Terra Nova - Academics playground

Only the Terra Novans can adequately appreciate the number of people in this Wired UK list who are involved in play, simulation, virtual worlds or things related (economics, network science, etc.) Minecraft, Sid Meier, etc. Check it out.

Jason Wall sent me a note explaining that World of Warcraft (you've heard of it?) is doing even more to encourage the formation of ad hoc raiding groups. Back in the day, he notes, the only way you could get raid-level gear was by being in a raid-level guild and by raiding, a lot. Much was said back then (not least by me) about the way MMORPGs seemed to provide a communal experience for people isolated by contemporary society. If society gave people anomie, then online community, it seemed, was the antidote. How pollyannish! We (I) also said that online...

The Dutch Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Runescape theft case today. You can find the ruling here, and here's a Google-translated version. The ruling cites to the work of Professor Arno Lodder (who guest-blogged here), who has been keeping close tabs on the case, as well as to my book and to my work with Dan on virtual law & virtual crime. One thing to bear in mind is that this case involved real violence and the theft of virtual goods. The victim was beaten and threatened with a (real) knife, with the defendants demanding he hand over...

Holy hellions, Batman, 2012 is off with a bang. Too bad about SWTOR, but Guild Wars 2 might actually ship this year, and there are some other exciting things brewing. Here's what I'm watching for...

Gamasutra just posted a rather longish essay of mine about Minecraft and what's wrong today with the intersection of games and intellectual property law. Here's the link. In some ways, I think I'm echoing Ted's criticisms of the new Star Wars MMORPG in the last post . In short: the more games become like movies, the less interesting they become. On the other hand, the more games let us express ourselves artistically and socially, the more interesting they become. One significiant problem, as I see it, is that the current trajectory that intellectual property law is pursuing is much more...

How did we get to the point that an online multiplayer game feels less alive than a single-player sandbox world? Like many of you, the past couple of months have been spent in Skyrim and SWTOR. A decade ago, Elder Scrolls games were large, empty spaces. They had many actionable items but still - the NPCs you encountered were rather quiet and mindless. You were the only person alive. But the genre of open-world RPGs has gradually added more and more life-like elements. Fallout 3 was an eye-opener for me. And now Skyrim, with conversing people, merchants on a budget,...

I can't count how many times a casual social conversation has led to someone looking at me incredulously, blurting "You haven't seen [Movie X]? How could you not have seen [Movie X]? You have to see [Movie X]. I'll loan you my DVD. In fact, come to my house next week and we'll watch it." I have a stack of DVDs of "essential" loaned films that I have yet to watch. Not to mention "essential" TV programs and "essential" books. I'd like to take this opportunity and tell the world: No. I don't consider it essential at this point in...

In 2004 (yes we’ve been around a long-ass time), I wrote Bah, Humbug & Digital Distribution, talking about the tensions between getting physical and virtual gifts. I’m yet to see a break down of the stats from Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) but I’m guessing the physical : virtual is going to break new ground. Back on ’04 I was musing about the impact of virtual gifts on xmas – I still do, how many of you bought someone a dead-tree-book rather than a kindle edition so you could give someone an object (do they sell some kind of...

We tend to focus so much on the digital that we overlook wonderful simulation engines right under our noses. Sometimes the best simulators are also simple games. Dress up chess a little bit, and you're doing combined-arms warfare. The game does not have to be digital or massive. Rather, the key contribution of Game is that games represent systems really well. It is very hard to write a book or give a lecture about a system. (Test: Explain your city's zoning system to a friend.) It is comparatively easy to create a simulation of the system, then add objectives to...

My colleague Mark Deuze just let us know about Notehall. The site allows students to sell their class notes. My faculty looks upon this with a negative eye. They say, You should write your own notes. The notes on the site can be stupid or outdated. Many of our faculty release the lecture notes for free anyway. Compare: "The site allows players to sell their gold. Designers look upon this with a negative eye. They say, You should grind your own gold. The gold on the site can be counterfeit. Much of our game releases gold practically for free anyway."...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's something missing in game designs. You may have noticed or read about dynamic difficulty adjustment systems. Basically, if the zombies eat your brains, the system spawns fewer zombies. What strikes me this morning is the degree to which these systems focus on combat. For one thing, it does not seem that puzzles go up or down in complexity based on how well you do. On the other maybe they do - do we get hints when we're stumped? I can't recall. But I do know this: I've never seen the story of a...

In tabletop RPGs, nobody is better than Paizo, makers of Pathfinder. Pathfinder is an incredibly significant game. Here's why: A few years ago, the then-owners of Dungeons and Dragons decided for some reason to radically change the game, trying to invent a new genre of card-driven, software-supported role-playing games. This failed. Meanwhile, the then-current D&D ruleset (3.5) was left without a developer. Paizo picked up the rules, made a few changes, and released them as Pathfinder. Thus, Pathfinder is the current holder of the intellectual and artistic vision of D&D, which makes it among the most significant games available today....

Of possible interest to readers: On July 9-10, 2012, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia) is having its 8th Annual Conference on Internet, Law & Politics in Barcelona. The theme this year is "Challenges and Opportunities of Online Entertainment," which would include much of what we cover here at Terra Nova. Deadline for abstract submission is December 20. The call for papers is here.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare just launched and in 5 days it's earned $775m. Xbox Live had more than 3m players from the first day. Some thoughts. First, we're close to seeing a game raise $1b in a weekend. Second, what kind of a game is it: A first-person shooter. Physics, realism, destruction, kill-or-be-killed, but all in good fun. Play war. War play. The experience has such a broad and deep resonance with the hairless ape. Homo sapiens is built to like it. Third, by capturing the spotlight yet again, FPS games reinforce their status as the representative of the...

Not my headline -- I took it from this article published Tuesday in Slate. (You may want to take a look at it before reading further, since I'm reacting to it here.) Once upon a time, I posted about my consternation that our blog was insufficiently interested in Second Life vis-a-vis the amount of media attention it was receiving. I personally wanted to like Second Life more than I did, but it just didn't grab me. This was despite my deep respect for Cory Ondrejka and my intellectual interest in the IP-related aspects of the platform. But now times have...

Lego Universe is a traditional MMO, requiring a subscription to play. Apparently they were not seeing enough revenue and had to close. It has wonderful graphics, seems quite smooth, and uses the same kind of combat mechanics s the immensely popular Lego Star Wars types of games (everybody's a lego dude and you break your enemies). Just not popular enough with the target audience. Lego is a hugely successful company and their decision argues for the limited appeal of the EQ model. Maybe the thrill of being a character in a world is a one-time affair (I think Richard Bartle...

Who should make games - artists or engineers? We've bemoaned in this space before the turn that WoW took, from the kludgy 3d mock-up of a D&D campaign that was EverQuest, to the very refined, very polished, and to some dead, grind that was (is!) Azeroth. We bemoaned it. Then we went out and played the heck out of it for years. Students come to game design with passion and see themselves as creators. It's a lot of work to get them to finish, polish, and refine to a degree the industry might respect. It's important pressure, though, according to...