Terra Nova

April Fool's Shenanigans

Blizzard's two-headed ogres were a joke, as was my riff on them. But the best gag of the day was from eGenesis and A Tale in the Desert...

Announcement: May 21 event at the ITU

Hi everyone. Just wanted to post an announcement for a symposium - Community Work: Managing Multiplayer Culture - we are hosting here at the Center on May 21. We'll be having a day-long event on the subject of community management in games and are incredibly lucky to have a terrific panel of speakers - Richard Bartle, Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell, and Jessica Mulligan. The full details and program can be found at the website. Registration is free but required by May 14.

I'll also just note quickly the symposium dovetails as the third day of a PhD course here, Game Culture (details also online) which runs May 19-21. Jessica Mulligan will be a guest speaker on day two of that as well. Applications for the course are due by April 19. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions!

Multi-User Avatars: MMORPG Economies May Soon Exceed Entire US GDP

World of Warcraft has just announced a new player race: two-headed ogres (thanks Slashdot and MMORPGDot). The official info page indicates that two players will cooperate in running the avatar. There's probably a precedent of this within text-based MUDs, but with the scale of current graphical worlds, these shared-ownership avatars create a very interesting and potentially extremely lucrative value proposition.

Continue reading "Multi-User Avatars: MMORPG Economies May Soon Exceed Entire US GDP"

Graphics Shmaphics

Replace the text of a MUD by graphics and you get virtual worlds that look like first-person shooters.

Replace the pictures of a first-person shooter by text and you get IF Quake.

If only it hadn't been released April 1st...

Dmitri takes games 'very seriously'

Shame on you if you have not read at least some of Dmitri Williams’s phd dissertation Trouble in River City: The Social Life of Video Games (note 11MB!) or the rather shorter The Video Game Lightning Rod: Constructions of a New Media Technology, 1970-2000.

But you’re in luck. This week Dmitri was interviewed on Michigan Radio’s State Side program. It’s a great interview where Dmitri talks about the social role and effects of video games and will be of interest to anyone that wants to take the subject ‘very seriously’ i.e. his comments are balanced and research based. The interview is here (requires Real).

Terra Nova Welcomes Constance Steinkuehler

The newest author adds to Terra Nova in several ways. She's trained in cognitive psychology (rather than law or economics, of which we have more than enough here already). She also has some experience in online learning issues, a perspective we completely lack so far. But most important of all, she's an expert, and an influential guild leader, in Lineage, the mammoth PvP siegefest that fascinates all of us yet remains, like much Asian gaming, obscure to our eyes. Constance is a member of the James Gee / Kurt Squire et al. videogame group at the University of Wisconsin, the school with the best student union beerhall in the world (speaking from personal experience, of course). On Wisconsin! And welcome Constance!

FunHi

Dan Terdiman in Wired reports on FunHi, a curious amalgam of social software system (à la Friendster, Orkut, etc), chatroom, and MMOG.

The milieu is gangsta, the economics purely Castronovan, the property regime Lastovkian.

Weird|Brilliant.

Should Some Be More Equal Than Others?

CCP (Eve-online) is trying to capitalize upon Earth and Beyond's descent with a new program:

Welcome Earth and Beyond users... CCP is now offering Earth and Beyond users access to a special evaluation program in cooperation with Gamespy. Earth and Beyond users have been forced to start looking for an alternative Sci-fi online game as Electronic Arts has announced it will close down Earth and Beyond at the end of summer... This upgrade program will include a no-obligation free trial of EVE Online and an in-game walkthrough of the game by an EVE volunteer who will explain the differences between the two games and help with the transition into EVE from Earth and Beyond. (see here).

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Where the Real World ends...

...Second Life begins...

So goes the announcement in my intray that Second Life v1.3 is shipping.

The new features are interesting because they seem to mark a specific push by Linden to blur the boundaries between SL and "real world" communication modes. So says the announcement:

The walls between Second Life and the real world are tumbling down! When you're not able to visit Second Life in person, v1.3 lets you receive and reply to your in-world Instant Messages via email.

Continue reading "Where the Real World ends..."

Free Culture for Free

Lawrence Lessig has a new book out. It’s called Free Culture and the really really really neat thing is that he has released it under a Creative Commons Licence, so it’s available for free all over the place, such as here. Physical copies can also be purchased.

For any TN readers not familiar with Lessig’s work, this promises to be another fascinating meditation / polemic on the nature of intellectual property generally and copyright specifically.

So are virtual items property?

There's Island of Women

On March 30, There will unveil its very own Paradise Island of iVillage women. Although the island is described by There as a "a special iVillage sanctuary" the boundaries between the iVillage island and the rest of There's world will be far fuzzier than the original fabled Paradise Island, as males will be able to freely access it and interact with "the natives."

This will be an interesting experiment for several reasons:

1 - It's a virtual space doubly marked by gender and commercial co-branding. (Is this the first of its kind? Anyone know of any precedents?)

2 - iVillage is a text-based community of women whose bonding often takes place specifically around members' relationships to their RL bodies in the form of pregnancy, dieting, health, and beauty tips. While there may be the rare case of role-playing and gender-bending in the iVillage web community (ie. men posing as women), most participants' online identities are extensions of their RL (female) selves. Will this direct tie between offline/online identity carry over into a virtual world? Or will iVillage women use There to role play, whether that means creating an avatar that looks radically different from their RL body, or even choose a male avatar?

3 - The branding of a virtual space as female automatically sexualizes it. Already some of the male community members in There are viewing the addition of iVillage island as a welcome opportunity to increase their chances for romance. How will the iVillage women respond to these romantic overtures? Is There prepared to deal with any Mr. Bungles that show up?

We'll find out soon. Next Tuesday the experiment begins.

Play Money / Julian is Famous

Another brief news note -- while I would normally permit our co-author Julian to declare that Wired's Daniel Terdiman has now made him famous -- see "But Will IRS Accept Virtual Cash?" -- it seems Julian has been understandably pre-occupied lately with his Play Money pursuits, conducting business by wifi (and engaging in soul-searching / ethographic research) in the back corner booth of a Flying J truckstop. And I should note he's got a new marketing slogan:

SHOP NOW AT THE playMONEY STORE
Do it, damn you!

Catchy, eh?

In the not-too-distant future, online play will rule universe

Or so says the Houston Chronicle. The story is actually an AP feed, by Matt Slagle, elsewhere running under the much less exciting headline "Tale of two video game worlds: Online consoles soar, PCs stumble."

US Sales of Online Game Titles: $1b and Counting

SiliconValley.com and the San Jose Mercury News report (thanks for the tip, Tomasz Wozniak) that sales of online-capable games in the US topped $1 billion last year, up 167 percent over the previous year. Note that these are only online-capable; people who buy Madden football may not use the online feature. Indeed, 69 percent of the online-capable titles are sports games. Seems natural, actually. Aren't sports games more likely than RPGs or world simulators to take avatar technology mainstream?

Should MMOG Players be Meta and Portable?

At the 04 Game Developer's Conference, I attended a tutorial Tuesday by the Sony folk (Raph,Rich,Gordon, Developing a Massively Multiplayer Game). Somewhere in the QA, late in the day, a claim regarding the economics of MMOGs emerged: given the current western MMOG ecosystem consisting of "AAA", "Mid-range" and "Boutique" games - the claim was that the economics of the subscription business model will eventually squeeze out the Mid-range MMOGs.

I can't judge this, but was left to wonder how one could live in an MMOG ecosystem at whose center were a few big generic MMOGs and whose fringes were lots of smaller, less-stable, but arguably more innovative MMOG experiments? There would be a vague problem of transitions: how to flow ideas from the edges to the center? How to encourage players to play in the fringes without being orphaned?

Now fast forward to a point floated by Peter Molyneux (AI: Gameplay and Design) later: wouldn't it be nice if in the future player profiles could be exchanged between games. Somehow games might collect, save, and then share player meta-info with other games. Then games could then adapt and configure themselves using this information to enhance the player experience.

Continue reading "Should MMOG Players be Meta and Portable?"