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Dan Hunter

Written by yanglu on March 06, 2009 13:37

I'm not sure what I think about this. If nothing else it puts paid to the old chestnut that Sony was actually responding to player preferences by forbidding trading in virtual assets. It turns out that they're functional equivalent to the RIAA: they want to ban the technology until they have a way to control it and monetize it. The knock-on effects are going to be most interesting. Will PayPal be forced to recognise this form of virtual object (as Julian has pointed out, they don't have a problem with other forms of virtual stuff). I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us.  

It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know. Where is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from it. I hope the audience did as well.

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown). And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies. Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.We have mass available stock of Star Wars Galaxies Creditson most of the servers, so that we can do a really instant way of Warhammer Online Golddelivery. We know what our buyers need so we offer an instant way of FFXI Gildelivery.An optimistic disposition -- a faith, even -- in technology and code-based problem solving runs deep in the technology and software development community (see, for example, Gary Lee Downey's ethnography of CAD/CAM engineering, The Machine in Me), and it hampers developers' ability to recognize the range of content and community creation (very broadly defined) by users as well as the fruits of the well-established but different methodologies and concepts of researchers.

I don't flirt, or try to produce any sexual vibes... I *do* tend to refer to myself using feminine terms (ie: "I'm your girl" instead of "I'm your boy" when agreeing to help someone)."

We are fairly confident that, in fact, Bob Moore is the brains behind the operation (Bob, if you're reading this, give me a call). But since we were uncertain about who was responsible for all the good work, we decided to grab as many of them as we could. Especially those who, like Eric, are big fans of Jane Austen, have spent years living in Southeast Asia, and who hold the conviction that every American 13 year old should be packed off to live with a Third World family for a year. Eric is particularly interested in quantititative methodologies of research in MMOGs.

Though to pre-empt Richard - is this the end of gaming as we know it? Has SOE just sold the magic circle to the highest bidder? Well probably not. But I can see a separation of VWs. Large commercial ones that eventually are all fully commoditised and capitalism is played out over and over, and small boutique worlds that probably far more interesting. Just like Hollywood and independent cinema I'm sure there is room for both.

Lastly, I wonder this will force a closing of the separation between legal identity and in-world identity.