Slashdot Mirror
One Journalist's Second Life
Jerry23 writes "The Second Life Community Convention site is carrying pre-release excerpts from O'Reilly Publishing's 'Only A Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much' due out in 2006 (direct link to 10-page PDF). From the introduction: 'When virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from the digital world of The Sims Online for being a bit too good at his job, it wasn't the end of the story but the beginning of the headlines that would capture readers around the world. Only A Game follows Ludlow's career as a virtual journalist as he and colleague Mark Wallace take us behind the scenes into not just The Sims Online but a fascinating universe of worlds that are far more colorful-and, at times, more disturbing-than their creators would have you believe.' As online *worlds* grow to earn their name, the last line of the PDF asks the million dollar question: 'How big is your game?'"
People having fun without an imposed gameplay. Shock! Send in the journalists! Exactly how many times can you report "look Ma, no rules" story before people start labelling you as a formularic hack?
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you were wondering why Peter Ludlow was banned from the Sims Online for doing is job "too well"... well, so was I. So I googled and found the answer.
The BBC says"Mr Ludlow thought the people behind the game should know what was going on inside Alphaville, not least because some things - child prostitution, for example - are morally and legally troubling.
But when they found out, Maxis, the game's developers, and Electronic Arts, the distributors, banned all in-game mention of The Alphaville Herald, says Mr Ludlow.
Then, says Mr Ludlow, he was thrown out of the game and his accounts closed down, cutting him off from his Sims."
Slashdot also covered this previously and links to this Gamespot interview.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
The problem with Second Life's business model is that there are only so many twelve year old girls with computers, so your potential for growth is limited by that market - unless you can some how convince older people and boys to get off dressing up virtual dolls and chatting in a 3D AOL environment.
Second Life is not only full of adults, but it's expressly for adults only, by its very terms and conditions. In fact, when the possibility of minors being allowed in was mooted, there was virtually unanimous rejection of the idea, and Linden Labs ended up creating a small Teen Grid on the side for minors, totally disconnected from the main one.
So your comment is not just incorrect, but entirely ridiculous.
Ludlow's experience is not surprising. Every online games company on Earth plays god, believing that they have the sole right to direct the evolution of "their" world despite the fact that 90% of its value comes from the synergy of its players.
It doesn't seem to register with these corporations that without the interaction between gamers, all they have is a Massively Single-Player Offline Game, and that all their servers and networks and GMs and content providers just burn up dollars as a recurring cost and provide no return at all. More so than in any other producer-consumer relationship, the players in MMOGs are priceless. Yet, their desires are so often ignored.
This isn't going to change, as it's in the nature of company management to want to control. Until someone finally produces the prototype of that open and distributed metaverse that everyone is always talking about, the Ludlow experience will be repeated, time and again.
Second Life may be the closest to an acceptable platform that we have experienced so far, but if anyone annoyed Linden Labs in the same way that Ludlow annoyed the owners of TSO, you can pretty much guarantee that he would be murdered yet again.
Only a distributed world will be free of that, and even then, coercion from those who dislike what you are doing will still exist.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Funny thing is... 12 year olds aren't even allowed in Second Life. Heck, there's a whole separated world for 13-17 year olds with the primary world being 18+ ONLY. This is why even the free client still asks you for a credit card; age verification.
It is definitely a stretch to call Ludlow a journalist. He is actually a guy who roll-plays as a journalist in a meta-game that orbits a virtual world -- he is a philosophy professor who pretends to be a journalist.
The problem with that is he freely mixes real news (real news from the real world, and real news from the virtual world) with roll-play fantasy, speculative conspiracy theories, tongue-in-cheek editorials and satire. It requires a refined undestanding of the issues to differentiate the material -- any newcomer to his work will have trouble telling the difference.
It is a shame O'Reilly is publishing his work.
..an MMO would be a great place to test the concept of a DIRECT democracy.
Imagine you're destroying the hordes of Nazarath when a little context window pops up in the corner of the screen that say "Amendment 23 requires your attention and voting participation."
And, then to take it even further you can test even more radical political approaches in MMO's like an institution REQUIRING it's denizens to vote or their account would be suspended. It would be a great testbed for real governments to find if hypothetical political strategies are even feasible.
But yes, before we could even get to that point on a mainstream level game we have to break through this facist barrier from game publishers, or look at freely distributed solutions which make it glaringly obvious there is a market for this type of "game".
In respect to his account being banned, I can sympathize with both sides. It mainly comes down to who the game is marketed to. I'm sure some Sim players didn't want to hear about virtual drama when they're playing to escape real life drama, for example.
In the end I'd have to side with SOE just because they didn't DESIGN the Sims to allow virtual/real currency exchange, and they certainly didn't design it to be an extension of the real world, regardless whether it is.
To the author of the article I WOULD say "Just go buy the game which does allow and foster a sense of the next frontier for virtual colonization."
But, the game you're looking for doesn't exist, yet.
Some more pointers for your design:
:-)
- Use an authority-at-the-leaves, power-at-the-root type of architecture, ie. like DNS. It's the only way it'll scale to MMOG-type numbers in multiplayer events, while still allowing people to control their own worlds and not get "Ludlow'd" by critics nor "Slashdotted" by popularity.
- Make the root servers no more than multi-world caches, accepting client logins, and sucking content from their authoritative leaf node worlds on demand. No doubt universities and then later corporations will start offering big iron services to handle the root load, but as mere caches, they will have no say on (nor responsibility for) the world content.
- Start by defining an extensible leaf-to-cache and cache-to-client protocol. This is absolutely mandatory, because there will be no fixed points in this evolving, distributed environment, and no possibility of dropping the system offline for a global upgrade.
- Don't expect it to be easy. But, if everything you do is extensible and distributed, then the power of a million eager world builders will prevail.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
O'Reilly MAKE magazine editor Philip Torrone has already casually commented that MAKE is thinking of putting out some SL How Tos. Now I'm totally looking forward to something like the O'Reilly Metaverse Developers Conference =D. That's got to be on its way sometime, with an eye to Web 3.0 ;-).
It never occurs to him that he doesn't own the server. In any gaming world you only have the rights that the -owners- allow you to have. For them to risk lawsuits and legal charges solely to satisfy a single user's bizarre sense of entitlement is stupid.
Even more so when he's now playing on a system where it is FREE.
This is like the guy who comes into your store, and buys a soda (or nothing at all), and thinks he can now start telling everyone what to do and how to do it. It's pretty damn arrogant if you ask me, and shows just how clueless this guy is about the internet, the law, and business in general.
If he really had any clue at all, he'd start his own game world.
Ludlow may feel that he was doing a service by bringing to the public eye what some users of TSO were up to.
My feeling is that he was doing a disservice, by publicizing an avenue by which some people could do things that society at large feels is unethical -- and where to find that avenue.
The correct course of action, the method of greatest benefit and least harm, would have been to make his concerns known privately to the operators of the server(s) in question. If that produced no effect, he should have brought it to the attention of authorities.
Only if legal authorities did not take action should he have set up his broadcast antenna.
My opinion? Ludlow is an attention-whore. He revels in the attention that people give him when he publishes his shrill opinions.
The best solution would be for him to be ignored by the public. Unfortunately, as we've seen with recent action against adult game content, this isn't going to happen.
The only plus I see from his outcries is thatparents maypay more attention to what their kids are doing -- but this doesn't apply to Second Life, since that kind of content is only allowed on the AO server(s).
What the gamer community, and the freedom-of-speech community, need to do is to expose him for what he is -- a sensationalist. We need to publicly scoff at his petty tirades, and ridicule his luddite attitude.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
We the people do hereby decree:
"Hold a tournament, appoint the victor king, and switch off this nuisance of a democracy mechanism."
[yes] [no] [abstain]
I had a credit card before I was 18.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Hrmph! I read his 10 page PDF. It appeared to be of much higher caliber than his pretend news blog. Maybe it won't be so bad after all.
If it said "Mattel" on it, it probably wasn't real.
We all like to bitch about developpers playing God and whatnot, but honestly I think running a MMO like a democracy would fail for several reasons:
1. The average player has _no_ clue of game design and the implications a change has.
E.g., more than half the players don't seem to understand that the numbers on a MUD or MMO are meaningless by themselves, and mean anything only as ratios to the other numbers. E.g., that (going by Blizzard's claim that an extra group member gives you roughly +10 levels) if I gave you twice the hit points and damage per second output, but put you against enemies 10 levels higher, you're exactly back to square one.
So everyone just whines for a shortcut, for a bigger number on their weapon or whatever, without even understanding what they're asking for or where that shortcut leads. (Usually towards a "click here to be level 60 and receive all the best equipment" kind of game. And then they'd whine that the game is boring.)
That doesn't apply to only DPS numbers, btw. Other issues, such as PvP or the economy or combat/crafting mechanics are whined about just the same by people who don't even understand what they're asking for and what the effects would be.
Briefly, I'll take a good designer any day instead of a horde of monkeys randomly clicking on voting buttons.
2. Griefers. Virtual governments have the same problem as in-character justice and other such tried-and-failed ideas. Namely: there's _nothing_ you can do in-character to someone who doesn't stay in-character and sees their character as disposable to start with.
Same here: there _will_ be a bunch of people voting just to cause the most disruption and damage, because it doesn't affect them.
3. Some issues aren't even feasible to solve that easily. Those companies have finite (if large) funds after all. If they end up having to check on and babysit every single player, sorry, your $13 a month just isn't enough for that.
E.g., sure, a guy can get a lot of political capital by playing the bogus "waah, I'm a victim! EA supressed my free speech when I ranted and raved against their game, and blew bogus issues like virtual prostitution out of proportion" card. But honestly, even if you voted that EA cracks down on virtual vice, how would they enforce that and at what cost?
I can tell you firsthand that none of the major MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's the players being inventive with other commands (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out) or just with typed text, IRC/AOL style. So if anyone voted that EA cracks down on that, EA would literally have to read everyone's chats with everyone else, and go through lists of all emote commands used, etc.
And then someone else would make a fuss about how EA violates their privacy. More voting, more posers playing virtual politician and agitating the masses, lather, rinse, repeat ad-nauseam.
4. For that matter, it would be just too much of an expense and effort just to keep up with the posers trolling for attention that way. Especially if you give them attention: nothing gets a troll going on and on like getting attention. And once you've officially invited them to play politician and have to democratically debate with them every bogus issue they come up with, that's what you gave them: lots and lots of publicity and attention.
I can see that getting out of hand fast. Every single ban (e.g., for outright cheating) would be brought up as some major political issue that needs to be debated and voted on, every single new spell or NPC would be debated to death too, etc. It would take a whole PR department just to keep up with the uphill battles of proving that, no, ffs, that guy isn't a martyr persecuted by the publisher, but someone who used hacks and cheats.
Etc.
Basically, dunno, democracy sounds good and fine, but I don't want to pay 2-3 times the monthly cost just so the devs can afford to implement it. And I can do without the open invitation for every poser and troll to play politician.
The iron fist rule of the publisher isn't perfect, but it works reasonably well. I can live with that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You may have a lot of clue, heck, you may even be the most intelligent person to ever walk the Earth, the fact still is: you still don't inherently have any rights on EA's private property. (E.g., on their TSO servers.)
As they say, "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. And the first amendment mentions very explicitly that it only applies to the government. ("Congress shall make no law..." and "to petition the government for a redress of grievances".) That wasn't in response to anything specific in your message, but just to set the stage very clear: you have no rights whatsoever on EA's servers.
If they want to listen to you ok. If not, not. Tough luck, go talk to someone else then.
The same goes for in-game "journalism." In respect to what happens on their servers, EA isn't censoring the press, EA _is_ the press there. They have the final word over what content they allow in their medium.
Same as you can't go to the New Your Times and demand that they print your blog, or to CNN and demand that they give you air time to hype your blog, you can't demand that EA carries it in-game either.
It doesn't matter why, and they don't even have to explain why. Maybe the editor just didn't think the topic fits, or thought it was a too sensitive topic, or thought you were too verbose, or maybe he had a personal vendetta against you. Or maybe he had a bad day and just dumped it into the trashcan unread. It doesn't matter. It's their right to do so.
If you don't possess the millions to own the press, it doesn't matter how clued or intelligent you are, you have exactly as much or as little rights as the owner wants to give you. Maybe sad, but them's the breaks.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So what you're saying is, MMOGs are almost exactly like real life?
It seems as if many MMORPG makers see there worlds as virtual playgrounds. You can play , but so help you god if you try to change it... I for one find a playground is most fun when you're not using it in the way it was intended. I'm reminded of a MUD I used to play. MUD was different from MMORPGs for many reasons, but unlike most MMORPGs they have almost unlimited customizability. Given that, you would expect the players some ability to change the world and have an impact. Instead me and my friends were killed by a GM event when we tried to claim a town for our own. Go figure.
Gosh.. i've you had read the article and the PDF you would have known that he was reporting on stuff that happened inside TSO on his weblog outside of the game.
Also: EA removed his account because they didnt want the TSO players to know about the scamming. (and all the other bad stuff that can happen to players)
They didnt discuss it, they just whiped his account.
He wasnt making claims about 'the players own the world they play in'.. so your entire point just flushed down the toilet of useless comments.
What he said was: The players create the content and the stories in the game. They make the game fun.
Dang.. You just sound like a customer.. who enters an online blog.. and without reading the posts (maybe just glancing over the subject lines) starts telling people why the stuff stated in the posts is wrong. Sound familiar?
Let's see, Ludlow wrote his Sims blog for a measly 6 weeks before his account was terminated. Yet this mini-experience netted him a book deal with O'Reilly, a book that comes a full 2 years after the events being described, in which he describes in colorful language how his character was "murdered" by Electronic Arts. Please. Ludlow, it's very simple. When you signup to play an MMO, you agree to a legal contract called a "Terms of Service". It says that the company makes the rules, and they can choose to terminate your account at any time. Move along, people, nothing to see here.
I've not only read the PDF, I read his Journal. He seems to think he has the right to not only bitch to the owners of the game about everything that is wrong, but to demand that they fix it!
And we're not just talking game bugs here.
As someone who has run his own MMO, and who has run an extremely popular area on a fairly popular MMO for almost a decade, I know what I'm talking about. I run into people like this all the time. They want to 'help' you by telling you what to do to make things 'better'.
I know what people want, I know how to please the majority, I know how to get a thousand people a day to pass through my place. Can you or this journalist do that?
Heck no.
I can. Two words for increased traffic.
Free porn!