Game Design as Cultural Practice

Second Life's Virtual Heritage

Upon first setting foot in the world of Second Life a first time user, with no background with this type of environment, could find themselves entirely overwhelmed by the sheer open-endedness that the type of atmosphere allows. Dropping the user off into the middle of a sandbox-like world with little or no direction, one is expected to find and create their own meaning through the world’s many social spheres and by personalizing an avatar and the space which they occupy. Being new to this sort of thing myself, my first presumption about the world was that it is some sort of game. It has quickly become apparent to me, however, that it is not. Much like Curtis’ experience with MUDs, this “game” has no long-term or explicit in-world goals for users to accomplish and therefore cannon rightly be called one. It does however provide for a freeform world where players can create whatever they wish. This brought up some questions in my mind as to what sort of limitations were in place to prevent players from causing harm to one another. Julian Dibbell’s paper “A Rape in Cyberspace” proved a notable precedent for this type of behavior and it led me to wonder what sort of measures, if any, there were in Second Life to prevent such horrid acts. After talking to a few people who played the game I discovered that the primary ways that people are kept safe from this their ability to set their own rules in their own area, spamming has been restricted and griefing has be strongly.

The second trait about Second Life that I noticed was that the huge number of unique custom textures and models that users had placed into the world. The massive amount of bandwidth required to transmit all of the data has to be astronomical. Upon reading the paper about Lucasfilm’s Habitat, I can see that several of the standards set and lessons learned from that project have already been applied to Second Life. With the large number of custom objects in the world, Second Life’s designers have learned from its predecessors that bandwidth is a scare resource. Because of this, textures are kept to a somewhat manageable resolution and simple shapes are the most often used tools by the in game users. Object-oriented data also plays a big role in the usability of this game. The ease of processing power and data transfer in a object oriented language is a lesson that has already been taken into account with Second Life.

The third and, to me, most profound characteristic about Second Life that I noticed was the vastly varied subcultures that had taken root within with world. Much like the Uru refugees that had taken part in the great relocating and resettled in other Game worlds (including Second Life) the different cliques within Second Life can have completely separate cultures of one another, as different as any real life social group. Some are only bound through the shared constraints of the Second Life world itself.

After having experienced the world of Second Life and having read about its predecessors, it is my opinion that Linden Labs has already taken into account a vast number of the lessons learned by its antecedents. Having said that, despite the fact that a lot of the user generated content can be considered largely inappropriate; the fact that Second Life is such an unrestricted place speaks strongly about it. I can’t think of any changes, as a designer or a player, which could control content without infringing on its sandbox character.

Wow Gamer Types: Variety and Popularity

The massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, or Wow, is one of the most popular online games of all time. Despite its relative age, in gaming terms, it continues to expand and to attract new players in droves. The primary draw of this game and one of the reasons for its continued success is the massive quantity of in game content, which allows a variety of player types to experience and explore the world in a manner that suits their play-style. These ways, however, are not at all new to online gaming. In fact, the thing that draws people to Wow is the same as what drew people to MUDs. According to Bartle, there were four attributes of MUDs that players typically enjoyed: In game Achievement, Exploration, Socializing and Imposition, and all four of these characteristics are available options for Wow players.

Having played this game for several years I have had the opportunity to be deeply involved with its community and meet a variety of different players, of both genders, who all played the game for vastly different reasons. Through my experiences, I have noticed certain trends of play and can form some broad archetypes, which are just nuanced versions of Bartle’s taxonomy, of the certain types of Wow gamer.

· The Power Player – This person takes the game very seriously. They are very goal-oriented players seeking Achievement through better items and status within the game world. They usually end up raiding or competing in battlegrounds.

· The Lore Lover – This person loves the flavor and background of the game. They enjoy the story behind the game as much as the mechanics themselves. Often explorers, they will go out of their way to discover some little explored zone or detail or possibly

· The Savvy Socialite – This person plays the game to experience it with other players. Be it through role-playing or regular social networking, they have the most fun playing with others.

· The Greif Giver – Also known as the “Greifer,” revels in the misfortune of others. They have the most fun when they are preventing others from accomplishing their goals.

While the vast majority of players are not confined to just one of these groups, their play-style is going to consist of some sort of combination of these aspects. It is these allowances that have provided so many different personalities opportunities to enjoy Wow. It is because of this that MMORPGs such Wow have been a major draw for females into gaming. According to Taylor, it is the freedom of play-style and diversity of social spheres that have been the major selling point to women. The same seems to be appealing the “baby boomer” generation, as Pearce’s paper provides quantitative evidence that these adults play more online games than their teen counterpart.

From a design standpoint, these different perceptions of how the game should be played and the cultural and social backgrounds from which they stem must present within a games mechanics to have the kind of staying power that Wow does. In Taylor’s paper on virtual Environments there is a game designer who is quoted in saying that “Diversity in all its forms is better than any kind of monastic or singular representation.” This is a goal that a lot of game designers strive to achieve, but because of outside, often uncontrollable issues are forced to abandon; However; it is the universality and diversity of these MMOGs such as Wow that is allowing them to be so popular.

Second Life, No Limits

In Second Life, very little is actually created by the owners of Second Life itself; the world is open to the users to create and build upon. Users can make their own avatars from scratch, including simply different shades of skin, to anthropomorphic animals, to transforming robots, to towering dragons, to even toddler-sized toys. Users can model poses for their characters, as well as furniture to pose upon and decorations to create the setting. Users can manipulate the earth to create oceans, islands, and continents for their buildings, parks, dream homes, or whatever they choose. Users can upload their own sounds, their own textures, or program their own tools and devices. Users can set their own rules in their areas, and travel to other players' lands to explore.

With this said, it can be seen that Second Life is as open-ended a game as the user chooses it to be. Second Life alone is a Massively Multiplayer Online game as well as a virtual world, relating it to other MMO's such as MMORPGs (Role Playing Games) and classic MUDs (text-based Multi-User Dungeons). Like a MUD, Second Life “is not [a] goal-oriented” game, although the user can choose to create or find places that offer quests or rewards (Curtis). Players spend their time usually either building onto the world or communicating with a percentage of the other users in the game. Since players build everything that exists in the game, they carry on their own culture from any standpoint (such as the group of Uru “refugees” who created their own Myst habitat in Second Life). Communication is a huge part of play on Second Life. While many players use it for conversation, many others find ways to use this communication for more devious means. Players who own land can set rules and regulate those in their land, as users around Second Life have been known to do anything from pleasant conversation, to constantly spamming the logs with messages, to having online “sex” in every way or form possible. By allowing owner players to set rules and regulations, the creators of Second Life have avoided allowing players to interact in many ways (besides private messaging) from large distances (for example, Mr. Bungle's voo-doo doll would be useless in the current laws of Second Life [referring to Dibbell's article]). World-wide rules have been implemented to fight griefing (playing to purposefully hinder or disturb other players), thus keeping such events to a minimum but at the same time stopping many forms of emergent gameplay.

With the game's current strategy of letting the users dominate, there is not much that can be done “world-wide” to improve the gameplay without changing the style of the game completely. For example, giving players a set of portable objects and individual skills as well as specific quests, such as in Habitat, would give players set goals to accomplish, but would not work too well in a world where the players control where everything goes.

Emily Cribb

The Undiscussed Classes of "World of Warcraft"

As a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) with over eleven million monthly subscribers, World of Warcraft's in-game environments, goals, and tools must cater to a huge amount of different players with varying interests.

In “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs,” Richard Bartle describes the a player of Massively Multiplayer Online games as being one of four types; an Achiever, an Explorer, a Socializer, or a Killer. Achievers focus on “points-gathering and rising in levels,” delighting in being the best of the best. Explorers search for discoveries in the game and the world of the game, “looking for interesting features” and glitches. Socializers tend to be more focused on other players rather than the game itself, using the environment as a “backdrop, a common ground where” players from all distances can interact. Killers choose to cause harm and destruction (possibly even being a griefer, or a user that plays a game to purposefully harass other players) without a real care for other aspects of the game; to a Killer, they're “all just means to an end.” The creators of World of Warcraft modeled the game to allow all these different types of players to coexist, and continue to upgrade the game's system to accompany them. In the game's upcoming patch, Achievers will have a huge amount of goals to strive for. A new system of, oddly enough, Achievements (various objectives that are scattered around the game that vary in difficulty and rewards) will be implemented and connected with the already copious amount of plot-driven quests. Achievers can also go to battlegrounds and fight in arenas to harvest points and tokens, allowing them to buy gear that will let them be more powerful. For the Explorer, there is usually no end to places to investigate. With each expansion of WoW more lands are added on; as of the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, the game world will consist of three large continents, a separate world slightly smaller in size than a continent, several large islands, and countless hidden or untraceable areas. Since many of the lands hold large buildings and structures that are constantly being worked on, Explorers have numerous places to search for glitches or tricks. Many famous findings include jumping strategically on an almost completely vertical surface to climb to places otherwise unreachable, or using unseen holes in the graphics to sneak into (or under) cities. Socializers, however, are given one big drawback. The plot of WoW (and the Warcraft series) involve wars between different races, and in WoW the races are divided up into two separate factions. Unfortunately, those on opposing factions cannot contact each other except for using emotes (special commands for users to make their characters do an action, such as dancing, laughing, or crying) when “face-to-face” or taking advantage of extremely rare occasions. When dealing with those in the same faction, however, players have lots of options. In WoW, players can be in “multiple contexts” of the game, within many “social spheres” such as in a guild, “amongst acquaintances,” strangers, or even with friends from off the computer (Taylor, Multiple Pleasures, pg. 2). When in the same area they can speak, yell, use the area's “channel,” or use emotes. There are several safe, open areas that were made for “foster[ing] sociability and communication” in-game (Taylor, Intentional Bodies, pg. 29). From any distance players can group up into a party and chat, whisper each other, or use their guild's chat channel. Killers, as well, are given many opportunities to wreak havoc, although WoW tries to keep them from griefing constantly. Killers can “gank” (attack opponents that have no chance of fighting back, whether because they are at a lower level or due to some other circumstance) other players or group up and invade towns of the opposing faction, halting progress there completely.

While there is a lot to do in the environments of WoW, not much is open in the area of character development. Players can choose a faction, a race from that faction, a gender, class, and several cosmetic items, but often are forced to go with whatever armor or clothes they can get (as using something less “powerful” will make the game too difficult, even if the look of the weaker clothes is preferred). However, steps have been taken to try to make characters more personalized. Upcoming updates to WoW include “Barber Shops” where players can change their character's look multiple times, and titles that can be added to the player's character's name. Although there is still a great deal of improvement needed in customization, the creators of WoW are aware of the huge number older women players. Players can have multiple accounts (in fact, according to a poll by Nick Yee, the average number of characters per person is 8.7), so families can play together, share accounts, and have different characters for questing and socializing. The openendedness of WoW makes it perfect for the generation of older gamers, who seem to prefer having games as an “outlet to relieve stress, interact with a community, and just have fun...according to their own schedules,” as opposed to games that follow a plot then end abruptly (Matthew Bromberg for Pearce, The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers, pg. 2).

Emily Cribb

Battalion Wars and Stereotyping

Bias and stereotyping can strongly influence a game, from concept to completion; this is evident in the 2005 Gamecube game Battalion Wars, which demonstrated a strong cultural, sexual, and racial bias. In Battalion Wars, the player is a field officer participating in what begins as a battle between the Western Frontier and the Tundran Territories. As a member of the Western Frontier, the player is briefed by the stout General Herman and petite Brigadier Betty before each battle with the Tundran Territories. However, both sides soon are compelled to join together as a much more dangerous foe appears, the Xylvanians, led by Kaiser Vlad and the traitorous Tsar Gorgi, who was originally on the side of the Tundran Territories. The battle escalates into a full-blown war as drama ensues among the leaders of the three armies.

While this seems like a load of gibberish, it is actually a load of gibberish sprinkled with historical commentary and filled with plenty of cultural stereotype bits. The battles, countries, and even characters of Battalion Wars, despite the goofy names, are based on counterparts in “the real world.” The Western Frontier is the United States of America, complete with easily-angered, overweight Texans (such as General Herman) and skinny, blond-haired babes (Brigadier Betty). The other nations were not as obvious stereotypes, as their characters' archetypes were extreme. The Tundran Territories were the game's stand-in for the Soviet Union, even going as far as using weapons and vehicles famous to Americans as pure Soviet engineering (such as AK-47's). Tsar Gorgi, the previous leader of the Territories, possesses a heavy Russian accent and an exaggerated belief in family honor and leadership. Xylvania becomes the most twisted representation of the three. Roughly based on the German Empire around the 1915's (World War I), it is shown as a country unlike a cartoon version of Transylvania, complete with vampire citizens. Vlad has the German title “Kaiser” (Emperor) and is shown as a ruthless (albeit clumsy and foolish) vampire ruler, while his army's uniforms and vehicles mimic that of the Imperial and Nazi Germany eras. Even many of the battles of the game mimic real-life events; Mission Twelve is named “X-Day,” modeled after the invasion of Normandy (D-Day).

 Battalion Wars is a prime example of a game that uses stereotypes and cultural bias as part of the gameplay and representation. While they are amusing, some of the stereotypes can push things a bit far; mimicking the past can be a bit dangerous, and if some were to make the connection they could turn it into one of the “stories of our [time] that pose [a great threat] to our children and our future” by putting a bias on what happened. (Utopian Entrepreneur, pg. 65) Meanwhile, the creators of the game could not  escape classic marketing research, aiming for the male players with the Barbie-bodied Betty,  continuing the game practice of being “alienating to women.” (The Hegemony of Play, pg. 3) Betty will even, and often, flirt with other officers, as well as the player (doing a part to label the player as a male “character”). Thus, Battalion Wars falls to the “Hegemony of Play,” connecting with biases of modern cultural stereotypes despite being a strong game.

Emily Cribb

Design choices in Lively

Google Lively is a web-based 3D virtual environment. It's new and undergoing a lot of changes currently. It's quite obvious to relate this game with Second Life, both of them are open to the creation and change of end users (players). However,there are several design decisions that are made differently, I am going to discuss the pros and cons of them. 

  - How real the characters should be?

Lively provides more options of characters on the spectrum from human and cartoonish representations.  It's interesting to compare this design choice with "There", in which the subtlety of social interaction (such as gestures, facial expressions) is praised by previous researches (e.g. Isbister, 2005). It's hard to say that the more realistic character is, the more social interaction is stimulated. For me, the fun of playing a cartoonish characters is to be comfortable to interact with other players by more physically, like huging or punching, which will not happen if I am using a human-like avatar to interact with strangers, even in a virtual world. Comparing with the example of MUD community LambdaMOO as described by Curtis, there is no graphical representation of the characters. However, the intensity of the social interaction is high. (refer to the example that a college student delayed visiting his parents on Christmas because of MUD). Curtis noticed the detachment between the self-description that usually involve role play and more direct and normal discourse that players quickly turned to. And he also cited the case of PernMUSH in which the role-playing happened due to the single-minded feature, which each of the player having the common ground of the story. What I learned here is that, role-playing is a social and collective behavior. This makes me think about the diversity of the representation styles provided in Lively, which seems to provide more option to the players. However, it does not has a consistent role-playing storyline or common ground knowledge. Eventually, the interaction falls back to the text-based chat assisted with expessions accompanying certain texts you typed. The fun of using different characters are constraint to personal choice, instead of contributing to change the dynamics of social interaction. One possible change is to give different abilities for different characters, and set some mini-games or tasks in the virtual world to require players with different abilities to cooperate with each other.
 

 

- Creating and sharing: Lively, as a web-based virtual environment, fits well with the web2.0 model. In particular, Lively provides the openness of creating places to share with friends. Google is definitely embracing the value of user-created content as they usually do. A lot of the lessons learned from previous multiplayer online game community are taken as the fundamental design principles by default, such as "Detailed central planning is impossible", "An object-oriented data representation is essential" (Morningstar and Farmer). However, in Lively, there is not enough tools for building user-generated content, which become a bottleneck for the growth of the online community. Write now, there is not much you can do in the virtual world except decorating your own room by dragging and placing objects from the library, and chat with people arround. Instead of creating more playgrounds by the developers, I believe they should focus more about giving the tools to build playable objects. Only by doing so, the virtual world can reach the kind of play that "games were made up, changed, and reconfigured by groups of ordinary people in site-specific, socially and culturally specific contexts." (Pearce, 2006) MUD is a good example here. It is substantially easier for players to give themselves vivid, detailed, and interesting descriptions (and to do the same for the descriptions and behavior of the new objects they create) in a text-based system than in a graphics-based one (Curtis). The ease of creating new objects corresponds with the richness of social behaviors, including both laws (Mnookin) and crimes (Dibbell). In LambdaMOO, the involvement of users push the interplay between the system technology and politics futhrer by the petition process (Mnookin). This partial democracy replaced the top-down centered control by the wizard.

- Structure of spaces and places in Lively: In lively, players are free to create "rooms" either private or public. Different from There or Wow, in which space are more constraint to their physical representations, Lively is more similar to MUD, in the sense that the spaces are basically infinite, although you can not embed a room to another. This structure of spaces and places allows infinite numbers of "residents" to the online world, each of them are only one step away from each other. One of the exciting features about publishing and sharing the room in Lively is that you can embed the room in websites, blogs, or facebook profiles. Also you can attach Youtube video or pictures to some of the objects in the game world. I believe this is where the potential of Lively is.I will see it will be more likely to be used among friends who you already know, like what instant messaging does.However, will the individual-centered space creation mechanism conflict with the folk art and culture that's based on the collective contribution (e.g. the Myst/Uru Diaspora as described in Pearce, 2006)? By looking at the list of rooms that's been built on Lively, many of them are very much like a party house with differnt themes (such as festivals, cultures). However, it still adopts the model of one central control and less fun to play with.

  K Isbister, Better Game Characters by Design, Elsevier, 2005.


Yan Xu, yxu7@gatech.edu

Toontown, a game for kids and families to play together

I am going to analyze the game of Toontown, the first MMOG designed for encouraging the kids' social cooperation by Disney. It's hard to use Bartle's topology to understand how the game is played. Based on the description from the authors of the game (Mine et al., 2003), "socializer" is the major type of play that's encouraged by the game design; "explorer" is also encouraged by the design based on Panda3D, an open-source 3D game engine that supports platform-agnostic scene graph and distributed storytelling; Players can become an "achiever" by the quests between Toons (players) and cogs (pesky businesslike robots) and many mini-games embedded in the game. But "killer" (doing things to other players without consent) is discouraged by the game design. The purpose of the game is to create a "safe interface" for kids older than 7 years old.

There are both educational and entertainmental purposes for ToonTown. The major motivation of the game is to encourage the cooperative play. Different from MMOG for adults, the audience of Toontown are mostly kids, who are at the position of vulnerable population, requiring more protection. In the paper of Taylor (2003 a), she focused on the perspective of designers, and discussed how the issue of identity and social responsibility is embedded by designers. She thinks that there is trade-off between the freedom of identity and social responsibility; persistent identity can help build a reputation system in the game. In the case of Toontown, designers plays a major role of defining the rules to make the game to be a safe place to play. For example, one design choice is to use the drop-down menu for conversation instead of open conversation. This is a trade-off between the freedom of communication and the safe online environment for children, and the latter weighs more in the design concern. Open conversation only happens under the protection of password between "secret friends". Compared to the constraints of conversation between players, the cooperation is made very easy. A Toon can join a quest simply by standing close to the quest. In mini-games, the players can join the same game by taking the same "trolley". Toontown designers plays an important role in creating the safe and fun space for kids to play by carefully designing the game mechanism. Another perspective to analyze identity is from the player(s), which is discussed in Pearce's paper (Pearce, 2006). Like many Disney products, bad guys can be defeated eventually. Toons can almost always beat the cogs as long as they are working together; even if the toons lose, they do not die, they go to the playground to heal. The choice of avatar is cartoonish and harmless: dog, cat, horse, duck, mouse, rabbit, monkey, bear and pig. For kids and teens, it's especially interesting to find how the identity in the online world forms while they are still on-the-way to explore, change and develope their identity in the real world. One piece of research that I found online is that, Toontown was highly praised to have "A more responsible conceptualisation of what it means to have a friend in social software". Instead of encouraging kids and teens to make friends as a contest, the friend making mechanism in Toontown corresponds with the existing research that "teens have no real interest in talking to strangers".

Another feature about the game is that it is designed for parents and kids play together. The design principle for the game is "simple but not stupid" to attract audience that have different preferences and flavors. One specific design is to encourage "newbies" and "elders" to play together. Elders are explicitly rewarded for helping newbies fight with cogs. During the quest, cogs tend to attack the higher-level players. According to findings about baby boomer gamers (Pearce, 2008), helping newbies is mentioned as the second favorable type of play, making it more fun for parents to play with their children. It would be interesting to conduct qualitative study about how this game is played among families as what Pearce did in her paper, finding the dynamics of family life around game play.

Although Toontown was designed for kids and families, theres actually a fairly large adult toontown player community which set up secret friends and largely group together or do cog raids on the VP, CFO or CJ otherwise players have to use the clumsy but safe speedchat function whilst it marginely works. And this population likes the more challenging game play, such as such as the powerful combination of lure + trap gags, which requires more advanced teamwork than battling together. But for players who target for self-improvement and less into cooperative play, the game received a lot negative comments. One of them is that the game max out itself in three months, after that there is no room for improvment for the characters except winning more jellybeans (which is the resource in Toontown). The positive and negative comments shows that how the vision of the designers directly influences the game experience, and selects the audiences of the game.

MR Mine, J Shochet, R Hughston (2003), Building a massively multiplayer game for the million: Disney's Toontown Online, Computers in Entertainment (CIE), ACM Press
F Romeo (2004), Y'know, for kids! Social software for children, Unpublished paper presented at O’Reilly Emerging Technology
Pearce, C. (2006). Communities of Play: The Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (eds) Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Pearce, C. (2008). The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers. Games & Culture, Vol 3, Issue 2
Taylor, T.L. (2003 A). "Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them." International Journal of Engineering Education 19, no. 1.
Taylor, T.L. (2003 B). "Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming," Convergence, Vol. 9, No.1, 21-46, Spring 2003.

Yan Xu, yxu7@gatech.edu

Second Life: Is the World Your Oyster?

I'll be the first to admit that it feels weird to enter Second Life again. My last foray into Second Life was almost exactly a year ago for a class, and back then, I had spent my time touring isolated areas, such as Vassar's impressive replica of the Sistine Chapel; and while it was fun to see the raw creative potential the last time, I never saw much of the much-lauded social aspects of this particular virtual world (except for the time someone had nudged my avatar off the docks repeatedly) , so I decided that I'd step back in this time and see how it was.

Admittedly, it's difficult to expect significant amounts of social interaction in such a vast world, so I instead tried out a few places that either catered to the general populace or to particular subgroups...in theory, at least. I was surprised to see how difficult it was to even find areas, since many of them (even the featured areas) would turn up blank, with no trace of where they had moved, if moved they had at all. The scope of Second Life is really so massive that comparisons to LambdaMOO are difficult at best. By nature of its wide userbase, it is entirely possible to wander around and not ever see a single soul, as had happened in my last trip there. in most MU*s that I've visited, there are usually people who welcome the player, as well as other guests/people with whom to converse and to navigate with through the tutorial areas. In Second Life, on the other hand, while the newbie island was populated, most people remained isolated, experimenting on their own or deeply involved with customizing the avatars.

Perhaps there is also something about the visual presence of the avatar that can make the people more reluctant to converse, and yet more likely to grief. On one of the other islands I visited, I noticed that about ten people were the same area, but no one was saying as much as a word. It wasn't until I asked the others a question that there was any chatting at all (albeit for a brief moment), despite having observed the other people moving about idly. Clearly, they were there, but the open socialization typical of a MU* seemed absent.

I did, however, strike up a brief conversation with someone from Spain while on the newbie island, much to my surprise. We only touched on our impressions of the world and our countries of origin before he flew off, but I was still pleasantly surprised. Later, two different people came up to me and asked if I could speak Spanish, and yet another asked if I could speak German. The wide range in demographics is certainly a huge change that these virtual worlds bring to the table, which MU*s often struggled at, given the lack of support for non-alphanumeric characters typically. SL’s expansive audience, though lowering the chance of random interactions, brings a more diverse audience to the table - which is a good thing.

-Pauline

Nothing Very Special

    After hearing about Second Life multiple times in the news and academics, I decided to check it out to see if I could have some sort of meaningful virtual experience of my own. As I entered the virtual world into the new user area, I found the players' abilities to be pretty open. I could interact with almost everything in the environment, and there were tutorials on how to do things. The tutorial showed me plenty of things that I could do, many features similar to Lucasfilm's Habitat; you can change player appearance and gender, you can read signs and even are able to create new areas. The starting area shows you how to jump to new areas of the world as well. There are rarely actual physical links between different areas of the world in Second Life, however, but like Habitat, there are items that can teleport you from one to another, or players can also bookmark a favorite location to simply teleport back to it later.
    The world is also filled with tons of virtual stores where the player can buy clothing and different models for your avatar to use.  Linden Lab allows players to transfer real money to in-game currency in order to purchase things for the player or their land. Unlike some place like LambdaMOO, the real-world ramifications of real money and the scope and size of the world mean that it is basically governed by Linden themselves.  Compared to something like a text based community, Second Life has much more legal issues to deal with due to the monetary link to the real world. Many shops in real life also have instances in the digital world, and many locations have been recreated, which is unlike many other virtual worlds that are centered more in fantasy or alternate worlds.
    With all the features in Second Life, there seemed to be one thing that the game was missing; in twenty minutes, I only encountered one person who was online and at their computer. Searching through the featured locations didn't help very much. The first place I went to, a user-created roleplaying world, seemed sort of interesting. I saw a few people(all with pretty mature names and costumes), but within a minute of walking in a building I had been teleported out of the world to some other town because my account was too new. I teleported to and looked at other featured locations, but I didn't see anybody who was actively participating with the others or the world.  In places like LambdaMOO, the most memorable things to users have been based on interactions with other people within the community, and unfortunately something like that did not come close to happening in my experience with Second Life.  There was plenty of user-created content, but although I was not in the world for longer than a few hours, the player interaction was so incredibly low that in order to find some sort of meaningful experience, it would take large amounts of effort on the part of the user to even start meeting others. Maybe I was just unlucky or impatient, but despite its features, Second Life seemed to lack the thing that makes virtual worlds.

Andy Korzik
gth707g

Player vs. Game Values

One issue I take with the majority of early readings, callois and dekoven especially, is that games do have impact on our lives.  They do create product, unlike what callois says, typically in the form or credibility or bragging rights, and can even construct the social order of a group.  Although possibly unfair, this credibility bears impact on business opportunites, relationships, and many other aspects of life.  These products both shape and respond to the values of the players.  I've found myself pondering in class about the next game of Super Smash Bros. that my roommates would undoubtedly be playing when i arrived home, and how i would need to crush them.  In contrast, I've had games of killer hack with the same room mates where all that was important was improvising impressive feats, not individual success.  Here we see that obsessive commitment to individual victory is accepted in smash bros yet not as desirable in killer hack.  clearly, values can be intrinsic to a game, yet these will clash with that of the players.  The versatility of games demonstrates this, from the fairness centered gym-class game of basketball to the bloodthirsty, swagger-filled professional game.  Cheating is another example of how one's personal values transcend those of the game.  Still, games can possess a value, purpose, and lesson.

In class we played several "new games."  Knots, rock/paper/scizzors tag, and parachutes clearly held a common theme in their interactions.  These all require heavy amounts of communication to progress.  In our sessions, we found central leadership arise in one player that was very sensitive to the other players, allowing for speedier victory.  This was true for both knots and tag; parachutes allowed for a much more ad-hoc system of play, but still cooperation and listening.  These games also employed touch, from the binding of knots to the huddling and contact of tag.  Knots did this particularly by needing players to contort themselves to victory.  This, like the communication, sought to get players to drop their boundaries and connect to eachother.  Parachutes rarely had contact, but we did sometimes run into eachother underneath.  It was unique in using an absence of rules to enforce this same principle, needing others to come together to cooperate.  These interactions directly challenge the jaded feelings of urban life.  The apathy towards and shutting out of others cannot be carried into these games if one is to play them well, as dekoven would observe.  Still, they could be, and the game would fall victim to its players, but that doesn't negate the values intrinsic to games.

As side comments relative to the reading, I was intrigued to discover space war's use as an educational practice in computing; it's therefor interesting that an iteration of its source code is packaged with Microsoft's XNA platform as Space War Evolved for educational purposes.  Also, principals detailed in the Well Played Game stand in parallel to the Positive Coaching Alliance, an organization that encourages athletes to reach their personal best in every competition, completely removing the emphasis on winning.

Max Groves