Often when I write about games, I'm interested in an experiential perspective on play and in the kinds of social and political structures that evolve within virutal worlds, but TN readers probably have noticed that I'm equally drawn to questions about design processes, about the authorship of digital games. I think this is why Metaplace excites me so much. It wasn't very long ago when I was last speculated about author tools here, and now here's an ambitious project to create a very powerful example of such a tool. An attraction to questions of design is a very old part of the culture of virtual worlds and online games. In play within worlds and in the forums, guild chats, and other systems of communication that surround them, there is an identifiable type of player who has strong opinions about design questions, sometimes informed opinions, sometimes malformed one, but opinions that go well beyond "U NERFED MY CLASS!!!!!".

It's always seemed to me that this approach to play was distinctive enough that it could easily be called a fifth Bartle-type to go alongside achiever, killer, explorer and socializer. Call it subcreator, or if you want to get fancy, demiurge. From MUDs to WoW, there have been games which reward the subcreator within the activity of play in some respect. Some examples: granting creator privileges, bringing the subcreator inside some privileged discussion about live management (various volunteer programs, for example), by allowing for a class of artifacts within the world that were created by players (books in Asheron's Call 1, or the entirety of Second Life). But with the exception of Second Life and maybe Neverwinter Nights, there has been less and less out there for the subcreator types to do. So for this reason alone, I'm rooting for Metaplace. Not because player-created content is superior or because it magically resolves some of the problems of existing virtual world designs, but simply because it will have tools for a type of player that normally is exiled to the MMO equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.

There is now a customizable digital Barbie that connects (with included cradle?) to a virtual world - 'a next-generation fashion doll and stylish MP3 player all in one'. You need the device to connect to the world, but once there can create a room, shop, and do other typical social VW stuff (all with parentally controlled permission settings). From Amazon (who are suggesting I buy one): The hottest toy of the season is finally here! The interactive Barbie Girls let you do more with Barbie than ever before! Girls can create their own, personalized online space--everything from designing a "room" to creating a character--where they can then play games, chat with gal pals, watch videos and even shop with earned virtual money.

Being a net leech on TN I thought I’d ask the Hive Mind another question. I’m running a workshop at Virtual Worlds in San Jose on Wed at 13:00 – 14:00. The workshop is part of my larger project to engage industry, academia and governments in discussions about virtual worlds and public policy. This all falls under the umbrella of the think tank The Virtual Policy Network that I’m gradually giving life to. The challenge here is: what topics / angles that fall broadly into the arena of public policy and fit within the context of the US debate would a crowd primarily interested in commercial / serious uses of virtual worlds be interested in? The ‘easy’ area, at least for a topic rather than an answer, is the use of virtual worlds as part of education. I want to include this but also think outside – when I start to think about things like MTV’s use of the There platform, or Coke studios, or Raph’s new gig – what policy related bulbs does this light up in the American psyche? Or should I stop worrying and talk about tax, rights holding and RMT?

Daniel Terdiman, long time FoTN, has a new book and blog out. Which apart from me wanting to plug, led to think about the amazing weight of books that are emerging about virtual worlds and especially Second Life. Looking at the Amazon pre-order page for Daniel's book discloses no less than 16 books on how to [(make money from), (understand), (have sex in), (generally deal with)] Second Life. You know that something is significant when the "Dummies Guide To Second Life" comes out. And a quick search for "virtual worlds" on Amazon brings up a metric assload of books, some of which actually look quite interesting (and some of them are not about Second Life, amazingly).

I'm currently re-reading a bit of Jesper Juul's book, Half-Real. I should say at the outset that I haved always enjoyed Juul's general approach to videogame studies. His work is highly accessible, innovative, thoughtful, and centered on concrete (and popular) examples. (He also includes lots of screenshots, which is good.) Juul takes what might be called a "grassroots" approach to game studies, not bringing heavy disciplinary baggage to colonize the area, but instead trying to build a formal theory of games from the ground up. He takes his lead primarily from game and culture theorists like Huizinga, Caillois, Crawford and Sutton-Smith rather than from literary theory or media studies. But I don't want to review Half-Real here -- I just want to share a passage that made me wonder a bit about the differences between MMORPGs and other games.

After citing to this paper, which described how Quake III players would turn down graphics detail in order to get higher frame rates, Juul says: Experienced players shift their focus from the fictional world of the game to the game as a set of rules. Juul references Haider and Frencsch and posits that this is a form of intentional information reduction designed to improve task performance. Imho, in the FPS (first person shooter) setting, that seems true enough. The reader can offer his or her own experience, but I think the "eye candy" of many FPS games is appealing but ornamental in terms of game play.

MMORPGs are generally not (directly) competitive games. So it would seem to me that most experienced players soloing the early stages of the games are probably not inclined to tune out the fiction in order to maximize instrumental play. While information reduction tactics might make the dreaded grind more efficient, it would probably make it correspondingly more miserable. For solo video games, I'd have the same hunch. If I could reduce the Katamari graphics to a gray ball and countless gray squares rectangles, I'd probably improve my score somewhat, but why would I want to play that game? Toward the endgame raids in MMORPGs, however, it seems pretty clear that the broader group's demands for precise social coordination probably *do* have a tendency to downplay the fiction in game play, making the individual player focus more on game objectives.

For players, is this right? How do you manage the balance between instrumental goals and world immersion? Are your strategies different at various stages? One of the many announcements made at the Tokyo Game Show a week or so ago concerned a new, peer-reviewed journal that might be of interest to some of TerraNova's readers. The International Journal of Role-Playing is "a biannual international journal that covers all aspects of role-playing, irrespective of the medium, platform or intent". It differs from other journals in that it treats role-playing with respect, rather than as some psychological aberration brought on by too little exposure to human beings and sunlight. You should be able to get quality work published here that elsewhere might be looked down on for being, you know, to do with games...The editorial board is made up of some of the most highly-respected people working in the area, plus me.

Being a researcher interested in the user experience of interactive technologies, I have always been following how video games are employed as a platform to explore certain topics and practices, especially in social sciences/psychology. The use of such kind of platform has already been discussed in the human computer interaction field for a long time. In psychology, especially, you have papers from 1995 about "Video games as research tools" by Donchin or some statements by HCI researchers (like Holmquist in "The right kind of challenge"). Several scholars have stressed the interest of using virtual environments like video games as research tool for psychological investigation by citing three major reasons. First, computer games are motivating and fun, and successful experimentation is easily achieved. Maintaining one’s undivided attention in video games is certainly easier than in other experimental environments.