Games
I have been at the New York Law School/Yale Law School conference on online games and the law. A very experienced British game development guru is quizzing a US Army guy about America's Army — a free recruiting tool/game. This is a somewhat out-of-body experience for me. “Granted, we're using taxpayer dollars to fund this effort. But because this game is so successful it's saved us money. We've managed to package this game with computer gaming magazines. Cost to the government: nothing. We save a lot through downloads. Our savings is around $14 million dollars.” Question: who owns IP rights in this game? We do, sir.
Has the army been looking into games that would teach skills? No, sir. We're not using this as a teaching tool, America's Army. Your first mission is to complete four maps, for example. We're not teaching you how to fire a rifle. You'd have to go to boot camp for that, sir. We're informing, not training.
Later in the morning, I talked privately for ten minutes on camera with the very gifted David R. Johnson (not David C. Johnson, who was also at the conference). NYLS is preparing a time capsule of views about the future of online gaming. David's questions were cogent, but I was completely exhausted and wasn't able to speak very clearly. (This conference is endless, but fascinating much of the time.) If I'd been able to talk, I would have said: more worlds will be walled; people will tend to play themselves. I did manage to say that we manage to ruin every paradise and are incapable of sustaining utopias. So it's very unlikely that we'll do better in online worlds. I also said that it's strange how few of the theory people here actually play games. Fourteen year olds are playing these games. Theory people say “interactive gaming is the most important development since the printing press,” but then go on to say that they don't play games online. Someone here whose business is selling virtual game artifacts says “this industry is small enough that everyone is here.” So that's nice. A great conference, and bravo to Beth Noveck.