Evolving Web

Evony – Thoughts on a Business Model and a Community

As software as a service becomes mainstreamed, I’ve been watching how startups monetize their applications. The straight subscription model is the default. However, the recurring costs of a subscription model seem to annoy people as time goes on.  If you aren’t using too many SaaS products, one or two subscriptions are tolerable.  When you move up to 5 or 6 products you begin to get subscription fatigue.

In-game economies is one answer to subscription fatigue. Evony is a massively multiplayer real time strategy game that’s made a quiet entrance, but has amassed an impressive user base.  It’s “always free” motto promises complete game play, but monetizes objects in the game. This gives the game player the freedom to buy into the game as much or as little as they wish. For Evony, the price can be free to whatever they’d like to spend.

Individual players in the game can join alliances which provide mutual support, protection and reinforcement in battle.  As the communities solidify, Evony has made several game elements exchangeable, but several others are not. This creates an internal economy of need. If your team needs your participation and that requires an object you might be able to find, that puts creates a social need for that object.

Playing alone, the gamer might wait for a few days or even weeks until they find that object. The social need becomes a powerful element in the Evony business model. In light of this, it seems that Evony would benefit from creating functional groups of their buyable objects. 

For example, when starting a new city in Evony, players need to quickly establish a lot of easily constructed structures and populate the city. Some of the things you can buy are “guidelines” that hasten construction and “boxes” or “packages” that can have people or resources.  A “new city” package that included people, resources and guidelines would be what I’d expect to come next.

The communities grow quickly in Evony and can determine whether someone will make it in the game at all. They should be the first aspect of the game to leverage for Evony success.  So, the next area I’d go for if I were Evony would be to provide community discounts.  So if you are part of an alliance that spent a certain amount on Evony, the entire alliance gets either a kickback of game currency, a discount or a package of some type.

The next thing I’d do is monetize game participation. If you have a 100 member alliance but only 10 of them actually participate, that’s not worth much.  But 100 members where 80 regularly participate is impressive and should be rewarded.

SaaS products outside the gaming world can learn from this as well. It’s not necessarily the software that is being monetized, it’s the performance of the user. Counter-intuitively the product becomes more valuable to the individual as their usage increases. This value increases exponentially as the network of users increases (Reed’s Law).

We’ve seen that networks don’t make an application sticky, but the activity of a network does. Evony has been interesting to watch as the activity of the alliances have brought people back to the game. This makes it “coopertainment” – entertainment that required cooperation in order to enjoy (and monetize) fully.

How to Birth a Culture - An Obituary for E. Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax has passed away.

It must be a good 23 years since I played Dungeons and Dragons last, in John's gameroom in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Regardless of what one might wish to say about D&D geeks, they are a culture - and a very long standing one by modern measure.  Practitioners of social media and social networking who aim to create on-line cultures and communities need look no further than Dungeons and Dragons to find all the elements necessary for strong community.

It is brilliant work.  Complex, subtle, and utterly open ended.

We used to play D&D not only for hours, but for days.  It was an incredible focal point for bored teens eager for both competition and intellectual challenge.

I can firmly see a huge table with the map and game objects, the players (Chad, Kurt, John, Chris, myself, and the cycling guests), the piles of food, the bean bag to let people crash when they couldn't go on.  Marathon sessions that didn't cause carpel tunnel.  That required face to face interaction.

All because E. Gary Gygax sat down and created some books.

It was the vital ingredients in D&D that allows it to be a sustainable community, not the game itself.  The game is merely a game.  It's construction and Gygax's forethought is what makes it sustainable. 

Why is D&D so special in particular?  What do we have to learn from it?  Well, it has all the key ingredients to culture, here's just five of them:

1. Cooperation is Vital to Survival

In a D&D world, you can be a super powerful character that can run around kicking butt and taking names - for a while.  But, unless you have a dungeon master that's scared of you, something more powerful will come and get you.

In a well balanced culture, people rely on each other for success.  Every so often we may need a character like Willem Dafoe's Elias Grodin in Platoon, but they don't make a healthy culture overall.  In fact, their uniqueness is what makes them valuable to the group.

Usually, you need to build a team of varying skill sets in order to succeed.  You need visionaries, detail people, and workers.  You need producers and consumers (see my previous post about LiveJournal).   You need balance.  You need cooperation.

When you need cooperation, you build virtuous cycles to success.  Each person not only adding their strengths, but also relying on others to do the same.  Surprisingly, people actually like to be relied upon.  They don't like being forced to do things, but they love the freedom to do good.

Cooperation is a key ingredient of culture.

2. Positive Feedback and Reinforcement

Do good, get experience points.  Get experience points, become more skilled.  Become more skilled, do even more good!

Seem simple?  Well, it is. 

Surprising, there are so many VCs out there giving money to Social Networking sites that simply don't get it.  They don't see why it's important.

And why should they?  Only recently has business begun to even accept that basing performance on strengths and not weaknesses is a good idea.  As a society, we're just beginning to grasp that positive reinforcement might be beneficial.

Gygax figured that out decades ago.

He made a game out of not getting your pudding before you eat your meat.  He figured out that we want to do the work if the reward is right and that the reward not only makes us feel good, but it makes us appreciate the reward giver even more.  In short, it earns loyalty.

Reinforcement is a key ingredient of culture.

Loyalty is a key ingredient of culture. (Bonus ingredient!)

3. Freedom of Choice

And Devo sang:

We're victims of sedition on an open sea
No one ever said that life was free
Sink, swim, go down with the ship
Just use your freedom of choice

In life we have a lot of choices and some of them are a real pain in the ass. No choices, however, is the very definition of tedium.

Creating an open ended environment where players were limited only by their imaginations - but still bound to a set of conventions - is truly masterful work.  The conventions need to be firm enough to create a coherent environment, but open enough to allow the users to build whatever environment they choose.

This freedom isn't just important because people's minds like to wander, it's important because culture is not a fixed concept.  Culture meanders through time.  It morphs, reinvents itself, but still maintains an identity - if it is allowed to.  If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Let's copy and paste that sentence a few times. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Stupid VCs who want to fund something quick take note, the world of culture building is not quick and building on-line communities to flip will fail in the long run.  Certainly you can build a bubble and steal make some money, but the tools will fail.

Gygax created a very detailed environment that let people go where they wanted and do what they wanted - within a given boundary.  A good dungeon master, in the end, was someone who knew exactly when and how to apply rules.  To keep the game interesting and fun, while being neither ungoverned nor oppressive.

Freedom is a key ingredient of culture.

4. Role Definition

We all wear many hats.  But, damn, we love hats.  When we don't have a hat, we're confused about what our roles are.

This is closely coupled with two other things: Fit and Style.

Don't give me a Cowboy hat.

The roles we choose need to fit our personality and our aesthetic.  In business, people often wear all sorts of ill-fitting hats.  Excellent producers who get promoted to managers, but hate managing people.  Team members who get a role because it's needed, but doesn't fit their strengths.  People fighting for a position for which they are ill-suited because society doesn't value what they do well.

Fit requires matching with your skill set, which requires definition. Your role must come with an explanation of what society thinks that role does.  You will augment that within bounds based on your style, but the role itself needs some boundaries in order to recognizable as a role.

(You will see many posts by me for management theory, discussing why process changes at some companies fail because people are reassigned to roles that aren't adequately explained or incorporated into the culture.)

Style is how that role integrates with you.  How are you going to be a good cost accountant or an elf mage?  Do you want to be one at all?  Does your style lead to success or failure?  You can mold the position to fit your style, but you can't completely obliterate the rules for that role.  You can't be a cost accountant that only bakes cookies, for example.

Gygax's D&D universe has a set of classes and subclasses of roles that are compelling enough to attract a wide variety of personality types and skill sets.

Roles are a key ingredient of culture.

5. Maturation Process

Can your community mature?  In D&D you mature by the leveling up of your character, but after time this becomes the mechanical part of the game.  Predictable, almost.

What starts as your primary motivation for playing the game, becomes merely a byproduct of it.  After a while, maturation takes on some familiar roles.

Mentoring, specialization, and governance are primary indicators of a mature community.  As characters and players mature, they lead other players forward and teach them the ropes (mentoring).  They become more and more skilled and subtle in their areas of knowledge (specialization).  And they tend to watch for malfeasance and, from their position of authority which comes from being a long-time member of the culture, deal with it (governance).

Again, we can see this in yesterday's LiveJournal article.  Players of World of Warcraft will recognize these elements immediately.  This process is a major factor in the success of Wikipedia.

This type of maturation reinforces culture by providing a healthy continuum of member growth and internal policing.

Cultural maturation is a key ingredient of culture.

Emotional Goodbye to Gary

You know, at the time of an experience you never know what lessons you will take away.  It's certain that at 13 years of age I wasn't really all that concerned with the cultural maturation processes of D&D.  I don't even know that Gygax was too concerned.

I do know that more than few funds were pooled to go to the Conestoga Mall in Grand Island and pick up yet another D&D book.

What I see now, as I work with clients to help build communities and collaborative management processes, is that Gygax understood tactics on a deeper level than any of us ever gave him credit for.

His company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), which produced D&D, is keyed on tactics. We always thought it was battle tactics. It's pretty clear now that he understood social tactics as well.

Consider this: D&D was sold primarily from word of mouth in a pre-Internet era.  (The lack of advertising scared parents who felt it was a pawn of the devil.)  In other words, it was a highly successful viral marketing campaign in an era where there was tremendous friction for word of mouth.

Gygax, in the end, was a person who seemed ultimately interested in the game and the community around the game.  He said in 2004:

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

In this one, compact sentence, is about half the essay above.  Every person interested in creating community, whether a social media creator, an urban planner or whatever, should have this quote on their wall.

Gygax's game did more than keep me off the streets, it reinforced deep community values and contributed to many of my current management and social theories.

So, thank you for that Gary.  I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful creations.

I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else. - Gary Gygax

Technorati Tags: Gary Gygax, E. Gary Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D, obituary, obituaries, community indicators, community, online communities, sociology, grand island, TSR, devil worship

Through the Hard Scrabble to Pride Point

This was an amazingly hard fought scrabble game between John von Seggern and myself where both sides fought hard to avoid the double and triple word score tiles and make nested moves that were impossible to extend upon.  I think it also took us two months or so to complete.  Asynchronous on-line game play is significantly slower than real-time.

Technorati Tags: scrabble, scrabulous, facebook, john von seggern

The Significance of Music in Second Life

co-written with Johnvon

Music has always been a social art form, created and enjoyed by people in groups. Some argue that music was one of the primary means by which early groups of humans communicated and maintained the social bonds that held their communities together.

Since the invention of music recording however, about a century ago, technological developments have made the experience of music a more and more private activity. Once music could be purchased for listening at home, the possibility of enjoying music in private by yourself became a more and more popular alternative to attending performances. This has led to our current iPod era, where the most iconic image of a music listener is of a solitary individual dancing with mp3 player and earphones attached, rather than the more social concert or club audiences of earlier periods.

More recently, networking and new online media technologies have reversed this trend to some extent, giving us new ways to form communities around music. Napster showed us all how badly we want to share our music, and in spite of the dogged resistance of the 'mainstream' music industry, technologies for sharing music and other media online continue to grow in sophistication.

Most recently, virtual world environments such as Second Life have introduced a significant new development, creating a virtual 3d space in which groups of fans can listen to and experience music together in real-time. Of course virtual reality tech like this has been around since the early 90s, but the last couple years mark the first time that they have been easily accessible by a large simultaneous user base.

We anticipate that virtual world technologies are likely to have a major impact on the world of music in the near future. We will focus on Second Life here as it currently has the most sophisticated in-world music scene.

Sharing the Experience of Music

People want to share music. This doesn't only mean passing mp3 files back and forth, it means sharing the experience of music. It means sharing feelings about it, sharing opinions and reactions, and talking about it in real time. For example, we all spent time as teenagers lying on the floor listening to new music and talking about it, and for many of us our musical tastes were one of the main ways we identified with our friends.

While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene, they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one's own recent music purchases or of a live concert.

The Internet, the Web and related networking technologies have brought great change to the music world in the past decade, from mp3 music distribution to the profusion of indie bands and producers promoting themselves on a MySpace page or through their own websites.

Last.fm is a great example of how Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, folksonomies, ratings and recommendations from users with similar tastes can be used to help listeners find new music they will enjoy.

However, although Last.fm bills itself as the 'social music revolution' and tries its best to connect you with other listeners, even going so far as to show you a page of images of other users whose tastes are similar to your own...

...yet just seeing some names of people who like the same music you do is not the same thing as actually being with them and hearing the music together. The 2d asynchronous nature of the Web does not allow for this level of interaction with others. Until now none of these online technologies could replicate the experience of going to see and hear a live musical performance in the company of other listeners.

Second Life provides an interesting and exciting extension to this. Through avatars, users can seek out not only social experiences to listen to new music in a shared context, but they can also search worldwide for the musical subculture that best meets their tastes. A Second Life user can experience a live performance from their dorm room in Ames, Iowa while the performer may be in Berlin and other listeners/clubgoers scattered around the world.

While the user's avatar is dancing, the user can be speaking to fellow attendees from all over the world. Casual conversations can easily happen, even more easily than they could in a real life club.

Add to this one very un-real element of Second Life -- distance is never a barrier. Users can teleport from one club to another merely by using the search utility, finding another club with music they like, and clicking the teleport button. The barrier of time and space is utterly nullified. The only barrier to leaving would be social.

But, regardless of where the user ends up, she'll be there with other people. They will experience the music at the same time, they will "share" the experience of the music in the truest sense of the word.

Are We Not (walk)Men?   No!

Until the advent of Second Life and similar virtual world technologies, the Internet had really only extended pre-existing trends towards music listening as an asocial private activity. As with iPods and the Walkmen before them, listening to music online has been largely a solo activity so far. The iPod advertisements were somewhat foreboding in this respect, the individual reduced to lone dancing silhouette -- action without social interaction. In so many situations, we listen alone.

However, Second Life is re-creating music online as a truly social event. The music played live and streamed through Second Life is simultaneously experienced by those gathered. This is a fundamental shift -- with Second Life broadcast media and experiential media coalesce.

In Second Life, individuals gather to listen to live music and DJ mixes from unknowns and mega-stars -- all from their own homes. Clubs in Second Life are often hosts for after-hours parties. After clubbing in their home cities, people will log in to Second Life to wind down before bed, visiting their favorite virtual clubs and seeing their SL friends. As an artist is performing, so is the audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.

Impact

Stay Tuned

In upcoming days Johnvon and I will examine Second Life and Music more closely. Articles will include:

• Culture, Networking and Music
• Monetization and Sales of Music heard in Second Life
• The flow of music from real life to second life and back again
• Music Production in Second Life
• Leveraging of External Networks in Second Life

Technorati Tags: second life, music, lastfm, social networking, social media, monetization, broadcast media, experiential media

Act Your Age - A Review of Rejuvenile by Christopher Noxon

Age is an issue of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.  ~Mark Twain

Have you met a person recently that was 40something or 50something and you can totally picture what they were like as 8?  And have you met people that you feel have been OLD forever - like straight-from-the-womb old?  Well, Christopher Noxon has done a bit of theorizing, interviewing and research on this and has rolled it into a wonderful book called Rejuvenile. 

Christopher believes that we are regaining our ability to play, to experience and to not be boxed in by life.  I say regaining because Christopher also posits, that it's only been the last 100 years that people have increasingly allowed themselves to be pushed into an "adult" form at the expense of all else.

Rejuvenile is a book that explains why we all might want to play kickball at 40 more than we want to sit inside and wax nostalgic about lost youth.  Youth, it turns out, is not so much lost as given away.  Increasingly, we are becoming more and more unwilling to give that away.

(See entire mind map in its natural environment)

(If you can't see the mind map in your feed, please go to the actual blog post)

As you can see in the concepts, Play is a major portion of Rejuvenile.  The roles of play are varied and rather exciting.  So let's discuss that first:

PLAY

Play is what keeps us young.  Why?  Because play, by its very nature is free of guilt, free of morose obligation, life-affirming, and ... pleasurable.  For me, play helps me recharge and, therefore, I try to set up even my professional relationships in a playful manner.

One of my business partners, who is a very large multinational firm, insist on the personal relationship first, the professional relationship second.  I was talking to one of them and they essentially said, "I understand you are great at what you do, now ... why should we be friends?"

In business they call this "building relationships", which is stodgy business talk for "are you fun to play with?"  The questions are less focused on "How efficient is your organization" and more "how much will you make me laugh?"

And Noxon catches your next obvious question... "You mean that being competent no longer matters?"  No, it does.  We are still adults and part of being adults is understanding the nature of responsibility. 

But being a good Rejuvenile Adult is learning that responsibility neither buries nor jails you.

Play is central to this.  When you are in jail (when I was a kid it was called "being grounded") you cannot play.  Post-industrial age adults were self-jailed in Victorian values that rewarded stoic demeanor and pooh-poohed expressiveness.

Noxon contends, this created a false distance between adults and children which may well have led to the issues we've seen in the last 30 years with the dissolution of the family.  Children of stodgy households never knew what growing up with a cohesive family was like.  In the service of order, the Victorian era effectively dismantled itself.

Play is central to most of the parents I know.  They often play with their kids, share directly in their imaginings and role playings, and get a lot from it personally.  Rather than their kids aging them, they are actually sustaining them.  How exciting!

Redefinition

More than a handful of redefinition comes from Rejuvenile.  We see alterations of the concepts of Maturity, Adulthood, Parenthood, Hierarchy, and Discipline.

What I see in Noxon's writing is the softening of the need for authoritarian rule (which requires distance, alienation and fear as central elements of power) and a rise of social discipline (which requires respect, accountability, and problem solving).  Kids still understand the natural authority of the parent, but the parent need not rule in an authoritarian way.

Inspirations

I have more than a few inspirations from this book.  I've already discussed the energy one in the post linked to above.  But there are a few others in the mind map that I'll try to roll into one or two paragraphs.

Kids naturally seem to want to help and have a willingness to fail (no this isn't universal, nothing is).  As we get older, our desire to help is often tempered by our load of responsibility and our willingness to fail is diminished by our growing awareness of our mortality.  We look at our parents invariably see the realization of some fear of adulthood we don't want to repeat.

But, it seems to me, our parents were always older than us.  So we always looked at them as "old".  We don't give them credit for their level of play or for the hard decisions they had to make.  So we are often reacting to stereotypes we have subjected our parents to, rather than the human beings that are actually our parents.

What's funny is that since their inception Cartoons have seemed to bridge this gap.  Until his death, my Grandfather was crazy for Loony Toons.  Now, when you turn on Cartoon Network, you see age straddling cartoons like Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. In one episode, Bloo is kidnapped and forced to be a spokes-imaginary-friend for a deodorant stick company.  During that episode, there are two TV announcers that look like Mary Tyler Moore and Ted Knight.  The character that looks like Ted named "Todd" and is constantly being called "Ted", to which he replied "It's Todd!" - A mirroring of Ted Knight's Ted Baxter character's recurring line on the Mary Tyler Moore show 30 years ago.

Closing

So, I'm very thankful for Amazon's little recommendation algorithm for recommending Rejuvenile to me.  I tried to set up a coffee with Christopher when I was in Los Angeles last weekend and he graciously accepted, but with the caveat that we'd need to hook up on the fly because he was going to birthday parties and other events with the kids.  So, alas, we didn't get together on that trip.

But I'm certain we'll find a time to play together later.

Rejuvenile gets a "Highly Recommended" from me.  I'm certain it will join the ranks of the often-referenced in the Evolving Web blog.

Incidentals

Read: 27 May to 5 June 2007

Where: San Jose, Seattle, San Marcos, and Palm Springs

Between: The Penultimate Truth and The Starfish and The Spider

Buy Rejuvenile here

Read Christopher Noxon's Blog here

Technorati tags: Christopher noxon, rejuvenile, childhood, adulthood, maturity, communcation, creativity, play, cartoon network

Blogged at Caffe Keffa in Seattle, Washington using Windows Live Writer.

Torrents, Not Just for the Kids Anymore

Like cassette tapes, video tapes, and MP3s before it, BitTorrent has now moved from the movie industry's "spawn of Satan" list to their newest distribution tool.

The entertainment industry now has an established model of technology adoption:  Fearful to Friendly.   Suffice it to say, they are not early adopters.

BitTorrent.com will now sell video games and movies.  What I think is cool about this is that "classic" games or movies can be picked up cheap.  Now you could pick up a copy of Mary Pickford and my grandfather cavorting around in Little Lord Fauntleroy.  Silent films aren't a big draw at the video counter or on pay-on-demand, but how great would it be for them to be $2 a download or less via BitTorrent?

The New York Times says:

The BitTorrent store will work slightly differently than rival digital media offerings like the iTunes Store of Apple and the Xbox Live service of Microsoft. BitTorrent will commingle free downloads of users’ own video uploads with sales of professional fare. And while it will sell digital copies of shows like “24” and “Bones” for $1.99 an episode, it will only rent movies. Once the films are on the PC, they expire within 30 days of their purchase or 24 hours after the buyer begins to watch them.

New releases like “Superman Returns” cost $3.99, while classics like “Reservoir Dogs” cost $2.99. The studio’s content plays in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11. It is secured by Microsoft’s antipiracy software, which blocks users from watching rented movies on more than one PC or sending them to others over the Internet.

For video games especially, a backcatalog in compelling.  No one wants to litter their shelves with bulky boxes and manuals from old video games.  Or worse, don't have a 5.25" floppy to run them.

Games for the PC-AT like Art of War, Ultima II or Neuromancer would be a fun diversion while sitting in an airport.

BitTorrent has done this superbly.  The entertainment files are still covered by DRM, but the price point is so low that it hardly matters. 

For me, this beats the hell out of Tivo and such things, as the television itself is less and less part of my daily life.  However, when my wife is taking an extra hour to leave the office, it would be great to fire up an episode of Battlestar Galactica.

I think the entertainment companies will soon realize that they can make great money from small payment, one-shot events like this.  And, perhaps for the first time, they can truly exploit their long tail.

They could get an on-line permanent archive and museum of every film ever made.  Now, just do this with music and we're golden.

 

Technorati tags: BitTorrent, MPAA, RIAA, Tivo, Francis Marion, Neuromancer, Art of War, DRM

Blogged at Alaska Airlines Board Room at SeaTac Airport in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Forget Your Troubles C'mon Get Happy

My friend Jerry says that your brain will reward you if you forget your troubles and get happy.

Jerry says:

Researchers are discovering -- finally -- that brains reconfigure themselves all the time.
ScienceDaily recently reported that scientists in Lausanne detected neural reconnections on an hour-by-hour basis. In an interesting twist, my favorite passage in the article draws a parallel between brain function and social networks:

"The circuitry of the brain is like a social network where neurons are like people, directly linked to only a few other people," explains [researcher] Markram. "This finding indicates that the brain is constantly switching alliances and linking with new circles of "friends" to better process information."

Oddly this is exactly what meditation has always been for - to clear out associations in the brain that are baggage or unproductive and to focus the brain on understanding the task at hand.  In essence, it's like an operator switching the alliances in the brain in an optimization effort.

But there's a sinister part of this, that repetitive messaging works.  This is a human autonomic response that is easily gamed.  Say, for example, you wanted to convince people of a course of action - anything from buying Coke to supporting a war overseas.  Well, the best way to get what you want it repetitive messaging - so the brains of your target audience gradually and unwillingly associate Coke with Life and Iraq with Terrorism.

"I am in control of my own brain, I am in control of my own brain, I am in control of my own brain, ..."

 

Technorati tags: Jerry Michalski, Sociate, Social networking, brains, neural connections, coke

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Blurring the Digital Divide

As we near the world of ubiquitous computing and as the concept of Cyberspace makes about as much sense as "Left Arm Space", we become further mired in the social, legal, institutional and political aspects of on-line life.  The increasing tax implications of earnings from virtual worlds is clear by the increase in news stories about it.

As I noted yesterday, Reuters has opened a bureau in the on-line world of Second Life.  Meaning that actions happening within a virtual world are now seen as important enough to broadcast to the physical world. 

Both of these events show that actions within a digital world have ramifications in the physical world to the point that there is no intrinsic difference.  People now can wake up in the morning, go to work in Second Life, make money, shut off Second Life and go have lunch with that money. 

Second Life therefore has become a fully integrated part of someone's day.  There is no more a cyberspace for that than there is a bossspace for work.  You could say "I'm going to bossspace" and it might even be pretty accurate - but work is part of what everyone does every day.

Clearly this extends beyond money.  While day traders certainly work all day in a digital environment, the social aspects of worlds like Second Life are not present.  You wouldn't have a Reuters bureau for Ameritrade. 

Social or even professional meetings occur there.  Romances, business arrangements, legal battles all come up.  And you can list the same for World of Warcraft and other online environments.

The insertion of a Reuters office into Second Life is just another brick removed from the imaginary wall separating our physical and virtual lives.

Technorati tags: cyberspace, reuters, second life, world of warcraft

Created using Windows Live Writer at the Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle.

 

 

Link to Reuters/Second Life

The Future is Ugly

Monopoly Money, the true trademark of the game monopoly, apparently no longer exists.  If you have a Monopoly game from 1950, it still works.  Will the one you buy with the new debit card work in 2050?  More than likely not.

Parker Brothers say they are "keeping with the times."  However, most people do no buy major property with a credit card.  So I'm not seeing that.  I see Parker Brothers feeling scared because Monopoly has no gizmo.

Apparently, there is a cost for modernism.  Engadget Says:

For those anxious to get their swipe on, or if you've simply forgotten how to use bills, the new version will set you back £24.99, while the now "antiquated" cash version can be had for £12.99, but only while supplies last.

Monopoly Money is part of the American vernacular.  When A-Rod left Seattle to go play for Satan Texas, he left because he wanted to milk a team for money and found the Rangers ready to let him suckle.  When he came to Seattle to play, fans would throw Monopoly Money around the stadium as he batted.

I'll continue to use my "classic" monopoly - which requires no batteries and includes barely an ounce of plastic.

Technorati Tags: monopoly, parker brothers, game, future, visa

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Who Grieves the Grievers?

Online gaming communities have the same host of issues as other commons - free riding, dishonesty and abuse.

This includes a dynamic called "Grieving" in which people abuse other game players or thwart objectives of groups. In an article entitled Gamers Don't Want Any More Grief, the Guardian reports on on-line gaming community efforts to police their own against Grieving.

The tools are recognizable, buddy lists, reputation management systems, and reporting mechanisms. However, it would be difficult for such systems to guard against something like this:

The players of World of Warcraft were left with a similar conundrum in March, when a group of gamers performed an act whose only purpose was to cause emotional pain. The death of a member of the community inspired her fellow gamers to hold a virtual funeral, which was raided by a malicious mob that made short work of the mourners, all of whom had relinquished their weapons as a sign of respect. Since the funeral was naively held in a zone designed for combat, few could question the legitimacy of the attack within the game's rules. None the less, the mourners were outraged, not at the penalties their characters would have to suffer, but at the brazen attack on their feelings.

This is another Bull-in-a-china-shop situation, where actors in a commons specifically set out to destroy the elements of the commons that make it worthwhile.

(Cross posted from Cooperation Commons)