First and most memeworthy seem to be those related to extending Google Maps to deeper functionality and greater potential for folksonomic markup (for much, much more on folksonomies, see Many-to-Many). Google Maps has added satellite images, which were marked up with personal narratives related to the spaces by the Flikr group Memory Maps, and then Craig's List apartment listings were scraped and integrated into Google Maps. Fun.

I rediscovered an old flame - an online game (Allegiance) that I played circa 2000. As I reminisced, old questions surfaced regarding team-play, role-specialization, and the degree to which the "duty" of players can be reasonably expected and incentivized in virtual spaces. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments. Thus our first biq question, can game software development as it is now conducted scale in the face of advances in hardware, appetite for content, and capped costs?

I've just added a link to the Accelerating Change 2005 Conference. Terra Nova is shameless overwhelmingly delighted to accept the briefcase of unmarked, small denomination bills play the role of media sponsor. ("Look mom, I'm a media outlet/journalist!")

There are 112 million gamers age 13 or older in the US. By year end 2008 this number will grow to 148 million. There was general recognition that successful campaigns must always be contextual and sensitive to the quality of the player’s gaming experience. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.

Statements: Different actors have different utility functions (Castronova, 2002), with different expectable challenge and consequently reward. RMT in a player sense is caused by the essentially incompatibility between challenge levels of the game and the desired or the proper one (ex. DAOC and the expansion Trials's master levels, farming in EQ or autoclicking in Project entropia) following the formula S = aR - b(C - x)^2. 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.

Currently, all RMT involves people buying items that reduce the challenge level. But what if a game was too easy?

Arseni Stardoumov, Stockholm School of Economics, has written with an interesting set of propositions regarding RMT. Assume the players have a diversity of tastes for both the rewards of the game system (R) as well as its challenges (C). 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 I’m not sure why. Maybe it -would- be a good idea if opposing sides took up virtual arms – anything is better than stones and bombs. For example, one might argue that the current India vs Pakistan test series is a cathartic political statement, the leaders of both nations being present seems to suggest that that game does have political significance. Or am I just trivializing matters now? After all, war’s not a game (pdf) now is it? Similarly, cory: i'm not saying that gold exchange is now always and everywhere inside the magic circle. I’m saying i can conceive of games designed with the *incentives* to ebay kept firmly in mind, that *will* be in the magic circle. 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 ongoing conflict between China and Japan seems to be spilling over into the MMO mulitverse. As I say I feel that this will see shifts and divisions in games. No eBayers (we need a new term here) will find places that will satisfy their needs if eBayers corrupt their spaces. We might see the rise in effectively eBayer zones where they are playing on roughly the same field with their shiny automatic paint guns, boats and football teams in the English league were not a single player actually is English.

To be picky I don't really like the use of the term Social Contract in this context as I feel that that really picks out a particular relationship between an individual and a state. Cyber-exceptionalists and the like might want these connotations but I'm not sure it's what we are getting at here, at the very least it can be a distraction. I've adopted the term ludic-contract because I think that that gets to the heart of things. That heart being, as I commented the other day on Nathan's thread, that which sustains a kind of ultra-minimal ludic state i.e. where two or more people share a common myth and values of the game (the network of bonds of trust that make up and sustain the magic circle is another way of looking at it, especially if one wants to be contractarian in ones ethics). Thing is, as Julian has been saying, in reality what we have are intersecting value sets and when we have something as big as an MMO the values of some players may not intersect in important ways.