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Jonathan Kinkley, who has just completed his Masters Thesis in Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago, ask if we could share his research.  We're always happy to link to new work on virtual worlds.

The full paper is available here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15860034/PostnationalSodalitiesSecondLifeJKinkley

His thesis analyzes the visual culture of Second Life and explores the complex spaces that online social networks create. Jonathan explains:

In Second Life's Caledon, we get a glimpse what an online social formation looks like. It is a society based entirely on shared interests - a themed community built of a patchwork quilt of Victorian-era iconography. Elsewhere in SL, artists like Cao Fei (SL avatar China Tracy) are fascinated with this idea of creating a sense of place out of virtual space. Her RMB city isn't about China, it's about China-ness - an amalgam of all the icons, stereotypes, and archetypes past and present of China. This paper is about the types of spaces in SL and how and why they are created out of the iconography of visual culture.

Thanks to Andy Schwarz for tipping us to this article in Information Week reporting on a Chinese government press release supposedly banning the sale of virtual stuff for real money. In the backchannel, Julian Dibbell reminded us that Korea did the same thing a couple of years back to no effect. No effect because it is hard to do without redesigning the virtual economy, and also because the law's intent was not actually to ban RMT. As we all know, some laws regulating a practice are not really intended to stop it - whatever the preamble might say - but to control it merely.

So: What is China up to?

Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, by our own Thomas Malaby, has its official release today, and the timing couldn't be better. I'm writing from the midst of State of Play VI -- "The Conference on the Serious Study of Virtual Worlds" -- where Thomas's book will be feted this evening and where the mood, in general, is that of a not entirely unwelcome intellectual hangover. The hype surrounding Second Life (and the broader phenomenon of virtual worlds for which it's been so imperfect a proxy) has come and, finally, gone, and there's a sense that only now can we begin to dig beneath the shiny, first-pass questions that provoked the hype and get a deeper handle on what we've been talking about. This is a challenging, exciting project, and if the thoughtful, game-changing ethnography Thomas has produced is any indication, it's off to a promising start.

Yes, plenty of vital ethnographic work on virtual worlds precedes this book. But the critical move Thomas has made here is to shift the focus away from the inhabitants of virtual worlds and onto the people who design and, in the final analysis, control them. From the beginning of virtual world scholarship, the “gods” of these worlds — the MUD creators, the game companies, the people with their fingers on the on/off switch — have been definingly important yet curiously underexamined pieces of the ethnographic puzzle. In making Linden Lab and its employees his primary subject (rather than Second Life and its residents) Thomas both broadens our understanding of virtual worlds and illuminates a rich array of questions. Work, play, games, technocracy and its tools, all of these are shown — through the lens of the Linden workforce and its contradictory struggle to impose emergent behavior on Second Life — to be in a moment of critical historical flux. Making Virtual Worlds is the most enlightening portrait of the high-tech workplace since Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, and we are a lucky blog indeed to have its author among us.

Yesterday at State of Play, Bart Simon made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion: that journals like Games and Culture adopt a five-year ban on articles that focus on Second Life and World of Warcraft.

He wasn't seriously arguing that this should happen but it is a pretty useful way to poke researchers about the degree to which these two places have become defaults for study as well as for play or social interaction in virtual worlds.

So as a reminder, if you're doing research, justify a focus on them. Here's a list of legitimate reasons that I thought of right away.

1.     

Because they constitute most other virtual worlds, maybe on a metropole-periphery model, even. E.g. that World of Warcraft now determines what most other game-like worlds will be, and Second Life will shape any primarily social world in the future, in all likelihood. (I can see the very strong influence of many Second Life institutions on Metaplace, for example.) So you study them because they're determinant, and because in many other worlds, you'll just studying them from a distance.

On the other hand, there are a whole host of casual games, kids' worlds and so on which aren't determined by these two poles.

2.     

Because any virtual world is just as good as any other for studying certain problems or questions. E.g., throw a dart at the dartboard, and if it lands on WoW, and what you're interested in happens there, why not?

3.     

Because the researcher is attracted to/interested in a given world, or have an investment of time that allows him/her a good qualitative understanding of a given world. We don't tend to admit in some cases that we pick our fieldsites because of a prior affinity for that place or culture, or at least that doesn't express itself as a justification for that work in formal publication. But it's still a good reason: if you know a place, and more people know Second Life and WoW than other games, why not make use of that experiential knowledge?

4.     

Because WoW or Second Life has a particular feature that is most distinctively realized or expressed in them, or a sociology that is best vested there. If you're interested in the sociology of raiding, arguably WoW is now one of the best places to study that.

5.     

Because there’s a literature, a canon, and it lets the researcher not have to explain everything that I would have to explain about a more obscure game; or because there is a community of colleagues who provide scaffolding/support. Obviously that's a kind of closed feedback loop which if you take it too seriously means that there is never any reason to study something which is not already heavily studied.

6.     

Because there are tools or affordances, some created by other researchers, which make the collection of data in these two worlds easier. I don't think that actually works as a justification for World of Warcraft, which is still a frustrating thing to study (or to demonstrate to classes).

Others? Still, the point is sound: there are other worlds that are studied, and some which should be studied vastly more than they are. (Yes, I know what you're all going to say next, EVE Online, and I agree. Maybe that's another post: why isn't EVE studied even more than it already is?)

State of Play 6 (2009) is up and running at New York Law School.  Yesterday was the grad student symposium and today is the first day of the two-day main event.  Dan is kicking things off at the podium and Raph Koster will be giving the keynote next on metaplace.  Feel free to post whatever conference-related in the comment.  If I can, I'll do some live-blogging in the comments here.

Officialish backchannel

Twitter hashtag

The regulation and governance of technology has tended to be based around industry sectors such as film, radio, television etc., or on things such as the radio spectrum or personal data.

I propose that we change this on a global scale and frame regulation in terms of the relationship between Functions and rights.

The Problem
Any practical taxonomy (including the one that I propose) has gaps. In the world of ‘old’ media this was not too much of a problem as media were relatively separate and static. Radio was Radio, TV was TV.

In the world of Convergent media (to use Jenkins’s term) this type of notion becomes problematic. Not only do particular technologies and notions of media change rapidly, they also blend, overlap and re-mediate each other. What’s more taken at face value even the notion of ‘media’ be it convergent or not may be inadequate to capture key features of the socio-technical practices that we see around us.

For example – ideas of virtual worlds as ‘places’ where speech may occur is a much more useful concept than ‘media’ for many purposes, though for other purposes is inappropriate.

We are thus left in a position where governance in its many forms has gaps, overlaps and contradictions. We also have initiatives that are likely to find that as their ink dries the intended objects of governance have evaporated.

The Solution
There is no simple solution to this. However what I believe will help as an approach to (at least some) regulation and governance bodies is - to see the universe of regulatatory objects in terms of Functions and collections of Functions, and not in terms of industries or applications.

What’s a ‘Function’?
Search, is a Function, as is User Registration, or Ranking. Each of these are processes that:

• occur in a number of application;
• have been relatively stable over time;
• are capable of being understood in within regulatory frameworks and boundaries.

Now this is already partially applied in various forms of regulation; e.g. the EU have specific laws on the treatment of personal data. However statute in this area tends only to be at a highly abstracted level. Here I propose to move up one level of abstraction from notions such as ‘personal data’ and ‘common carrier’ to ‘Function’.

Across and Down
Let’s look at this two ways.

First let’s take ‘Registration’. What I mean by this is the bundle of processes whereby a user registers with something. Here we have a mixture of best practice and pre-existing statute e.g. the Data Protection Act in the UK which regulates how certain data are stored and treated. Though we might want to include other things into the understanding of what might be governed as a Function e.g. display and consent to terms and conditions during the registration process – which might be subject to industry best practice.

When we look at things in these terms we can see that there can be quite a rich set of Functional sets that would be highly common across applications. So registration for Club Penguin is very much the same as for Flickr and Facebook and Maple Story or for the Huffington Post.

To take a second Function – Ranking. There has been a recent controversy over YouTube’s ranking system wherein ‘Most Viewed’ and ‘Most Favorited’ videos are in fact not Most Viewed etc., as certain content is demoted. This seems the kind of area that may companies might want to do.

I’m not going to get into whether this is correct or not, rather note that this seems exactly the kind of Function that all stakeholder might want to see a consistent approach to – even if that approach is clarity (exempting trade secrets) in how the system works. It would help me as a user to know what I’m looking at if I’m told something is the most popular room in Metaplace or most popular group in Facebook – and I don’t want one to fall under ‘virtual world regulation’ and another to fall under ‘SNS regulation’ excepting in those places where there is something conceptually exceptional.

Now if we look down the Functional stack and take, say, Flickr we can see that it might have a bundle of Functions that overlap in many places with Second Life – especially in the areas of user generated content / IP. Second Life and World of Warcraft may be common when it comes to in-world money (though there we have an interesting question of sub-division which is well worth debating – I suspect there is a large common set between all virtual currency systems from a regulatory point of view).

EULA Freebie
Readers will probably be ahead of me here also in noting that with such a system we can see how at a certain level we can also start to move towards a common system of EULA not just across virtual worlds (as has been discussed in a few places) but across all online applications that have EULAs.

More Functions
Below I’ve suggested a few more Functional areas that look like they may be suitable objects of governances. As you see this is list is nested. I think this is critically important as it allows people to agree one what is common and leave what is unique or contested at the appropriate level of details – hence, while we might not know a specific thing about a virtual currency in a game with a fictional setting, this does not mean that we don’t know a whole lot about how virtual currencies in general should be governed.

• Ranking
• Registration
• Search
• Virtual Currency
  • Closed economy (no RMT)
    • Fictive / game based
    • Non-fictive
  • One way exchange (currency buy systems)
  • Exchange based (fully exchangeable virtual currency)
• Provider based content provision
• User Generated Content
• Synchronous textual / symbolic communications
  
  • one-to-one
  • one-to-several
  • one-to-many

Governance
Almost lastly I should point that that I am not advocating a highly top down system of government regulation. I’m NOT suggesting more governance – in fact viewing the world this way may expose overlaps which would lead to less governance (should we live in a world were redundant statutes etc were ever taken off the books).

What I am suggesting is that we look at what the objects of governance might be in a more rational way for the internet age and then decide whether they need to be governed at all and if so who by.

We may determine that some things are simply down to user choice, other things may fall under standards created by industry or even cross-industry groups and / or by regulators and state actors.

The framework I propose is wholly neutral about the from of governance that may or may not apply to any Function, what the contents of that governance, if any, are and who the governing actors are – it’s and empty framework.

Rights
I made not of ‘Rights’ at the top of this post as I tend to think about these matters in terms of individual and group rights.

Let’s think globally for a moment – after all, that’s what the internet is, global. This proposal might help to set the scene for a slightly different tenor of internal debate.

There are various rights frameworks such as: those from the UN, EU Convention on Human Rights and the US Constitution. The Functional approach may open up an illumining debate about matters such as the various conceptions of free expression and Functions related to things like User Generated Content and Search.  A US / EU debate over raking systems as interpreted under Article 10 of the Convention on Human rights and the 1st amendment would be a fascinating thing.

Again, while not a panacea this is another way to approach the international debate over regulatory harmonization (or lack of) and the burden that this places on any business seeking to use the internet and any user seeking to use a system based on the internet.

Endnote
Lastly as with any sweeping suggestion like this I awaited someone to tell me that there is an entire library on the subject, or it’s been tried and failed or it’s exactly what’s going on already. I’ve not read anything that propose this form of governance but please supply reverences if it’s already out there it will simply add weight to the idea.

Oh, and the pun that this is both a system of Functions and a system that should actually Function is well intended :)

This August, Lee Sheldon and I are hosting VW2, a one-week workshop on the possibilities and pitfalls of using virtual worlds for business and research. Our aim is to help professionals who are new to the field from wasting several years and heaven knows how many millions of dollars re-learning the same old lessons. Our focus is practical, not academic: Here's what you do, and here's what you DO NOT do.

In designing the program, we've been fortunate to have the input of an illustrious advisory board. Rich Vogel and Ron Meiners are coming to give keynote lectures. Participants will learn by developing applications specific to their own environment. This includes pitching ideas, writing design documents, setting up hiring plans, choosing tools, and building their own virtual environments. On exit, participants will have created a shovel-ready virtual world project for their home organization.

More information about the board and the workshop here.

At the Digital Entrepreneurship conference, I remarked on the rising number of bankruptcies of virtual worlds or companies that develop them (most cleverly illustrated by Woody Hearns' bugzapper at gucomics, here, here, and here).  I'm interested in what we can learn about the bankruptcies of virtual worlds. 

What I wanted to ask the Terra Nova community is this: Is there anything special that we should think about or plan for when a virtual world goes under?

Questions include:

• Can virtual property be used as collateral for loans, such that secured lenders get first priority in bankruptcy? 
• If courts treat users as having merely non-exclusive licenses for software, can users enforce those licenses over the world creator's objection under Bankruptcy Code 365(n)?
• Can virtual worlds use 365(n) to retain rights under licenses governing user-generated content?
• Is there less, or more, of a problem valuing virtual assets than valuing intellectual property in bankruptcy more generally -- on the one hand, we have grey-market economies to provide a value baseline.  On the other hand, the world only has value on its own terms: if the world is gone, its assets aren't worth much.
• Is there any reason to treat intangible assets like virtual property differently than, say, a bank account (given that both are more or less contract rights in an entry in an electronic database)?

I value your questions and ideas more than those I've posted above! What catches your fancy about the end of worlds?

There's no solid evidence that violence in media causes violence in society, certainly not at the level that would warrant any kind of policy response. Here at Terra Nova, this has been discussed again and again and again and again and again. Yet the issue will not die, or, more accurately, a misguided conversation continues and at times certain points need to be reiterated. The immediate spurs to this post include a) getting an email about videogame violence effects from an undergraduate at another school, b) seeing one of Indiana's PhD students give a talk on videogame violence, and c) seeing media effects being debated at the International Communications Association meeting in Chicago this past weekend. Researchers continue to pursue evidence for a causal link between violence in media and real-world violence, and important people in the real world still think there's some sort of emergency.

Common sense objections to the agenda and the urgency are legion, best summed up here and here. Yet there are deeper issues, of a scholarly nature, that need to be addressed as well. Research in the field of media violence effects is generally ill-conceived, poorly executed, and result-driven. I have seen few things that I would describe as findings - results that become a permanent part of my view of the world and how it works. Before any more PhD students waste their careers on bad science, let's once again put the cards on the table.

To begin at the end: Scientific research should not be framed as the pursuit of evidence for something. To do so violates the important norm of disinterestedness. You are not supposed to care how the numbers turn out. The proper way to think of things is "What causes Y?" not "Can I find evidence that X might effect Y?" The Y here is violence in society. We know that the main causes of violence in society are parents and peers. A disinterested scholar would stop there. Yet in media violence research, the norm is to go looking for a link. One senses that in most papers, nothing would be sent to the journal until some evidence for the link was found.

How does one get that sense? This is the second major issue: significance. In scholarly writing, the term significance refers to a very specialized statistical feature known in most fields as statistical significance. It is a measure of the accuracy of a finding. It is also widely misunderstood and improperly applied.  (How do I know? Training under econometrician Arthur Goldberger.) Look at it this way: You are the captain of the ship. The engineer comes and says that some rivets in the hull are weakening and are about to pop. Yet you can only fix them one at a time. Your first question is, what rivet is weakest? That is where the engineer should start. Oddly, in psychology and the social sciences, one insists that the engineer start working instead on the rivet whose weakness is most accurately measured. "We think rivet 12 is weakest, but we know more about rivet 34, so let's start there. By the way, rivet 34 seems to be pretty strong. [glub glub glub]"

In media violence research, it appears to be a universal practice that the accuracy of an effect's measurement is presented always first, and often exclusively. The size of the effect is considered secondary, if it is considered at all. In my experience of articles and presentations in this field, I have yet to see a sentence in the following form: "All else equal, a 10 percent increase in this measure of media violence leads to an X% increase in this measure of social violence." This is a very simple simulation of effect, and it seems never to be done.

Here's how the first two issues are related: If the research paradigm is to hunt for effects, and the standard of a "finding" is based on statistical significance, it is usually easy to produce the desired result. The nature of statistical signficance is such that if you mess around with the data set enough, eventually some set of controls and procedures causes the computer to pop out an asterisk indicating statistical significance on the media violence variable. This why the paper says "Although no overall media-aggression link was found, a link was found among children who identify with a violent character." Meaning, if you split the data into those-who-identify and those-who-don't, you find the desired link in the former group. In any reasonably complex data set, there will be some sub-group or some tweak that generates statistical significance. It's a mechanical thing in the end. And thus, when a researcher produces an entire career of papers showing the same result over and over, you get the sense that the disinterestedness norm is being violated. This scholar is not in the least disinterested. He knows what he is after and he is going to find it. The only way that disinterestedness could be restored in this field would be for scholars to forget about statistical significance and examine instead the real-world significance of findings, by means of these simple simulation sentences. Let's talk about the rivets that seem weakest. Assertions of real-world significance are not popped out by SPSS. They cannot be cooked. If media effects researchers want to be trusted, they should abandon statistical significance as the measure of truth.

The issue of significance goes beyond statistical significance, however, into the realm of policy significance. The media violence field gets its energy from its ostensible policy relevance. Yet the research questions are not framed in a way that is helpful for policy. The policy question is simple: If we regulate media violence, will social violence fall? But the research asks: If we expose this person to violent media, how will he act in the next hour? The latter is not relevant to the former. Or, there does not seem to be a good theory explaining why the latter is relevant. Yes, there are diagrams of boxes and arrows known as theories, but they are really just conceptual overviews, informal and heuristic, and cannot be used to measure or explain how a social effect emerges from a lab effect. As an example, suppose we use an Aggressometer to measure a person's aggressive mental state, and find that viewing Star Wars increases the Aggressometer by 20 percent. The question now becomes, if we show Star Wars generally in the public, we are generally going to have a 20 percent increase in Aggressometer readings. What theory tells me how this is specifically going to change the crime rate? I need to know that, because I need to evaluate policy in a common sense way. Keeping a million kids from watching Star Wars costs society $7m in lost entertainment value. Is the purported value of crime reduction more or less than that? A box-and-arrow diagram does not help. If the research is going to stay focused on the mind, we need a good theory to connect mind outcomes to policy outcomes - otherwise the research isn't relevant for policy and should be labeled as such: "Warning: Not For Use By Legislators."

Of course, the research could move away from the mind and frame itself where the policy questions live. There are some papers doing that; one piece by some economists and the longitudinal study by Huesmann, Aron and colleagues. These papers are worth of examination, because they state their  findings in terms of the issues that motivate the research. But, of course, the findings conflict.

Why would they conflict? Why is it so hard to find answers in this area? Fuzziness. The media violence - aggression field has chosen to study two things that do not admit accurate observation. What is media violence? What kind of a thing is it? The policy debate seems to assume it is a continuous variable that acts as a gloss on a piece of media. Thus, you can apparently make a movie less violent by taking away an explosion. Similarly, what is aggression? It appears to be taken as some sort of negative gloss on a person, such that if you make them more aggressive you make the world a worse place. Needless to say, taking aggression and violence as separable from the whole entities in which they are observed is a fuzzy and probably fundamentally wrong-headed way to approach things. You could, if you wanted, study the relationship of dog's ears to the sounds of motors, but you'll never find solid evidence that dogs get happy when their people drive into the garage. You need to study dogs and people, not ears and motors. In fact the only reason you might study ears and motors separately is that you had some agenda to promote the motor industry by showing that it makes dogs happy. But of course, that wouldn't be disinterested.

I cooked up a silly example. Consider the following report:

"Textiles scholars have studied the effect of softness in cloth on affection. Children rubbed with soft cloth as opposed to scratchy cloth self-report significantly higher levels of affection and exhibit more affectionate behaviors (hugging teddy bears, for example).Responding to these findings, and acting out of a concern about the dramatic declines in affection in recent decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children's exposure to soft cloth be maximized. The State of California has mandated that all cloth sold to minors must meet a minimum standard of SS+ (from the industry's cloth softness self-rating system). Unfortunately, the laws have been struck down as an improper extension of government authority, as stated in the 28th amendment ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the textile manufacturer"). Nonetheless, pressure continues for some sort of government response to the softness-affection crisis."

Ridiculous, of course. The PTA's insistence that school kids wear velvet boots would last one rainy day, and that would be it. But to be more specific about what's wrong here:

1. The research deals with vague value-laden concepts, not objective observables.
2. The findings are not disinterested. Somebody's looking for something.
3. There is no evidence of a crisis at the social level.
4. The pediatricians' recommendation to parents assumes thoroughly incompetent parents.
5. So does the policy.
6. The policy asserts an unrealistic level of measurement and control.
7. The relevance of the findings for the policy is nowhere demonstrated.
8. "Significantly" refers to statistical significance, not real-world significance.

There's not much difference between the cloth-softness debate and the media violence debate, unfortunately.

People and their Art are certainly worthy of study. But if we are going to be scientific about it, there are certain rules that must be followed. Following those rules might mean that some questions simply elude us. They cannot be answered in the way that Science-Capital-S demands. In such cases it is better to pursue other rhetorical strategies.

If you want me to believe that regulating violence in media would make our world a better place, you'll have to walk me around the world and through history, and help me to imaginatively experience a culture in which control of expression led to more happiness. I wander around in history a lot - it's been a hobby for decades - and i don't know of any such culture. Even fantasizing about the future, I am not seeing anything good.

In the end, I suspect that media violence research has been motivated primarily by aesthetic concerns. The Three Stooges are disgusting and vulgar, whereas King Lear is sublime. Why are we watching so much crap? Back in the day, you could make the aesthetic plea directly: Look here, you are watching bad art, and you shouldn't - just because it is bad. Today, aesthetic disgust gets channeled into sciency-sounding condemnations of entire media forms for their "effects." In our free-thinking age, no one can effectively change anyone's mind by asserting that Grand Theft Auto is simply adolescent, an 1812 Overture of bullying and nastiness, of low appeal. But because the age is also utilitarian, you can make the case that Grand Theft Auto has "bad effects:" like cigarettes, you say, its use harms others.

Here is the dull version of the marketing release about SoP.  For the interesting version (which discloses all manner of personal information, including my many vices) you'll have to sign up for the email channel.

The Sixth Annual State of Play conference returns to New York City this summer!

            On June 19-20, 2009, New York Law School’s State of Play VI Conference will convene in New York to examine the past, present and future of virtual worlds. In conjunction with the University of Southern California Network Culture Project at the Annenberg School for Communication, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the conference will focus on the startling rise of virtual worlds and multiplayer online games, and ask whether these worlds have reached a plateau in their development. At the same time we will question whether we have reached a limit in our understanding of these worlds, and ask whether there are useful research questions still left to pursue.

           This is the sixth time we will host the State of Play conference, having previously run successful conferences in New York and Singapore.  As before, this conference will bring together scholars, games developers, industry leaders, government leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, social scientists and policy–makers to set the agenda for the development and study of virtual worlds.

            The State of Play series is the conference series that takes the study of these environments seriously, and this year's conference is no exception.  We’re looking forward to the discussions that will emerge from panels focused on the special challenges faced by public and private institutions in online environments, opportunities and efforts in learning and education facilitated by virtual spaces, how youth-related virtual worlds differ from adult spaces, developments in the ongoing conversation regarding ownership of virtual property, tax, and regulation, and the special concerns of government in relation to terrorism, security, and money-laundering. 

            Moreover, we are eagerly anticipating the first Graduate Student Symposium at State of Play.  We are supporting around thirty graduate students from all over the globe to come to Tribeca to present and discuss their work, and receive commentary and criticism from the experts and industry leaders whose work has shaped the virtual world studies and entire conference series.  The Graduate Student Symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas between the newer generation coming up in the study of virtual worlds and those who built and studied virtual worlds in their infancy.

            Between the accomplished and remarkable speakers scheduled for panel discussions and the number of attendees already registered, State of Play VI is set to be a stand out in the legacy of the State of Play Conference series.

Visit us at: www.nyls.edu/stateofplay

In law school, death drives property.  Property law is generally taught, somewhat anachronistically, by teaching the mechanisms transferring it at death.  So I find especially interesting the recent public attention devoted to transferring virtual assets upon death.  Legacy Locker creates an "online will," that transfers your online assets to designated beneficiaries.  And Eternal Space permits the creation of virtual spaces that honor the deceased.  Just one more step on the way to functional recognition of property interests in digital objects, IMO.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Incisive Analysis Office has just released its "Reynard "Broad Agency Announcement" which "sets forth research areas of interest in the area of identifying behavioral indicators in Virtual Worlds (VWs) and Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) that are predictive of real world characteristics of the users."  

Jackson v. American Plaza Corp. (with analysis at the E-Commerce and Tech-Law Blog), has non-trivial ramifications for virtual worlds.  The case holds that one Craigslist user cannot sue another for violation of Craigslist's TOU.  For a while, lawyers have been discussing whether virtual world players can sue each other based on third-party beneficiary theories. If I grief you, can you sue?  True virtual world junkies will recall that this question was left unsettled by the Hernandez v. IGE settlement.  Jackson says no, which is a relief to both attorneys and, I would think, players.

The MacArthur Foundation will launch its own island in Second Life on May 18. A major event has been planned. Details here. Significant? You decide.

This is pretty much an open thread for comments/reactions about SOE's Free Realms. 

I haven't had time to play with it yet, but there sure has been buzz and the rarely impressed Scott Jennings even seems to be sort of impressed, which impresses me.  Wagner James Au seems not too impressed, but I'm not sure he's right that kids are dying for Habbo-style retro 2.5D graphics.  He has a point about the downloaded client, but that hasn't held Maple Story back -- tweens will probably cross the install hurdle.

So my first impression, which is based entirely on the launch video below, is that this is pretty big.  By giving FREE title credit, they're billing that they're not billing, which targets the zillions of kids now on Runescape, WebKinz, Maple Story, and Club Penguin. 

But more importantly, I watch this video and I think: "Hey, isn't that Goldshire?  Haven't I seen that guy before in IMVU, There, and Home?  Is that a Nintendog?  Aren't those Pokemon cards? MarioKart?"  It is clear that SOE has done its kids media business homework really well -- as Scott puts it, tweens are "bracketed with laser-beam accuracy".   Free Realms taps into the appeal of many of the choicest bits of the most popular properties out there for the demographic. They seem to be rolled together into a shiny integrated package.

Of course, one can't judge a virtual world by its cover, which I why I'd like to hear your reactions.  Does it grind?  Is it buggy?  Does it feel coherent?  Does the micro-payment model seem to work?  But something about this video reminds me of seeing the first screenshots of World of Warcraft -- probably because they looked a lot like this.  This is free, though.

Update: Good thoughts from Rocks, Paper, Shotgun ("all things to all children") More links to thoughtful analysis would be great.

The Council of Europe (CoE) has developed two sets of Guidelines that seek to interpret Human Rights in an online context. On 6 May 2009 there is a Council convened workshop in Strasbourg to explore the guidelines. Prof Bartle and I (with my think tank hat on) are speaking at the meeting.

In this post I’ve provided a short background to the context of the documents and some of my views on the way that key concepts are constructed in the guidelines intended for online game providers. I think that the Council would appreciated a wide set of views on these guidelines as they seem sincere in trying to gather input from a wide set of actors, hence I post these views here to gather your comments.

The guidelines at hand are"

• “Human Rights Guidelines for Online Games Providers”
• “Human Rights Guidelines for Internet Service Providers”

These seek to outline how these two industries can promote rights as defined in the “Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms” in the context of their customers and citizens generally.

The rights focus of both of these documents is Article 10 of the Convention:

Looking at the document “Human Rights Guidelines for Online Games Providers” I want to look at the opening section of the document (see below). Given its title I am taking this to be an overall conception of the key actors involved in the rights at hand and a normative view of what roles they should take, I believe this needs some examination.

"Understanding the role and position of online games providers in respecting and promoting human rights

Providers (designers and publishers) of online games design and make available products which can promote the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, in particular the freedom to express, to create and to exchange content and communications while respecting the rights of others. Designed and provided in an appropriate manner, games can be powerful tools to enhance learning, creativity and social interaction, thereby helping users to benefit from the information society.

However, like other content, online games may also inadvertently impact on the rights and sensibilities of individuals, in particular children, as well as their dignity. The potential impact of such games may increase as they allow the gaming experience to become more creative and interactive (as the possibilities for expression, interaction and exchange of content with other gamers increase) and ever more realistic (as the visual effects of games develop).

Online games can play an important positive role in the lives and development of individuals, especially for children and young people. It suffices to consider the importance of rights and freedoms, values and dignity, into the embedded design and marketing of games. In this regard, it is recalled that the exercise of freedom of expression carries with it duties and responsibilities, in particular as regards the protection of health and morals and the rights of others, which publishers of online games are encouraged to bear in mind when deciding on the content of their games.

Games designers and publishers are therefore encouraged to promote and facilitate gamers’ well-being and should regularly assess and evaluate their information policies and practices, in particular regarding child safety and responsible use, while respecting fundamental rights, in particular the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy and secrecy of correspondence. At the same time it should be noted that member states, civil society, other private sector actors, parents and gamers themselves have important roles to play in engaging in multistakeholder co-operation, promoting gaming literacy for children and assisting game providers in fulfilling their role.

In this regard, designers and publishers of online games are encouraged to take note of, discuss and make their best efforts to comply with the following guidelines (below) and to consider making reference to them within their games and in their enduser agreements.

The appended guidelines are without prejudice to and must be read in conjunction with the obligations applicable to online games providers and their activities under national, European and international law.” (Human Rights Guidelines for Online Games Providers page 4)

The key actor here seems to be the ‘online game provider’. Interestingly the guidelines conflate designer and publisher – whereas of course these are often separate entities with very different outlooks and drivers.

What providers do under this text is exercise ‘freedom of expression’ while moral constraints are covered there seems no recognition of economic and social factors that might constrain this ‘freedom’.

While the text goes on to say that providers are ‘encouraged’ in respect of ‘gamers’ wellbeing. There are a several instances in the text where providers are reminded that they have ‘duties and responsibilities’ in respect of rights.

The artifacts under consideration are variously referred to as ‘product’, ‘content’, ‘embedded design’ and ‘marketing’. The artifacts have the ability it assumed to ‘promote’ the exercise of rights and have a role in the ‘development of individuals; as well as potentially being able to  ‘inadvertently impact’ actors. It is also noted that the ‘gaming experience’ can become more ‘interactive’ allowing the gamer to exercise expression. Many other potential social goods that can result through interaction with an online game are noted.

Here the artifacts seem at once to be static entities but at the same time things that can have a complex role in lives and inter relations of actors. So while it is acknowledged that there is increase interactivity neither the agency of the actors nor the affordances of the artifacts seem to play much of a part in this description. Critically, it seems to me, the technical-social nexus of the online game as a site in which the rights at hand can be expressed or restricted by the actors that use the online game seems to be passed over setting rights guardianship into an implied hierarchy where the end user is almost passive.

What’s more as I have noted in previous works the act of giving primacy to the ‘artifact’ nature of online games, as opposed to the ‘place’ like nature or ‘contractual’ nature that many of them have sets any discourse about them in a particular direction.

Lastly the other key actors appear to be ‘children’, ‘users’, ‘individuals’, ‘gamers’, ‘member states’, ‘civil society’, ‘other private sector actors’ and ‘parents’.

As noted above, the relationship between the users of the artifacts and the creators and other actors seems to imply a hierarchy. What’s more the text sees to put emphasis on protecting and keeping children safe.

There are many categories that are overlooked by this typology, those I suggest are useful to incorporate into an analysis of online games include the following:

‘adult gamers’ – while this is possibly the larges single category of gamer it often seems overlooked. From a policy point of view this strikes me as problematic as it does not seem to me that it is self evident that the rights of child gamers trump those of adult gamers in all circumstances, and even if they do the case needs to be explicitly stated.

‘player community’ – in many online games the notion of and the feeling of belonging to a community is key the experience of the game and many of the goods suggested by the guidelines.

‘user generated content’ – there is mention of users and expression the idea that users might them selves be active in the generation of game content for other users which might include: text, the act of gaming, mods, fanfic and other content that some how becomes part of the gaming experience – seems missing. 

In these categories it seems to me that their might be an implication of active-agency that seems lacking in the text in relation to the notion of any agent using an online game.

Other categories we might consider include: ‘game designers’, the ‘games industry’, ‘retailers’, ‘self governance structures’, ‘guilds’, ‘consumers’ and ‘professional and industry bodies’.

In summary this definition of roles appears to set up an industry with freedom that is bounded only by rights-related duties and users, primarily children, that interact with relatively fixed artifacts in ways that have relatively defined outcomes on them that they have little control upon. A key invisible category is assumed presence of the Council of Europe itself the author of the document.

I suggest that a more rounded approach to rights online should include a more granular understanding of how the practices of game production and use come about through a much more complex interplay of actors. What’s more key elements of context to take into account include the notion of a game as a system of constraints and acts within a game as being fictional or symbolic.

 In a further post I may explore in detail the actual guidelines that are suggested in the document.

Calling all VW grad students...

I wanted to let you know that we're running a grad student symposium as part of State of Play 6.  It's going to run on the Thursday before the conference (Thu, June 18) and will feature a whole lot of discussion between students working in this area, and some of the graybeards (e.g. Mia Consalvo, Doug Thomas, Greg Lastowka, Bart Simon, Torrill Mortensen, Tom Boellstorff, Dan Hunter) who have been doing this VW thang for a while.  Details about it will follow soon, on the conference website, but I wanted to alert any VW grad students out there of a scholarship deal that we have on offer.  Details below the fold...

The Grad Student Symposium @ State of Play

New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy is delighted (ecstatic, actually) to announce the first Graduate Student Symposium for the Serious Study of Virtual Worlds at the State of Play VI Conference.[1]

So, we hear you ask, what is this unimaginatively titled symposium? 

It’s like this:

State of Play was the first conference on virtual worlds, started way back in 2003.  It represented a kind of Woodstock moment for many of us who had just begun the serious study of virtual worlds.  Since then we’ve run the conference every year (or so) and we’re now up to number six (or “VI” if, like us, you’re big fans of the Superbowl). This year's conference will once again attract speakers and attendees from business, industry, a variety of academic areas, representing a diverse array of viewpoints.  We wanted to leverage the opportunity of the conference to gather together the next group of researchers in virtual worlds.  VWs are now mainstream enough to attract funding and grad students, and we wanted to take this opportunity to collect as many of you together to talk about your fields of study, and for you to exchange ideas with the older guard who have had to confront the disbelief and difficulties that studying games and online spaces tends to generate.  We hope to help this new guard build networks and community, like, well, you know, the way academia is supposed to work.

The Symposium will run on June 18, 2009, immediately before the two days of the main State of Play conference.  All attendees at the Symposium will be able to attend the Conference as part of their Symposium registration.  The format of the Symposium will be a series of roundtable discussions and small-scale presentations, to be worked out once we know who is coming and what they want to do.  A draft program will be available early in May.  The basic idea is to have grad students present and discuss their work, and receive commentary and criticism from the graybeards.  There will be learned debate, and discussion.  There may be music and dancing.  There will be alcohol.

In order to make this happen the IILP has engaged in some very creative accounting and is going to make a number of scholarships available to grad students to help with the costs of attending.  The basic support will be:

1. Free symposium registration for the Symposium on June 18.  Free meals during the Symposium. (Breakfast/lunch/dinner).

AND

2. Free State of Play VI Conference registration for June 19-20.  Free meals during the Conference (Breakfast/lunch/dinner on 19th, breakfast/lunch on 20th)

AND EITHER:

3.a. Free lodging in shared (double) grad student hostel (probably on Upper West Side, maybe Williamsburg, we’re still working on this), for the nights of June 17-June 20;

OR

3.b. Significant help (up to about $500 or so, depending on how much everyone else costs) with airfare.

We anticipate being able to offer between 15 and 20 scholarships.  To apply for a scholarship please send (1) a 200-300 word précis of the research you want to present; (2) a resume, (3) the names of a couple of academic recommenders who can vouch for your work, and (4) a description of your first pet,[2] to:

                        Ms Naomi Allen

                        Administrator, Institute for Information Law & Policy

                        New York Law School

                        57 Worth Street

                        New York NY 10013

                        Naomi.Allen@nyls.edu

Applications close on April 30, 2009, but applications will be processed on a rolling basis from April 14, 2009. If you need an early decision to arrange travel then please get your application in early and let us know of the urgency.  Regular registration for the Symposium will be available once we’ve processed the scholarship applications.

We look forward to seeing you in New York on June 18.

Questions about the Symposium or the scholarships can be addressed to:

Prof. Dan Hunter

Director, Institute for Information Law & Policy

New York Law School

dhunter@nyls.edu

[1]             Yes, we know this is an ugly mouthful, but you’re gonna have to live with it until you come up with a catchier name.  For the moment we’ll just call it GSS4SSVW1@SoP6.  Simple huh?

[2]             The description should note how cute they are/were, how sad you were when they died/were spayed, etc.  Make us say “awww” or make us cry; but make us feel something.  If you have never had a pet, then send us your SSN and an essay describing your deepest fears.

My article, Anti-Social Contracts: The Contractual Governance of Virtual Worlds, just came out in the McGill Law Journal.  I profited enormously from the great discussion on Terra Nova when I first proposed the piece, so my thanks to this wonderful community.   Of course, I always learn a lot while writing a paper, and it’s that further thinking that I want to write about.   (Some of this thinking is based on or responds to Michael Risch's excellent piece, Virtual Third Parties.  I agree with him on many points and disagree on a few, but I think that he has done a fantastic job of presenting the other point of view, and the paper is very short and well worth reading.)

Some background: there are two broad challenges to EULAs, unconscionability and privity.  The first argues that EULAs are unfair due to oppression or surprise; the second asserts that a contract between A and B contracts shouldn’t bind or benefit C as a default matter.  (I talk about third-party beneficiaries below.)

The fairness argument, legally speaking, is that EULAs are so one-sided as to “shock the conscience.”  The problem is that these unconscionability arguments are often unconvincing.  I view most EULAs with a certain dull resignation, not with shock and outrage—and I think that’s the experience of most players.  I am also not particularly convinced that standardized contracts necessarily unfairly surprise consumers.  People know what is in the contract: the player loses, the game god wins. 

So if the argument from unconscionability is not appealing as a theoretical matter (and let me reiterate that these broad unfairness charges are the only thing that have worked to date – as in Bragg), what is the alternative?  In Anti-Social Contracts, I argued that traditional limits of privity might provide a way to understand what has gone wrong with virtual world EULAs.

This privity argument does capture something of the problem.  Can players sue each other for violations of virtual world EULAs?  Should they?  It is just plain odd to use a contract between A and B to govern C’s behavior.  This seems to speak to some of the current cases:  Hernandez arguing that he can benefit from IGE’s promises to Blizzard, or Blizzard arguing (successfully) that MDY is bound by Blizzard’s agreements with its customers.

We can use third-party beneficiary terms to permit C to benefit from an A-B contract; and we can use tortious interference to bind C to the terms of an A-B contract, but both of those actions provoke horror from attorneys I’ve talked to.  First, to quote one inhouse counsel, “my job is to make sure there’s nothing in a contract that can be construed as granting third parties rights.”  And we can see why: game gods really do not want their customers bringing lawsuits against each other for blue chat on third party beneficiary theories.  And companies generally do not want to be subject to suit by parties with whom they did not contract.

Risch asserts, correctly, that the law is quite capable of finding third parties to be beneficiaries of other people's contractual promises even where the contract is silent (but where the court nevertheless detects an intent for the contract promise to run to the third party).  That is, unless game gods actively state that their players cannot sue each other for blue chat or griefing, courts may find that players can in fact sue each other for such EULA violations.  (I would argue that in such circumstances courts should find that players are not intended beneficiaries of the contract.)

But from my conversations with game designers and their lawyers, I find that player-to-player lawsuits were not what they intended.  Some player-to-player suits gain popular support, of course -- lots of people were pleased about Hernandez's attempt to sue IGE for RMT.  But outside of the RMT context, it's worth wondering whether players want to run the risk of suit by other players based on EULA violations.  And by extension, it's worth wondering whether game gods want to allow or disallow those lawsuits.

The extension of the obligations of contract terms (e.g., “Thou shalt not use botware”) to third parties is just as problematic, in my view.  We can talk about whether the court’s determination in MDY was limited to its sense of MDY’s knowledge of infringement and profit motive, but the bottom line is that both of those components are present in any commercial software developer.  It bothers me that a game god would be permitted to restrict what software third parties can develop.  I understand that Glider doesn’t seem to have a non-infringing use, and that’s fair enough.  But a few baby-steps away from that, and we enter disturbing territory: game gods using their contracts with customers to block competition, for example.  What if a software provider created botting software that was useful in playing multiple games, including Star Wars Galaxies, in which scripting and botting were part of the game?

It is of course possible that we will limit the lessons of Hernandez (there is no holding there, but perhaps a warning for RMTers) and MDY to cases where a person is violating a EULA in something resembling bad faith.  That seemed to matter to the court in MDY and certainly accounts for most of the discussion that I read about IGE.  But I wonder whether instead we may see EULA provisions applied in less emotionally appealing circumstances--and then, given that "bad faith" has no real part in the legal tests described, I am curious to see what will happen.

Specifically, I am interested to see which way the 3PB issue is resolved.  Will game gods expressly make their customers beneficiaries of each others' promises to the game gods? (My guess is that this is unlikely.)  Will game gods expressly negate 3PB designations?  (I find this more likely.)  Or will game gods not move on this issue until there is a high-profile case in which one player sues another based on the EULA, and then take steps to expressly negate 3PB designations to soothe customer concerns over being sued for Barrens Chat? (I find this most likely.)

I'm interested in your thoughts.

Like a lot of World of Warcraft players, I found reports about WoW designer Jeff Kaplan's GDC critique of quest architecture in the game to be intriguing.

For one, I thought the talk was further evidence of how Blizzard's success with WoW has a lot to do with their internal corporate culture. It's clear that Kaplan's criticisms were the result of sustained attention to WoW's weaknesses and strengths by its live management team coupled with a healthy degree of honesty and confidence. Most other virtual world management teams to date have come off as much more defensive and blustering, at least in their public presentation to players, trying to bluff their way past problems and mistakes until the magnitude of such problems becomes such that the developer has no choice but to address them publically.

Like a lot of other people, I found myself quibbling with Kaplan's views of what does and does not work in World of Warcraft, sometimes because I have my own treasured beliefs about what could work if only it were implemented more effectively. Sometimes that's because I'm unrealistically wishing that WoW was something other than what it is. What Kaplan calls a "mystery quest", for example, strikes me as potentially very workable, but only in a game that's more of a dynamic environment, more of a sandbox. In WoW's extremely controlled, hand-holding design, it's perfectly true that a mystery quest just comes off as designer sadism. There's a reason why you still hear new players asking plaintively, "Where is Mankrik's wife?"

I guess I'm most struck at Kaplan's argument that World of Warcraft's quest designers have suffered from "medium envy", that they have rarely succeeded in designing quests which are native to the distinctive character and affordances of virtual worlds and digital games.

Kaplan comments that "we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game". I think he's right enough about the main thrust of his insight here. The very few quests in World of Warcraft or any similarly designed virtual world which arise and progress seamlessly from within the action of gameplay tend to be among the most popular (presuming they otherwise function well in technical terms).

The "Wrathgate" quest in the current WoW expansion seems to be one of the most popular in the game's history, largely for its use of a dramatic cut scene that features an interesting plot twist and the subsequent quest which incorporates the player directly into events of major consequence within the gameworld. It's not even a very strong example of what might be possible in terms of storytelling within the virtual world form compared to many other digital games, given the relatively mechanical and even awkward stitching together of gameplay and cinematics.

World of Warcraft's current expansion also features a number of examples of "phased content" (Wrathgate is one such) where the world changes as a player progresses along a quest chain. Phasing is another case where the content of questing is integrated into the action of gameplay. The game mechanics sometimes push against that integration in some odd ways. Players who have not yet progressed along a phasing quest chain stop being visible to players who have when they are both in the same location. The final dramatic resolution of a phasing quest chain tends to settle a zone or quest hub into a permanent state of stasis: creatures and antagonists that ought to be absent as a result of the narrative remain as features of the landscape.

I can think of isolated cases of seamless storytelling within the mechanic of quests in other similar virtual worlds. In City of Heroes/City of Villains, for example, a player pursuing a quest was sometimes ambushed by appropriate antagonists while en route to the next destination, sometimes creating havoc in areas where the typical player-character was much less powerful than the questing player. Quests in a number of games sometimes turn on storytelling events or twists that unfold within the action of the quest itself rather than as a written narrative delivered once the player returns to the quest hub.

To ride my own design hobbyhorse, however, I can't help but feel that Kaplan's ambition to get Blizzard designers to stop "writing a fucking book" clashes uncomfortably with his prescriptions to more tightly control or direct the action of players as they move through a series of quests. The static pacing of storytelling in WoW and its many imitators is rooted in the basic structure of quests themselves and in game-mechanical contrivances like the quest hub. When I think of solo digital games that have storytelling styles that seem "native" to the form, what they all share in common is dissolving the delivery of narrative into the game mechanics, making the action of gameplay itself the natural, invisible modality of storytelling. Think of Planescape: Torment making death and resurrection a part of its narrative, or the way that Half-Life 2 and many similar shooters make the next objective a part of the environment itself. If Blizzard designers dump books on players in little 511-character doses, that's not just medium envy, it's a consequence of the quest-hub surrounded by many mini-treadmills, of an environment with no spontaneity in it. If I see a creature in a WoW zone, I know sooner or later that I will be tasked to collect its gizzards or claws. One of the basic attributes of narrative, in any medium, is surprise. For stories to arise from within the action of gameplay (rather than as books or movies or theater), the gameplay has to be thought out with narrative in mind.

Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion in Second Life, with Celia Pearce, Thomas Malaby and Tom Boellstorff, on the roles and merits of qualitative and quantitative methods in cultural anthropology.  The audio and a text transcript will be available soon.  (I will provide a link here, as soon as they are.)  UPDATE:  You can find the transcript here.  Instead of rehashing the arguments, I would like to simply spell out my rather bleak prediction of what data-rich and easily-manipulated online communities (like virtual worlds and social networking sites) mean for the future of qualitative research in areas like anthropology that study culture.

Ted Castronova and I are hardly the only ones to note that virtual worlds are great tools for running experiments that we couldn't run otherwise, allowing theory-testing in fields like economics and anthropology.  And for those who prefer exploring data archives (using econometric methods instead of experimental design to draw clean inferences), they might follow a model more like Dmitri Williams and his colleagues, and get data from virtual worlds or social networking platforms.  

So here is the prediction:

I am not arguing that this is a desirable outcome, but it isn't a hard prediction to make.  Economics and psychology are already in the final stages of this process, sociologists are losing prestige to psychologists as they resist the trend, and anthropologists are already starting down the path. I think my fellow panelists see the writing on the wall, which explains their impassioned arguments on the merits of qualitative research (everyone), the folly of objectivity (esp. Thomas), and the need to secure a place for all methods (Celia and Tom).  

Having thought more about this since the panel, I am concluding that quantitative research drives out qualitative research in a two-stage process.  In cases when quantitative and qualitative methods go head to head--where the same research question is amenable to both methods--the quantitative researchers have a real advantage in persuading skeptics, getting funding and influence.  While there is room for debate about whether this is the best outcome, it is certainly a defensible one.

Where Celia, Thomas and Tom have a real cause for concern--and where the academy makes a far less defensible judgment--is in reasoning like this:

Golly, if quantitative research is preferable to qualitative research when the two go head to head on the same research question, then qualitative research must not be worthy of respect even when applied to questions that are not amenable to quantitative methods.

That type of flawed generalization is pretty common (as shown in repeated experiments in marketing and psychology)--but it is flawed, nevertheless.  The research questions become no less important just because they can't be addressed with controlled experiments or fancy econometrics.  Neither do the qualitative methods become any less rigorous.  So Celia, Thomas and Tom are right to fight this unwarranted conclusion and make sure it doesn't eliminate qualitative methods from the best departments and journals in their field, even in the cases where there is no quantitative alternative.

However, I think it is counterproductive to criticize the follies of objectivity, the oversimplified philosophy of science held by most practicing quantitative researchers, the limits of hypothesis testing, and the like (which featured prominently in yesterday's discussion).  While some philosophers and scientists might be on your side, these arguments give the appearance of protectionism and resistance to new methods, while not actually addressing the flawed reasoning that I see as truly sounding the death knell for qualitative methods when technology and data make quantitative methods.