Some of you may have been following the Arden project (reported in Nature and the Chronicle of Higher Education). I'm pleased to announce that the project has come to fruition. With generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, we have created a fun game environment and used it to conduct a month-long experiment. Our experimental question (kept secret up to now) was: Are fantasy game players economically "normal"? Or on the contrary, when they make themselves into elves and dwarves and hobbits, do they stop taking economic decisions seriously? We created two virtual worlds, one an exact copy of the other, except that in the experimental world the price of a simple healing potion was twice as high as in the control. If people are taking prices seriously in this fantasy environment, they should buy fewer of the potions when potions are more expensive.

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

The initial findings of the Arden experiment will be released during the International Communications Association meetings in Montreal next weekend. The session we're part of is this one:

"High Density Session: The Web 1.0, 2.0, and Beyond"
Time: Sat May 24, 3:00 - 4:15pm
Place: Le Centre Sheraton / Drummond West

Get more information about the meeting here.

In this format, eight presenters will each have 5 minutes to describe her or his work. Then we will go to our posters, pasted to nearby walls, where each of us will answer questions about the findings. I'll be standing at my poster; thus if you have a particular interest in the Arden project and its findings, please feel free to attend this session and see them first hand. Fresh off the internets, as it were.

I will collect comments from the ICA meeting and use them to revise the paper we're writing, before sending it off to a journal. This will occur sometime in June. At that time we will also release the paper as a Working Paper. An announcement about the paper will be made here.

Today,  I come into find out & read  Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe & Lewis Kaye's article titled as "YOUR SECOND LIFE?  Goodwill and perfomativity of intellectual property in online digital gaming" from virtual law bibliography in Lawspot online.

www.yorku.ca/rcoombe/publications/YourSecondLife.pdf  (2006)

This article deals with the governance issue of VW(eg. SL), the key tool for argument is not an exclusive proprietary one such as IP or VP but -- to my delight-- an inclusive one, corporate goodwill.

With regard to this, I tell you I registered an article on SSRN recently.

Real Money Trading in MMORPG items from a Legal and Policy perspective

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1113327

It was originally presented at 13. Dec. 2004 in Future Game Seminar held by Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute.  By virtue of professor Yee Fen Lim and lawyer Nicholas Suzor's encouragement and assistance, I could published it in complete english version.

My article deals with the RMT issues of VW(eg. Lineage), and the key tool is Gwonri-geum(a korean legal concept similar to goodwill, strictly speaking, more akin to that of 'lease goodwill'  in England, Austrailia).

*Nic Suzor thankfully made a nice abstract of the article, you can read it here

My paper, same to that of Andew Herman at al, centers on the creation and management of goodwill, an intangible asset of considerable value to VW itself based on affective bonds between players, MMO platform operators, and their commodities in the marketplace. (Differences are, i approached in micro level with economic's support, while they did in macro level with communication study)

I hope recalling these two goodwill be an international goodwill, then help in concluding a peace treaty between properties(IP v. VP), and carve out the identity of VW & its virtue.

We've been talking about TOS/EULAs for quite a long time here at Terra Nova.  Here's a fairly obvious theory about these agreements, borrowed from Jeremy Bentham's felicfic calculus:

1) If TOS/EULA provisions make both the designers and participants in virtual worlds on the whole better off (while making third parties no worse off), they're generally good, and we should support them.

2) If TOS/EULA terms make all collective interests generally worse off, they're bad, and we should oppose them.

So, here are the thoughts of Public Knowledge and the EFF on the copyright claims in the MDY case.  In short they seem to say: sure, cheating is bad, but using the power of copyright law to enforce TOS/EULA contractual agreements will lead to bad results for software users generally. 

This is indeed a very interesting case.

Computer games are a catalyst for a generational change in self-identification.

I believe that the notion of being a ‘gamer’ is not merely growing but becoming mainstream. Gamer is no longer a excuse for having bad personal hygiene and no social skills but simply something one is.

Of course as practices norm the category is being rendered as un-remarkable. In my personal experience Wii’ers, for instance, do no self identify as gamers; but I wonder what the trend is, where users of highly social Wii games will remain in that category or start to encompass thing that they more readily identify as computer games.

Now, in terms of the impact of computer games on society there’s a lot of discussion around these points at the moment. Some of the central themes of Castronova’s Exodus To The Virtual are about the impact of expectations of fun on society. Earlier books such as Got Game talk about the impact of the gamer generation.

Here I’m wondering I there is anything to be said about a very specific narrow point. Not the direct impact of the fact of us gaming, or as Joss de Mul has explored the idea of ludically constructing identity but that of self-identification.

Malaby has touched this here Gamers are Standing By where he posits the notion that there might be “[…] a growing cultural tendency to see the world, technologized or not, as a game?”.

For one thing I wonder if in a world of game we see our selves as gamers, or as a gamer we see the world as a game. I suspect that it’s a bit of both. An increasing number of systems and media are using the language and aesthetic of games and have elements that can or are even designed to be ‘gamed’.

I can’t say that I have much to actually say in answer to my own question. My un-informed instinct follows the equally un-informed musing above that game tropes are becoming functionally pervasive and at the same time we not only increasing see systems as things that can be gamed, but as self-identified gamers we see ourselves as people capable and legitimized to game these systems.

Here I feel the urge to defend against trivialization rhetoric. It does not seem to be that it’s a corollary that by gaming things we necessary under-value or differently value the outcomes. I still have not quite put my finger on what the nature of games as things that are generative of meaning and value does to our relation with systems and practices that we start to see through a ludic lens, I add this point to the open list that I present to the floor.

I’d just like to add a note of thanks to the Science Museum’s Dana Center for its series of game / virtual world events which inspired these thoughts.

Truly a herculean effort has been undertaken!  The Association of Virtual Worlds has compiled 'The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds", an index to 250 virtual worlds from all over our physical world, all neatly meta-tagged and linked.  Oh, and there's a glossary... 

So who are these people, I ask myself?  Turns out it's an assortment of international figures in the virtual worlds industry, including a former Linden...

From their site (someone loves themselves some iphones!):

The Association of Virtual Worlds believes that virtual worlds represent a major information and technological revolution in how we work, play and live. The Association mission is to serve those companies and individuals who are dedicated to the advancement of this multi-billion dollar global industry and reach out to those who have not yet found virtual worlds.

1. To create a forum for the discussion of issues affecting the industry
2. To assist in the development of industry procedures and standards
3. To promote the virtual worlds industry, its interest and developments
4. To educate on the benefits of virtual worlds to enhance work and play
5. To offer business and social networking opportunities
6. To connect the public and consumers with members of the virtual worlds industry
7. To participate in the determination of the collective interests of the industry
8. To further the common interests of the industry
9. To provide leadership for the betterment of the industry
10. To recognize accomplishment within the virtual worlds industry

So the document is free.

Here's what I'd like, though... Put the whole thing online, wiki-fied, and let people add to it.  Screenshots, stories, knowledge bases, forums, etc.  That would be amazing.

Recently, I happened to catch a segment of Sesame Street that my daughter was watching. In it, Cookie Monster was trying to hire a human assistant to help him sell six cookies. Cookie Monster explained helpfully, “Cookie Monster sell cookies in order to have money to buy cookies”.

Virtual world exchange can feel like a Cookie Monster economy sometimes, but never more so than in Flying Lab Software’s Pirates of the Burning Sea. It’s been an interesting economy to watch as the live game has taken shape. Not so much because it is innovative or provides a fun game mechanic. Even by the standards of persistent virtual worlds, the economy in Pirates is unusually broken in functional terms. However, on one hand, it is one of the most successful Cookie Monster designs I’ve seen, in that it attracts players who are most strongly drawn to the game’s setting or the game’s design ambitions and niche vision. On the other hand, it also throws a sharp light on collective action in MMO economies that are designed to blunt or hedge against exposure to markets.

Mechanisms of exchange have evolved in graphical, commercial virtual worlds from some remarkably crude beginnings. Veterans of the early days of the first Asheron’s Call may remember that at one point, there was no mechanic for secure trade between players. You could hand someone else an item, and then wait and hope for payment in kind. Players responded to that certainty by trying to improvise a reputational culture, including players who built reputations as a trustworthy mobile escrow (both players in a trade would hand their items to the escrow player)., who would then verify that the trade met both of their expectations and distribute the items to their new owners.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has many of the features that have developed over the years to facilitate economic production and exchange, such as an Auction House. On the surface, the game presents itself as putting economic play at the center of its action. One of the three player classes for “nationals” (French, Spanish, English) is the “freetrader”, many of whose skills seem to confer economic advantages. The ships that players sail are largely built by player production, as are many other items used in the gameplay. Overall, the ostensible interaction of the economy and struggles between the four player factions most strongly invokes some of the design of EVE Online.

In EVE and many other games, the production of virtual goods begins either with materials gained through drops from combat targets or through the labor of gathering and extraction from the environment. In mining in particular, in EVE, the value and volume of the output is pegged partially to the game-mechanical skill of the player-character, partially determined by the amount of risk a miner is willing to take in dangerous areas, but it is also a product of the real-world time invested by the miner in production.

In Pirates of the Burning Sea, the faucet-sink relationship is skewed in an odd way. The faucet is as it is in many virtual worlds: players run missions and sink NPCs to earn money. The sink, however, is player-produced commodities. Players can pay to establish a warehouse in a number of ports, and then pay to build production facilities in those ports. Each production facility has a recurring rent associated with it, and there is a per-item cost that needs to be paid at the time of production. Many commodities also require other player-produced items as inputs.

The goods produced through this system are intended to be sold to players through an auction house. The first problem in the early history of the game is that the faucet and sink were significantly out of balance: the flow of money into the game’s economy was very tight while the sink of production-related rents sucked a lot of money out of the economy. The consequence was that the end product of most player production, ships and their outfittings, were expensive enough as to make many players reluctant to risk them in combat against other players. There were other problems, some familiar in the history of virtual worlds: some of the most potentially desirable player-produced goods are also drops from NPCs, the volume of production that the system allows swamps imaginable demand many times over for many goods, and some production chains seem to misconceptualize a high value of the ultimate product in relationship to its specified uses. This is aggravated still further by the fact that all types of players have effectively equal access to and capacity for economic production. Though the “trader” class on paper appears to have important advantages, in practice these are (so far) negligible.

The developers are moving to open the faucets wider, but there is still a structural issue that they and many players don’t seem to fully understand. When a player makes a sale of an item on the auction house, he’s not making value. He’s only moving value around. Money only enters the game through the labor invested in missions or combat against NPCs. In most other virtual world economies, including EVE, the production of items begins with the labor of players and is pegged to the time they spend extracting resources in some form or another. In Pirates, all players who want to engage in economic forms of play must rely on other players to generate currency value. Money can flow from the “worker” players to the trader players, but then money flows from the trader players back into the rent-sink.

The economy is a kind of Potemkin Village: on the surface, it looks like the economy of an economic-sim game like Port Royale with many primary and secondary goods being produced and listed that evoke the setting and mood of the game. But it doesn’t function very well, though a few players are fooled by the surface into imagining its depths. More importantly, the economy doesn’t sustain its own distinctive type or kind of play, it isn’t a sandbox of its own.  The developers of Pirates have a lot of tasks on an urgent to-do list, but reworking the economy strikes me as something that both has priority and is exceptionally difficult to do.

Nevertheless, one thing that the flawed design in Pirates has helped me to see more clearly about economic behavior in MMOGs is something that I’ve come to think of as “turtling”. When I think about how a market in a virtual world could be seen as playful or ludic in its own right, I tend to think of an almost idealized representation of exchange and investment around a commodities or futures market. Looking for low prices as a buy, looking to make slightly differential profits as a seller. Looking for underserviced markets and opportunities, investing a great deal of effort in becoming a major supplier of a consumable good, maybe even engaging in a little collusion on the side with other producers or consumers.

In many virtual worlds, however, it seems to me that the most economically-oriented players look for serious bottlenecks in the developer’s economic design and move very quickly (often using knowledge from participation in a beta-test) to establish a commanding position at that bottleneck. This makes good economic sense, but it is often precisely what motivates a great deal of the actual economic activity of players to disappear from the structured mechanisms built into the economy, for a great deal of production and exchange to disappear from auction houses into the closed world of guilds. This is “turtling”: to protect themselves from being ganked in the open market by monopolizers dominating production bottlenecks, many guilds look to build vertical monopolies of important or crucial production chains from among their members and to reduce production to its base costs. This has the side-effect in some cases of killing any hope for playful exchange in public markets, of creating a kind of “guild socialism” within what is ostensibly a “free market”.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy. It’s a sensible way to curb one’s vulnerability as a player to the machinations of other players. And yet, it always makes me a little sad to see it happen to a major extent (as it has in Pirates). Any ideas about how to keep auction houses and similar mechanics sufficiently playful, to keep most players vested in the public economy rather than the private economy of guilds?

Last Monday capped off the first season of interview series, Metanomics:  Business and Policy in the Metaverse.   Over the course of the season (35 shows in 35 weeks), we refined our focus to the following four target audiences:

• representatives of real-world enterprises using virtual worlds to achieve their goals
• virtual world entrepreneurs meeting the needs of those enterprises or their fellow residents
• developers,  policy-makers and analysts who will shape the future of the metaverse; and
• academics who are studying and educating these groups, or using virtual worlds as their classrooms or laboratories.

One industry we haven't delved into yet is entertainment.  The fit is natural, as the reports on Virtual Worlds News shows us just about every day.  But how do we get movers and shakers in entertainment to appear on Metanomics?  Well, one way is to be a little more entertaining.  So take a gander at our Metanomics Colbert Challenge.

No one is going to suggest I quit my day job to do comedy, but SLCN does an excellent job of packaging.  Feel free to pass it on to your friends--and to Jon Stewart, Rob Riggle and Stephen Colbert, if you know them.

Metanomics is running 'best of' shows on Mondays at 11am Pacific Time and Tuesdays at 3pm Pacific, until we start our second season in June.  If you want to suggest guests, please do--self-nominations welcome. 

As has been reported in several places starting with the EA-Land blog (to which the EA-Land site now points), EA will be shutting down EA-Land in August.  EA-Land was the do-over of The Sims Online, which at one time in its heady pre-release days was the presumptive heir to the "first million user virtual world" crown.  A virtual world/game  from EA and built using the biggest, most successful and accessible game IP ever? 

What could possibly go wrong?

This is a question that has been asked innumerable times in view of TSO's lack of commercial success, and which deserves some real consideration.  The inability of TSO to attract even 100,000 users gave many virtual world watchers significant pause -- could this whole thing be just a big fad after all?  We've since discovered that the market for virtual worlds is orders of magnitude larger than TSO's numbers might indicate, but still this is a nagging question. The Sims Online seemed to have everything going for it: the best possible IP, the biggest publisher, and a huge team.  So what happened?  Why didn't this game crest a million happy, Simmy users as new players flooded online?

There are a lot of thoughts and a lot of theories: Was it the removal of The Sims' charming internal motivations, leaving them as only empty avatars?  Was it the lack of significant gameplay (aside from making gnomes, jam, and pizza)?  Was the game in effect too social and in the wrong ways? Was it even the fact that EA has seen huge success with single-player console and PC games, but was ill-equipped to take on the design of an MMO?   Or something else?  I have my thoughts and opinions (full disclosure: I was on the TSO team early in its life, and my opinions are informed by that time), but I'm interested to hear what others who have followed it and played it think. 

One last thing for now: it's  important to note, as Luc Barthelet said in his 'thank you' post on the EA-Land blog, that "virtual worlds are still in their infancy."   This is certainly true, and we should expect some big failures -- but hopefully ones that, as Clay Shirky recently wrote, will fail informatively.   We've seen a number of failures in MMOs (including several from EA), despite the overall large number of commercial successes, and will no doubt see more as time goes on.

What can we learn from the redo of TSO and now the shuttering of EA-Land, and what does this tell us about the future (in terms of design, production, and commercial success) of MMOs and virtual worlds?

Ah, the sounds of spring: classes ending, birds chirping, and one Englishman going apeshit on his countrymen. Witness the awesome power of this fully operational Bartle-station in the Guardian.

I've made the same demographic argument in a book chapter before, and tied it to social and cultural trends, but perhaps not quite as color(hmm, make that "colour")fully as Richard's just done.

Still, I think old attitudes die hard on each side of the pond, and I expect the release of GTA IV to lurch our culture wars back into prominence, just in time for elections. Academics, prepare to be quoted! I said no to an interview today because I haven't actually played the dang thing yet--not that that will stop the usual interviewees we'll see over the next few weeks. OK, I'm off to play it!

Earlier this month, Linden Lab released a demo of a hands-free interface for movement within Second Life.  While they were careful to explain that this project is still in the early stages of development, the interface as it stands would allow players to walk and fly through the world using only the positions of their bodies.  Apparently inspired by the controls on Segway scooters, a 3D camera would capture players' movements as they stand a number of feet in front of their computer screens--or, as in the case of the demo, conveniently ginormos televisions.  Linden also claims that the technology in development can sense facial movement and expressions.

While other bloggers are seeing a potentially ground-breaking new way to interact in a world whose current user interface is a giant pain in the butt, I'm wondering: what will going hands free do for sex in Second Life?

Obviously, having free hands facilitates easier masturbation. However, the demo only showed hands-free movement--and most Second Life residents don't fly or walk while having sex.  Still, if we think ahead to an entirely mouse-less, keyboard-less virtual world, one in which our avatars can match our movements one for one, the possibilities are endless.  We could not only "touch" ourselves (i.e. I touch my breast, and my avatar touches hers), we could reach out and touch each other. Silly as it may seems, we could even enact mutual sex acts, each on our separate ends of the screen.

Of course, hands-free online sex as a reality may be a long ways off, but one thing is for sure: it would definitely change the way we interact sexually in virtual worlds... Thoughts?

In a week when Sony has announced yet more delays (another in a longer series of gaffes that has spawned endless humiliation) in the development of their much hyped virtual space, Home, and when even the roar from WoW’s success seems to be fading into an echo, a reminder about the incredible success of a little game that could...  Like All in the Family or this year's indie darling Once (or the Aeron chair, for that matter), it almost never got made 'cause people making decisions about such things didn't believe Will Wright (who doesn't believe Will Wright?!) when he said it would be the best thing ever. Cause after all, who the heck would want to play in a virtual dollhouse?   

The Sims franchise has now sold 100 million copies (in 22 languages and 60 countries) since 2000. From a recent NYTimes article sent to us by Tripp Robbins (who also notes how strange it is that videogame articles appear in the television category):  

All told, the franchise has generated about $4 billion in sales or an average of $500 million every year for the last eight years, placing the Sims in the rarefied financial company of other giants of popular culture like “American Idol,” “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter.” 

I’m in love with Will Wright, I am going to confess (though there’s no chance for me as his fiancée is way more beautiful than even my best avatars). I saw him speak at the Game Developer’s conference a couple of years ago: not about games, nor game design very specifically, but rather an exploration of his intensely nerdy passions for astrophysics and exo-biology and how they relate to game design (Spore, of course). He’s a game designer that gets underneath the covers, really thinking about what makes the game experience unique from other media experiences, and how he can design games that provoke and inspire. Pride, accomplishment and guilt, for instance, are emotions that videogames have the power to evoke in spades (I had to stop playing Age of Empires because I felt guilty for burning the little digital peasants out of their houses), but that are rarely present in other media (except perhaps if you’re watching An Inconvenient Truth, I suppose). As a relatively new medium still struggling to find ‘its language’, reminders like this are important… in the game designer’s rant at GDC this year, for instance, several of the talks explored the idea that there is still so much more to be done with videogames in terms of engendering emotions that are positive (as Clint Hocking said, why isn’t Medal of Honor about honor, or Call of Duty about duty?), and fostering experiences that are a step beyond the videogame equivalent of B-movies and T-and-A fests.

Now as much as I like to talk about videogames being more meaningful,  I know that Terra Nova is a blog about virtual worlds. And I believe in the social power of virtual worlds.  I have often pronounced to audiences that gaming has traditionally been a social activity, and once computer networks evolved sufficiently people gravitated towards playing with one another in a variety of time-tested ways (do you know people who still play Solitaire once they have an Internet connection?). I have even ventured to say that once people have the experience of gaming socially, they are less inclined to go back (I backed this up with the assertion that people even play single player games socially, as I did with all my single player games back in the day). 

But maybe I’m wrong. What is it about the experience of the single-player Sims game that surpasses all else?  Is it just the allure to demographics outside the core gaming audience?  Or some sort of mysterious je ne sais quois that is unlikely to ever be replicated? This quote from the Times article got me thinking...

“What we’ve discovered is that the Sims is a very private experience for a lot of people,” Rod Humble, head of the Sims studio, said in a telephone interview last week. “It’s private because it’s set in real life. Rather than on a console in the living room where everyone can see, you generally play on a handheld or on a PC in the study, where no one can look over your shoulder. You get to tap into this wonderful childhood imaginary game, which is ‘What if I could create my own little world and all the people in it and watch them go through their business and jump in and change things when I want?’ That is a pretty personal fantasy.” 
 

Okay, but won't people want to share their personal fantasies?  I mean people do already.  So why then did the Sims Online fail so miserably? Our own Mia Consalvo has a theory or two, all neatly documented in her chapter From Dollhouse to Metaverse: What Happened When The Sims Went Online (in the Player's Realm anthology).  She notes that she enjoyed the Sims much more than the Sims Online, for instance, because she tends to be a more solitary player.  But why?  One reason is that solitary play allows one to construct a magic circle (for lack of a better metaphor) that doesn't have to look like a Venn diagram where players are constantly constructing, reinforcing and arguing about the boundaries between those two play circles.   It is precisely the necessary overlp of the circles that creates so much conflict in MMO environments (more on this here and here).  A truly satisfying game experience allows one to construct whatever type of circle they want, unfettered by gameplay or other social norms that might otherwise influence their freedom of expression:

Given an artificial situation, players can experiment, allowing them to see ‘what happens’ when a Sim nags another Sim for too long. There are no real consequences involved. Yet when the other Sim is a real person, even if it’s a person I do not know, my feelings change. I can nag a computer easily—another person is more difficult. And likewise, even if I really wanted to have my Sim slap that other Sim (or just peck her on the cheek), the other Sim now has the opportunity to refuse. Not that the computer AI couldn’t, but it was different somehow. These changes in my expectations for what is acceptable behavior are perhaps my own, not shared by others. ...It is possible that because TSO is so similar to ‘real life’ that I have transferred my behavioral norms—just as I wouldn’t expect to be able to slap a stranger on the street IRL, neither can I do so in TSO. That norm is not so pronounced in other types of online games, where situations are more fantastical, and different behavioral norms already more established. But the underlying point seems to be that players either bring with, or invent, expectations for interactions, when other people are involved. And these norms have consequences for how they behave. Whether that is a good or bad thing I can’t say. But it does suggest that the ‘look and feel’ of a virtual world can inspire in players certain behavioral norms, and as we see the rise of more non-sci-fi and fantastical MMOGs, behavioral norms will likely change, as both the environment and player base change as well (Consalvo, 2007, p.  22).

(So this, of course, makes me think about solipsism (those of you who know me know that I have a pet theory about us all living in a big virtual world, and we have also discussed it elsewhere here)… is this world I live in a personal universe? Do any of the rest of you lovely people exist? Oh, dear, I hate it when my brain meanders into existential territory that leaves me depressed. So unfair. And anyway, I don’t care if all of you really exist or not ‘cause I love you anyway…)

The point is that game experiences can and should be about the stories that people create themselves, not about the stories that others choose to tell them.  And what's lovely about this is that there is a huge body of literature amassed in recent years that addresses the possibilities of storytelling and personal narrative for transformational purposes.  What it makes really clear to me is why people can find sort of basic and boring emergent environments endlessly fascinating, while many of us are left scratching our heads: what the heck is the appeal of grinding through several tens of thousands of creatures that need killing. Well, of course we know that no one would play WoW if there were no other people involved... but that has more to do with the state of evolution of single player games (the status quo plus people is better than just the status quo), and the fact that videogame narratives can now be constructed on the fly by all sorts of people at the same time.  But what about the next evolution?  Can it trump the MMO?

Soon (!) I will have the option of designing my own personal Sim universe, designed with lots and lots of love by my favorite Will Wright. What could be better than that?  And looks like they might have learned their lesson:

Spore is unique in that while it has multiplayer elements involved there will be no direct live contact with other players. Players' created content gets saved to a master server and will be downloaded by the client-software of other players. In this way, a player will interact with the content created by another player in a non-intrusive manner.

I can show them my sandbox, but they can't mess it up.  Is that the best of all worlds? My universe is unpwnable.

Neils Clark forwards a five page collage on "Gaming Addiction: Clearing The Air, Moving Forward" on Gamasutra (April 3, 2008).   Clearing the air might be ambitious at this stage of the discussion, but Neils provides a useful catalog of the range of ideas that have taken root in this landscape.  The difficulty of charged-up umbrella issues is that all sort of argument can become ensnared.   A few selected quotes are provided below the fold; read the essay on the Gamasutra site.  There is excellent comment there too.

1.

The public opinions among developers run the gamut... -- "The biggest problem in your life is that you get to play games all day? Poor you." Others view it with an air of caution... "Bad for business, and the industry knows it."

2.

...distinguish between gameplay elements that might encourage all players to go overboard, versus those that caused problems for a select few...

3.

Games make a magnificent target. It doesn't have to be addiction, violence, or any one thing.  ... (the late) Gary Gygax wrote...  "Oddly enough, we don't seem to have progressed far beyond the Salem witch-hunt stage, 'Thar's demons in them-thar games!'...

4.

Just as too many governments, researchers and regular folks seem distanced from games, developers seem to sometimes distance themselves from a game's potential for causing problems.

5.

(Increasing use of) "Internet Addiction" (IA) when referring to heavy game use. This is despite serious and ongoing concerns over many different elements of IA's validity.

6.

...issues raised by excessive gaming appear very real in the eyes of the South Korean, Chinese and Singaporean governments, whether or not the analysts at the helm have an adequate understanding of gaming.

7.

"It's almost impossible to make a game addictive on purpose... It's a bit like the Tao: those who set out to look for it are guaranteed not to find it."

8.

...what happens if a presidential candidate gets draconian on video games? ... It seems bad for players either way. If the issue blows over, then there won't be any pressure to have a serious discussion... If something gets the angry mob on overkill, then our discussions are going to be about designing around federal mandates, something already required for Chinese designers and localization teams.

9.

...The people who make games are giving us something to do, and they're good at what they do... sooner or later the industry will want to engage critics in dialogue...