Terra Nova

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...?]

People play online

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

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

First, back to me…

Giving Up the Fantasy

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

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

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

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.

The Virtual World of the World Cup

Some of it feels gimmicky, as when Alexi Lalas stands on a real pitch explaining how the players move, the players being life-size digital images superimposed on the video. Some of it seems like genuinely useful application, such monte carlo simulations of outcomes (play the game 10,000 times virtually, count the wins, call it a probability). (Note: Doing it once, like this, is not informative. You have to repeat it 10,000 times.)

Older issues arise again. Once again we encounter the virtual world of sport, where utterly trivial things really seem to matter. It is undeniable - look at the faces of the players. It is life and death to them. An evolutionary argument explains it. Take 10,000,000 football players (not handegg players) with a distribution of talent and interest. Among them, a certain percentage believes that football is the most important thing in the universe. Assume the same initial distribution of talent among them as among the general population of players. Over time, the obsessives become better players, however, due to their obsession. Now we have perhaps 50,000 obsessed, talented players. Repeat. Now we have 5,000 super-obsessed, super-talented players. Repeat. Now we have 500 maniacally devoted, machine-like players. Repeat. Now we have the makings of a World Cup team: A community of people who take it all very, very seriously.

Knowing all this, I nonetheless dive headlong into this virtual world, as I do in any other. Ask no questions, respect the aesthetic, participate, float along. Being American, I was thus jumping on Wednesday and moping on Saturday. When society gets into the act, you find yourself having to suspend belief, not disbelief. The default state (unless you arduously train your mind in skepticism, something I would not recommend) is to accept the apparent reality and go with it. 

Finally, let's take a stroll in the darkest, most evil virtual world of all: The World Cup as seen by the referees. This year, the officials have concocted an internal virtual world in which offsides is onsides, onsides is offsides, goals are not goals, and not-goals are goals. A little bit of bad officiating can help motivate the immersion - "The INJUSTICE!" - but systematically errant calls make you wonder why you dove into this place at all.