture, I have to say I'm heartened by the diligence of the Guild Wars 2 developers in trying to create a more friendly, less offensive chat culture from the first day onward.

There's a thread at Reddit where the developers have offered to tell anyone who has been suspended why they were suspended or banned. Basically it breaks down into two major causes: first, that the account has been hacked by gold sellers and second, because the player was saying racist, homophobic, or grossly offensive things in public chat. It's an interesting thread just in purely documentary terms, since developers normally maintain a steely silence about bannings and allow players to represent themselves as the innocent victims of a mistake or a vendetta. But there's also a real pleasure to be had in seeing a player put up their character name, ask in all apparent innocence why they were banned, and to read the community representative quoting back to the player what they said in chat.

I get that this is too labor-intensive to keep up indefinitely. But it's a sign of some smart social thinking to at least do it now and hope to "seed" the emergent culture of the game with a lighter, more inclusive feeling.

My Cup Runneth Over

Holy hellions, Batman, 2012 is off with a bang.

Too bad about SWTOR and the LEGO Universe, but Guild Wars 2 might actually ship this year, and there are some other exciting things brewing.  Tera Online might emerge unscathed from its legal machinations and make its promised launch date of May 2012.  Blizzard is making a 'casual' MMO (with product placements)...

But here's what I'm waiting for...

The Secret World (April 2012) - This one is exciting even among the 'I'm not an MMO person' crowd.  To me, it's like the game I've been waiting for.  Here's why:

• The lore is wide-ranging and accessible, if you're one of those people who has paid attention to mystery schools, secret societies, fairy tales, monsters, alien conspiracies, black ops, and the like.  Basically 'everything is true' in a rich 'what if?' environment.  Tied into history, popular culture, etc. 
• The game is set in the modern-day world, and takes advantage of all the amazing beauty of this planet, its cities and its citizens.  The details and how they are leveraged are really incredible-looking.
• There are threee factions - the Templars (England), the Illuminati (New York)and the Dragons (Seoul).  The initial experiences are very different depending on the chosen location.
• Visually STUNNING, based on the Dreamworld engine used for Age of Conan.  Feels like a quantum leap.
• The game takes an alternate reality (ARG) approach by embedding the game with puzzles that must be solved via research online.  Building information literacy, of course, and mimicking the skill development that all we digital denizens need. (BTW, here is a podcast I did recently on this topic...)
• Character classes are thrown away in favor of a flexible abilities system.  It works a bit like a card-based game like Magic: the Gathering - the player has the option of selecting 7 active and 7 passive abilities and can re-organize them at will.  There are also templates that allow the player to map abilities toward certain configurations (like the Monk, a healing/magic using hybrid).  But the player is never locked in.  So if I want to tank today and heal tomorrow, I can do that with the same character.
• The creation of characters seems to have some of the fun aspects of creation in games like City of Heroes/City of Villains.  Many of the characters portrayed in the trailers are female, too, and cute/powerful without the mega boobage and bare assed armor we progressive women balk about.  Clothing is customizable and stat free, but your abilities also progress with equipment and items.
• Players affect the environments via their actions.
• There are various mechanisms for rallying players into group pursuits.
• Quests involve exploration of the world to uncover what needs to be done, and NPCs lead players through the locations.
• The developers (Massively) are based in Norway and were also responsible for Anarchy Online and the Age of Conan.  The interviews make it clear that this game has been really well thought out.
• This one is for Ted - the algorithms for NPCs and monsters are based on population mechanics rather than respawning rules.  I'm not sure how that's going to work out, but it sounds very interesting.
• The learning curve is well managed with in situ introductions to the game mechanics, lore and skills.
• PvP is well supported.  Guilds are called 'cabals'.  Encounters involve all 3 factions.
• Quality writing and voice acting!  Cut scenes that I might actually watch!  Clever/funny dialogue! OMG!

Want more?  Check out the initial announcements at PAX 2009, or more recent trailers and interviews.  Register for the beta, if you haven't already.  Watch out for the government.

Also, don't forget that DiGRA (the Digital Games Research Association) is holding its semi annual conference in Tampere, Finland (where all the very cool kids are).  They need papers and reviewers, so get in touch!

We moved the lines online

 

In 2004 (yes we’ve been around a long-ass time), I wrote Bah, Humbug & Digital Distribution, talking about the tensions between getting physical and virtual gifts. I’m yet to see a break down of the stats from Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) but I’m guessing the physical : virtual is going to break new ground. 

Back on ’04 I was musing about the impact of virtual gifts on xmas – I still do, how many of you bought someone a dead-tree-book rather than a kindle edition so you could give someone an object (do they sell some kind of token you can give, like a card with a code on it, if not why not?)? 

The ritual I’d either forgotten about or something that was not such an ‘event’ in ’04 was the midnight launch. As the guys (and they all seem to be guys) on pod casts such as Mos Eisley Radio were lamenting many game stores did not have a midnight release event for SWTOR, which as the people are starting to note is a gamer ritual that some of the hard-core are starting to miss. 

There are multiple reason for why midnight release was not a big thing in the case of SWTOR: Digital Download / Amazon et al pre-ordering; but possible most of all the phased early entry process that was used. There are god management reasons for having phased entry, though for those of us that sat in popcap queue for a long time last week load balancing did not go perfectly (though possibly as well as it could). But, there did seem to be a lack of an event, a communal moment for many players – though as podcasters have noted some people shifted from standing in line to waiting in server queues on vent with their buddies – we always find a way to be together I guess. 

May the force be with you^TM….

Where Are All the Sex Games?

Ha, got your attention, eh? But this is actually an important topic, of the 'reality is broken' variety. Like the fact that we're obsessed over sexting and other digital phenomena related to sex, yet we have done little to improve sex education in this country. In fact, we have vilified and cut funding to Planned Parenthood and other organizations that save people's lives by providing them critical information that affects them physically, emotionally, spiritually. I ranted about this on Quora recently:

Sexting isn't the issue. The lack of good, ongoing and honest sex education and support (from elementary school) is. I personally don't care what kids do in this regard, as long as they are well-informed and not succumbing to pressure from peers or romantic partners. And obviously this behavior is probably not appropriate in classrooms.

As an anthropologist, I will tell you that sex play in early pubescence and later is very, very normal, and in some cultures, very well tolerated with positive effect. We are extremely backwards in our proclivity to bury our heads in the sands.

I do, however, think all kids need to be educated on the potential ramifications of having a digital trail of activity like this, and what it can mean in terms of reputation (immediately) and career later. It's outrageous that kids learn most of what they know about sex from each other, tv/movies and the Internet. This leaves gaping holes in their knowledge and their judgment about something that can affect their lives in such profound ways, and can even lead to illness and death.

I've been thinking for some time that games could play an important role in helping to eliminate a lot of the misinformation that is spread among kids and teens. Typically this sort of thing is handled a la the serious game: take some existing curriculum - the sort of thing you'd see in a high school sex ed class (if a school is lucky enough to have it). 'Chocolate-covered broccoli'. Seldom about the realities of sex and the social and emotional contexts that surround it. And boring.

One of my favorite sites is Ask Alice, a community effort from Columbia University that provides a forum for kids and teens to ask any question about sex, drugs, what have you, and get a truthful and reasonable answer. I think it's an incredible resource, but most people don't seem to know about it. So where are people getting their sexual educations?

I was really inspired by a TED Talk a lovely woman by the name of Cindy Gallop gave not long ago. You should watch it yourself, otherwise I might ruin it, but I will tell you that she makes some rather stunning points about how porn culture has distorted the way people think about sex. Clearly we need to figure out some better ways to communicate all of this, aside from ignoring the groundswell of sexual activity that is incredibly normal for our species.

There's rather a dearth of recreational, digital sex games, a fact that surprises me given the proclivity of clever porn mongers who hawk every kind of sex ware imaginable. Have throughout history, using any available technology. It's well established, for instance, that early photography and film thrived on sexual innovations. And we certainly spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of cybersex back in the day, when everything digital was a novelty. Are we jaded? Or recession economics?

Well, it seems like a business opportunity to me. They appear to sell plenty of books and board games in those novelty sex shops. People could certainly use some variety in their sex lives. Yet the ecosystem somehow manages to eschew innovation, just like the video game industry. Microsoft, for instance, is blocking sexual uses of their Kinect device, citing 'unintended puposes' (imagine a mash-up of a Kinect device and teledildonics - long distance love, FTW!). I did find A-Chat , but it seems like a graphics enhanced chat room app, and that's boring, too... I suppose there's the seedy underbelly that is Second Life's sex subculture, but it seems, well, seedy. And not terribly educational. But if people are into it, great. Let's just have some other options.

Most sex and videogames conjecture has been about either glorifying or bastardizing sexual content. There are few balanced perspectives: Brenda Braithwaite's work is very insightful, and Bonnie Ruberg has made quite a few contibutions, too. That's sort of not the point I'm trying to make, though. Sure, we could be more mature about sex and sexual imagery in games. But I sort of don't care about that stuff. I want us to ask, yet again, how can this incredible platform for persuasion be used for the greater good? How can we inform people, encourage safe play and experimentation... delight with escapism, encourage fantasy and role-playing... do all the things that we know video games are so good for?

So, brilliant Terra Novans... what games would you design to solve this problem?

CODE: Frankenworld

 From the Ultima Online Is Everywhere Department, we have Call of Duty Elite. Word of this came out on Monday and I've been mulling it over. It's a console shooter! That's just Xbox. It's got a fee! Smells like UO. Old UO, in fact; that part of the market seems to be going Free to Play. (On the other hand, Rift and World of Warcraft are doing well with subscriptions.) Anyways, back to CODE: You can form groups! Again, that's a UO thing. You can connect to people and post and share! That's Facebook.

CODE is a Console-MMOG-Facebook mashup: a Frankenworld.

Gamification II: Rate-a-Terrorist

What distances the true terrorist from some wannabe? His forum posts, of course. And how is that to be measured? With forum Likes, of course. With gamified terror forum rankings, the best of the best can get leaderboarded and waterboarded! Gamification >> all! (Thanks to student Peter Winland for the tip.)

Gamification

Nick, your wish is granted. Gamification!

What is it? The effort to remold standard practices, mostly in business and learning, as games. Earlier, I was a supporter. Now I am not sure at all.There's a lot of strength in the concept but there will be major misunderstandings too.

My gamified syllabi in classes, for exampled, have bombed. Students *really* don't want their grades determined by MMORPG mechanicsms. That's because one of the essential conditions of XP acquisition - that you can try and try again indefinitely - are missing in a classroom. In teaching, time is limited. So are mob pulls; you can't have as many shots at challenges as you want. In a classroom, you have a few challenges, time runs out, and somebody - me - has to judge how you did. Also, there are not enough opportunities for loose, flowing grouping; every teamwork exercise in a class is forced-grouping which, we've learned, people hate. Add to that the fact that ultimately the class is serious and not play. This means no one can say "settle down, it's just a game." And therefore, they DON'T settle down. They get almost homicidal when another team-mate screws up their grade.

I am not sure this means that the classroom cannot be gamified. To the contrary, I've argued to myself that the classroom already IS gamified. The standard syllabus has survived endless threats and adaptations, and there it is. Do projects, take tests, participate in class, receive an individual score relative to an absolute standard. Maybe that's just the best possible game under the circumstances.

If true, the perception that the classroom is already the best of all possible games implies problems for the Gamification Movement.

Terra Nova Antiqua Bona

After a careful, mature, scholarly, 3-minute discussion interrupted by a YouTube video of an electric rabbit, the founders of Terra Nova would like to announce nothing.

You see, an issue came up. It was said that virtual worlds are dead, and TN, as the blog of virtual worlds, has lost its way. It must therefore focus on something more current. Games, social media, Lady Gaga - something. 

However, casual examination - it's the only kind we know - reveals quite clearly that virtual worlds have not died but rather have undergone a powerful and gushy sporogenesis. When the world stepped on MUD, it went Poof! And now its children are everywhere.

Birth is messy and Terra Nova has best served its purposes by getting its hands dirty. It's most fun for us, and least work, when we can write about things we don't understand at all. Sure, it's a big category, but we aim high. Like, who understands Farmville. Really. And Twitter - who knew chat would turn into that? Our puzzlers are sore just thinking about it. Sore in a good way.

Therefore why should we avoid such subjects just because we are "supposed" to talk only about things that look, today, like World of Warcraft looked in 2004? If folks think that's what Terra Nova is about, we need to correct that misunderstanding. TN has always tried to live on the frontal messy edge of online social media gaming stuff. That has not changed.

Reflecting on our lack of innovation, therefore, we offer the following Policy Statement (tm):

"It has come to our attention that some in the Terra Nova community have been laboring under the misapprehension that there is a meaningful ontological distinction between, say, Second Life and FarmVille. We regret the confusion and would like to clarify that discussion here is and always has been open to any topic related to digitally mediated spaces dedicated primarily to forms of social play, generously defined."

There, we said it.

Now, at some point, when we decide to do some work on the blog, we will clean out the sidebars. A lot of old information there. We'll also rewrite the About page to reflect our failure to become a blog dedicated to the virtual worlds of 2004. And we will be getting to that bit of administrative work soon. Right around noon the day after tomorrow; or next week. Actually, we'll get back to you on it. But soon! Very soon!

BioWare and the "Straight Male Gamer"

Some game forum threads are destined to become classics, enshrined in the annals of epic winningness. That's the case, I think, for the recent BioWare thread on the topic of the "straight male gamer."

The OP in the thread (who had apparently posted on this topic several times, in hopes that he would receive support for his views), was voicing his outrage over the fact that Dragon Age 2 allows romance to occur between any two players, rather than enforcing heterosexual norms. The centerpiece of his argument is that "straight male gamers" make up the vast majority of players, and their needs should therefore dictate the game's design.

The Meaning of Play

I humbly propose a new theory of what play is....

[edit 28 Feb 11: or do I...?]

Moral Combat

Monica Potts argues in the American Prospect (for those of who who don't know, it's a left-of-center magazine) that liberals who play video games go along with the conservative modes  of play within them. (For the purposes of this discussion, the word "liberal" will refer to everything from social democrats to greens to progressives, while those who desire limited government will be called libertarians).

Research by Jonathan Haidt is the best thing yet offered on the difference between liberal and conservative thinking. Haidt's work suggests there are five core dimensions of moral reasoning: Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Conservatives register concern about all five. Liberals care much less about the last three. Flashpoints of liberal/conservative conflict would therefore be things in the last three categories, such as: Having a Don't Mess With Texas Bumpersticker (Loyalty), Doing What the Police Officer Says Just Because He's a Police Officer (Authority), and Sing the National Anthem in a Traditional Way (Purity).

Ms. Potts touches on various experiences in games like the Sims and casually refers to some play modes as conservative and others as liberal. She also tends to view most of videogame play as essentially conservative, with a few liberal exceptions. She is concerned that she is not disgusted by, and actually enjoys, some of the conservative play modes.

Are there liberal and conservative moments in games? Does one or the other type predominate? Or are games an inkblot, much like mainstream media, which is criticized by all sides for being biased the other way?

Or, consider the premise that games are conservative. Why would that be? Are game developers generally a conservative bunch?

Finally, why couldn't you play any game in a way that suits your moral inklings? Are the incentives in games strong enough to lure people into acting contrary to their moral commitments?

Ruberg on Sex as a Game

Our friend Bonnie Ruberg has sent a paper composed during her expedition to the Comp Lit program at Berkeley. The topic: Sex in Second Life as a game. The report arrived by packet boat yesterday and may be collected at this wharf. Enjoy!

Madness? Or Sparta?

WSJ reports this morning that Zynga is worth $7b. Is it?

Games, Narratives, Marketing

Multiplayer gaming is collaborative storytelling. That makes it hard to be an author. How to you induce the special experiences you want the Other to have? Sometimes you have to massage her behavior. Gee - if you knew how to use game tools to massage behavior in the service of nice aesthetic experiences, you could probably massage behavior toward other ends too (so long as nice aesthetic experiences went along in the baggage car). Yes!

For example, you could use D&D storytelling methods to sell stuff.

GLS Conference 7.0 Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS
Games+Learning+Society Conference 7.0
http://glsconference.org
June 15-17, 2011 Madison, WI

Another winter, another reason to dream about talking games and learning while sitting on the Terrace at UW Madison and enjoying the lake view. The GLS conference there every summer has always been one of the few conferences in this arena that "gets it," putting gaming experiences alongside real "fireside" discussions, stupendous keynotes, and great panels (and more!). Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and their GLS students will somehow do it again. I've put the full call for papers after the jump.

People play online

…they play with each other. Peer-to-peer. Person-to-Person.

To some, this is a revelation. But we will return to that.

First, back to me…

Giving Up the Fantasy

A major newspaper just reported on the sad moment when Bill Holcomb finally had to leave his fantasy world behind. Bill, in his 70s, had spent better than 20 years in a virtual world and finally got too old to keep it up. He had to retire. He had to step back out into reality and make the transition from Hero to Everyman. He had to experience The Return from the Hero's Journey. It's what the enemies of games wish we would all do, once and for all. Give up on the dream, stop living in a pretend world where we are somehow special and significant and capable of great things. Return to the real world, trudge through the day like everyone else; limit encounters with the heroic to the TV. Watch it, we are told, but don't live it. Look, don't breathe.

Mr. Holcomb's virtual world was a baseball fantasy camp. He was pretending to be a shortstop, not a sorceror. Interestingly, the paper's treatment was poignant and sympathetic rather than dismissive and critical. They didn't say he wasted his time or his money. They didn't insist that he was crazy for paying real money for a virtual experience.

It's not a little contrast. Fantasy Football has 18 million players. Playing with virtual football players is not subject to social criticism, while playing with virtual warriors is.

Gamification

You remember Jesse Schell's TED talk about games invading real life, and Lee Sheldon's Quest-driven syllabus. A new startup aims to help anyone import game mechanics into any kind of motivational situation.They call it "gamification" and can be found at Gamify.com. It's a strategy operating on the border between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Dangerous territory, filled with risks and treasures. Expert guides to it, though, will be in high demand.

(Disclosure: Nada. Don't know these folks from Adam.)

World of Warcraft is just numbers

Of course, we kind of knew that already, but Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation touches on WoW's number-centric play brilliantly.

I've been playing Cataclysm almost every day since it's release last month (minus some traveling days). At first, the abundance of "new" kept me going for a long while. Now that I've hit a little slump, waiting for the guild to get enough toons to start raiding, I'm in that part of the cyle where I reflect on the play a little and wonder why I was so sucked in. I think for me it was seeing everything there is to see, flying around in (new) Azeroth, leveling-up in the new zones, seeing the new dungeons, etc. I suppose I like exploring (though, I'm not an explorer, as I don't like typifying players; rather prefer typifying behavior).

But now that I've done that, what do I have to fall back on? Just numbers and the maximizing thereof? I sometimes think that every design decision in the last 5 years was purposefully done to narrow legitimate play, not just encouraging number play but normalizing it. I started on an RP server way back when, yet these days all I seem to be doing is theorycrafting (or, more precisely, consuming theorycraft). It makes me uncomfortable.

Even more uncomfortable is the thought that maybe the reason why no one seems to be able to compete with WoW is because they don't focus on number crunching as much... Is that true?

 

Prediction Time Again

It's that time again... the persistent rush at the beginning of each new cycle of time to reflect and predict. Well, we like that sort of thing around here. Sometimes we're right, sometimes wrong. But we're always trying to draw out our inner oracles...

My 2011 (and onward) predictions:
- our small people will continue to overrun our Facebook accounts as  they fiend for more and more digital bling, especially since Facebook apparently doesn't let kids under 13 have their own accounts.  I will continue to  shell out the credit card for $10 of 'presents' for my kid's best gamer  friends.  Perhaps this economic boom will fuel the 'maybe we will survive this media change!' mentality.
- the fantasy MMO reaches saturation levels except for the truly committed.  This is not a lore problem, but a pattern matching one. Expect regeneration in 5-10 years or when the new LOTR movie comes out. Oh wait.  Guild Wars 2.  Does war count as fantasy?
- more 'brand-affirming' virtual worlds.  Some might be good.
- more alternative/augmented reality and transmedia MMOs (mobile plus tv plus Kinect plus books plus movies plus 3D-everything).  More and more exodus.
- more sci fi, speculative fiction, near term possibility exploration (simulation, as predicted by Ted eons ago)
- Is the MMO inside out yet? More and more I find myself gaming with people like my ex mother-in-law (lovely woman, not a gamer of any description tho!)
- More worlds, fewer games? (does Facebook count as a world?)
- The phrase 'casual gaming' will die as everyone begins to game, casually and otherwise.  Already so in South Korea (I find it useful to consider parts of Asia as possible reflections of our future(s)).
- The gaming industry will more fully begin to fund and rely on research.
- Singularity?

There are far too many of my interests resurrected in this post.  Please add  your favorite memes and join me in documenting our predictions! (how will we otherwise remember?)

Jared Loughner: MUD Maniac

The Wall Street Journal reports that the rampage killer Jared Loughner was a gamer. As usual? Recall Mr. Cho, whose killing of Hokies was followed immediately by angry denunciations of the game industry for programming him thusly. It turns out that the only game in his troubled mind was Sonic the Hedgehog. I guess Sonic only seems to be a cuddly rodent; he's actually the vehicle for a secret code that turns ordinary people into frenzied savages.

Loughner's preferred game was a MUD called Earth Empires. Aha! Now we get to the root of things! Richard Bartle, what insidious mind-altering snippet of code did you hide in MUD1 that has spread across the gaming industry and caused all these murders? Come clean, you rogue hacker!

On a serious note, it appears that Mr. Loughner's MUD community was more supportive and helpful to him than the world at large. He got kicked out of jobs and school, but one gets the impression from WSJ's report that EE forum readers never stopped trying to engage with him or give him advice. Certainly - and this is critical - none of the gamers encouraged him in his ravings.

SE vs. AE

While wandering through Mass Effect 2, I was struck with the vitality of the world. Circa 2004, the main attraction of a multiplayer environment relative to single player worlds was that single player worlds felt dead. Multiplayer, on the other hand, had vitality but also the annoyances of dealing with other people and their inevitable failure to be perfect friends, or perfect foils.That problem can be reduced by Social Engineering (SE): Designers use policy (sometimes enforced by code) to optimize an individual's experience when dealing with others. Judging from ME2, the problem of dead single-player worlds can be addressed successfully using a suite of tools involving digital storytelling, emotive animations, deep conversation scripts, and a strong responsiveness of the emotive/relational space of characters to the protagonist's actions. Altogether, let's call this bag of tricks "Artificial Emotion" or AE. It's not a new term, indeed Professor Turkle has paved the way here, as before.

As the market for fantasy evolves, these two approaches to improving happiness seem to be facing off.

A Kinected World

Call me a fan girl, but I think a little revolution snuck up on us while we weren’t looking.

[nepotism alert: I do work at Microsoft, but not currently in games. However I have been hearing about Kinect for a long time, under the codename Project Natal, whispered around the usability labs with a reverance usually limited to the more deserving nirvana or mecca.]

Moving your body instead of your controller(s) creates a range of viscera that surely denote a million possible magic circles. Sure Wii paved the way and some may continue to like that experience, but this is true evolution. The controller-less interface liberates developers to entertain any possibility for interaction. Select the best aspects, refine them, imagine what’s possible, and what people want that they don’t even know they want.

I have been watching my kid play since digital Santa delivered the magic device: dancing, delighted, shouting AWESOME!! repeatedly, enchanted by the physical experiences enabled by a small black bar, with wonder shouting ‘Mommy, I can fly!!’, nurturing pets and programming hamsters to compliment her in the way she loves. Always, always MOVING! ‘You can do two players and you don’t have to select anything, the second person can just jump right in!’, she crows. Techno-ambivalent auntie is even awed as they play dodgeball with one person controlling legs and another controls arms.

I'm enchanted in a somewhat uncustomary way:  gamer-me, parent-me, vain-me (unboring exercise!), citizen-me and educator-me. We’re living in the future, people.

And now we have it, a Kinected WoW. Next time you see me: 30 pounds lighter.

This Christmas, Protect Your Loved One From Games

Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal offers ten reasons why he does NOT want an iPad for Christmas. Reason number 7: The games. Writes Arends:

"Yes, they're great. But that's the problem. Computer games are as addictive as cigarettes. And this is a habit everyone is taking up, not quitting. This is why I dumped my iPod Touch. Am I alone? Maybe. But I don't think so. I know lots of people with horror stories about addiction to immersive games. Someone I know—now, as it happens, a British member of parliament—once sat down to play Civilization, a role-playing game, on a PC one Saturday evening and didn't finish until three o'clock ... Thursday morning. (He stopped when he ran out of cigarettes.) And that was on an old PC. Games on the iPad are more intense than ever. A friend recently showed me some of the serious news apps on his iPad. I noticed that to get to them he first had to "wave" us past several screens of games. Is he really using his iPad to read that article about the Indonesian economy, or is he playing Angry Birds? Hmmm. You make the call."

Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds

I have just posted a (rough) draft of my latest paper, entitled Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds to SSRN.  Virtual worlds make such great research testbeds precisely because people act in a lot of ways (especially economic ways) as if the virtual world were real.  But that complicates ethical research design: you can't engage in activities that threaten the subject's digital property or community, for example.  This raises human subjects research issues that a lot of Institutional Review Boards may not immediately take into consideration.  Here's the abstract -- but the important part is that this is still a work-in-progress (it's coming out in a symposium issue of the U.C. Irvine Law Review next year), and I would love comments or suggestions.  Abstract after the leap.

Symbols in Virtual Worlds

Commenter Dave wrote to say that he's interested in a discussion about Call of Duty's policies toward user-created images.

Quoth Dave:

Recently a gamer asked a CoD developer if using a swastika as an emblem ingame would be ok. The developer said no and it would result in a ban.

Original question via Twitter; recent coverage; blog post by the developer.

Will it ever be possible to clearly separate the 'real world' from the virtual or will we always carry baggage over from one into the other? Will a red rising sun always mean Japanese imperialism to Chinese gamers?

End Quote

Interesting stuff. Thoughts?

CFP: Game Behind the Game: April 8-9, 2011

The School of Communication and Information at Rutgers is planning a major conference to be held April 8-9, 2011.  The conference will cover the cultural, business, legal, and artistic aspects of the videogame and virtual worlds industries -- pretty much everything practical and academic about gaming.  If you'd like to spend a couple of days conversing with other folks who think seriously about gamers and the video game industry, please consider submitting to the Call for Papers, which can be found here: http://bit.ly/gbgcall  (Deadline for 500-word abstract = Dec. 15th.)

For more information about the conference see this link:  http://bit.ly/gamebehindgame

More details about the sorts of topics we're looking to explore below the fold:

An Exodus Recession?

The economy continues to move slowly and economists seem as uncertain as ever about the causes and what to do. Months ago, I began to wonder – could this possibly be the first “exodus recession”? In my first book I sketched out the idea. Suppose economic activity moves from the real world into the virtual world. Human happiness is unaffected or even goes up, however, the goods that produce the happiness are now produced and consumed in a virtual environment rather than the real one. Measurements of economic activity, being all based in the real economy, would begin to show weakness. I argued that contemporary political and economic control systems do not tolerate much weakness, thus, there might well be some sort of crisis in the real world, for no good reason, simply because production and consumption was going “off the books” and into virtual environments. One term for this would be an "exodus recession" - an economic downturn caused by the movement of human attention and energy into virtual environments.

Are we in an exodus recession right now?

A dissertation distilled into a single blog post /cry

Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to share my research with you. Hopefully, this post isn’t a tl;dr moment for you.

I recently defended my dissertation at the University of Washington College of Education, and, as you can guess from this post on Terra Nova, it was on learning in MMOGs. Specifically, I looked at the change in raiding practice of a group of World of Warcraft players as I played alongside them for 10 months. Of particular note, my data is from the early days of WoW, spanning the life and death of a Molten Core (and later BWL and AQ40) group that came together out of a multi-guild alliance. We were on a role-play server, which I think is important to note, given the group’s shared values and goals of hanging out and having fun over and beyond itemization and progression. That said, eventually, some players did become more loot focused over time, and the fragmentation of individual motivations and group values definitely contributed to its eventual dissolution. Also of particular note, when my raid group started, theorycrafting was still a budding practice, and we did not have access to threat meters and other popular third-party add-ons that today’s WoW raiding relies on. In fact, a major section of my dissertation chronicles the change in the various material and other resources that were assembled for raiding once the first threat meter came out in Spring 2006.

Shocking, Interesting, True.

The other day, a reporter asked me whether video games are art, and thus the waves of Roger Ebert's lately weakly retracted opinion to the contrary crash lap upon our shores. If Roger Ebert can offer a strong opinion just for the heck of it, so can we! So let's dive in.

Here's my take: Good art is shocking, interesting and true.

Shocking: It takes you out of your normal mode of thinking. It forces consideration and reflection. 

Interesting: It draws you in. You find yourself unable or unwilling to ignore it.

True: It accords with a proper understanding of the human condition. It pierces the shell of your biases and immaturities, allowing you to come upon thoughts that are neither lies nor myths but rather subtle and profound insights. 

Are video games capable of being shocking, interesting, and true?

Step into my Neverland

On IGN, an announcement for the Michael Jackson MMO we've all been waiting for: Planet Michael.  The announcer 'couldn't stop laughing'.  No violence.  You win using 'the power of dance'.  Using your keyboard, not your actual body. Free to play. Virtual items will be available for 'real-world currency'. Charitable contributions enabled. 

From the press release:

Planet Michael will be an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael’s music, his life and the global issues that concerned him. Entire continents will be created that will celebrate Michael’s unique genius in a way that underscores his place as the greatest artist of all time. Michael’s longtime fans will feel at home as they find themselves in places that seem familiar and yet unknown at the same time, and new generations will discover and experience Michael’s life in a way never before imagined. At its core, Planet Michael is a massive social gaming experience that will allow everyone, from the hardcore fan to the novice, to connect and engage in collaborative in-game activities with people worldwide.

Though my initial inclination was to disparage, maybe this could work... MMO universes drawn from the world-views of famous individuals.  Elvis-verse?  BeatlesWorld? DalaiLamaUniverse?  PicassoPlanet?   LadyGagaLand!  I'm impressed that Planet Michael's mechanics are designed to uphold his pacifist leaning and philanthropic efforts, and I can imagine that forays into his imaginings are ripe with possibility <chortle>.

I predict the vanity MMO will become a trend, and as much as I hate to say it, could be the break-through-to-the-mainstream (the Second Life commercial push all over again).  What do you all think?  Will we see the Housewives of Beverly Hills obsessed with their first virtual worlds?

An MMO Manifesto from the Guild Wars 2 Team

^{Disclaimer: I confess to being a fangirl of NCSoft, publishers of City of Heroes, which I studied  for about 5 years.  They have also published the Lineages, the original Guild Wars and Aion.}

So...

The intrepid warriors from NCSoft and ArenaNet are presaging the pre-holiday beta launch of Guild Wars 2 with a declaration of independent thinking. More on that in a sec.

First off, let's review its pre-cursor, the original Guild Wars. What made it obsession-worthy?

- accessible to the 'casual', newbie MMO gamer.
- highly instanced combat (Sir Richard cringed).
- grouping that includes NPC mercenaries.
- very beautiful emotes like the Monk's dance.  Amazing landscapes, architecture, everything.
- alternative play modes allowing high-level play for the low-level n00b.
- observer mode: enjoy the gank gladiator-style, you emerge un-scathed.
- 'no loot stealing, spawn camping, and endless travel'.
- guild capes  (I confess to leaving guilds if they had ugly designs that didn't match my outfits.  How shallow of me!)

I have more than a few opinions about what an exciting, 21st century MMO might encompass.  Happy to say it appears that true evolution is in the works.  Deviations/expansions of established MMO conventions in Guild Wars 2:

- Doing away with the grind.  Not all will agree this is a good thing, but as my kid says, there is nothing worse than a videogame that is both 'hard and BORING'.
- New character classes (professions) like the Ranger.
- Personalized story-lines.  NPCs remember you.  You are not on the exact same quest path as everyone else, with the same goals, outfits, spells, items, etc. at the same levels.
- Cause and effect prevail, personal agency is paramount.  Changes you effect on the environment persist.
- Dynamic events, a mechanic that has worked very well for CoX.
- PvP in non-zoned, non-instanced areas.  Huge-scale world vs world combat events.
- Variations on healing and death rituals.

And for the techno-geeky among you, it's all being built on a new physics engine, Havok,  that allows the designers and developers to more fully realize their conceptual vision:

We're creating a world, and what's the point of exploring a world if there isn't the awe and wonder, you know? We try to create those moments of awe and wonder. - Jeff Grubb, ArenaNet

For those of you who don't readily embrace change, Guild Wars servers will continue running, and an ongoing free trial is on offer.

Any predictions on the effect on social dynamics, innovations that are likely to stick, etc?  Other games trying new things? My kid, for instance, is obsessed with Wizards 101, a pay-for-stuff-the-kid-MUST-have MMO that creates accessibility and safety for the semi-literate aspiring gamer.

I think things are about to get very exciting in Videogame Land. To over-use an over-used term, epic!

More on GW2:

• The official website.
• Wikipedia is chock-full of up-to-the-minute details.
• Guild Wars 2 Community Hub (wiki, blog, video - share, share, share! - talk to devs and they will listen!)
• The art of Guild Wars 2, in coffee-table-book-format. (when you can't stand to look at your computer anymore)
• A playable demo of the game is available at Gamescom 2010 (August 19 until August 22, 2010). Another playable demo will be available at PAX, from September 3-5.

Plants v. Zombies

My house, like many others, has been invaded by this little gem of a game that sets life against unlife. Though small and simple, the game upends stereotypes and provokes thought.

Like many good games, PvZ is a violent game. Massively violent. Incredibly destructive. Plants get eaten alive, crushed, kidnapped. The undead get frozen, burned, shot, eaten, exploded, pierced. As the Zombies die, they lose their limbs and then their heads. Yet the game seems completely appropriate for kids. Why?

Though single-player, PvZ is a social game. Yesterday, there were four boys at my house, age 4-8, all crowded around the computer, taking turns at PvZ. When the player unleashed a killer move, they all screamed and jumped for joy. "Jalapeno!!!!" Games are not like TV. If I had them watch a movie, they would slump down quietly on the couch, like, well, like zombies.

PvZ instantiates a fantasy world. Last week, after adults pried the boys away from the computer, said boys invented a RL PvZ game, where one was a Zombie, two were Pea Shooters, and one was the Jalapeno. 

Like many good games, PvZ makes a gendered statement. All the Zombies are male. Most of the plants are male. Some female plants are helper-types, such as the Marigold that creates money. Others, though, are fighters, such as Cactus. Sunflower is the star of the game, taking the lead role in the music video during the credits. She is the main source of power on the side of Life.

PvZ has a dual-currency economy. One currency is Suns, produced by Sunflower (and to a lesser extent, Sunshroom). You use Suns to buy new plants. Coins also appear, dropped at first by Zombies and as level rewards, later by Marigold. Coins are used to buy power-ups between levels. 

PvZ has a coherent ethos that is symbolically consistent with reality. Animated corpses are a universal evil, and living things are a universal good, in RL as in PvZ. RL agriculture is indeed a positive feedback loop, and it does indeed require sun. In RL as in PvZ, disparate weak elements can be combined into powerful teams. The game makes sense.

PvZ is a fine tool for teaching tactical thought. It has been fascinating watching my 4-year-old gradually learn to put tank-like Wallnut by the Zombie entrance points, to hold them at bay, while glass-jawed Pea Shooter plucks away from the middle. At the rear, Sunflower, important but militarily useless, pumps out her sustaining Sun power, which is then used to replace fallen Pea Shooters and Wallnuts. Mind, I didn't teach him any of this. He started with Wallnuts in the back to protect his house, too few Sunflowers, and Pea Shooters up front. The game taught him that the pieces had to be put together in a different way.

If I had to choose a poster child for interactive entertainment, PvZ would be it.

From Winter to Crazy Spring

It's April 1!  But this isn't an April Fool's post (though there are plenty around).  It's April, so it's Spring!  Literally and metaphorically we seem to have come through a long hard winter.  At the end of 2007 here on TN I wrote about the possibility of a virtual world winter, and Bruce Damer wrote similarly in 2008.  Since then there have been some hard times, as well as a huge amount of growth in online games -- just not so much in virtual worlds or traditional MMOGs.  In that area World of Warcraft continues to dominate, while other major efforts struggle and dwindle.

Over on my blog I've been posting more frequently recently, including some thoughts on the end of this virtual world winter -- punctuated by the demise of three different and significant virtual world efforts.  My conclusion is that yes, we've been through a tough winter, and now it's coming to an end -- but the new growth blooming all around us isn't perhaps quite what many of us, steeped in prior generations of virtual worlds, would have expected.  

We're certainly seeing unprecedented growth in online games, though many of these remain fairly primitive (and early examples were sometimes ethically questionable).  I don't believe we're going to return to the days of huge multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollar-budgets any time soon (though they aren't all gone yet), or to the all-inclusive all-immersive MMOGs and VWs that many here have come to know, love, research, and even defend vociferously.  

I believe instead that this new generation brings with it new forms of growth, just as MMOGs and VWs were once new.  These new games and proto-worlds are primitive just as many early MMOs were, but are also developing in fascinating ways, from both economic and psychological perspectives.

Welcome to Spring.

It's 2010! Let's predict!

• What's in the pipeline?
• What are the major trends in MMOs and virtual worlds?
• When's the Star Trek MMO coming out?
• Who will be TN's next contributing author?
• What conferences will rock?

This is your chance to give TN all of your opinions, so please do!

Prior crystal ball gazing:

2004 Predictions...
2006 Predictions...
2007 Predictions...

Greenland Open Beta

A main goal of the synthetic worlds initiative at Indiana University is to develop large games as research environments. To test some ideas, we have prepared a browser-based game of kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the stone age. The world is called Greenland and it enters open beta today. We invite those interested in such things to help us by testing the environment and contributing reactions and criticism to the forums.

To enter Greenland, go to http://greenlandgame.com/ and choose the Mercator server (the other two servers are closed for internal testing).You will need a code to register for the server; it is GLOPENACCESS. 

If you have questions or problems, please contact our community manager Matt Falk at [email protected].

Thank you.

AI and society

Designer Dave Rickey (whose credits include EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and now Wish) notes that increasing bandwidth makes deeper AI available in large social games. Up to now, AI basically just decided whether to fight the player and then how to fight badly enough to lose, over and over. And over. Other NPC actions were scripted: "Take this bottle to my sick cousin and return for a reward." Rickey urges designers to re-think their inattention to AI. That got me excited about Wish as a game.

Perhaps the future of AI in these worlds will be a 'massively social AI' that involves the users in dynamic relationships among the NPCs. Extensive AI can create events that generate emotional investment: a spouse is seduced, a child abducted, a land ravaged. It could also create the possibility of reward and resolution, by yielding to the user in the right way, at the right times. And a massively social AI could create a level of collective immersion that validates these emotions and makes them real. By making a large number of people feel that these events are meaningful, the AI can make its emotional gifts that much more credible: As a user, I am happy not only because this robot says I did well, but also because other players - real humans - attest that what I did was hard and also valuable. Ultimately, a social AI could create a home-like atmosphere: a group of people who know very much about me, who know what a hero I am, who call on me for help, and who cheer when I return.