But in both places in the last few years, you’ve had some similar kinds of reformist movements that looked to elections as a possible window of opportunity for changing or eroding the power of an authoritarian state elite. Similar in the kinds of claims and strategies they’ve employed, similar in being forced to rely on a figurehead opposition figure whose future commitment to liberal political values is at the least ambiguous. Similar in the social composition of the strongest underlying constituencies pushing for reform: urban populations, educated elites, aspirant cosmopolitans.

And the consequence of both reform campaigns has been broadly similar: to reveal that the state they critique is even less ideological than it appears and that the chief authoritarian or his closest associates is only partially in charge of a state apparatus that has largely been taken over by a silent coup d’etat of securocrats who have connections to paramilitary or irregular forces which draw from different social foundations than the reformers do. And that the securocrats are determined to stay in power regardless, and have the means, lack of scruples and competency to do so, perhaps indefinitely.

Some critics charge that liberals or the left are silent about Iran (or Zimbabwe) because they have a double standard, or even because they have a kind of bizarre sympathetic view of nationalist autocracy in developing nations. I’ve agreed that there’s something to this charge when it comes to Zimbabwe. I don’t feel competent to say the same about Iran. But the substance to this critique strikes me as complicated.

More importantly, there’s another layer of silence that comes from feeling an echo of the same futility and despair that’s clearly affecting reformist actors in Iran or has affected them in Zimbabwe. Beyond saying for the umpteenth time that the upper echelons of state power and securocrat authority in both states are morally contemptible, destructively short-sighted, grotesque, and so on, what’s left to hope for or advocate? Every avenue of international or local action seems played out. The people in control of both states don’t appear likely to allow themselves to be tricked into letting a process of change develop so far that they can’t stop it. They don’t seem to have any interest in the long-term sustainability of their economic or social policies. They seem to have a strong enough internal organization of the state’s capacity for violence that they can’t be challenged effectively by militant or violent action from within. We’ve already seen where most kinds of external intervention lead; even strong diplomatic suasion arguably has a rebound or self-defeating effect in some cases.

Many postcolonial regimes which have organically collapsed from within have done so in many cases because they commanded states with little internal coherence or capacity for directed force, not because they were challenged by strong local social movements, international pressure, or more competent rivals intent on reorganizing and reforming the government. I can think of some important exceptions, but even a few of those seem to me to have given way over time to a recurrence of the same kinds of regimes that they originally displaced.

This is where Iran is a really different kind of case: not contemporary Iran but the beginnings of the current regime. Depressingly similar as it might appear now in its resistance to some kind of liberalization or democratic reform, the current government was the consequence of a pretty genuine bottom-up revolution which gained important traction from international pressures against the Shah’s regime. What I’m struck by, though, is how impossible that kind of successful bottom-up social upheaval against an oppressive state feels to me now, if it is limited to an alliance between urban populations and educated elites. (Which, importantly, the Iranian Revolution was not, though it incorporated those constituencies.) All around the world, it seems to me that states dominated by military or police power have learned how to resist, frustrate, suppress and isolate that kind of transformational pressure from loosely “liberal” constituencies pretty much indefinitely. The only real threat to most regimes are illiberal social and political movements: national or ethnic resistance or religious fundamentalism primarily.

I think a lot of the starry-eyed fetishization of Twitter and other new media in the case of Iran is simply about a hope that a magic technology will come along and make liberal revolution or transformation plausible where social organization has not. As we’ve seen, the technology for organizing smart mobs works for as long as a securocrat state will tolerate it working, and no further. If shutting it off and violently crushing public dissent costs such a state some kind of economic opportunity in the global system, that’s clearly a cost that these states are prepared to pay.

So all of this thinking is also why there’s silence of a kind. Getting up with a bullhorn and declaring one’s outrage slides pretty quickly into self-parody, into a public confession of impotence. Knowing that, what is there to say? I suppose one could get busy with the five-point plans and communiques and various inventories of miniscule carrots and eeny-weeny sticks, but it seems all rather futile. Or, as a lot of blogspheric hot air producers seem to prefer, one could just recycle ire and outrage into wholly domestic attempts to gain miniscule political advantage over local opponents.

1. The theme for State of Play was “Plateau” and unlike most such conference themes, it seemed pretty descriptive of where academics, policy-makers and developers are with virtual worlds at the moment.

On one hand, they’re undeniably established as subjects of study, areas of interest for policy and law, and as a media form which some companies will continue to produce, operate and profit from.

On the other hand, all the utopians who expected virtual worlds to have a transformative impact on culture and sociality, to be the transcendent media form of the 21st Century, or to be the perfected experimental instrument that would at last permit social scientists to generate knowledge comparable to the natural sciences have mostly moved on to the next technology of desire or have tempered their expectations. Academic work on them is unmistakeably segmenting into more disciplinary or focused kinds of questions, which I think is largely a good thing and a sign of intellectual maturation.

This sense of a flattening out of expectations did sometimes manifest as a kind of gloom or resignation. When the occasional panglossian voice piped up about how exciting their organization’s presence in Second Life was going to be, there was often a kind of bemused ripple in the audience, that someone hadn’t gotten the message that they were trying to peddle yesterday’s news. It’s hard to come down to earth and just deal with virtual worlds as merely a form of entertainment, only a form of communication, another interesting flash (but no more than a flash) of particular insight into human sociality and culture in the 21st Century. It’s maybe especially hard if you’re trying to pull down some money either to develop a virtual world project or to support major research into virtual worlds. I have no such ambitions so I can kind of afford to sit back with a bemused grin as others try to refine old turns of seductive phrasing, or to cop a superior pose at the frustrations expressed by people whose genuine artistic ambitions and life’s work are heavily invested in MMOs as a form.

This is a bit of what I was getting at with my remark that the developers’ panel seemed to be “chasing their own tails”. It seems to me that a few existing virtual worlds are meaningful commercial and cultural successes within their own terms, and that’s a good enough starting place. I’m the first to complain that the form is capable of so much more even within its areas of strength, but I don’t really expect a persistent-environment MMO with 3d avatars to have the dissemination of a popular Facebook or iPhone app or the commercial success of a Top-Ten television show. Especially not in a fragmented cultural marketplace which may never again have products which are truly dominating mass-market experiences shared by most or all of the North American audience.

I have a lot of the same wish list (or hate list) as the developers, but I think it might be time to stop and ask some questions about those ambitions without sidelong glances at World of Warcraft or recapitulations of the history from MUD to now as a kind of trauma. Why don’t we have dynamic or sandbox worlds? Is it all the bad money men who don’t get it? Are we talking about the same thing when we invoke those words and ideas? If there was an unlimited budget for development, what else would cap or frustrate those ambitions: absent or embryonic technologies, limitations of existing infrastructure, expectations of players, the organization and sociology of game design itself? Or maybe there’s some conceptual flaw that’s deeper still, I dunno.

The nice thing about getting to a plateau is that it might be a good time to rest, have a picnic lunch and enjoy the scenery and reconsider whether to try and climb the cliff looming above the current plateau or to climb back down and look for another mountain.

———

On the other hand, I really enjoyed the recent issue of The Escapist that focused on frustration. This is not unique to virtual worlds, really. I keep being struck that no matter how much I like digital games of all kinds, they are just rife with pleasure-killing features and designs that really seem wholly unnecessary, that aren’t part of the challenge of a game or even just a case of “filler”. Contrary to the editor’s note for the issue, though, I wouldn’t say that these experiences are what make it all “worth it”. Instead, I think they’re a real limit condition for digital games: a limit to their audiences, a limit to their success in their own terms as a cultural form, a limit to their success as products. More than a few experiences of dropping $60.00 on a bad, aggravating cultural experience is a pretty serious disincentive to keep going. I know, books, films, and TV can also be frustrating. But digital games have turned the unnecessary assault on the audience’s patience and sanity into a nearly standard feature.

————–

By the way, last week was also a big week for industry mergers. What does it all mean? Hell if I know, but Electronic Arts is certainly an interesting company to study if you want to try and understand how the drive to consolidate, absorb and monopolize a given industry is ultimately even against the interest of the consolidating company. EA clearly has executives who understand that the company’s size and structure actively impedes it from consistently producing the best products it can or even from making consistent marketplace successes. But this is sort of old news for cultural industries in general.

It’s hard not to see changes in the management at Mythic as a sign that Warhammer Online is recognized within the company as coming up short against benchmarks for minimal acceptable success that Mark Jacobs himself announced prerelease. I wonder a bit if WAR is actually going to survive more than another year or so.

This makes me note also that elsewhere, SOE has become a curious niche with MMOs, a kind of elephant’s graveyard where wounded, underperforming or neglected games end up. Which, if they’re all making some kind of profit, makes some degree of business sense.

Going back to my first point in this post, though, you’d think this would all make it a bit easier to drive the point home with the money people in these firms that the last thing anyone needs is a clone of World of Warcraft. You can’t possibly out-WoW at release at this point, and so you’ll inevitably suffer by comparison, no matter how bored people are with WoW. When I read about something like the new Star Trek MMO and get the vague, possibly inaccurate, impression that there are going to be tank ships, healer ships, dps ships, or that the game-mechanical questions around cloaking are going to be imagined in roughly the same terms that rogue stealthing in WoW are imagined, it really depresses me. Most attractive IPs aren’t necessarily suited to be MMOs at all, and very very few are suited to just be a reskinned WoW. A Star Trek MMO might work, but only if the basic structure of the entire project is reconsidered from soup to nuts.

——-

Moderating a panel on methdology and the study of virtual worlds at State of Play, I was suddenly struck that even though I’m more inclined to the methodological practices of my anthropologist colleagues who were on that panel, the foundation of my own methodological approach to the form is really quite different, and ultimately very much unlike my work on African history. Basically, I think I’m a memoirist at heart when it comes to games and virtual worlds, more like Julian Dibbell or Jim Rossignol. I think this is also a legitimate methodological approach within academic contexts as well as outside of them, and an approach that has a kind of tense, uneasy and sometimes rivalrous relationship with ethnography. I think I might try to work up a more formal commentary on this for Terra Nova.

My seeding was totally random, e.g., as I thought of easy-to-make lunches, most of them using Trader Joe’s precooked or precut foods, I put them into brackets, though I did try to avoid doubling-up things that were too similar.

Unfortunately my daughter is already gaming things, not so much to favor things she really likes (which is the point of the whole exercise) but because she’s too tender-hearted to see something lose and because she wants to show her loyalty to what she’s learned about healthy eating when The Man aka Dad appears to be recording her preferences. I just barely bought that lentil salad defeated a salami-and-cheese medley in the first match-up yesterday, because the lentil salad was pretty good. But today rice salad tied with a pepperoni-and-cheese medley and the rice salad was decent but not really a kid’s thing. (Trader Joe’s precooked brown rice + a bit of sausage and chicken + roasted red bell pepper + fresh green beans from garden + lime vinagrette.) Unfortunately I hadn’t figured on a tie. I’m thinking a secret judge’s ranking that’s based on “how much of each lunch was actually eaten”, in which case today’s pepperoni medley won pretty handily.

Julian Dibbell: the hook of these stories is maybe completely done in the terms that we’ve seen so far (e.g., “this is the future! there are people with stores in Second Life!!!!” but thinks there is still a tremendous amount of fascinating stuff to say; that imagination and simulation are really important still.

Bernhard Drax, reporting from within a virtual world

Ta-Nehisi Coates. normalizing gaming, normalizing virtual worlds. Talks about how he was comfortable blogging about Michelle Obama, music groups, politics, and so on, and then he decided to add blogging about World of Warcraft–was curious and anxious about what would happen when he did. Surprised at the positive and substantive responses. Is attracted to stories that tell him something about himself, so why not talk about being a gamer, too? Great quote: “I used to wonder if when I died, I would want people to say, ‘Hey, he was a great frost mage’, but now I’m thinking that would be ok, it would be ok.” On joining a guild of academics and writers in WoW: “The prospect of not having a 14-year old tell me I was so ghey was so enticing”. The journalism question for him is this: what is it that makes the social part of virtual worlds satisfying to him?

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Joost van Dreunen. Stepping away idea of designer as author, moving towards the idea of supplying tools to players or participants. Video games as meaning-making experiences. Interested in how kid worlds/tween worlds actually make money. [ME: I think this is a really good question where there are likely to be inaccurate or misleading assumptions.] In his view, this is partly about how you extend a commercial or consumerist presence into the home if you’re a media producer or consumer-products manufacturer. Question the designers have to solve is how to give children agency over spending decisions without violating legal restrictions or antagonizing parents; prepaid cards as major technique. Movement of toymakers into this space is a really significant development, online components to offline play. Sees power law; very small number of players keep the world going, draw other players in.

Angela Tiffin, representing Children’s Advertising Review Unit, self-regulation group, trying to control advertising to children online. Early on created guidelines for gathering personal information from children, which informed later legal regulation. Issues that are key remain: gathering information, controlling disclosure by children in chat, etc. A lot of concern now rising about the kind of information used for behavioral marketing.

Betsy Book, talking about There. Q: how to manage an unplanned shift in the demographics of the game in which younger teens/tweens started appearing more and more in the game. Older and younger users tend to feel rivalrous, how to deal with that. Also problem with use of credit card instruments by children that draws adults in with some degree of alarm. But also lots of positive interactions, mentoring that spontaneously forms. Refers back to discussion of Whyville yesterday; says that There really doesn’t see itself as teaching citizenship to children, but about enforcing content standards. More concern really about branding–do you really want tweens if that drives older players away, how do you keep the space culturally mainstream?

Erin Hoffman, game designer. Lengthy resume–GoPets, Dragonrealms, Shadowbane

Designing for kids is harder than designing for adults. Columbia University project to teach nutrition to kids through massive participation game. Trying to give a game for parents to run alongside, so parents can understand more of what’s going on.

Doug Thomas. Research question: what are kids actually doing in these worlds? we don’t really know as much as we could or should. Problem: it’s very hard to study kids. Hard institutionally in particular, enormous IRB issues. Asks: how serious is it actually for kids to give out phone numbers and so on online? What are the actual risks that kids are incurring? The probabilities of risk? The power of fear in controlling what can be done in design of kid worlds, do we want to push back on fear, and how?

———

[Me: Thank god for these guys, just as an aside: developers interested in exploratory conversations about the form, who don't just stare at people and say, "It's all under NDA, everything is under NDA, my breakfast cereal is under NDA".]

Raph Koster: there’s much less diversity in MMOs, no experimentation.

Mike Sellers: it’s easier to talk about the few places where something is changing. Mike says even Eve Online is “kill monsters, get gold” [ME: I don't really think so]. In some respects, tools are less sophisticated now than they were in the 1990s. So question is, where are the little mammals that will survive if the dinosaur designs die? Says, “Maybe the little games in Facebook”.

Nick Fortugno: We conflate too many things together, an MMO doesn’t have to be a fantasy RPG. Why does everything get defined by World of Warcraft? Massively multiple participation before these technologies was about voting, other kinds of big social experiences; we don’t have a deep imagination of what a game with 10,000 people might be.

Jesse Houston: Let’s stop talking about WoW as the winner. It isn’t a winner, it’s a benchmark.

Raph Koster: WoW just has as many players as a bad little cable show that’s heading for cancellation. [ME: 1. Guys, stop talking about WoW: it always makes developers look like sour grapes purveyors. 2. NO individual game scales well against other popular culture.]

Mike Sellers: there are more bird-watchers or NASCAR fans than MMO players.

Dan Norton: let’s be positive!

Mike Sellers: I want to stay negative for a moment. Virtual worlds aren’t real the way lots of things are real. Maybe we’re just talking about buggy whips or player-pianos. [ME: but Mike, when player pianos had a big market, player piano makers talked about them. Should they have stopped talking about them then because someday there was going to be an iPod Touch? By that context, stop talking about airplanes, televisions, etc.]

Mike Sellers: publics are media and entertainment agnostic, meaning they’ll move on. Who cares about Joanie Loves Chachi these days, for example? [ME: Mike! Take a look!]

Nick: Learning curve difficulties, ossification of the form as obstacle to new players. If these are skewed always to people with huge amounts of time, they’ll never evolve.

Raph: average in all virtual worlds, even pre-graphics, is 20 hours/week. So economies, graphics, etc., doesn’t make a difference in terms of engaging players. The nature of the engagement hasn’t changed.

Quick exchanges between whole panel: upshot, we’re not as mass market as we could be, some things are. [ME: GUYS WHY IS BEING THE MOST MASSIFIED THING POSSIBLE THE GOAL? Seriously, not even television or movie producers imagine that the film they are making must have total penetration of the mass market to succeed.]

Jesse: We need tools for players to take more control over experience of play.

Raph: I’ve tried.

Nick: We have to approach games keeping in mind what they are for people, what they expect.

Raph: Dancing is my poster child in MMO design. There was dancing in text muds, then it went away in graphic MMOs, then I got a lot of people asking for dancing in SWG, so I put it in. But a lot of people complained, why are you spending time on dancing as a design? But now we have dancing in every MMO. [ME: Did AC, EQ, UO really not have a /dance emote? I can't remember.] So we need things that have common cultural touchstones in MMOs.

Nick: A lot of emergent behaviors in earlier MMOs have become codified, and then become expectations for hard-coded design structures in all subsequent MMOs. Strong tied people: my real friends VS. my acquaintances/loose ties.

Mike: MMOs today are good at supporting strong tied connections, actually, not weak ties though.

Raph: agree with Mike. They cluster people a lot, they make strong ties, and that’s as much a design consequence as a social prior. We should figure out how to support ‘weak ties’ better–that’s what something like ‘Mafia Wars’ does.

Nick: But I think there’s been lots of experimentation with weak ties in MMOs and not so much trying to imagine in new ways dealing with strong ties. But weak ties are what’s new and interesting in our world, and these technologies, so it’s where all our attention should be.

Mike: intentional communities as an interesting way to think about weak ties. But it’s very risky to experiment with novel forms for intentional communities.

Nick: when casual games started, we were very surprised by the people who played them, we thought it would be the same people who were already gamers. So suddenly there are conventions for casual games: don’t ever use the keyboard, don’t use the right mouse button, etc. So the way forward is to look at the interactive conventions that exist for an audience. You want what’s natural, e.g. Wii Sports. [ME: But what's 'natural' in physical, real-world games like golf and tennis has layers of complexity, too: there's the casual golf and the serious golf in the real world too]

Mike: All other software besides games has an external task it has to satisfy, some external need; a game has to create the task that will be fun.

Raph: there is a collision between making the game challenging vs. increasing sociability. Can you make a better chat system? Yes. But does it make the game worse? Yes. Instancing makes the game run better, but it ruins the social system. Travel is treated as a nuisance in virtual worlds, but it forces people to have social connections to people near them, not always be where their friends are. In-world economies need more travel, but we don’t think about that.

Dan: Are there things that players expect in MMOs that you wish had never happened? Features you’d love to eradicate forever?

Jesse: I wish guilds had less rigid structures, and there were more innovative structures supported.

Mike: We did have other structures in Meridan 59. But then you have to support those variations, and that’s a design burden. So we moved towards a norm, which takes relatively minimal and modular design.

Raph: I would kill levels and classes. They’re rigid and limiting. [ME: But then why does Metaplace, a fairly social world, have levels????]

Mike: Asheron’s Call’s allegiances were a non-guild system that was kind of an alternative to level-class.

Jesse: City of Heroes has a weak-tie mechanic.

Mike: So what I would kill is questing. It robs us the ability to experience deeper, better narratives. Appeal for dynamic world.

Jesse: right, we should have dynamic worlds where lots of things can happen.

Nick: Let’s get rid of MMOs that present to each player the promise of being the hero.

Raph: the problem is just the weight of the conventions we’re importing from game to game, to the detriment of the form, some of which come from before digital media.

Jesse: that’s a problem with more than MMOs, all digital games have this issue.

[ME: I'm going to need to think about this panel and write something later. I think these guys are largely stuck chasing their own tails in some curious and unnecessary ways.]

Dan: So what should we be building?

Raph: Let’s make persistence more central, the dynamism of worlds more important.

Mike: yes, but persistence can take a lot of forms, can be just about identities and not about worlds.

Jesse: I think achievements are a really nice feature, can be even more of it, giving people more and more ways to be distinctive and individualized.

Dan: But achievements are almost a better, richer way to data-mine player experiences.

1. No application, design or game can live up to the utopian imagination of potential users or players, and that utopian imagination is surprisingly resilient in the face of many disappointments. I’ve been writing a bit recently about a couple of notorious past cases of vaporware MMOs where players really expected everything and more from them: a sandbox, a mimetic mirror of the world, an instrument to reform real life, and more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. So I should know better to have those feelings myself by now. And yet, I really was struggling with deflated feelings as I messed around with Metaplace during and after Raph Koster’s keynote on it. Those feelings aren’t fair to Metaplace, which seems very interesting in many respects, and provides some fascinating points of contrast and comparison to Second Life in particular. But somehow I was expecting an authoring environment that would generate a wider variety of visual and narrative experiences for users and a wider range of implied invitations to possible creators. Maybe that has yet to come, because it’s still very early days for it. The thing for me now is to see it for what it is and what it was meant by its producers to be. Still, even in those terms, to go back to my post from yesterday, I was struck that Raph seemed to position Metaplace in terms of functions and purposes that are already strongly served or satisfied by existing tools and applications.

2. This morning, Doug Thomas is talking about the theme of “Plateau” for the conference, and in the magic circle and economies panel, I did feel that we’re at a point rather like that. But it makes it frustrating because it’s hard to move the conversation onward in a number of respects.

Julian Dibbell’s introduction: maybe virtual economies were not so important, or not as important as we thought in the way that we thought they were. Maybe RMT doesn’t have to be quite the battleground that it was. Virtual economies don’t have to be radically autonomous to be richly interesting and playful.

Stephanie Rothenberg

Sweatshop education through reenactment in Second Life, film “Invisible Threads”

[Comment: the problem here is that the reality of MMO games trumps the polemical intent of their project, I think. Not the RMT sweatshops, but just think of pizza-making in The Sims Online, and how quick some players were to turn their leisure into a sweatshop-style operation. But I readily confess to a strong bias against serious games that are crafted as polemics--I think they're an inefficient way to make a critique and end up reinforcing the image of left critique as cheerless (e.g., taking play and making play 'serious'). Plus it's hard not to end up as condescending towards the people you're meaning to polemicize--they haven't gotten our message yet, so we have to use a game! Not usually thoughtful as Bogost is about what makes a game persuasive, often just a translation of a polemical text into a mechanically simple game structure.]

Margaret Wallace, Rebel Monkey Properties

CampFu, casual teen-oriented game. Designer trying to talk about how they think about putting an economy into the gameplay.

[My thought: I'm really struck here at how unvarnished or undisguised the instrumentalism of design thinking about an economy here is: that it is designed to make players do something which is not the economy itself ("engagement") is the word here, but not fun in and of itself. But what's not clear to me, and Juho Hamari's interesting work earlier in the meeting really seems to be saying interesting things on this subject, is whether they're actually right about whether economic design is instrumentally effective.]

Andy Schneider, Live Gamer. New startup. Talking about RMT. Live Gamer proposed to integrate with an MMO rather that be outside of it, sort of a new covenant with developers. Average transaction size $45-50, greatest volume is Fridays. Live Gamer also works with GoPets’ secondary market: [ME: parents, lock up your credit cards.] [Schneider doesn’t really talk about the other big side of this, I think: the more the developer directly benefits from the cash value of items, the more you are tempted to design straight to that premise, so that cash differentially buys what in-game labor time now buys.

Ted Castronova

Fusion of real and virtual work spaces and labor value was inevitable; markets will seek more efficient solutions, less trouble, lower transaction costs.

We need to think about the policy and social consequences of the current state of economies in virtual worlds, however, to not merely let markets dictate this. Also argues it is in the self-interest of the game industry to be worried about the merging of the real and virtual; among other things, taxation will be extracted directly per transaction once the state is finally aware that this merger has happened. If it’s kept fuzzy, maybe the state’s presence or role can be kept fuzzy.

Need to actually make active decisions now, policies, not leave it to developers, create serious covenants between players.

————-

Curious exchange later: James Bower of Whyville.net described himself as training children for civic and political life through Whyville, and compared it to a Greek city-state. Knowing something about Greek city-states, I’m thinking this is a less wholesome comparison than he thinks. But Ted Castronova really pushed back on him, and noted that it’s an odd thing for someone in an autocratic position to be seeing themselves as preparing kids for democratic citizenship. Bower said, “Yeah, it’s a Greek city-state, and I’m Zeus”. Well, it’s an old metaphor with virtual worlds, actually, so not that odd.

We had a prior discussion at my table about whether there’s anything much left of use in “the magic circle” as a concept, and someone mentioned a recent discussion by Jesper Juul on the issue.

Jerry Paffendorf discusses the graphing of different kinds of online experiences at Metaverseroadmap.org, point of observing that the ways in which virtual world experiences spill out or become visible to some publics. He’s got a project for selling a square inch of land in Detroit, using them to link to virtual spaces. (Loveland)

——————-

Alexander Macris, publisher & editorial director of The Escapist.

Use of achievement system within forums spurred a lot of forum participants to find ways to get badges, etc, how that makes participation (and incentives) on a forum very “game-like”, MMO type…so how MMOs are becoming a larger metapractice. How to make rock-paper-scissors more exciting–culmulative, competitive, contextual. “for our audience, what mattered more was what was outside the ‘game’ of badges, not inside of it–the external systems of recording etc.”

———————

Beth Coleman, media studies at MIT

“emergent design principles in X-reality design”
how design between virtual and real interact and iterate on each other
“if we’re moving toward ubiquitious computing, we need to move towards an experience of ubiquitious use”

Another claim in this case that 3d modeling makes controlling or commanding processes in the real world, but I find this one much more satisfying and intriguing, partly because it’s not a comprehensive claim, focused on particular (and highly spatial) kinds of physical work that requires complex two-way information flows.

More detailed paper on her arguments is available. Very interesting.
———————–

Elizabeth Lawley
“tangible matters”
the tangibility of the virtual makes a difference.

Why are we at this conference, given that we could do it all online?
social capital needs to transfer across a magic circle to be valuable; can’t be tied up in a world

Liz argues that this is about inherent desire, that we have a need for materiality.

[One thought: I wonder how much of this point is getting tangled up in a difference between the ephemeral and the persistent, e.g., we value some objects not just because they're material, graspable, touchable, but because they last. there are a lot of 'tangible' things which are very short-lived that we struggle to keep hold of, and a lot of tangible but ephemeral moments are also private, only something you remember: a view on a hike, a butterfly that crosses our path, etc.]

———————

Dennis Crowley, how game-logics spill out into the world. A lot like Thomas Malaby’s point about gas mileage and ludocapitalism. Mentions Feltron Reports, very interesting example. Once you start thinking of everyday life in ludic terms, and social software lets you make that something other than a private or idiosyncratic understanding, what happens to everyday life.

———————–
[Another thought: as is often the case around these topics, I think people are overstating the novelty of making everyday tasks into something ludic, or creating a game-like feeling around accumulative or numerical tasks. Putting notches in a gun, etc. Heck, Gimli and Legolas playing "kill the orc". This is a pretty old and elemental way to talk about repetition, accumulation, and so on. The difference here is the technologically-mediated collection of individual action and its reporting in systems of achievements, badges, placements into maps and spaces, and so on. The impact is not that something becomes playful suddenly that was not, but that you gain a sense of all other people playing a game; that the playfulness of tasks become transparent to all the people interested in or involved in the system. That cuts both ways, as you can see with WoW achievements. On one hand, it's fascinating to find out what everyone else is doing in WoW, and what your practice is in relation to that; on the other hand, it becomes a driver of what people do, and the basis for a new and maybe unwanted system of social power.]

Tori Horton, description of how virtual worlds can link to public diplomacy, reviews weaknesses and strengths of virtual worlds for servicing public diplomacy.

My comment: same issue as with Raph’s framing of Metaplace, really. Why should we privilege or turn to virtual worlds for communicative purposes? What can we do more there that we can’t with other media forms or tools? (I think we can, but I feel like folks who are advocates of virtual worlds get pretty cagey about this point.) Either it’s about particular publics that are important or it’s about a way of communicating that has distinctive character, effects, etc. (which might include being indirect or diffuse in communicating)

Jean Miller, governance. When government agencies were interested in being in Second Life, why? What kinds of challenges did they face?

Me: in a way, this is kind of the story that’s now being told about Second Life as a quasi-postmortem: all the organizations and institutions that went into Second Life with an idea about what virtuality was and would do for them, and found difficulties, etc.–most of them are now absent from Second Life or very nearly so. I think this is where virtual worlds as an overall idea or media form are at this point now as a whole: they were oversold as the arrival of the Metaverse, the virtual world as replacement or overlay for the world. Instead, it’s just a media form, an interesting one, but it can’t do any of the things that were expected of it (or that were hyped about it).

Elizabeth Losh. Virtual state. Book, Virtualpolitik. Thinking about military video games, why and how do militaries choose to make games. Interested in how game developers come into the military institution, but points out that when people come to doing a game from the military side is in some ways more interesting. Looking at the way that Iraq specifically was represented in military games. Emergent play within several worlds, used to train but also for other purposes (therapy for PTSD, for example). Use of game to demonstrate or authenticate an existing project from government. Looking at repurposing of Second Life Iraq representations for artistic or political commentary.

William May, description of official thinking about use of virtual worlds within State Department, esp. Second Life, how they took an interest, what they thought they could do within Second Life that they couldn’t do otherwise. “It’s just another medium: it has to let us do something that we couldn’t do otherwise”.