The more of our competitors that are so hopelessly misguided, the better. Just makes it easier for rest of us who know even vaguely what we’re doing to make enough money doing it that we can keep on learning and improving our products :).

Sure, this undermines (some of) the sense of achievement of (some of) the players – I’m not objecting to that. I’m objecting to the oft-proposed claim that it “ruins the game” or similar. IMHO (and this is as much a guess as are the claims I’m objecting to :)), all it does is impose some extra pressures on the pricing model of your game – get the pricing level wrong, and this is an additional way that you will irritate / lose your players. But then “getting the pricing level right” is one of the easier avenues that MMOs have generally failed to attempt, and I think it’s long overdue for more companies to start experimenting more boldly with them. NB: when I say “pricing” I mean “the actual figure you charge for each purchasable thing” rather than “what things you charge for, or how you charge for them”.

Thanks for the nice explanation of the Bragg case. I agree that what he did initially would be unlikely to be upheld (IIRC it was near identical to any other case of accidental mispricing, which has hit many online retailers, and generally has been awarded to the retailer as an “unintentional” price, therefore not something they are required to honour?).

My comment that I felt Linden would “probably” have lost even with special laws was referring to the part where they seized all his assets. As such, I don’t think it’s a worrying sign per se – in a world where you specifically pay for goods and are told you “own” them completely, I’d expect even special VW-focussed laws to uphold your right to keep what’s yours. In this particular case, I’d expect a separate law to say it was never yours in the first place, of course :), and trump the law on ownership.

I especially liked your point about the way that other forms of entertainment have their own laws that are NOT extrapolated from the core laws, e.g. boxing does not simply inherit all the laws on assault and battery – I felt this was a very simple but effective illustration. I think people should use examples like that one more often.

>I think we have to be careful not to mix that up with the specifics of things like the SL case, which *even with separate laws* probably would go against Linden.

Well, what went against them was the striking down of the EULA’s preference for arbitration rather than a court case. Linden Lab is registered in Delaware, is HQed in California and the complainant was in Pennsylvania. The judge decided this was inter-state, so inter-state laws applied, and they move that when it comes to arbitration, both parties need to agree to it. Bragg said he didn’t, Linden Labs said he did because he accpeted the EULA/TOS. The judge agreed with Bragg that the arbitration clause was “unconscionable”, which has a knock-on effect of making the contract itself susceptible to allegations of being “a contract of adhesion” (ie. unfair because of the unequal barganining positions of the parties).

Now whether this would have gone against Linden Labs if there had been separate laws or not I don’t know; what I do know is that this has weakened the armour of the EULA, and could quite possibly make all click-through EULAs invalid if it went to a court decision (Linden Labs settled before this happened). If all click-through EULAs were indeed rendered invalid, what would that mean for virtual worlds? Imagine if WoW had to enter into negotiations with every player when they signed up, so they could demonstrate that they knew what they were getting into. Imagine if they had to do the same thing after every patch.

Basically, unless we got new laws that allowed the current style of take-it-or-leave-it EULA (perhaps within certain parameters), we’d have no virtual worlds of any significant size at all.

> Laws generally reflect the prevailing culture (according to the lawyers), and in the prevailing culture Linden seemed to be acting unfairly

Not in the culture of the virtual world. The general sentiment among SL players seemed to be that Bragg had indeed been caught cheating, and should not have been allowed to keep his ill-gotten gains. However, Linden Labs banned him and recovered his other in-world assets, too, particularly his land (which, I believe, they sold on). This is what prompted Bragg to sue – Linden Labs had said many times that people “own” the stuff they buy. Bragg said that even if he had been banned, they couldn’t take away stuff he owned and he should be able to sell it. Linden Labs said he couldn’t sell it because he’d been banned, and therefore couldn’t access it so as to sell it, and that (basically) he hadn’t ever owned it anyway, he was just renting.

Personally, I think Bragg kinda had a point: Linden Labs did talk a lot about “ownership”, and so he did have a reasonable expectation that he did own “his” stuff (Linden Labs have changed their EULA since, to make it clearer that no, you don’t actually real-world own in-game stuff, except the IP of anything you create). However, the danger is that at some point someone may get banned from WoW or some other game world and claim that they “own” their virtual goods, based on some Lockean argument or whatever. If they won such a case, game worlds are dead in the water.

>it’s nothing more than a guess and a groundless theory until/unless you add something – anything – that makes it more solid than that

The thing about micro-payments (which are very popular in the Far East) is that if they have no gameplay effect, players are generally OK with them. They don’t mind if you pay money for your character to ride a panda instead of a horse; they do mind if the panda runs faster. For many players, the aim is to achieve, and they want to play on a level playing field. To them, if you can buy an advantage then it forces them to buy the advantage, too, which they resent. to them, it’s as if runners in the 100m in the Olympics could pay $10,000 to have their starting line moved forward a centimetre – its not fair.

Now, in many games this kind of thing isn’t all that contentious. However, in game worlds, with their Hero’s Journey underpinnings, it can be a major issue. This is why so many players are against RMT, too – it undermines the achievement hierarchy.

There are ways around this, of course (only sell people things when they’ve hit the necessary achievement levels, for example). Nevertheless, there’s some resistance to the idea of micropayments. If nothing else, people feel that they’re being ripped off (especially as these games are often advertised as “free to play”). Try playing Project Entropia as a newbie and see how far you can get without a) buying any PEDs, and b) having someone suggest to you that you buy some PEDs.

Micropayments may or may not end up undermining players’ sense of achievement, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence around to suggest that the possibility that they will do so is not entirely resident only in the land of theory.

>there are games being made that are exceptional teaching tools

There are indeed (as I mentioned in my talk, I’m acting as consultant on one). There just aren’t enough, though, and the paradigm shift we desperately need hasn’t come along yet (nor does it show any signs of doing so in the immediate future).

>my only question is why govts haven’t gone AWOL about this > 5 years ago

They’re following it, but at the moment the amounts of money involved are too small for them to waste resources. I spoke to the FSA about this last year.

There have been issues with money laundering in South Korea and China that have had side-effects on virtual worlds, particularly the clampdown that occurred after China got annoyed with QQ Coins.

>I’d be interested to know in what WAY they saw them as identical: were they just exceptionally ignorant and had no idea what either is actually like? or were they saying that, treated as a black box within wider processes / business models, the two are effectively indistinguishable?

OK, so first they generally were ignorant, in that they knew what virtual worlds were from having read about them, not from having played them. Also, though, from their point of view this was enough: they were interested in leveraging/monetising communities, and the nature of the community wasn’t on their agenda – a community is a community, right?

Sigh…

>I disagree completely. But … it’s hard, really hard, because practically all the good game design has ignored teaching to date

It’s ignored it because educators know nothing about game design (come to that, few game designers do..!). Also, few game designers are interested in pedagogy. The games that educators come up with are, in general, deeply, depressingly bad games; I don’t know how the games designed by game designers stack up in the educational world, but I can’t imagine they’re much better at teaching than educators’ games are at being fun.

I’ve had conversations with educators that ended like this:
Me: “This isn’t a game! It’s a simulation!”
Them: “OK, so what if we offer a prize to the person with the highest score?”
Me: “Aaargh!”

It’s possible to do good educational games. I personally believe that aiming to teach anything other than material at the opposite ends of the spectrum (ie. the least and most abstract ideas) is probably going to be doable better than in other ways, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong (although I doubt I will be). The question is, though: where are these good educational games? We’ve had “serious games” for over a decade – why aren’t kids playing games every day in class by now?

Yes, the older I get, the more impatient I become…

>I think it’s still critically important to understand the details, since so much of the success or failure of a game rests on the level of polish, and the polish is ONLY about these details

The details follow from the design. Polish itself isn’t a skill, polishing is the skill, and if you can do it for one aspect of design you can do it for all of them. I’ve seen WoW’s polish; I don’t need to see it in every single raid instance or in countless PvP battles to see what Blizzard’s designers do when they polish something.

Sorry for rambling on, but I thought you probably deserved some answers after such a long write-up!

Richard