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:

Article 10 – Freedom of expression1

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

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:

Enterprising young scholars who are interested in cultural anthropology and are also trained in statistical methods are going to draw out testable predictions from the body of existing qualitative work, and test those predictions by applying experimental or econometric methods to data extracted from virtual worlds and social media.  They will garner funding and publicity in the areas where they compete head to head with qualitative researchers, and the latter will be forced to defend their methods and conclusions.  Some schools will conclude that they can make a bigger impact in the field by hiring faculty trained in these methods.  Several decades later, the top departments and journals studying the ideas of cultural anthropology will be dominated by quantitative methods.  Qualitative methods will either be relegated to less-prestigious schools and special-interest journals in cultural anthropology, or else cultural anthropology will decline in influence relative to other departments (like psychology) that embrace quantitative methods to study similar questions.

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.

Cool looking conference in April at Stanford Law about the copyright, EULAs and machinima.  Among the speakers: Henry Lowood, Lauren Gelman, Julie Ahrens, Matteo Bittanti.  More info here.

Next week sees the meeting of the G20 in London and we have the opportunity to use the unique power of virtual worlds to have a voice.

[edit 29 March 09] There.com are supporting we20 by setting aside a meeting space where all Thereians can we20, see over the fold for details.

The summit is usually highly exclusive event however for this meeting the UK Government attempting to reach out in all kinds of interesting digital partnerships. For example G20Voice is a collaboration between 50 bloggers (chosen by the internets) and organizations such as Oxfam and a number of other organizations.

we20 is a grassroots volunteer organization that has the simple aim of encouraging people to get together in groups of 3 to 20 to create and vote on plans to be put to the G20. The UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office will be reviewing plans on the we20 site and there is already a we20 page on the London Summit site. 

So where do virtual worlds come into this?

Easy – where better to have we20 meetings?

Virtual meetings save on CO2 outputs, they easy to organize and great places to gather views from around the globe in one place.

So, Dwarves and Hobbits, Draenei and Tauren, Gallente and Caldari, Furries and Vampires, put down your swords (or whatever furries hold) – meet, plan and vote!

All the details you need are at we20.org which even has a way of posting meetings and I’ve set up a we20 group in Second Life. Though I’m sure the TNe community will be interested in feedback about how virtual worlds contributed to the we20 efforts so feel free to post here.

If you have a blog - blog it, do it :)

[edit 28 March 09, adapted from we20.org...]

The G20 London Summit is on 2 April 2009 - but don't worry if you can't meet before then, there will be more G20 Summits and we20 is here to support the creation and voting on action plans.   

Here is we20 in several easy steps:

1. To go we20.org

2. Register & read to understand a little more about we20.

3. Think of a challenge which you want to fix. It might be a local, national or global challenge or involve individual people.

4. Create your we20 meeting on we20.org and invite people to come up with an action plan.

5. Meet, discuss and agree a plan to solve the challenge you identified.

6. Post your we20 plan to we20.org for the we20 community to read. You can embed YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare by pasting URL into the description field.

7. Read debate and vote for or against we20 plans. The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office will be looking at your plans to decide if any can go on the Official London Summit website (http://www.londonsummit.gov.uk/en/join-the-debate/your-debate/we20). After the Summit we will see where we20 is and talk to you about how you would like to to take things forward.

meta-we20:

[edit 29 March 09]

There.com

I'm happy to tell all Thereians and potential Thereians that thanks to the good people at Makena Technologies (Tiffany, Betsy and Michael) we20 has a home in There.com

Info can be found here: http://www.therefuntimes.com/there_fun_times/2009/03/have-a-we20-meeting-in-there.html

Second Life

The group is: we20

You can meet anywhere but if you want a site, feel free to use one of the follow plots:

• The Feeding Edge: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IQ/67/104/49
• the Virtual Policy Network: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Hyperborea/75/179/23

Twitter

The hash tag is: #we20

Monday, March 30th at 11am Pacific Time, Tom Boellstorff, Celia Pearce, Thomas Malaby and I will be in Second Life on a panel discussing the following question:

What can qualitative and experimental methods tell us about virtual worlds and culture?

Roland Legrand of the Belgian news outlet MediaFin, and author of Mixed Realities, will moderate the panel.  Click here to get details on attending the event in Second Life.

And read on for the dramatic backstory!

Earlier this month, I had cultural anthropologist Tom Boellstorff on Metanomics, along with Prof. Celia Pearce, for a discussion about anthropological research on virtual worlds.  We had some great discussions, before and during the show, about how traditional methods of anthropological research apply to virtual world settings.

For those who don't follow the field, Tom is the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, but despite his lofty credentials, has spent a good deal of time in Second Life, where he conducted the research behind his recent book, Coming of Age in Second Life.  Celia Pearce is a former doctoral student of his, and has studied the "Uru diaspora" in There.com and Second Life.  You can get all of the links and background information on them here, as well as the audio, video and text transcripts of the discussion, and even the inworld backchat.  (We at Metanomics take our archives seriously!).

Anyway, leave it to me to stick my foot in it at the end of the show by making a rather Castronova-esque proposal:

Virtual worlds give anthropologists a fascinating new opportunity—to actually create cultures.  Virtual world developers have already been doing this, as our guests showed so clearly over the last hour.  So let’s bring research anthropologists into the mix, right up front, and use VWs as a laboratory to test and refine the predictions of anthropological theory.

Naturally I elaborated on the benefits of the experimental method, and the promise and challenges I saw with such a research program.  I didn't intend to be controversial, but cue the rotten tomatoes, in the form of this blog discussion.

Frankly, I think there is a lot less disagreement than it seems on the surface--research methods should complement one another, at least as much as they compete--but there are also a lot of substantive issues that could benefit from further discussion.  Discuss them we will, and I hope some Terra Novans will join us.

Feel free to weigh in on the debate (you might start with Boellstorff's reaction to Castronova's suggestion along similar lines), and pose questions for the panelists.

It struck me some time ago that under EU banking regulations MindArk’s Project Entropia looked a lot like a bank, or at the very least an e-money institution.

Well - now it is.

Or to be exact Mind Bank AB a wholly owned subsidiary of MindArk PE AB is has been granted a banking license by Sweden’s Financial Supervision Authority (Finansinspektionen).

This is important on a number of levels. First, I’m not aware that any other virtual word has gained this status – though this may simply be due to my lack of knowledge of virtual worlds in Asia. I’d be interested to know from readers what the legal status of things like QQ coins are. So this may be a genuine first in the virtual world industry for MindArk.

Second, I wonder if this will have an impact on the rest of the industry and how regulators view it.

I’ve argued in the past that virtual world are in a difficult position as while their Terms of Service may state that what goes on within their virtual walls is not commerce, the practices that surround them increasingly work as if in-world currencies were just like any hard currency. What’s more virtual currencies exist in a financial world where we have the Zimbabwean dollar whose inflation level hit may millions of %, and western banks that are in danger of such levels of default they are taken into part state ownership, making virtual worlds a rational option for some money related transactions.

Thus while virtual world operators might not like it, it seems to me that there may come a time when regulators will force a duty of care upon virtual worlds so as to protect the potential losses of citizens. Or a tangential law, and I always use the example of a divorce lawyer, will take a look a practice and go ‘that gold piece just quacked’.

This I’ve suggested will be bad for virtual worlds as under notions of a bank that exist, particularly in the US (where I do not think electronic money institutions exist in law), virtual worlds would become subject to crushing regulation. What’s more this regulation would differ by country thus protecting citizens by destroying the industry that never wanted citizens to be exposed to the supposed harms in the first place.

What may alter this is the simple argument – if MindArk can do it, why can’t you,,, Blizzard, Linden Lab etc etc.

The big difference of course is that MindArk, so I understand, have structured their technology in anticipation of becoming a bank and have based their business model on becoming one.

Leading to my daily nightmare as a virtual world policy wonk that there are so many unique cases and exceptions to any rule that everyone outside the industry can get their head around.

So what can the virtual world industry do to avoid banking regulation?

One part of me things – nothing; and, in fact, if we look at the way practice is going then the potential cumulative harm to individuals caused by scams etc., things may get to the point where virtual worlds should be banks.

A notch down from this, I wonder if the best option is to lobby for a revised version of the EU’s electronic money directive to be adopted as a global standard for virtual worlds of certain types. The revision to the directive would allow flexibility around the nature of and use of e-money tokens making it clear which spaces they did and did not operate in and in what ways.

Lastly, I think if game virtual worlds want to stay out the world of banking the have to be and have to be seen to act against RMT (real money trading) to a much higher degree than they are now. The real action here may be in PR and lobbying rather than technical measure but my feeling is that virtual world operators need to step up their game.

  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’s 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 virtual worlds, and ask whether there are useful research questions still left to pursue.
 The State of Play conferences examine the significance of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online spaces. It continues to be the only conference series that studies these environments from multiple perspectives: commercial, academic, governmental, and technological. Six years after the founding of State of Play, this year’s conference will take stock of how we got to where we are, question whether there is anything new to say about online worlds, and ask what should be the direction of the these worlds and their study as we move forward. Multiple panel sessions are planned, along with specialist workshops, and a graduate student symposium.
We invite your participation.
 For more information and to register, visit www.nyls.edu/stateofplay.

(who appears to have lost the keys to this place)

"World of Warcraft UI Add-On Development Policy Blizzard announced a WoW UI Add-On Development Policy for World of Warcraft addons today. Among other things, the policy that all addons be distributed free, unobfuscated, and it bans them from advertising in-game.

In a few short hours, a very lengthy -- and sometimes overheated -- discussion (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15864747207&sid=1) has started to take place on the game's UI forums about everything from the causes that prompted Blizzard to take this action, to legal and moral issues surrounding such a policy, to the real-world mechanics of how some mod authors make the transfer from for-fun to for-profit addon development.

Eric Nickell"