We were WiFi-ing like it was 1999! Virtually no connection and even when the connection was up, no bandwidth. Very annoying. Usually, when talks or panels are infomercials they are labeled as such. While Nokia fessed up, shame on the other folks who didn't. 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.

The participants. If you want to mingle with the folks who design, make and think about online-games, AGC is the place for you. It's a small show, so you constantly cross paths with people you always wanted to meet and the schedule is laid out with generous breaks to encourage hallway discussions. Kudos to Christopher Sherman and the rest of the Game Initiative on making the show feel old school.

The 2nd Annual Austin Game Conference took place last week in Austin, Texas, and managed not to jump the shark. Located alongside the Women's Game Conference and a day after another great Breaking Into the Game Industry event, AGC2004 improved on the already well received AGC2003. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

On first blush, a game with 50K players seems a less risky proposition than a game with 1K players. The thought is that a single player (with 50 accounts, remember) in a 1K game has disproportionate greater influence over the revenue base than does a single player in a 50K game. But, perhaps this reasoning is somewhat mitigated by the social dynamics of MMOGs. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research.

What are Virtual Worlds for? There are Game Worlds and Social Worlds but even this simple categorisation is misleading to those not familiar with the genre - as game words can be just as social as social worlds. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

All proposals will be subject to a process of blind peer-review by the Scientific Committee on the basis of its originality, technical quality, style and clarity of presentation, and in its relevance to the field. Prospective authors are expected to present their paper at the conference.

Anshe: Definitely not. There are still plenty of opportunities. If you can innovate you can still get rich. You need do careful market research to find something not everybody else already does though, keeping in mind that once enough people compete at the same thing there is a price race to the bottom - and the "bottom" price in SL is set by freelancers in Indonesia and players who do things for free and for fun. Innovation and creativity however rule the Metaverse :-)

But this can't be the complete answer from the Terra Nova perspective. First off, we have the empirical observation that the punters love it and are rushing to use voice. There could be lots of reasons for this, but my guess is that it may have something to do with that problem we keep bumping up against: the love of the magic circle, which I will define (badly) as the intuitive sense that these worlds are separate places where the self may be expressed without the limitations of the real and should therefore be protected against the osmotic pressure of real world considerations like money (and voice and external regulatory activity).

And in performance-critical environments such as MMO raids it's hard to imagine doing without Teamspeak or Vent; otherwise how else can the raidleader scream that "the next hunter to grab aggro will get booted"? (Although I do recall the amusing moment when of the class leaders in one old raiding guild I was involved in finally got a mike and we all discovered that he was a 12 year old. I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time.

Which leads me back to the thing that motivated my interest in this to start with: the psychology of voice use by players when it is available. Krista-Lee Malone, one of Thomas Malaby's students is looking at the way that women play MMOs within raiding guilds. I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.