living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there, and our rights have to be recognized and enforced.

- Virtual Citizens Association [1]

Introduction

These pages cover metaverses, 3D worlds and trends, and immersive gaming worlds, as well as Play Ethic developments. See Pat Kane's summary of the Impact of Play on Business Organization

To put the trend toward P2P-based virtual worlds into the context of gaming developments, please read this introduction by Gwendal Simon.

Check out the typology of Virtual Worlds; Clay Shirky argues that Multi-players Games and Non-gaming Metaverses are Fundamentally Different

We support the goals of the Organization for Transformative Works

Resources

Key Articles

1. Games as P2P Utopia: Alexander Galloway on the World of Warcraft and Utopia
2. Game Modding and Education: excerpts of a thesis on using entertainment for eduction, that goes beyond the failed edutainment model.
3. The Power of Play: essay by Pat Kane for Soundings magazine. In conversation with Ephemara in Dialoguing Play
4. Play Struggle, excerpts of the book Hacking Capitalism by Johan Soderbergh.
5. Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture by T.L. Taylor: Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory design this piece explores some alternative frameworks for understanding the designer/player relationship.
6. The Governance of Virtual Worlds. Thomas M. Malaby (focuses on Second Life as case study)
7. Inequality in Synthetic Worlds. Edward Castronova.
8. Video Games for Politics, Activism and Advocacy. Ian Bogost.
9. Klang, Mathias, "Avatar: From Deity to Corporate Property - A Philosophical Inquiry into Digital Property in Online Games
10. Contrasting Proprietary and Free/Open Source Game Development, Alessandro Rossi & Marco Zamarian
11. Moore, Christopher. 2005. "Commonising The Enclosure: Online Games And Reforming Intellectual Property Regimes." Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3(2): examine the potential for computer game studies to contribute to an understanding of an alternative intellectual property regime known as the commons

Also:

1. Short intro but with lots of links to critical and independent gaming culture.
2. What is Play?. Toward a Universal Definition. By Gwen Gordon.
3. Integral Play. Developmental levels in play. By Gwen Gordon.

Some important distinctions:

1. Zerosum vs. Non-Zerosum Games‎
2. Finite vs. Infinite Games‎
3. Game Communities vs. Play Communities

Key Blogs

1. The Play Ethic blog of Pat Kane. Watch or listen to Pat Kane on the Play Ethic
2. Terra Nova http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/ is "a blog about virtual worlds and their implications." (Academic) game research and virtual worlds in general.
3. GameTunnel http://www.gametunnel.com/ is "the web's home for independent video games." Other indie game sites linked at the bottom of the main page.
4. The Second Loop: on the interaction between real-life and our avatars
5. Game Politics: "where politics and video games collide"; monitors conflicts between platforms and user communities

Key Books

1. Bernie DeKoven explains Coliberation strategies in his book The Well-Played Game
2. Pat Kane. The Play Ethic
3. Pat Kane reviews the books Synthetic Worlds and Second Lives
4. McKenzie Wark, whose Hacker Manifesto is a classic for our times, has published a new draft book open for discussion, on Gamer Theory
5. Ed Halter's book, From Sun Tzu to Xbox "a definitive history of the longstanding relationship between games and military culture, from wargaming's roots in ancient civilizations, to the Cold War development of computing for battle, to a recent crop of Pentagon-funded shoot-'em-ups, big-budget commercial titles and homemade hacks".
6. Barbara Ehrenreich. Dancing in the Streets. A history of collective joy
7. The Ecology of Games, focuses on learning effects
8. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet
9. Ralph Koster: Theory of Fun for Game Design

Key Experts

1. Pat Kane
2. McKenzie Wark
3. Gwen Gordon

Key Reports

1. Government in 3D: How Public Leaders Can Draw on Virtual Worlds. David C. Wyld.

Key Resources

1. Fan History records the history of Fan Fiction and other fan communities.
2. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research [2]
3. Metaverse Roadmap): Pathways to the 3D Web.The MVR is an extensive 10-year technology forecast and 20-year visioning survey of virtual and 3D Web technologies, markets, and applications. Video interviews on the topic at http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/metaverse/
4. List of open and free games from the Libre Game Wiki

Key Videos

1. Second Skin: how lives have been changed by Massive Multiplayer Online Games.
2. Cory Ondrejka on User Generated Content at Second Life
3. Interacting Locally and Globally through Games
4. Introduction to Second Life
5. Jochi Ito on MMORPGs
6. Joi Ito on Commons-based Licenses and Games
7. McKenzie Wark on Gaming
8. My Second Life

Key Tags

Delicious Tag: P2P Gaming ; Play Ethic

Various Links

1. Wikipedia has a list of open source games
2. Liberated Games has a list of free, legal games for download

Known Distributed Systems

• NPSNET (Naval Postgraduate Scholl of Moterey)
• Spline (Mistsubishi Elecronic Research Laboratory)
• Massive (University of Nottingham)
• Continuum (France Telecom R&D)
• Score (INRIA)
• Open Source Metaverse Project
• Croquet Project
• Virtual Object System
• VREng: Interactive and Distributed 3D Application over the Internet using Unicast or Multicast

Studies on Gamers

• The Psychology of MMORPGs
• The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments

Some Open Source 3D Tools

• Ogre, open source real time 3D rendering engine
• OpenSceneGraph, open source high peformance 3D graphics toolkit
• Blender, open source software for 3D modeling and rendering
• Xfrog, a procedural 3d organic modeling and animation software program
• X3D, Open Standards XML-enabled 3D file format
• Panda 3D, a free animation system in Python, created by Disney and the Carnegie Mellon University

P2P Gaming Concepts