First, MMORPGs are relentlessly socialSecond, the sociality they represent is real-world, not virtualOn the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhereIt is how most of us conceptualize a simulationWe talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.gof Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state)In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence.."butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon. 

A question for the future is how to implement larger simulations with more objectsIn a Gamespy.com article a while ago, Tim Sweeney stated that while the last ten years of programming progress were about objects, the next ten years will be about "ecosystems of objects." Buy SWG Credits keep your high powerAnd technology is moving away from an engineering-style application of linear rationality to solve problemsAs we are really have available stock of Cheap WOW GoldThey looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic researchWhile I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developersAnd there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companiesMaybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.You would get more than you though with owning Cheap SWG CreditsOne problem looking forward is how to work reliably with game simulation objects in parallel (see "concurrency")As he points out, the approach of today using mainstream programming languages is to manually synchronize object state - a developer has to explicitly lock/unlock the bits of the object and figure out how it should share with other objects ("shared state concurrency")This won't scale - it is too error prone and too complicated to implement over large object setsIt is also expensive (skilled developers)Thus, we stand at the edge of the abyss looking to worlds feared with plains of bugged tribbles.

Beyond software engineering there too have been subtler claims favoring parallelized codeAssuming tools and practices catch up (a big if), can it lead to more fine-grained definitions of game simulation behavior? Third, the bandwidth available to conduct those relationships is constrained. 

In MMORPGs, friendships are formed, but you never see the other person's face.  You spend 8 hours on Teamspeak with someone -- they are mature, competent, brilliant; you engage in complex political maneuverings with themYou know them pretty wellIn fact, I'll bet I know some of the people I raid with -- *inside* -- better than I know some people that I term "friends" in real life. 

This leads to a question I've been thinking about for some time: Is there an optimal "bandwidth" for human relationships? And is that optimal bandwidth less than full, constant, real-life contact (which has been set up, by default, as the social gold standard of online relations)

Oddly, often we aren't at our best face to faceUniversity of Arizona research indicates that we are better at lying than at detecting falsehood -- under constrained communication conditions (lying through /tells) we can detect lies much better than we can if the person is standing there. 

I'm sure this is heresy, even hereBut then I see groups of people who are not in real life leaders, leading and directing complex organizations with difficult political hierarchies and subtle power interplaysI see them politicking and gladhanding.  Doing a wonderful job