Chrome Bits

I have used Metaplace since alpha and have thought a lot about what it means for us. I’ll have more to say in coming weeks — including experimenting with a Chrome Bits world — but in the meantime, Massively has interviewed Raph Koster about the current state of Metaplace. A few choice quotes;

You can have a Metaplace that’s designed to look like it fits right on your page. I think that’s right where it gets really interesting.

Virtual worlds need to make that jump to become “ordinary,” in a way. Having them become a key part of the web would be a key part of that. It’s always been a mistake for us to think that virtual worlds will swallow the web. I don’t think that’s the way things are going. But I do think we’ll be seeing a much tighter integration between virtual worlds and the rest of the Internet.

That last statement (emphasis mine) essentially sums up one of the core ideas I intend to explore with this site.

Kyle Maxwell Linking Metaplace, Raph Koster, virtual worlds

MMOGs have a lot in common at their roots with social networks, and I firmly believe that gaming and the web can learn a lot from each other. We know that socialization and player connections drive player retention in MMOGs, so what can these games do to foment that?

Activity streams could form the core of this new approach. For example, a feed of your friends’ achievements: collection completions, PVP accomplishments (e.g. kills / victories), leveling progress, quest completion, joining a new guild, etc. Each player could even have a RSS feed, and of course fine-grained control should be a sine qua non since players might not want to publish everything.

Free-form text might attract attention as well, much like Facebook status updates or Twitter. This could fill the gap for things that players want to broadcast but the game system doesn’t recognize directly. As player-generated content grows in importance, so does this.

Some games have started down this path already. Free Realms has something like this on their site, though it hasn’t gotten fully integrated yet with the rest of the world and doesn’t allow for status updates. EVE Online has a system in development (code-named “COSMOS“) that might cover a lot of this ground. And while I don’t have a lot of personal familiarity with World of Warcraft, I believe the WoW Armory includes some of this.

MMOGs really will do their communities and, by extension, their business quite a favor by giving players tools they already understand to connect to each other, including when they can’t log into their game client (e.g. on their mobile phone). It seems like a lot of games just don’t want to acknowledge that players may want to use other tools besides the game client itself in the misguided notion that this will drive retention. But community does that far better than client logins, particularly in an age and market where people want access to their data at any time from any place and focus on their relationships most of all.

Set my data free, let me bring it into Feedly and FriendFeed, and I will repay you by sticking with your game because it will form the real glue of my community.

What social tools does your favorite game include that other communities should integrate?

Kyle Maxwell Gameplaying eve online, Facebook, Feedly, Free Realms, FriendFeed, mmorpg, social networking, twitter, web 2.0, World of Warcraft

Nonlinear storytelling presents entirely new sets of challenges that we’ve only recently begun to explore, after centuries of exploring the art of linear stories. Since the development of hypertext (and arguably since Ulysses in 1922), though, writers and storytellers have tried to figure out what sorts of stories work best with this medium and how so.

As an example, Norse mythology has a great deal of complexity, ambiguity, and shifting relationships. The creation and end-of-times myths, the development of the trickster Loki throughout the canon, and the growth of the All-Father Odin all provide examples of how complicated and allusive these stories can become. Not only do characters have odd and unfamiliar relationships, their weapons and objects have names and personalities and histories, and our fragmentary reconstruction from limited sources means that scholars don’t even fully agree on what we know about the mythology. So for understanding these myths, we should read them in a hyperlinked format, perhaps most notably via a wiki with its lack of imposed formal structure and support for densely-linked data.

We can generalize from this and suppose that repositories of cultural information in general (e.g. the theology of a particular belief system or traditions associated with a learning institution) work best when presented in a hypertext format rather than a linear narrative, because the story itself doesn’t come in the form of a straightforward arc. But they still have the essential components of stories and hold the same fascination for us, which is how we start looking at one Wikipedia article about a species of bird and end up becoming lay experts on the history of typesetting 3 hours later.

I’d like to see more stories develop like this, or at least families of stories. The ancient forms won’t disappear anytime soon, and eventually I don’t know that the two forms will really seem all that divergent. Just like scholarly versions of great works of the past rely heavily on footnotes, references, and bibliographies, hypertext versions (or similar) of future literature could help, maybe particularly for genre fiction like military thrillers or historical fiction. Think about the popularity of Pop-up Video when it first began and the growing ability of YouTube videos to include links, notes, and more.

What stories would you tell nonlinearly?

Kyle Maxwell Thinking hypertext, Norse mythology, storytelling

At the risk of trivializing an important religion and cultural system, I’ve often compared my relationship with Star Trek to that of a lapsed Catholic. My family raised me in a tradition to which they continued to adhere even when I found it stilted, boring, and no longer relevant. But still, I love my dad, so I’d go to the most important of the regularly-scheduled events. For Catholics, that’s Easter and Christmas Mass; for Star Trek fans, that’s the release of a new movie.

So when we heard that JJ Abrams planned to “reboot” Star Trek with a fresh take on the original series, I promised him I’d go, though I did that more out of a sense of love and duty for my dad more than for the story. Then I saw the movie, and everything changed.

I am a Trekkie again.

Kyle Maxwell Watching star trek

(This review of Little Brother appeared on Amazon.com yesterday.)

I grew up different than most everyone around me. Whether nature or nurture shaped me more, I can’t say, but my grandfather was an electrical engineer, my father is a network engineer, and I am a security engineer. If you had a kid in school who always dressed just a little bit oddly, read books about math and science for fun, could do things with computers and electronics that the other kids would have never even imagined, and constantly got in trouble for being bored in class but managed to get good grades anyway… well, me and that kid would have been great friends for having so much in common.

Among this geek subculture, we tend to hold certain beliefs in common. Geeks usually have a strong libertarian streak of one sort or another, possibly due to the fact that we just want society to let us be different and explore the world our own way. And, like some other subcultures, we critically examine (in the best sense of that phrase) what people tell us and how things work. We never left behind that childhood phase of asking “why?” over and over and over. We wear T-shirts with obscure technical jokes and argue about what the word “hacker” really means.

We can trace back our “subcultural roots” for centuries. Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman and Alan Turing and Nikolai Tesla and Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and Benjamin Franklin… all the way (at least) to Leonardo da Vinci. And my generation keeps the flame alive in its own unique way, particularly with the genesis of Net culture. Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, has established himself as one of the thought leaders of this subculture, or at least someone who conforms to our little brand of non-conformity and has enough of a soapbox to champion many of the causes dear to our hearts. Find an intersection between social justice and copyleft and mathematics, and he will be chronicling and championing it.

Little Brother represents Doctorow’s homage to 1984 and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, boiled down to a novel aimed squarely at teenagers. I can’t really call this “science fiction”; it’s more of a libertarian thriller that gets listed in the YA section at the bookstore. He runs through a (fictional) terrorist attack on San Francisco and the ensuing response by the Department of Homeland Security. Make no mistake, Little Brother says as much about politics as it does about technology. I suspect Doctorow would argue that the two have grown into each other at this point, and he’d do so convincingly. Conservatives reading this book may wince at some of the characterizations found in it, as the book openly espouses a particular sort of progressive politics centered around San Francisco.

The novel doesn’t quite reach the heights of the novels and writers mentioned above, and that’s a shame. Doctorow could have treated some of the antagonists in the novel with a bit more nuance, or at least presented the other side of the argument with a little more understanding, less polemically. In places, the exposition gets a little thick, partly due to his desire to explain the real-life technical details and partly so that he can make out the bad guys as really bad. He takes a few shots at minority religions, including this reviewer’s, and glosses over the racial implications and complexities of the Global War on Terror and DHS. These details detract from the novel, moving it from a tale of the struggle for freedom backed up by technology to a propaganda piece for a particular brand of techno-libertarian progressive white politics.

They don’t do so, however, to the degree that the novel loses all value. Doctorow has a lot to say about these things, and so not only should those of us who belong to the geek / hacker subculture read this book, and maybe buy a copy for a smart 15-year-old, but maybe for an intelligent but staid person who just doesn’t quite understand why kids these days can’t just listen and respectfully accept what authority figures tell them.

Kyle Maxwell Reading book review, Cory Doctorow

My biggest tangle in my online life right now? Sharing stuff. The revolution right now means that nobody has really figured out yet how this stuff should work, though I suspect that when we do have the answer, it will look like it should have been obvious all along.

Just as an example, should I post interesting links to Twitter or FriendFeed? Or Tumblr?

What about separating my personas, or spheres, or keeping my worlds from colliding? I need more tools to do this. Right now, I have two separate Twitter accounts, one for EVE Online and one for everything else, but that largely stems from not having a good group tool built into Twitter. Even then, sometimes I want to post something to Facebook (where I talk to my friends), other times to LinkedIn (where I should be talking to colleagues), sometimes to Twitter (where I talk to the world), and I don’t know the rest. Blog comments, forum comments, everything is spread out everywhere.

See, the reason all of this feels broken is that I don’t have a bunch of different social networks. I have one network, and different sites give me different renders of that network.

I can think of a few different starts to this. Maybe it starts with tagging everything so that semantic tools can figure out what goes where: oh, he’s talking about EVE Online, so this bit goes in this bucket. Now he’s talking about Christianity, so it goes in an entirely different one. Picture of his kids? Yep, over there. But right now, it’s based on “where” I post, not “what” I post, and I don’t like that any more than I like trying to call different phone numbers to find somebody. I talk to people, not places.

Hmm, that last bit might end up providing my answer. I talk to people, not places. I want tools that help me do that. Don’t focus on pulling me as a user into your “place,” focus on helping me talk to people whereever they are.

Kyle Maxwell Thinking eve online, Facebook, FriendFeed, social networking, twitter

I’m writing something for some EVE Online planning and needed to clarify my stance on roleplay versus gameplay. Really, I’ve always viewed every game I play as sort of a roleplaying game, or at least storytelling in some form. To paraphrase Donald Davis, storytelling is not what I do for gaming – it is how I do all that I do while I am gaming.

But at the same time, I don’t enjoy the sort of bar-hopping or angst RP that many others seem to. I play games for adventure, immersion, and escapism, not to seek new forms of interpersonal drama. Real life provides plenty of that all on its own.

So in trying to whittle down what I’d written to a simple, clear, unambiguous statement (and one that would fit on Twitter), I finally settled on this:

Roleplay is to gameplay as a marinade is to a steak: it adds flavor but isn’t the whole meal.

Of course, I’d like your perspectives on this. Do you think roleplay should more than that? Or less? Or something else entirely?

Kyle Maxwell Gameplaying, Roleplaying eve online, storytelling, twitter

NB: I am a licensed private investigator in the State of Texas due to my work as a computer forensic analyst, and my professional background lies in information security. So I approach these matters both from the perspective of an informed user as well as a professional. I am not a lawyer, however, and this is not legal advice.

Literally millions of people have discussed and thought about the recent hoopla regarding the changes to the Facebook Terms of Service. I don’t intend to revisit the specifics of that issue here except to say that a lot of people with little to no experience in these sorts of issues got their dander up about legal wording they didn’t fully understand and technical architecture they may have understood even less. No one really questions the legality of what they did, of course. They question whether Facebook should do it this way. I tend to think that Facebook did the right thing legally and technically, but handled the relationship poorly. More on that below, but first another example.

SOE is providing years of Everquest II server logs to a research organization. Again, the existing TOS let them do this: essentially, they own everything you do in their world. Some folks like Raph Koster (formerly of SOE, now of Metaplace) have proposed a sort of “avatar bill of rights” that encapsulate what people want, though reality rarely reflects this. SOE later explained that this effort does not include player chat logs; they should have explained this sort of thing from the beginning.

Unfortunately, Facebook and SOE both did mediocre jobs of handling the customer relationship here, as they should have gotten out ahead of the issue by clearly explaining the issues to their customers. Failing that, they shouldn’t have responded by basically saying, “trust us”. People have real concerns about anonymity, privacy, and security. (With MMORPGs, I suspect that cybersex also lies at the heart of the concerns of many of their players.)

Facebook basically just did a bad job of PR; we don’t yet know all the facts about SOE because they haven’t said a whole lot, but either way, given their history with SWG and the now-infamous NGE, they should have learned to explain early and often, then actually listen and act.

A lot of emotions (including fear and embarrassment) get dredged up when we discuss privacy and anonymity. Frankly, despite the fact that Raph Koster has long positioned himself at the forefront of this issue, the fact that Metaplace community manager Tami Baribeau dismisses all of this really concerns me. I don’t want to misrepresent her, but her approach to privacy concerns literally consists of “get over it or get off the Internet“. The fact that some folks with the same viewpoint look at DRM with such a different view fascinates me even more.

Metaplace has very blunt (and liberal) policies on user-generated content, but it seems like they have some internal cultural conflicts they need to resolve. Otherwise, at some point they will inevitably make the same customer relationship mistakes that Facebook and SOE have made.

Kyle Maxwell Thinking

I haven’t forgotten about those reading this site, but another project has occupied a great deal of my time lately and so I apologize.

Those of my readers with an interest in EVE Online, amateur science fiction, and related themes might be interested in my EVE fiction blog Ecliptic Rift. If you have thoughts about it, please let me know!

Kyle Maxwell Meta

At some point, do we really start to self-identify with our characters, even in aspects we don’t really share with them?

Role players focus on inhabiting the minds of our characters, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. We dance between acting and writing, improvising these fictional people. And while most of us would dispute the hypothesis that the media we choose to consume can force us into doing evil, we’d probably not dispute the fact that what we watch and play and read and hear says something about ourselves.

Sometimes maybe that’s something we don’t want to know or for others to know.

I believe this can apply in more than one direction, of course. In EVE Online, I currently play a character (Casiella Truza) who works as a freelance researcher, a hacker in the old-school sense, and perhaps a future revolutionary. That says a lot about me, even if you don’t know me particularly well. Readers who draw parallels too closely between the character and the player would make a serious mistake, but ignoring any connection whatsoever between Casiella’s interests and mine, or even her personality and mine, would end up just as mistaken.

The advice “write what you know” means more than just your interests and surroundings, of course. It doesn’t mean you can’t learn through research and writing. But it does mean that the human bits, the characters and reactions and emotions, have to come from someplace we understand, things we know. Who and what we choose to play, how our characters evolve and grow— all those things reveal something about ourselves. Perhaps as we fight monsters and gaze long into the abyss, the character’s direction says more about us than the starting point does.

Kyle Maxwell Roleplaying, Thinking, Writing casiella truza, characters, eve online, hacker, nietzche