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One Journalist's Second Life 54

Posted by Zonk from the behind-the-crunchy-exterior dept.
Jerry23 writes "The Second Life Community Convention site is carrying pre-release excerpts from O'Reilly Publishing's 'Only A Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much' due out in 2006 (direct link to 10-page PDF). From the introduction: 'When virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from the digital world of The Sims Online for being a bit too good at his job, it wasn't the end of the story but the beginning of the headlines that would capture readers around the world. Only A Game follows Ludlow's career as a virtual journalist as he and colleague Mark Wallace take us behind the scenes into not just The Sims Online but a fascinating universe of worlds that are far more colorful-and, at times, more disturbing-than their creators would have you believe.' As online *worlds* grow to earn their name, the last line of the PDF asks the million dollar question: 'How big is your game?'"
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One Journalist's Second Life

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  • People having fun without an imposed gameplay. Shock! Send in the journalists! Exactly how many times can you report "look Ma, no rules" story before people start labelling you as a formularic hack?

  • Story behind the banning (Score:5, Informative)

    by radicalskeptic ( 644346 ) <x&gmail,com> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @06:44PM (#13609303)
    If you were wondering why Peter Ludlow was banned from the Sims Online for doing is job "too well"... well, so was I. So I googled and found the answer.

    The BBC says [bbc.co.uk]"Mr Ludlow thought the people behind the game should know what was going on inside Alphaville, not least because some things - child prostitution, for example - are morally and legally troubling.

    But when they found out, Maxis, the game's developers, and Electronic Arts, the distributors, banned all in-game mention of The Alphaville Herald, says Mr Ludlow.

    Then, says Mr Ludlow, he was thrown out of the game and his accounts closed down, cutting him off from his Sims.    "

    Slashdot also covered this previously [slashdot.org] and links to this Gamespot interview [gamespot.com].

  • Distributed metaverse is the only solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @07:22PM (#13609603)
    Ludlow's experience is not surprising. Every online games company on Earth plays god, believing that they have the sole right to direct the evolution of "their" world despite the fact that 90% of its value comes from the synergy of its players.

    It doesn't seem to register with these corporations that without the interaction between gamers, all they have is a Massively Single-Player Offline Game, and that all their servers and networks and GMs and content providers just burn up dollars as a recurring cost and provide no return at all. More so than in any other producer-consumer relationship, the players in MMOGs are priceless. Yet, their desires are so often ignored.

    This isn't going to change, as it's in the nature of company management to want to control. Until someone finally produces the prototype of that open and distributed metaverse that everyone is always talking about, the Ludlow experience will be repeated, time and again.

    Second Life may be the closest to an acceptable platform that we have experienced so far, but if anyone annoyed Linden Labs in the same way that Ludlow annoyed the owners of TSO, you can pretty much guarantee that he would be murdered yet again.

    Only a distributed world will be free of that, and even then, coercion from those who dislike what you are doing will still exist.
    • In true Slashdot style:
      1. Make a GPL 3d modelling program that is as easy to use as Second Life's modelling tools.
      2. Do the (absolutely necessary) community development and get the tool into the hands of creative people.
      3. Integrate a media library so users can share textures and models with ease.
      4. Add a web interface to this library so people not using the program can also browse and contribute.
      5. Then, and only then, develop a distributed virtual world that can use this content.
      6. ???
      7. Profit

        I'll probably do step 1 sometime

      • Some more pointers for your design:

        - Use an authority-at-the-leaves, power-at-the-root type of architecture, ie. like DNS. It's the only way it'll scale to MMOG-type numbers in multiplayer events, while still allowing people to control their own worlds and not get "Ludlow'd" by critics nor "Slashdotted" by popularity.

        - Make the root servers no more than multi-world caches, accepting client logins, and sucking content from their authoritative leaf node worlds on demand. No doubt universities and then later

      • In true Slashdot style:

        Make a GPL 3d modelling program that is as easy to use as Second Life's modelling tools.

        Do the (absolutely necessary) community development and get the tool into the hands of creative people.

        Integrate a media library so users can share textures and models with ease.

        Add a web interface to this library so people not using the program can also browse and contribute.

        Then, and only then, develop a distributed virtual world that can use this content.

        ???

        Profit

        People roleplay child pr0n for

    • Well, the control of a central authority is certainly ripe for abuse, but in some ways, it's almost a necessity for online worlds. And that's because there's not enough consequences for being a bad citizen in an online world.

      If you're running around griefing in second life, they can't throw you in a virtual jail. Even if they did teleport your avatar into some sort of prison that you couldn't leave, all you have to do is log-off and forget about it. They can't fine you real money, and if you're just in the
    • So what you're saying is, MMOGs are almost exactly like real life?
    • I had trouble with censorship on a MMOG recently, although nowhere near as extreme as being permanently banned from the service.
      I was watching a friend give me a demo of Second Life and it reminded me that it had been quite some time since I'd logged in to Active Worlds (a very similar 3D building world, although a lot older).
      I went and visited Active Worlds, said 'hi' to a few old friends, and then mentioned that I was visiting because Second Life had reminded me of how good Active Worlds was.
      I was promptl
  • ..an MMO would be a great place to test the concept of a DIRECT democracy.

    Imagine you're destroying the hordes of Nazarath when a little context window pops up in the corner of the screen that say "Amendment 23 requires your attention and voting participation."

    And, then to take it even further you can test even more radical political approaches in MMO's like an institution REQUIRING it's denizens to vote or their account would be suspended. It would be a great testbed for real governments to find if hypothe
    • I'm not going to play a game that forces me to vote on whatever referendum comes up. I don't care if some people want the MMO world to have rain while others don't. If you require me to do things in the game that I don't want to do, it's going to stop being fun, and I'm going to stop sending you money in exchange for the privilege to play.

      Not to mention the practical problems. What if I'm out of town for a week? When do I vote on stuff going on then? What if I'm not educated on some of the issues, should I
    • We the people do hereby decree:
      "Hold a tournament, appoint the victor king, and switch off this nuisance of a democracy mechanism."
      [yes] [no] [abstain]

    • I don't think it would work (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @05:24AM (#13611927) Journal
      We all like to bitch about developpers playing God and whatnot, but honestly I think running a MMO like a democracy would fail for several reasons:

      1. The average player has _no_ clue of game design and the implications a change has.

      E.g., more than half the players don't seem to understand that the numbers on a MUD or MMO are meaningless by themselves, and mean anything only as ratios to the other numbers. E.g., that (going by Blizzard's claim that an extra group member gives you roughly +10 levels) if I gave you twice the hit points and damage per second output, but put you against enemies 10 levels higher, you're exactly back to square one.

      So everyone just whines for a shortcut, for a bigger number on their weapon or whatever, without even understanding what they're asking for or where that shortcut leads. (Usually towards a "click here to be level 60 and receive all the best equipment" kind of game. And then they'd whine that the game is boring.)

      That doesn't apply to only DPS numbers, btw. Other issues, such as PvP or the economy or combat/crafting mechanics are whined about just the same by people who don't even understand what they're asking for and what the effects would be.

      Briefly, I'll take a good designer any day instead of a horde of monkeys randomly clicking on voting buttons.

      2. Griefers. Virtual governments have the same problem as in-character justice and other such tried-and-failed ideas. Namely: there's _nothing_ you can do in-character to someone who doesn't stay in-character and sees their character as disposable to start with.

      Same here: there _will_ be a bunch of people voting just to cause the most disruption and damage, because it doesn't affect them.

      3. Some issues aren't even feasible to solve that easily. Those companies have finite (if large) funds after all. If they end up having to check on and babysit every single player, sorry, your $13 a month just isn't enough for that.

      E.g., sure, a guy can get a lot of political capital by playing the bogus "waah, I'm a victim! EA supressed my free speech when I ranted and raved against their game, and blew bogus issues like virtual prostitution out of proportion" card. But honestly, even if you voted that EA cracks down on virtual vice, how would they enforce that and at what cost?

      I can tell you firsthand that none of the major MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's the players being inventive with other commands (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out) or just with typed text, IRC/AOL style. So if anyone voted that EA cracks down on that, EA would literally have to read everyone's chats with everyone else, and go through lists of all emote commands used, etc.

      And then someone else would make a fuss about how EA violates their privacy. More voting, more posers playing virtual politician and agitating the masses, lather, rinse, repeat ad-nauseam.

      4. For that matter, it would be just too much of an expense and effort just to keep up with the posers trolling for attention that way. Especially if you give them attention: nothing gets a troll going on and on like getting attention. And once you've officially invited them to play politician and have to democratically debate with them every bogus issue they come up with, that's what you gave them: lots and lots of publicity and attention.

      I can see that getting out of hand fast. Every single ban (e.g., for outright cheating) would be brought up as some major political issue that needs to be debated and voted on, every single new spell or NPC would be debated to death too, etc. It would take a whole PR department just to keep up with the uphill battles of proving that, no, ffs, that guy isn't a martyr persecuted by the publisher, but someone who used hacks and cheats.

      Etc.

      Basically, dunno, democracy sounds good and fine, but I don't want to pay 2-3 times the monthly cost just so the devs can afford to implement it. And I can do without the open invitation for every poser and troll to play politician.

      The iron fist rule of the publisher isn't perfect, but it works reasonably well. I can live with that.
      • > I can tell you firsthand that none of the major
        > MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's
        > the players being inventive with other commands
        > (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to
        > sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out)

        Ahhh, who can forget good old Ultima Online...where you could combine these relatively innocent things into one fun evening:

        1. Getting "drunk"
        2. Wearing only underpants (whitey-tighties)
        3. The pimp hat

        To use: Get your character into underpants the
    • And, then to take it even further you can test even more radical political approaches in MMO's like an institution REQUIRING it's denizens to vote or their account would be suspended.

      IMO it would be more interesting to fork their reality. If someone doesn't want to play by the new rules, let him continue to play by the old ones with whomever else agrees with him, may the dominant reality persist.
      • It would be more interesting to fork their reality. If someone doesn't want to play by the new rules, let him continue to play by the old ones with whomever else agrees with him, may the dominant reality persist.

        Continuing on that thought, what if then you could convince people after the fact to change their vote and thus change their reality? If you are in the minority group, you can easily switch to the majority. If you're in the majority, you need enough people to agree with you to switch to reverse th
    • > Imagine you're destroying the hordes of Nazarath

      Like when Jesus cast out Legion into the herd of swine that then ran over a cliff?

  • It's a popular milestone in itself that O'Reilly is putting this book out (O'Reilly Media is the largest independent publisher of technology books) and that the material is being introduced at the first Second Life Community Convention side-by-side with State of Play [nyls.edu] at the New York Law School--two events seriously considering the emergence of the global metaverse/social 3D Web.

    O'Reilly MAKE magazine editor Philip Torrone has already casually commented [blogs.com] that MAKE is thinking of putting out some SL How Tos.

  • Typical ignorant stuckup Journalist (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Banner ( 17158 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @09:17PM (#13610307) Journal
    It never occurs to him that he doesn't own the server. In any gaming world you only have the rights that the -owners- allow you to have. For them to risk lawsuits and legal charges solely to satisfy a single user's bizarre sense of entitlement is stupid.

    Even more so when he's now playing on a system where it is FREE.

    This is like the guy who comes into your store, and buys a soda (or nothing at all), and thinks he can now start telling everyone what to do and how to do it. It's pretty damn arrogant if you ask me, and shows just how clueless this guy is about the internet, the law, and business in general.

    If he really had any clue at all, he'd start his own game world.
    • A lot of people with clues don't possess milions of dollars, extensive programming knowledge, and vast amounts of time on their hands.
      • You may have a lot of clue, heck, you may even be the most intelligent person to ever walk the Earth, the fact still is: you still don't inherently have any rights on EA's private property. (E.g., on their TSO servers.)

        As they say, "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. And the first amendment mentions very explicitly that it only applies to the government. ("Congress shall make no law..." and "to petition the government for a redress of grievances".) That wasn't in response to anything
        • Whoa. Hold up. I wasn't saying anything of the sort. I was just suggesting that making your own game' world' is a task many would find a lot harder than is commonly assumed. Otherwise, I agree with you.
      • It takes about a grand to set up an MMO if you're going with text based, and not much more for a graphical user one. There are A LOT of MMO games in the public domain.

        If you knew anything about the medium, you'd know that.

        And just how much would it cost to set up his own version of second life? Not nearly as much as you seem to think.
        • Yeah, if he had the code and servers to do it. There's a reason people charge lots and lots of money to play MMOs. It's because servers cost lots and lots of money. Also, for a game as feature-rich and open-ended as Second Life, there is just no way one man could code that kind of world in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe a MUD, or a MOO, or whatever, but not a graphical Second-Life kind of world. No way, no how.
          • Second life is free to play. Didn't you know that? There are several free graphical MMO's out there. There is code in the public domain for running them as well.

            It doesn't take that much money to run an MMO on your own unless you want to do something incredibly fancy. What it takes is time. If I wanted to have no life at all, I could run something like second life for probably a grand a month and offer it free to all. You're really only paying for the net connection once you've gone online.
            • Second Life used to cost money. Then they realized they were making an incredible amount from renting land, and not that much, relatively, from subscriptions. So they realized that they could increase their player base, and therefore increase their land rent, by making the game free. No, you could not run Second Life for a grand a month. You could easily run a MUD on a small, private server, but you could neither code nor run a game as complicated, with as good graphics, and with as much content as second l
        • Which is why there is WorldForge [worldforge.org].
    • Typical Arrogant, ignorant, stuckup slashdot reader.

      Gosh.. i've you had read the article and the PDF you would have known that he was reporting on stuff that happened inside TSO on his weblog outside of the game.
      Also: EA removed his account because they didnt want the TSO players to know about the scamming. (and all the other bad stuff that can happen to players)
      They didnt discuss it, they just whiped his account.

      He wasnt making claims about 'the players own the world they play in'.. so your entire point ju


    • Gosh.. i've you had read the article and the PDF you would have known that he was reporting on stuff that happened inside TSO on his weblog outside of the game.
      Also: EA removed his account because they didnt want the TSO players to know about the scamming. (and all the other bad stuff that can happen to players)
      They didnt discuss it, they just whiped his account.

      He wasnt making claims about 'the players own the world they play in'.. so your entire point just flushed down the toilet of useless comments.

      What
      • I've not only read the PDF, I read his Journal. He seems to think he has the right to not only bitch to the owners of the game about everything that is wrong, but to demand that they fix it!

        And we're not just talking game bugs here.

        As someone who has run his own MMO, and who has run an extremely popular area on a fairly popular MMO for almost a decade, I know what I'm talking about. I run into people like this all the time. They want to 'help' you by telling you what to do to make things 'better'.

        I know wha
    • But say someone goes into your shop, buys a soda, and then shouts, "WTF? there's a cockroach in this soda!" Bizarre sense of entitlement? Only in that you're entitled to expect what you paid for, and in the case of Sims it was people expecting "Sims Online" and not "sad-CGI-porn online" or "mugged-for-your-dinner-money online".

      Grab.
      • Hey, if you're a stupid person, you deserve what you get! All of these people wanted something for nothing, and all got scammed because they were greedy. In short they learned a valuable life lesson for almost nothing.

        MMO's ARE NOT safe little games. They're almost as nasty as living in Real Life because there are just as many people there preying on others as out your front door.

        To go with your example, it's like buying a bottle of cockroach soda and being surprised when *GASP* there's a cockroach in there

  • Ludlow's problem (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 )
    Ludlow may feel that he was doing a service by bringing to the public eye what some users of TSO were up to.

    My feeling is that he was doing a disservice, by publicizing an avenue by which some people could do things that society at large feels is unethical -- and where to find that avenue.

    The correct course of action, the method of greatest benefit and least harm, would have been to make his concerns known privately to the operators of the server(s) in question. If that produced no effect, he should ha
  • It seems as if many MMORPG makers see there worlds as virtual playgrounds. You can play , but so help you god if you try to change it... I for one find a playground is most fun when you're not using it in the way it was intended. I'm reminded of a MUD I used to play. MUD was different from MMORPGs for many reasons, but unlike most MMORPGs they have almost unlimited customizability. Given that, you would expect the players some ability to change the world and have an impact. Instead me and my friends were k
  • Let's see, Ludlow wrote his Sims blog for a measly 6 weeks before his account was terminated. Yet this mini-experience netted him a book deal with O'Reilly, a book that comes a full 2 years after the events being described, in which he describes in colorful language how his character was "murdered" by Electronic Arts. Please. Ludlow, it's very simple. When you signup to play an MMO, you agree to a legal contract called a "Terms of Service". It says that the company makes the rules, and they can choose
    • Do the terms of service include:

      - You are NOT allowed to warn people about scams?

      - You are NOT allowed to talk about in-game events and activities?

      I see this as one of the three items of major history in MMORPGs:

      1. Character banned for embarassing (to the company) virtual newspaper

      2. The killing of the unkillable Lord British

      3. The almost-killing of the "unkillable" Sleeper monster dragon, with cheezy, tawdry, last-second reset by an employee to prevent this "travesty"

      I'm sure little goodies like this will
      • From a Detroit Free Press article [freep.com]: "Electronic Arts wrote that his account was terminated because he violated terms of service by posting links to outside Web sites within the game and because of player complaints, which they would not detail. "'It is simply not true' that the company tried to censor Ludlow, Brown said. 'He got kicked out for breaking the rules and for annoying other players.'"
        • Yes...but that sounds like pulling over a black guy in an SUV, then claiming it was because he went over the line a little bit.

          The real reason is he had caught their attention by embarassing them by exposing virtual child prostitution, etc., stuff that they didn't want to have to deal with should the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather get ahold of it.

          There's an old saying: "Follow the money"

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