Terra Nova

Hell Is Other Gamers (And Some Games)

(x-posted to Easily Distracted) Game developers talking about "culture" are often deeply frustrating. Either they are overly credulous about how design directly and symmetrically can create a particular set of cultural practices and outlook within a game, as my friend Thomas Malaby has observed about Second Life, or they see gamer culture as a hard-wired or predetermined result of cognitive structures and/or the wider culture of the "real world". Only rarely both in a somewhat more nuanced but contradictory way: Raph Koster, for example, has at times argued that particular design features in games (say, the implementation of dancing and music in Star Wars: Galaxies) can create or transform cultural predispositions among players but also has argued in his Theory of Fun that gameplay and "fun" are driven by fixed cognitive structures and tendencies.

Developers tend to favor one of these two viewpoints because they either make the culture of play in a particular game something that they can design towards or they make it a fixed property that they have no power over, something they can imagine either completely controlling or being completely helpless to control, and in any event, something easy to summarize in a reductive, mechanical way. They'd rather either than what the culture of play in a particular game really is, an emergent and contingent result of interactions between particular design features, the general cultural history of digital games and their genres, the particular sociological habitus of the players, and the interpretation of visual and textual elements within the game by different players (individually and in groups).

When Aris Bakhtanians said that sexual harassment was "part of the fighting-game community" he was, in a way, perfectly correct in an empirical sense. This is not to say that all or even most players of fighting games, even in competitive gaming, practice harassment of the kind Bakhtanians infamously displayed, but that sexual harassment and harassing attitudes are commonly witnessed or overheard in a great deal of online gaming, as are the harsh and infantile abusive responses flung at people who complain about such behavior or expression. The one truth sometimes spoken in such responses is that outsiders don't really understand how such things get said or what they mean. Outside critics and designers alike would often prefer for "culture" of this kind to be easily traced to the nature of the game itself, either its semantic content or the structure of play, or for the culture of the game to be nothing more than a microcosm of some larger, generalized culture or cognitive orientation, an eyedrop of sexism or racism or masculine misbehavior in an ocean of the same. If that's the case, either there's something quite simple to do (ban, suppress or avoid the offending game or game genre) or the game is only one more evidentiary exhibit in a vastly larger sociopolitical struggle and not an issue in its own right.

Understanding any given game or even a singular instance of a game as "culture" in the same sense that we understand any other bounded instance of practice and meaning-making by a particular group of people, with all the unpredictable, slippery and indeterminate questions that approach entails, means that if you care about the game as an issue, you have to spend time reading and understanding the history and action of play around a particular game. The stakes are very much not just academic (are they ever?): certainly the viability of a particular game as a product in the marketplace hangs in the balance, sometimes an entire genre of game or an entire domain of convergent culture is at financial risk. But also at stake are the real human feelings and subjectivities of the players themselves, both within the game culture and in the ways that those identities and attitudes unpack or express in everyday life as a whole. If we're going to argue that game cultures teach all sorts of interesting and useful social lessons, or lessons about systems and procedures (as we should) then we have to accept that some of the social lessons can be destructive or corrosive. Not in the simple-minded, witless way that the typical public complaint about violent or sexist media insists on arguing, sure, but we still have to ask what the consequences might be.

Why should politicians care about games?

Games in general, that is, not just electronic ones.

I was asked this today and I’m wondering if the TN hive mind can come up with a short compelling set of reasons.

 

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?

The People’s Republic of Warcraft

A popular phrase these days is “If you are not paying for it, you are the product” the thing is, with social media of all types - including multiplayer games, even if you are paying for it you are still the product, what’s more you are the workforce too.  

 That is, multiplayer play can be seen as a form of ‘productive leisure’ or more simply labour.

A bit too far?

You can’t get arrested for using BitCoin (yet) but you probably can for that pun.

To get to the point - I'm worried about BitCoin. 

The aesthetics of video games

Are video games art?

Of course they are – the interesting question is, what type(s) of art?

 

The Emperor’s (New) New Clothes

Producers and users of virtual spaces are heading toward difficult times. These could be made worse through increased regulatory intervention by various countries. I suggest that it is in the best interest of users, produces and nation states alike that those online service providers that use virtual items and currency form self-regulatory body. I suggest further that sport provides a ready-made governance model that the online industry should adapt and adopt.

I thus propose the formation of an: Online Dispute Arbitration Board (ODAB)*

*An academic treatment of this was first presented at The Game Behind the Game by myself and Dr Melissa deZwart.

 

The Meaning of Play

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

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

Virtuality and Methods of Understanding

Inspired by Mark Chen's project summary and ensuing discussion, I have been thinking that we should collect on our collective experience and document some of the ways we achieve insight in an area as rapidly evolving as virtuality.  In the associated comment thread, Richard and I discuss method, and I explain a lot more about participant observation and why it is sometimes ok to be subjective.  We have also had more than a few discussions about method over the years.

That said, it's still a highly emergent and tricky area, with researchers and practioners inventing and reinventing methods on a constant basis.  This, arguably, is a good thing.

In my MMO research I made a lot of methodological decisions based on technological parameters/ limitations (WoW, for instance, didn't have an easy way of collecting chats, yet City of Heroes did - critical to my method that I can collect qual data such as this, therefore it had to be CoH).  What are the rules?  Is it a spectrum inclusive of scholarly and commercial efforts accompanied by a range of expectations about what constitutes evidence, truth, and calls to action? 

 A lateral thought:  I have also been pleasantly surprised to see more and more speculative ideas about virtual worlds, virtual life, the virtual sel(ves), etc. etc. etc.  (even entire tv series). I appreciate the big picture perspective:  what got us here, and where we might be going.  I'm also involved in some projects that remind me how far we've come, and how much further we have to go.

Of course, history tells us that we tend to overestimate some of technology's impacts while simultaneously overlooking others (Alan Kay?).  My role as an anthropologist encourages me to look around me and try to ascertain what aspects of our culture are likely to survive, to morph, what technologies are emerging, what sub-cultures will thrive, what people will care about, how they will play/work, how kinship and learning and philosophy change, or don't. Etc.  Really not a lot of crystal ball gazing, just observation coupled with intuition and a deep embedding in the culture(s) in question.  We even accept anecdotes in this 'verse.

My role as a futurist attempts to project what our world might look like within that context, or better yet, within some variations not even imagined, or imaginable.  In a usability lab, I might take advantage of specfic data collection methods that prove a point in graphs and charts of what happened in that one session on that day.  Extrapolation is, of course, possible, but not 100% accurate, once observer effects, natural vs artifical environments and longer term behaviors are evaluated.  However, there are seeds of some possible future(s) in these observations.  The question, ultimately, is what will stick, and what will fade. Or as an old friend called William Shakespeare said:

If you can look into the seeds of time and say, which grain will grow, and which will not, speak then to me.

Tricky business.  'If Union Pacific had realized they were in the transportation business, instead of the railroad business, we'd be flying on Union Pacific planes'.  (someone said it).  Decoupling technologies from cultural shifts is the first step in understanding.  Or at least that's my opinion and my preferred approach, which is really only a variation in perspective, not better or worse than other approaches, but pieces of the puzzle.

Above I have commented on some of the methods I use in achieving a deeper understanding of virtuality.   I know psychology, law, economics, education, cybernetics, cultural theory and communications have yet other perspectives, while commercial research's distance between, say, market research and observational player research, is often a cultural chasm that doesn't take advantage of those perspectives in symbiosis.  Yet it achieves other things, so in combination with other approaches, it becomes a way of observing in details some facets of the overall possibility/problem space to be explored.  Different types of data persuade different categories of stakeholders, eliciting the change(s) desired.  A constellation of methods can better assure success (inspiring relevant change/innovation) in the distributed, interdisciplinary groups we work within.

Soon I will post a more thorough introduction to my preferred approaches, one of which is cyborg anthropology (if you just can't wait, you can buy the book or hear Amber Case explain it...).  In the meantime, Marshall McLuhan:

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”   

 

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?)

Blizzard is CLU

I don’t understand why Tron: Legacy has come in for so much critical abuse. I like it as much as my colleague Bob Rehak does. Just taken as an action film, it’s considerably more entertaining and skillful than your usual Michael Bay explosion fest, with set-pieces a good deal more exciting than its predecessor. However, like the original Tron, the film also has some interesting ways of imagining digital culture and digital spaces, and more potently, some subtle commentary about some of the imaginative failures of the first generation of digital designers.

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.

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?

Lights Going Out in the Anti-RMT Bunker

For years I've argued that fantasy in virtual worlds is a special human joy and that everyone (courts, legislatures, players, devs, pundits) ought to do their best to prevent anything that breaks immersion. A chief culprit has been RMT, that practice of using dollars during games that some of us play in order to take refuge from the world of dollars.

This position of mine has gradually eroded and recently has taken some severe hits. The roof is cracking and the lights are dimming. It might be time to get out of here before it caves. Below the fold, the hits and what they mean for the future of living fantasy. There are also some implications for social theory.

History Version 3

In the beginning there was mud.

We all came from mud.

Me vs The Daily Telegraph

I’m a really irritating person.

 

I irritate myself.

 

I’ve probably irritated you. 

Space: The Boring Frontier

This year I fell for the Mars Hoax. Hard. I bought a telescope and planetarium software to plan a viewing of the red planet with my eldest son. As we scanned the skies using the software, we were able to look at anything and then magnify it into a large, beautiful image. We had a great time. As the image of Mars was growing on our computer, through magnification, we started to pretend that we were in the cockpit of a ship traveling there. "Mars needs women!" I shouted. We giggled with glee. "O Noes!11! we're gonna crash!!! AHHHH!" Great fun.

The software told us that Mars was to rise above Bloomington's horizon at 3:30am this morning, so yesterday we planned a breakfast and he came up with the idea of Solar System pancakes: Whipped cream for the Sun, M&Ms for the planets (Earth blue, Mars red, Mercury orange) and drizzled chocolate for the orbits. Yum!

Last night at about 6pm a friend suggested it might all be lies. Indeed. LIES! Those damn internets.

Now I had the dilemma of explaining all of this to a child.

Is Terra Nova Aging?

Yes it is. Things are not what they were. A reader (who may decide to de-lurk) wrote to us asking why the frequency of posts has declined. A little discussion emerged in the backchannel and it presents a moment to reflect on the blog as well as the subject matter it covers.

The gee-whiz era for virtual worlds has passed, and this changes what happens at TN.

Virtually Eternal: A Positive Pathway to a Healthy and Sustainable Virtual Worlds Industry?

With grateful thanks to John Hengeveld of Intel and others for many concepts and wording

Heady Times for Early Adopters

The early years of a technology is frequently characterized by a boisterous cacophony of players. Each player has a dream, but to realize that dream, they have to build everything from the ground up and develop their own platforms. Early consumers of technologies are limited to a small group blessed with the patience, wealth or time (or all of the above) to deal with the gaps in these home grown gadgets to get something to work. Automobiles went through this phase as did personal computers. The medium of Virtual Worlds finds itself there now.

Slowly, through gradual or mass extinction, industry players disappear or merge together and one or more monopoly powers emerge. Concentration of resources and marketing prowess then creates the basis for mass adoption. This happened in the 1930s with the telephone company once affectionately known in the USA as Ma Bell.

The close cousin of virtual worlds, online game worlds, finds itself further down the road to maturity with several big commercial successes under its belt. Game play worlds have settled into a model not unlike the film studio system of the 1920s, with aggregation of talent around big projects producing a few “hits” generating large returns. The game world studios must always be working on the next potential hit as current box office returns fade to black.

Stuck on Max Headroom Island

I Gamer

Computer games are a catalyst for a generational change in self-identification.

I believe that the notion of being a ‘gamer’ is not merely growing but becoming mainstream. Gamer is no longer a excuse for having bad personal hygiene and no social skills but simply something one is.

A Case Study of Second Life

Innovations is a relatively new journal from MIT Press edited by Philip E. Auerswald and Iqbal Z. Quadir, and it focuses on technology and governance (two frequent topics here), with a specific focus on their policy implications. A regular component of the periodical is the presentation of cases by innovators themselves, accompanied by critical commentaries. The latest issue includes a case study of Second Life by our own Cory Ondrejka, with commentaries by Philip Evans of The Boston Consulting Group, Paul R. Verkuil of the Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, and, well, me. A bit more below the fold; dig in and comment, if you like.

IBM's Virtual Worlds Guidelines

Back in 2005, IBM published a set of  blogging guidelines for employees. The introduction said

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Net -- at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees' Internet access. We continue to advocate IBMers' responsible involvement today in this new, rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

In so many way, nothing has changed with the adoption of virtual worlds. Last month, IBM's virtual worlds guidelines pointed out that

IBM believes that virtual worlds and other 3D Internet environments offer significant opportunity to our company, our clients and the world at large, as they evolve, grow in use and popularity, and become more integrated into many aspects of business and society. ... IBM encourages employees to explore responsibly and to further the development of such new spaces of relationship-building, learning and collaboration.

There has been a lot of press coverage of these guidelines. An Associated Press article was run pretty much everywhere (here's an example at TIME). Since people are often quick to assume that IBM is clamping down on its employees use of virtual worlds, and that's really not the case, I'd like to attempt to clarify a few things here and give even more of an insider's perspective than I previously did on Eightbar. It may be an interesting discussion for anyone thinking about whether companies need virtual worlds guidelines, why we bothered and what implications they have for employees using virtual worlds on their own time.

Player Vs Player in a corporate environment

Roo and I are very much looking forward to these guest posts we are going to be making here where it brings a chance for yet another voice to be developed. So thank you for the invitation and an obvious /bow to Ren Reynolds.

Before we start I do have to say the postings on this site are of course our own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Having worked in a corporate environment for a 17 years, but having been a serious gamer for even longer, I have been struck by the similarity in some of the concepts found in games and how they appear to be being played out in a supposedly buttoned down, “professional”, serious environment.

Much of this thought has been sparked by the challenges Roo and I faced in the last 17 months bringing virtual worlds/metaverses, such as Second Life to a corporate environment initially under the banner of Eightbar. We have spent a long time explaining to people that just because it looks like a game, it does not mean that it is. Now I am starting to look at the opposite point of view that business is a game it just does not look like one.

Legs wide shut

I’ve finally found the least sexual, most wholesomely family values orientated part of Second Life.

Yup.

Welcome to Playboy Island.

Questions, Questions...

Continuing the theme of asking Terra Nova readers questions that journalists ask me, recently I was interviewed by the Guardian's game blog and asked this:

If you could take over control of one major MMORPG - which would you choose and what would you do with it?

My answer didn't exactly endear me to 8.5m World of Warcraft players, but never mind what I would do, what would you do?

Applied innovation strategies in a network society

The title of this post is also the title of my thesis on IBM’s 3D Internet initiative, of which I would like to share some of the discussions as my final post as a TN guest author. My arguments are within the frameworks of Network Society & Innovation Strategies, and User Driven Vs. Community Driven Innovation.

Gaze into your Crystal Ball

I'm often contacted by journalists, and the last thing they always ask me is: "if you gaze into your crystal ball, how do you see virtual worlds in the future?".

Never mind how I see their future, how do you see it? Say, 15-20 years from now?

Virtual facilitation of real world social interactions

Hallo, TN readers.

For some time now I have been processing thoughts on the matter of, if virtual world facilitation of real world social connections and interactions is a previously somewhat unknown essential key to success, which game designers need to have stronger focus on in the future? I guess my question asked, positions me as part of the “suits”, with a question to the “talents” as categorized by fellow guest author Robert Bloomfield, and also reverses Roberts direction arrow of real world actions migrating into virtual worlds, to an apposite scenario of whether virtual world interactions migrating into the real world prolongs the lifetime of the virtual world because of those potentially new bridging connections.

Bringing Sexy Back

What if you held a party but no one showed? Or...the problem with the word "accessibility."

KidSpace Stamp

The virtual world industry should create a set of best practice standards for the operation of spaces for the under 18s.

It should further certify those operators that meet them thus raising the overall level of safety in online spaces and reducing confusion in the market place.

What do we MEAN by "game accessibility?"

The word "accessibility" is a mean one. It's confusing and can mean so many different things such as lack of access to technology due to poverty or "usability." But what I mean when I say it (and others in my group, the International Game Developers Association's Game Accessibility SIG) is making games accessible for gamers (or potential gamers) with disabilities.

Rat atat tat (or why rat food and vodka don't mix)

Jeff Atwood forwards a thoughtful piece considering online extrinsic versus intrinsic reward systems, read it on his site.   He contrasts Amazon's Mechanical Turk with its book review system.  With one you are paid to contribute, with the other you volunteer.  By Jeff's reckoning one is more successful than the other.

Kiddification

Does MMO really mean – Must be safe for kids?

Synchronized Punditry About Second Life

Clay Shirky, Beth Coleman, and Henry Jenkins have decided to coordinate simultaneous blog posts discussing Second Life.

Clay's post on Many-to-Many, entitled Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds, addresses two questions: "Will Second Life become a platform for a significant online population? And, second, what can Second Life tell us about the future of virtual worlds generally?" No, it's not an SL-bashing piece. Not in the least. What it is is a thoughtful, lengthy exploration of the questions he poses. His conclusion? That the promise of immersive virtual worlds will not be met with today's technologies, and that "as a result, games will continue to dominate the list of well-populated environments for the foreseeable future, rendering ineffectual the category of virtual worlds, and, critically, many of the predictions being attached thereunto."

Henry's post, A Second Look at Second Life, responds directly to some of Clay's previous criticisms of SL press coverage, but shifts the focus: "I care only a little bit about the future of virtual worlds. I care a great deal about the future of participatory culture. And for the moment, the debate about and the hype surrounding SL is keeping alive the idea that we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture. That's something worth defending."

Unfortunately, Beth's post has yet to make its appearance on her site, but I'll update this post once it does.

The posts are intended to be the beginning of a coordinated conversation. According to Henry, "After corresponding with Shirky and with my colleague Beth Coleman, it was decided that we would offer some new statements about this controversy across our three blogs today and respond to each other's posts in about a week's time. We also agreed that we would post links to the other posts through our sites which would help readers navigate between the various positions." I'll certainly be watching this interchange with interest.

2006 Predictions Review

Once again it is time to review my predictions from last year. I attempted to reach a bit more as it seemed inappropriate to be batting over .500. How did I do?
1) A winning candidate in the 2006 US Congressional elections will have campaigned in an MMO or virtual world
Nope. Came close in some ways and it looks like we'll be seeing more interest going forward, but this didn't happen. 0 for 1.
2) Apple's share of the PC market will double to 5%
And then some. 1 for 2.
3) Second Life's peak concurrency, currently at 5000, will reach 20,000
Barely but we did it. Perhaps more interesting is that we had only reached 5k by asking our residents to log in at the same time, so our actual concurrency was more in the 2 to 3k range. Thus our concurrency, like several other published metrics grew by nearly an order of magnitude in one year. 2 for 3.
4) WoW will end 2006 with fewer players than it has today
I think this was wrong, but I haven't seen any recent WoW numbers. Anyone know? 2 for 4.
5) Peter Ludlow won't send me an autographed copy of "Only a Game"
Sadly, I'd have happily lost this one if I got the signed book. Instead, 3 for 5.
6) A Second Life resident will begin selling a service for exporting SL items to a Fab Lab (such as Berkeley's Squid Labs) in order to create them in the real world
At least one that I know of. 4 for 6.
7) A Virtual Research Foundation, based in a virtual world or MMO, will be created to gather games and virtual world research, create research standards, and provide funding to researchers
Alas, this didn't happen yet, although Ted got some great funding to build a game, which is very cool. We'll see what 2007 holds. Hopefully it will be like my prediction about real-time collaboration in a CAD tool, which came 3 weeks late for me last year. 4 for 7.
8) The US Democratic Party, in an attempt to capture the "family values" vote, will demonize games during the 2006 election cycle
Wrong. Although there was some of this, it was not a driving issue in the elections. 4 for 8.
9) A business or service in a virtual world will successfully file for a trademark
Lots of rumors about this but I haven't heard of any that were completed. 4 for 9.
10) A Terra Nova author will testify before Congress about virtual worlds
Dmitri ftw! 5 for 10.

So, .500 for 2006. Next week I'll post my fearless predictions for 2007.

Nice Company. We'll Take It.

Alex Engel, Community Manager for Nest Egg Studios and formerly a volunteer with CCP and Eve-Online wrote to us on CCP's merger with White Wolf. I'm posting it on his behalf below.

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Surprisingly, I haven't seen anything on Terra Nova about the recent merger between CCP hf, the creators of Eve-Online, and White Wolf, creators of the World of Darkness.

"CCP hf. and White Wolf Publishing, Inc. today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement to merge. The creators of the single largest persistent online role-playing world and the world's second-largest developer of offline role-playing, strategy and collectable card games will create the industry's largest independent Virtual World developer ? The combined company will introduce new online and offline gaming products across the science-fiction, horror, and fantasy genres."

Shirky FTW

The inimitable Clay Shirky has just posted a wonderful essay about the recent hype on Second Life, and the relevance to our understanding of the New New Thing (tm).

There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.

God, I wish we'd been able to able to buy him when we started Terra Nova. There's no way we can afford him now.

Virtual Worlds as non-predatory spaces

Everyone seems to know that the place to find child abuse perpetrators is in the dark corners of society, in the woods, lurking in the shadows on the edge of town and now of course on the internet, in chat rooms and all over mySpace.

This popular truth about perpetrators is indeed frighteningly true; though of course its prominence also masks the fact that most child abuse occurs at the hands of parents, close family and people in positions of trust, not by strangers.

I’m sure there is a mountain of theory about why the typical abuser is depicted as ‘other’ rather than, say, family. It certainly confuses matters. And if public policy follows received opinion, which I fear it does, we face a serious situation.

But within the context of TerrraNova the thing that confuses me is why Virtual Worlds are not getting the blame. I see no rational reason why Virtual Worlds should facilitate abuse more than other computer mediated technologies (which of course means that there must be cases where a Virtual World is implicated), but causal links don’t seem to be the determining factors in what the media chooses to give primacy to.

We’ve had addiction rhetorics, violence, social-isolation, evil Asians or evil East Europeans. But so far no one has tried to pin child abuse on Virtual Worlds – why not?

Searching for the 3D tipping point

In the long and winding why do we never talk about SL thread a question that lurked around is whether SL is the basis for a 3D version of the web and the meta question of whether such a notion makes any sense. Just below this post we are raising the notion of a global metaverse from the point of view of its social implications, but I want to talk about product and market dominance for a moment.

This got me thinking about whether SL has already reached that tipping point. Sure it has an infinitesimally small number of users compared to the web or mobile phones, but every day we see yet another brand setting up office .

If you view is that SL has certainly not attained status of de facto standard as the ‘3D web’ - how are we to know when something has? What characterizes the tipping point when a n other wizzy 3D tech becomes the 3D tech?

Better dating through MMOs

Meeting potential romantic partners in MMOs is often seen as bad idea.

The case against: the medium is too thin to establish a ‘real’ relationship, there is too high a chance of projection or out-right deception and everyone online is supposed to be playing a role anyway.

At the recent Sex in Video Games conference, artist and now game maker Andrea Fryer spoke up for the medium suggesting that meeting in MMOs has advantages over traditional dating. Here she summarizes the case for romance in MMOs:

Trust, Contingency, and WoW Guilds

For the last year I've been very involved with a guild in WoW that is beginning, it seems, to break apart (as so many do after their core members reach 60). I've had a fantastic set of experiences that were possible only in this guild, but their apparent loss leads me, now, to reflect a bit on the nature of social groups, trust, and games. (And, it's refreshing, by the way, to write something here shaped more by my point of view as a gamer than by my research interests.)

Thoughts on Virtual Laguna Beach

As many of you may have heard by now, Makena Technologies has been working with MTV Networks along with several other partners and advisors on a “brand” new 3D social virtual world based on the television show Laguna Beach.  Virtual Laguna Beach launched in beta yesterday.

Confessions of a Virtual Transient

or, The Future History of the Triumph of Persistence over Pseudo-pseodonymity

In my twenties, I threw my two cents into a discussion on computerized trading. The year was 1986, and the venue was the Risks Digest. Google was more than a decade in the future. It was a spur-of-the-afternoon comment on my part, and probably reflected my naivete of how stock markets actually worked more than anything else. What's interesting to me is that by 2000, this was the top bit of information that Google knew about me, and remained so for a couple years.

The internet is slowly erasing the venues where ephemeral forms of communication can take place. I had no realization in 1986 that my words would be readable (if they cared) by a huge fraction of the world's population today. I'm not claiming that any harm has come to me, but I find this fact mildly surprising. Today's kids seem at peace with this. Googling your date is acceptable, and you expect potential dates to google you in turn. Even still, kids like Laura K Pahl, and even the initial author who blogged about her, can be quite surprised when the internet tunes in to a conversation thought to contain only a couple or a couple dozen participants.

Okay, time for a change of topic. Let's talk about MMOs and virtual worlds.

Mindark, I’m sorry…

…if you’re unhappy with what I wrote. But accusing me of slander and using scary Swedish mind tricks to make my life miserable is a bad idea. Let me explain…

Public Media, Public Diplomacy, Games, and Place

OK, time for some beardy musings. Ren just posted about the BBC 1 Big Weekend and referenced a discussion on Raph's site about public media. In it, Raph throws cold water on Alice's discussions of how games could fit into public media. Given the intersecting pieces of public media, public diplomacy, and public broadcast that have happened in Second Life alone over the last two weeks, it is clear that Raph isn't giving either the BBC or other public media sources enough credit. More importantly, it highlights an interesting choice when thinking about how to use technology in the public media/public diplomacy arena.

Public media is looking at what games and virtual worlds can bring to the table. Harvard's Berkman Center hosted Beyond Broadcast this weekend and conducted a simulcast into Second Life. A year ago it might have been correct to think that broadcast media isn't influenced by virtual worlds, but that is no longer the case.

Which leads to another of Raph's comments. He says that the World Bank can't afford the price tag of making games. First, while they might not be the kind of games that Raph makes, both the PBS and BBC sites are FULL of games. My three year old has been a pretty avid web game player since she was two and she spends nearly all of her online time on these two sites. Second, the BBC has proven quite adept at demonstrating how to experiment within a limited budget, with 1 Big Weekend a prime example. Plus, the technological differences between what was required to create 1 Big Weekend and -- say -- to host public debate on intervention in Iran, including live discussions with participants from appropriate countries, links to up-to-date news and analysis, technical discussions of enrichment and the history of confrontations between nuclear-armed nations is negligible. Any organization that wanted to do this could pull it off for relatively low cost -- zero cost compared to developing a game from scratch. The BBC is simply ahead of everyone else.

This brings us to the real questions. Sure, people can spend time making decent single player games that teach about food distribution. On the other hand, you could build a space in Second Life that showed how to distribute the food or introduced you to the people getting the food. These places allow you to engage in discourse about the problems and challenges, rather than playing through a fixed experience that encodes one set of beliefs.

When we look to the future of virtual worlds, we should focus on playing to their unique attributes -- putting people into shared places. My only disappointment in the otherwise excellent USC Center for Public Diplomacy Awards Ceremony was that it was an award for the best "Game" used to advance public diplomacy. How much farther can we go when we truly become comfortable thinking beyond games?

The Virtual Office

When I think most of us are in a TN frame of mind we tend to think of virtual worlds as only games or social spaces. The concept of work when it does come into play tends to do so in the sense of its traditional boundaries being challenges by a shift in the consumer / producer divide or in the sense that is is entailed by the pracitice of gold farming.

So here in a bit of a novel and experimental move for us is an essay on the subject of the Virtual Office by Andrew W. Donoho who is Web Theorist in the bit of IBM they like to call Emerging Technology. Responses to to the questions that Andrew poses and the very inclusion of the discussion of the virtual office as a topic on TN are welcome.

The Virtual Office: A Holy Grail or Attainable 'Reality'?

The virtual office (VO) is a dream of human interface/virtual system researchers for many years now. Yet, the VO seems as far away as ever. Yes, we have hours of entertainment in fabulous virtual worlds, such as the World of Warcraft, Second Life and others. But how do we transition out of the entertainment spaces and “get some work done” in VOs?

Project Entropia

By now, everyone has probably read the gushing news stories: Project Entropia’s developer, MindArk, has introduced a bank card that allows cardholders to treat their “virtual currency” from Project Entropia “just like real money” and withdraw it from a cash machine.  The BBC, the New York Times, ABC News, and any number of other mainstream media sources have run stories on this.  They boggle at this miracle and explain how,

[t]he new cash card blurs the boundary between the virtual and physical world even further.

This is the kind of story that we love here at Terra Nova, since it involves nifty issues about virtual worlds, the social fiction of money, and all sorts of other interesting questions.  But I don’t love this story.  I think it’s basically bogus.  In fact it’s worse than that.  This story has finally convinced me that MindArk is fantastic at generating public relations stories that credulous media sources pick up without questioning, but which, if investigated for even a moment, make you shake your head in wonder.

Why Do Kids Kill?

Two Columbine-style (tm) school massacres have recently been thwarted. Media reports of near-tragedies like these usually mention a connection to violent video games. But in Teens Who Hurt: Clinical Interventions to Break the Cycle of Violence, two Family Therapy scholars, Ken Hardy and Tracy Laszloffy, warn away from blaming simple environmental factors like video games and guns. Rather, they trace the roots of teen violence to four things: devaluation, erosion of community, dehumanized loss, and rage. It seems to me that off-the-shelf video games, specifically in the MMORPG format, directly address three of these conditions in a positive and possibly therapeutically beneficial way.

Coding Dispositions at GDC

Not too long ago on the TN backchannel, a few of us got to talking about the tendency for game designers and developers to fall into the trap of looking down upon their users, devaluing their knowledge, opinions, and skills. Well, in the wake of my first (and certainly very limited) GDC experience, I'm surprised to find myself revisiting this criticism of game developer myopia. I'm coming to believe that precisely what this site might be seen as testament to -- the ability of researchers, writers, designers, and developers to talk together productively -- is the very thing that may not have much potential beyond cozy corners such as this...

The WoW_wave

WoW wave (noun): The phenomena of online gaming creeping in to the public consciousness evidenced by a deluge of exploratory contacts from journalists, marketing organisations, VCs, TV types, blue chip companies and random others asking what all this online stuff is all about, what it means, what they can do with it, and where the money is.