Everything. Much of the GUI is not as complete or polished as planned in designs. Room creation/publishing/decorating could be a lot easier than it is now - we're working on that. Social functionality needs to be built out further - finding friends and inviting friends should be easier and more productive. There are some aspects of the client that limit how flexible it is as an element of web design - we would like to have it be more malleable in the hands of web designers. There is a big demand for the ability to create content. We have a tool that our artists and partners use to publish content after its been exported from off-the-shelf DCC tools like Max, Maya and SketchUp. The publishing tool needs a redesign and documentation before its ready for public consumption. However, UI design and development for that is a simpler task than ironing out the policies for user-generated content.

Many real-world attitudes and expectations seem to apply to virtual rooms. Many people are asking for the ability to limit who can visit or decorate a room. Some people just want to hang out with their friends and they want to create a space for that but its awkward if a stranger drops in. There are a variety of use cases where groups, organizations and businesses need to limit access to members, customers or employees. We considered a sharing framework like the one for Google Docs where you choose to have a document be public or private - if its private then you grant access by sending email invites to the people that you want to share with or collaborate with. Now that we have a lot of users, we can test alternative ideas to find patterns that better match what people want to do.

Lively is a platform for virtual socializing that adds a lot of degrees of freedom to ways that people can express themselves on the Web. We want the UI to be very simple so that rooms fit comfortably into the Web context - you should be able to multi-task, web surf, email, IM and hang-out in rooms without shifting gears too much. On the other hand, the UI should be very flexible and productive so that you can socialize and create things in fluid and natural ways. Earlier conversations with Young may or may not have involved interface design changes specific to cybersex, but since Google has no official statement on sex in its virtual world, those comments will have to be left to your imaginations, Terra Nova readers.

Fairfield thinks the case that everyone is waiting for "is the one about whether or not these things are real property. This (suit) is more like airline mistake cases, where people snap up cheap tickets and try to keep the tickets." In the end, Fairfield said, Bragg's case is "about the terms of service," and according to Fairfield, U.S. courts tend to strictly enforce such agreements. Accurate assessment or Jedi mind trick? Comments open. Okay, time for a change of topic. Let's talk about MMOs and virtual worlds. Some people say that virtual worlds can provide a place to explore identity. They seem safe, and pseudonymous. Over the last few years, I enjoyed my virtual life as a virtual businesswoman, hard-nosed and avaricious. Oh, and my other life as an inept womanizer. I was a not-so-teenage virtual transient, spending a few months in one pseudonymous identity or another.

EFF attempting to get involved on behalf on the side of the end users. Hearings on motion to dismiss at the end of the month. Points out that EFF is defending the right to use and to modify the games that people have purchased, not to allow rampant copying. Unfortunately, these modifications can run into anticirumvention components of DMCA. Points out that culture has always relied on borrowing from other sources. Silly that TM applies within digital worlds. Not what trademark is designed to do. Trade secret issues appear in reverse engineering. Should be a lawful way of gaining access, not a misappropriation. Competitors should be free to use these methods against commercial products. Not OK to steal source or use illegal means. Some concerns about whether fan interest can cross the lines. Patents can creep in, with software patents.

You can’t go anywhere in the MMO metaverse these days without someone making you a very very special offer. I first noticed this when Anarchy Online special offer banners began to flash at me. Anarchy was three years old yesterday and in celebration want you, yes you, to join them for a measly 9.99 (pick your currency) and free game time till September. Dark Age of Camelot has gone even further. They have a special offer URL: Come back to Camelot - though their offer is restricted to wayward souls that lost their DaoC way and possibly started to flirt with other, maybe younger, maybe better looking MMOs. The offer is really only for 14 days free, but there is a prize draw where you can win the real Excalibur. OK, not really, the prize is actuallly a NVidia GeForce.

The problem with this portrayal, as Michael Hartman pointed out, is that: Such a person is *NOT* an explorer then. That is an achiever. This understandably fills most players with anxiety as the vast majority of MMOG combat in WoW or any other game involves trying to "pull" or disaggregate groups of enemies and handle them in easily defeated clumps. But beyond that immediate concern (will I be punished for normal practice?) you can sense there is a deeper philosophical contest of wills here. Who determines how a game is to be played? What separates clever insights by players about the nature of the game's underlying programming from an "exploit"? Against what are we playing: a boss monster, the underlying programming of the game, or the developers themselves? Blizzard representatives, especially in the thread by Joowanna, also offer a practical justification.

Everyone seems to know what an explorer is. The problem is that they don't agree with each other. Here's what I know from data from online surveys of MMORPG players. But here too there is an interesting philosophical question, and it's one where I think the players by and large have it right. The entire design of WoW, like almost all persistent-world games, fundamentally mandates that players be driven by accumulative activities. Asking players not to act that way--and punishing them for doing so--is rather like the God of Genesis giving Adam and Eve insatiable curiosity, putting an apple in view, and telling them not to eat it under penalty of expulsion from Eden. My Terra Nova colleagues will doubtless observe that these are deeply familiar, well-trodden discussions, and so they are, all the more so for those of us who've been at it since the prebiotic soup days of MUDding.

Responses to the following two statements are not strongly correlated. In other words, they are different kinds of people altogether. At this point, the book finally introduces interactive storytelling as a distant cousin of games, books and movies. He goes to great lengths to explain why interactive storytelling won't (can't) evolve from any of these other art forms, focusing in on the tensions between plot and interactivity. In particular, he correctly points out that many apparently interactive forms don't actually allow the player any choices and that true interactive storytelling needs to allow the player many closely balanced decisions. His next sections attempt to explain why interactive storytelling attempts have failed, focusing first on the fact that programmers are lousy storytellers and most storytellers are lousy programmers.

I found this section especially interesting since many of these approaches are also responsible for skyrocketing game development costs. He then discussed several strategies that might work, including data and language driven models. Again, these discussions apply equally well to any game design and are quite informative. Like the rest of his book, he does an excellent job of providing citations and resources so that the reader is able to explore these concepts more fully. His focus on visual languages, and the inverse parsing he uses to make an effective user interface, is extremely thought provoking. Finally, his personality model section is an excellent introduction to building a personality UI. Great breakdown and discussions. The last third of the book details his experiences and techniques in building the Erasmatron, his interactive storytelling engine.