Raph’s Website » Off to New York for State of Play





By N2H

blog · games · writing · music · art · shop · about Raph · contact

Off to New York for State of Play

June 18th, 2009 (Visited 1338 times) Tags: speaking, state of play

I am flying off to New York in about two hours for State of Play VI. If I have the chance, I will liveblog some of the sessions… but last few conferences, I failed miserably at that, so we’ll see.

I’ll be giving a keynote all about Metaplace, and also be on a panel on the issue of whether or not virtual worlds have hit a design plateau.

I plan to be live in Metaplace tomorrow around 9:15am Eastern time, so if anyone wants to show up in Central around then, you can wave hi to all the conference folks!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

23 Responses to “Off to New York for State of Play”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

Reader Comments

We Fly Spitfires said on June 18th, 2009 at 11:49 am:
Good luck with it and hope the flight is nice and smooth. Looking forward to hearing about it all.
Jerry Paffendorf said on June 18th, 2009 at 7:56 pm:
See you bright and squirrely!
Raph said on June 18th, 2009 at 9:31 pm:

OK, no so bright and squirrelly now, given that I just got to the hotel at quarter past midnight…!
len said on June 19th, 2009 at 12:39 pm:
Knock ‘em dead, Slugger.

Thanks for the bit on live gigging in Metaplace. Great!
taolurker said on June 19th, 2009 at 5:05 pm:
Was wondering when you would make it here to the East Coast, and wish I had known about this conference sooner.

So, How was that live blogging shaping up?
Raph said on June 19th, 2009 at 7:45 pm:

The liveblogging has outright not happened. I only made it to one panel…!
Prokofy Neva said on June 20th, 2009 at 11:22 pm:
Raph, can you just explain in a paragraph what the Gr8t Deb8t of this year was all about? I see all these tweets banging on Jim Bowers from Whyville, but he normally makes a lot of sense and most conferences I’ve heard him speak at, so I don’t know the issues.

If Ted Castronova was saying “can your players vote you out of the game” then he was betraying his bias toward seeing every single virtual space as “a game” which it is not. My impression of Whyville is that it is more a communal space with a lot of different things happening in it, from socializing to internal games to learning opportunities so that it needs a civil society/governance structure — and has one, unlike the wilds of Second Life especially in its earlier years.

What we can’t do with Castronova’s games is vote Zeus the game dev out of office — we can’t even have a bill of rights that gives us, the user, the right to IP and freedom of expression — in his bill of rights there’s only freedom of expression for game gods.

If I have to chose, I’d rather pick a platform that has a sole authority or proprietary company that creates a platform with basic democratic rule of law and then the freedom to operate within that for the user, than a supposedly open-ended platform with no governance and laissez-faire libertarians — who in fact end up creating the tyranny of the hedonic oldbie or ad farmer or grief-builder basically depriving everyone else of their rights. Unfortunately, that *is* the choice we mainly have in worlds.
Raph said on June 21st, 2009 at 4:35 am:

My sense was that people started resenting what Jim had to say in part because he asked a question at every panel, and in part because he comes across as making pronouncements with his questions. But much of what Jim said was quite sensible and straightforward, and most wouldn’t disagree, I suspect, with the broad strokes of what he is getting at in terms of the degree to which operators shape the in-world culture by their choices, and the commonest techniques used to do so. Many of the folks here want governance of virtual spaces to arise out of the people completely; Jim feels that in many ways it’s a solved issue for virtual worlds, and that all the experimentation that people describe is more likely to lead to bad experiences, bad governance, and even dangerous learning on the part of users. Bear in mind that he makes a world for kids, so his arguments are coming at things from that particular angle.

I don’t think that this was the great debate this year though. Maybe it was.
Liz Lawley said on June 21st, 2009 at 3:36 pm:
Raph, it was great to see you at SoP!

And no, Bowers wasn’t the “great debate” by any means. He was, however, extraordinarily annoying. It wasn’t that he asked questions at every panel; instead, he took up 5-10 minutes of what could have been question time by making a speech (a repetitive one, at that), and being borderline (and sometime not even borderline) insulting to the panelists. That never leads to productive outcomes. Trolling is trolling, whether online or in the physical world. It’s just harder to /ignore someone who’s hogging a microphone.
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 22nd, 2009 at 11:26 am:
Perhaps I should jump in here – I DON’T think that this was the big debate at this meeting – and, frankly, I was surprised at the reaction to that effect. Seems I hit a resonate cord with “the internet is the new utopia” crowd. Alternative, several students said something like “I can’t believe you questioned Castronova”, however, (and I appologize for my ignorance) I didn’t even KNOW who is IS, although it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

– and just for the record, I do think that I probably stepped to the microphone more than I should have — although, actually, it wasn’t like there were long lines of people waiting to talk — Instead, it was more like in many sessions, people were falling asleep.

And yes, I repeated myself – but here is why:

Despite Raph’s characteristically interesting and provocative and open minded (he might not think so), kick off key note – MOST of the meeting was focused almost entirely on supposid lessons learned from Worlds of Warcraft (arguably in my view NOT a virtual world) and quess what, Second Life. And the participants were largely academics – who, in my view (as myself an academic) have SOME obligation to maintain or even seek a larger point of view. There are now more than 400 virtual worlds on the Internet, not even counting the metaverse-based variations – WHY were the presentations and their various pronouncements and assumptions STILL based on the odd (and I think transient) features of Second Life. There are AT LEAST an order of magnitude more humans in Habbo every day than there have ever been in second life. Habbo was hardly even mentioned, and the session on kids virtual worlds was only attended by 1/5 of the meetings participants. Instead, almost all of the conversation was about adult use of virtual worlds, when in fact the population most involved in virtual world living are kids. And the issues there are completely different.

Even the secondary title of the meeting ‘plateau’ reflects this bias. (I don’t see anything like a plateau in Whyville or other kids virtual worlds – and need I say, kids are the future).

As I suggested in one of my diatribes, the lack of structure in second life seems to allow academics to postulate all kinds of connections to things past and future – almost any authority on anything can imagine how second life either does, should or could reflect their own particular view of the world – but who cares, really?? Linden labs is following Fortura into the world of selling things to the military — for the obvious reasons.

So, I was honestly very dissapointed and also extremely annoyed at the lack of intellectual rigor, knowledge and imagination represented by many of the presenters in the meeting. My reaction under these circumstances is to try to shake things up.

There were exceptions — of course, as I mentioned (and not just blowing smoke here) Raph’s keynote was well considered and also somewhat aggresive as well, perhaps anticipating the need to broaden some perspectives in the room. And Ren’s panel on virtual worlds and policy makers was also characteristically informative and interesting. BUT, with a few other individual exceptions, on balance, what was presented at the meeting was at least myopic and in many cases simply wrong (who says kids don’t like poetry, and since when is Linden lab making $100MM dollars and year, and where is the evidence anywhere in human history that humans don’t want and need governance – jeesshhh).

So, sorry, my response to this kind of situation is to be annoyingly persistent —

Lets not kill the messenger on this one.

(keeping in mind, Zeus never dies)
Peter S. said on June 22nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm:
Now I’m tempted to put *kills Zeus* at the top of my reply. I’m not the only one, just admit it.

Quick thoughts:

1. There’s tons of evidence in human history of people not wanting governance, not wanting the governance they need, or wanting a governance they don’t need (or wouldn’t want if they better knew what they were getting into).

2. Tone counts, in as much as it can pull people’s attention away from what you’re saying. Just the tone of the post here is more aggressive than inviting.

Whoops, need to get to a meeting. Grr.
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 22nd, 2009 at 3:44 pm:
with respect to 2) ah yes, “tone” counts more or less depending. Less if you agree, more if you don’t.

with respect to 1) the argument trivially could come down to the definition of “governance” but avoiding that, the point I was making is that primates, including humans, are hierarchical and social – define themselves in terms of social groups and tribes. In the absence of some imposed form of social political structure, they design develop and impose their own (and fight over which one wins). In the case of Second Life – there IS actually an imposed order, it just wasn’t made very clear in the beginning or wasn’t something much that Linden Labs thought about or wanted to think about, or thought they needed to think about. My early discussions with the developers (pre launch) had much the flavor of, ‘if you build it they will come and behave” – which I attributed to a liberitarian / utopian ethic, for which there is little evidence in human history — a point I made in the meeting (only once I think), but for which there seems to be a lot of sympathy in the Internet crowd.

In any event, clearly, those days are gone, even in second life. But the discussion of this topic at the meeting, was almost completely dominated by a consideration of WoW and SL, unfortunately. For example, one of the observations made at the meeting by a panelist – was that in “virtual worlds” (read Second Life), perhaps the relationship between the owners (designers) and the citizens (users) should be modeled on fuedal political structure (and law) – the argument being (in part) that that was better than the current perceived anarchy (again in second life), and/or the fact of actual autocracy of virtual worlds (again read second life).

While the discussion that ensued was interesting, in fact there are many other ways to do things, several of them already manifest in virtual worlds, and in the case of Whyville manifest for more than 10 years (ie. before SL or WoW launched). I am a neurobiologist, not a social scientist, however, if I presented a paper at a major meeting that had as limited a breadth as many of the discussions at State of Play, it would be taken very badly, in tone and otherwise.

With respect to Whyville, we explicitly set out to build a system of governance reflecting the best accumulated wisdom and experience we knew of (and that which we knew best). The resulting system combines what we had observed for 17 years about successful class room (read small village) learning management, with various features of the political structure of the state of California (Elected senate, system of petitions, open press, etc). As a business, BUT ALSO as responsible managers, the owners, like the classroom teacher, have to be in a position to be able to make fundamental decisions consistent with the objectives and values of the site — in the case of Whyville, children’s learning in a safe encouraging environment. Whyville also has a space for dissent (the WHyville times) and a way for any citizen to contact the ‘gods” known as city managers. In addition, we also make very clear what our ethics and governmental structure is. The result is web leading engagement figures, both for per visit lengths and duration of active use. So, in fact, there is a business pay off for the attention as well.

As far as political analogies go, you can think of the owners representing the judiciary interpreting a constitution if you want a US centric interpretation, OR – what I have realized over time, is that the governing structure of Whyville more resembles a Greek City state – where there are mortals, and an elected senate, that mediates (and communicates) between the citizens and the gods (thus, the reference to Zeus) who as a whole share a basic set of beliefs, but whose implementation details are dynamic and being ever refined. The fact that Whyville is a poly theism (in effect) matters, as no one of the gods (or city managers as we are called in whyville) rules supreme. There are many voices even at that level. Our users know we each have different personalities and different powers and they appeal to us in different ways accordingly.

What has been interesting is to see how well it works, suggesting that this is actually a very natural form of governance for humans.

Anyway, I don’t want this to be a long ramble on the governance structure of Whyville – but, I hope that it is at least a little clearer the source of the frustration and annoyance — and yes the TONE That results, when I endlessly have to listen to discussions of Virtual worlds as if there is only one. And when the one (or two if you include WoW) was, in fact, not very well designed at all from many points of view (technical and governmental).

Frankly, tone be damned, there are some failings more significant than tone -
taolurker said on June 22nd, 2009 at 10:13 pm:
Jebus WTF?!?

Knowing when to be succinct and when people aren’t going to take you seriously because you say too much seem like definite failings. You also can’t ask a question if you are too busy making statements.

Please take note: It’s not what you say or how you say it (tone) as much as saying just enough and not too much.

I was actually wanting to step to the microphone and ask questions in the developer roundtable but 1) did not wish to stand, 2) was waiting to see if someone asked my question before me, and 3) was quite shocked that the few people able to ask questions spent as much time expounding prior to their query as the roundtable spent answering them. If there were time and focused, directed questions, I bet more people would’ve stood to ask something.
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 am:
just for the record, not that it matters, but I wasn’t in the developers workshop — and in fact, MOST of the “questions” asked in the sessions of this meeting weren’t questions – further, most of the ’short introductions’ by the panels were also mini-discourses – for whatever reasons –

Perhaps the standard for communication and discourse has now become some tweet or other – which is too bad
Yukon Sam said on June 23rd, 2009 at 9:08 am:
The killer app for virtual worlds is anarchy. Apart from a sparse handful of rules (or better, game physics) to keep griefing down to a dull ache, the fewer restrictions that are imposed (whether from the devs or from some form of player government), the more dynamic and creative the community will be. Whether that creativity manifests itself in entirely new forms of interactive art or in the search for the perfect sex bed engine is largely irrelevant; if the world doesn’t allow both, odds are that you’re not going to get either. That’s the nature of freedom — you’ve got to be free to make bad, risky and tasteless choices as well as good, safe, aesthetic ones.

And THAT’s what makes Second Life INFINITELY more interesing to discuss than some kiddie autocracy (or would that be theocracy?).
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 23rd, 2009 at 11:05 am:
Pop anthropology (sociology, political science, art history, whatever) – I love it.

Any evidence in human history (or second life for that matter) for your assertion – or doesn’t it matter – how you “feel” about something trumps about 8,000 years of human history, experience, and thought.

Oh, and BTW, if you really think that Linden Labs is running an experiment in anarchy – my suggestion is that you dig a little deeper. Linden labs is running a business – complete with everything that entails —

And you made a nice contribution to their marketing efforts. congrats.
Yukon Sam said on June 23rd, 2009 at 2:17 pm:
My central thesis is this: the fewer restrictions that are imposed, the more dynamic and creative the community will be. And I really think, looking over the broad sweep of human history, it should be self-evident.

A few examples that come to mind; the weakening of the Comics Code Authority heralded the emergence of comics as art, with more mature stories and themes. The end of the Hays Code preceded a similar blossoming of American cinema. The social turmoil of the sixties gave us rock and roll, pop art, performance art and a revitalized fashion industry, just as the roaring twenties energized jazz, literature, art deco, and modern dance. The great masters of the post-impressionistic period arose in cultural settings with decidedly diminished social strictures and mores. The Italian Renaissance was a direct response to the weakening central power of the Catholic church; just as the Elizabethan era was marked by a significant reduction in repression and religious persecution (of Catholics under Henry VIII and Protestants under Mary) and a concurrent flourishing of drama and other art.

For counter-examples, we need look no further than the authoritarian regimes of Soviet Russia, Communist China or Nazi Germany. Art harnessed in the service of the state ceases to be art at all, but becomes mere propoganda.

In terms of virtual worlds, it’s no surprise that the font of creativity is Second Life. Disregarding derivative worlds based off the SL source code, there’s simply no other graphical virtual world of any significance that offers an accessible tool set to create content, a minimum of constraints on the form of that content, and IP ownership to the creator. And that’s why we have real world art instalations exploring the emergence of “mixed reality” art in Second Life, amazing interactive virtual light sculpture, and more SL fashion blogs than there are RL fashion blogs.

Game worlds without any of that are great fun. I play them all the time. But if I want to do anything serious, something with any significance beyond wasting a few hours in mindless fun, I go to Second Life.

I’ll kick the Lindens daily and twice on Sunday for various boneheaded mistakes, most especially recent policy choices to appease stuffed suits at the expense of core users. But artistic freedom is something that they did right.
Raph said on June 23rd, 2009 at 2:21 pm:

You must admit though, Sam, that there was still plenty of governance during the 60s, 20s, and Renaissance. There’s a lot of middle ground and subtlety here…
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 23rd, 2009 at 3:27 pm:
Correlation is not causation – one can equally argue that the periods of energized art you mention were a result of actual (or fake in the case of the 20s) excess in resources and as a result, societal STABILITY, and that changes in governance followed, and didn’t lead societal changes at all.

By the way, this has strong support in biological modeling in population genetics.

Furthermore, I believe your original claim was that anarchy itself was necessary for creative expression to flourish, and my challenge was to give me an example in human history. As Raph points out – there was no such thing in any of the periods you mention – quite the contrary.

Anarchy produces chaos, and chaos is something that humans avoid (and lots and lots of humans who have gone to Second Life once or twice, haven’t returned).

So, perhaps you are arguing that some special type of human reaches their ultimate creative potential under these circumstances. But I am not such an elitist, and I don’t accept that argument at all. Case in point, Whyville currently has about 3,0000 registered avatar part design shops, and our poor suppressed kids have generated more than 1MM parts and sell about 40,000 of them a day to other kids. We are currently in discussion with a major clothing manufacturer to have those designs influence a real line of clothing in the real world. The reason – the professional design guys LOVE what our kids are doing and our kids do too.

BUT, every design that ends up in the virtual stores of Whyville passes through our curation system for content – NOT style, but offensive content. Why? because offensive content is a turn off to everyone – FURTHER, the fact that we impose standards has meant that our kids have reached above and beyond those standards –

So, I have famously been quoted in the past as saying, if you build a place where anyone can do anything, it will end up being a cross between Bagdad where the terrorists run wild, and Orange County, where the developers run wild. Who wants to live THERE – not me (and it would be hard to argue that much interesting art has come out of either place recently).

p.s. one other point about deregulation – the weakening of the comics code authority allowed a supressed underground comics movement to bubble up – one can argue the same for several of the other periods of time you mention. So, in fact, there is probably more evidence that repression leads to great art than anarchy — the release from repression allows it to bubble up, become commercial, and often trivial, corrupted, and bad in the process.
Peter S. said on June 23rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm:
@ James (mostly),

You’re a neurobiologist? Dude, very cool.

My understanding (as a base) is that humans are social and self-interested, and the interaction of these two drives leads to hierarchial social structure.

These structures are emergent given the two base conditions (social and self-interested). In other words, I agree that people ‘design, develop and impose’ their own. The aspects of the structures, such as what are in-group and out-group criteria or what behaviors are and aren’t tolerated, will of course differ (and differ wildly). (Aside, “Artistic freedom ends where art criticism begins,” to make up a quote toward what Yukon Sam was saying.)

Taking the name Zeus is accurate in this sense: the designers are gods, not politicians. Note that I’m not saying they are like gods, they are gods, able to define the fundamental nature of their pocket reality in absolute terms. (Example: can people be harmed or killed? Can people fly?)

Thus, there is the ability to establish, in a fundamental and absolute sense, a political system, as though Democracy or Communism or any other system were as fundamental of a rule as gravity. Or, if not explicitly done, to craft the nature of the place to inherently favor some structure or structures over others. (Example: in-game currency certainly may favor capitalism, where a lack of such may favor a barter economy [fiat currency notwithstanding].)

There is also the ability to establish these systems at a more “profane”, less fundamental level, using any of the tricks gods have traditionally used to impress their desires upon the mortals. The difference is, one can violate the Ten Commandments but cannot violate the Laws of Thermodynamics.

I’m saying all this because this distinction becomes very important when replying to a statement like:

What has been interesting is to see how well it works, suggesting that this is actually a very natural form of governance for humans.

…given that the speaker is literally able to define natural law. How much of the natural feeling is due quite literally to the place’s nature, making a given system work more naturally? How much is alternately due to the “priests”, the representatives, interpreters, salespersons and ultimately communication pathways presumed to be following the will of the gods? How much is due to the people themselves, in the light of the self-selection bias inherent in all games? (“Over time, the players remaining in your game will be the people who like your game as it is right now,” to mangle a quote that could well have come from Raph.)

Okay, damn, that’s an awful lot to type just to set up what I was going to say. You’re not the only mike-hog here, dude.

In any case, this does relate to the discussion of freedom and governance between James and Yukon as the potential for social calamity exists regardless. Anarchy doesn’t (explicitly doesn’t) prevent people from forming social cliques that can, even with no authority, stifle individualism and creativity. Should authority intervene, and governance imposed? Should it be the priests or the gods themselves? “Less is better” is to me too simple of an answer, and one providing no direction for what form the intervention would best take.

Thus, I think, the reason for the discussion of what form these relationships should evolve into, from those currently existing in the two currently well-known examples. I can see a criticism that perhaps they should not have picked the examples due to their ease of discussion, and one that perhaps people didn’t propose or discuss things that were far out enough compared to the baseline the two games effectively establish. But in terms of evolution, it makes sense to start with the two large, successful strains and see how they may evolve and adapt, particularly if the governance aspect is a weakness and their success is in spite of it.
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 23rd, 2009 at 5:24 pm:
Good – finally something to chew on — however, I will avoid further chewing in this format – as frankly, I have many other responsibilities, as Zeus as well as dad, P.I., rancher, etc.

But – a couple of quick points:

1) I suggested to Raph in a side bar conversation that he consider including in metaverse the option to import the structure for different forms of governance. Would be rather an interesting experiment. In general I don’t think that the VW community has spent as much time thinking about this as they should.

2) I am a neuroethologist -and my view of humanity, as all animals, is not nearly as open minded (with respect to social structures and behavior) as most in the social sciences. I actually DO think that there are much more and much less optimal forms of government based on our genetic nature.

3) of course what a site / game / virtual world is trying to accomplish determines a lot of this kind of decision making. Regard it as ironic, but we are actually trying to give kids skills for the real world. One of the points I made in the conference is that virtual worlds are much more closely related to the real worlds of kids as users, than adults. It is an open question whether ‘our’ kids, when they get older will want the kind of annonimity that many adults seek on the Internet. My guess is that it will be so much a part of their lives that it won’t occur to them (for the better, in my opinion).

last) I will make the point again that we chose existing known governance and political systems to model Whyville’s governance on – thus, we were hoping, benifiting from many years of human invention in this regard. OF course, I know that these things are cultural and etc etc, but, our data leads us to believe that we got something right — in use stats, in behavioral stats, in the commitment our kids and their parents feel to the site, etc and to the creativity that has resulted.

I have, of course, been in SL – frankly, I find a lot of the site superficial, including a lot of the art – and not very engaging. I have also been to burning man – which also is surrounded by the same ‘live free and create’ ethos – that in a very similar way is also illusory — both in the supposid freedom and also in the quality and significance of a lot of the art.

Turns out, it is hard to do important things – takes a lot of time, thought, attention, experimentation and structure —

but thanks for your thoughtful entry.
Yukon Sam said on June 24th, 2009 at 7:21 am:
My use of the term “anarchy” was ill-considered. I should have said, “the killer app for virtual worlds is freedom”, which has a nice all-American ring to it and raises fewer hackles.

And in doing so, I can agree with a more moderate stance. There is a balance to be achieved. I’ve cited Maslow’s hierarchy in our discussions of PvP, and in that hierarchy the need for self-expression doesn’t emerge at all until all the lower-order needs are met, including the fundamental need for security. There are exceptions; even in war zones, art pops up now and then. But for the most part, it’s much nicer to have the social and commerical infrastructure to pop down to the art shop and pick up some acrylics.

But I’m wary of censors. I don’t mind warning labels, and I don’t mind a bit if some labels are off-limits to underage users. I also approve of giving users the ability to filter content by interest and by quality. I understand and accept the need to protect IP. But as an adult, I can make my own judgements about what is tasteless, offensive, or obscene. And as a creator, well, any attempt at censoring my work is going to provoke a response that is extreme, emotional, and very, very loud.

But if I accepted a job working at Disney, I’d shut up and draw hippos in tutus. It is art, and some of it is quite good art. But it’s out of balance without Vargas and Crumb and Zappa on the other side of the teeter-totter.

And I agree that much of SL is superficial (or just plain bad). Sturgeon’s Law is in full force. But without the 90% of everything that’s crap, you don’t get the 10% that’s not. One man’s crap is another man’s compost.
James Bower (Zeus) said on June 24th, 2009 at 10:10 am:
Yukon – good —

agree, it is all in the balance — I almost quoted Maslow earlier.

and, it turns out that maintaining that balance takes hard work, thought, experimentation, and paying a lot of attention.

1/3 of the employees at Numedeon are involved directly in community management – and I think that is about the right ratio. For sure, there should be more community managers than programmers –

If you are interested in knowing more, you should go to Whyville, and search in the whyville times on censorship. Our kids discuss the issue all the time – I think with considerable insight and awareness of the complexity of the issues involved.

this stuff ain’t easy – but, for sure, if you decide not to pay any attention, it will bite you.

Recent Trackbacks

Twitter @raphkoster

@cuppy It could be worse -- could be called Wang Chung. in reply to cuppy 10 hrs ago
@cuppy I see piles of people with active LinkedIn status update streams... someone must be using it that way! in reply to cuppy 4 days ago
Connected LinkedIn to Twitter. Let's see if it's annoying or not. :) 4 days ago
More updates...