Technology Blog

At Foo Camp last month, I finally had an opportunity to play the game werewolf—something I’ve heard a lot about, but hadn’t participated in. It’s not a technology-intensive activity, by any means. No computers, just a deck of cards. For details on the game (and its sibling game, Mafia), see the link above. For those of you too lazy to click through, here are the basics:

A group of people gather around a table. We had around 20 people starting each round, but you could have fewer. The game master (in our case it was danah boyd) hands out cards to each player—on the card is the role you’ll play for that game. The roles in our games were villager, werewolf, healer, and seer. For some of our games we had four werewolves, for others there were three. There’s always one seer and one healer. Nobody knows what anyone else’s role is when the game begins. The game master tells everyone to “go to sleep,” which means you close your eyes and make some kind of noise—humming, etc—so that you can’t hear what’s going on. The GM tells the werewolves to open to their eyes, and to acknowledge each other with eye contact; then the GM tells the werewolves to silently agree on someone in the village that they want to kill off. The werewolves then are told to close their eyes, and the healer is told to open his or her eyes, and to indicate silently to the GM who s/he would like to heal for that round. Then the healer closes his or her eyes, and the seer is allowed to wake up. The seer can point to one person in the circle and have the GM tell them if that person is or isn’t a werewolf. After that, the GM announces it’s morning, and that everyone can wake up. If the person the werewolves picked to kill was not healed by the healer, the GM tells the deceased of their fate, and they have to leave the circle. Then comes the fun part. The remaining players try to determine as a group which players are werewolves. The players can vote to lynch someone if they believe they’re a werewolf, or can choose to do nothing. Then the cycle repeats. The game ends at the point where either all the werewolves are dead (villagers win!) or there are more werewolves than villagers (werewolves win!).

One variant of the game allows deceased players to inform the group of their role, so that the village knows if a werewolf (or healer, or seer) has been killed. We didn’t play with that rule, so we never knew for sure who’d just been killed off.

So, what’s the point? You learn a lot about people from the subtle clues they give off. This is all about deception and perception, about how to read the “tells” from the people around you. The better you know people, I’ve heard, the easier it is to tell if they’re lying.

It is incredibly addictive. And it’s fun not just to play, but also to watch the game. Once you’ve been killed off, you get to see what everyone’s real roles are, and to see who’s most effective in convincing the others of their innocence (whether or not they really are innocent).

Tom Coates, danah boyd, and Jane McGonigal all have excellent accounts of the gameplay at Foo, and observations on the game itself, on their blogs. (Jane also talks about the fabulous “reverse scavenger hunt” that she ran at Foo, which was a great exercise in creative thinking and improvisational acting!)

So, this got me to thinking…are there werewolf players at RIT? If not, there totally should be. I’m thinking of proposing a monthly RIT werewolf game…time and place to be determined. Who wants to play?

source: werewolves @ rit?

I had invited T. L. Taylor to participate in the social computing symposium, but she had a prior E3 commitment. Much to my delight, Tamara Pesik snagged her to speak in the MSR speaker series this week, so I get a chance to hear a presentation from her today about her research! Yay!

There’s a good turnout, which is nice to see.

She starts by painting a basic picture of MMOG environments, including the software and service model associated with them, noting “breakthrough” titles such as Ultima Online (1997), EverQuest (1999), and World of Warcraft (2004).

Shows an excellent chart from mmogchart.com showing subscription data (how does he get this?). The WoW curve is pretty astounding (and it’s six months out of date, showing 5 million rather than 6.5 millions WoW subscribers).

She’s interested generally in the relationship between social and technological artifacts, and sees games as an excellent context in which to “unpack” that relationship.

Becoming a player involves a great deal of socialization—norms, practices, social regulation. There’s a lot of ‘indeterminacy’ — things that aren’t specified in the manual, that users have to make sense of and create through social practice. She uses “trains” in EverQuest as an example of how practice and lore develop around technical phenomenon. (She mentions use of trains for grief play, and this spurs an interesting side discussion, one that I refrain from responding to because this is a particularly sore spot for me in WoW right now.) Excellent point here — “you can’t look at a train and figure out what it means; you need to look at the context to understand it.”

Next she talks about guilds, and points out how different they are. Family guilds, professional guilds, raiding guilds, casual guilds, age-based guilds, and many others. Most involve trust, responsibility, accountability, and reputation. At the highest levels of most games, it’s almost impossible to play without having been socialized into a guild structure.

Shows a social network graph showing relationships among members of a family guild, differentiating between RL and RP (role playing) relationships. (Nice line: “Friends are the ultimate exploit.”) Notes the extent to which people share characters, which is technically a bannable offense—but an example of how users co-opt aspects of a system in ways devs may not expect or want.

Some discussion of the external databases of player-created information about the game. The examples she shows require explicit input by users, but many of the WoW sites now use add-ons to automatically update (like thottbot.com, or auctioneer).

Interesting question from the audience—how much of the reward for playing comes from system-based rewards (levels, xp, honor) and how much comes from social interaction (reputation, etc).

Shows a raid-leader’s screen, with mods everywhere. Wow. I’ve not seen this before. It does change the experience. She notes the social impact, as well, since these mods often show explicitly the micro-level contributions of each player.

Talks about some “persistent critical issues.” She mentions a variety of RMT issues—selling accounts, buying gold, etc. Public vs private sources of control. She shows the warrior protest in IronForge, and the “bullhorn-like” response by Blizzard. (Found the story and the screenshots; scroll down to bottom for system message.) Talks about the GLBT-friendly guild issue, as well, and the whole “should real life come into gaming environments” issue.

Discussion (as is typical at MSR talks) is intelligent and wide-ranging, so I’m not going to try to distill it. The most interesting surrounds the issue of “addiction.” This is clearly a divisive issue, and TL handles it quite well. She reminds people of the moral panic over the introduction of childrens’ literature, and talks about the increasing number of people playing with their kids.

Interesting question—“is there a takeaway from your book for designers of social spaces?” Makes me think there’s a hunger for this right now, for lessons we can bring from these increasingly important and influential spaces of play into other contexts.

source: t.l. taylor at msr

I’ve updated the Urban Dead HUD Greasemonkey userscript; it now offers inventory sorting, inspired by Ikko’s userscript (albeit a little different in implementation). Here’s a screenshot:

Right now, UD is reasonably interesting — our team of plucky survivors have been helping out with the defence of Caiger Mall, a major mall towards the north-west of the city. We’ve repulsed the Church of the Resurrection’s attempts to wipe us out, but that seems to have made us quite a juicy target; there are now no less than three separate Zombie groups ganging up on us. For now, we’re still holding out.

games greasemonkey hacks mmorpg software urbandead

This post was written by Justin, source: Urban Dead HUD; added Inventory Sorting

photo from The Mirror

[004] Snowly of The World of Warcraft (Xinhua) A young girl nicknamed “Snowly” died last month after playing the online game “World of Warcraft” for several continuous days during the national day holiday. Several days before Snowly’s death, the girl was said to be preparing for a relatively difficult part of the game (namely, to kill the Black Dragon Prince) and had very little rest. She told her friends that she felt very tired. A big online funeral was held for Snowly one week after her death (see photo from The Mirror).

With 4.5M users there are bound to be deaths in the World of Warcraft and gauging by the relationships I’m building with fellow gamers I can definitely see how an online funeral would be a very big deal. I often see players playing until they pass out, especially when they are questing in a group where their participation is required for the group to hold together as a team. (I’ve passed out a few times as well.) There is also a lot of pressure to catch up if you drop behind a group of friends in order to play your role in the quests.

However, I don’t see this as a reason to bash these games. Clearly the addictive nature of these games are a risk from a productivity and health perspective, but I think that the sense of responsibility and teamwork that is built by the games exceeds this cost. I’ve seen a lot of coaching of young players by older players about behavior, responsibility, sharing and kindness that is crisp and makes a lot of sense in the game context, but might be lost in a conversation in the real world. Players typically stay up all night helping other players, not out of peer pressure, but out of a sense of teamwork and comradarie. The structure of the game and the rules make it very easy to measure the value of this teamwork and when a team isn’t working. Most of the difficult quests require a very large group of people training and working together. It’s hard to describe the sense of responsibility players gain to people who don’t play, but I urge people not to discount it with playing.

I feel sorry for Snowly and everyone else whose lives are taken or ruined by games, but I think there is a social benefit. Like all new things, I think we will have to work on ways to support people who play to mitigate risks and manage addiction, but there is so much there that I hope news like this doesn’t cause parents to prevent their kids from playing online games.

via Boris via Rebecca

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source: Funeral in World of Warcraft

I’ve been playing a bit of Urban Dead recently.
Urban Dead is a very low-key, web-based MMORPG — you play a 3-minute turn once
every 24 hours. It needs some rebalancing and some new features, especially
given the organised nature of some of the bigger marauding zombie hordes, but
I’m still finding it fun.

To scratch a couple of itches, I’ve written a
Greasemonkey user script for UD called the
Urban Dead HUD. It adds several nifty
features to the user interface:

• keyboard accelerator access keys for the action buttons, and your inventory — very handy when you’re attacking an enemy repeatedly;
• an on-page long-distance map of the surrounding squares;
• a distance tracker, which tracks the distances to “important” locations for you

There’s screenshots on the download page, so
you can see what I’m talking about.

Greasemonkey is a fantastic tool, as is Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into
Greasemonkey, which has repeatedly turned
out to be an excellent, well-written reference while hacking this. Thanks
guys!

games greasemonkey javascript mmorpg ui urban dead web

This post was written by Justin, source: Urban Dead HUD

I guess there’s something about online games and the Year of the Rooster. I just remembered that the first post of this blog is a link to an article that Howard Rheingold wrote about my addiction to Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) back in 1993 in Wired Magazine. (The post is dated the publish date of the magazine article, not the date the post was written. This post dates back to before my blog when I organized various links on my web site.) Groundhog Day! It’s 2005 and I’m doing the same thing. Eek.

I remember that trying to get onto the MUD server at Essex University was what got me to learn X.25. (A little more than KDD wanted people to know.) It was the people who I met on the MUD that got me an account on the University computer where I was first able to access APRANet. I learned more about computers from other players in MUD than anywhere else during my high school days.

I wonder what I’m learning playing World of Warcraft…

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source: The Year of the Rooster and my gaming habit

Thanks to Philip and Beth, I’ve purchased a plot of land in Second Life next to the MAKE plot (secondlife://Crescent/13/99) for #joiito members to hang out. (Nice neighborhood.) Feel free to drop by and mess around. You can join the #joiito group by searching for #joiito or “joi” in groups. The land is also listed. The SL URL for the plot is: secondlife://Crescent/29/86

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source: #joiito space on Second Life

A large percentage of World of Warcraft players appear to be men, but there are quite few people who play female characters. The gender issue has always been interesting to me, but an episode a few nights ago was a special highlight. Jason started a new character and decided to pick a female character. I asked him why and he said that considering the number of hours he would be sitting there looking at his character, that maybe it would be more fun to have a female character. Jason, Sean and I grouped up and went on a quest. I noted to Jason that his character was pretty cute. As we jogged across the countryside, I noticed that she also had a nice bounce to her walk. In WoW you can type /flirt and your character will say flirty things and make flirty body motions to the target. I started flirting with Jason’s character. Then something hit Jason. He suddenly said, “oh man, that’s SO wrong…”

On the other hand, there is a very cute Gnome Warlock that I often quest with. I flirt with her too, but the guy who plays that character seems to enjoy the role playing.

I think that people’s relationship to their online character is really interesting. It’s clearly not the same for everyone. I’m on a normal server, but I’m sure that it’s more interesting on the role playing servers. Has anyone studied this academically?

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source: Gender in the World of Warcraft

Today I went on my first World of Warcraft (WoW) raid. WoW has two “sides” Horde and Alliance. The Alliance are the usual “good guys”, humans, elves, dwarves and gnomes. The Horde are undead, tauren, trolls and orcs. The designers have created stories for the Horde side that tell of the suffering and struggle of each of the Horde races and makes each one justified and lovable. One of the many parallel layers of the game involves the war between Alliance and Horde. In addition to the normal experience gained from killing monsters and completing quests, there is a whole ranking system based on honor points, honorable kills and dishonorable kills. Basically, huge mobs of players get together and raid towns and castles of the other “side”. Killing civilians, even from the other side constitutes a “dishonorable kill” and can hamper your ability to gain rank. You basically kill guards and other players who have “Player vs Player (PvP)” turned on, signaling that they are non-civilians. Killing the leader of the particular city, fort or castle provides special honor. The ranks are based on military ranks and after you gain this rank, it is prominently displayed even when you’re not fighting the other side.

It was my first raid so most of my energy was spent figuring out exactly what the hell I was supposed to be doing, but the whole mission was organized in a somewhat dysfunctional military way with teams and squad leaders. I have no idea whether I was running with a bunch of 13 year olds or professional soldiers (the game has many of both) but the raid channel chat was a bit noisy. What was disturbing was the hateful and some of the over-the-top role playing. Other members of the raid were clearly disturbed as well. I imagined a bunch of leaderless young soldiers raping and pillaging some village. I felt a bit dirty afterwards.

This is only one sample so I probably should not make a judgement yet. Maybe I should try a raid with my guild members… Or better yet, maybe I should get our Orc guild tough enough to defend the cities from these bad humans.

I was a bit too low level to be on a raid and I kept dying, but here’s a picture of me on the steps of the lower level of the big Horde Undercity.

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source: The “war” in World of Warcraft

My apologies for all of the gaming posts recently, but I wanted to let any World of Warcraft players know that we are starting a new all-Orc guild on Khadgar. We plan to run every Saturday evening US time, Sunday morning Japan time. Each run will start approximately at 6PM Eastern, 3PM Pacific, 7AM Japan time. We’ll start today. I’m just setting up the guild now.

The guild will be called “We Orc” and is the Horde affiliate of “We Know“.

We’ll play only once a week and anyone who misses a run can try to catch up to the level that we all go to during the run. We’ll post the current level on the wiki. The idea is to try to see whether and how much more fun it is to have everyone at the same level collaborating.

My Orc character is named “Tasmanian”. Whisper me if you want to join. I’ll be hanging out at the spawn point to rendezvous with the new characters. Orcs all the way down… see you there.

UPDATE: Until we get the guild going, do a “/join weorc” to join the chat channel.

UPDATE: We got the guild started. Thanks! Here’s a group photo.

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source: Horde run today

Video of some people who like Warcraft. Funny. (At least to me.) Watch it to the end.

via Jason

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source: Warcraft video

Inspired by Cory’s talk at Accelerating Change, I’ve started Second Life. (Someone described it to me as a home for retired Warcraft players. ;-P) My name there is… Joi Ito. I’m still pretty confused, but if you have a character there, please give me a holler or tell me something interesting to do. Thanks!

Update: Philip just flickr’ed a photo he took when I visited him in Second Life.

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source: Second Life

As you may have noticed, my blogging has been a bit light these days. This is partially due to the rigor in which I have taken on my research into the World of Warcraft (WoW). I’m still level 36 (out of a maximum of 60) so I am still a “newbie” but I thought I might share some of my observations.

First of all, it is no wonder over four million people play WoW. It is by far the most interesting game I have ever played. I started online multi-user games with the original MUD (Multi-User Dungeons) back in 1984 on the first server at Essex University. It was all text based and as far as I know, open source. After you became a Wizard, you could add to the world. In the original MUD, when you died, you were dead. I quit after my character died just a few levels before reaching Wizard.

Later, when graphical games came out, I sort of dismissed them, believing that a 3D world would never be as rich as text or as easily customizable and interesting. I did play my share of graphical games, but none of them had the same community feeling and the levels of social complexity that I had encountered on MUDs.

WoW has changed my opinion completely. With a customizable user-interface, WoW allows you to tweak and tune your interface to suit the race/class and type of play that you are interested in. Plugins allow you to automate and augment activities that you engage in most frequently. The interface for advanced users is as impossible to understand to other people as an airplane cockpit.

I started out poking around killing monsters and completing quests on my own. The early levels were a bit lonely, tolerable only because your level increases so quickly at lower levels. There is a lot to learn about how to play the game and use your controls (there are very customizable key-bindings). I think these early levels are really like a boot camp. Sort of like learning to type.

Later, I ran into “Way” in a ogre mound. Way was “farming” (killing) ogres because they “drop” (carry around and allow you to loot) silk. Way is a tailor (among other things) so she (actually a he) was picking up silk to make objects and to sell silk at the auction house. Way and I hunted together for awhile while chatting about philosophy and decided to start our own guild (we were in another guild together at the time) to focus on our own twisted sense of humor with our own friends.

I blogged about this and our guild was quickly populated by people we met online as well as people I know from blogging and IRC who had seen the post. At the moment, we have 36 people in the guild if you include people’s alts (alternate characters). Being the guildmaster and feeling somewhat responsible for trying to build a foundation for new members, I decided to focus a bit on making some money. Way suggested the auction house as a good way to make money, so I downloaded the auctioneer plugin and got to work. Auctioneer scans the auction house and keeps a historical record of prices of things for sale. It is not immediately clear what each item is for, but the various online forums can tell you. The prices of objects fluctuate as quests are added that require items or rules change. It is also very dependent on supply which fluctuates as the volume of players in various areas change. Various professions allow players to gain experience and build exceedingly complex things.

For instance, I recently acquired the blueprint to make Aquadynamic Fish Attractors. These things increase your ability in fishing. (Some people don’t seem to appreciate fishing, but it’s a great way to pass time when you have low bandwidth and want to just relax.) To make one, you need 2 bars of bronze (which require a bar of tin and a bar of copper which require tin and copper ore which needs to be mined), nightcrawlers and corse blasting powder (which is made from corse stone, which is mined). You then use these fish attractors to increase your fishing ability so that you can catch, for instance, the Deviate Fish. These fish can be found in the lakes to the east of Ratchet in the Barrens. Add spice and cook these fish (if you have the proper cooking skill and recipe which is very hard to get) and you can create Savory Deviate Delights. So what? Well, if you eat a Savory Deviate Delight, you randomly turn into a ninja or a pirate.

So what? Well, it’s cool. There are only a few people who are able to create these things so you rarely see ninjas or pirates running around. When I board the boat to sail to another continent or am in a group raiding a dungeon, I often transform into a ninja. To many people, I am the first ninja they have ever seen in the game. I then give everyone who wants one, their own fish. Soon we have a funny party of ninja and pirates. Why do I do this? Marketing. I sell Savory Deviate Delights at the auction house and I have a feeling this marketing increases demand. You can buy a stack of 20 of these for your next party in the Darkmines for a mere five gold or so. (The market price of the recipe is about 50 gold and about 0.1% of beasts in the Barrens carry it.)

One of the problems with WoW is that it is very difficult for characters at different levels to collaborate effectively in quests. If you have a high level character in your group, most of the ways to gain experience points are severely limited. Slashar (Don Park) yesterday, had a good idea and we all created new Horde (there are two “sides” Alliance and Horde) characters. The five of us all decided to choose orcs. We had heard rumors that developers at Blizzard play Horde characters themselves and that it was actually more fun to be Horde. We had a blast. You can type /dance and your character will start dancing. Each race has their own dance. Orc dancing was the coolest thing I had seen in a long time. Clearly the developers loved orcs. So now, in addition to our more formal Alliance Guild, “We Know” we have started a merry group of orcs which, so far is great fun because we are able to all play at the same level and collaborate more.

Anyway, I could ramble on and on, but I think I’ll stop for now. I wonder if I should start another blog to talk about WoW in case people here aren’t interested. Or better yet, maybe you should all start playing and we can talk there.

UPDATE: We’re going to do an organized Orc run. We’ll be setting up guild called “We Orc”. Horde Guild on Khadgar. We’ll run as a pack at 6PM Eastern Time on Saturday night every week or so. We’ll hit a target level and people who miss that run should try to catch up by the next week. We’re level 5 or so now. See you there!

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source: World of Warcraft update

I’m at the airport on my way to Hobart, Tasmania to give a talk at the AUC “Evolution of the Species” conference.

My apologies to anyone who cares for not posting very much lately. My travel has been getting continuously more crazy. However, I will be grounded for two week after this trip to renew my passport and hope to get thoughts and other things organized.

Thanks a million to Thomas for picking up the slack on this somewhat neglected blog. I will admit that my (cough) research involving multi-user games online has also been taking up a little time.

Anyway, see you one the other side.

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source: Off to Tasmania

Shacknews

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarantine and infecting other players.

via Boris Via Wonderland

Then, I ask Jonas about this and:

Jonas

It was a sight to behold. Some tell me, IF was finally usable and that the lag was gone for once, but Orgrimmar was fun nevertheless. Red blobs splashing everywhere, healing and renew/regrowth was being mass-spammed, and there were more bodies and skeletons around than I’ve ever seen, and I’ve raided IF before.

My biggest fun was screwing with those incompetent GMs. Some used their own chars to herd us, which made the plague transfer even faster, others messaged and threatened consequences if we did certain things. The idea was, to move all infected players into instances, where we could be by ourselves, so we hooked up into large raid groups, rezzed instead of corpse walked, and re-infected ourselves before hearthstoning back into Org. Bog Troopers, a huge horde guild in Org, raided Stormwind, which was almost empty, and killed the child king (no HK, there, you have to kill the Guardian) before walking into the Stockades, farming gold. The GMs congregated up on Honor’s Stand, so we had a handful of players up there, stealthed, and infecting them. It was more fun than any other world event EVAR!.

Not much to add. Just hilarious.

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source: Plague on World of Warcraft

Decided to play a bit more World of Warcraft this weekend. Wandering around Darkshire, I met the first person so far with a sense of humor. (Also the first person over 30 who I don’t know in real life.) His name is Illuminus and he’s a 37 year old philosopher/bouncer who likes to play mages. Anyway, we decided to start our own guild. It’s called “We Know“. If you’re on Khadgar and want to join us, sign up on the wiki and look for me on Khadgar. We’re still in the process of getting people to sign the charter.

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I’m trying to keep track of my friends on World of Warcraft. If you have a character on WoW and want to hang out, please register on my World of Warcraft wiki page.

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Interfax China

PowerNet and China Communist Youth League develop “Anti-Japan War Online” game

Shanghai. August 23. INTERFAX-CHINA - PowerNet Technology, a Chinese online gaming firm, has developed a new online game in cooperation with the China Communist Youth League (CCYL) named “Anti-Japan War Online,” which will begin commercial operation by the end of 2005, a PowerNet official said Tuesday.

“The game will allow players, especially younger players, to learn from history. They will get a patriotic feeling when fighting invaders to safeguard their motherland,” a PowerNet Project Manager, surnamed Liu, told Interfax.

The background for “Anti-Japan War Online” is the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, from 1937 through 1945. Players are able to play simulations of key battles, but will only be able to play as the Chinese side…

The CCLY said in statement that few games on the Chinese market today generate a “national spirit” that can educate young players. As a result, the CCYL will actively partner with online gaming companies to jointly develop “patriotic” online games.

“‘Anti-Japan War Online’ is a patriotic online game that is both interesting and instructive, and can attract and guide young players,” Chen Xiao, the CCLY official in charge of partnerships with online gaming firms, told Interfax…

I can imagine this game will be very popular. I wonder if they will let Japanese register to play. Is there any news about this in China? Do most people in China think this is a “good” thing? I’m very curious to see how the history is portrayed.

via Metafilter

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