The 6th Ministry

Alienated play: presentation.

2010-01-17T12:20:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I gave a lecture on Final Fantasy XI and the constraints of play, and its relationship to transnational tensions, RMT and player motivations. I was recently asked for the slides to the talk.

Here it is:

2007-12-10T21:33:00.000-08:00

MMOs spawn a rich constellation of research tools, databases, forums, walk-throughs and guides. Players analyze and document the content and behavior of the worlds, discuss strategies and tactics, and discuss their experiences of other players and the producers of the games. Final Fantasy XI in particular has inspired a wealth of these sites and resources, some of which Rachel has mentioned in her discussion of crafting.

Among the most robust and expansive of these tools is the FFXIclopedia wiki. Though relatively recent compared to sites such as Allkhazam.com (which hosts forums and databases for many MMORPGs) or Killing Ifrit, the focus on producing articles in a Wikipedia format has been enthusiastically taken up by a large number of participants.

Jesse directed me to this article on the Auto-Translate function from the site. While wikis are ultimately collectively authored, the initial layout and concept for this page, and much of its content, seems to have been produced by Eleri, an exceptionally active producer of FFXiclopedia content, who created the page in August of 2006. Not only is it an interesting example of high quality, player-produced documentation, it is also an interesting case study of the wiki page as a form of writing. The page has grown extensively from its origins, and its development was accompanied by some disagreements, controversy and negotiations between contributors.

Wikis have become an object for study in their own right: one commentator created a screencast showing the history of the wikipedia article on the “heavy metal umlaut.” This paper analyzes the history of the wikipedia article on abortion, using a data visualization tool developed by IBM to track the sudden explosions of material, the points of controversy, the edit battles, the acts of vandalism and their resolutions. I’ve used this tool to analyze the Auto-Translate page, but there isn’t much that it reveals that isn’t fairly obvious already: that there are three primary contributers, of which Eleri is by far the most active. There was a small edit war which I’ll address shortly—otherwise, this is a page that developed slowly and constantly over the past several months.

One of the features which distinguish FFXI from World of Warcraft and some other MMORPGs is the design decision to make all servers international. While WoW offers specific servers for North American, European, and Asian players, as well as allowing players to choose from a variety of game experiences (some servers allow for PVP—inter-player combat—and others do not; some encourage roleplaying, others do not), all of the servers in FFXI are, in theory, identical. The player populations on all of them are international: this has the advantage of creating a “follow-the-sun” play environment, by which players can be reasonably sure that a number of other players (without whom advancement is impossible) can always be found online. Of course, this introduces problems of mutual comprehension.

The game was originally released in Japan, and the client software supported Japanese text. When, about one and one-half years later, the game was released to the North American market, a new client was created that does not support the production of Japanese characters (although these still could be read by players.) Language reflected the differences in national player populations, and cultural distinctions between the two player communities surfaced around the language differences.

The Japanese market, arguably, remains the first priority for the producers of the game. While FFXI is, depending on one’s method for reckoning such things, either the 4^th or 5^th most popular MMORPG globally, it is the most successful such game in Japan, and enjoys considerable exposure (getting referenced in Japanese television just like WoW is referenced by shows like South Park.) Differences in play styles have created tensions between Japanese and American players, although often considerable goodwill also exists. In order to facilitate communication between players, in 2003 the producers introduced the auto-translate feature, which allows players to use tab-completion to input commonly-used phrases in their own language and have it generate a translated version on other players’ screens. Auto-Translated text appears between two colored brackets: an English player might type (Nice to meet you.), which would be seen by Japanese players as (どぞうよろうしこ。)

The Auto-Translator became a toy for some, who would produce amusing, idiosyncratic or idiomatic uses, sometimes using it for risqué humor, or to generate puns—neither of which uses would, of course, be meaningful to audiences seeing the output in their own languages. More interestingly, the translations weren’t always literal, but functional. For example, the English (Nice to meet you.) is translated into a phrase that is only appropriate in Japanese for first meetings, just as “Nice to meet you” usually is. However, in English, this phrase is considered appropriate when ending a first-meeting with a new acquaintance, while the translated text in Japanese is only appropriate at the opening of a conversation. In fact, a more literal translation of the Japanese phrase is “Please be kind to me,” although as a discourse act, it is accurate to translate it as “nice to meet you.”

Other translations are even more fraught with misunderstanding. The English Auto-Translate phrase (Help me out!) is in Japanese translated to something more like “Please come to my immediate aid,” rather than the generalized request for assistance which would be a valid reading of the English text. One edit war erupted in the wiki about the correct translation of a French phrase: the debate included appeals to personal authority (French native ability, Quebecois identity) as well as reference materials.

The problem of communicating across languages is one that vexes Japanese players as well. While many simply choose not to play with players in any language except Japanese, others enthusiastically seek out players from other countries. A specialized phrasebook, called　ヴァナ·ヂィール留学ガイド　(Literally “Vana’diel study-abroad guide,” but subtitled “Study abroad in Vana’diel”) included all the phrases covered by the Auto-Translator, along with culture notes to explain baffling American player behavior and a guide to the abbreviated text-slang that many American players use: omg u wipe? LOL! u need r2? kk, omw (“Oh my God, did you wipe [Did your entire party die]? Haha! Do you need Raise 2? OK, on my way.”) An appendix, now somewhat dated, even addressed the idiosyncratic use of the Auto-Translator by English-language players, who would generate phrases that were meaningless in any other language, but were amusing in English (such as (May) (bee) for “maybe.”

Afterwards:

What follows is a consequence of letting an article lie fallow on one’s hard drive for months.I began this article before a controversy erupted regarding FFXIclopedia, which has since migrated to Wikia. As a result of the controversy (which I won’t dwell on in this post) Eleri no longer participates in FFXIclopedia, and instead participates in another project, the Blue Garter wiki. Yet another wiki project has been started by the largest of the fan-based sites, Allkhazam. While each of these projects has defined itself as distinct from the original one—BGwiki by focusing on end-game events, Allakhazam’s wikibase by focusing on the fictional and cross-cultural aspects of the game (including a number of documents reporting on the background of the game which have been translated by one Elmer the Pointy, who runs his own professional translation service,) one can’t help but see in these forking projects a dissipation of efforts.

Virtual Economies, Virtual Experiments: Present and Future

2007-03-26T02:20:00.000-07:00

Introduction

In the quest for expansion and profit, nothing can be so promising as an unexplored territory. It must come as a great disappointment to explorers that the last Earthly frontiers began to be exploited well over a century ago, and humanity still does not have the ability to properly extract resources from beyond the planet. Still, the meeting point between innovation and entertainment has provided a fresh avenue for wealth creation – and along with it, many questions of academic interest.

In particular, this intersection is the expansive worlds known as MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). These are fully 3D virtual spaces, with thousands to millions of participants; persistent state worlds on which a full life-cycle of activity continues even when a single user is not logged-in. Generally speaking, these games are characterized by fantasy settings, heavily inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, complete with swords, armour, spells, monsters to be killed, and treasure to be had. These worlds have their own currencies, their own goods, unique production chains, different institutions and related transaction costs. As such, one might expect player-based economies to develop in a variety of manners, albeit with some consistency.

One of these consistencies is the existence of RMT (real-money trade), that is, the business of selling in-game currencies or other assets for physical currencies (most commonly U.S. Dollars, Euros, Yen, and Wan). While this may seem absurd on the surface, economics does not differentiate between the physical states of goods when determining what has value, rather value is dependent strictly on what someone is willing to pay. Some estimates have valued the RMT exchange trade to be worth close to USD 1 billion annually (Castronova, 2006), clearly no small business.

However, analysis of games is not the only area of interest. Adapting tools from MMORPG development processes with existing VR (virtual reality) technologies used for medical or military training, or rehabilitation can offer the ability to recontextualise laboratory experiments in a fashion that allows for greater parallelism. Fiore, et al. did just this in a 2007 study on governmental policy and willingness to pay for environmental protection. A comprehensive description of the technologies available and the manners in which they can be used is also provided by the authors.

Literature Review

Castronova’s seminal 2001 study, “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier,” inspired much of the still-sparse literature on the subject. He discusses his experiences in Sony Online Entertainment’s (SOE) game Everquest and describes various macroeconomic indicators. While there’s little theoretical work, it is useful as an introduction to the topic and its relevance in economic studies.

This is studied in more depth in Castronova’s 2002 paper, “On Virtual Economies.” Strong arguments are made for economic study of virtual economies, and the relevance of valuation of virtual goods is shown. Further theorizing is done, in which he develops a utility model for games of a general form, with the recognition that this is a unique setting in which people are willing to pay to be constrained. Models of challenge levels are introduced, the trade-off between various games is considered (including the “real-life game” of working and non-game leisure). A brief discussion of RMT introduces the concept and importance, the proper comparison to exchange rates and currency markets is made. This is an important point. Some future research into RMT requires an understanding that in-game currency is not simply another commodity to be fit into the consumer’s budget. Costs to players such as sunk start-up costs and switching costs are mentioned for the potential of future monopolization of the market. A brief discussion of policy concerns, including jurisdictions and tax revenues suggests these growing economies will come under closer scrutiny in the near future.

In “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Real-Money Trade in the Products of Synthetic Economies,” (2006), Castronova seems to have lost some starry-eyed visions he had in earlier writings. He takes a critical look at RMT by performing a cost-benefit analysis of surplus divisions amongst four sectors: RMT businesses, players that use RMT services, players that do not, and corporations that run the games on which RMT operate. Making some assumptions about RMT elasticities of subscriptions and total costs, he finds that the socially efficient allocation is some level of RMT greater than zero, but below its current levels. A thorough discussion of economic impacts and policy responses is presented.

In a different vein, Fiore, et al., present a new formalization of experimental methodology to economists in their 2007 “Virtual Experiments and Environmental Policy.” They propose mixing VR systems and software toolkits developed to generate settings for MMORPGs with economics experiments, a methodology they refer to as VX – Virtual Experiments. The benefits discussed include a recontextualisation of the experiment to the subject, allowing greater flexibility and replicability, and removing concerns of parallelism. They describe an experiment they conducted in which they were analyzing choices made by subjects over policy changes to environmental protection schemas. They use Forest Service geographical data to reconstruct life-like forests with stochastic chances of fire dangers. The problem presented to subjects is whether or not to increase the level of fire-management methods to reduce the chances for fires, and elicit responses from a properly incentivized virtual property simulation. They do not present the results, perhaps because this is still a working paper.

Future Research

While Castronova seems to be focused on theorizing over utilities of players, a number of interesting economic questions are still present within virtual worlds. Clearly there is the possibility for an in-depth study of production chains and internal macroeconomic data. However, perhaps more interesting are studies involving the cross-over of the real world with the virtual one, that is to say, involving RMT. One important fact to note is that in almost all games players are split across 20 or more unique servers with completely non-linked economies, providing a great resource for controls over variables.

Inflation and RMT

A big debate in the developer and player communities is that of RMT causing inflation. Castronova (2006) seems to take this for granted. Though I am not aware of any research that shows this is the case, it is quite probable that it encourages or accelerates inflation, as it tends to keep money in the system rather than letting it flow out of the natural drains. It may seem that this is intuitively obvious. It bears remembering that the discussion at hand is not that of a commodity price versus a currency (where a drop in the commodity price clearly encourages higher demand), but rather an exchange rate between currencies. In real world economies there is no clear strong link between exchange rate fluctuations and local inflation even when measuring the import good sector of the CPI: “The relationship between consumer price inflation and the exchange rate tends to be quite weak across regimes” (Kara and Nelson, 2003). As such, it is clear proper research is needed.

In particular, a study of one MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) by Square-Enix, would be quite useful. FFXI has a number of things that differentiate it from other virtual worlds: an independent web site not associated with Square-Enix, www.ffxiah.com, reports all sales by all players on all servers that occur in the world, in almost real-time. Thus it is possible to acquire in-game price data quickly and easily. Furthermore, Square-Enix has lately taken an active role in removing RMT from FFXI. There are purges on a near monthly basis, resulting in deletion of several thousand accounts and the removal of billions of gil, the game currency, from the system. They publish rough numbers of the amount of gil removed. This combined with the RMT prices of gil on 3^rd-party business web sites can provide a good estimate of both gil supply and, obviously, gil prices.

With this data, it becomes quite easy to conduct granger-causality tests on the hypotheses “A decrease in gil prices causes in-game inflation,” or “In-game inflation causes a decrease in gil prices.” The converse could also be tested: “An increase in gil prices causes in-game deflation.” These results would provide fodder for future studies, as well as actions by companies or the player-base.

Deflation

In a similar vein, the recent frequent removal of apparently large pieces of the money supply has left the FFXI economies in a tail-spin. Prices are consistently dropping and many players report increasing difficulties in selling their goods, as people hold on to their cash anticipating future deflationary pressures. In the meantime, certain fixed cost money drains required by the programmers of the game remain constant. This has put all but the richest of players in a bit of a pinch. Of course, it is entirely likely that the quantity of gil removed is not constant per server. It is also likely that each server has roughly the same levels of aggregate demand and supply for and of goods. If precise numbers about the money supply of each server and its reduction were obtainable from Square-Enix, one could conduct cross-server analysis of impulse response functions of the CPI to exogenous shocks in the money supply.

Investment Opportunities

As a result of actions taken by Square-Enix against RMT, FFXI has seen more frequent inflationary and deflationary cycles. Inevitable gil fountains continuously introduce money into the system, while the drains are perhaps insufficient to keep it at a stable level, so a certain level of inflation is natural. One avenue of research is to put together a basket of goods and track its performance over time. Good forecasting models could easily result in a net profit in in-game terms. The interesting question here is: “Is it possible to put together a basket of virtual goods such that, when compensating for in-game inflation, real-world inflation, and variable RMT exchange rates, a real-world positive profit can be earned?” Undoubtedly investment banks would be interested if the answer is yes. Having observed the prices of commodities and exchange rates over the past year, I estimate that if one had purchased USD 10.00 of gil in December of 2005 and not performed any in-game investment, selling the same quantity of gil today would gross USD 34.00 due to in-game deflation, for a return of 340% in just over a year.

Luxury Markets

FFXI has a rich manufacturing system. There are eight different sectors a player can pursue: Smithing, Goldsmithing, Alchemy, Clothcraft, Cooking, Leathercraft, Bonecraft, and Woodworking. Ability in the chosen craft is modeled by a skill number (out of 100, that signifying a master craftsman) representing a certain amount of practice in the trade. Each product is defined by its recipe of ingredients and a skill level. A player above the skill level of the chosen product can generally create the product easily. A player below the skill level of the recipe is either completely incapable of attempting it or risks a randomized chance of failure and loss of ingredients. One gains more ability by attempting the manufacture of goods above one’s current skill level. This is essentially a model of routinisation.

A player can practice all of the crafts up to a point. However, after a certain level of competence (a skill of 60, in this case), she must specialize. There are only 40 points total to allocate across skills over 60. The difficulty of this choice is compounded by the creation of “high quality,” or luxury goods. By being a certain number of skill points over the skill level of the chosen recipe, the crafter gains a specific percentage chance to produce high quality; the more points over the recipe’s skill level, the greater that chance – tests by the player-base indicate these percentages are either negligible, 10%, 30%, or 50% depending on the difference in skill levels between the crafter and the recipe. In some cases, the high quality manufacture results in a larger quantity of the item created for the same ingredients, generally in the consumables markets. In the durable goods markets, however, the results are luxury goods.

Expected Value theory informs us that a reasonable value to assign to an uncertain outcome is the probability-weighted sum of the potential outcomes. The luxury goods market is a perfect way to test that. With the current age of FFXI, it is reasonably safe to assume that all manufacturers of high-quality goods have reached the highest skill level of their chosen craft. As such, computing the probabilities of the outcomes is easy, as is finding the prices of the input and output goods. A brief review of one specific market in the game (the “Elemental Staves” market, consisting of eight non-substitutable items, each with normal- and high-quality outcomes, and requiring a high level of woodworking competence and a reasonable bankroll to attempt to enter) indicates that the expected value of the marginal good manufactured is exactly the cost of the inputs (with less than 0.25% forecast error)! While this seems to validate expected value theory, it raises at least one very interesting question: why is there no producer surplus rent being captured by the manufacturers to recoup the not-insignificant fixed cost of entering the market? Have players succumbed to the gambler’s fallacy, or is there an asymmetry of information, where one crafty manufacturer has learned of a way to improve their odds of the high-payoff result? Further research can help answer these questions and determine if this holds for many other popular luxury goods.

High-Stakes Trials and Replication

It is natural that experimentalists question whether results obtained by many studies scale up when the stakes are higher. MMORPGs can allow researchers with even frugal research budgets to conduct high-stakes experiments thanks to the relative value of in-game currencies and real world money. For instance, a typical payout to a subject in a real-world experiment may approach USD 20.00. At current gil prices, however, this can be converted to close to 1 million gil – a rather meaningful amount to most players, as the time required to earn that quantity well exceeds the time needed to earn the dollar-equivalent by most laboratory subjects (three to four hours at minimum wage, whereas the time required to earn 1 million gil can exceed 10 to 20 hours for most players). FFXI’s publicly visible random-number generator also provides a mechanism by which the experimenter can produce lottery outcomes. It might take several runs for the experimenter to gain the trust of the players (that payouts are real) and thus induce incentivised behaviour or study anything related to discount rates requiring future payouts, but once this is established it is relatively easy and cheap to replicate many experiments under high-stakes conditions.

Future Experiments

A research project with a much longer-term goal involves direct experiments with MMORPG players. It is easy to imagine academics having some role in development of future games, or perhaps having the research budget to develop and host a game directly. As a fantasy world created for the enjoyment of others, one could easily construct a world that contains, for example, (at least) two different nationalities, into which the players are randomly- or self-sorted when starting to play. One of these nationalities would have few institutions (much as the games of today do, any government qua government is almost exclusively related to plot-lines and has little or no effect on the game world) and have a relatively laissez-faire approach to its citizens. The other would be a polar extreme: heavily institutionalized, perhaps even changing rules and laws every other month – this is exclusively how the player observes it, in actuality the changing laws reflect a new experiment being conducted.

For example, consider the possibility that a certain rare token (a saleable commodity) could be found occasionally by killing monsters (a dominant mechanism for obtaining commodities in these games). This token would be sufficiently rare that the average player should expect to receive no more than 6-8 of these during a week of play. Once a player has accumulated a large quantity of tokens, say, 75, it could be possible to redeem them for a highly-valued and desirable (but non-saleable) item, for instance, a fancy new hat that increases power in some manner. In the control group (the laissez-faire nationality) a market for tokens would proceed as normal. In the treatment group (heavy institutions) the following program would be offered: a herald for the kingdom would announce an exciting investment opportunity in the kingdom’s foreign trading company. All players are welcome to contribute as many tokens to the kingdom’s efforts as they like. At the end of each week, the kingdom’s accountants tally the donations, the investments are made, and the tokens are doubled (“200% returns guaranteed by the kingdom’s treasure coffers!”). Each citizen of the kingdom is then eligible to claim her per-capita share of the total proceeds. By now it should be clear this is a public goods game, with the benefits of having interested participants, properly incentivized, a large sample size, no laboratory bias, a control group, and immediate and obvious parallelism. As above, changing the structure of the institutions observed by the players is in reality conducting another experiment.

Following the lead of Fiore, et al., it’s also possible to recreate the experiment in a slightly more real-time manner, perhaps avoiding some potential criticisms about its parallelizability. In this case, one would create a world on a much more vast scale. There is a rich history of online games where a player is an empire-builder, rather than simply controlling a single avatar. Much like the game “Solar Realms Elite,” one would be able to purchase land and develop it, and play some role in policy-making not just for their own territories, but for the world as a whole. Policy interactions and development strategies would require interface to a rich climate modeling system, where probabilistic weather events could destroy developments, and hence, income earning possibilities. As a persistent game, the players would have a much greater stake in maintaining a sufficient level of global well-being than in the one-shot experiment conducted in Fiore, et al.. Furthermore, it’s easy to systematically vary a variable of interest by allotting players to different world in the same virtual universe, each world in competition with the others. It’s simply a matter of imagination to saliently convert an economic question into a game eagerly played by thousands.

References

Castronova, Edward (2001a), “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier,” CESifo Working Paper No. 618, December.

Castronova, Edward (2002), “On Virtual Economies,” CESifo Working Paper No. 752, July.

Castronova, Edward (2006), “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Real-Money Trade in the Products of Synthetic Economies,” Info, Vol. 8 No. 6.

Kara, Amit and Edward Nelson, “The Exchange Rate and Inflation in the UK,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, Bank of England, Discussion Paper No. 3783, 2003, December.

Fiore, Stephen M., Glenn W. Harrison, Charles E. Hughes and Elisabet Ruström (2007), “Virtual Experiments and Environmental Policy,” RFF/EPA Conference Frontiers of Environmental Economics, Washington.

The Ritual of Crafting in FFXI

2007-02-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

Before I begin, I would like to thank William and everybody involved in the Serious Play event on February 8. It was very interesting and a lot of fun.

Recently in FFXI, I have been trying to learn more about crafting and the rituals and communities that surround it. I had started FFXI with no prior RPG or MMO experience, and I was completely unfamiliar with the crafting activity in the game. Once I joined the linkshell KirintheDestroyers, I discovered that crafting in FFXI is a major activity that has an entire community around it and an entire set of rituals associated with it.

When I reached level 51 on my red mage, I asked a KtD woodworker to make me a dark staff. He replied, giving me a specific day and time to meet him. Several days later, at our appointed time, I traded him the materials and his character switched to crafting clothes, moved to face a certain direction, and created a dark staff. He made two more attempts, to my bewilderment, insisting that the day/moon was perfect for a high quality staff. After three "normal quality" staves were made, he sighed in frustration and apologized for not making a HQ. This was one of my first experiences with crafting, and it seemed so complex it bordered on magical.

Crafting, in FFXI, involves combining crystals with certain materials to create goods such as clothes, weapons, food, or medicines/potions. Crystals are obtained from monsters, and materials can be "farmed" off monsters in the game or purchased from NPCs. Players can join all of the crafting guilds (which are game-based). A craftsman can only make items that are less than 11 levels above him. Unlike in games such as WoW, crafters do not buy recipes and they are not restricted to certain crafting paths, so all clothcrafters can make all clothcrafting recipes as long as they are of the sufficient level.

There are other game restrictions on crafting. Players can get all crafts to level 60, but after level 60, players are only allotted 40 levels to be distributed across all other crafts. For example, they may take their main craft to 100, but all of their other crafts can only get to level 60. Or, they may take two crafts to level 80, or one craft to level 70 and another to level 90. And so forth. Fishing is an exception; it can be taken to level 100 regardless of other crafting levels. Fishing also doesn't include the creation of goods, so it is different from all other crafts.

Because many items that are crafted can be sold for profit on the auction house, crafting is a popular money-making activity. Unlike in other games, however, the "synthesis" of materials into a crafted good is not always successful and if a synth "breaks" (fails), the player may lose costly materials.

Because of the time and money involved in crafting, there are many beliefs regarding why some synths break and why some are successful. Through years of discussion about crafting, players believe that there are certain elements that affect crafting: the type of crystal that is used in the synth, the element of the day (e.g. Earthsday), the moon cycle (e.g. 33% waxing crescent), and the direction they are facing while synthing. There is an NPC in San d'Oria who directs players in elemental directions, such as dark being north, ice being east, etc. and crafters rely heavily on this chart.

Players diligently record these elements while crafting, documenting them on websites, blogs, or messageboards. Players' accumulated knowledge is combined on crafting websites like lokyst's crafting timer, which inform players of how difficult a synth will be depending on the crystal they use, the direction the face, the day of the week, and the moon cycle.

Some players keep personal records of their own crafting history. They record every synth in a notebook or an Excel file, tediously working through which combination of elements is the most successful. One player I knew had obtained 100 in goldsmithing (one of the most difficult crafts in the game due to the cost of it) and had an extremely elaborate system he used while synthing. His combinations of elements were not based on the mainstream beliefs or practices but were a based on his experiences. He kept this guide as a carefully-guarded secret. Crafting in FFXI is very competitive, especially when players gamble millions on one synth.

In addition to the public timers and crafting guides, crafters use messageboards on sites such as ffxi.allakhazam and KillingIfrit to discuss which synths are most profitable or which craft a newcomer should take up depending on server (each server has its own economy), resources, and interests. Crafting recipe lists can be found on more "database" type sites, such as ffxi.somepage.com. Finally, fishing has its own dedicated database site at Clan Wind, which allows players to input their skill level, fishing rod type, and crafting rank in order to see where they can fish certain types of fish. Fishermen consider the moon to be correlated to their success in fishing, so Clan Wind also offers a real-time indicator of the moon cycle.

Finally, I recently discovered FFXI Timer for Palm -a downloadable program for Palm Pilots. FFXI does not allow windowing. Although a large number of players (50% according to the survey I conducted last year) do use a "Windower" add-on to the game, it is against the terms and conditions of the game to use it. Therefore, a player created a program for Palm Pilots that allows people to access information for things such as crafting, airship trips, or weaponskills while playing the game.

I find it interesting that most of the communities surrounding crafting can be found out of the game on websites and messageboards. Crafters sometimes ask other players in the game about a type of synth, or which direction they should face. It was not uncommon, on a slow day in KtD, to see a crafter asking which elemental day would follow the current one, which direction to face while using this crystal, or whether the moon cycle was good or bad for a particular synth. Because of the size and experience of KtD, crafters could rely on their linkshell mates to have experience with crafting or to know of a resource (such as a website) that would useful.

Despite the in-game community support, many crafters utilize the resources offered on websites, databases, and messageboards to learn more about their craft. With the Palm Pilot program, players can now research crafting when not on a computer.

Serious Play

2007-02-02T22:03:00.000-08:00

What's going on, you might ask?

This, at CALIT2 on the UCSD campus:

Serious Play: MMO gaming, real money, and social worlds
A Discussion

Thursday, February 8, 2007, 4-6:30pm
Atkinson Hall, Auditorium

Featured Speaker:

Julian Dibbell (author of Play Money and My Tiny Life)
“Play Money: Gold Farms, Polar Bear Rugs, and the World-Historical Relevance of Game Studies”

Julian Dibbell, author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World and Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, argues for a game studies that goes beyond traditional cultural and media theories — into the realms of political economy, social history, and computer science — in search of the emerging significance of computer games. Drawing on examples from his own experience in the “real-money trading” markets and other provocative social phenomena found in and around World of Warcraft, Ultima Online, and other massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), Dibbell leans hard on the best contemporary and historical thinking about games to urge game studies toward the broadest vision possible of its subject.

Graduate Research Presentations:

Ge Jin, aka Jingle (Communication Department)
“Chinese Gold Farmers: a feature length documentary on real money traders in MMORPGs”

Ge Jin, PhD candidate in Communication, is researching areas of the computer gaming culture in China, real money trade in online games and documentary filmmaking. In China, a new kind of factory hires people to play online games like World of Warcraft and Lineage and produce in-game currency, equipment, high-level characters and other virtual goods. Affluent gamers from Korea, Europe and America pay real money for these virtual goods to quickly raise their status in games. Jin’s research takes a close look at how these factories, commonly known as “gold farms”, organize the production and distribution of virtual goods.

William Huber (Visual Arts Department)
“Complicit Play in Virtual Worlds”

William Huber, PhD candidate in Art and Media History, researches videogames and software as well as aesthetic theory, human-computer interface and Japanese visual culture. His work identifies MMORPGs as cultural artifacts, as texts, and as aesthetic spaces. He also sees both sides of the production/consumption divide: how MMORPGs are designed and developed (usually collectively and iteratively), and how they are played, perceived, navigated, documented, discussed, and re-interpreted by the player-audience. Huber uses the structural elements of the game Final Fantasy XI, the categories of player experiences and the player typologies that have emerged since the release. Huber worked in the software and information technology sector before entering the UCSD PhD program.

Guest Respondent:

Raph Koster (President, Areae)

Raph is the former Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment and lead designer for Star Wars Galaxies (SOE) and Ultima Online (EA). He got started in virtual worlds back in the days of text-only MUDs in the early 90s, working on LegendMUD. He was creative lead on the original Ultima Online and lead designer for UO Live and Ultima Online: The Second Age while working for Origin and Electronic Arts. He’s also the author of the acclaimed book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, and somehow finds the time to write constantly on his popular blog, http://www.raphkoster.com/.

This program will be available as live streaming video at: http://rpvss.ucsd.edu:8080/ramgen/broadcast/live.rm

Presented by Calit2, CRCA, and the Sanford Berman Chair of Language, Thought, & Communication

Another Introduction :)

2006-11-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

Following Jesse's lead, I'll post an introduction and keep it very brief since I'm never sure what to say in these.

I'm currently a graduate student in the Communication department at the University of California, San Diego. My undergraduate degrees were completed in psychology and anthropology at the University of Southern California, and I had the privilege of working with Mimi Ito at the USC Annenberg Center on the Digital Youth project before coming to UCSD.

My first major research interest was in online fan communities for science fiction or anime series. Following my research on fandoms, I moved into the social communities in online games. I focused on the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI and spent quite a bit of time with the linkshell KirinTheDestroyers, an extremely friendly and tight-knit community of players who cannot be thanked enough for their help. In particular, I am interested in the social relationships and communities that are created in FFXI and how these relationships flow within the game and outside of the game into instant messages, websites, messageboards, and emails. I am also interested in how these communities facilitate learning and success within the game.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Valuations (or: Why I Find Second Life Boring)

2006-11-17T06:32:00.000-08:00

I can't understand the hoopla about Second Life. Don't misunderstand, as an MMO player I can fully comprehend the many reasons to participate in an online world. What strikes me as odd about it is that despite paying a monthly fee for access, a "land purchase" fee (more aptly described as a rental fee, more on this later), and additional monthly land use fees, the company still can't turn a profit. Joking aside, the currency exchange markets are reasonably sophisticated for an MMO, allowing direct buyer/seller matching and providing a host of useful economic statistics for review. It's no wonder that economists are enthralled with Second Life as a medium to study virtual economies. Still, something rings false about it.

In a recent conversation with William, he raised valid points for its attractiveness to researchers -- among them a broader experience than that of monsters, level grinds, and difficult mechanics. Undoubtedly this attracts a wider demographic than, say, World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI, and further encourages innovation by virtual entrepreneurs earning a virtual currency easil translatable into a real currency (in this specific case, US Dollars) at prevailing public or black market rates. One might look into this as the rise of a new cottage industry. All fascinating, no doubt.

Here's the catch: What troubles me about the economics of Second Life is precisely Linden Labs' private valuation of land. Yes, a Second Lifer can be a land speculator or developer, buying newly available land and hoping to resell it as the area grows in demand. However, even the purchase of land is really a rental: these are just the graphical representation of bits on some corporate server (ceci n'est pas une pipe!) which can be shut down or repossessed ("seized under the right of eminent domain"?) at any time. Furthermore, the monthly use fee charged by the company sets a base rate of exchange for a harder form of currency -- the land itself. As such, there is no real in-world mechanic for assessing the valuation of any item, except, perhaps, in out-of-game terms (a sort of aesthetic appeal). The motivation is largely just a kind of vanity. As William put it, it's a kind of Lockean model, where the player "mixes his labour" with the virtual land.

In contrast, more traditional MMO settings, with all the features that might discourage many researchers, tend to take a harsher stance on what's known as RMT -- Real Money Trade (though some exceptions exist, such as Sony Online Entertainment's "Station Exchange"). However, the existence of well-defined game mechanics and of concrete goals established by story arcs similarly gives rise to economies. Unlike Second Life, in which valuations are extrinsically linked to dollar-valued land prices, the valuations of items in goal-driven games are intrinsic; they are established and agreed-upon by the player base, and are exclusively determined by the rarity and usefulness of the items within the parameters of the rule set (and to some extent by the supply of money, but the ratio of prices tends to remain somewhat constant). This alone makes the study of these economies interesting, as there is no sanctioned method for external valuation (or even an external floor value, such as the purchase price and upkeep fees in Second Life). It can be more properly considered as a natural experiment, and the difficulty in foreign exchange may very well place a greater lag, reduce the coefficient, or have no significant correlation of the effects of real world inflation on game economies. As an economist, I can find far more interesting questions to ask in this setting than I would in Second Life.

Another Introduction

2006-11-17T06:22:00.000-08:00

William was kind enough to ask me to contribute to this blog, but with that carrot came the stick of a required introductory post. I'm no good at these, so I'll keep it brief. I am currently doing doctoral research in economics at the University of Trento. Included in my interests are the economic issues of MMOs and persitent virtual worlds, and a particular curiosity about financial and macro behaviours evidenced therein. Though I share with others interests in general concepts of ludology and new social spaces, I'm not nearly as fluent as some of the more erudite of the community. I've contributed to this line of work before, having written occasionally for the Ludonauts blog. I hope to have some interesting thoughts every now and again, and with any luck, others will find them interesting as well -- even if they are not entirely rigorous arguments. Once in a while I may have the chance to abstract proper research works here.

Transliteracies

2006-11-14T21:28:00.000-08:00

I'm now a participant in the Transliteracies project, which researches the practice of reading online. In particular, I've been asked to examine MMOs as reading interfaces. I'll be studying both Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft.

One facet of MMO textuality that has caught my interest is role-playing, and the affordances and challenges that the MMO interface creates for role-players. I have opened up a dialogue with a group of role-players in FFXI to hear how they use the interface to perform their own narratives and fictions. The conversation has begun to veer to broader questions of the relationship between role-playing (in the conventional sense of dramatic enactment) and MMOs: despite the fact that MMOs are often described as "role-playing games," the roles proffered by them are usually constrained, in tension with both the mechanics and the authored fictions of the games.

Transliteracies Research Project

FFXI and cyberanthropology.

2006-07-20T02:39:00.000-07:00

Alan Meade has been gathering data on player attitudes for two years as part of his dissertation research. Among the interesting findings: the regional differences in median player age (17 in Norway; 22 in the US; 27 in Japan.) In general, players from East Asian countries are older than those in the Americas and Europe.

There are a number of possible explanations for this: that there are differences in the structure of free/leisure time in different countries (due to differences in educational and work systems); there are differences in access to the platforms, etc. My own interest is drawn to the possibility of distinct canonical players in different national markets. Manga, for example, is considered a "young person's" medium in the West, but is ubiquitous as a format for popular non-fiction and fiction alike for a wide variety of demographics in Japan. While I don't think that video and computer games are "unmarked" as a medium--that is, the canonical player is not the canonical subject, and playership marks the player as a particular, rather than general, kind of consumer--there may be a wider distribution, and less particular marking, for the game player there.

I also wonder if the differences in age are as responsible for the in-game conflicts between North American and Japanese players as "culture" is. (I put "culture" in scare-quotes, partially out of skepticism of the privileging of national identity as the boundary-line of culture.) Discussions with the game producers revealed that the complaints made by Japanese players of American players included those associated with maturity: deficits in planning, foresight, and consideration, in particular. The differences in median age between the two groups, interestingly enough, distinguishes those who may have significant adult work experience from those who may just be finishing their education. Insofar as the Final Fantasy XI group-play experience resembles a real-world work-team, the differences in player experience could be significant.

Alan's dissertation should be available soon.

Introduction.

2006-06-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

I've made this blog to create a space for shared research and reflection on a specific massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG): Final Fantasy XI. There do exist blogs that discuss theoretical and practical concerns about MMORPG design, and sites which study the sociology of MMORPGs, but to date there's been less work (though by no means none) on MMORPGs as cultural artifacts, as texts, and as aesthetic spaces. I'm interested on both sides of the production/consumption divide: how MMORPGs are designed and developed (usually collectively and iteratively), and how they are played, perceived, navigated, documented, discussed, and re-interpreted by the player-audience.

Starting from the perspective of the artifact itself motivates a kind of interdisciplinarity, even a hybrid approach which crosses boundaries between visual culture and media studies, anthropology and sociology, and even a certain amount of cognitive science and human-computer interface theory.

Though initially I suspect that I'll be posting ideas-in-progress here, I'm hoping to open this up to contributors.