Terra Nova

My Cup Runneth Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gamification is Bullshit?

So says Ian Bogost.

In terms of the audience he's addressing, I pretty much agree with everything he says. Gamification in this sense is just the latest conceptual hook that allows marketing executives and business experts to convince their paymasters that they're up-to-date and innovative. ("Innovation", ironically, was last year's gamification.)

It isn't just marketing people, of course. When the talk turns to serious games or games + learning, a similar move is often visible. The people drawn to gamification in this sense are drawn to it because it makes them look like they're doing something to improve their yields, reach the unreached, learn that last stubborn group of the unlearned, mobilize the unmotivated. Gamification here is both alibi and life-preserver. It explains why there is something still to be done (we haven't used games! which is why people don't buy our stuff/take their medicine/learn their math/smash the state!) and why you should keep the gamifier in the picture. (Do you know how to make a game, Mr. CEO/university president/non-profit manager/Marxist theorist?)

But these are waves that wash up on the beach. When the tide recedes, the sand is still there.

What's the sand of gamification? What will be left when this too has passed like the once-universal faith that we would all one day live and work in Second Life?

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?

Predator Detection Bots

Crisp Thinking announced today that its community management platform will be used by Jabble, a new children's social networking site. Says Crisp Thinking:

"The technology has an independently tested accuracy rating of 98.4 per cent by Cambridge University in the UK in the detection of online predators. It uses a combination of machine learning heuristics to detect long-term behaviours, concept analysis, filtering technology and reputation analysis to help keep children safe online. The Platform operates in multi-languages and ensures communities, social networks and online games remains COPPA compliant."

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.”   

 

World of Warcraft is just numbers

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

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

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

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

 

Prediction Time Again

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

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

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

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.

SE vs. AE

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

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

A Kinected World

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

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

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

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

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

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

What character are you using?

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal reveals that Deep Packet Inspection is making a comeback. DPI allows analysts to work over the packets you send out and mine them for patterns relevant to problems like, deciding which ads to send your way. Earlier versions of this technology encountered much blowback due to privacy concerns. The current generation of promoters say that privacy is respected. In discussing how the systems handle privacy, the promoters make some interesting revelations about a completely different matter: Personality. It turns out that if I want to target ads to you very closely, I will tailor my pitches in different ways at different times of the day. You're just not the same consumer at work as you are at home. In a very interesting shift, one vendor mentioned in the article, Kindsight, says that it delivers information not on people but on characters. Characters - just like game characters. Yes: The shifting of character identified by Turkle and others in social media worlds is verified in DPI of our online behavior in general. In fact our shifting selves are so distinct from one another that someone can make money by identifying and tracing the differences. 

Do we have shifting identities offline as well? Is the person unified, or is each person actually many people in one? The formula for the Trinity is "One God, Three Persons," and if one objects that that seems awfully contradictory, one is told that it is simply a mystery, something that need not make sense to be true. It is true whether logical or not.

Are we mysteries like this? Can we be one person but also several characters at the same time? An 8-sided die is one unified object and 8 different objects, all at the same time. You might also say it is one object with 8 states. Or, it is one object that appears as a different object from time to time, according to some standard of what makes for a relevant difference.

When we play RPGs we typically make not one character but many. This portfolio of characters - does it basically just extend the same process of character creation that we deploy for our offline selves? A new face for the die? When Kindsight examines my packets, will it treat my game characters just as it treats my workday research character, my evening politics character, and my weekend shopper character? "O, that's his female rogue. She never buys anything. Don't send the ad until The Shopper comes back."

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?

Step into my Neverland

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

From the press release:

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

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

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

An MMO Manifesto from the Guild Wars 2 Team

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

So...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on GW2:

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

Pure Imagination

I ended my previous post by asking: If we are to make reality, what should we make? Lisa then posted evidence that our powers of creation are growing. We are becoming ever more able to immerse our attention in worlds of fantasy. Richard Bartle, getting straight to the point, asks: Where will it go? 

We will be living in worlds of pure imagination, and that right soon from a historical perspective. Doesn't this reveal the normative question in the most commanding way? If imagination is what will be, we need to ask what that should be. We are gaining the power, and with power comes responsibility. 

By what standard should worlds of imagination be judged? From what source do we derive the moral criteria, the normative stances, necessary to decide what worlds to make? Surely the source is not logic and reason; imagination is not fact. Worlds of imagination cannot be true or false. They can be good or bad - that's the moral question - but what makes them good or bad? The answer must involve aesthetics. Judging the moral worth of an imaginary world begins with its aesthetics. Is it Beautiful? Apt? Shocking? Thought-provoking? Balanced? Engaging?

I cannot think of any area of thought more muddled than aesthetics is today (see Dutton). Yet judgment of beauty should be a well-developed ability of all people. Art should not be judged by its politics or its ability to reject any expressed standard. It should be comprehensible without reading 1,000 pages of arcane theory. Great works should be more than tourist attractions, they should be treated as achievements well worthy of respect.

The imaginary worlds being created all around us deserve respectful appreciation, first, and secondly, they should be subjected to inquiry on aesthetic grounds. Those grounds are not mere whims of the observer; they have universal elements. Dignity is an important touchstone here. On entering a new virtual environment, proceed with care and ask whether the world you find is uplifting for the human person.

Virtual Parentalism

By way of background: about a year ago, W&L held a symposium entitled Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online.  Lots of TerraNovans were there.  The panelists gave some really great papers, which we turned into an issue of the Washington & Lee Law Review (that issue goes to press this month).  And that's a good thing, because the papers were ready when Congress asked the FTC to report on the potential availability of adult materials to kids in virtual worlds.  (The FTC's report is due out in early December.)  More on my personal paper, which ended up with the title Virtual Parentalism, after the fold.

Ludotopian

Adj. The belief that through games the world can become a better place.

GDC 2008: Game Designers' Rant

I was sick on Wednesday, and missed the annual Game Studies Download featuring Terra Nova co-author Mia Consalvo and the amazing Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. (Perhaps Mia will post about that talk...) But on Friday I was healthy enough to make it to the "Pouring Fuel on the Fire: Game Designers' Rant," which included Jane as well.

The session was wonderful--engaging and inspirational. I took copious notes, which follow.

GDC 2008: The Future of MMOs

What self-respecting virtual worlds blogger could pass up the opportunity to attend an all-star GDC panel on "The Future of MMOs"? Not me, certainly. So at noon on Thursday I found myself in the first row of a crowded room, listening to John Wood (managing editor of MMORPG.com) pose a series of interesting questions to:

* Jack Emmert (Cryptic)
* Matt Miller (NCSOFT)
* Ray Muzyka (BioWare)
* Min Kim (Nexon America)
* Rob Pardo (Blizzard)

What follows are my notes on the session; in many cases the responses are not verbatim, but instead are condensed versions of the key points. I was very impressed with how articulate and thoughtful these questions and answers were; it was an hour well-spent.

Consensus

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Benjamin Duranske's excellent virtual-worlds-and-law blog, Virtually Blind, and came across the following remark:

Most writers, including VB’s editor, take commodification and subsequent legal intervention as a foregone conclusion at this point.

This got me thinking: the first State of Play conference was in November, 2003, and since then the arguments have settled down considerably. When we do get legal intervention, it will be far more informed than it would have been 5 years ago.

I'm wondering, though, what degree of consensus there is out there with regards to how the law "should" treat virtual worlds?

Why Fantasy?

Here's a simple question for you, which I suspect does not have a simple answer: why is Fantasy the predominant genre of game-like virtual worlds?

It can't all be down to the influence of The Lord of the Rings, surely?

Richard

What to Call a Griefer?

It used to be that the term griefer had a very specific meaning in virtual worlds: it meant someone who deliberately did something for the pleasure in knowing it caused others pain.

What does it mean nowadays, though?

How Much Time Do Second Life Users Spend In-World?

According to this Wall Street Journal article about a Second Life user whose real-life wife isn't too pleased about his in-world marriage, "a typical 'gamer' spends 20 to 40 hours a week in a virtual world."  First off, I love that the word gamer is in quotes. Do we really exist? Who knows!  Second, that number sounds sensationalist-ically high to me.  When I said so a few weeks back over on my blog, a reader reminded me about Nick Yee's actual research on the subject. According to Nick, the average amount of time an MMO player spends in-world is indeed around 20 hours a week. Where The Wall Street Journal got 20 to 40, the world will never know.

Sustain That Brand

State of Play V, from immaculate Singapore, kicked off this morning with a panel on "Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds." As I write I'm listening as the panel wraps up, with the panelists -- all involved in business development companies that focus to some extent on virtual worlds -- taking questions from the audience. But continuing to resonate in my mind is a phrase that panel participant Ken Brady of Centric used in his remarks to characterize what businesses should aim for in virtual worlds moving forward: "sustainable branding." This idea was echoed by the others on the panel as the discussion progressed, and to me this should prompt us to continue to think about the current era of virtual worlds as one that is beginning to be defined less by the relationship between their makers and their users (as individuals or nascent groups), and more by the expansion (one might even say colonization) of them by both emergent and pre-existing institutions.

Augmented Mixed Reality - Real to virtual and back again

Augmented Reality has been around as a concept for a long time. It has very often been described in images of the future as enhancing the real world with additional layers of digitially created information.  As more people are becoming aware of virtual worlds and seeking to build within them they, in general, start with trying to recreate some element of Real Life. This may be representations of themselves as avatars, existing buildings and offices they frequent. real world metaphors such as chairs, tables, presentation screens. This is something I have observed as the willingness to engage with virtual worlds has extended past gamers and early adopters. The representation is focussed on the boundaries of the environment being used and on how to manipulate the building tools to create that vision, crafting for that environment.

We are seeing more uses of things from the real world crossing over into the non-game metaverse environments. e.g. tennis ball trajectories and scores from Wimbledon into Second Life.

Is this augmented mixed reality? Are we creating Augmented Reality for virtual worlds? Is there a continuous circle feeding real things and virtual things into representations of one another?

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.

All Bets Are Off

Linden Lab has recently changed their policy about gambling in Second Life, effectively banning it (find a clutch of news reports here). The specific demands, in terms of policy and regulation, that gambling and other significant-stakes gaming make on virtual worlds have drawn my attention on TN before. Here I'd like to ask TN-at-large the following: What do you think the effects of this policy are likely to be on SL? On virtual worlds in general (if any)?

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.

3D media in 3D worlds

There was a watershed moment in the history of Western pop culture in 1985. That year, Dire Straits released a music video ("Money For Nothing") that was partially made with 3D, computer-generated imagery. There was a big buzz around this; I remember friends remarking about the "high-tech" appearance of the 3D characters, even though the animation looks primitive now.

Organizing the Virtual Organization

Wikipedia defines a 'virtual organization' as one that exists 'as a corporate, not-for-profit, educational or otherwise productive entity that does not have a central geographical location and exists solely through telecommunication tools'.  Since the 1990s, virtual organizations and teams have seemed like a panacea for a lot of problems that arise from RL collaboration (real estate, travel costs, time wasted commuting, etc. etc.), but there hasn't been all that much useful data on what makes a virtual organization or team work well, despite the fact that there are many that are majestic examples of virtual organization (and more notably, self-organization) that flourish beyond anyone's wildest expectations.  Likewise there have been horrible failures resulting from efforts to contrive a successful organization in a virtual setting (think of some of those horrible groupware experiments).  And while  I suppose there are those who might debate whether MMO play constitutes productive activity or not, it does seem clear that the skills one develops via participation in MMOs might be hugely relevant to other types of virtual organizations.

Evaluating virtual population projections

I am a great believer in the potential of virtual worlds as platforms for communication, interaction, discovery, and entertainment. But I am also a realist when it comes to appraising related technologies and user interest in virtual worlds. In this post, I'd like to talk about population projections, and how technology may limit the development of virtual worlds in the next few years.

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.

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.

How will "free-to-play" business models affect the gaming landscape in the West?

In 2004, I traveled to Thailand to learn more about young gamers who congregate in Internet cafes to play online games. With the help of bilingual research assistants, I interviewed approximately 60 gamers, parents, and game shop owners. On average, each interview lasted for approximately half an hour.

In May of this year, I returned to Bangkok and Chiang Mai for a second round of data collection. We interviewed approximately twenty participants, and these conversations were even more detailed.

I'm writing up most of the results elsewhere, but one of the most intriguing findings to emerge from this longitudinal  project seemed more appropriate for Terra Nova. 

Simply put, the finding is this: free-to-play virtual worlds pose an enormous threat to those worlds that require users to pay for gameplay. This surely comes as no surprise to regular readers of this forum, but the topic deserves further discussion.

Gamers are Standing By

Dave Elfving (of Machine Chicago) pointed me and others to this insurance commercial ("The Lord of Mishap"), which he first saw on television. Take a look and come back. I'll wait.

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? 

Tipping the Scale

My guildmates and I in WoW are an unstoppable force, able to mow through furlongs full of Furbolgs crying "Strength and Honor!" all the way. Well, that's not quite true...While we have every reason to believe that we can pwn Sunken Temple (aka The Temple of Atal'Hakkar), we have been thwarted time and time again.

Are we too low level? Nah. Do we have poor leadership? Certainly not (as long as I'm not leading). Are we not geared properly? Please -- this is a guild where members know the WoW Auctioneers on a first-name basis.

No, the problem is a Blizzard of technical obstacles.

Predictions for 2006

With a 0.550 batting average for 2005, clearly I wasn't reaching enough with my predictions, so for 2006 I'm going to live a bit more on the edge. Without further ado, 10 fearless predictions for 2006:

1) A winning candidate in the 2006 US Congressional elections will have campaigned in an MMO or virtual world
2) Apple's share of the PC market will double to 5%
3) Second Life's peak concurrency, currently at 5000, will reach 20,000
4) WoW will end 2006 with fewer players than it has today
5) Peter Ludlow won't send me an autographed copy of "Only a Game"
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
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
8) The US Democratic Party, in an attempt to capture the "family values" vote, will demonize games during the 2006 election cycle
9) A business or service in a virtual world will successfully file for a trademark
10) A Terra Nova author will testify before Congress about virtual worlds

Virtual World Philanthropy

Randal Moss of the American Cancer Society is actively interested in ideas about encouraging philanthropy within virtual worlds, and about using virtual worlds in the ACS's fundraising activities. Below the fold is the announcement about how the ACS is expanding its presence within Second Life. It's obviously a great organization and a great idea, so I recommend it to you.

Apart from providing the announcement the ACS is interested in feedback about how it might use VWs in its fundraising generally, and so it (and we) welcomes feedback in the usual way below. One idea that was mentioned is a kind of "estate bequest" for those leaving their favorite game and donating the RMT profits to the ACS.

God knows what the devs would say about that.

Other information can be found at Randy's blog and updates will be posted there in the coming weeks and months.

[Update 12:16pm: Forgot the URL. Go here for more info]

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MMOG eSport?

I've just returned from DreamHack, an event billed as the "worlds largest LAN party" (over 6000 participants). It took place in three convention halls, two being filled with rows and rows of people with their machines as well as some exhibitors (and the third used for sleeping). Last time I was at something like this if you wandered around peering at people's machines to see what they were up to you saw the usual mix of things like CounterStrike, movies, music files, instant messaging, etc. What took me by surprise this time (though certainly shouldn't have given what I see in our own game labs with students) is the amount of WoW being played. I dare say it outnumbered the times I saw CS on someone's monitor but I don't want to stretch my observational data too far. Suffice to say it was immensely popular. I kept making passes Friday night by a group of eight players who were in an Onyxia raid (heh, I won't try and tally how many times I saw "Release spirit now" on the screen) and there was always a fair number of others milling around them watching too.

Industry Bodies

Why isn’t there a trade body to represent the interests of virtual world developers?

In the UK we have trade associations for body piercers, cartoonists, the greetings card industry, television camermen, packaging companies and homeopaths, among others. Why isn’t there any organisation at all for virtual world developers?

Old School

I'm a historian, so I have  vested interest in thinking that the past is important. Yet when it comes to virtual worlds, and video and computer gaming more generally, I struggle sometimes to understand how to think about the history that's involved. That history matters to players, to game designers, and to academics studying virtual worlds, and is often invoked by them, but it isn't always clear what lessons we ought to learn from that invocation, or even whether we're remotely talking about the same thing.

After me, after you

I’ve been thinking a lot about death and the virtual afterlife recently.

DIY Branding in Virtual Worlds

I’ve posted a new paper about member developed business brands in There and Second Life to SSRN, available for download here.  This is something that grew out of last year’s more general Advertising & Branding in Social Virtual Worlds project, this time focusing on four “DIY” brands developed by members themselves.

Advertising in Games Conference

Yesterday I attended the Advertising in Games conference here in New York.  Most of the conference was off topic for virtual worlds enthusiasts, as there were very few references to MMOGs. However, it offered interesting insight into the current ad agency mindset and I enjoyed catching up with speaker Ian Bogost from Watercooler Games. Read on for a brief summary of common conference themes and a few metrics gleaned from the presentations.

Yakkity Yak

As an update to the post on the Accelerating Change Conference readers might like to listen to some audio of the roundtable conversation between Brian "Psychochild" Green, Jamie "Gaming Open Market" Hale, Daniel "Three Rings" James, and Steve "IGE" Salyer. The moderaterateror is our very own Cory "They like to call him "Linden Labs" but we call him "TerraNova"" Ondrejka.

Also on the same site, you can have a listen to Bill Gurley's massively multi-player market talk from O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference.

Keeping It Virtual

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about a medium that enables radical transformations of locations, objects, bodies, and identities into living fantasies of idealistic perfection.  A medium that purportedly allows people to achieve more fully realized, well-rounded, capable, or desirable selves. Sound familiar?

When worlds contract

It seems pretty inevitable. If you cruise around the MUD Connector you will find lots of ghost towns out there. I'm sure many of us have experienced a world or two closing in the past, but more commonly they seem to hang on in some diminished way. The recent announcements about further server mergers in EQ prompts me to wonder lately about downward trajectories. There are a lot of fascinating details to be dealt with (duplicate names, character limits) and things that will arise from the change, not the least of which will be seeing how two server communities negotiate now living on the same block.

We have a lot of stories about vibrant communities online, but it'd be great to have more reports about when networks fade, when people leave, and what exactly remains. Of course, one of the interesting things that has happened with past worlds is that sometimes groups of users swoop in to salvage or recreate - often on a smaller scale - their beloved spaces. I'm don't mean to overstate this and suggest EQ is going to have the plug pulled anytime soon. But having seen Bristlebane when it was so big it had to be split, the pending merger admittedly leaves me a bit nostalgic. So I'm curious, what does the death of a world look like in the MMOG-age?