Terra Nova

Got a Life

Salon.com and the UKs Guardian Online both feature a piece James Meek called Get a Life. The feature covers the business of MMORPGs both from the publisher stand point and the growing trade in item trading. I did not spot anything that would surprise a TN reader (though of course they have impeccable sources: Dr C, Julian and Professor Bartle are all referenced [edit: scandalously Julian is not cited, but Nick Yee is – sorry I was halucinating]) but it is interesting to see MMO coverage stretching across the media landscape.

Incidentally the Guardian aunched a games blog this week.

Nuclear Family Fallout

The running joke about the Nuclear Family is that it went critical sometime in the 70's and blew up all over the place, with fallout we're still trying to sort out even now. The modern paradigm is the "Blended Family", the product of divorce and remarriage. I'm intimately familiar with that, as the reason I've been so scarce for the last 6 months has been dealing with trying to make a family out of me, my fiance, her two boys and my daughter.

My paternal grandparents once told me that the world had changed so much since they were young, they didn't even recognize it anymore. Born in the 1920's, their childhood was during the Great Depression and their young adulthood during World War II. When they were young, divorces were rare, mass entertainment was movies and radio dramas, and long-distance calls so expensive that you heard from relatives in other states only on special holidays and in emergencies.

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Virtual World Economy: It's Namibia, Basically.

In my original study, EverQuest's productivity was measured at about $2,000 in terms of annual GDP per capita. This was misreported in the press as "Economist finds virtual economy bigger than Russia!" Absurd. No virtual economy could outproduce, in gross terms, Russia's hundred-million-worker economy. I wonder how many sensible people have rejected the whole line of research on the basis of this misreporting.

But let's address the question head on. Is it possible that virtual world economies might make a gross impact equivalent to that of a real country? Actually, yes. Virtual worlds are already that big, economically speaking. More accurately, some unfortunate countries remain that small.

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After currency

In this exclusive interview TerraNova talks to Second Life member Jacqueline Richelieu about her plans to create an in-world investment bank and stock exchange.

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Other Players conference

Due to some technical difficulties the submission deadline for the Other Players conference has been extended to August 16. Papers should be submitted online (contact Miguel Sicart for any questions about the process). The conference is December 6-8 at the IT University of Copenhagen and is sure to be a good one so hope folks can make it!

It's Academic

Following on from Ted's job news, as of today I'm officially Visiting Professor in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering at the University of Essex, England. The main consequence of this as far as I'm concerned is that I can use the job title Professor.

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Rubicite Breastplates & Narrative Nudges

Timothy Burke, who teaches at idyllic Swarthmore College, comments here from time to time, and had some interesting criticisms of Star Wars Galaxies a while back, has just posted a pair of papers on his weblog about design directions for MMORPGs (link link).

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Loot, More Loot, and Money

From Slashdot, Dark Age of Camelot is planning to hand out loot (described here) to help out casual players ("Gift of the Realm" system), to encourage players to move to under-populated servers ("Gift of the Realm sped up" system), and incidentally they plan to ban a significant number of cheats and in so doing take a revenue hit. As discussed (Do ya a deal Govna?), deals are springing forth all over the MMO space. Why stop? How about encouraging players to role-play Middle English? Ka-ching for any text-matched against a database of Chaucer? How about a plat for every fun, vivacious adjective you use... How about playing off-peak hours? When do deals become fiction breaking?

He was a veray parfit gentil knight.
Canterbury Tales. Prologue. Line 72.

Manhunted

News just in: a major UK retail group is withdrawing the game Manhunt from sale. According to a BBC news item, the game has been linked with a murder case in the UK by the victim’s parents and the product has been removed from sale as a mark of respect. So far most other retailers have not taken similar action.

Yes, Manhunt is a single player game – but a computer game is a computer game right?

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Dragons in Chickasaw

Peter Jenkins has a new paper in the Journal of Internet Law that analyzes free speech issues in MMORPGs. A version is available on SSRN. From the abstract:

In the 21st century, traditional company towns like Chickasaw, Alabama, where a corporation steps into the shoes of the state for purposes of the First Amendment, are almost non-existent. This paper postulates that they have been replaced by Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG's)... The paper emphasizes that the case law on freedom of speech in MMORPG's will have a profound precedent setting effect on how the First Amendment is applied to [a] coming universal virtual platform, since the legal principles concerning new technologies tend to be set at an early stage of their development.

This is the most extensive analysis of the "company town" doctrine's application to virtual worlds that I've seen. For what it's worth, many of the TN authors here are cited.

Update: Readers may be interested in doing a contrast/compare with Jack Balkin's article around pages 33-37, where he discusses the Marsh case as well...

Do ya a deal Govna?

You can’t go anywhere in the MMO metaverse these days without someone making you a very very special offer.

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Jeux en ligne

Those lucky enough to be in Paris on 21 September/septembre might like to head along to this half-day symposium on intellectual property issues in online worlds. The program (en français) includes a presentation on the nature of virtual sales and the market, a paper explaining Ubisoft's position on the virtual sale of assets, a discussion of the law of virtual assets and a roundtable discussion.

Pas mal.

[Thanks Cédric]

AI Game Masters?

I am at the (American Association for Artificial Intelligence [AI])AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI. A question lurks: is the AI challenge for MMOGs to develop "Game Master" capabilities that can manage/adjust play intelligently to the player experience?

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Switching costs fall

Everyone hates the leveling treadmill, but the business strategy makes sense: Once people spend 800 hours to get to the great content of your game, they will be less willing to spend another 800 hours to get the great content of your competitor's game. So long as every game has a leveling treadmill, each company has considerable pricing power over its installed base. You usually don't see this in the form of higher fees (I am not sure why not), but rather in the form of cost-cutting (minimal customer service, buggy expansion packs, the developer-is-always-right syndrome*). The competitive response is, of course, to cut the switching costs. One way would be to lessen the leveling treadmill or make its effect on the fun of gameplay minimal. Another would be to allow people with powerful characters in your competitor's game to enter your game with a similarly buff toon. A step in that direction: Playvault's migration service (mentioned in this comment by Joel Hutson first), through which a company can set an explicit exchange rate between a competitor's currency and their own. The service is expanding, apparently. If you are a millionaire in Ultima, you can now switch to Horizons and still be rich. Thanks Andres for the tip.

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Oh great!

Massive Incorporated, who specialise in the dynamic insertion of advertisements into games with an online component, has just secured an additional $5.5 million in funding from a couple of VC firms.

So w00t, big biz will soon get excited about filling virtual worlds with brands 'n banners. Let’s hope immersion triumphs, or this is what we might face..

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