2005-10-08

Building the Global Metaverse


different biases brought to games from context

about 70 million asian game players; 4 million in the west.

do cultural differences effect the type of play, the social relationships? what are the political implications of communicating (and inhabiting a shared space, working on shared problems) across national boundaries?

some work by the panel participants:

alter ego photography exhibition: http://www.proud.co.uk/exhibitions/exhib_ego/

the murder of miss norway: http://www.nyls.edu/pdfs/v49n1aspaight.pdf.pdf

hacker culture: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0816633460

and also somebody discussing the croquet project, massively distributed post-browser 3d interface: http://croquetproject.org/


"A true global culture has emerged, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it." -- Fukuyama, The End of History

Clifford Geertz says culture is a system of inheritied conceptions, bounded systems. [This is vs an unbounded model that I missed.]

Good quote: "We stand on the shore of a new world, and its lands are made of light."


eve online has nationalised space: eg, areas of the universe where everyone speaks russian. you're distant from understanding, it must feel odd.

Tom Coates: would be really interesting / dodgy to represent language groups with nations or races in games like WoW
Matt Webb: i wonder whether people who can speak two languages are therefore more successful, because they can arbitrate across two markets
Tom Coates: oooh fascinating
Matt Webb: they control a fording point

[wow, croquet has come on a lot in the last few years. you can see the code of a bridge, being simulated under gravity. it's a peer-based system. it's a live coding environment, and the 3d object is just there.]

question from the moderator: is building a global metaverse just another form of cultural imperialism?

mention of a client being built in china that all the other clients just plug into.

in final fantasy XI, there's automatic text translation! somebody else mentions an IM system that has automatic translation built in. it works a lot better than static text translation because it's interactive--you can rephrase what you're saying if it doesn't work so well.