Terra Nova

The Billion-Dollar Game

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare just launched and in 5 days it's earned $775m. Xbox Live had more than 3m players from the first day.

Some thoughts. First, we're close to seeing a game raise $1b in a weekend. Second, what kind of a game is it: A first-person shooter. Physics, realism, destruction, kill-or-be-killed, but all in good fun. Play war. War play. The experience has such a broad and deep resonance with the hairless ape. Homo sapiens is built to like it. Third, by capturing the spotlight yet again, FPS games reinforce their status as the representative of the medium. For better or worse, when non-gamers think of games, they think of FPS. Fourth: It's a dusty game. The olive, blue, and feldgrau of European and jungle war has been replaced by sandy brown gear. War is now a dry desert thing.

Why Second Life failed

Not my headline -- I took it from this article published Tuesday in Slate.  (You may want to take a look at it before reading further, since I'm reacting to it here.)

Once upon a time, I posted about my consternation that our blog was insufficiently interested in Second Life vis-a-vis the amount of media attention it was receiving.  I personally wanted to like Second Life more than I did, but it just didn't grab me.  This was despite my deep respect for Cory Ondrejka and my intellectual interest in the IP-related aspects of the platform. 

But now times have changed, at least in the media consensus.  Second Life has spent five years in the trench of the Gartner hype cycle (though perhaps, despite this Slate article, it may be climbing out). The media's souring toward Second Life was no surprise.  Ren suggested in 2006 that the media's love of Second Life was so strong that it was doomed to burn out in 2007.  So this week's article in Slate is about five years late to the "why Second Life failed" party.  In fact, it's pretty much a 2011 repetition of what Ren said people were going to say (and then said) in 2007:

In 2006, the future was Second Life. Business Week put Second Life on the cover. American Apparel, Dell, and Reebok, among many others, rushed to build virtual storefronts. Reuters even created a full-time Second Life bureau chief. People rushed to sign up and create their own avatars. Blue hair and Linden dollars were the future.  Looking back, the future didn’t last long. By the end of 2007, Second Life was already losing its fizz.

Note that the inset video in this article is about Second Life prostitution -- points 1 and 2 of Ren's prediction. 

The gist of this article is the claim that Second Life failed because it doesn't fill a consumer need.  Brilliant -- welcome to 2007.  Actually, maybe 2003, since this is basically the same criticism that many of us had when Second Life launched (do we really need a Metaverse?) and the reason the more game-focused set of us always had a little trouble liking Second Life.  It seemed like a very cool tool that was not particularly fun to use.  Without a game mechanic that lended purpose to your presence on the platform, what Second Life offered seemed a lot like an avatar-populated uncurated 3-D art gallery.

Today, though, my feelings have flipped (at least a little).  I still don't hang out in Second Life very much, but I do respect the technology and community in a way I failed to do in 2007. 

Part of this is probably that we are now entering a gamification hype wave, where not only is it the kiss of death to have a virtual world with no game-like elements, it is the kiss of death to sell anything (e.g. toothpaste) without badges, trophies, and epic wins.  I have no idea how long this gamification bubble will last, but in any event, the spread of game mechanics everywhere makes me more interested in those virtual platforms, like Second Life, that deny that they are games.

The other thing that has changed my mind about Second Life is that, almost against my will, I have gotten to know it better.  Part of this is simply from reading about it.  Academic interest in virtual worlds has often congregated, for understandable reasons, on the virtual world with the real economy that was not a game.  So it is hard to participate in academic conversations about virtual worlds without tracking the state of Second Life.  After all, some of the most interesting books about virtual worlds are about Second Life -- I'm thinking particularly of TN author Thomas Malaby's book, and Tom Boellstorff's book. 

But more importantly, I've now used Second Life on many occassions to speak with audiences.  The Slate authors say that Second Life is a neat technology that no one wants to use because it meets no consumer need.  Actually, it really isn't a bad technology for certain forms of distance teaching and collaboration, as IBM and other firms have learned.  Other forms of social software are more popular, but spatial simulations make possible certain forms of interaction that a technology like Facebook does not provide.  To put it in the framing of the Slate authors -- there are actually some useful milkshakes in Second Life.  Not everyone needs them, but some do.

So Second Life has not failed, really.  Wired and the tech pundrity seemed convinced that we would all be logged into Second Life working virtual jobs in 2011.  We're not.  The tech media in 2006 bubbled over with the belief that all these companies seeking free publicity by launching offices in Second Life were going to make big profits within Second Life. They didn't.  So, in my view, Second Life never failed--the media reporting on Second Life failed.

Additionally, the Slate authors aren't so graceful when they stumble on a key fact about Second Life:

In the first half of 2011, the company reported that an average of about 1 million users logged in every month—which, you have to admit, is about 999,990 more than you expected.

Really? Why should we have expected that? Oh -- I know why -- because it has been common knowledge for five years that Second Life "failed."

Actually, it seems to me that if Second Life has 1 million users each month, the company is actually serving some need for some market.  The question is: what kind of milkshake are those 1 million users drinking? 

Based on my admittedly limited experiences, I'm sure that some of them are using the technology as a distance collaboration tool, because I know it works well for that purpose.  John Carter McKnight raises another possibility -- maybe Second Life has "failed" to the extent it has systematically failed to realize the rather peculiar flavor of milkshake that it offers. Perhaps, like the Slate authors, the creators of Second Life think they haven't got a milkshake to sell, or perhaps they don't think it is a milkshake that the world wants to buy.

And perhaps, in terms of broad demographics, it isn't: Second Life is a tool for those users with the passion and ability to make and customize their own fantastic worlds.  That's a pretty niche interest, isn't it?  Sort of like a Shamrock Shake.  But obviously, and perhaps suprisingly, a million people today are willing to buy it.  If I were Slate, I think that's the story I'd want to run in 2011.

Lego Universe to Close

Lego Universe is a traditional MMO, requiring a subscription to play. Apparently they were not seeing enough revenue and had to close. It has wonderful graphics, seems quite smooth, and uses the same kind of combat mechanics s the immensely popular Lego Star Wars types of games (everybody's a lego dude and you break your enemies). Just not popular enough with the target audience.

Lego is a hugely successful company and their decision argues for the limited appeal of the EQ model. Maybe the thrill of being a character in a world is a one-time affair (I think Richard Bartle has argued as much). After you get over that, what keeps you engaged? I'm an explorer type, and I burn out when I can sense the boundaries or the world or, alternatively, when I can tell that getting to the boundaries (such as the highest level) will take far too many hours of repetitive gameplay. I dream of a world that is called into existence by my footsteps. At the same time, mere land and sky is not enough. I want to come across villages that no one has seen before and find that they need me somehow.

 

Do you build a game like a machine?

Who should make games - artists or engineers? We've bemoaned in this space before the turn that WoW took, from the kludgy 3d mock-up of a D&D campaign that was EverQuest, to the very refined, very polished, and to some dead, grind that was (is!) Azeroth. We bemoaned it. Then we went out and played the heck out of it for years.

Students come to game design with passion and see themselves as creators. It's a lot of work to get them to finish, polish, and refine to a degree the industry might respect. It's important pressure, though, according to a surprising source. Ernest Adams, a game design artist, tells us that passion is overrated.

Constructing these large-scale engagement systems - is there a method to it? Is it scientific, like the building of ships and cars? Come to think of it, what's an example of an "indie car" or an "indie ship" or an "indie building" akin to the indie games that many say are the only soul left in the business? Are these examples apt at all?

Goonswarm Shocks EVE Markets

More evidence that an MMO can look like the real world! Compare the Enron saga to the following story sent in by Goonswarmer endie. Thanks endie!

***

Basically, this is about some emergent gameplay that we in Goonswarm (it's always Goonswarm) are running right now.  It requires a touch of background for the non-Eve player, but is fairly easily comprehensible to the non-Eve constituency.  There are three basic things to understand:

1- In Eve, "POS Towers" (essentially small space stations) are at the core of much manufacturing, being used to react various compounds to make the building blocks of advanced construction.  Of the four Eve races' towers, by far the most efficient for this task are Gallente.  Gallente towers are thus used almost exclusively for high-end compound reactions.  Without the results of these reactions - many essential items from interdictors to jump freighters - simply cannot be built.

2 - Gallente towers use a specific type of ice which is predominately mined in Gallente empire space (it spawns in a few other places but is economically unrewarding to mine there until prices become vastly higher).  By filtering on various criteria, we were able to determine that only seventeen of all of Eve's thousands of systems were suitable for the methods used to mine almost all Gallente ice (automated botting by large numbers of ice-mining accounts).  I'll spare you the details of what those criteria were unless you are particularly interested.

3 - The automated bots use ships that themselves require at least thirty or so hours of mining to pay for their own capital investment, when fitted.  Ironically, they rely on CCP's own mechanics for protection: if you shoot them in empire space then "Concord" (an external, invincible force of NPCs: essentially town guards) will spawn very quickly and destroy you.  However, it is possible to fit certain ships so as to deal sufficient damage sufficiently rapidly to destroy one or more miners before Concord arrive.  For obvious and predictably tasteless Goonswarm-cultural reasons this is known as Jihading.

We have therefore announced and begun a campaign aimed at preventing anyone mining for Gallente ice in Empire space.  Since we have thousands of members, we have proved able to shut ice-mining operations down almost entirely.

GDC Online Coverage

Our friends the psychogamers are covering GDC Online over on Motivate.Play. Can't wait to hear what Neal Stephenson has been up to.

Minecraft as Web 2.0

I was recently invited to write a book chapter about the intersection of amateur creativity and digital games. I just posted a draft of that chapter here. It's half about Web 2.0 and half about Minecraft.  Feedback is welcome.

I have been interested in amateur creativity for over a decade now and it has been one of the things I have found most interesting in studying virtual worlds.  As I explain in the draft, I think digital gaming is itself interesting because it is intrinsically aligned with solicitude for a certain group of creative amateurs (players).  So I've been fascinated following the phenomenon of Minecraft and how it works as both a tool for creativity, a game, and a locus for other forms of creativity.  I'm going to keep watching to see how it evolves.  So if anyone reading is doing academic research on Minecraft--or knows of anyone else who is--please let me know.

Minecraft is set up like an adventure game, but unlike in World of Warcraft, you're not on a roller coaster ride to level 85.  Instead, Minecraft embodies what I once wanted Second Life to be.  Second Life is supposedly all about user creativity, but it seem that many users don't take much advantage of the creative tools it offers. In Minecraft, though, user creativity is baked into the gameplay.  That makes it a more satisfying experience for amateur creators.  Not to knock Second Life, but based on the numbers, it seems that many people (I'm curious about how many are kids, btw) are finding Minecraft's sandbox more fun than the sandbox of Second Life.

As I explain in the draft, I'm not sure what Minecraft says about the future of user-generated content in games.  I imagine the industry is paying attention to Minecraft and how it became what it is.  But I'm not sure the mainstream games industry is anywhere near ready to create a Minecraft clone, for reasons I discuss in the paper and in this prior paper.

I don't imagine it is going to happen, but a massively-multiplayer version of Minecraft would be really interesting, wouldn't it?  Especially if it allowed some sort of client-level code-modding as you moved through regions, so groups of users could add new layers of functionality to their spaces. I wonder what sorts of things would emerge from that?

Back to Ontology

Happy Monday, world! Let's do some philosophy!! Correspondent Freek Rijna has sent us a monograph applying Searle's concepts of social construction of reality to the ontology of virtual items. There's a nice, tight little point in here: Virtual things are real simulations. Simulations are real things, after all. They have physical existence as images and sounds. If you accept this, you don't have to get bogged down in debates about whether virtual things are real or not real. Look at it this way: A rook in chess is a real simulation of a castle. It takes its place among the set of real things labeled {simulations}, not among the set of real things labeled {buildings}. Therefore, asking whether a rook is a real castle is like asking whether a fish is a real bicycle. The fish and the bicycle are both real. And the construction "a fish may NOT be a real bicycle" is not very interesting at all.And so when people buy and sell virtual items, they are not doing so as if those items were real. Rather, they are treating them as the real things they are - real simulations.

Is Game Development Better Than Mohair Goat Farming?

When I was working in Benefit-Cost Analysis and Public Policy Economics, a colleague told me a tale about his friend the mohair goat farmer. "Mohair goat farmer - what's that?" you ask. A mohair goat is a goat whose hair - mohair - produces a fiber of particular value in the making of a certain type of military cloth. Now, the military had a hard time getting its hands on mohair. It seems there were never enough people who chose mohair goat farmer as their occupation. Moreover, the peasants who did mohair had a habit of being born and then continuing to live, for decades at a time, in lands of unreliable relation to the USA. Therefore in the interest of securing domestic production of this important strategic good, our government began to subsidize mohair goat farming. Heavily. So heavily, in fact, that a man searching through government records for the most-subsidized line of work of all would come upon - you guessed it - mohair goat farming. And that is how my colleague's friend became a mohair goat farmer.

I do not know whether husbandry of this noble caprid remains the most heavily-subsidized business in America, but I do know that video game development is getting close. Brian Keegan (thanks Brian!) sent around this piece about the government's favors for game development, most of them apparently accidental. Video games are not a strategic resource (yet), but Uncle Sam still smiles on them almost as much as he smiles on those preciously hairy goats.

Postscript: Google tells me that former Rep. Anthony Wiener took on the goat subsidy. The goats attacked and drove him off. If only we had understood their message!

Wall Street Journal: Woah Dude! Line Between Real and Virtual is Kinda Shady!

On September 10, 2011 (TN is experiencing a little backlog), the WSJ devoted several column inches in the country's highest-selling newspaper to the possibility that virtual goods have real value. The author, Holly Finn, does a nice job of making the basic point. In a poignant closer, she says that her augmented-reality New York, with its twin towers still there, feels more real than the physical New York, where they sadly remain missing. At the same time, she brings something new to the discussion, "holomelancholia," a term coined by novelist Alex Shakar to describe the inevitable disappointment of virtual worlds. It seems so cool, and then, something sets in  - I almost said 'reality' - the possibilities fade, the experiences seem not so cool, the other people are just other people, as usual. So is disapointment everywhere? Or, is it in our heads, not in the realities we construct out of those heads? Or maybe the hedonic treadmill is at work: You find something cool, but your brain adapts to it, and then you need something more cool to get the same rush.

What's most noteworthy, though, is the simple fact that more and more people in all walks of life are realizing that VR is here.

Game Education: What Should You Study?

Adam Rademacher at Gamasutra has an interesting piece today reviewing his college education and finding that, in retrospect, he wishes he had learned things a bit differently. I commented, "When I talk to young people looking for game design programs, many of them want to go to a place that lets them sit in cubicles and code video games all day and all night. I tell them they should consider a program that integrates game design with training in the classic fields. "As you approach leadership positions in the industry, you'll wish you had psychology, writing, marketing, management, and the humanities [religion, philosophy, history]." I say it, and they resist it. A lot of people starting out (perhaps this applied to you Adam, I don't know), just can't see the connection between sociology and videogames, history and videogames, scientific logic and videogames, psychology and videogames, business and videogames, and on and on. Then they get into the industry and realize that the people who move companies forward are taking videogames into all these areas. The ones whose training was just about the FOTM games when they were in school - they have difficulty moving beyond code monkeydom and QA testery."

What do YOU think?

Play the Deepak Chopra Game!

I promise this will be the last religious post for while. But in the spirit of ecumenism, let's wrap up the theme with a New Age game, sent to us by Natalie Hunter. Thanks Natalie!

Leela: The Prospects of Gaming as Religious Experience

Over the past several years, and after decades of being perceived as little more than children's toys, video games have come to be more and more accepted as serious works of art, and even begun to earn a place in the traditional and online school as a respectable teaching tool. However, New Age spirituality advocate and self-help author Deepak Chopra sees potential in the medium for more than that, believing that video games could serve as a vehicle for genuine religious experiences. In an effort to make this a reality, Chopra is developing a piece of gaming software intended to serve as an interactive aid for meditation.

The first product to come out of Chopra's nearly year-old licensing agreement with video game publisher THQ, Leela  (Sanskrit for 'play') is set for a November 8th release on the Xbox 360 and Wii consoles. It will feature a series of guided interactive exercises for what Chopra refers to as "chakra-based meditation." This type of meditation focuses on specific areas of the body referred to as chakras, believed by practitioners to serve as spiritual energy centers.

CS Lewis: Zynga is doing a Bad Thing

Using the arguments of CS Lewis, Josh Foreman of Gamasutra draws some interesting parallels between scientism and metrics-based game design.

EVE Online Releases Data

EVE continues its tradition of innovation, becoming the first major online game to release economic data to the general public. They're providing a test run of a year's worth of price info from major trade regions. More info here.

Virtual Life Satisfaction

With life satisfaction expert Gert G. Wagner of Berlin I've co-authored a study that's just come out in the economics journal Kyklos (Edit: Free version). We find that people have higher life satisfaction in Second Life than in real life. That's not such a big deal by itself, but the effect size is large and leads to some startling comparisons. Such as: For an unemployed person, the happiness boost for going to Second Life is bigger than that for getting a job. An East German gets more of a life satisfaction increase by being in Second Life than by moving to West Germany. Generally, Second Life provides as large a happiness boost as a number of major life changes. Choosing Second Life is a lot easier to do as well. The data thus suggest that choosing Second Life over major life change would be "rational" because VR provides more of a happiness boost at less cost.

These are all regression results with other relevant factors such as age, sex, and income accounted for. We are not finding any causal effects here, just correlations. What's noteworthy is the magnitude of the correlations. Second Life is providing a big chunk of life satisfaction, just as big as the factors that previous researchers on life satisfaction have found were the "biggies," like health, employment, and family relationships. (By the way, in case you didn't know, money does not make you happy.)

This evidence is consistent with the concept of a "toxic immersion dilemma" that I brought up in my first book. When someone freely chooses VR but then is leading a "bad" life (according to our standards), what do we do?

Facebook, Religion, Family, and Drunk Teens: Correlations, Causes, and Policies

We at Terra Nova have been obsessed with avatars drawn from fantasy and science fiction: The Elves and Aliens often found in games. The Facebook page is an avatar too - an idealized creation of self. Facebook avatars represent a much broader swath of the population than game avatars. They're also less restricted, in that you can build them however you want. FB avatars are no less restricted than game avatars in another sense, though: They must make sense within the lore and backstory of the world. In games, it's a fantasy or science lore. With FB, the "backstory" is the context of ordinary daily life. FB avatars are ordinary people living in the 21st century, but they are those lucky people who are always socializing with cool people, always thinking cool thoughts, always going cool places, always doing cool things. Nobody puts up a picture of himself as an exhausted, lonely parent harrying his toddlers into bed. FB avatars are a biased sample of life.

The bias has some known directions, too. For example, FB avatars are biased toward drug consumption. FB avatars are often seen partying. Many is the FB picture of a young man or woman chugging something.

Interesting then that a study shows a large positive correlation among 12-17 year olds between FB time and drinking and smoking and weed. Among teens who use FB at least once a day (70% of the sample), 10 percent smoke cigarettes. Among the other 30%, only 2 percent smoke. Seems significant.

It's not. First, consider the source. The report comes from the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse. The chances of such an organization finding no problem is nil. Outfits like that don't explore reality, they hunt for findings that support their world view. (I'm sure they are all wonderful people, very conscientious and concerned. But that's the problem. We want our scientific findings to come from people who don't care what they find.)

Second, buried in the report are some interesting correlations. Eating dinner together as a family is correlated with reduced substance abuse. So is going to a religious service once a week. The effect sizes are of the same order as the purported FB effect. I have seen similar findings for these variables in my own work and in countless other studies of income, crime, out of wedlock birth, you name it. The headline is usually about something else, but family and religiosity almost always have a big and positive effect on the quality of life.

This leads me to suspect that these factors, and not Facebook, are the real cause here. I suspect that kids growing up in chaotic circumstances spend more of their time on the internet than kids who are, you know, doing stuff with their family and going to church youth group. The chaos kids are also more likely to do drugs. So, sure: There's a correlation between FB and drugs. It's there because chaos causes both of them. Eating togther and attending religious services reduces the chaos, reducing both FB time and substance abuse.

You could check this explanation by running a regression of substance abuse on age, sex, and the family factors. If the family situation is causing both drugs and FB, then FB time would have no effect of its own. Very easy to test. (Indeed, so easy that I am suspicious that the authors of this report didn't do it.)

In any case, the authors stuck with the FB correlation and made that the headline. Family and religion effgects? Last page. Now, why is Facebook the headline and not family togetherness and being religious? That's a question worth considering. Is it easier to do something about Facebook than about family cohesion and religiosity? Maybe. People have tried. But you can't regulate media. It's against the constitution, thankfully. Only a couple of months ago, the Supremes routed another video game regulation law.

What about the alternative to blaming media? Maybe its too hard, or too upsetting in some sense, to say something like "youth problems are best addressed by encouraging the formation of stable religious family environments."

Sure it's a hard sentence. But we have to decide. We can keep projecting our cultural problems onto media, or we can actually do something about them. 

eSports: Coming to the West?

I recently caught a little flack for commenting in a documentary that high-end MMORPG players are like athletes. But people in eSports do think of themselves as athletes, and in Korea at least they have created a spectator sport. (They even have their own version of Danica Patrick.) The energy seems to be moving westward. According to eSports expert Will Byrd, a Major League Gaming event in Anaheim attracted 20,000 spectators. They got pretty pumped up. MLG Raleigh is happening this weekend and will include League of Legends, a million-player MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena).

This stuff is not for the faint of heart. MOBA players get pretty mad if you stink. (Personal experience.)

We've heard from eSports before, of course. Has its time come?

North Korea's Gold Farming

Several alert readers mailed me about the articles in the New York Times and Forbes about North Korea's use of gold-farming bots to obtain hard currency. The North Koreans have a difficult time getting cash because of the sanctions they've earned. So, they code up some bots who can go into huge South Korean games like Lineage and farm for virtual gold there. The North Koreans then sell the virtual gold on South Korea's gigantic virtual currency exchange market for Won.

Why does this make sense? Well, consider the alternative: Yen Farming. Send laborers to Tokyo, have them farm Yen, trade the Yen for Won, then send the Won home. But laborers are people. People don't farm as hard as bots. Moreover, they don't follow orders like bots do. The laborers might just keep the money and stay in Japan. Basically, when it comes to gold farming, bots are better than slaves. 

The use of botting in games is not new, but the intervention of a government provides a certain impetus. Governments can command and direct large-scale activity, enhancing the effects of botting and gold farming beyond mere nuisance.

In a way, it's also a fun moment. The designers make games that ostensibly have a clear line between human players and the AI. The designer's AI exists to give the players a good time. But here we have a large outside actor designing new AI for the game world. The new AI manifests as "player"-characters. This fudges the line between PC and NPC. It points to a future in which AI and human intelligence mingle and socialize together. What if you fell in love with a charming young avatar only to find out she is a fraud-bot?

O, the normative, political, and regulatory issues! My my. And the design issues. Any generally-tradable currency will be farmed, and farming drives the value of the currency down to the marginal cost of farming it. It was already low, with the human gold farmers. Now it goes lower, with the bots. Maybe this means you can't use currency to gate content. Well, you can use currency, but it just can't be generally traded between the players. Or, your world could have social norms against "buying your way forward," which would keep the value of currency high. Its hard to squelch the demand for farmed gold, but it can be done. I would favor a player-run judicial system that boots people for not playing by the rules, whatever they may be. This is how board games work, right? You don't play with people who ignore the rules.

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?

The end of dual currency?

Diablo 3 will cut out the virtual currency and directly sell game content for dollars. Thanks Travis Ross for the tip.