I'll mention in passing the important detail of wealth transfer within alliances. A careful reader would have anticipated this basic dilemma: "if carebears make all the ISKs (money) and PvPers lose most of the ships..." How does that work? The answer is that part of the charter of corporations and alliances is to manage wealth transfer between these two interests. For example, most alliances will insure your vessel against loss if it is lost on approved missions, etc.

The ratio of the friendly to enemy forces improves (better odds = greater willingness) There is improved clarity of "moral" purpose of the home forces. For example, ally support operations for murky reasons (e.g. currying diplomatic favors with another alliance) would tend to generate less enthusiasm, whereas an arch-rival aggrieving a mining operation of a popular corporation is likely to generate much enthusiasm.Should there be a threat and the muster is seen as inadequate devices are available to encourage turn-out: Popular/peer pressure may be applied. It can start as persuasion and discussion in chat channels, and then work its way up through to heckling players as "carebears". Policy-based threats may be administrated: "this is a mandatory operation" (and by the terms you enlisted...) other leadership instruments may be applied.

This DOES however seem to backfire wildly however, as the corp churns thru its strategic reserves of ships (if it has them at all), and players left financially destitute after the war, leading to what some have refered to as the "failure cascade" when players and corps leave wholesale for empire to try and rebuild and tend wounds, leaving a profoundly injured alliance to succumb to the ravages of war...It is tricky business navigating the divide between cowmen and farmers. A careful reader in the previous threads might have seen in the discussion hints of how some of the large alliances in Eve-Online are forming vassal arrangements with lesser alliances to better manage the schism, at least on a macro-level.

Following a link from f13 to Kotaku brings me to a story that the management of the Chinese MMOG King of the World has suspended accounts owned by male players who used female avatars. Supposedly by using required webcams to verify the match between the gender of character and players. I'm ever so slightly wary of the story itself, but let's assume that this is pretty much just what happened. Other Asian MMOGs ask for an alignment between character gender and player gender. Moreover, the issue is pretty much the #1 most discussed topic ever in the history of virtual worlds, MUDs and RPGs. Read a game-related forum and you could pretty much set your watch by the regularity with which a huge flame-filled thread on the topic arises, and the extent to which players who are new to the genre almost immediately want to talk about this question. It's easy to see this, as Kotaku puts it, as an "only in China" moment. The webcam part of it seems that way to me for the moment, though there are comparable issues that sometimes come up about how gender is revealed through voice communications in MMOGs.

It looks like Google might really be planning an avatar space. We noted vague fuzzy hints of something a year ago, but it now seems Arizona State is doing student sign-ups for a prototype test of an avatar/game/social network for a "major internet company" which everyone seems to think is the G-borg. Google isn't talking, no real details are out there that I found, and the beta isn't live yet, but... the cutesy little graphic on the ASU page asks: "Are you into 3D modeling, videogaming, etc? Do you have a virtual avatar? If so, click here!" (Note that's a *virtual* avatar, as opposed to a *non-virtual* avatar.) Anyway, accordingly, and based on past rumors, the speculative chatter seems to be all about somehow linking Orkut social networking & Google Earth/Maps & SketchUp to a Java client (or something like that).

Since the folks on Terra Nova really helped me revise my Anti-Social Contracts article, I wanted to provide the updated version. Special thanks to Richard Bartle, Greg Lastowka, Leandra Lederman, and Peter Jenkins for some great comments. Also, please feel free to stop by Second Life and hear me give an in-world lecture on the role of contracts within virtual worlds, as part of the Metanomics Series.

We started a new blog based on the research our team (aka Pop.Cosmo) is doing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative . We study cognition & learning in the context of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) or virtual worlds. Constance Steinkuehler (that's me) is Principal Investigator. With the help of a generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation, we empirically investigate key literacy practices that constitute successful MMO gameplay (such as scientific literacy, computational literacy, and reciprocal apprenticeship) & how those literacy practices connect up with life and learning beyond the virtual worlds themselves. Then, based on this understanding, we develop after school instructional programs that leverage MMOs to get kids involved in what we see as core 21st century skills (that are often under-emphasized in classrooms).

Yesterday Raph Koster's group Areae finally took the wraps off of Metaplace, the project they've been working on for some time (this has now been covered by Boing Boing, the BBC, and Slashdot, as Raph notes on his site). The announcement was greeted with much applause, along with a bit of head-scratching by some (and I'm sure more than a little relief for the Areae team). Metaplace is not just another virtual world: they're doing their best to break down the walls around the currently walled gardens. This is a huge development that could change how we think of virtual worlds... if they can make this cool flying machine actually take to the air. How is Metaplace different from all the other "does it yourself" platforms and such that are in development? Lots of ways, not least of which is the very low threshold to entry that people have to cross to create their own microworld. As the site says: Our goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own.

We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games... and set up doorways from one to the other. Basically, coming to work in the morning is a lot of fun. There's more info on their site. And there are a ton of questions of course -- how do you build the worlds, how does the company effectively monetize what they've built can people be sufficiently creative to make worlds others will find worthwhile, etc. Much will be learned and revealed in the coming weeks and months.

Indiana University has a job opening, and I know there are others but I've forgotten who they are. If you have a job opening, post it here. "Candidates should hold a Ph.D., J.D., or M.F.A." I wish we could hire direct from industry, but these are the rules we are given. Tenure-track (meaning "long-term") jobs require a terminal degree, which means having an MFA, PhD, or JD.