One thing that I think is important about the general suite of concepts under this heading is that they can be painfully vague or misleading in the wrong hands, or just marketing hype. But in the context of games, at the very least, emergence is a technique for creating the psychologically convincing simulation of life or intentionality. There is clearly a deep mental algorithim that human beings use to sort life and non-life that agent-based emergent systems do a pretty good job of tapping into. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world.

But then again nothing this economically quantifiable has happened in the history of games and modders. Take Two lowered expected earnings by 40 million dollars. This is important because up until now the contribution of modders were almost always seen as positive. In the cases where a company has had to put a stop to a mod it was because the mod was infringing on other companies’ intellectual property like, for example, the G.I Mod for Battlefield 1942 or the Duke-It-Out-In-Quake Mod for Quake.

I've got a lot of thoughts sparked by DiGRA coming, including a long meditation on the dreaded ludology-narratology thing, but first I wanted to mention an interesting sub-theme I noticed weaving its way through the conference: emergence, complex systems, non-human agency, network theory and related topics. Nicholas Glean dealt centrally with these issues. I understand Seth Giddings as also being engaged on these topics, though I missed his paper presentation. I caught a number of other mentions or invocations of these concepts. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade (their presentation on it was one of the highlights of the meeting for me) also clearly is a case of emergence, even if they don't explicitly see it as such. If the organizers can give participants a real sense that they are part of a larger, worldwide effort and make them feel that by donating their time and money they truly are helping to make a difference, I think the event will be a success.

Kotaku is reporting of Hasbro's "Real World Online Monopoly Live" promotion. Yet another variant of the blending of the virtual with the physical worlds...

Raya spent four months in 2004 interviewing 110 women, primarily EQ players, about their experiences in mogs. It's a nine-part series, should be interesting. Figuring out what exactly is 'pink' about online gaming - maybe nothing - is not easy. Are most women online gamers involved in digital recreations of face-to-face gaming (spades, euchre, literati)? What are the implications? 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.

A growing number of flickerbees are using the 'digra' tag, so to check out more photos from me and others go Flickr. Back to the Kansas City T-Bones. 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?

First, I know Cory O posted on it before, but I finally got around to reading Cory Doctorow's Anda's Game. It's good stuff. I admire his craftsmanship in framing the story to smuggle in a whole laundry list of hot-button MMORPG issues: e.g. avatar gender presentation, MMORPG addiction (the Acanthosis Nigricans bit), and even the pros & cons of RL voice chat vs. role-play. (Doctorow said he was reading Terra Nova when he wrote it, and it really shows.) The primary thing I liked, though, was how the story resonates with Ted's "Right to Play" article and concepts from Sherry Turkle about the ways MUDs work as spaces for transformative identity experiments.

The point is to get the reader to see ethical dilemmas in MMORPG economies -- this is Julian's Bone Crusher anecdote writ large (though short). On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation. We talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.g. of Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state). In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence... "butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon.

Fred (who argued the case in the 9th Circuit) and Rebecca Tushnet are right to see the ruling as a loss for the copyleft: this inducement prohibition chills the spread of technology, to some extent, by opening up new avenues for creative litigation claims (e.g., Tushnet asks if "Rip. Mix. Burn." is now a risky way to advertise?). Still, one can also see the glass as half full. The ruling confirms the strength of the Sony standard in the age of digital copyright as protecting the vast majority of technologies (if a company doesn't actively encourage the infringement of copyrights).

Brad King (EEG News) cites an article from Technology Review claiming Electronic Arts (EA) intends to diversify in order to minimize exposure to the cyclical console game release schedule. EA seems to be considering involvement in other media (e.g. music and movies) as well as broadening its game title and platform portfolio. This activity raises an interesting question: what is diversity (in a business revenue sense) when it comes to games/worlds genres? On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.