Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Ren Reynolds of the Virtual Policy Network reports that the British government has recently released the Code of Everand game, which uses the design aesthetic of popular quest-oriented massive online games that are popular with K-12 students like Runescape, although developers adapted the MMO format for the education of young citizens about traffic safety.

After playing the game for an hour, I soon discovered that much of the game actually plays more like Frogger, since players have to avoid being crushed by the "monsters" whooshing by in the "spirit channels" that they may attempt to cross, preferably at a designated crosswalk. In addition to traps and spells, the main protocol of the channel crossing involves looking right and then looking left to prepare to enter left-side-of-the-road traffic. (See below.)


The "about" page elaborates the game's design philosophy as follows:

Code of Everand is a multiplayer online game, which has been developed by the Department for Transport, to engage children making the transition from Primary to Secondary school, on the topic of road safety. The aim is that players will improve their road safety behaviour and apply what they have learned in the game, to the real world as a learned response. The Department for Transport’s aim is to reduce child pedestrian casualties and deaths among this age group by allowing young people to practice good road safety behaviours through a channel which is known to be very popular among those making the transition to Secondary school.

As a recent article explains, the game was actually developed by Area/Code, a firm perhaps best known for its theoretical work with ARGs and pervasive games.

Virtual News

Sometimes the New York Times has excellent coverage of the Internet and gaming, especially if it has work written by new media journalist Clive Thompson. Sometimes it has terrible coverage. Not all the stories about online gaming in the newspaper were ill-informed today. In "Chinese Agencies Struggle Over Video Game" not only describes an interesting dispute between the authoritarian government's Ministry of Culture and the more culturally conservative Administration of Press and Publication over regulation of the game World of Warcraft. It also pointed out that U.S. massive games tend to have a much smaller part of the total market share than games developed in China. For more coverage of the controversy, check out "Clarification from the Ministry of Culture" from Web2Asia.

But "Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays" makes a number of missteps, even though it talks to real gamers about their virtual purchases and identifies sources from big players in the market of social games like Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom. The big mistake that it makes is relying on the opinions of venture capitalists, who tend to have poor understanding of reputation economies or the subversive potentials of online social networks.

Analysts estimate that virtual goods could bring in a billion dollars in the United States and around $5 billion worldwide this year — all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce.

“It’s a fantastic business,” said Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested $10 million in several virtual goods companies. “Because it’s digital, the marginal cost for every one you sell is zero, so you have 100 percent margins.”

First of all, anyone who collects virtual goods will tell you that not all digital items are created equal and that "few hours of work by an artist" has to be done by someone who can create a compelling image using only a few pixels wisely. Games that are successful, like Farmville, which is one of their examples, rely on having a range of crop and animal animations that are visually engaging at a number of scales. To have the cuteness quotient of what the Japanese call "kawaii" characteristics requires a particular attention to the aesthetics of the screen.

Second, the idea that players are merely passive consumers eager to purchase meaningless tokens underestimates the likelihood of player revolts, particularly since -- as the article itself admits -- most players play for free. For example, last year's PackRat revolt, which I am writing about in the upcoming collection Facebook and Philosophy shows how participatory culture punishes what it perceives as systems of greed.

Finally, there is a tone of amusement at this mysterious behavior, despite all the explanations that the article offers, that seems ironic, given that something like the greeting card industry doesn't get similar amazement for having customers. Buy your friend a greeting card and it may well cost you over five dollars, including stamp, gas, and time for selection. And then who can see it? How does it give your friend any continuing pleasure once it is opened? Virtual goods are profoundly about the social and the public dimension of online interactions, a quality that the NYT doesn't always seem to get.

Big Game Hunting

This item from USA Today, which announces that "For social networks, it's game on," opens with a discussion of the popular Facebook game FarmVille, where players do chores and literally watch the grass grow, as they take a desktop break from their socially networked lives. Although I don't discuss FarmVille in my essay in the forthcoming collection on Facebook and Philosophy from Open Court Press, I see a number of features in the game that are similar to those in the games that I analyze. I, of course, kept expecting that there would be unexpected interactions and consequences from the agribusiness that the game promotes, based on having played environmental games like the McDonald's Game from Molleindustria in which modern farming is revealed as being unsustainable in its waste profile.

Thanks to Dylan Wittkower for the link.

About Internet Addiction

"A Self-Confessed Addict" depicts the grim life of failed college student Adam Brown who blames addiction to the MMO World of Warcraft for his struggles with campus life. This item on "Internet addiction" from the PBS show Frontline and its special series digital_nation shows a stereotypical pasty-faced low affect gamer with a laptop and a shelf of action figures. Henry Jenkins presents the counterargument at "Is It Really an Addiction?" in which he argues that depression or obsessive compulsive behavior is at the root of the social dysfunction that is being described as an addiction to the content and practices associated with new media.

In general the show is a disappointment to those who go to PBS expecting to learn something. It panders largely to pre-conceptions: items on teen exhibitionism, military serious games, virtual reality and avatars, and digital learning could as easily come from a local news show relying on B-roll from the PR pile. There are a few surprises, like the parents who decided to support their daughter in her goth modeling after having forced her to delete all her photographs earlier, but the show generally doesn't force people to rethink how they are participating by focusing on exotic others and ignoring the potential for serious political, social, and civic change.

Jenkins also appears in a segment on "Mom Vs. The Computer" that is designed to educate parents about the need to do more than prohibit their children's cultivation of online lives and that echoes many aspects of my Ten Principles for the Digital Family. During my trip to Holland I did find myself immersed in a conversation with two mothers of graduating high school seniors who felt that computer game play was interfering with their relationship with their sons. I made my arguments about trying to play games themselves, about using the systems and rules of games as conversation-starters to hear them out about their attitudes about fairness, cheating, contracts, collaboration, competition, obediance, etc., and to defer the disapproval of violence that causes so many teens not to listen.

Thanks to Ren Reynolds for the link.

Forgive Us Our Debts

In an article called "I.O.U." in the New Yorker, writer Jill Lepore argues that U.S. history has been closely tied to patterns of indebtedness since the nation's inception. She also argues that getting into hock or behind in one's payments is a central narrative in the rise of the novel in the time of Fielding and Defoe. This made me think about how many videogames often present a kind of fiscal fantasy in which your character isn't allowed to have a negative balance. There are exceptions, but it is interesting to see how inventory economics defines the virtual lives of many players.

Shaken Not Stirred

Yesterday, at 10AM, millions of Southern Californians, including my two children, participated in The Great Southern California ShakeOut, a truly massively multiplayer disaster simulation in which the puppet masters were geologists at the USGS and regional emergency response planners. (The USGS created a number of videos of aerial view simulations showing the effects of a 7.8 earthquake in various local communities. To those with a YouTube attention span, they don't look very scary at first, but just wait until about seventy seconds in.) The ShakeOut website also solicits user-generated content from participants, including photos and stories from the events of the day. Although the official site has yet to post this content, ShakeOut photos are already turning up in places like Flickr. The ShakeOut Site is also promoting After Shock, a "massively collaborative earthquake simulation," and an online serious game, Beat the Quake.

In Beat the Quake, the player decides how to secure over a dozen household objects by choosing from a multiple choice menu. Once all the decisions are made the room animates with movement and object-smashing chaos takes over. (I aimed for a score of zero for maximum comic effect.) In the paper "The Birth of the Virtual Clinic," I argue that such computer-only games that represent crises in public health or safety serve a rhetorical purpose that involves the dissemination of expert knowledge without engaging in the kind of community role-playing activities that had shaped the training of a previous generation of emergency first responders. In many ways, the Great ShakeOut de-emphasized representing the emergency on the screen or in 3-D virtual space, although -- like many of the alternate reality games praised by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture for their participatory ethos -- computational technologies were essential for coordinating activities.

Trying to Send Them to the Spore House

The blog Game Politics has been covering user revolts related to the game Spore among buyers unhappy with stealth DRM software that places restrictions on the number of machines that can play the game, and often creates problems even when only one machine is running the software at one time. Customers have also been giving the game negative reviews on Amazon in a user-generated attempt at consumer consciousness-raising. Now lawyers have launched a class action lawsuit against the company based on the fact that the company didn't even disclose specifics on its click-through EULA.

You can read the fine print of the lawsuit here. The rhetoric that the plaintiffs deploy in this document often uses the company's own promotional language against it to show how the game's "personal universe" is actually a God game of a different kind. They concede that "consumers are told that the game uses access control and copyright technology," but point out that "consumers are not told that this technology is actually an entirely separate, stand-alone program."

(For those who are mystified by the acronyms in this posting, Wikipedia has relatively good definitions of DRM and EULA.)

Surviving Bard Times

Some of you may have been following the Arden virtual Shakespeare initiative at Indiana University through some of its struggles, which I also talked about in a recent conference paper, in which I looked closely at questions of literary adaptation as a kind of explanatory device.

This May, project lead Edward Castronova released the following announcement, which seemed to herald good news about a project that many in the serious games community had dismissed as doomed after Castronova publicly admitted to making some "awful mistakes as a manager" on the project.

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. At stake here is the entire idea of using virtual worlds as a Petri dish. If fantasy gamers behave in ways that violate our most basic assumptions of economic normalcy, then it makes no sense to use virtual worlds to study large-scale economic behavior. If, conversely, fantasy gamers seem to be normal economic agents, then perhaps some of the behavior in virtual worlds does indeed generalize to the real world. If so, then we can consider using virtual worlds to conduct controlled experiments at the macro scale of society, where our most pressing problems seem to live (natural resource management, intercultural mistrust, information security, disease). The initial findings of the Arden experiment will be released during the International Communications Association meetings in Montreal next weekend.

It's a fascinating document rhetorically, which is very different from his public mea culpa earlier in the year. The idea that a central research question would be "kept secret up to now" probably sounds strange to most faculty members familiar with the norms of granting agencies, but there is a triumphalism in tone that commonly comes with such press releases (or in this case an announcement on a mailing list), so in many ways it represents a much more conventional form of university rhetoric than some of Castronova's earlier electronic communications.

(Thanks to Peter Krapp for the text. Now that Peter isn't blogging, it's all to easy to cannibalize the material that he disseminates through other channels without giving him proper credit.)

PoW WoW

The Onion recently parodied the MMORPG World of Warcraft in 'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'. Given the fact that Julian Dibbell reports that low-wage Chinese gold farmers who play the game for work often treat it as a pastime during their off hours as well, this vision of infinitely recursive play is not as crazy as it may sound.

There's also a parody of WoW at WTF!?, which was created by my UC Irvine colleague Robert Nideffer. Although I played a bit of it successfully when it first appeared, this Flash game is now offline as a result of a series of server nightmares for the designers.

The Sophist in Azeroth

At the Computers and Writing Conference, Douglas Eyman won the outstanding dissertation prize, which is no wonder, since the recent PhD from Michigan State and assistant professor at George Mason University has been known in digital rhetoric circles for many years the editor of the peer-reviewed online journal Kairos. Eyman's talk, "Gaming and Writing: An Ecological Framework," detailed the five major aspects of what he called game ecologies: environmental action, para-textual development, documentation, infrastructural processing, and research. With a series of case studies derived from the MMO World of Warcraft, Eyman listed a range of relevant areas of interest for compositionists: writing about games, writing around games, writing inside games, and writing games themselves. As his in-world character, "Sophist," Eyman has been considering what Annette Vee has called "proceduracy" by analyzing the game's requirements for persuasive appeals, in-game documents, text-based communication, and the interface itself as an example of multimodal discourse. He noted that a study of composition readers published between 2003 and 2006 included no references to games, despite covering other topics related to artifacts from popular culture and entertainment such as advertising and films. Too often, Eyman complained, writing specialists only treated "writing on games" and did so superficially, by focusing exclusively on trite topics such as videogames and violence. Although education and literacy specialists were examining game-based fan fiction, websites, short story competitions, and online discussion, faculty in rhetoric and composition rarely considered the conjunctions of rhetoric and literacy, as in the case of web pages designed for recruiting new members to a guild.

Eyman is now launching "Digital Games/Digital Rhetoric: A Consortium of Scholars in Games and Writing Studies" and encourages researchers from both groups to contact him to spread the word. The rest of the profession may be catching up with him. At Michigan State, they are developing Ink as a "free online multiplayer game for writing & community." (Your first task as a player apparently involves writing a press release.) Meanwhile, the textbook behemoth Bedford-St. Martin's is launching Peer Factor, an online peer-review game that claims that it "provides immediate and tangible feedback that is pedagogically sound but also fun and engaging." To its credit, according to Eyman, the latter acknowledges that "learning to game the system" is an integral part of game play, so that -- as Mia Consalvo has argued -- cheating is recognized as a form of literacy.

NASA: Need Another Sensible Answer

At Water Cooler Games, Ian Bogost reported on the federal space agency's decision to cut funding for game developers working on formulating plans for a a proposed massively multiplayer online game that would seek to achieve the following lofty goals:

Persistent immersive synthetic environments in the form of massive multiplayer online gaming and social virtual world, initially popularized as gaming and social settings, are now finding growing interest as education and training venues. There is increasing recognition that these synthetic environments can serve as powerful “hands-on” tools for teaching a range of complex subjects. Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity, making it easier to grasp complex concepts and transfer this understanding quickly to practical problems. MMOs help players develop and exercise a skill set closely matching the thinking, planning, learning, and technical skills increasingly in demand by employers. These skills include strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, team-building and cooperation, and adaptation to rapid change.

Instead of conventional work-for-hire, however, NASA administrators decided to rely on a combination of volunteer programming efforts and unprecedented entrepreneurial risk-taking to make the MMO happen. Perhaps, in the wake of the failure of the Arden educational MMO project, serious games seem more of a gamble to would-be funders, but more than frugality or pragmatism seems to be at work.

There is some rhetorically interesting damage control in "NASA Asking For Free MMO? Hardly" that asserts that the cut-off would actually benefit cash-poor developers by freeing them from onerous government restrictions and the red tape normally associated with a federal contract. However, as Bogost notes, this leaves game developers with taking all the risk for "plans for a never-before attempted commercial educational MMO."

It's easy to descry government stupidity when it comes to creating state-supported digital experiences, and -- as someone who has now literally written a book on the subject -- it is certainly even simpler to find other examples of similarly poorly thought out initiatives involving serious games, but the challenge might be to explain why NASA thought that this arrangement might be a plausible solution from the standpoint of anything other than voodoo economics. Bogost tends to be a sophisticated reader of the Realpolitik involved in government media-creation, but he sounded too jaded to hold forth on the specifics. So, as a frequent NASA-watcher, I can offer the three factors to which I think it boils down.

1) NASA is a profoundly hierarchical organization

There are exceptions, of course. I shot this photograph today of a vending machine for disposable goods, such as protective glasses and gloves, which a NASA employee in the Spacecraft Fabrication division at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had rigged up to get rid of the expensive inventory manager who would otherwise be necessary.

But the disastrous PowerPoint and e-mail communication linked to two space shuttle crashes continues to show how reluctant the agency is to adopt a distributed network model that might be better suited for game development or web development environments. Based on the case studies I've explored in military-funded videogames, I think it is fair to say that often game developers come from a profoundly different culture than the political appointees and career civil servants who staff government organizations.

Sometimes these groups don't even share the same vocabulary. When I described one NASA-funded videogame as a "god game" to one of the official leads on the project, she responded with such irritation at my impolitic and potentially blasphemous assertion that it was clear that she was unfamiliar with the common set of generic expectations that have become associated with Will Wright-style or Civilization-style games.


2) NASA takes volunteerism for granted, because of a long history of Pro-Am partnerships.

At the annual JPL open house, signs of the participatory cultures associated with amateur astronomy, rocketry, and robotics were in evidence everywhere, a set of cultural practices that John Seely Brown has described as a model for twenty-first-century education. This culture seems to revolve around a reputation economy that rewards association and valorizes exploration and naming rights rather than traditional labor/capital relations.

In other words, when NASA thinks of the "public," what they see is a particular contingent of people in the communities that surround NASA installations or that pursue space-related tourism of launch sites and museums. Unfortunately for NASA, if you look at Nick Yee's list of six factors that motivate MMO players, you won't see any of the character traits of those who gravitate to NASA company towns. (You can see one of my offspring controlling a taxpayer-funded protoype below.)



3) NASA sees itself as a successful brand in a government less concerned with information design and more concerned with iconic marketing.

In the book, I argue that there are four big trends in government rhetoric in the electronic age: 1) social marketing, 2) public diplomacy, 3) risk communication, and 4) institutional branding. The NASA brand, epitomized by the famed "meatball logo," has a kind of macho cachet. At today's event, I saw it everywhere: stickers, patches, t-shirts, backpacks, hats, etc.

Nonetheless, even America's Army knew that it would have to pay game developers to promote its brand, especially in a war-weary country in which the camo-wearing civilian soldiers of fortune may be in retreat in the culture wars. By arguing that MMO subscribers would be happy to pay for a NASA-themed game, government stake-holders are ignoring the fact that many are attracted to America's Army because it is a free alternative to pay-for-play MMO combat games and that game play is about hunting bargains not hunting humans.

Fortunately, sectors of some NASA branches still care about information design rather than branding. See these signs spotted at JPL for some entertaining examples of the visual culture of the workplace.


Of course, if it were up to me I might suggest some pretty unlikely MMO titles to be approved by NASA. What about Jilted!, the game for diaper-wearing female astronauts in which the object is to kidnap the girlfriend of your ex-lover in a parking lot? How about Dream On, a game for political appointees about denying global warming? Or Hide the Black Astronaut, a game about the cover-up of the 1967 death of pioneering African-American Robert H. Lawrence while training for a secret mission in the space race with the Soviets?

Naught's Had, All's Spent, Where Our Desire is Got Without Content

Regular readers of this blog know that I am obsessed with the genre of the public apology on the Internet, so before the month is gone I have to say something about Edward Castronova's fascinating open admission of failure in "Arden Slows Down" at the Terra Nova blog.

The official website doesn't yet indicate this month's tumult about the virtual environment's stunted development or the fact that, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the MacArthur Foundation has refused to provide additional funds to Castronova's persistent synthetic world, which is intended to bring Shakespeare's works to life by using videogame technology and the paradigm of the massively multi-player online role-playing game.

In the absence of any explicit acknowledgment of a setback to the Indiana University project, the website of Arden does appear to have much of the apparatus of an online fan site for any game: an FAQ, community forum, etc. But whether or not this flattened out narrative, set against historically scrambled backdrops for the War of the Roses, would have really foster emergent behaviors was yet to be seen.

I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, teach it, read it at the dinner table, drag my kids to perfomances a few times a year, recite it in the car, and just this week saw Ian McLellan's private parts from ten feet away during the storm scene in King Lear, but I'm not sure that videogames are the right idiom for the Bard's masterpieces, even speaking as a booster for embodied digital experiences. Knowing these texts, I'd favor something more like "Grand Theft Shakespeare," where the objective of the game is to steal from as many different sources as possible, while still creating a remix that produces a coherent aesthetic experience for the audience. Besides, as I've said snarkily before, I think The Aeneid would make a much better MMO.

That said, putting on my rhetorician's hat and taking off the one I wear as a literary critic, I'd give top marks to Castronova for making the initial difficult public statement that hasn't invited ridicule or castigation in the blogosphere. Maybe I wouldn't have used clichés like "lessons learned" or "bumpy roads," but I do think his willingness to credit the labor of his beta testers and acknowledge uncertainty in the project's future does show the proper decorum, given the occasion of loss associated with the death of a funded grant.

Most revealing, of course, is the part where one reads further down into the comments section on the blog posting and finds Castronova admitting more candidly to institutional dramas befitting the Jacobean period.

You're all correct in guessing that there's more to the story. I made some awful mistakes as a manager, which I don't hesitate to admit because, well, I am not a manager. And the project wasn't funded at a level where hiring a manager was feasible. As manager, I did a lot of stupid things.

@Timothy: Volunteers! That was my starting philosophy. But my experience has been that each additional volunteer (n) detracts n*n from the project's quality. Because you're not paying them, you have to give the volunteers leeway. Their leeway in terms of content eats into your vision. Their leeway in terms of time slows you down. Basically, you need full-time employees (or slaves). Students have talent and enthusiasm but you can't get five of them in a room at the same time. And once you start paying tuition for them, they cost $60K FTE (10K stipend + insurance + $20K tuition for 20 hours of work). In future work I will subscribe to the Lee Sheldon Fascistic Theory of Managing Creative Projects, which, if I my improvise, is to tell your volunteers and employees to be slaves or be gone.

@David: You guessed it. Rather than be a manager, I'm going to be an author. I'm coding it myself this time, implementing a personal and idiosyncratic vision, using no more resources than my time and my desktop. I hope to have something worth playing eventually.

@Tripp: the object is and remains to do experiments. Emphasizing Shakespeare was a mistake. The burdens of a license! Everyone thought it was World of Hamlet and the point was to teach high school kids 2B|~2B. But teaching Shakespeare has always been an ancillary benefit, not the point. I thought it would be cute. But putting Shakespeare in the game, I found, took away resources from fun. Lore, by itself, did not make a fun game. Shakespeare also loaded us up with an entire community of expectations, people who dig the idea of a digital Shakespeare. To those people, I want to say YES, I dig the idea too, but please come up with the $50m it will take to build that world before asking me (AGAIN) when Arden is going to be done. I had $240K and was thrilled to have it. But that's 1/200th of the money you'd need to do what some of the folks out there had dreamed up. Their dreams became pressure on us, and made me wonder why I didn't say I was making Arden: World of Actuaries.

Also, we are working on our website. January.

@Robert (and others): Thanks for the words of support and respect. They are mutual.

But don't get the wrong idea. I am not quitting this. Not because I am pugnacious, not because I owe MacArthur results (though I sure do, and I am very mindful of that) but because I just love coding in NWN Script. LOTRO is my main game right now, but when I sit down at the computer after my kids go to sleep, I just feel more like coding. I love D&D and I love being a game author. It's the most fun I've had intellectually in years. I've made this announcement mostly to get monkeys off my back - I got sick of dealing with the multiple layers of wild expectations that I had stupidly encouraged (another dumb management move.) MacArthur supported me for a year so that I could get the damn thing going. Now, it's going. Thank you John D. and Catherine T., I will never forget you. But now it's time for me to apply my own effort to make a world that people would want to play. When I get them playing, I will do my super-secret experiments, and then write the paper I owe MacArthur. And the world I make will live on, a little society lab, and I will keep fiddling and experimenting with it.

It's easier to say nothing, of course, but as a result nothing gets added to the knowledge base about institutional authority and digital media development.

I'm fascinated with cryptohistories and the story of the game (or digital library or distance learning initiative or website) that wasn't built, so I'm sorry to see that there wasn't even more discussion after this stunning series of revelations from Castronova in the comments section. Instead, readers largely commented on the big budget/small budget questions of game development -- which are standard panel talk topics at game studies conferences -- rather than address the real role-playing games of Arden that implicated decisions made at the level of the chain-of-command and the treatment of bit players.

I think that this could prove to be a significant turning point in the educational videogame development movement. Often these games fail both as educationally rich pedagogical experiences and as genuinely fun games, so this opportunity for reflection that Castronova is inviting may be particularly timely for a lot of players.

Cut to the Quick

During a year in which the press has celebrated Web 2.0 and the computer-generated avatars that provide the face of this so-called participatory culture, Lisa Nakamura provides some thoughtful scholarly criticism about the role of racial ideology and labor politics in the supposedly utopian realms of distributed networks and user-generated content. Nakumura, author of the forthcoming Digitizing Race from the University of Minnesota Press, started her talk with a Southpark episode in which the show's characters inhabit a fictional massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Stonehaven. As Nakamura points out, the identity politics of the show include a refusal to take "crap from a girl" and ethnic slurs about Koreans as fellow players.

In her questions during the conference, Nakamura has expressed concerns about the ideologies of Web 2.0 as distinct from Web 1.0 and has developed her own taxonomy, which she calls "Avatars 1.0" and "Avatars 2.0." While the former provided therapeutic self-portraiture, leisure, and an opportunity for "passing" and composing new identities through practices of freely created textuality, Nakamura argues that the latter merely manifests a "culture of profiling," characterized by observing behavior and choices in the circuits of capital, labor, and profit.

I've talked about the difficult position of Chinese "gold farmers" playing in MMOs before in this posting on Virtualpolitik, but Nakamura incorporates the field research experiences of Julian Dibbell and Ge Jin into a larger theorical construct in which Asians are cast as both "hyperconsumers and unwanted labor," or as "both buyers and sellers." Rather than travel to the sweatshops of China, Nakamura bases her arguments on pro- and anti-Chinese machinima videos available online. To contextualize the genre of machinima, Nakamura breaks videos into three categories: 1) "ludic" (concerned with strategies of game play and exceptional performances), 2) "cinematic" (concerned with presenting new narratives that use the game mechanic to produce original stories), and 3) "polemic" (concerned with arguments about laws, politics, and culture, particularly gaming culture).

In looking at this "struggle over the meaning of race," Nakamura showed the racist video "Ni Hao," which I have embedded in this post above the text. Nakamura agrees with Nick Yee that this is old rhetoric, which can easily be traced back to nineteenth-century protests against Gold Rush immigrants.

In another session there was a talk that similarly explored how Web 2.0 manifests certain kinds of racist ideologies. Geographer Darren Purcell, who examines borders as social constructs looked at the anti-immigrant surveillance group American Patrol and considered how the extensibility of individuals who participate in digital networks around social media makes their nationalistic arguments fundamentally contradictory, just on the basis of their own behavior. Purcell has also suffered his own troubles with the IRB, as he has looked at Facebook groups that deal with border politics and immigration. He points out that one anti-immigration group, "Illegal is Illegal," uses agrammatical, short messages and frequent homophobic language, while the pro-immigration group "Secure Fence Act of 2006 -- a new low even for Bush" uses academic prose and more sophisticated arguments that demonstrate rebuttal techniques and acknowledgment of potential counterarguments.

Surprise Guest

The best thing about going to conferences is discovering the work of people that you have never heard of, which makes all the airplane lines, hotel room screw-ups, and e-mails from querulous neglected students all worth it.

In this case, the pleasant surprise was the presentation of Sal Humphreys, a bespectacled woman with short gray hair, who was attired in no-nonsense jeans and sweaters during the conference, and who might easily be overlooked at a four-day event full of well-dressed divas, where the outfits included Mia Consalvo's dramatic pink and black crepe numbers, Lisa Nakamura's gorgeous shimmery po-mo skirts, and Lisbeth Klastrup's fabulous Danish design peekaboo outfit. How women who spend all day in front of a computer could be so well-dressed is beyond me, since I basically own two classes of outfits: clean black clothes and dirty black ones.

I had actually had dinner the night before with the game studies interest group that included Humphreys. She was at the table that was watching Star Wars Galaxies machinima and gay porn, and I was at the table with much younger male game developers talking about marriages and careers.

Humphreys is more generally interested in questions involving regulation and online social software, and had at first planned a comparative study of the policy issues in four countries, but soon found that the "spaghetti-like" structure of competing codes in Australia would be plenty to occupy a revealing policy examination of networks with a meditation on macroeconomics and global trends that reminded me more of the work of Manuel Castells than what is generally thought of as game studies.

Humphreys argued that "convergent media challenge the boundaries of silo model" and that “how you characterize a problem characterizes how you think it can be fixed." To characterize those problems, the conventional linear models of media production will not work in which there is a one-way chain of author – text – publisher - audience. Instead Humphreys showed an amazing diagram of MMO policy issues on a slide that I wished I had photographed.

Her analysis of the discourses and domains of MMO games broke down into the following seven areas:

1) As text (governed by intellectual property, classification conventions, trade law, and free speech principles as part of a knowledge economy)
2) As game (governed by separate jurisdictions that included private law and private policing, such as sports law, in which consent to contracts, typically formulated as EULAs, determined power relations)
3) As community (governed by consumer protection and cultural policy, which could be troubled by the problem of mass private media)
4) As data (governed by privacy and consumer protection law)
5) As creative industry (governed by principles for industry development and amateur production concurrently)
6) As production network (governed by labor and consumer protection law)
7) As global media (governed by laws for cross-jurisdiction interchanges)

Following Humphreys, Dan Burk focused on legal issues in his talk on “Owning Avatars: Legal Control of Human and Non-Human Data Representations" that attempted to grapple with questions of "database rights." As a digital parent, he opened his talk with an explanation of his entire family's participation in MapleStory in which different members filled the roles of ice mage, cleric, and assassin. Although his daughter was initially reluctant to play with her uncool enders, she soon discovered that it was a case of the more the merrier if she wanted to bring down a dragon. She was even there when her parents were married in-game for their 25th anniversary.

Much of Burk's talk looked at questions of often competing rights of copyright, the right to privacy, and the right of publicity associated with celebrities who want to maintain control of their images. In looking at how celebrity avators could be used by large corporations, he showed digital animation of Gene Kelly singing in the rain while popping and locking in a plug for Golf GTI. He credited Cassandra Van Buren for her scholarship on celebrity avatars but also looked to the ideas of MIT's theorist of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, whose work on representations of human beings as "persistent data patterns" included topological features, physiological patterns, genetic coding, and many other ways to think about questions of identity in informational terms.

Like many intellectual property law professors this month, Burk was celebrating a recent court decision that Major League Baseball could not claim ownership of its players statistics for purposes of excluding fantasy sports leagues from using this commonly available data.

500 Pages of Documentation

That was the promise of one of the panels about open source game development at SIGGRAPH's Sandbox Videogame Symposium. "500 pages of documentation." Open source packages represented by their creators on the dais included Blender (the 3D modeling rival to Maya), the Open Source Computer Vision Library or OpenCV, the Bullet Physics platform, and G3D. Panelists no longer celebrated what they called the "politics" of the free culture ideology and instead emphasized business opportunities, rapid prototyping, and innovation in game play made possible by enabling independent developers. Achievements chronicled included the feature animated film Elephants Dream, a contest where the winning submission was a series of Rube Goldberg machines, and the victory of Stanford's robot in DARPA's recent autonomous race across the desert. Eigenface face-recognition technology now being deployed at airports apparently also has a history of public domain knowledge. Of course, the diversity of possible licenses in the digital development ecology of initiatives labeled "open source" to offer alternatives for software developers to proprietary models appears to be generating anxiety, and problems with copyright ownership -- which sometimes must be solved by open source developers in authoritarian fashion -- make these programs less attractive to the legal departments of many corporate entertainment conglomerates.

Politics and ethics were also of concern to the famed developer of Deus Ex, Warren Spector, who gave the keynote address. Spector now also keeps his own blog. On the first day of the conference the big theme, which Spector first introduced was emergence, which continued with several papers, including Celia Pearce's work on Mermaids. As Pearce points out, emergent social behavior can also include public protest, including a civil demonstration by World of Warcraft players who marched to register their discontent with the appearance of their avatars.

The big story in the evening session with IDGA was media conglomeration and how middle-range studios were being squeezed in the production cycle of AAA big-budget games. Theory of Fun author and Star Wars Galaxies creator Raph Koster took a relatively dark view of what "mid-sized: meant in which he argued that even EA might not have the power of competing multinational megamedia corporations like Viacom and Disney. Online delivery, particularly of Flash games was also a much-discussed topic. Unfortunately, there were many broad generalizations about casual gamers and female players, so I was pleased to be sitting next to Celia Pearce of Georgia Tech who vociferously debated the repetition of tired truisms.

Update: Out on the floor of the exhibits hall, I followed the COLLADA treasure hunt by collecting stamps from participating booths and also trailed perhaps the biggest intellectual property story in the entire SIGGRAPH year. COLLADA is an "open digital asset exchange schema for the 3D interactive industry." They also maintain a wiki and a bank of 3D models to encourage the sharing of user-generated content. In layman's terms, COLLADA functions as a three letter extension in which you can save individual files (like .pdf or .doc or .swf), but one that can be created in either a proprietary software package like Maya or an open source program like Blender. In addition to giving users more ownership and control over the digital assets they create by making them more independent of competing corporate software companies, it also allows design professionals to move more easily between proprietary and open software.

WOW

Mastercard offers rewards program for World of Warcraft currency.

(Stunned silence.)

Update: Okay, I read the digital fine print. The rewards seem just to be for game time, not actual in-game lewt.

Virtual Watergate or What Does G. Gordon Liddy's Avatar Look Like?

Game journalists have been reporting on the fact that even the campaign office of a presidential candidate has been targeted by those bent on committing property damage in virtual worlds. According to "John Edwards Second Life HQ Vandalized," the headquarters of the White House hopeful in the popular MMO was trashed recently, adding to Edwards' woes created by his attempts to reach out electronically to a younger, media-savvy pool of voters. One assumes that like the a branch of National Front and several retail outlets, including American Apparel and Reebok, some SL residents had political objections to his election storefront in cyberspace.

My favorite piece of recent reporting on the virtual world has to be attention being paid to an essay on "MetaTerror: The Potential Use of MMORPGs by Terrorists," in which an intelligence analyst warns of terrorist organizations financing and recruiting jihadists via virtual worlds. Certainly vigilantees attempting to kill low wage Chinese gold farmers in games like World of Warcraft might have more fun if they thought that they were killing evil terrorists rather than mere economic competitors. I have to grant that the piece did have an interesting hypothesis, however, about how terrorists could practice their scenarios for destruction in 3-D worlds, just as companies like Toyota experiment with prototypes, protocols, and new business practices. Of course, I think this is yet another example of how groupthink affiliated with the government's mindset demonizes videogame play, file-sharing, and other common practices in electronic culture by associating them with terrorism, child molesting, or other reprehensible forms of association.

Via Game Politics.

Update: Interesting discussion of Jones' terrorism hypothesis going on now at Terra Nova.

Digging to China

Regulating how the rules of conventional society translate to a virtual environment becomes even more complicated in the context of an authoritarian state.

This boundary confusion becomes particularly vexing when hundreds of thousands of players are engaged, who create their own community standards, as is the case of the playing of World of Warcraft in China. When theft of a virtual sword from a game in a similar genre, Legend of Mir 3, wasn't recognized by local authorities, one enraged gamer turned to murder, as the BBC reported.

Following the case, associate law professor at Beijing's Renmin University of China said that such weapons should be deemed as private property because players "have to spend time and money for them".

But a lawyer for one Shanghai-based internet game company told a Chinese newspaper that the weapons were in fact just data created by games providers and therefore not the property of gamers.

Warcraft itself has been held responsible by the media as a possible cause of a teen suicide, although a suit by his grieving parents was rejected by the courts. In response to an official gaming crackdown on hours of play, protestors staged a mass suicide within the game to express their political defiance.

Even adultery blamed on Warcraft-related interactions can be subject to crime and punishment by Chinese crowds in both virtual and face-to-face environments, as online lothario and college student "Bronze Mustache" discovered when he decided to pursue a married woman, "Quiet Moon."

But if you want to figure out the difference between right and wrong, be careful before turning to the Chinese wikipedia, which was created to offer a state-sponsored alternative to a supposedly subversive, transnational encyclopedia, even if large chunks are plagiarized from the original and even taken from parodic imitators like the Uncyclopedia. My favorite Uncyclopedia entry is on dirt, although there is also an entry on the People's Republic of China.

Build, Display, Entertain, and Live

These four verbs explain the rationale for minors spending their hard-earned allowances on owning virtual real estate in Teen Second Life, the new supposedly child-safe offshoot of Second Life, a massively multiplayer online role-playing environment. The socially immersive Second Life graphic environment offers powerful scripting tools from which one can make digital objects in the online world, the ability to fly from place to place, and opportunities for do-it-yourself virtual community building from the State of Nature up.

Those who haven't been following the Second Life phenomenon (which is still dwarfed by online giant World of Warcraft, where millions of virtual political subjects engage in medieval fantasy play) might not be aware of how its series of disconnected free states represent experiments in civic organization oriented around new ideologies of object permanence in cyberspace.

Some of the governance attempts to create utopias for political activists who may be frustrated by real-world authoritarianism. The most ambitious laboratory for a would-be virtual nation-state is probably Democracy Island, where government entities and interest groups can have online space for rule-making exchanges. There are also local sites for real-time political occasions in Second Life. For example, you can hear a general counsel from Creative Commons speak or attend a an activist event and art happening for digital rights sponsored by Free Culture. It is interesting that personalities associated with the creative commons movement feel compelled to present avatars that approximate the general appearance of their real world public personae.

That doesn't mean that there isn't any Hobbesian skepticism in this virtual State of Nature. There is also political and legal conflict in Second Life. Readers of the Second Life Herald know that there can be real-life suits over virtual real estate deals gone bad. Those same readers also know that life as a muckraker can involve taking on gangsters and corruption. Of course, one contributor to the periodical, Marsellus Wallace, doubles as both correspondent and a mob boss.

The darker side of Second Life can present a pretty bleak existential landscape. Those who abuse their cyber-privileges may find themselves subjected to the cornfield punishment. Those who want to engage in more psychically twisted virtual tourism can visit a mental health clinic in Second Life and see the schizophrenia simulation that was initially developed as a training tool for health care providers by Janssen Pharmaceutica.

Of course, there's plenty of commerce going on, as labor is combined with digital raw materials in the Second Life world. Tringo, the game within a game in Second Life, has apparently found a real-life online market among casual gamers for its combination of Bingo and Tetris. Certainly, the space is being used by business professors and advertisers, and now even some companies are building virtual corporate headquarters for their time-shifting global workforce. For example, from a session on Corporate Opportunities for Multiplayer Games, which was associated with the Massive Games conference here at U.C. Irvine, I learned about how the Aerospace Corporation is building a "work-safe" project on Chatsubo. Apparently, Linden Labs, the corporation that runs Second Life, largely manages their experiment as a corporate-friendly, laissez-faire model. Nonetheless, they do have economists on staff to make sure that the currency remains stable.