Metadatamania
My XBox 360 is lonely. I know this not because I can glance over at its dust-covered carapace, single wistful power light blinking sadly at me, its drive mouth closed and set in a thin line of dismay, but because it’s blogging about it and sharing its sentiments with the world. “He better not have another console…” it whined. Considering that the Gamecube literally sits on top of the 360, this betrays a remarkable lack of self-awareness — while at the same time providing a great peek into the future of networked devices.
Back when I discussed my reactions to Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, I talked a bit about how virtual world objects are true spimes: Sterling’s neologism for objects that exude information. Well, here’s the 360, acting as a spime (minus the transience). Only it’s bringing something else to the table: personality.
One of the things in the basement of my late father-in-law’s house was a Gibson Melody Maker guitar. Based on the serial number, it’s from around 1961: after they went to two P-90 pickups, but before they went to the double cutaway. (The picture to the left is one I found on the web — the guitar in question needs a lot of cleanup before it’s deserving of a photo!) In researching this guitar to see how much it might be worth and what needs done to restore it, I continually ran across phrases like “like a member of the family” and “she can roar when she wants to” and “I depend on her so much!” and “Treat her nice, right ? Little lady can’t take any abuse in my opinion.”
What we have here is a basic human impulse: anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. It’s the same thing that is happening with that 360 blog. If all our devices are, as Bruce says, moving to emitting information at all times, it’s almost certain that they will not be just doing it passively. Instead, our objects are going to express “feelings” based on statistical analysis of data — kind of like how the Aware House at Georgia Tech generated art based on the circulation of people within it. There’s no doubt in my mind that good design will demand objects that guilt-trip us, that are affectionate, and so on, if only to get us to maintain them properly.
The thing about this is that it demands that the information being used be of consequence. As has been illustrated in countless sci-fi TV shows and movies, a personality on a computer that doesn’t serve a purpose is merely irritating to the user (and amusing to the viewer). What really interests me is the possible applicability of all this to virtual worlds, of course. Why can’t we see virtual worlds blogging? And I don’t mean someone blogging about playing WoW — I mean WoW blogging, talking about the way its insides tickle what with all these crazy little avatars running around inside its belly.
In some ways, the metrics surfaced by various adjunct services, such as XFire and the PlayOn project, are effectively this. But they rely on human interpretation. We look at the XFire stuff, and we wonder at RF Online’s presence in the top ten; we look at PlayOn and give thanks that there’s a stack of PhD’s there to interpret the data.
Recently, over at Making Light there was a post in praise of fanfic.
Storytelling is basic to our species. It’s one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe. Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories…
In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t…
Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.
Leaving aside the literal definition of “fiction” for a second, let’s instead broaden our scope to “story.” It’s the narrative impulse that is fundamental here, not just the impulse to make stuff up. We fictionalize even the truth (witness the James Frey controversy). Blogs like most of the Player ones I have linked on the sidebar there are building narratives as well as commentary. What’s not there is the central narrative, the Louisa May Alcott original. The virtual world’s own version of the story.
Our history in the VW’s is pretty ephemeral. For every incident like Rainz killing Lord British, there’s countless things like the way in which the player orc tribes got started that are largely lost, even though they are arguably much cooler stories. (For those who don’t know, the whole orc roleplaying thing didn’t start with Shadowclan. There was a player near Trinsic on one of the UO servers who would appear as an orc, and roleplayed interacting with the players near the city. Whoever this player was, he developed a crude patois and manner and a bit of cultural background. As stories about him spread, others ran with the idea; I can’t even recall his orc name).
In order to get this sense of history, we’d need the game itelf to not only generate gigabytes of data (the games already do that) but to actually parse it intelligently, noticing events that are worthwhile. Seeing the depressing regular cycles of number of rats slain won’t cut it. Mere raw observation of the data will show mundanities like the way in which player activity follows a definite weekly cycle. What you want to find are exceptions to the standard data stream, something that is an atypical event. News. News becoming history.
Then you need to surface it, and surface it with flavor. It has to somehow become something people want to read, rather than analyze. I think this would even make it easier for game admins to manage the game — when the game itself reports inflation or an excess of dragonslaying, rather than it needed to be teased out of tables and graphs, we’ll listen more closely.
More importantly, I think it might help reverse the trend of seeing these worlds in a purely instrumental way, of seeing them as manipulable objects. Bad things happen in the real world when we regard real places as mere commodities or sources of material; I think bad things happen to the fabric of virtual places when we see them as collections of XP and aggro responses. Among the bad things is a demystification, the loss of the sense of wonder that we all had when we first set virtual foot in them.
The reason why I’m itching to see that Gibson fixed up, finish gleaming and shiny new strings put on it, is because it has the mystique of sharing the tone of Jimmy Page in early Zep, of tube amps that warm up slowly until they let you deliver a fat warm tone, and of all the bands that have slid this guitar across barroom floors or accidentally banged it on the mic stand. It’s that accumulated emotional history that makes it a lady with a temper. It’s that which makes us value it all the more. It has mystery and magic to it in a way that my toaster oven doesn’t.
If the worlds start talking back to us, maybe we’ll see them as more important to us as well. Sometimes we need the opposite of reductionist, scientific quantification. I want to see a VW throw a tantrum, or breathlessly recount how exciting it was when some major boss was slain, or express sorrow when jerks disrupt a memorial service. Because we learn through stories, and it’s only by bringing things to that personal level that maybe we’ll get through to the people who see the world — this one, or others — as just data moving to and fro.
18 Responses to “Metadatamania”
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“Marge! The doll’s trying to kill me and the toaster’s been laughing at me!”
– Homer Simpson
Raph writes:
This isn’t so much personifying the virtual world as much as it is writing AI to fill the role of “newsman” IN the virtual world. I’m sure that at some point someone will do that as a PhD thesis, and a few years later everyone will be doing it. Until that happens nobody is going to spend the hundreds (or thousands) of programmer hours it will take to figure out how to do something more complex than posting articles when a major NPC is killed or a player hits the level cap.
In the meantime, though, we could just hire journalism students on the cheap and get them to act as a filter on the data the way that journalists do in the real world. That won’t scale very well, of course. Maybe the players could be tricked into doing it for each other if you provide them with the raw data. Providing raw data is super-easy, you just have to have a Daniel James-style willingness to tell your competitors everything there is to know about your business.
The journalist thing has actually been done; UO did a little bit of it, and Second Life had Wagner James Au as an embedded journalist for a long time.
I stand by the notion of personifying the whole world though. You don’t want it to feel like AI reporting events. You want to create the sense of a world reporting its history.
Players do do it for each other right now, but they tend to do it classified by cliques. At one point, SWG was going to have a writer profession that tried to fix that… I should blog about how that would have worked sometime.
In reading this, though, I wonder what constitutes identity at the world level. Is the virtual world simply an aggregation of the servers that run it and the data it stores, or rather is the identity something larger? Does not that identity also include the collective minds of those who live in it?
What then is the mechanism then for this identity to talk to us? How does it work in our physical world? We have monuments, artifacts, ruins, and tablets; we have history and an evolving mechanism of relating that history to others. What would the equivalent be in a virtual world?
At one point during my UO travels I became somewhat obsessed with the ability to write in books in the world and leave them laying around. At least, I think it was UO … maybe it was something else. In any case, you couldn’t add enough text to the books to make more than a (extremely) short story, but it was a fun way to try to launch player-run quests/events/etc.
I really like the idea of the vw being able to “broadcast” its “feelings” based on its own analysis(es) of events in the world. The question is: does some AI-driven “reporter” broadcast to the masses? Or does “Gaia” respond to events and reflect “feelings” through physical changes in the world? Do weather patterns reflect turns of triumph and defeat? Does the landscape change to in response, say, to encroaching evil (depending, of course, on the mythos in the game)? Or is it really about an AI journalist reporting the news?
Either way, you’re talking about broad strokes the reasons for which are recognized by all, or at least a good number of players. The connections that I think you’re aiming for will be facilitated when individual efforts make a mark on the world. At least, I feel that the “emotional history” you’re aiming for stands the best chance for success when a singular player sees their achievements somehow “recognized” by the world.
Maybe I’m over-thinking it.
Yeah, the books were in UO. What’s more — the book spawn code actually chose from ANY of the books that had been written. We seeded the system with some, but player-written books were just as likely to get spawned as the ones we did.
Gaia’s Thoughts:
I with Uranus would let my poor babies out once in a while. They might be ugly, but hey! it was a first try. Some of those little human things that my grandson made got fire. I hate to call him my grandson. Prometheus, such a good boy, did well. Spit in the eye of that patricidal maniac. Maybe if I shake enough, I can get some of those chains off you.
This is how I would see this type of thing manifest. I am sure that there are some elements of this already coded into some games. The more you put in, the more personality the VW will have. At some critical point the user will be able to “feel” the prescence of the VW just by the mood it projects to the user. The mood is based on a whole series of routines which take into account all the various activities in the game and manifests itself in various subtle ways. Maybe the VW is angry that someone figured out how to easily kill a particular mob so now it increases the power of all of the mobs and players are being killed right and left. Or maybe the VW is cheery because a skilled group of players found all the clues to a puzzle and solved it in an entertaining way so the VW increases drops across the game.
A moody VW could be quite interesting to play.
You might find this interesting: http://www.rebang.com/csven/Kirkyan.htm
It led to something else interesting as well: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=889
A few months ago, I discussed with a buddy about a concept for a virtual world populated and driven only by players. No story. No friendly NPCs. A world in which the players develop the story, drive the economy, etc. I don’t know if this would be fun, but with sufficient content platforms to reinforce subscription growth, I think there would be enough players to create a virtual reality (with some limitations.) These limitations probably shouldn’t be that of the real world. After all, the world shouldn’t simulate the constraints of reality.
[…] Comments […]
What you describe sounds a bit like Second LIfe. Which many people find immensely fun (not to mention a handful finding it quite profitable).
With regard to your concept, do you see there being ANY sort of direction from the developer? Or is it completely open to the playerbase? In other words, do you create a big empty world and let the players loose (Second Life) or do you control the setting (medieval, space, whatever) and provide some sort of contstraints within which the players must operate? Presumably if there are mobs wandering around waiting to molest your players, those mobs have to derive from some sort of backstory. Hard to have orcs without a reason for orcs.
Personally, on its surface I love the idea, but it seems like there might be a lot of hurdles: How do you get the playerbase to “agree” on what the “story” is going to be?
I don’t know, I think you’ve got something possibly very neat brewing here. I suppose if you restricted the space to, say, a medieval setting then an interesting world could grow out of that. But if it’s just wide open, anything goes then you have Second Life (not to mention an overabundance of porn shops).
Believe it or not, Morgan, that’s extraordinarily close to what my pet project over the past few years has been. I think that the trick to bringing players in line is the old mandate of “managing player expectations”. Second Life goes by the fiction of “This is another place where you can be anything you want. Really: anything.” So of course people put up porn shops. It’s hard to deny that no one wants porn, considering its massive market. But if you put a different spin on it–for instance, I rather liked Shadowbane’s spin. Off their FAQ (off the Wayback Machine)…
I freely admit that I haven’t followed Shadowbane enough to know whether this potential ever became a problem… Let me know if you’re interested in talking about this more in depth, both Morgan and chabuhi, on a vaguely more appropriate forum. =P
And I’ve spent five minutes wracking my brain for a good way to dodge spambots. Turns out that Sourceforge provides an email address. =P @users[a dot]sourceforge[another dot]net with the username of mikedsc.
Yes. There needs to be a starting point, internal and external subscriber support, and professional content creation. The starting point could be a primitive environment where players can build a civilization from scratch. Or the starting point could be a high-tech futuristic world heading towards an apocalyptic event (e.g., Shadowrun’s fusion of technology and magic.) People tend to create the world in their vision.
You don’t. That’s the beauty of the system. Is there consensus on the meaning of life? The value of democratic government? The existence of deities and ghosts? Conflicting factions, tribes — societies — are value-adding. Players bring their personalities and their behavior into the virtual world. Many of these players are bound to experience conflict. Conflict creates factions, and factions of people tend to conflict with other factions of people. These conflicts create new and additional content.
Excellent points, and for all the obstacles I can see this is, again, something I would love to see come to fruition.
I’m going to take Michael up on his invitation. 🙂
[…] In my move away from generic news posts I wondered what to do with all the odd bits of information I stumble upon so often. I decided to stick them into a more compact and idiosyncratic format and just prod at stuff I find interesting. Yeah, more like one of those damn blogs. I can just grab a paragraph or so that says something interesting and focus on it. It’s more efficient and immediate. And fits conveniently into my plan to turn Toybane into a personal blog. Fair warning. At least this way it’ll take up less space on the front page and it’s easy to skip. Raph Koster talks about about metadata and how it can be used to add narrative to virtual worlds. “More importantly, I think it might help reverse the trend of seeing these worlds in a purely instrumental way, of seeing them as manipulable objects. Bad things happen in the real world when we regard real places as mere commodities or sources of material; I think bad things happen to the fabric of virtual places when we see them as collections of XP and aggro responses. Among the bad things is a demystification, the loss of the sense of wonder that we all had when we first set virtual foot in them.” […]
[…] Later on, I began to hate RMTing. This was at a time when I felt the games were becoming too focused on raw acquisition. Where was the roleplay? Where was the mysticism? The games were becoming about number crunching alone. Little did I know that tradition was much older than my involvement in MMORPGs. […]
[…] For what it is worth, we get a small mention by name in a fairly recent article by Raph Koster on his own website. That should be worth something, right? I mean, that guy is famous! He also references us again in some comments he makes to an article over on the Terra Nova website. That comes close to real media. I know Rakgru appreciates what kind of eggheads all post over there. That site is the who’s who of game design gurus.Last edited by Gor’bladz on Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:39 am; edited 1 time in total […]