Terra Nova

The Horde is Evil

In the Terranova backchannel, an ugly debate (I've been creating most of the ugliness) has erupted over the significance of avatar choice. I've advanced two controversial positions: that avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity, and that the Horde, in World of Warcraft, is evil. Nobody agrees, but it's been suggested that the community could chew on this a bit.

Delusions of granter

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is my set of experiences over the past two years reviewing for large grant agenices. While my experience is still a bit limited, it has been intense, and I have developed some impressions (and that is really all they are, given anyone's limited point of view relative to these funding agencies) about the current trends in social science research on technology in general (and virtual worlds in particular)...

Magic

Why do so many virtual worlds feature magic?

One explanation is that virtual worlds have to be the same as the real world to a great extent (so that players aren't distracted by trying to understand an alien physics), but that they also have to be different in key ways (so that players can perceive them to be separate from reality, thereby freeing them to act in ways they wouldn't ordinarily). Magic is a well-understood trope that enables this distinction to be made very easily.

But still, why magic rather than technology or the supernatural or even history? All of them can easily separate the real from the imagined without distracting the player. Why magic?

This fantasy is configurable

Quite simply David Thomas’s Architecture and Vice (The Escapist issue 4) is not just the best thing ever written about Second Life it’s a fascinating meditation on what occurs when ordinary people are given the ability to express, share and let other play with their inner life.

Oh and forget the happy, brightly coloured Second Life you might have read about - this is the fricking ecstatic, dirty, dark, furry, Gorean, queer and out-there-weird SL that I know and love.

C*n*orshi*

Here's a question I've been meaning to post here since a conversation I had with Dan Hunter at State of Play last year:

Is there any subject matter that can appear in a virtual world which should always be banned by real-world authorities?

Ce n'est pas un monde virtuel

Although this has been discussed once or twice before, it is clearly time to charge fearlessly into the breach.

Are graphical digital worlds just text worlds with pretty graphics?  After all, people get all excited about sales of virtual items, weddings, stalking, gender bending, and governance, yet all of these behaviors happened in earlier text-based worlds and were probably discussed on MUD-Dev in 1997.  Several of these comments touch on this topic in the context that creativity in Second Life is no different than MOOs,  so I wanted to put a stake in the ground and then duck and cover:

Physically simulated 3D worlds are fundamentally different from text worlds.

Read on for why

Pure or Applied?

I was listening to the radio in my car yesterday, and there was an interview with composer Alexander Goehr. It's OK, I'm just as much a philistine as you are, and I hadn't heard of him before either. Anyway, during the interview he expressed a view that it's one thing to write music about, say, the Holocaust if you yourself have lived through it and are working your personal experiences; it's another thing altogether if you're attempting through your music to convey how others felt. He called the latter "applied".

I wonder, can such a distinction be made with computer games?

Designeritis

Suppose you go to see a movie and find yourself sitting next to Stephen Spielberg. Two hours later, when the movie has finished, what could you possibly say to him about it? His knowledge of movie-making is so much deeper than yours that he'll have seen things you haven't seen, picked up on nuances that passed you by, understood symbols you didn't even know were symbols: it's almost as if you've watched two different movies.

Yet you may have had the better experience. For you, the magic is still real.

The Boundaries of Diversity

I ran across this WoW message thread because of a referrer link from my site. It’s commentary on a newly proposed gay-friendly guild on the Sunstrider (Europe) server.

There were the overtly homophobic comments:

•  “this is a game. with children. hello?” (#11)

But I think the most intriguing comments were those that claimed to be non-homophobic but argued for suppression of minorities:

•  “You guys are free to do what you want of course, but I think two gay guilds on the same server (and same faction too) is overkill.” (#5)
•   “If you're upset by the homophobic comments on the site then why support the forming of a guild that's a magnet for homophobes? (#20) Calling a guild Loud and Queer is an invitation for homophobes to poke fun and be offensive. (#22)”

It’s interesting that someone argued that you can’t have more than one gay-friendly guild on a server - partly implying that there is a single gay identity and one affiliation would suffice and also implying that there is only a certain quota of gay men that can be tolerated. The second comment is even more intriguing in that it suggests victims should censor their own identities and have only themselves to blame.

In Fullness of Time

Do worlds take time to unfold and extend their full wingspan?  What do Harry Potter,  Monty Python,  and AD&D suggest to us, if anything?

Burning Down the House

Alice -- apparently the world's fastest typist -- has posted an amazing account of GDC's "Game Developers Rant." It is quite a read and includes some great comments on "piracy," including Greg Costikyan's sarcastic "[t]he world is not designed in such a way that money inherently funnels its way into your wallet!?"

However, it isn't anything that hasn't been said before: publishers are risk averse, games are getting more expensive, we're all going to be outsourced to Bangalore, nobody cares, and there is a need for alternative distribution channels.

In 2000 I left THQ to go work on Second Life at Linden Lab. While we have since started to learn that collaborative digital worlds have the potential for helping those with disabilities, driving innovation, and building phenomenal communities, none of those reasons had anything to do with me leaving THQ. I left because I wanted to create technology that would let everyone make games. SL isn't there yet, but events like the Tringo deal remind me that we are the way.

However, I think that the history of SL/Linden Lab acts as another response to the rant session. If you don't like publishers or Wal-Mart, then don't use them. While the cost of AAA titles has skyrocketed -- Greg's estimate of $20M is now on the low end -- the options for making and distributing games have never been better.

Read on for six ways to make games without EA.

But Seriously Folks

Ben Sawyer's Serious Game Summit got underway yesterday at GDC. Raph Koster started things off with his "Theory of Fun" talk, from his book and based on his talk at the Austin Game Conference in 2003. I had a chance to speak about Serious Games in Second Life, Wilde Cunningham, Brigadoon Island and Virtual Hallucinations, which was quite fun (and seems to have been well received.) Also got see a great demo by Andrew Phelps and Dave Parks of RIT, who's MUPPETS project is an amazing approach to computer science education. It is also exciting because it echos many of the benefits of collaboration and real-time development that we see in Second Life.

A couple of things from Raph's talk jumped out at me. Several times he focused on the difference between "thinking" and "knowing." He also repeated asserted the common statement that we get "worse" at learning as we age and that older people (he used his father as an example) wouldn't be able to comprehend the open nature of Second Life.

Read on for why I disagree with those thoughts.

Sex 101

Finally (in this flurry of post-age), GGA has a bit on Sociolotron, the visual alternative to cybering.  Coincidentally, Wired has a bit on them too.  Games like this have been around for a while, and there's not much new to report.  But it's been a while since we talked about sex and VWs.  Thoughts?

Ad Deals are Big Deals in Virtual Worlds

Recently Ilya Vedrashko noticed that the Google ad area of his blog was serving up ads for two companies offering in-game advertising and marketing services, inGamePartners and Massive Incorporated. (Full post located here) Ads for the former touted the company as the “#1 name” in the biz while the latter proclaimed itself “the largest.” This mini ad-battle playing out on a blog about media and advertising (as Ren would say, “how meta!”) led Vedrashko to ask, “Is the war officially on?”

Ultima Online R.I.P.

[Ed: Posted for Petrus]

Ultima Online is dying?

I believe that there is evidence to suggest that it could be.
Admittedly when something is very large, its demise often takes a
considerable period of time...The Titanic took something like four
hours to sink after initially striking the iceberg. But there are a
couple of reasons why I believe that from a long term market share
perspective, the game could be in trouble:-

You Can't Take It With You

I’ve spent the last few days flirting with the Christmas orgy of consumption and along the way introduced a few more people to virtual worlds. All of them express the usual there is no spoon amazement when they find out that people are paying lots of real money for virtual goods. However, it’s less incredible when you consider that even in the real world the goods people are buying aren’t as real as they seem.

Believability

[Ed: Posted on behalf of Anders Tychsen.  See also http://www.rpgdot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=176736]

During a recent analysis of the relatively new Diablo-clone Sacred, it struck me that I felt absolutely no suspension of disbelief while playing. It did not bother me too much that I had to slaughter hundreds of creatures that wandered around aimlessly, seemingly without any purpose except to kill my “overfeatured”, bikini-clad avatar. What ruined the experience was the fact that hordes of goblins would jump me whenever I got within sight, but stay away from e.g. an unprotected farm. They would even follow an avatar into the farm, without ever considering the farmer a viable target. Later on in the game, a 10 ton dragon attacked using wings that was seemingly attached with duct tape, ignoring the demands on the body structure it takes for an organism of that size to have wings, or even use them in a 1G environment.

Virtually Virtual Worlds

I've recently been playing a couple of games which aren't quite MMOs, but nearly are. First, the wonderfully silly Kingdom Of Loathing. Initially just the perfect tonic after a hard day's bearded discussion of brain-farts, it creates an impressive sense of community despite lacking a multiplayer core game. A multiplayer core game is one thing that Guild Wars does have and it will be interesting to see whether its reliance on instancing will cause it to suffer in the long term as Richard Predicts. Despite my reservations about instancing, I soon relapsed in to my old monster bashing Diablo addiction. I'm sure it will be a success and it's possible that Guild Weed will act as a gateway drug, bringing more people to MMOs and working well as an alternative on NCSoft's channel. I just hope that it is an alternative, rather than the path that all future MMOs will take. Having come this far it would be a shame to just return to Diablo.

The WGC, gender, and MMOGs

I’ve been a bit behind in some conference mentions I wanted to do but an article out by Katie Hafner gives me a good excuse to jump in with at least one. Her NYT piece touches on the Women’s Game Conference (which took place alongside the Austin Game Conference) and asks a few questions about the state of the industry and game design. It raises some of the issues that got discussed at the conference: what do women want in games, how can the industry get more women involved in development, what does it mean if we start considering women a serious part of the market, etc.

Death of the Auteur?

One of problems that I think both middlebrow criticism and academic scholarship focusing on videogames faces is how to talk about authorship. Andrew Sarris' famous importation of the French "auteur theory" into American film criticism in the late 1950s proposed that the author of a film is the director, and that directors should be encouraged to conceptualize themselves as such and seize authorial control over a film. Besides giving generations of academic film theorists something to attack, Sarris' intervention also had a profound influence on mainstream film criticism and eventually became a common part of how most movie audiences perceive the author function in films.

We talk a lot about "designers" as a group, and attribute some authorial intention to them in aggregate (as in Richard's recent posting to Terra Nova). At the same time, avid gamers and game critics are very aware that game creation is a structurally complex and expensive process, and that even relatively low-ranking programmers and artists may be effectively authorially responsible for particular features or images in a game.

Who is the author of a game? How should we speak of authorship?

Dead Monsters and Naked Emperors

I’m now doing much online catching up after a long trip, and Richard Bartle’s entry Fire in Their Bellies is the first place I landed. It's a nice provocation, and echoes some thoughts I had just before I took off about recent experiences playing games with my 3-year old, as well as my own frustrations with the current state of things in MMOGs.

Middle Where?

It was really interesting to see the BigWorld tech up close at the Austin Game Conference and be able to browse their source code and talk to one of their senior developers. I was very impressed (and I'm only slightly biased by its close philosophical resemblance to the tech I built for Warhammer). It was also great to hear that BigWorld have a number of customers. The impression I had of MMO middleware was that there were a number of good solutions, but that the market was small and that the majority of the big players were using proprietary solutions. That impression has been strengthened having talked to people from Sony and Turbine at Austin, from working on Warhammer and Dragon Empires and from looking in to commercialising MASSIVE-3 while at Nottingham University. So what is the future for MMO middleware? A thriving industry in which distributed systems experts sell unfamiliar technology to a grateful games industry or a long winter where middleware developers try to prove their tech by selling it at knockdown prices to aspiring indie developers?

Fire in their bellies

When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism.

Yet I look at today's big hitters, and I wonder: what happened?

What are they for?

What are Virtual Worlds for? There are Game Worlds and Social Worlds but even this simple categorisation is misleading to those not familiar with the genre - as game words can be just as social as social worlds.

I believe that we need to begin to use a much broader definition of VWs that see them along side the PC or the Internet. One way we should see VWs as a tool that has many uses.

What finally brought me to this conclusion was reading A Lever to Move the Mind by Hamlet Linden / Wagner James Au over on New World Notes; then experiencing The Virtual Hallucinations Building in SL. This is a fascinating project - part research, part experiential learning, part scary.

For me, one of the big futures for VWs is these alternative uses and it is going to be interesting to see where things go - will gaming in virtual worlds end up as minority VW activity?

TN Interviews: Julian Oliver

In this interview I talk to Julian Oliver aka delire who is an artist, free-software developer, composer and media-theorist working with game technology.

The list of art works that Julian has either created, collaborated on or initiated includes: q3apd, Deathjam, Quilted Thought Organ, Escape From Woomera, Acmi Park and Fijuu. In 1998 Julian established the art based game collective selectparks one of the most important groups in the development of the genre.

In this wide ranging interview we talk about the way serious art that uses the genre of games is received, virtual spaces as art / public spaces and the importance of Open Software.

Whither Good Design?

I get to see lots of virtual world designs in my self-proclaimed capacity of industry consultant. Most are good in some parts and not so good (but improvable) in others. Some, of course, are so bad as to be beyond remption. A small few, however, are absolutely superb.

Hardly any of these projects make it to launch, mainly because they can't get the second-round funding they need. That includes the ones that really, really should be played.

Nomic World: By the Players, For the Players

Clay Shirky, god of group interactions and social software, has posted an essay on governance in VWs/MMOGs that came from his presentation at the State of Play conference. In the paper he asks "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?" It's a fascinating question, especially in light of the on-going control issues of game developers (compare Second Life's ceding of control to their users, with the crackdowns on eBaying that are in the news these days).

Virtual Worlds: Good For Our Health

Four years ago, Bill Joy warned that some of the most exciting new technologies on the horizon - genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics - could kill us all. That horizon has gotten appreciably closer, and Larry Lessig has recently reminded us of the dangers. He also put them in the context of contemporary international relations, which, obviously, don't offer much solace about the chances that a disaster will actually happen. In a sure sign we really should think about it all, insurance companies have even begun to hedge the costs. Lessig's analysis of the situation suggests that no police powers, however intrusive, could possibly protect us. GNR technologies will be well within reach of small, otherwise unremarkable groups of dedicated killers. And if we can't control the killers, it seems, our only option is to reduce their incentive to kill us. That's becoming a tough row to hoe.

I'd like to argue for a third option: Run away. Run away into the comparatively safe haven of virtual worlds.