From MUDs to MMORPG

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A lively debate has emerged in gameblog terra nova this week about the reinvention of the online game community research from MUD/MOO to current MMORPG. The article in Terra Nova offers a very clever summary of what has changed from MUD to MMORPG, here are some excerpts extracted from the post by Timothy Burke and the commenters):

Some old issues have become completely new in their implications:
  • simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been
  • there are genuinely new issues--if nothing else, the perceptual and psychological issues posed by 3-D graphical engines in virtual worlds as compared to text-based or isomorphic designs.
  • one of the biggest things to have changed is [internet] penetration. (...) Adoption of whatever phenomenon by many millions of people has got to change the characteristics and nature of that space. It certainly did in the case of both the Web and the stock market. (stated by Mark Wallace)
  • Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days. There has always been talk about "embedded experiences" but the idea of literally replicating single-player to limited multiplayer games wasn't one that had currency (stated by Raph)
  • What happened to intermud protocol? (stated by Raph)
  • computers now are more than 100x faster than they were in the mid-90s when I started on this; that has had significant impact on the kinds of things that virtual worlds can represent. (stated by Mike Sellers)

Why do I blog this? To me this topic is strikingly interesting since I am currently working on a research project about the creation and evolution of online games communities (for an R&D privately funded). Last week, I collected plenty of research about this topic in MUDs/MOO (which I use to play with few years ago) and I took for granted the fact that the studies made into the MUD field already tackled elements that would be of interests in MMORPG. I am actually in the process of selecting what would be new to study, drawing on these elements.

News technosocial situations discussed in TIME

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Last week, in the TIME, there was a very insightful paper, an interview of some of today smart thinker (whatever that means, people who have the ability to send snow balls that roll and roll to become huge at the end of the day). What I find interesting is the "technosocial situations" they discussed (i.e. the way technology shapes new social practices), some excerpts I found relevant:

  • Mark Dery: "You have people walking down the street listening to iPods, seemingly oblivious to the world, singing. More and more, we're alone in public."
  • O'Reilly: "There's also more communication even in apparent isolation. (...) they [kids] are also communicating in new ways, and I suspect most of us in this room maintain communication with a group that is far larger, far more geographically diverse than we ever would have known without technology"
  • David Brooks: "Is it possible that as the Internet creates more geographic diversity, it creates less demographic diversity? There once were millions of people in Elks Clubs, and Elks Clubs were incredibly diverse. These days, with, say, online dating, you can screen people who aren't demographically like yourself."
  • Clay Shirky: "We're used to thinking everything is going to get more and more virtual until we're these big floaty video heads, but actually there is a return of the real, as we figure out how to use this stuff to have real-world encounters."
  • Brooks: I know people who fly to see a football game, but I don't see why this is transformational.
  • Clay Shirky: We're seeing lots of places where value is being created outside of institutional frameworks, in ways that institutions can't touch.

News technosocial situations discussed in TIME

in

Last week, in the TIME, there was a very insightful paper, an interview of some of today smart thinker (whatever that means, people who have the ability to send snow balls that roll and roll to become huge at the end of the day). What I find interesting is the "technosocial situations" they discussed (i.e. the way technology shapes new social practices), some excerpts I found relevant:

  • Mark Dery: "You have people walking down the street listening to iPods, seemingly oblivious to the world, singing. More and more, we're alone in public."
  • O'Reilly: "There's also more communication even in apparent isolation. (...) they [kids] are also communicating in new ways, and I suspect most of us in this room maintain communication with a group that is far larger, far more geographically diverse than we ever would have known without technology"
  • David Brooks: "Is it possible that as the Internet creates more geographic diversity, it creates less demographic diversity? There once were millions of people in Elks Clubs, and Elks Clubs were incredibly diverse. These days, with, say, online dating, you can screen people who aren't demographically like yourself."
  • Clay Shirky: "We're used to thinking everything is going to get more and more virtual until we're these big floaty video heads, but actually there is a return of the real, as we figure out how to use this stuff to have real-world encounters."
  • Brooks: I know people who fly to see a football game, but I don't see why this is transformational.
  • Clay Shirky: We're seeing lots of places where value is being created outside of institutional frameworks, in ways that institutions can't touch.

Mikel Maron's Locative Animal Project

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Mikel Maron's presentation of his contribution for the Open Plan workshop is very insightful and original. I like his 'locative animal' concept very much:

My [Mikel Maron] angle in my application to the Workshop was Locative Animals. Nothing much happened on this, but I did get to meet a researcher with similar interests, Shaun Lawson. Here's the blurb I submitted on Locative Animals.

My interest in Locative Arts has been somewhat on the fringes of the predominantly urban, socially focused arts projects. The natural world is under ever greater stresses, and these technologies, usually employed to buffer nature, can and have been effectively used to raise awareness of the non-human world and give it a voice. The idea of over saturation of technology has been parodied by projects like "Augmented Animals", though in reality new communication modes are being employed by wildlife researchers to track elephants and reindeer by SMS and GPS. I've been gathering various resources on spatial technology and spatial understanding in animals under the moniker "Locative Animals" [http://del.icio.us/mikel_maron/locativeanimals/]. Nature is not seperate from urban experience, though most city dwellers would not be that aware of the populations living in their midst. Sensing and tracking of wild fuana and flora in urban environments could raise awareness of wildlife in a tangible, positive way. Bird watchers are particularly active and independent; tools to bridge individual bird monitoring into larger situated databases and patterns could be another interesting application of the technology. Another interesting area is Porton Downs, site of much controversial chemical testing, but due to the lack of intensive human activity, also home to many rare species that have disappeared from the rest of the UK. If access is be attained, artistic investigations of nature on this site would be potentially very insightful. This concept grows out of my interest in spatial models of ecosystems, and spatial niches. Birds may not be able to navigate human buildings that competently, but they can migrate to precise locations over 1000s of miles, with senses evolved for the purpose. In other words, a map is only one (and sometimes inferior) way to get around. The Nottingham Jubilee Campus was a pretty successful brownfield restoration, melding natural and urban fabric.

What about using locative media to give people a background awareness of animal life in urban environments?!

Asychronous location awareness in CatchBob!

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This morning I tuned the new interface we're testing in CatchBob: an asychronous location awareness tool, that is to say an indication of the past position of each partner in the game. At the moment, it's a bit too thin but the point was to tune the range: we will display the last 40 positions of the partner (and a trail to connect them) as represented below:

Showing the last 20 dots was a bit too short:

Boring Location Based Services part2.

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Last monday, I had a quick discussion with Russell Buckley from Mobhappy about the small amount of LBS that are really interesting and customer/user oriented. I already commented on his previous post about boring LBS (which triggered a good discussion with Roger from Kaywa). Then Russell posted a good note after that I sent him the poor scenarios Intel envisioned for his LBS services (GPS augmented by WiFi): "the technology could be used, for example, to alert you if your dog leaves the yard, to decide which printer on a network is most efficient for a pending print job, or to determine the shortest route to an emergency exit in a building". Russell summarized the two ways of innovating (and lively debate in lots of places :) ): techno-push ("invent something cool and clever and hope there'll be a use for it") and market-pull ("look at user behaviour, identify a problem and then look to invent something that'll solve it"). Currently LBS are exactly at the point where both approaches are used and not-so-many compelling applications came up. Of course there are specific niche market in which LBS has been successful but clearly in terms of mass-market nothing emerged. Maybe non-mobile LBS like google maps (and all the corollary mash-ups) are the most advanced applications. In addition, games and art installation + map hacking/geowanking are great too but what's next? We're all working (struggling?) on it.

Creative and Tech conference in Zurich

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A conference in Zürich where I might go on November 9-10th. It's roughly a festival for media culture & digital lifestyle and there are relevant people in the program as mentioned here:

Zum Beispiel darüber, wie Science-Fiction-Szenarien plötzlich Wirklichkeit werden: in «the hacker crackdown» des legendären US Science Fiction Buchautors Bruce Sterling. Wie technologische Innovationen die Kultur verändern, ist das Thema von «a researcher's outlook on life with computers in 10 years time» mit Dr. Walter Hehl vom IBM Forschungslabor in Rüschlikon. Aus Japan angereist, wird Fuminori Yamasaki, der Chef der japanischen Roboter-Entwicklers iXs Research Cooperation, im Speech «robots are better dancers» seine Visionen darlegen, wie unser tägliches Leben mit Robotern aussehen wird. Wer in Zukunft Informationen und Wissen kontrollieren wird, beschäftigt in «who owns the information society?» den Europa-Präsidenten Georg C.F. Greve der Free Software Foundation. Und wie Kunst als systematische Urheberrechtsverletzung verstanden werden kann, legt in «the Net Art Generation» die in Berlin und Hamburg lebenden Medienkünstlerin Cornelia Sollfrank dar.

Talks will be both in english and german/hochdeutsch.

Tent for tree-huggers

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Via d*lires and travelizmo, this incredible tent meant to be put in trees. The project is called TreeTents

Dutch designer Dré Wapenaar created this singular construction in 1998 for British activists so they could sleep among the branches of trees they were trying to save. Made of steel, canvas and plywood, a Treetent measures 15 feet high by nearly 9 feet in diameter and is large enough for a family. A Dutch campground now rents the tents. You can see a Treetent at the just–opened show "SAFE: Design Takes On Risk" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Tree-hugger centered design? I am a great fan of this sort of "device". I can fairly imagine this kind of stuff in cities. Wapenaar's work is impressive, his website is great, full of interesting projects about tent: tentprojects. The one on the left reminds me a vehicle in Dragonball Z and the other on the right would perfectly fit in our new office:

But maybe the grand pavilion is the best of those temporary architectures:

Input Management in Map-Based Interfaces

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Cohen, P. R., McGee, D. R., & Clow, J. (2000, April 29-May 4). The efficiency of multimodal interaction for a map-based task. Paper presented at the Applied Natural Language Processing Conference (ANLP'00), Seattle, WA.

This paper compares the efficiency of using a standard direct-manipulation graphical user interface (GUI) with that of using the QuickSet pen/voice multimodal interface for supporting a military task. In this task, a user places military units and control measures (e.g., various types of lines, obstacles, objectives) on a map. Four military personnel designed and entered their own simulation scenarios via both interfaces. Analyses revealed that the multimodal interface led to an average 3.5-fold speed improvement in the average entity creation time, including all error handling. The mean time to repair errors also was 4.3 times faster when interacting multimodally. Finally, all subjects reported a strong preference for multimodal interaction. These results indicate a substantial efficiency advantage for multimodal over GUI-based interaction during map-based tasks.

Why do I blog this? This paper seems to be a good reference about multimodal input GUI. In CatchBob! we use map-based interface and only one modality but it might change with a structured interface that would help users top communicate, through predefined strategy messages.

CatchBob milestone

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In CatchBob!, the messages which deals with strategy could discriminated with the following characteristics:- content: Bob's position, Bob's approximate location (area), the proper triangle configuration, advice/order abotu spatial behavior, a meeting point and network problems. - the adressees: A,B,C,B+C,A+B+C - temporal aspects: at which moment in the process a message is relevant - temporal evolution: refinement/modification of a message - coordination strategy: manifest/explicit agreement/convention (Clark's typology)

The point is to have a structured interface which will graphically represents those messages and help players to communicate these information. I will then run a new experiment with this new interface and logged information about the usage of such an interface (nb of clicks on each button and when) will allow me to check the validity of my model (the coordination strategies in mobile collaboration).

Todo list

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Short reminder for ongoing projects:

  • Run new CatchBob experiment with asynchronous awareness tool
  • Sketch the new structured interface to allow players to write predescribed strategy messages
  • Complete paper for COOP2006
  • Sketch the outline of a potential journal paper about location awareness
  • Write down research plan for the project about on-line communities creation and evolution, take World of Warcraft as the platform to be studied.
  • Finish the literature review for the european project
  • Check the final details of the Lift conference to be organized in Geneva in 2006

Julian Bleecker on dislocation

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Californian cool cat Julian Bleecker wrote a very interesting piece about what he calls dislocation: the "ways in which various forms of (mostly electronic) communications/networking social infrastructures make tectonic, geographical alterations on the landscape". This is meant to appear in a book about locative media edited by Jeremy Hight.

... some of the ways that certain spatial practices related to some technologies are changing how we operate in space. Specifically, the way VoIp shifts the practice of telephony from place-specific to place-agnostic (area-code assignment, Skype from plane or Vonage from plane). There's no one way to read this shift, other than to say it is emblematic of practice-in-transition. This was anticipated by cell phones and is tied to the relationship between location and motility. The relationship being that location is "ours" in the case of this practice. We decide from where we telephone and how to represent where we are when we telephone. In the primary case, it was such with the portable handset evolving in degree to the VOIP systems, with cellular telephony in between (as well as more sophisticated DIY call-forwarding schemes, one of which got a colleague at Data General reprimanded for configuring his phone to call-forward to his parents house so he could avoid the toll charges.) This topic also relates to the challenge of anonymity at a time during which resources are committed to surveillance and intelligence gathering. The gangster calling from an "outside phone" is working against the agents who's task it is to trace and record and locate the originators and recipients of telephone calls.

Why do I blog this? I like this concept very much and I think it's a new 'technosocial situation', i.e. a new technologically-mediated social orders (= Erving Goffmans’ theory of social situation : isomorphism between physical space and social situation). This concept comes from Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe's paper Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use. Julian's article also connects this dislocation concept with locative media projects.

No remote control for the first VCR

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This is the Ampex VRX-1000 (aka the Mark IV), the first videotape recorder. The cedmagic website has a good introduction about it (picture taken from there):

Research on recording video on tape was begun in the early 1950's, and Bing Crosby Enterprises demonstrated a prototype system in 1951 that ran at 100 inches/second and had 16 minutes per reel. But the quality was poor. RCA demonstrated a better system in 1953, but it ran at 30 feet/second and only had 4 minutes per reel. The small Ampex Corporation came up with the ideas of using rotating heads, transverse scanning, and FM encoding which allowed broadcast quality recording at 15 inches/second and 90 minutes per reel. The VRX-1000 set off a storm when it was demonstrated on April 14, 1956 at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Convention

50,000 bucks at that time! There seems to be a Buddy Holly look-alike in the background.

The blue guy

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There is currently a very intriguing exhibition in Switzerland entitled ""L'Homme Bleu, le rhinocéros et la solution du monde"" (the blue guy, the rhinoceros and the world's solution). It actually depicts a guy dressed in a blue costume in different contexts (he travelled all around the world). The artist (André Kuenzy) is also a swiss architect who also has an web/design company called rhinoceros (which is also the name of a project he is working on: a mechanical rhinoceros made out of wood). More about him in the migros magazine (in french). The project began by a promenade in Basel dressed in scuba diving gear.

Pictures taken from the Maison d'Ailleurs website.

His next project: a blue cheese

Serious Games Project Overview

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There is a good overview of current serious games projects on Gamasutra by Ben Sawyer (Mr Serious Games I would say :) ). It's tightly related to the nearly arrived Serious Games Summit. He also gives good insights about the state of the sector. Some relevant excerpts I found pertinent:

the diversity of content is growing and the quality of organizations, developers, and companies participating is also ratcheting up. (...) Much of what we can now make of the serious games sector does have to do with the branded aspect the moniker that ‘serious games' creates. It may not be perfect in all its glory, but it does the job. Serious games is now a branded aspect of the overall games space but it still means many different things to different people, and narrow views or opinions can sometimes poorly define the big picture. (...) We are still primarily fueled by the triumvirate of gaming's ascendancy as a media form, positive press coverage, and a willingness to experiment on the part of various individuals and organizations. The space is not driven by lots of proven results and sustainable business models. (...) the entire serious games space is still very supply-side driven in terms of visible activity. I'm beginning to see more customer-side activity, and we are truly starting to see the benefits of more seasoned projects, developers, and funding activity. (...) The activity in Europe is itself fueled by more direct grants through various government educational agencies, although some local media agencies and economic development agencies are also taking part.(...) a huge research gap in serious games, but so far it hasn't hurt things because people are still getting new projects online. At some point, however, the justification and design issues related to determining the return on investment and outcomes from game-based approaches may become too hard to overcome without more and better research(...)

The part about the connection with research is clever, I like this statement:

It is also important to note here, though, that there is a problem within the research community where some people expect us to find a so-called silver bullet - a piece of research that spans many major questions about games. We will never be so lucky. Instead, we must eat at the edges more, and be more specific to the traits successful projects share, versus finding the secret formula to Coke. (...) Thankfully, through efforts at DiGRA, FAS, Education Arcade, Future Play, and key institutions we are seeing research that is meaningful, More importantly, the systems through which the collective community can address research needs is getting better.

Why do I blog this? I think that serious games is an emerging field that sounds promising and that there will be plenty of things to work on with regards to user experience analysis + potential learning gains investigation as we do currently.

Intel working on an indoor GPS

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According to this yahoo news, Intel is working on an indoor GPS:

The company recently presented its precision-location project as a possible solution to the shortcomings of a global positioning system in an indoor setting. Using wireless networks and fixed access points, a laptop computer can triangulate its own position in relation to other devices in the office.

Yet another GPS augmented with WiFi...

Mac Mini robot

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Via infogargoyle, this ultra-cool Mac Mini robot (in german, so check the english translation) :

Mini psi - in such a way our small friend is called - orients itself with one iSight and thinks with a MicroPsi Nodenetz. Three strong Servos turn a omnidirektionalen drive - thus the robot can itself, without having to change its adjustment, move in each direction.

More information on the project page. It's a project carried out by Kay Berkling, Armin Zundel, Nile Appelhans, Jessica Tin, Holger Heine, Tim Kietzmann, Roland Hafner and Ronnie Vuine.

This week's job: paper for COOP2006

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I am currently writing a paper for COOP 2006, not because it's in south of france but rather because it seems relevant with what I do:

The conference aims at bringing together researchers who contribute to the analysis and design of cooperative systems and their integration in organizational settings. The challenge of the conference is to advance on :
  • Understanding and modeling of collaborative work which is mediated by technical artefacts;
  • Design methodologies for cooperative work analysis and cooperative systems design ;
  • New technologies supporting cooperation;
  • Concepts and socio-technical solutions for the application of cooperative systems.

Our contribution will be geared towards the influence of new technologies (mobile Computing, ubiquitous computing, etc.) on cooperation, exemplified with our CatchBob! experiment. I will explain how strategies to achieve the catchbob game are influenced by the presence of the location awareness tool.