[Literature] Communities of Play, book 2: The Uru Diaspora

Celia Pearce and Artemesia. 2009. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. The MIT Press.

Some notes on the second book of Communities of Play by Celia Pearce. You can also read a summary about Book 1: Play, community and emergent cultures.

Chapter 5: An imaginary homeland

Ethnography conducted in the TGU hood (the Uru version of a guild) from March 2004 to September 2005, following a method for research that serves to inform game design.

Uru is the MMOG version of the Myst series. It was developed by Cyan Worlds and published by Ubisoft in 1993. Myst was the best-selling PC game until The Sims came out in 2001, it sacrificed speed and action for visuals and audio. Most Uru players were Myst players. Hence the typical player was around 45-year old, did not really play other games but liked puzzles. Many write poems (later analyzed by the researcher). In many game communities, players may not be aware of the values and ideologies that attract them to a game. Uru could be played multiplayer connected to a server or single-player locally. In the game, players live in neighborhoods, aka hoods. The game company created artificial drama between players through paid actors. Books are used to teleport avatars between places.

Uru has several places of particular interest:

• Tutorial zone,
• Home: contains player's items, a library with books and a teleport link to the player's hood. More features are added to the home as the player progresses through the game.
• Hood: place where the hood (same name for the group of players) gathers. Contains a message board.
• City: public, shared by all players, uninhabited and in a poor state of devastation
• Ages: player-instantiated maps. Players can join other player's Age to solve the Age's puzzle collectively or chat. Seems similar to Furcadia's dreams.

Chapter 6: Identity as place

TGU was one of the biggest and most influential hoods of Uru. It formed during the beta of Uru and officially started accepting members in November 2003. At its maximum, it was so large (400+ members) its hood map required to be sharded in 3 different instances.

Invitations were sent to Myst players. A total of 10.000 players signed for the free beta and each beta cycle accepted 500 players of the waiting list, approximately every month (gating). Two clerical errors resulted in the entire beta list accepted in late December 2003 and late January 2004. Uru never made it to commercial release, it went on sale in November 2003 and the servers closed on February 2004. The last thing Uru players saw was a screen indicating an Internet error. Developer and publisher blamed the market for the lack of success of the game, players blamed the faulty technology and lack of marketing. Despite the 2.000 players who petitioned to pay a year of subscription in advance to keep the game running.

The Koalanet forum was opened by TGU members when the game closed. Members of TGU showed symptoms of posttraumatic stress, the shared trauma became a bonding experience. Poems expressed ethnic identity and diaspora. Players explored 2 alternatives: recreating Uru thanks to game development tools (eg virtools, VRML, Active Worlds, Atmosphere development environment or LSL scripts) or joining an existing ready-to-play virtual world (eg temporary text-based MUD, There.com or SL; EQ or Ryzom were considered too violent and competitive).

The hood leader joined There.com but said players could go anywhere, Koalanet would stay the main TGU hub. There.com's TGU club got up to 450 members, some not from Uru. The migration on a shard of There.com caused lag on this shard, hence griefing from indigenous. TGU became self-protective but There.com's community managers were accommodating. TGU members knew a permanent solution would be one not controlled by a corporation. Over time, TGU members integrated and some even became leaders in the There.com player culture.

One TGU player who wanted to program his own hood found that the fountain and water are attractors in public spaces. Other Uru players manage to reverse-engineer the game and were allowed by the developers to launch their own server "Until Uru". Some players did not want to come back to "Until Uru" because they wanted to move forward. Ubisoft and Cyan never attempted to intervene or interfere with any Uru player initiatives. In September 2005, the Myst franchise is retired, becoming a fan-owned and operated phenomenon.

Chapter 7: The inner lives of avatars

Avatar customization and animations matter. There provided little choice in customization, and SL animations were stiff. TGU players wanted to reproduce their Uru avatar. Avatars are intentional bodies, ie avatars' actions have been designed by the game makers (cf Taylor). If Uru avatars were humans, and not from any of the game's factions, it is because developers chose to position players as explorers, not as participants (unlike in WoW for instance). Because Uru came from Myst (a single player game), Uru avatars tended to look like an idealized version of players, hence little cross-gender (3 cross-gendered out of 450 TGU members).

The avatar was a re-embodiment for a player stuck in wheelchair. When the server shut down, players lost their virtual self and their friends. Avatars are a version of me that only exists in a particular mediated context. That part of the self expressed and projected through the avatar is as much a creation of the group as the group is the creation of the individuals within it. Avatar identity is an emergent collaboration between the individual player, the community and the designers, who present as the game and its ecosystem. UGC style and leadership of players were influenced by social feedback. A sense of social presence within the play space is more emotionally compelling to some players than a sense of physical presence.

Chapter 8: Communities and Cultures of play

A quarter of eligible (ie Myst) players signed up for the Uru beta.

Pearce challenges the Western assumption that play is a waste of time or "unproductive". She suggests that play may accelerate the process of social bonding. Uru players did not expect those bonds to happen. Disclosure of personal information was an indication of bonding. The game is virtual but connections between people are real.

Community of play: group of players who have switched from playing for the game to playing for the people. These communities share values. Intersubjective flow is the adaptation of Flow to a group of gamers. Selling user-generated content to other residents of Second Life or crafting elixirs for a WoW raiding guild are examples of intersubjective play. Intersubjective flow is an unconscious metagoal at the heart of play-based emergence. To achieve intersubjective flow, players need feedback and need to feel in a play practice, even if it's a professional activity. It can be solo play with the community in mind (eg crafting with raiding in mind).

Chapter 9: Patterns of emergence

Play styles are engines for emergence. Emergence is play beyond the original game design. Play styles can be: spatial literacy, exploration, puzzle-solving, cleverness and creativity, mastery, games within games, togetherness, wordplay and multimodal communication (ie voice + text chat), horseplay, dancing and acrobatics, spontaneous leadership, etc.

Chapter 10: Productive play: cultural production, meaning-making and agency

Productive play is creativity around play. Unlike Trekkies or cosplay, MMO fans can modify the world they come from. In the case of TGU, productive play consisted of inventing new games and practices, carrying their culture to other virtual worlds and UGC/artisans (ie creating game environments).

The Uru nostalgia increased group cohesion. Uru was also a source of creative inspiration: wherever Uru players went to, they created artifacts of their culture. Players who become versed in a game's content may [...] take possession of that content. Cyan, the owner of Uru, let players do their project. There were no pursuits for copyright infringement. Cyan was not only permissive but also supportive of fan creation. Original business models could leverage player creativity.

Chapter 11: Porous magic circles and the ludisphere

Arguably, each VW or MMOG is contained in its own magic circle. However, there are ludic leakages: TGU players carried and adapted their play style across magic circles. They had itinerant or portable identities: each person had avatars in many different online places. Intergame migration and multiworld identities could be useful for MMOG designers. Players who migrate a lot become particularly adept at spontaneously adapting new spaces to their own play requirements.

Chapter 12: Emergence as design material

The more agency players are given to design, the more emergence (and the more diverse). Emergence is an inevitable outcome of a large number of players within a network. More people means more emergence. Fixed synthetic worlds (MMOG) provide less emergence than co-created worlds (VW). Communities of play, social construction of identity, intersubjective flow, productive play and porous magic circles are contributing factors to emergence.

Addendum from Books 3 and 4

After having completed her PhD work dealing with the Uru Diaspora, Pearce was asked in Spring 2006 to do consulting for Cyan as to whether Uru could reopen. Uru later reopened in 2007, and closed again in 2008.

MMOG players have viewed their game's designers as deities of sort.

Designers should not try to step in to fix games that are already in the midst of emergent processes. The failure of The Sims Online is a prime example of a complete disconnect between designers and emergent cultures: researchers said player-made avatar skins were vital, and the designers went against it. The game industry has no such [ethnographic] research tradition, while big IT companies such as Microsoft or IBM have participatory or community design. Community managers have an important role to play in knowing the player community. Player representation can help.

Edit: PopMatters also has valuable reading notes.

Differences between VW and MMOG

7 grad students met in a room and tried to grasp the differences between VW and MMOG.

We defined VW as massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVE). Examples: Second Life is a VW, but Super Mario Galaxy 2 is not. VW are free-form, open-ended, they allow more UGC than MMOG. In VW, UGC is expected and tools are given to users so that they can create content. In MMOG, new content comes from developer updates and expansions. Somehow, we managed to scratch the surface of the ludic-to-paidaic axis that Pearce talks about.

Then someone mentioned MineCraft. MineCraft has 2 different gameplay versions. In the "Classic" mode, players can only remove from or add to the world textured cubes of virtual matter. In the "Alpha" mode, monsters and zombies wander in the open world and players have health points (and can die). Hence, Classic would be a (sandbox) VW while the multiplayer Alpha would be considered an MMOG.

MMOG development studios want to provide the exact game they have playtested to their players. The virtual world is, somehow, protected: players are not allowed to modify it. Hence UGC is client-side only (eg UI add-ons for WoW). However, Game Masters can bring new and refreshing entertainment during live events such as summoning a demon in Stormwind, the Human capital city in WoW. While these events do not happen often in MMOG, they are inexistent in VW. Somehow, Game Masters could evolve into "dynamic" game designers, while traditional current game design would be considered "static".

[Literature] Who owns the mods?

Who owns the mod? was written by Yong Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi in May 2010. They conducted 15 interviews with WoW modders (ie those who make WoW add-ons) after Blizzard had decided to forbid modders to make money with or advertise in their mods. Currently, more than 4.000 mods have been coded by modders.

Blizzard's new policies

QuestHelper has 23.000 lines of codes and has been the most downloaded mod with 38 million downloads (and counting). QuestHelper, nUI and Carbonite were popular enough to support their owners full time with in-game player donations or for-pay versions with additional features.

But in March 2009, Blizzard posted in their add-on forum section a new set of add-on-related policies. Modders were particularly furious at 2 policies: Policy 1 — Add–ons must be free of charge and Policy 5 — Add–ons may not solicit donations. Only a few modders managed to live with the revenues generated from their add-on, and most modders did it for fun and for free. However, the whole WoW modding community felt betrayed and considered the new policies were a violation of modders’ trust. Modders started to see Blizzard as a company with intimidating lawyers rather than with friendly developers.

Modders reacted on the WoW forums. Cogwheel was a forum MVP and the author or useful mod tutorials and guides. His vehement reaction against the new policies only made Blizzard remove all his posts (ie stickies and normal posts) from the forum. Modders felt that they deserved a response from Blizzard. But apart from reprimanding Cogwheel and deleting the posts of critical modders, Blizzard chose silence.

The modding community

Modders respect each other's work. The ownership arrangement was not legally enforceable, but was upheld by the community’s own mechanics: websites such as curse.com or wowInterface, two key download sites supported by plentiful advertising, were able to remove non–conforming mods from their download sites. WoWMatrix, a download site that did not recognize the community rules, was shunned by modders. After the new policies, Blizzard stood quiet and did not debate with modders. Hence, the solution came from download websites. The requests for donation were relocated from inside the game to the download page of the mod on both WowInterface and curse.com. But mods are downloaded less often than they are used in the game, so this post-policies solution was still less profitable for modders.

Mods such as SellFish, Threat Meter or Group Calendar have been integrated into the official game by Blizzard. Blizzard does not infringe any copyright owned by modders on their work, they simply take the ideas seen in the most popular add-ons. Ideas are not protected by copyrights but by patents, and filling a patent is too administratively complex for a mod developer. Hence what Blizzard has been doing is perfectly legal. And modders never complained about it. Rather, it was a sign of their work done right. Modders were also recognized in their community if their mods had a high download count.

Conflicting interests

Players sometimes complained about bugged mods, or harassed modders for additional features with little respect to their efforts. In fact, many players considered they owned the right to use a decent mod with no ads or donation requests because they had paid for the game. Obviously, this kind of players was not very supportive to the add-on developers. As seen in the figure below, different conflicting interests aroused between players, Blizzard and modders.

In late March 2009, the GroupCalendar mod was removed from distribution. Its author protested against the change in Blizzard's policies. Players came to the authors website and asked for a come back of the mod on curse.com. The mod came back.

API = (developer) community management

Decursive was a mod that automatized many actions into a single click. Blizzard found it simplified the game too much, and the modder rewrote it. Moreover, it seems modders accept updates in the API very easily - after all, code is law. Instead of the highly unfriendly “You have 60 days to comply!” software platform changes are described in neutral, impersonal programming terms. Hence, a lot of the modder community management could happen through the API. [However, I think it requires a very complex mod platform/environment that Blizzard does not have yet].

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch5: Creative Play

Self-defining play

Choosing an avatar is an act of self-definition because the players can identify to the avatar he/she controls. A player can choose an avatar from the beginning (in Monopoly or car video games for instance), customize his/her avatar (in old RPGs where the character acquires new skills or equipment, for instance) or build the avatar from scratch (in modern RPGs). The player can modify two types of attributes of his/her avatar: the functional and the cosmetic attributes.

The functional attributes affect the gameplay. Functional attributes can change during the game (eg XP) or be defined by the player at the beginning (like strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc. from Dungeons and Dragons). The player should be able to know how the choices made concerning his/her avatar's attributes will impact the game. Giving players a random number of points to assign to their attributes allows them to make interesting choices and create an avatar who reflects their own personality or fantasies without unbalancing the game. Include a default configuration for players who do not want to spend too much time in their avatar creation.

Cosmetic attributes such as eye or skin color are not part of the core mechanics but bring a lot of fun and do not need to be balanced. Cosmetic attribute must stay cosmetic attributes after updates of the game (example: bigger avatars are not stronger).

Creative Play

Creative Play happens when the player builds or designs things in games such as Sim City or Barbie Fashion Designer. Provide saving and sharing functionalities (cf Sporeopedia or Pokemon global trade station). Creative play can be constrained or freeform.

Constrained creative play provides a structure or tools for the player's creativity, and features can be unblocked as the game progresses. Constraints can be based on the game money (SimCity or RPGs), on the physics of the world (Bridge Construction Set), or some aesthetics standards. The aesthetics rules can either be established by the game designer beforehand, they can procedurally change over time or the public could also vote online for their favorite.

Freeform play sets no restriction at any time on the player's creativity. Constrained creative play-games sometimes offer a constraint-free sandbox mode. The construction of Spore creatures is an example of freeform play.

Other plays

The Movies or Stunt Island are games that feature storytelling-play. They let the players make their own movies and share them online. The player communities around the Sims also produced stories with commented screenshots of the game.

With mods, players can edit levels, items, characters and many other parts of the game. FPS hardcore players sometimes develop stronger bots (in the sense of FPS opponents, not cheating programs) than those given in the original game. However, UGC can sometimes be very ugly, inappropriate, or even amoral (porn, racism).

Test your skills

• Think of a game where the player can build something different than vehicles, buildings or cities. What is the reward given to the player? How could money be spent into the different pieces of this new construction? Could there be upgrades?
• Find a set of real-world existing aesthetics rules (in architecture, clothing, design, music, interior decoration or landscaping for instance). How could your game follow these rules to measure/appreciate the player's creations?
• How can you make clear to the player the consequences of his/her avatar customization decisions during the avatar creation?
• How can you create a sense of community between your players? How do you allow them to share their creations with others?

[Literature] Communities of Play, book 1: Play, community and emergent cultures

Celia Pearce and Artemesia. 2009. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. The MIT Press.

Here are my notes on the first book of Communities of Play by Celia Pearce. I extensively use several acronyms: VW, MMOG and UGC. My comments stay in [brackets].

Chapter 1: Communities of play and the global playground

Gemeinshaft ("communities" in German) are association of individuals with a collective will that is enacted through individual effort. Communities of practice engage in a process of collective learning and maintain a common identity defined by a shared domain of interest or activity.

Except a few exceptions such has Solitaire, games have always been multiplayer. However, the advent of singe-player genres as the central paradigm for games is an historical aberration of digital technology. Examples of ancient games mentioned are senet, ur and mancala. [I do not remember if I read it in the book or if I thought about it while reading, but RP games contain a huge part of UGC. Players direct the story, influence each other, etc. Ideally, the GM only has to control the flow of the story.]

Tolkien (1955) + Conan (1960) + PC (1970's) = MUD in US college male heads (1980's)

Corporations do not say why a game failed, whether the game was launched or not. [Although there are some post-mortems going around about video games, I admit I have not seen many post-mortems about MMOG. But I am not sure that everything is always said in post-mortems...] Moreover, no research on players of a particular MMOG is possible when the players have left the MMOG in question. So it is really difficult to know why a MMOG really failed. The Uru Diaspora developed in this book is one of the rare case where such kind of players have been studied. After the down of the MMOG Uru, many players fled to other MMOG, but some instigated a network of player-run Uru servers to allow players to run the game after its initial closure.

Chapter 2: VW, play ecosystems and the ludisphere

Principle characteristics of VW
spatial
contiguous (mappable)
explorable
persistent
embodied persistent identities
inhabitable and participatory
consequential participation ("your presence is a part of the world")
populous (social)
worldness (coherence/consistency helping the suspension of disbelief)

The core conventions of feature films provide a consistent set of guidelines that have changed little since they were initially established in the first half of the 20th century. [Does this means once we have found our Citizen Kane game, game design will not change its basis anymore? Should we look for a Citizen Kane or for as many Citizen Kane as possible?]

Definition of play from Caillois in 1961
not obligatory	in a circumscribed time and space	no predetermined outcome	not productive [what about UGC??]	governed by rules	fictive

Virtual place	Description	[Example]
Ludic world	formal structure of objectives and constraints	MMOG with leveling or PvP
Paidaic world	offer a range of activities or choices to socialize	UGC, VW

World rules
communication protocols	group formation protocols	economics	land or home ownership	avatar creation and progression	geography, terrain and transportation

Emergence is UGC [or maybe is it the other way round?]. SL has a system of economic and social status based on technical proficiency: the scripters who can sell their pieces make money and are respected. On the other hand, subverting game affordances can be source of pride, respect and social status. [The less possible subversions, the more controlled the sources of social recognition for players?]

Chapter 3: Emergence in cultures, games and VW

Properties of VW/MMOG that lend themselves to emergence
close (ie have boundaries, making players bring content from outside)
consistent rules (players can get consistent feedback)
open-ended (no final state)
persistent (enable cumulative actions)
(a)synchronous inhabitation (enable feedback)
long-term engagement
social phenomena are accelerated
the more people, the more emergence
the more diverse the people, the more emergence

Urbanism (virtual or real) fosters (positive or negative) emergence of behavior. According to De Landa, emergence is defined as the unplanned result of human agency. Emergence is synergetic, hence a top-down approach to cultures or society can not reveal emergent behaviors [cf Bernard Weber's 1+1=3]. Internet is an emergence catalyst. Examples of emergence are

• Chinese gold farmers shunned on WoW,
• SL IG banking agencies which failed and lost a lot of real money ($750,000)
• WoW warriors IG protest caused a server overload

Corporations will tolerate a certain measure of emergent behavior as long as it does not threaten their bottom line (ie profit and legal issues) Hence grieving is tolerated, but not mass protest.

Emergent systems are bottom-up in the way that they are adaptive systems producing behaviors one scale above them. Example: ants (bottom) create colonies (up). For Bar Yam, emergence is a collective behavior (I do collectively what I would not do myself), an environmental behavior (I do this because I am in a specific environment) and the act or process of becoming an emergent system. As for the Uru group studied in the next books, it satisfies emergence criteria and is imminently studyable because:

• some behaviors were unexpected from game designers
• 18-month time frame study
• 160-450 players, manageable size for a qualitative study
• recognizable patterns across sampling of participants
• the group moved from one environment to another and adapted its behavior
• individuals, groups and environment can be observed concurrently

Studying communities of play raises two main challenges. First, the researcher has to be able to analyze a phenomenon at different scales simultaneously. Second, relationships between play communities and the play ecosystem can only be understood as a lived practice. Which methodology could best fit the study of the Uru Diaspora?

Chapter 4: Reading, writing and playing cultures

The culture of VW/MMOG is a social construction of shared meanings between designers and players. According to De Certeau, consumption in industrial society is an act of production, perhaps even an art form. Examples are given by Willis: motorcycle gangs customize their bikes. For VW and MMOG, examples are avatar customization or SL IG content buyers. Allowing creative input from players is an inevitable outcome of emergent behavior.

Because most MMOG and VW are played on computers (as opposed to game consoles) they vie for attention with other PC functions such as email, forums, IM, VoIP and productivity and creativity software as well as other games.

Ethnography, social anthropology and ground theory provide a post-facto meaning to data that could have seemed meaningless during its collection.Social network analysis often lacks the sense of context that is vital to understanding games from a cultural perspective. The methodology followed in the study of the Uru Diaspora is called mutli-sited ethnography. It was first mentioned by Marcus in 1995. [remark about ethnography in VW: at the moment, ethnographers do not join hardcore PvP/PvE guilds or guilds which average age is under 16. A self-selection bias make the researchers choose the most culturally interesting: WoW LGBT guilds or active quasi-permanent guilds. Quantitative research takes those banal guilds into account, but to the same extent as extraordinary guilds.]

Read the summary about Book 2: the Uru Diaspora.

Towards another community management feature

I detailed some of the current community management features in one of my previous post. Community management can also be done in an active and «preventive» manner instead of simply being reactive when events happen. For instance, Blizzard has organized its fourth BlizzCon in August 2009. During this, some Developer Panels showed to players how new levels were created. I do not know if there were particularly charismatic developers inside the Developer Panels. But if most of these panelists were unknown of the player audience, either work should be done to improve their visibility to the players or panelists should be people more visible. Also, I think that a close contact of the developers to the players from times to times may boost them because they see the mass of players they are working for and it is really rewarding. Including costumed players from the BlizzCon 2009 in game products like the Diablo III box is a very smart way to get Real-Life UGC and show your players/fans you care about them.

Moreover, I hope there were key players in the audience of the BlizzCon. By key players, I mean Tobold, Ensidia core guild members or Greedy Goblin. As an example, Greedy Goblin writes sarcastically about how to make money in WoW. His blog had 2k subscribers in June 2009 and 3.5k now in November 2009. His latest blog traffic graph shows peaks when he argued with Scott Jennings about layoffs in industry or when he showed his inventory and bank storage. Goblins are not easily one's friends, but if Blizzard manage to bring this Goblin to the BlizzCon in paying for him the flight and the hotel, Blizzard do not only get 1 more friendly player but 3.5k. Of course, each blog subscriber will not be affected the same way. But if the blog owner publishes nice comments concerning Blizzard, they will touch many players.
This point was actually suggested by Nicolas Ducheneaut in a discussion we had some weeks ago. I filled it with examples and included it into my post.

Finally, a crazy idea. Since MMO are attracting more and more people. Real-life player meetings change the way players see the game as they realize that there is someone behind the pixels. Some players even stopped insulting others after they met them IRL. So in a tupperware consultant style, why not organizing metings regularly in big cities? I heard about communities like DS in Paris who organize meetings in Paris Cafés where they play Nintendo DS games together. The Java User Groups (JUG) are monthly meetings where Java developers gather to talk about Java world news, learn new techniques, share knowledge or drink beers. Maybe MMO companies are not wealthy enough at the moment to pay for monthly buffets and refreshments in each of the 188 urban areas of the world counting more than 2 millions inhabitants. However, MMO companies could set up electronic tools on their websites to help their players organize local real-life meetings about their favorite MMO. This sounds like organizing raids, so developing the web app should not be too difficult.
I actually can write about the positive effects such IRL local meetings could provide as this kind of meetings actually happens/happened for some RO French private servers. Some active players or people in the server team sometimes organize real-life meetings called «IRLs» at Asian-culture conferences like the Japan Expo or simply in their home city when there are enough people to meet.

• The GM team (aka the community management team) knows players faces, discusses IG issues directly and more openly than on a forum
• The Development Team has direct feedback from players. Also, after the meeting, developers are no longer writing code for the fun of it, they realise that hundreds of people rely on them to have fun.
• players realise who are the people behind the game, and demystification of the work is sometimes followed by admiration of the people: «they are human, they are doing something fun for me and they spend so much time on it»

So even if no developers can attend the MMO meetings, which is likely to happen very frequently, such events are a good way to promote the MMO company, especially when this company has sponsored/helped organizing the event. This is the way to transform the video of the left into the video on the right. The video on the left was done by an active member of the Alliance-RO French private server community to describe the game and attract new players. This video was done by a fan of the game and the server. The video on the right was taken by an active member of the community in Alger, Algeria. Players say in the video and in the written comment that they have uncovered the secret reason why gentimouton (yes, it was me), a Game Master of the server, does not understand them: he is 70 year old (French quote: nous avons percé le mystere mysterieux du GM:gentimouton ! encore fois °° !!). If you want it, you can ask me for a full translation of the video dialog. This video of a meeting of players in their city brought a precious (but late) feedback to the GM.

[Literature] Surveys in Virtual Worlds

Quick introduction ...

Currently, there are very many researchers in sociology focusing on Virtual World populations. Actually, there is also some psychology, economy, law and even politics research led in MMOs. Various analysis of the MMO worlds can be done :

• Analysis of virtual life : basically how and why do people play, the amount of money produced in an MMOG ...
• Analysis of virtual world possibilities : online/immersive education through an MMOG, Taxing virtual worlds ...
• Comparison to real life : avertising, politics, ...
• But also analysis of real life thanks to virtual life : comparison of LA gangs to WoW guilds, ...

Researchers need data. To collect data from a huge amount of players, they need fieldwork tools. And the best tool for collecting people's thoughts about a very precise topic is the survey.
Basically, surveys can be conducted in the street. That is sometimes expensive and long, and brings few results. Maybe that's why street pollsters are voluntary. Thanks to Graham Bell in 1876, larger scale surveys were made possible. The rain does not impact anymore on the amount of people surveyed in the day. But pollsters still have to survey people themselves. In 1990 started an era of online surveys thanks to HTML pages. Now, pollsters only have to think about their survey, put it online and wait for their <form> to be filled/submitted by millions of people.
What about MMO player surveying? Players have to logout from the game, connect to a website on which they could take the survey. They are no more in a "player" stance : no more blade, gun, fun or handsomeness. They are simply answering a survey addressed to any WWW user, that is to say everyone (actually, not everyone ...). The ideal is an IG survey.

VDCI : the State of the Art

Chronology

In April 2008 Mark Bell, Edward Castronova and Gert Wagner published a paper concerning VASI and VDCI. Topher Zwiers, a SL educator describes a VDCI presentation from Mark Bell in a post on his blog. Castronova published on Terra Nova a very short description of the tool.
But in June 2009 (actually the survey ran for 30 days in early 2009 (02/03 to 03/05).), these same people published another paper discussing how they led a survey in SL thanks to the VDCI.

VASI and VDCI

If you already know about VASI and VDCI, then you can skip this part (or tell me if you see points where I could be wrong or inaccurate).
Researchers looked for a tool that preserves immersion because players have feelings and perceptions that are particular to that environment. The method they propose to solve this immersion break is called VASI, and its implementation VDCI. They used a mailing list, a classified ad system where respondents select themselves and then are teleported somewhere, and a random location protocol where their research avatar was teleported if it was possible. When it was possible, a sort of NPC kiosk appeared. No participation rate can be estimated because this NPC waited for people to talk to it.
The VDCI is a HUD (official HUD description), that is to say a control panel allowing the user to perform actions he is the only one able to see. Particularly filling a form to answer a survey. The player gets this HUD by an NPC, wears it and then can answer the questions. When he has finished, the research avatar gives the player some virtual money.

Implementation

If you already know technically about VASI and VDCI, then you can skip this part (or tell me if you see points where I could be wrong or inaccurate).
The VDCI uses LSL [...] which formatted HTTP calls that use PHP to write the respondent's answers to a MySQL database. Since Second Life is Open Source, and their wiki is quite well documented, it was not very hard to understand : see LSL, HTTPRequest in LSL and the Server Architecture (see RPC server). I think the RPC server must handle a proxy somewhere. It could be worth spending time in SL sources some day ...
Good remarkable thing, when the database did not record whether this was a person responding due to a classified ad, an email or encounter with a random kiosk, it was refered to as <no record>. I presume in the PHP scripts an argument was given to tell the provenance of the answer, and if this argument was missing or incorrect, an error was detected. Anticipating errors and making them appear in the final figure not only show the impact that could have had these errors in the final results, but also show the reliability of the use of the VDCI system in SL. I think that the percentage of <no record> may vary depending on the server(s) bandwidth and processing capacities.

Limits

• identity in SL is fluid, so ensuring respondent identity is difficult. Actually, this is the same for any MMOG : players exchange passwords when they play in teams, guilds, with friends, etc. Also, VDCI captures the avatars name [...] to ensure that the same avatar does not take the survey multiple times. As they write, this does not prohibit a user with multiple avatars to take the survey multiple times. There might be a very easy-to-say solution for this : store the fact that an account took the survey in an account variable. This solution means either UGC API (or language) can set client-side account variables or a server owner (Linden Labs for SL) has scripted the item for the survey (thus the account variable is stored server-side).
• Researchers were only able top place kiosks at 10% of the randomly chosen places, concentrated on the eatsern side [...] much more populated than the western side, so this is not a bias. I honestly dont know if this makes a bias. IRL, voluntary pollsters stand at very populated locations. In any MMOG, there are strategical spots where many people meet : capital city, current expansion zone where every high level is, PVP zones, etc. but people can also meet in a small unfrequented street in any town of the world or during a quest in a very particular place. These "common" zones hosting 3 players a day are part of the world and should not be forgotten.
  Anyway, because there were 1543 respondents based on classified ad and 75 respondents based on the quasi-random protocol for 2094 valid responses, and because for the overall sample the quasi response rate is 2094/1100000 = 0.2%, I consider many active people selected themselves to participate in this survey. These active players are the usual 10% of the population producing 90% of the server content/life. To my mind, passive players have not at all been surveyed.
• This then paid the avatar 250 linden dollars. : a survey should be led, consisting of only one question : how much do you want to receive for this survey? And the answer can range from 0 to NaN. The fact that 90% of the classified ad respondents are willing to get re-contacted does not definitely mean that those people want to be paid for doing it again. I do agree on the fact that quasi-random sample and [...] classified ad sample are the samebut in the way the quasi-random survey was led : only active people were surveyed. So concluding that classified-ad sampling obtains a representative sample of the SL population is not exactly true. Quasi-random is simply more expensive, but the same sort of people are surveyed.
• While conducting a natural experiment about the fieldwork strategy in SL, they found an increeased number of respondents after the new placement of the class ad (in a day : more than 100 compared to the usual 30). Many people may answer the survey because it is something new : a special research avatar, a kiosk, a new ad, a mail. After some days, people are used to the kiosk or the ad, it has become part of the everyday scenery of the place. And this happens faster if the NPC/element is passive : a walking, yelling and bursting NPC with fireworks might take a bit longer to be forgotten/ignored.

What else? What now?

In other MMOGs

SL, as a MMOSG, has much to do with UGC : items, places ... But for typical MMORPGs like WoW, UGC has not the same place. SL VDCI needs the player to wear a HUD which is definitely something available IG thanks to UGC. The only way to implement such HUD from a UGC point of view could be WoW add-ons. I honestly doubt that current WoW LUA API permit transmitting data out from the game. I have not seen such things on wowprogramming or on wowwiki. Other recent MMORPGs dont seem to put forward add-ons, and I think WoW was the first MMO to implement such a programming tool.

MMO firms

Exctracts from the previously quoted article from Mark Bell, Edward Castronova and Gert Wagner :

• About the register of SL users (inhabitants) which can be used for drawing a random sample : Linden Lab does not provide this kind of information for commercial or for research purpose
• According to Linden Lab, from 02/03/09 to 03/05/09 about 1.1 million avatars were active in SL.

If firms were to participate in such surveys or share the use of such tools, it would be easier and safer for IG pollsters to implement their survey. Also, much could be done to ensure the fact that a real person (and not avatar) can answer the survey once and only once.
I contacted Mark W Bell to know if they asked Linden Labs about their survey, what support they could have asked, etc.

Quote of the day

Found on a French forum : je cherche un add-on qui permet d'xp tout en étant AFK pour faire plus de RP (translation : I'm looking for an add-on that could make me xp while being AFK so that I can RP more)