Ted: Strong walls are good. You can seal things off, because sealing them off allows them to bloom. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels. Buy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Gold will keep your high power.

Cory: No -- the scripts are better than they were. Economics. Goal is to find the right trade-offs. We want to figure out how to bring a right to tinker back into a digital space. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels. Buy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Gold will keep your high power.

Most gamers tend to strongly (stridently) argue for the latter option, that it is always better to wait and polish and perfect (even though they may also eagerly anticipate the release of a particular game). Aesthetically, I would agree, and I suspect so would most developers. But in business terms, it's not so clear. Essentially, it boils down to this: do you lose a substantial enough potential base of customers by launching prematurely to justify the enormous continuing expense of development costs before revenue comes in through box sales and continuing subscriptions?

I once would have said yes, but I would now say no--because I now do not think the bugs, instability and design problems in SWG were dependent upon a rushed launch. I think instead they're predicated on an overly complex, fussy, baroque design and on live team management problems, including numbers of staff on the development team, problems that another two months or ten months would not have fixed. Plus it's clear that some of the people who tried SWG and didn't like it would never have liked it because of some fundamental design decisions it made about how to instantiate Star Wars in MMOG form. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term.

Even virtual absence can be a factor: Take Mia Consalvo's recent example of being irked by fishing bots in FFXI -- those bots were offensive primarly, I think, not merely because someone was possibly cheating and possibly borking the economy, but also because playing with player-AFK-bots feels like an insult to the social nature of the game.

Or Torrill Mortensen's thesis (all 410 pages here) describing the MUD, Dragon Realms. Dr. Mortensen's critical focus is as much on player understandings of the play experience as it is an attempt to understand the game "authorship" of the admins. The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.

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.

Adina then thrusts the question of the experience of multiplayer games and MMOGs into the social software scene: There’s a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that’s going on around us, and that’s worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn’t have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems.

Adina then thrusts the question of the experience of multiplayer games and MMOGs into the social software scene: There’s a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that’s going on around us, and that’s worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn’t have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems.

Adina then thrusts the question of the experience of multiplayer games and MMOGs into the social software scene: There’s a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that’s going on around us, and that’s worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn’t have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems.