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? 

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.

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.

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?

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?)

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.

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?

Please Welcome Guest Author Dr. Mark 'Danger' Chen!

Mark and I have collaborated on a number of things these last few years, and now that he has finished his doctoral work (woot!), I invited him to guest author and summarize his work for us.  Mark is another virtual worlds researcher who relies on traditional anthropological methods to understand social dynamics and learning.  He's a great researcher and an extremely passionate gamer.

Using ethnographic methods, Mark Chen focuses on teamwork, communication, and expertise development in situated gaming cultures. Currently, Mark is a post-doctoral scholar at the UW Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, working with computer science folks to study player learning through science and math games that take advantage of massive amounts of computational and human power. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, College of Education, looking at the practices of a group of gamers in the online game World of Warcraft. Prior to doctoral work, Mark was the webmaster and a web game developer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, OR. He holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Reed College and grew up in the Bay Area as a child of the 80s. You can read more about Mark on his blog...

Other People

This past weekend, I saw the film Coraline, which I found terrific in many respects. Among other things, I think it has a lot to say that applies very strongly to virtual worlds, about why though we may all complain about bad pick-up groups, griefers, loot farmers, Barrens chat, virtual worlds are not a demonstration that hell is other people. Quite the opposite: virtual worlds live (and sometimes die) on whether they infuse authentic sociality into everything we do within those worlds.

In Coraline (modest spoilers ahead), the title character is frustrated with her parents' quirks and lack of attentiveness to her. Drawn into a magical world that exists inside her new home, she is at first enchanted by her Other Parents, who have marvelous talents, live surrounded by wonder, and are utterly devoted to Coraline herself. I don't suppose I'm giving away much when I say that there's a big catch to all this, and the last portion of the film is about how wonder gives way to horror.

The only seeming clue that Coraline's Other Mother is anything but perfection is that her eyes (and the eyes of almost everything else in the magical world) are made from buttons. And yet there is another clue right from the outset, in some ways a much more unsettling sign of just how wrong this world is. Everyone and everything in it exists only for Coraline. They have no apparent interests of their own, no desires apart from hers, nothing to do but please and delight Coraline.

Virtual worlds occasionally toy with treating each player like Coraline. In World of Warcraft, my character is greeted with delight by guards and non-player characters who allude to his past adventures. This lasts only until I begin a new round of quests in a new zone, whereupon my famous achievements are forgotten and I am merely one more anonymous grunt. When my character seems to make momentous choices that should hang about him forever, those too disappear into the haze. I am torturer one moment, and the next a saint who seeks all across the world for a cure which will save the life of hero faced with enslavement to the Lich King. In my most important adventures, I exist inside wholly private instanced worlds with a small number of friends or allies. That world, too, exists only for me.

What keeps World of Warcraft or any other virtual world from being as ultimately empty and terrifying as Coraline's magical hideaway is that these worlds are full of people who do not exist for my own pleasure. They may be people I know and like, people I tolerate, people I find pathetic, people who infuriate or disgust me. But they mean that the world is not merely my mirror.

Now I think that virtual worlds themselves could function more that way: they could react to my actions (or the actions of many players together) in much more dynamic and autonomous ways. Reading Jim Rossignol describing the latest astonishing developments in the long-running war between BoB and Goonfleet in EVE Online makes that very clear. The underlying world in EVE does not exist in a one-to-one relationship to individual players, and its basic economic and politcial infrastructure transforms in relationship to collective action in some striking ways. A world which is itself a dynamic presence in play need not be as harsh or treacherous as EVE's world is, but the basic principle is an important one.

Until we have a fuller range of dynamic worlds, though, other people, acting in the most unmanaged and unfiltered ways possible, are the only thing that keep virtual worlds from total sterility. Sometimes we all feel like Coraline: we'd like a world which exists only to delight us, full of cheering throngs and valiant allies. But like Coraline, we'd be better off knowing from the first moment of that desire that we're really chasing something horrible rather than something pleasant.

Game as Cultural Form, Play as Disposition

I've just posted a piece to SSRN about play. In the past I have focused on games as a culturally-shaped activity (what we anthropologists would call a "cultural form"), and in the course of that I have made explicit efforts to decouple games from the concept of play (see here, for example). I argued that it is not very useful to see play as an activity, with games as a subset of it, and suggested that play more usefully denotes a disposition, a way of approaching the world.

In doing that I wasn't trying to argue that games and play are not related to each other, but rather that we need to move beyond seeing them as intrinsically linked (where the question of, for example, whether something is a game boils down to whether it brings about a playful experience). The primary motivation was to make room for an approach to games on their own terms, but the issue of play has been simmering with me for a long time. The posted essay is the result – a long-planned attempt to articulate play as a disposition.

Maxwell's Hammer

From time to time here on TN I've delved into methodological territory, and in my last effort, quite some time ago, I focused on the charges of "anecdotalism" that qualitative research in the social sciences sometimes faces, and argued that generalizable claims can be generated out of such methods. But, in retrospect, that piece did not confront the root of the problem directly, given the degree to which I do not there question generalizability itself as the core aim of scientific inquiry.[fn 1] As research on virtual worlds continues to increase, and as the different parts of the academy ramp up their efforts to fight for their funding (and perhaps thereby seek to discredit other approaches), it seems worthwhile (and consistent with the ecumenical spirit that largely characterizes TN) to consider how scientific the pursuit of other kinds of claims apart from the general are.[fn 2] And that's where James Clerk Maxwell comes in...

What a performance! Live Vs Recorded in a multi player world

A theme strand has developed in how I view virtual worlds and metaverses. It has formed from online and multiplayer gaming but been flavoured by my work environment (As with all these posts these are merely my opinions not those of the IBM). That theme is about performing, about the nature of the live performance as opposed to the crafted and edited kind.

What are the opportunities to benefit from live expressions of knowledge, talent and ideas? How does this change the perception of a metaverse environment when it is regarded as a performance medium as much as a canvas for fixed assets to be displayed?

I think there are two main ways people express themselves through their actions. The first is the product of their actions, something manufactured, crafted and delivered for other people to use. The other is through live performance actions of some kind.

Metaverses and virtual worlds are as much about live performance as they are about manufacturing and creating content. 

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.

Howard Rheingold Interview: Cooperation in virtual worlds.

I had the opportunity for a short interview with Howard Rheingold. Howard is the author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs, and a well respected thinker and writer within the framework of social media, culture and digital journalism. Howard has worked on the Cooperation Commons, a joint project with Institute for the Future so I asked him some questions about his perspective on cooperation theories and how they apply to a Second Life setting and on corporate utilization of the medium. The interview ends with Howard posting a question for the TN readers to discussion and elaborate on.

Real Politik

Almost exactly a year ago I asked whether virtual world makers with significant economies and RMT should "'open their books' about how their economies operate, given how much control they have over the conditions and mechanisms of those economies." Today, via the New York Times, comes this account that suggests that the makers of EvE Online have answered in the affirmative.

Prodigal Players

Via BoingBoing, news surfaces of a Chinese MMO that is inviting banned players back into the fold if they agree to donate blood.  That's real life blood, of course.  1 pint of blood = 1 restored game account.  Platelets FTW!

Beam Me In, Scotty

If the forthcoming Star Trek MMO isn't enough to satisfy your fantasies for epic space travel (or if you just like your MMOs served up with a healthy side of RL-relevant content), then do we have some news for you! 

Liberté, égalité, fraternité et réalité?

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulations, has vacated our reality. Seems right to pause a moment and consider whether ‘hyperreality’ is truly upon us, and if so, does it mean we have sold our collective soul for the promise of bigger, better, faster, more, convincing ourselves in the process that pale imitations of precious human activities are fulfilling us?

It is more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult from our real world perspective to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth-dimension. The simulacra will be ahead of us everywhere. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. Since the world is on a delusional course, we must adopt a delusional standpoint towards the world. - Baudrillard

So, let's talk about our delusions...

Ganking the Meaning out of Games

Steven "Play No Evil" Davis, in a great comment on Mark Wallace's thread, asked the following question:

Is griefing simply emergent play that some folks don't like?

I think this is an interesting question to pursue, and I'm going to take a somewhat provocative stance and answer "no," partly to explore some territory and partly because I think there's a case to be made against griefing that doesn't founder on a libertarian objection (i.e., that if some people do something in a low-consequence environment, then it must be fun to them/their choice, and therefore must be okay).

Discipline & Pwnage

So I've been having my usual beginning-of-the-semester chats with my graduate students about their projects and progress. I enjoy these, and I think they do to (they almost never complain about the thumbscrews, or -- more of a shock -- having to read Habermas). One of them, Krista-Lee Malone, is a master's student and long-time gamer who is completing an excellent thesis about hardcore raiding guilds. During our chat she said something about how these raiding guilds went about preparing her to participate in their activities, and it prompted me to follow up on some ideas from here. It's about Foucault, bodies, institutions, and whether the relationship between developers and guilds is changing in important ways.

Dreaming of An Educational MMO

Finally, via Joystiq, a productive use of time for those of us who worry that repeatedly whacking monsters is not actually contributing to improvements in our zen… Or maybe it is, but soon it will be possible to learn Chinese in Zon – The New Chengo Chinese MMO, and we'll be able to both get zen and spout koans right and left in their intended language! And maybe even be able to play someday with our  millions of  Chinese fellow WoW fiends, or at least lambast the gold farmers appropriately...

Anti Anti-Anecdotalism

The recent flurry of attention to SL and its numbers (here, here, here, and, most recently, here) leads me to think that folks might be interested in having a chance to chew through some methodological stuff, along the lines of the "Methodologies and Metrics" panel on which Nic, Dmitri, and I served at the State of Play/Terra Nova Symposium early this month. Below the fold, some tweaked ideas from some emails I circulated among the panelists in preparation for the panel. While I'm not discussing virtual worlds and the methodologies we'd use to understand them specifically, I hope this will be helpful background for such a discussion.

A New Backbone for Our Metaverse(s)?

This just in via CNET...

The International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) has just announced plans for the Neuronet, an initiative that "will evolve into the world's first public network capable of meeting the data transmission requirements of emerging cinematic and immersive virtual-reality technologies".

Why?

"Today, the best and the brightest innovators in the world are pushing the boundaries of virtual reality and gaming. Virtual worlds such as Second Life, The Sims, Everquest, and World of Warcraft continue to attract legions of followers while new game systems from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft offer near life-like character renditions. In business, companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems are investing heavily in virtual reality business applications. These VR trailblazers, and many others, have been limited by the confines of the Internet. The Neuronet's communication bandwidth and real-time VR and gaming data transfer protocols will enable them to reach their full potential."

Have they really been limited?  I'm not so sure.  But certainly thinking about fancy infrastructure for the MMOs that might exist from 2009 onwards (the date this will be ready for 'consumer applications') must be a good idea, right?

Domain names - .vr (for 'immersive virtual reality neurosites') and .cin (for 'cinematic virtual reality neurosites') - will be available next year...

 

Games & Culture CFP

For those of you who want to escape family obligations today and tomorrow, tell them that you have to work on a submission for this call for papers!  It's for a special issue of the Games and Culture journal, focused on Gaming in the Asia-Pacific region. Read on for details...

What's up with group IM in Second Life?

As a conversation analyst and an active-Second-Life-resident-who-has-logged-in-more-
than-once-and-in-the-last-60-days, I am interested in how communication works (or doesn't work) in Second Life and other virtual worlds. One of the things that has always bewildered me about communication in SL is its "group IM" system. Compared to guild chat in other MMOs, group IM in SL gets surprisingly little use, although there is as much need in SL to find answers to technical questions and find other people to play with.

I have just recently blogged about this on PlayOn where I argue that this under use of SL's group chat channel is likely simply the result of a poor UI design (see details). In a nutshell, compared to guild chat messages in other MMOs, group IMs in SL are much more disruptive of game play (and needlessly so). Consequently, SL players seem to have developed a shared practice of discouraging their use and considering almost any messages to the group "spam." Just imagine if in any other MMO, you asked your guild, "does anyone want to do something?," and you received the response "DON'T SPAM THE GUILD."

Have any other Second Life residents (who have logged in more than once) observed similar practices around group IM?

UCLA Mediascape CFP

UCLA's film, television, and digital media e-journal would like to solicit contributions from the TN community for the features and reviews section of an upcoming issue.

Read on for more details...  (but hurry, deadline is Jan 1, 2007!)

Meaning, Games, and Bureaucracy

A while back in a comment posted in this thread, Ren posed an excellent question that I've been pondering for some time. Wondering about the implications of my model of games as process for the question of meaning, he asked:

Do we then just have that the meaning-generative property of games is just a fact of process [i.e., no different from other social processes] and the types of meanings [in games] are consequences of the contrived contingency?

Curse you, Ren! I haven't slept since August!

The MMO Brand Goes Bad?

It’s easy to look at the graphs of MMO growth over the last few years and think that it’s a game category that will continue to grow exponentially.  In fact, I have often said that since games have always been largely social (and single player gaming an anomaly that resulted largely from technological limitations), that once people have a taste of gaming with others few will choose to go back to solo play.  And I do believe that.  Other players represent that sort of super sophisticated AI that no NPC can begin to approach.  And for me, the only thing that makes the average MMO grind at all fun, for instance, is the chaos and uncertainty brought forth by other random players.  Social structures make games more complex and interesting, to be sure.  But is that always a good thing?

Why I will never be a Centurion

I must confess: I like PvP, a lot. Perhaps this has something to do with the inordinate amount of time I spent playing Counter-Strike with my friends in college, or just a basic need to show off my 3l33t skills. But the bottom line is that I've been spending a lot of time in World of Warcraft's Battlegrounds lately, trying to climb up the ladder and equip my avatar with a nice armor set.

Here is my problem though: I am at rank 8 (Legionnaire) and I'm stuck. In fact I've been stuck there for weeks. This is really a problem since I cannot complete my coveted armor set until I reach rank 10! But I also have the luxury of some fresh data about PvP play patterns that Nick, Eric and I computed recently - why not look at some numbers and see if they could help?

Are Virtual Worlds Good For the Soul?

Dmitri recently received an e-mail from Mike Fred, a Behavior Intervention Specialist who uses WoW therapeutically as part of his work with challenged kids: 

I play WoW with a few of the students from my school. It has proven to be beneficial to the students socially, academically, and therapeutically. In general these students lack social skills. Even when they want to make friends, they often behave inappropriately and tend to push people away. Yet, as these students have gotten involved with playing WoW, they have made social connections - not only with each other, but with other players online. They are all active members of their online guilds… their online relationships are not deep. However, the fact that they make relationships at all is significant. Moreover, two of these students have developed a real friendship.

Against Exceptionalism: A New Approach to Games

Selling games short -- it's happening all the time in games research scholarship and in books on game design. In the rush to carve out a special place for games scholarship, to demonstrate its importance, and to attempt to convey what we feel as gamers is powerful about games, games thinkers have relied on an exceptionalist approach to games, seeing them as a form of play necessarily set apart from the everyday, and therefore requiring a distinct treatment. In short, this inherited and largely unexamined theory of games assumes there is a rupture (in experience, in form) between games and other aspects of social life.  But while understandable, this is precisely the wrong approach.

The R-word & Social Interaction

As an ethnomethodologist and conversation analyst, someone who scrutinizes the micro organization of talk-in-interaction through audio-visual recordings, what intrigues me most about virtual worlds is that they take face-to-face conversation as their communicative metaphor (many of them do anyway). Often when I play, I notice ways in which avatar and chat systems differ, in interactionally consequential ways, from the system of real-life face-to-face. And I ask myself, "Why did the designers do this?" "Was it too hard to follow real life?" "Were they going for a different effect?" "Or did they just not know enough about face-to-face as a system?"

Now whenever I propose that designers might benefit from following real-life, I inevitably get rebuked by some for using the R-word... realism. "You can't translate real-life into the virtual." "Virtual worlds are supposed to be fantastic, aren't they?" "Playability is more important than realism." "We can make the virtual world better than the real." It seems that realism has fallen out of style. So I'd like to step back for a moment and briefly examine what we mean by "realism" in art and media.

Time to Turn the MMO Inside Out?

Joystiq reports on a recent talk by Thomas Bidaux of NCsoft Europe at the Develop UK event where apparently it was revealed that 'everything we think know about MMOs is wrong'.  Mr. Bidaux  has a number of opinions about how MMOs are going to be revolutionized, turned on their heads even, via platform innovations (though anyone who played Everquest on the PS2 might be a bit skeptical that this is a positive move), Xbox Live style persistence in terms of player rankings and achievements, novel payment models, and yes, 'a lifestyle revolution' enabled by our experiments with Web 2.0, 'collective intelligence (e.g. Wikipedia) and viral content (e.g. MySpace)' that  'provide opportunites for community and collaborative efforts'.

Well, we like our trend watching here at TN...

A Tale of 6 Cities

In a recent musing on VWs as petri dishes, Ted Castronova commented on the impact that creating four new auction houses in WoW's Azeroth has had on the populations of the capital cities. Wondering just what exactly did happen, I went scuttling back to the PlayOn data.

Here are the pretty pictures. Explanations of the data are left as an exercise for the readers.

Do We Need a Virtual Gaming Commission?

In another life I was a researcher on gambling, and perhaps the most important public policy question that (legalized) gambling presents is regulatory: how are the games guaranteed to be "fair"?  In Nevada, for example, the Nevada Gaming Commission oversees the casinos to ensure that the operations of the employees and of the technology (roulette wheels, slot machines) are, as their mandate from the legislature puts it, "honest and competitive." The point is not to protect people from making some bad bets (such as betting on a single number in U.S. roulette -- a 38:1 gamble that only pays 35:1), but to guarantee that the games are (a) run as they are claimed to be and (b) in the case of slots, not paying out less often than a certain floor percentage. Why think about this here?  Well, with RMT now openly encouraged by the makers of some virtual worlds, can their players trust the 'house' not to skim a bit too much off the top? 

"Alone Together" in World of Warcraft?

The "social factor" is often advanced to explain the popularity of MMOs: "it’s the people that are addictive, not the game." And indeed, social networks are essential components of the online gaming experience. Game designers build "virtual third places" to encourage interactions. Quality time in a MMO is time spent with others, be it raiding a dungeon in a group, socializing with bystanders in a cantina, or chatting with remote guildmates while exploring the wilderness on your own.

Or... is it? The data PlayOn has assembled from World of Warcraft challenges many of these assumptions. Could it be that a less, not more, social environment contributed to WoW’s success? Read on for more.