Fallen Earth: Field Notes 1

I’ve decided to acknowledge that my cyclical frustration with social virtual worlds is in a deep trough, and choose something other than Blue Mars for field observations for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds. I’ve taken on the post-apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth.

Sunday morning I read several blog posts in succession that gave the game glowing reviews, leading me to think that it was different enough from World of Warcraft to be intriguing, yet similar enough that some of my experience and skills would transfer. I’m sick to death of Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I’ve been actively looking for an MMO in another genre, but have been put off by bad reviews of Champions Online, and found my trial of City of Heroes aesthetically unappealing.

I decided to download the game from Steam rather than ordering disks from Amazon (or, gods forbid, going outside to a store!). I started the download around 10 am, stopped it in the evening to play WoW, and restarted it before bed. The download didn’t complete until early Monday morning, as my computer had gone into hibernation during the process. Then, on setup, it required a patch almost the size of the initial download. I set it to run while I went off to class, and came home to a (supposedly) complete and ready to play game around 9 pm.

Character creation is a huge part of the game experience for me, and will immediately make or break my gameplay. Avatars in Fallen Earth draw on an artistic style similar to that of Dragon Age Origins, sort of “realistically ugly” for the setting. As with that game, bodies aren’t customizable at all, except Fallen Earth allows a choice of height (one forum poster suggested pulling the slider to the lowest setting, to make yourself a smaller target!).

The body types aren’t egregious, but they aren’t great. The male is of fairly average build, the female sort of anorexic, with a hip-to-waist ratio I’ve never seen on an actual human woman, but seems the inevitable default in games. The skin tones are okay, with palettes intended to be “white,” “Asian” and “Black,” and all conventional human tones. Per usual, the Black tones are more “Florida golfer” than “African,” but the Asian ones are quite nice.

There’s a really good, broad range of tattoos and piercings available, which also seems to be a common feature currently.

I was able to recreate my cross-world “Kaseido Quandry” avatar pretty well, while my “older, badass version of my atomic self” rendering came off looking more like mental patient/hospital orderly

The game starts with a sandbox tutorial, with access to full game chat channels, including a default Help channel that’s become general chat despite the GMs’ constant efforts to limit the forum though calls to take general chat elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the very first quest in the tutorial revealed a flaw running throughout Fallen Earth: it drops key files like whoa.

Quests are indicated by a gold rotating biohazard symbol over the questgiver. In the tutorial, you rez in some sort of personal chamber or cell, and can see the symbol over a computer terminal in the next room. The quest is given by voice and text: it’s a woman elsewhere in the facility who says that she’s going to help you escape. She commands you to go to the next terminal and “activate the LifeNet” before proceeding.

There was no next terminal. Across the way was a bank of computers symmetrical to the questgiving one, except for an open space in the middle where the actual quest terminal would be.

So, I looked all over the room, and ran out in the hall, to find a door that wouldn’t open until the LifeNet was active.

I was too embarrassed to ask for help: I thought that failing the “report to” starting quest was the ultimate in noob stupidity. I relogged to see if that might make a difference, but no. I then went to the forums and searched for “LifeNet,” and found that the missing terminal was a bug that could be fixed by running “Perform Complete File Check” from the login screen.

And, sure enough, it found another 3000 files to download. I logged back in to find symmetrical terminals, activated the LifeNet, and was good to go.

It’s *Our* Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

I’m not sure how I found Alter Ego, but I spent a few really engrossed hours with it last night. It’s a browser based (also available in Android and iPhone apps) text game, a decision tree covering life choices from birth to death. It’s charming, warm, very immersive, and really delightful. And it provides an interesting perspective on narrative and gameplay, character creation and immersion.

Alter Ego

Alter Ego looks like an iPhone screen, with a branching tree of attractive icons representing family, love, finances, work, health, and so on. Clicking on each icon generates a situation with a choice, that may in turn branch from one to four times. A separate box keeps track of character stats: trustworthiness, happiness, confidence; cash and debt; and a few other things.

And that’s pretty much it. You make choices, choices shape your character, your character shapes the arc of your life. Then you die.

My projective identity (no character names) felt real. I felt her frustrations, her triumphs, her losses – and her death after a healthy old age brought a melancholy completeness: I/she/we didn’t have quite the life I/she/we wanted, but it was rich and full, and very much complete at the end of her days.

It was cathartic, and in a way quite profound. Despite a major rewrite of childhood, her middle age nonetheless looked very much like mine: we’d converged around our core *character* – whether measured by stats or expressed in our choices. That realization gave me an “aha” moment in a way that twenty grand of therapy couldn’t – I lived it and saw it, right there on the screen.

Experiencing it through my projective identity made it real in a way that other means of learning really couldn’: that “alter ego,” that life re-roll, became my story, as much as my own life is (interestingly, WoW Insider ran a column today on “Real Life Character Re-Customization,” addressing something very similar)

A powerful, moving psychological/narrative experience had emerged from some icons and a long list of questions.

Character and Immersion: It Ain’t Graphics

Yesterday saw a bunch of gee-whiz tweets and retweets from the official Blue Mars channels, including a short video of Blue Mars running in panorama on three widescreen monitors.

I didn’t tweet my response, because I wanted to consider it (I’ve been in a “knee-jerk negativity about virtual worlds” phase, and didn’t want to just “bah, humbug” without some thought).  My immediate response was, so what? It’s pretty scenery, and I couldn’t care less. Give me people, give me a UI with effective tools for communication and expression (through text, images and building). What matters is the human world, not pretty reflections off the waves.

I was right. Alter Ego, with no more pretty than some well-designed graphic icons, deeply engaged me for the better part of an evening. Blue Mars, despite my needing to cover the world for a class, hasn’t pulled me back in weeks.

Why?

Realism and immersion aren’t generated by graphics engines, they’re generated by people, real or fictive. This is hardly news to old-time MUDders (I’m not one, but I’ve talked to them extensively), but continues to escape software engineers and too many game designers.

Dragon Age Origins

Another example: I played this week with the Dragon Age Origins character generator.

As Tobold observed, it’s not a character generator, it’s a face generator. As such, it’s really quite good (except, why is it, in game after game, you can make an avvie with nice African features but not African *hair*?).

But, using a D&D-like system, your characters are almost entirely pre-rolled, there’s no way to create a character bio, no real choice of starting talents. And you can’t modify the avvie bodies at all: not only that, the bodies across races and factions are identical aside from height (at least among the humans and elves) – so a human rogue and an elf warrior look pretty much identical below the (choose your length) neck.

So how is it a character generator?

Simple, if you think like a software engineer: it’s all about the visuals, the surface, the code that generates graphics.

Dragon Age Origins encourages you to upload your characters to a social network (an interesting take on the “alone together” phenomenon of people not really playing MMO’s socially – so Dragon Age Origins is the natural next step beyond being able to solo to level cap in WoW: it’s a solo game where you can show off your achievements socially without having to actually play with other people).

But what do you upload? Some largely pre-set stats and a profile icon.

Why not backstory? Why not the output of a little “character generator” like Alter Ego, that indicated how the character might likely behave: are they dishonest, sexually assertive, likely to try talking their way out of a fight first but brutal in finishing it, uninterested in wealth but drawn to power? How much more interesting that would be than the width of my avvie’s nose and the extra point I put in DEX?

It’s *Our* Story

This week I’ve been reading First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, an anthology covering the ludology/narratology dispute in games studies. Ultra-short version? Academic wank and turf wars. Ultra-short re-roll? “Tastes Great!/Less Filling!”  Short version? Ludology stressed games-as-rule-sets, holding in its extreme view that there’s no possible room for narrative or story in games. Narratology basically wanted to read games as just like movies, with player-actors. Yes, that’s unfair, pejorative, and grossly oversimplifying. If you want the full deal, read the book.

What struck me was that both factions were arguing over the head of the player, as it were. Both seemed to be grounded in an auteur model, just arguing over what was being authored, a rule set or a text.

But what all these examples I’ve mentioned here have in common is player authorship of emergent narrative. I wrote a life in Alter Ego, not the very skilled authors of the questions and decision tree. I created, however tentatively, three characters for Dragon Age, not Biosoft. If anything interesting happens in Blue Mars, it won’t be due to the CryEngine, but due to the people.

Here’s another interesting example: there was a consensus the other day that story is irrelevant in boss fights in WoW. I think they’re only half right. I’d say, Blizzard’s story is irrelevant in boss fights, because we’re too busy enacting the events that will figure into our narratives, our guild’s tale of the time we took on the boss. And note – the bloggers weren’t saying that Blizzard’s story is irrelevant -  not at all – but that it’s best gotten from media that do a better job of delivering authored stories: novels, manga or comics. Let each medium do what it does best.

Good designers give us good tools, an engaging setting, and let us get on with living, and then telling, our own stories. Bad designers (and a lot of academics) still think it’s their story.

It’s our story, all of it.

Harshing Your Squee

We had a rare treat yesterday in Alice Robison’s ENG 553: Videogame Studies: Jim Gee dropped in for an hour and a half chat.

Jim ranged from the politics of healthcare in the US, to the lack of innovation in distance education, to the wild success of the American school system in turning out docile, uncritical service workers. A couple student questions, including one of mine, turned on his concept of “affinity spaces,” as distinct from another popular term in the literature, “communities of practice.”

He stressed that affinity spaces are purposeful communities, where, paraphrasing, other issues are left at the door. He gave the example of a pickup group in World of Warcraft, where you don’t care if the other player is a good person, or shares your opinions and values, but only on how well they play their class. He also said that internet-based affinity spaces give you the opportunity to set aside your physical-world signifiers like race, gender and class, but implied that it’s more than an opportunity, rather more of a mandate, since those things are seen as extraneous to the purpose of the space.

I didn’t, and don’t, buy it, but I didn’t have a ready and compelling critique. Reading Miguel Sicart’s The Ethics of Computer Games today, I came across a useful tool to hang a critique on.

Sicart (the book is adapted from his PhD dissertation in philosophy, so the language is difficult – though he’s amazingly clear for a philosopher) presents a model called the “ludic hermenuetic circle” (warned you!). Unfortunately, the diagram isn’t online, and my scanner’s not working, so bear with me here…

One of Sicart’s main points is that the player of a game isn’t some being that popped into existence at the login screen: they bring a lifetime of experience, both in games and in the world, and they bring their culture(s). What the diagram conveys is that the gameplay is an interaction of the affordances and constraints of the game, the player’s experiences, the game community and the player’s involvement with it, and the player’s culture and values. It’s all a whole.

So, for example, when I’m playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, my play experience is directly informed not just by what’s on the software disc, but by my knowledge of the Star Wars saga, my experience as someone who sucks at console shooters, my mouseless laptop, and my own history of thinking about, and experiencing, matters of race, gender and sexuality. Your play experience will have some commonalities and some differences.

Now, say I enter into an active community of KOTOR players. Gee’s formulation would have me check my personal history, values and culture at the door.

Really?

No, not really.

What this view means in practice (though I’m sure it’s not Gee’s intentional formuluation – I’ll come back to issues of intentionality either below or in a later post) is, “check your *minority* attitudes at the door.”

Sicart makes an outstanding point about game culture:

If the community is comprised exclusively of those who can afford to log onto the Internet regularly and/or spend vast amounts of time participating in the common creation of the game culture, then there may be silent web-less majorities that do not follow the values of the community, thus distorting the values of the game as they can be perceivedd. That is, the values of the game as deduced from its communtiy may only be the values of an elite group with time and technical knowledge and capacities.

There’s a concept of “reflexive” and “projective” users, that’s useful here (from Christina Lindsay’s “From The Shadows” in How Users Matter, Oudshoorn and Pinch, eds.): designers often design for other people just like them – that’s the reflexive user. They also have views, maybe broader and more nuanced, of who their users are – that’s the projective user. These categories are often narrower, and sometimes have very little relation to, the actual users.

So, in the KOTOR case, the projective users of the game were experienced Xbox players. Then the game was ported to PC, and actual users came in who weren’t familiar with or skilled at console games – and those mingames that formed gates for console players became barriers for people without console skills. Actual users varied from projective users, and they found problems the designers never intended.

Now, the same thing happens with race, gender, sexuality and class.  One of the things happening on the Blue Mars forums was actual users confronting the designers’ decisions to make avatars look like the developers’ reflexive users: young white and Asian guys, with limited and really fake opportunities to present oneself as female, conservative, older, of African ancestry.

Now, there are three responses. One, “STFU and play,” was taken by a developer in a recent post (with a terrific critique by Cuppycake here). This view says that your identity is irrelevant to the play experience. But if it was irrelevant, then the designers would happily play gay, shapeless African women. That doesn’t happen. So what they actually mean is, your *minority* identity is irrelevant to our *majority* creation – *your* identity doesn’t matter, but *mine* does.

The second is I think what Gee is getting at, though I may be wrong. “Look, here’s your chance to pass as a buff, high status straight white guy! Lucky you!” Despite my sarcasm, there’s some real value here. People *can* set aside their low-status signifiers and be judged on the merits of their play, commentary or creations, and that’s of enormous value. However, there’s a price, and that price is being seen as a projective user, rather than as an actual user.

I think this is where a lot of racewank comes from, though it’s a subject I’m very weak on. In a space where nobody has signfiers, most everybody assumes most everyone belongs to the projective users, to the majority. And then somebody says something about a minority that they’d never say if they thought there actually were minorities present, and a flame war starts.

So “no signifiers” *never* means “race, gender, sexuality, age, don’t matter.” It means “each of us assumes all the others are members of the majority.” Which is equalizing, but equalizing at the price of people losing their particularity, their history, their culture.

But we *don’t.*

As Sicart says, we’re all embodied players, and we carry our past, our values and our culture with us. We *can’t* check them at the door.

I’m reminded of one of the early Death Knight quests in WoW, where we, as a servant of the Lich King, steal and don the Scarlet courier’s gear – and suddenly all the Scarlets, whom we’re at war with, appear as friendly to us. Sure, I can stand and talk to High General Abbendis in the middle of the Scarlet army and chat with her, safe in my Scarlet disguise. But let me tell you, if I said “HAI GUYS IZ SCOURGE”  I’d get killed on the spot.

That’s the experience of being any sort of minority, cultural or player, in a lot of “affinity spaces.” As long as we’re all Scarlets here, it’s all happy fansquee. But just go and say “I’m really enjoying my undead lifestyle,” and just watch the flame war start!

The third response is that of the actual user who says, “deal with me, respect me, give me the affordances as a minority that you give to the majority.” *You* get an avatar that looks and moves like you – give me one. You get to flirt with the NPCs you find cute, give me the same ability.

Somehow that’s immensely controversial in the community of developers and players who fit the reflexive-user model.

So, when we speak out in affinity spaces, most of us really aren’t there to harsh your squee by bringing nasty real-world politics into your game space. We’re just bringing *ourselves,* just as you do, but want *our* selves to be acknowledged, represented and respected in the space just as *your* selves are.

I want to squee too – but it’s hard to do with a lame-ass avatar!

Quick Notes: first trip to Venezia/Neo-Venice

There were a good dozen people in the login area, chatting about missing features, and they all seemed to be unaware of the discussion on the boards. Resizing the window to full screen, the chat-scrolling bug, and avatar body customization came up. I asked how to get to Venezia/Neo-Venice: one person said “just click on the board,” which was sort of obvious and not helpful. Transhumanist blogger Giulio Prisco ran over to the right board (labeled “Under Construction”), and told me to right-click on it. I thanked him for his help and headed off.

Even as the region loaded, I was struck by its beauty. It’s really wonderful, and if city builders design to this standard, the place could be amazing.

Movement, however, was more of a challenge than usual: waypoint placement seemed especially persnickety, and I had to move in small steps along the curved path, as placing waypoints even a dozen steps out led to stalling on turns.

A kisok turned out to hold a regional map, which on mouseover pointed out areas of interest. However, there was no point-to-point teleport system as in SL, and no clear relation of the highlights to my present location (like a WoW Carbonite or QuestHelper dotted path with distance estimates). I couldn’t readily (well, at all) relate the locations on the map to my current position, or figure out what I’d need to do to get there.

Something floated by that looked like a drone from the Culture. Intrigued, I tried to right-click on it to examine it – and of course ended up laying down a waypoint that led me to walk into a wall – by which time the drone was gone.

I made my way to a dock, where I was offered a choice of three destinations for the boat taxi. I picked one… and nothing happened, aside from standing in the boat (rarely a good idea) and bobbing in the surf. My camera was frozen (not that I’d have been able to zoom anyway, and the lack of zoom is *physically* frustrating), I couldn’t move, there was no button like SL’s “Stand Up” to end the animation, and I couldn’t click on the destination sphere again.

After a few minutes of bobbing, I decided it was effectively a crash, and logged.  I’d wanted to spend the rest of my morning before class exploring, but rather than log in again and make my way back, I’ll head into WoW and knock out the Dalaran cooking daily. The lag will be worse, but at least the tools will be familiar.

Lessons Learned or Resented?

I’m rapidly emerging from deep skepticism about Blue Mars, and here’s why: they seem to be managed by grownups. After 2 1/2 years of being a subject of Mad King Linden, I could fall on my knees, pledge fealty, and start writing checks. Here’s two incidents from the past 24 hours to illustrate my point.

Over on the Second Life forums, someone posted a link to “The cardinal sin of community management,” a blog post by the former CTO of IMVU. The article is a work of *sheer fucking genius,* by someone who deeply knows what he’s talking about. The link was posted with a short, polite note that the Lindens could benefit from its insights.

A Linden posted in reply, repeatedly:  not, “that’s interesting, thank you,” or “how do you readers think we could use these insights?” but with a fit of defensive, fingerpointing whining. And guess what one of the main takeaways from the article was? “Blaming your customers is rarely good for business.”

Two conclusions are possible: one, that Linden posters can’t follow arguments written in basic English, while not impossible, seems unduly harsh and difficult to prove. The other is that Linden Lab’s culture is so deeply fucked as to be beyond repair. That one is supported by years of evidence, and confirmed nearly daily. It’s sort of the Theory of Evolution of virtual worlds: inescapably true, but there’s a significant contingent living in rabid denial of it.

Here’s the second incident: yesterday I put up a sarcastic, snotty, somewhat negative review of Blue Mars’ avatar creation tools. What was the Blue Mars response?  The first comment I got was from the *freaking CEO* of the corporate owners, Avatar Reality, telling me I’d missed something critical. When I pointed out that I in fact hadn’t, he *publicly thanked me* on Twitter for pointing out a bug that they committed to fixing. And over on the forums and inworld, several official posters stated that new avatar tools and options are on the way.

A lot of us are concerned about how Blue Mars will handle sexuality. IMVU “fired its customers” who wanted free, mature self-expression, starting a downward spiral for the platform, according to their former CTO. Linden Lab has been far more solicitous of demagouges and extremists than its own customer base, engendering a deep bitterness across that base, even for customers without a direct stake in the issue, in exactly the process described in Eric Reis’s cited blog post.

I’m struck by the perception – backed up by a  not-small number of blog comments and tweets from Avatar Reality principals, that they’re actually thinking this issue through, rather than resorting to the least common denominator corporate mentality of IMVU or the sewer-rat paranoia of Linden Lab.

LL’s greatest failure with Second Life was that it left its marketing and image maintenance to griefers and demagogues, rather than to its passionate customers. So far, Avatar Reality seems to be doing an admirable job of respect and inclusion for its customers, apparently regarding us as assets rather than just a source of unending torment

Blue Mars, Newly Rezzed

After okaying my avatar creation, I appeared in a slow-to-rez area (in retrospect, I don’t think it ever actually did in the five minutes or so I spent there), populated by three or four guys chatting, and one other female av, who moved through and out quickly.

Conversation came up in a chat window and also as awkwardly-placed bubbles, overlapping the (really neglible) UI. The chat bubbles aren’t as godawful as Google Lively’s were, but I found them too small to read and badly placed. And, *no* user options, so no apparent way to turn them off.

I tried moving around, with pretty much no success, and used one of the destination signs to leave, in hopes of finding some less laggy area to get my bearings in.

On teleporting out of the “home” area – not “orientation” or “welcome,” as neither of those was present – my “Beach City” destination rezzed more quickly than a moderately busy SL sim, and looked *fantastic.* OTOH, it seems likely that my dual-core, 4 gig RAM laptop won’t be up for the challenge, and I’ll need to run BM on my quad core Alienware desktop instead. BM has *no* HUD, no options, no performance tools, but I’m guessing I’m getting about 4 frames per second.

Beach City was significantly less laggy than the home area, though, and I was able to figure out that WASD did enable movement, and more effectively for me than the waypoint system. Guild Wars uses waypoints, and I find them awkward and immersion-breaking, as opposed to using the arrow keys to move steadily and organically -but that’s a matter of personal taste. BM enables both, and I’m glad of the choice.

The default clothing options for women are short denim shorts or a miniskirt; men get jeans. Tops are a nice polo or a tank top, and of course the infamous bikini. The lack of a longer-than-crotch-length option is seriously annoying. The default female walk is ludicrous, more hip-swingy than the most lascivious SL walks, but improbable rather than sexy. One comes away with the feeling that the avatar design team never actually met women, but read about them in Japanese translations of 1960s Bulgarian girly mags.

Eventually I clicked on the “?” button. It delivered a tutorial on walking and running, then popped up again a few minutes later, to deliver a tutorial on camera movement. The information was immensely useful: despite some 15 minutes of trying things on my own, I hadn’t figured out camera movement. Turns out that the camera can be moved, with right-click + mouse drag – which is bloody awkward on a laptop, but at least it’s possible. The “get a random tutorial when the question mark appears” system is odd and unhelpful: had I known what was on offer, I would have clicked much earlier. The third time it appeared it offered “Walking and Running” again: apparently there are only two tutorials. “Chat” and “UI” would be nice.

I saw another av – but had no idea what to do. There’s no hovering name tag, no “click to view” option – clicking sent me running toward where the other av had been, as she ran off at an angle. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent to the SL profile, or the WoW roleplayer’s addon that serves a similar function. Or, for that matter, the gear check you can get in WoW from clicking on someone’s icon. This is deeply limiting for social interaction, and crippling to professional interaction.

Having gotten the basics of moving and camming down, and seeing nothing readily apparent to do, I logged, ending my first session.

Impressions? I’m reminded of vintage 2007 criticism of SL: lots of gorgeous buildings in deserted regions, because builders hadn’t provided any reason to stay. I don’t think that’s what’s going on in BM, but I do think that a similar mentality is at play: as early SL sim builders were motivated by building, rather than community, they built gorgeous stuff that people would look at once, then leave. Similarly, the BM designers clearly care passionately about what the world looks like, but it seems like avatars and social tools were at the bottom of the development list.

It’s engineer’s mentality, but software doesn’t make a community, social bonds do. And they don’t seem well-supported so far in Blue Mars.

Avatar Creation in Blue Mars

I’ve created my avatar in Blue Mars: Kaseido Quandry for consistency.

Interestingly, I had to choose an avatar gender before downloading the client and being able to see what the default avatars looked like. I’ve found my gender choice is often a factor of whether I can get a distinguished, older-looking male av or not: I’ve honestly never been tremendously happy with my male avs in SL – mostly a function of not being able to find a good skin that’s tanned, with a blond goatee and some weathering:

That’s male-Kaseido in SL, which, meh.

OTOH, Perfect World does a male av I’m really happy with:

Anyway, not knowing what I’d be getting, I chose female, and set myself the challenge of seeing how closely I could match WoW-Kaseido and SL-female-Kaseido:

On starting the Blue Mars avatar creator, I had a choice of default faces. Following a tip from SL blogger GoSpeed Racer, I switched to the Advanced menu, which provides a handful of sliders for each of head, eyes, eyebrows, nose and lips. Oddly, moving the sliders makes the hair fluff out and back, which distracts from the fairly small range of movement in the actual features at issue. Also, oddly, there’s no clear choice of eye color – you get a very dark brown, and that’s that.

There’s a choice of two hairstyles, in blonde, black and reddish brown – “hacked off at chin length with dull scissors” or “Brady Bunch Bangs.” I went with the bangs in blonde.

Some of the slider descriptions were less than obvious – “drawn/pursed” and “puckered/retracted” for lips are still a bit unclear to me, even after playing with them (did I mention the hair-fluffing is distracting?) Likewise, I’m not sure what “heavy/light” for the head does.

By contrast, “Variation” seems to take the current portrait and generate a 3X3 grid, of, well, variations. It helped me get rid of the sort of mean look I hadn’t been able to lose by manipulating the sliders. It’s a fun tool – and somehow managed to get me some lighter lion-golden eyes.

On finishing my face, I was asked to confirm, told that I won’t be able to change my avatar for my first three weeks. I clicked OK, and was taken inworld: there are no customization options for *anything* but the face, a la WoW. And, all the faces look 18-22, though there’s a decent range of skin tones available.

To sum up: the avatar creation tools are midrange for 2003: better than WoW’s, more extensive but distinctly less attractive than Guild Wars, more attractive but less extensive than City of Heroes, and more attractive but less extensive than SL of that era. For 2009? Sub-par and disappointing.

Next up, my first trip inworld.

Blue Mars, Bakhtin and Burning Man

Two articles today touched on the very heart of philosophies of governance in virtual worlds. Both, interviews with former Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale and with current Avatar Reality CEO Jim Sink, pointed towards the choices facing creators of virtual worlds. At the most basic level, creators need to answer, “who is the world for?” Failure to have a coherent answer and appropriate policies dooms VWs, as Google Lively quickly learned. Both CEOs, though, missed – or in Rosedale’s case, was in full retreat from – a strong, coherent answer to that question.

In discussing virtual worlds, one of the first questions one’s often asked is, “why?” It’s an excellent question, both at a personal level and and at the level of the world/business.

I hadn’t had a good personal answer for some time, and hadn’t logged into SL but a few times in a good eight months, when I had a chat with a prominent SL resident who’s been thinking of leaving. Paraphrasing, what they said was that SL is at its most personally rewarding when you’re using it to get something you’re not getting in the physical world, and least rewarding when it’s substituting for something in your offline life.

I’d been using SL as an augmentationist, going to the same sorts of talks and conferences that I go to as a grad student. And that wasn’t holding my interest. Rather, the lag, the technical problems, the policy foolishness from Linden Lab, outweighed any benefit, and left me feeling pretty negative. On thinking about that bit of advice, and asking myself what I wasn’t getting outside of SL, I found renewed purpose and presence. While my crazy schedule this semester is eating time, my online and offline lives are complementary now, rather than conflicting, and I’m enjoying both more than ever.

Now, that advice I got, while seemingly practical and somewhat conservative in the light of personal choice, is potentially radical at the level of worlds.

What if a virtual world conceived of its market niche as providing something powerful and deeply satisfying, that many people don’t get in their offline lives?

Well, they’d be MMOs. MMOs provide an expression of aggression, of competition, of challenge, reward and achievement most of us sadly lack. And as a result, they’re deservedly popular. They deliver the satisfaction of real needs that our culture’s largely failed to address.

What if a non-game world were to do the same thing?

That was the initial premise behind SL – that it would be the Burning Man festival, delivering community, creativity, bacchanalia, but not one weekend of the year in one remote place, but always, globally. And Second Life largely became just that – a geeky carnivale.

But the creators and funders of this expression of creativity, this outlet of sexual energy, this global community of the brilliant and bizarre, craved legitimacy. More and more they denigrated, disrespected, often insulted, their core customers in the pursuit of endorsement from corporate enterprise and higher education. And finally, Philip himself has come to say that SL needs to abandon its Burning Man roots, in order to reach “hundreds of millions.”

Reach them and do what?

What deep need, that goes unmet in the offline lives of “hundreds of millions,” can SL meet by abandoning its roots in the technophilic bacchanalia of Burning Man?

To that question, Philip has no answer.

Meanwhile, Blue Mars, just in open beta (and no, I don’t have a beta key, which will make fieldwork in that world for EDT 691 this semester…interesting), has recognized the possible answers to that question and admitted they don’t know yet which one will work for that world, an admission I found charmingly honest and direct.

There seem to be three paradigms for virtual worlds: food court, science museum, and Burning Man. The food court model offers sanitized sociability and inoffensive goods for sale: Lively and Sony Home, along with most of the corporate-sponsored worlds like MTV’s Laguna Beach, seem to follow this model. One might say that neither the physical nor the digital food court meets any deep human need, but rather aims to numb them, if not erase them, and substitute consumerism. At any rate, most of us have plenty of malls and food courts in our physical lives, and digital version offer only substitution, a recipe for failure by my friend’s astute analysis. And, the market seems to bear that out.

The second, science museum, would bring high culture out of the downtown edifice and into our homes. It’s an excellent and noble goal, and I expect to work in this field to some large degree. As an answer,it’s a good one. As a market, I’m rather less convinced. My discussions with the Blue Mars representatives at the Games Learning + Society conference this summer gave me the impression that this is one of Blue Mars’s core answers. I wish them well, and I’d love to work with them, but I’m not entirely convinced this model can keep the lights on and the servers running.

The third is Burning Man. Here, I think the need is profound: desperately in an America washed to blandness by the determined inoffensiveness of corporate entertainment and the brutal puritanism of the religious right, but still profoundly across an increasingly disembodied, dispassionate West, we need our bacchanalia, our Bakhtinian carnivalesque, our passions to be expressed in music, in the surreal, in the sexual, to match our passions expressed in violence and competition in MMOs.

So why are some five to 12 million (depending on your estimation of how many accounts are owned by gold farmers) people active in World of Warcraft and only some fifty thousand 750,000 (thanks to Hamlet Au for the correction – 50K is concurrency, 750k is monthly users) (depending on your estimation of bot traffic) active in SL?

There are a lot of reasons, some cultural, some corporate. One has to be that Blizzard Entertainment has determinedly, creatively *met* the emotional needs of its user base, while Linden Lab, embarrassed by its customers, has largely worked to hinder theirs.

I’m left with an image from my course readings this week: Clifford Geertz’s Deep Play: notes on the Balinese cockfight, in which the village cockfight is raided by state authorities, the result of “pretensions to puritanism” by a state seeking orderly, id-free nationbuilding rather than the passion, the status contests, the not-so-sublimated sexuality, of the ring.

Will the villagers of SL, and the academics among them, soon scatter before a raid by Linden troopers, in the name of the legitimacy of church and state? And if so, whither Burning Man, whither our needs for the creative, the sensual, the passionate? Will we be left with only outlets for making Warcraft, not, um,… Lovecraft? One suspects our cultural Cthulu cannot long be repressed, and hopes that some smart entrepreneur will seek out the market Philip would abandon.

Blue Mars forums, day one

As I’m studying  Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for ENG 553, Video Games Studies, I hope to study Blue Mars for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds.

Still waiting for my beta key for Blue Mars, but I finally got into the forums, on about my 20th try at entering the captcha.

I admit that I’m approaching Blue Mars with some deep predjudcies (I won’t *say* schadenfreude), that are coloring my perceptions. I think that vetting content, rather than enabling user creativity, has both proven itself a failure as a business model (There, Home, Lively) and is generally a bad, disempowering, anti-democratic thing. And my long conversation with the community developers gave me the impression that while they’re trying very hard, they have zero experience with virtual communities, don’t know what they don’t know, and don’t know enough to bring on a veteran community manager.

My read through the forums this moring suggested that my initial impressions remain accurate. The “suggestions” forum had threads mocking the ballyhooed announcement yesterday that BM was issuing bikinis to its female avatars “because women demanded it,” criticizing the lack of avatar customization, the sumbissive flirtatiousness of the female animations (‘sleazy” and “not businesslike”), and camera positioning and avatar expressions that break the fourth wall.The discussion of user generated content also repeatedly referred to the empowering aspects of easy entry into creation in SL, compared to the technological and administrative barriers that are key to the BM approach.

By contrast, a discussion on sexual expression was remarkably clear and sophisticated, driven by one poster’s observations that a VW needs to clearly address a fundamental need to be successful, citing socializing and achievement in WoW and intimacy in SL. BM has apparently remained largely silent on the subject: on the one hand one suspects the corporate clients they’re wooing want a complete ban on sexual expression, while, if they’ve done their homework at all (dubious), BM will see that this poster is right about mature interaction being the key to a successful adults’ VW.

There was one statement quoted that community policies would be set by regional developers (akin to sim owners in SL, but on a larger scale), which bodes well for governance and user empowerment. We’ll see.