Terra Nova

Welcome to Bruce Damer

Greg L

We're very pleased to announce that Bruce Damer, a well-known virtual world pioneer who has been a guest author here (twice) has accepted our invitation to join us as a regular author. Below is a short bio about Bruce's past work in virtual worlds, but there's much more to be found on his website.

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Pssst...Hey, Mac!

Thomas Malaby

So Age of Conan seems to have opened strong, and I'm eager to play it, I guess. I'm not a big fan of the Conan series, but I really miss gritty realism after so long in cartoony WoW, and everything I've heard about the class design has piqued my interest. I even got it for Father's Day. But that was, what, three weeks ago? Why haven't I gotten in touch with my inner barbarian? In short, it's because there's no Mac client, and that leads me to ask a question of the wiser industry-savvy types around here. In the current moment, is not designing your big budget MMO for easy Mac use a Grade A blunder?

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

Bruce Damer

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

Heady Times for Early Adopters

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

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

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

Stuck on Max Headroom Island

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Virtual Policy ‘08

Ren Reynolds

As many TN readers know I’ve recently formed a think tank to look at public policy issues and virtual worlds, it’s called the Virtual Policy Network (tVPN). The point of it is to bring together academics, industry and policy makers in local, regional and global dialog.

As part of the usual thinky tanky things tVPN is creating and supporting a range of conferences and is kicking of a number of research projects.

And so to the point of this post: I wanted to make TN readers aware of a possibly the first UK based conference focused purely on public policy and virtual worlds. Snappily titled Virtual Policy the event is on the 22nd & 23rd of July in London at the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform’s (BERR) conference center. BERR are co-sponsors of the event and it’s quite inspiring to have a central government department so involved in debates over virtual worlds.

Here is the event sign up page: virtualpolicy08.eventbrite.com

The event features some of your TN favorites such as Richard Bartle, Bryan Camp oh and me; as well as a number of Europeans that might not be so familiar such as lawyers David Naylor of Field Fisher Waterhouse in the UK and Dr. Andreas Lober of Schulte Riesenkampff in Germany.

I can’t bring myself to do a pure promo post though. What interests me about this event is that much of the debate about virtual worlds that one sees in academia, at least, has been driven by the US. This means that North American issues, rhetoric and sensibilities have been given primacy. Hosting an event in the UK should help to flush out those areas where Europeans either don’t think an issue is important or have a very different framing of it.

What do TN readers think the main points of departure are going to be?

Gender Differentials in Age of Conan

Liz Lawley

This month, a number of my colleagues in VW research have disappeared from WoW in favor of the shiny-new Age of Conan game, and I'd heard a lot of rave reviews from them. I'd also been encouraged before the release by one of their trailers, which showed a kick-ass female toon.

Yesterday, however, I received this email from my RIT colleague Jessica Bayliss:

As some of you are aware, I've been playing Age of Conan for the past few weeks. It's an interesting MMO with some different things from the standard WoW.

Apparently, they have also gender biased their MMO against female characters and according to various reports from the people who played beta, it was a known problem a while ago.

Female animations are slower than the male animations for the attacks of the dual wielding assassin. It is unknown if this effects other class archetypes or not, but I'm guessing it would effect any dual wielding class. Since the female can't attack again until the animation is done, that means that females do less damage than male assassins. And yes, the timing difference is visually noticeable.

There's a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C4z-pTrII

I wasn't sure that I completely believed it and so I timed it myself. The male is definitely faster than the female and it is as noticeable as it looks in the video.

The latest we've heard from Funcom itself is that they are "looking into" the issue. Meanwhile, I sit and wonder how something like that could have possibly gotten through QA.

When I asked Jessica's permission to post her email here, she also asked me to add the following:

A link that puts together some discussions of the problem: http://forums-us.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=55674

Funcom's current admission that there might be a problem and that it's
not intended to work that way: page 10 of the link above

And the latest joke about the bias: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=105819

Suddenly I'm not feeling quite so bad that AoC won't run on my MacBook Pro...

Call for Papers: Culture of Virtual Worlds

Mia Consalvo

A bit of self-promotion for a special issue I'm co-editing with Mark Bell for the new Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about what/when/how to submit a piece, and please consider sending something in.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
Special Issue: Culture of Virtual Worlds
Deadline: September 30, 2008
Publication Date: November 20, 2008

Guest Editors
Mark Bell, Indiana University
Mia Consalvo, Ohio University

* jvwresearch.org *

Early users of virtual worlds trumpeted their potential to bring together like-minded groups to create community, to encourage social activism, and to explore facets of identity. Over the past 20 years, we have seen virtual worlds develop from text-based to graphical, and from 2D to 3D interactive spaces. Some spaces have focused primarily on game-related activities, from MUD through Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, while others have concentrated on social aspects of being, allowing users to define their own goals, and often create many parts of the spaces they inhabit--from LambdaMoo to The Palace and Second Life. Virtual worlds have also become big business at the same time as some worlds remain resolutely tied to different goals. Yet what of the cultures that have grown up in, around, and through virtual worlds in this same time period? What do we know about that culture, or more accurately, those cultures and how to define them?

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Patenting Virtual Commerce

Robert Bloomfield

Last week I received the following email from an officer of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO):

I am a Patent Examiner at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in the area of Business Methods, Finance.  I am the examiner of record of multiple patent applications  (20+) involving virtual worlds and different types of credit accounts, charge accounts,  escrow transactions, risk mitigation (to name a few) used within these worlds….I am looking for references from 2004 and earlier.   A published paper, game manual, or even a detailed blog entry that details the economic system / banking system / shopping / business creation in a MMORPG (especially Second Life) would be amazingly helpful.

As a relative newcomer to virtual worlds (I started writing on these matters in May of 2007), I promised I would pass on this challenge to Terra Novans.   But I can’t help also asking for opinions on a few aspects of the patents that raise some pretty interesting issues.  More background and gory details below the fold, if you dare. (There are a LOT of details).

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Onion satire

Nate Combs

The Onion News Network  is known for its satire.  Recently it produced a video that has become well known on video game sites on the Web: "Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft.'  If satire is militant irony (paraphasing Northrope Frye, merci Wikipedia), what exactly is it satirizing, if anything?

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A New Virtual World Winter?

Bruce Damer

(editor's note: find a brief bio of Bruce Damer from his March 2007 guest column)

Its been just over a year since my last guest posting and in that time we have put some real beef into the Virtual Worlds Timeline effort. The team led by Henrik Bennetson and Henry Lowood at Stanford will soon start ingesting hundreds of hours of video and other material produced by a number of people during the mid to late 1990s virtual worlds early-adopter "boom" (a veritable "Cambrian Explosion" of VW platforms happened in 1995-96). Our archival efforts took us back even further with Chip Morningstar's digitization of a superb LucasFilm piece about Habitat produced in 1986. This is also going into the VW timeline project (thanks Chip & Randy!) and you can get a preview of it here on Google Video.

But this column is not about looking back, but about looking forward to the future, especially where this current Virtual Worlds boom may be going. The key question I would like to pose the community is: are we already seeing the early sign of a Virtual Worlds downturn that may lead to a "winter" as severe as the one in the period 2000-2003? The second logical question is: if this is so, what can we do to head off or reduce the slope of a new downturn? If the  infamous "chasm" lies before us, and not back in 2000-2003, then what can we do to sling a rope bridge over it?

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On/In

Greg L

We often post thoughts on TN about things that happen in virtual worlds. 

Note the "on" and the "in" in that previous sentence.  Why do discussions happen "on" TN, but "in" virtual worlds?

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Playing with history

Nate Combs

This past week included Memorial Day in the US. I attended a parade and a dedication to a Korean War monument. Afterwards, I struggled a bit trying to recall the details of the history of The Forgotten War. I did some reading on the web; unfortunately I seemed to have lost texts I used to have on the subject. Yet I found compensation, I discovered a boxed copy of Victory Games' "The Korean War (June 1950-May 1951)" in storage. Originally published in 1984, I obtained my copy in the early 90's to PBEM with a friend.

What I love about its 51 page rules/scenario manual is what I love about most manuals of this genre of game - they provide a succinct accounting of a model of history. I skimmed the rules, I remembered the board game, and in so doing I recalled something of the history - albeit one narrowly focused on the (geo-)political/military one spanning 1950-51...

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Maxwell's Hammer

Thomas Malaby

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...

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The Bot-Slaughtering Totems of Stormwind

Greg L

Andrés Guadamuz, lecturer in law at Edinburgh, and co-organizer of the upcoming, very-cool-looking GikIII Conference at Oxford, has waived his claim of copyright infringement against me for cutting and pasting below a recent blog posting he put up at Technollama.

It's a really interesting post.  As Andres frames it, it is about how disgruntled Alliance players have come up with a clever, though perhaps somewhat EULA-non-compliant hack to enable community self-help (aka murder) as  means of silencing n00b bot gold spammers on the cobbled streets of Stormwind.  Screenshot at right.

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Arden Experimental Results: Preliminary Release

Edward Castronova

Some of you may have been following the Arden project (reported in Nature and the Chronicle of Higher Education). I'm pleased to announce that the project has come to fruition. With generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, we have created a fun game environment and used it to conduct a month-long experiment. Our experimental question (kept secret up to now) was: Are fantasy game players economically "normal"? Or on the contrary, when they make themselves into elves and dwarves and hobbits, do they stop taking economic decisions seriously? We created two virtual worlds, one an exact copy of the other, except that in the experimental world the price of a simple healing potion was twice as high as in the control. If people are taking prices seriously in this fantasy environment, they should buy fewer of the potions when potions are more expensive.

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Goodwill Calling

Unggi Yoon

Today,  I come into find out & read  Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe & Lewis Kaye's article titled as "YOUR SECOND LIFE?  Goodwill and perfomativity of intellectual property in online digital gaming" from virtual law bibliography in Lawspot online.

www.yorku.ca/rcoombe/publications/YourSecondLife.pdf  (2006)

This article deals with the governance issue of VW(eg. SL), the key tool for argument is not an exclusive proprietary one such as IP or VP but -- to my delight-- an inclusive one, corporate goodwill.

With regard to this, I tell you I registered an article on SSRN recently.

Real Money Trading in MMORPG items from a Legal and Policy perspective

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1113327

It was originally presented at 13. Dec. 2004 in Future Game Seminar held by Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute.  By virtue of professor Yee Fen Lim and lawyer Nicholas Suzor's encouragement and assistance, I could published it in complete english version.

My article deals with the RMT issues of VW(eg. Lineage), and the key tool is Gwonri-geum(a korean legal concept similar to goodwill, strictly speaking, more akin to that of 'lease goodwill'  in England, Austrailia).

*Nic Suzor thankfully made a nice abstract of the article, you can read it here

My paper, same to that of Andew Herman at al, centers on the creation and management of goodwill, an intangible asset of considerable value to VW itself based on affective bonds between players, MMO platform operators, and their commodities in the marketplace. (Differences are, i approached in micro level with economic's support, while they did in macro level with communication & cultural studies)

I hope recalling these two goodwill be an international goodwill, then help in concluding a peace treaty between properties(IP v. VP), and carve out the identity of VW & its virtue.

WoW v. MDY: Copyright, EULAs, and Game Rules

Greg L

We've been talking about TOS/EULAs for quite a long time here at Terra Nova.  Here's a fairly obvious theory about these agreements, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham's felicfic calculus:

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I Gamer

Ren Reynolds

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

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

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An Atlas of our Terra Nova?

Lisa Galarneau

Truly a herculean effort has been undertaken!  The Association of Virtual Worlds has compiled 'The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds", an index to 250 virtual worlds from all over our physical world, all neatly meta-tagged and linked.  Oh, and there's a glossary... 

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The Cookie Monster Economy and "Guild Socialism"

Timothy Burke

Recently, I happened to catch a segment of Sesame Street that my daughter was watching. In it, Cookie Monster was trying to hire a human assistant to help him sell six cookies. Cookie Monster explained helpfully, “Cookie Monster sell cookies in order to have money to buy cookies”.

Virtual world exchange can feel like a Cookie Monster economy sometimes, but never more so than in Flying Lab Software’s Pirates of the Burning Sea. It’s been an interesting economy to watch as the live game has taken shape. Not so much because it is innovative or provides a fun game mechanic. Even by the standards of persistent virtual worlds, the economy in Pirates is unusually broken in functional terms. However, on one hand, it is one of the most successful Cookie Monster designs I’ve seen, in that it attracts players who are most strongly drawn to the game’s setting or the game’s design ambitions and niche vision. On the other hand, it also throws a sharp light on collective action in MMO economies that are designed to blunt or hedge against exposure to markets.

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Bears are People Too! The Metanomics Colbert Challenge

Robert Bloomfield

Last Monday capped off the first season of interview series, Metanomics:  Business and Policy in the Metaverse.   Over the course of the season (35 shows in 35 weeks), we refined our focus to the following four target audiences:

• representatives of real-world enterprises using virtual worlds to achieve their goals
• virtual world entrepreneurs meeting the needs of those enterprises or their fellow residents
• developers,  policy-makers and analysts who will shape the future of the metaverse; and
• academics who are studying and educating these groups, or using virtual worlds as their classrooms or laboratories.

One industry we haven't delved into yet is entertainment.  The fit is natural, as the reports on Virtual Worlds News shows us just about every day.  But how do we get movers and shakers in entertainment to appear on Metanomics?  Well, one way is to be a little more entertaining.  So take a gander at our Metanomics Colbert Challenge.

No one is going to suggest I quit my day job to do comedy, but SLCN does an excellent job of packaging.  Feel free to pass it on to your friends--and to Jon Stewart, Rob Riggle and Stephen Colbert, if you know them.

Metanomics is running 'best of' shows on Mondays at 11am Pacific Time and Tuesdays at 3pm Pacific, until we start our second season in June.  If you want to suggest guests, please do--self-nominations welcome. 

EA to Close EA-Land: Goodbye to TSO

Mike Sellers

As has been reported in several places starting with the EA-Land blog (to which the EA-Land site now points), EA will be shutting down EA-Land in August.  EA-Land was the do-over of The Sims Online, which at one time in its heady pre-release days was the presumptive heir to the "first million user virtual world" crown.  A virtual world/game  from EA and built using the biggest, most successful and accessible game IP ever? 

What could possibly go wrong?

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Tell us what you really think

Dmitri Williams

Ah, the sounds of spring: classes ending, birds chirping, and one Englishman going apeshit on his countrymen. Witness the awesome power of this fully operational Bartle-station in the Guardian.

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The Sexual Implications of Going Hands Free in Second Life

BonnieRuberg

Earlier this month, Linden Lab released a demo of a hands-free interface for movement within Second Life.  While they were careful to explain that this project is still in the early stages of development, the interface as it stands would allow players to walk and fly through the world using only the positions of their bodies.  Apparently inspired by the controls on Segway scooters, a 3D camera would capture players' movements as they stand a number of feet in front of their computer screens--or, as in the case of the demo, conveniently ginormos televisions.  Linden also claims that the technology in development can sense facial movement and expressions.

While other bloggers are seeing a potentially ground-breaking new way to interact in a world whose current user interface is a giant pain in the butt, I'm wondering: what will going hands free do for sex in Second Life?

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Did We Ignore the Rise of the Personal World?

Lisa Galarneau

In a week when Sony has announced yet more delays (another in a longer series of gaffes that has spawned endless humiliation) in the development of their much hyped virtual space, Home, and when even the roar from WoW’s success seems to be fading into an echo, a reminder about the incredible success of a little game that could...  Like All in the Family or this year's indie darling Once (or the Aeron chair, for that matter), it almost never got made 'cause people making decisions about such things didn't believe Will Wright (who doesn't believe Will Wright?!) when he said it would be the best thing ever. Cause after all, who the heck would want to play in a virtual dollhouse?   

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The air that we breathe

Nate Combs

Neils Clark forwards a five page collage on "Gaming Addiction: Clearing The Air, Moving Forward" on Gamasutra (April 3, 2008).   Clearing the air might be ambitious at this stage of the discussion, but Neils provides a useful catalog of the range of ideas that have taken root in this landscape.  The difficulty of charged-up umbrella issues is that all sort of argument can become ensnared.   A few selected quotes are provided below the fold; read the essay on the Gamasutra site.  There is excellent comment there too.

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Against Cyberproperty

Greg L

This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden.  The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a.k.a. “cybertrespass,” a.k.a. the Internet variant of trespass to chattel doctrine.

Though this article doesn't explicitly mention it, cyberproperty doctrine has some interesting connections with virtual property and virtual worlds -- below I'll explain what cyberproperty is and how it relates to the concept of virtual property.

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Voice in Virtual Worlds, Take 3

Nicolas Ducheneaut

In line with the recent discussions we had here about the role of voice in virtual worlds (see for instance this post, and more recently this one), some new research by Greg Wadley from the University of Melbourne adds more empirical data to the debate. The findings are summarized in this paper but click below to read Greg's own summary of his findings:

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Can you hear the game now?

Mia Consalvo

I was recently invited to speak at the Culture and Computer Games: Studying Online Activities conference held at the HumLab in Umea, Sweden. The conference was organized by Torill Mortensen, and the participants were mainly European games researchers who have their own WoW guild, The Truants. As a non-WoW player I was honored to be asked, and the conference was great, featuring not only research talks and research-in-progress discussions, but also workshops on how to make machinima and how to pull data from games for interesting sorts of analysis and display.

I arrived in the middle of one presentation about game audio (by Kristine Jorgensen), and I'm so sorry I arrived late. Her talk was one of the first I've heard that takes seriously the audio in MMO games. More thoughts on why audio is so fascinating below the cut--

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The Point of No Return

Richard Bartle

I ran a roundtable session at IMGDC last weekend on the subject of "Government Interference: How Much Can you Take?". The way it worked, I presented a number of scenarios in turn, ramping up each one of them to see when (if ever) the situation would become so intolerable that it would stop the attendees from ever wanting to develop an MMORPG.

Some things were irritating, but not so irritating that they'd cause the assembled developers and designers to give up. For example, government requirements for tracking every single transaction to prevent fraud fell into this category: it adds a huge overhead, but it's something people can just about live with.

There were two proposals, however, which hit the abandon ship button for everyone. Both of these are ones I've seen advocated a number of times, included here on TerraNova.

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AIIDE '08

Nate Combs

Games AI seems most associated most with single-player computer games.  This is because with single-player games there is no social dimension to highlight (it is up to only the AI for dynamic content).  However, AI has an important role yet to play in social "massively multiplayer" spaces, I believe.   Consider the features readers of MMOWatch thought were important in RPGs (see site poll) as illustrative.   In order of importance (at the time of my reading): "NPC interaction", "Character development", "Exploration", "Combat" (only 5%),  "Puzzles", "Questing"...

A call for papers is out (AIIDE '08), details below.  Readers here might take this time to suggest to those considering writing what they think are the important qualities of entertainment AI in MMORPGs.

The Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '08) is soliciting papers and presentations on research and applications involving artificial intelligence in computer games and entertainment. The conference will take place on October 22-24, 2008, at Stanford University in California, USA. Paper drafts and talk proposals are requested before April 22, 2008. More details can be found at the conference website: http://www.aiide.org ...

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U.S. Congressional Hearing on Virtual Worlds

Greg L

It's April 1st, but this is legit. 

It's a hearing of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee.  See this witness list and there's an MP3 of the proceedings now that can be found here.  I'll refrain from comments until I've listened to all of this, but the opening statements of the Congressfolk were, to say the least, interesting.

Update: Video, audio, and prepared statements now archived here.  Some news reports now available  here.  And one initial thought: apart from the opening remarks, this was mostly a hearing about Second Life.  The speakers other than Rosedale talked primarily about Second Life and UGC worlds.

Update 2: On listening to testimony and further reflection, in lieu of commenting, I think I'll just point to Lum's reaction.  I'm really not sure I have much to say about this event myself.  Still, it is the first Congressional hearing on virtual worlds.  I wonder what the first hearing on airplanes was like?

Update 3: Ok, my last comment on this, in reply to Raph's thoughts.  If you can get past 1) the opening remarks, 2) the promotional video for Second Life, and 3) the fact that everyone at the hearing seemed to think that Second Life was synonymous with virtual worlds (made convenient by the fact that the other witnesses had major investments or involvements in Second Life), then you'll find the Q&A (starting at 51:20) has some very interesting stuff.  Some of it shows the legislators being perceptive.  Some of it shows the legislators and witnesses being not so perceptive.  But if you're interested in the regulation of virtual worlds, it's worth a listen.

Report of the Byron Review

Ren Reynolds

The long awaited and, in part, widely feared report of the Byron Review into children, the internet and video games is out.

Titled Safer Children in a Digital World, the report is 226 pages long and includes a section specifically on online games – which recommends that guidelines are created for ‘good practice in child safety’ (I think I get to say to the industry - I told you so, see KidSpace Stamp )

I’ve posted the exec summary below the fold but I suggest people go to the full report, in particular Chapter 8 ‘Online Gaming’.

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Even More on Teaching Languages in Second Life

BonnieRuberg

Fresh from the press release oven, we have word of an entire 24-hour conference to be held in Second Life this May on the topic of teaching languages in virtual worlds.  The event is called SLanguages2008, and it should prove fully multilingual (neat!).  It's still two months away, but ESL dorks like myself have been officially advised to mark their calendars.  From the release:

"The conference will be held within Second Life allowing the participants to exchange ideas and share experiences simultaneously around the world. The online conference is free to attend and includes talks, workshops, discussions and posters on language education using virtual worlds such as Second Life. The events will cover methodologies, teaching tools and experiences."

Blizzard v WoW Glider: Interesting, no?

Dan Hunter

The EFF's Fred von Lohmann just sent round a note on an email list about the summary judgment briefs in the WoW Glider case. I've mirrored the briefs here and here for those who are interested, and below the fold I'm gonna engage in rampant copyright infringement by reposting all of Fred's message. He sums it up too well to bother trying to explain any better, and I'm sure that he'll forgive the infringement...

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Using Second Life to Teach English as a Second Language

BonnieRuberg

This one definitely gets filed under "blatant self-promotion."

I recently started freelancing for Forbes.com, and the first article I've written for them is called "How to Spark Remote Learning." The piece covers the (surprisingly sizable) movement to use Second Life's immersive environment to teach residents foreign languages.  Specifically, I talked to Kip Boahn--head of a German ESL school by day, and founder of a new island named Second Life English--who's dedicated himself to providing free resources for the game's estimated  5,000 language learners and 1,000 instructors.  What's particularly interested is the way Second Life English and other programs make the most of the world itself.  From the article:

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Second Skin

Greg L

Did anyone see the MMORPG documentary Second Skin at SXSW? 

I'm curious because the story from the official weblog seems to be that gamers are wildly enthusiastic about the film.  The Escapist says: "gamers walk away feeling like they had seen seen their life story, with slick editing, a peppy soundtrack, and the seductive polish of an Apple commercial."  On the other hand, this opinion at Gamasutra says: "As the lights dimmed, I was excited to explore how interactive media is changing our experience of ourselves. But instead, I just wound up feeling sorry for the losers playing World of Warcraft."  Eric Zimmerman's comment (scroll down on that link) seems to accord with that: "I was distressed by a film that seemed to be a parade of gross stereotypes, most of which were clearly negative."

Who is right?

Virtual Law Bibliography

Greg L

As part of the preparation for the book on law and virtual worlds that I'm writing, I've been trying to make a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus on the intersection of law and virtual worlds. 

Just in case readers are interested, the current version is attached below.  If I'm missing something, please let me know in the comments or by email.

As you'll see, the rate of publications has been increasing, with the majority of the publications coming out in the past couple of years.

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Arden I Going Offline

Edward Castronova

For a couple of months, we've had the Arden I environment available for people to experience, but we have to take it down now. We need the server space to run a social science experiment in Arden II: London's Burning. More on that in a little while.

If you are interested in playing around with Arden I, please do. The module is available for free download at this URL. Go ahead and monkey around however you'd like. See what you can do with a Shakespeare fantasy module.

Philip Rosedale the CEO is Dead....Long Live Philip Rosedale the Chairman of the Board

Robert Bloomfield

Today Reuters' Second Life division reported the scoop that Philip Rosedale is stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab, but will replace Mitch Kapor as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Eric Krangel (Eric Reuters in SL) asked me for a comment on his page of resident reactions, and I went with this:

Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets.  The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy.  First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom.  Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office.  Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.

So, what do YOU think?

 

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Lying Online

Thomas Chesney

Here we have a top Prof laying into some virtual world research. His objection is basically, that he can lie about his personal details and generally not take the research seriously. While it is more difficult to lie in a real world laboratory about age and sex, as the experimenter can immediately see through the lies, it is still entirely possible to make stuff up. Even with age and sex, if I fill in the form and submit it with 10 other people, it's possible the experimenter won't realise if I say I'm an 80 year old granny.
An experimental economist discussing the possibility of running experiments in virtual worlds, commented that when subjects show up to his real life lab, they see him looking stern, dressed in a suit and generally being threatening. This, he said, causes them to 'straighten up' and take the whole thing seriously. It's true that in our own in world experiments, we've had people clowning around before (sometimes during) and after the work. We just accepted that as part of the world's culture, although we did take steps to try to get people to take the work seriously (mainly by explaining what we were trying to do, rather than using visual cues like the experimental economist, although we did wear suits and our lab was as 'serious-looking' as we could make it).
So here's the question - how can virtual world participants be encouraged to take online research seriously, or should no attempt be made to change their online behaviour?

Are Religions Virtual Worlds?

Merci

Right now I’m reading about player behavior in MMOs. I keep thinking how similar those player behaviors and game worlds are to the fantastical real-world-overlays we know as religions. Both imbue players with feeling of elevated direction.

Religions and MMOs give believers/players a lot in exchange for their subscription. Believers get a realm to achieve in that doesn’t necessarily affect what most people hold to be the real world. Recurrent personalities exist at the same time as the believers, but persist regardless of the life span of any one believer. Your grandmother's Jesus is your Jesus. The NPC you met last week during a quest will be there two months from now when you sign up a secondary character. And lastly, religions and virtual worlds both contain objectives that can be broken down into steps for the believer. Religions almost always require believers to do at least one thing, even if it's only to take an NPC into their heart. That action is not much different, and frankly, takes much less time, than solving riddles, collecting items, or grinding XP.

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Games+Learning+Society 4.0 Conference -- Call For Papers

Dan Hunter

Just got pinged by the fabulously fabulous Sean Michael Dargan who, when not touring the world as a surprisingly-tall-and-dapper-guitarist-cum-singer, coordinates Games+Learning+Society for Constance and Kurt and the Madison gang. He reminded me that they have a CFP out. GLS is a great conference, and the location is just wonderful. The CFP is below the fold and y'all should be thinking about submitting a paper, and then going.

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Review of "The Second Life Herald"

Dan Hunter

I just did a short book review of Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace's "The Second Life Herald" for Science. It's just been published and so I can make it available here. For those who don't want to read a one page review, I'll give a mini-review of the review over the page, and ask a couple of questions of y'all.

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Localization meets Culturalization

Mia Consalvo

Due to my interest in the global aspects of MMOGs and games generally, I wound up at a really interesting session at GDC a couple of weeks ago. It was titled "Self-Censoring Potential Content Risks for Global Audiences: Why, How and When" given by Tom Edwards from Englobe. His talk went far beyond the "avoid blood in Germany, stay away from the Taiwanese flag if you want China as a market" tidbits I've seen before. He argued for something beyond localization--adequate culturalization of games, which makes increasing sense, given the emerging markets and necessities for creating games that appeal to more than one cultural/national/whatever group. Yet his talk was focused on single-player and offline multi-player games, and I began to wonder, how would MMOGs fit in?

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Residents versus Users

Thomas Chesney

There's been a lot of press lately about how virtual worlds can be used to study human bahaviour. But is it really human behaviour? The following is from an unpublished paper about behaviour in virtual worlds:

 

An interesting point to consider is whether we are researching residents or users (the term ‘resident’ referring to an avatar and ‘user’ referring to the human controlling the avatar). They are not necessarily the same - Turkle (1995) discusses one of the appeals of virtual worlds as being the ability of a user to change themselves, with change of gender being discussed most. For example, one study of a Japanese virtual world revealed there to be 4 male users to 1 female user, but only 3 male residents to 1 female resident (Stone, 1995); given the number of players of that world, many tens of thousands of users were swapping gender (Turkle, 1995). The approach taken here was that we were collecting information from residents about acts performed by residents and the effect this had on other residents.

Is it good enough to study avatars? Or should some attempt always be made to tie things back to the guy sitting at the computer screen?

 

Gary Gygax, 1938 - 2008

Nate Combs

Perhaps Gary will be best remembered for Dungeons and Dragons (1974).  I  fondly remember the colorful 1977 Monster Manual (1st Edition), I believe I may still have it in a box in the attic.  I also can look to my bookshelves and see the first version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), 1974 soft copy plus Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements winking at me from behind a mountain of paper, "it has been a long time."  Indeed.

How many other books do I still keep from the 1970's?   You?

A story I like is from the Wikipedia: "The game Gettysburg from the Avalon Hill company captured Gygax's attention. It was from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hexagon mapping sheets that were available. He began looking for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and used not only common dice (with six sides), but dice of all five platonic solid shapes."

A generation of kids learned probability from those dice, and a whole lot more.

This quote also  illustrates how imagination and genres of game are cross-fertilized.    A theme we've discussed many times on Terra Nova in the past is the legacy of table-top Role Playing Games (RPG) to modern video-game RPGs and indeed through MUDs to the massively-multiplayer MMORPGs.  Yet, I think this technical lineage is too confining.   Perhaps the clearer statement of legacy is from Anton I., from comment here:

May he rest in peace proudly as one of the very few people whose creations will outlive them.

Of not many people will this ever be said.

Yet, Gary sounded humbler than his legacy, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

Gamers everywhere, whatever your genre, salute.  One of your kin has passed.