guardian competition December 1, 2009
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedThe Guardian is running a competition for the best explanation of Tony Blair’s finances, but it is only open to UK residents aged 18 or over.
virtual world machinima June 8, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedIt’s intriguing that different vws work out differently as the background locations for machinima music videos. With WOW you get a sense of the characters in the songs, even if the characters’ movements and gestures are stock movements with little range. But the runescape characters are so small and the perspective on the scenes makes the characters seem so far away that there’s little hope of being able to relate to the characters in the songs at all.
runescape code monkey 2 June 8, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedrunescape code monkey 1 June 7, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedbartle and the politics of regulating games April 29, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedJust after the Commission’s decision to focus on online games, Richard Bartle (writes in the Guardian) suggesting that the political paranoia about computer games is time limited as gamers age:
Gamers vote. Gamers buy newspapers. They won’t vote for you, or buy your newspapers, if you trash their entertainment with your ignorant ravings. Call them social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life, the most you’ll get from them is pity.
eu commission and on-line games April 25, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedThe Commission is concerned about the (lack of) regulation of online video games in the EU:
Overall, the Commission considers that additional efforts are needed with regard to on-line videogames, in order to take account of their specificities: a swift and effective mechanism for age verification is needed, and particular attention should be paid to chat rooms. A pan-European dialogue between all stakeholders would be useful in this respect.
In this context, the EU policy to reinforce public-private cooperation against cyber crime, and in particular against illegal and harmful content on the Internet, may serve as a starting point.
real world, virtual world April 23, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedI have just read a paper by Vili Lehdonvirta which challenges the distinction much mmo/mmorg scholarship makes between real and virtual worlds (the author cites a paper I wrote with Michael Froomkin among the examples of this distinction). It’s a really interesting paper. Lehdonvirta says:
This game-like character of everyday life has not gone unnoticed in MMO studies: Castronova equates society with a large game, although he only sees one game instead of a multiplicity (Castronova, 2006a: 171). At the same time, in some instances MMO gameplay is increasingly resembling work: laborious, tedious and occasionally lucrative (Yee, 2006; Grimes, 2006: 982-985). For all these reasons, I believe it does not do injustice to MMOs to treat them on par with other fields of life, instead of placing them on a separate plane.
I agree with this approach and am working on the ways in which real world financial activity and virtual world financial activity resemble each other – traders on the financial markets may behave as if they are playing a game and some virtual world participants are serious about generating revenue. The trouble is that once we collapse the distinction in the literature between the real and the virtual that has significant implications for the application of legal rules.
For lawyers I think the real/virtual distinction makes sense. Lawyers like to solve problems by defining categories and making distinctions, and we can use up a lot of energy arguing about those distinctions. The rules that apply to different types of tangible and intangible property may be different. And lawyers generally spend a lot of time thinking about jurisdiction: jurisdiction to regulate, jurisdiction to enforce, jursidiction to decide disputes. We tend to think a lot about questions about allocations of power between different geographically defined and hierarchically defined authorities. And there’s a recurrent problem of the extent to which people should be allowed to contract around rules which have a public policy component.
Just because it caught my eye, here’s another example of a real/virtual world distinction in the most recent spiffworld Jonathan Coulton video which is a response to the original here (which uses photographs from flickr) (and which Coulton likes) :
presentations i wish i’d heard April 3, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedThis one by Richard Bartle. There are some provocative comments about law and mmos. For example, looking back from 2018, he says:
The main legal issues that brought down mmos were:
– Applying the laws wrongly
– Unfair contract laws
– Intellectual property laws
– Gambling/gaming laws
– Anti-Money-laundering laws
– Taxation laws
– Mad patent laws
And there are details. Unsurprisingly, law isn’t the only topic on which he makes provocative comments…..
Seen via Raph Koster.
avatars in congress April 2, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedThe House Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications and the internet held a hearing on Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium yesterday (april fools’ day) while Stagecoach Island was trying to persuade people that they could send smells through the internet. Phillip Rosedale of Second Life reassured the committee that:
Because there are a variety of conflicting gambling laws around the world, we chose last year to ban games of chance in Second Life. Residents are not permitted to operate casinos taking “virtual currency” on games such as Baccarat, Blackjack, Keno, Roulette, Pachinko, Gow, Poker, and any other game, new or old, that relies on chance. This policy also prohibits sports betting. Our “G-team” actively searches for such activities, and where we discover gambling, we remove all related objects from the in-world environment. We take escalated measures against egregious or repeat offenders, including suspension from Second Life.
Seen via Terranova where Greg Lastowka and Robert Bloomfield noted the focus on SL.
consumer protection – eu style March 13, 2008
Posted by Bradley in : games , comments closedA Finnish online game, called Galactor, won the European Consumer Campaign of the Year Award. It’s a bit creepy with cockroaches wandering all over the screen. Ireland’s financial regulator won the best financial campaign deisgnation with a campaign that included a (not) scarymoney monster and an ad set on a bus which has produced lots of reenactments shown on youtube. Here’s the original:
And here’s one of the re-enactments: