Jane Pinckard of gamegirladvance.com moderates.

Sheri Graner Ray is game designer currently working for Sony as a lead designer on unannounced MMORPG. She’s written a book about designing games that appeal to both sexes. She says that the market is focused on males 15-25, but that demographic isn’t growing as quickly as the game industry itself is. So, the industry has to learn to skew wider.

James Au is the official blogger for the game SecondLife. The player can create her own landscapes. He calls it a Massively Multiplayer Massive Online Creative Agora. He also writes for Wired and Salon. He shows impressive events and scenes created by users, including a Viennese formal ball. Slides are here. [Hmm, I just realized that I carped about something Au wrote about Doom 3 a while ago.]

He shows a character created by a homeless person. Is that true? Even if it’s not, says Au, it’s an interesting narrative the woman created for herself…blurring the line between avatars and people.

He also shows a slide of Cory’s avatar holding an online book forum in the world.

Ray: We’re all asking if we’re making a sandbox or making a game.

Au: There was a tax revolt in our world. The game used to deduct virtual bucks depending on how much property you own. One person created a protest parade of rats.

Ray: In the social organizations within these worlds, they tend to be led by females and they tend to be the glue that holds the group together. They’re also the ones who externalize the game and take it outside the game, running the web sites, doing the fan fiction…

Au: One woman, Jesse, created herself as the premier hostess. She set up a villa in the designated war zone, told the combatants they were being rude. She got a gun. She scared them because she had a lot of “social power.” [I don’t know what sociala power means in this game, and they’re not taking questions yet.]

Q: What about player-killers, griefers, i.e., those who are there to cause mischief.

Ray: They’re actually playing against the developers, finding the loopholes. We spend a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to handle them. And we consider them from the gitgo.

The questioner (Mike from Disney) says that there did used to be vigilante players who would police the area, but that got squashed by the developers.

Ray: It wasn’t enough. So we had to step in and try to make the experience friendly to new players.

Ray: Players are perverse. “Why are you trying to put the tree in your backpack?” But they’ll do it. In one of the games I play, they put in beds. Players immediately stacked them to climb up on things they weren’t meant to climb up on.

Au: We had a war zone, but people started building there. Homesteaders were being shot. And that puts you where you started, so they’d be transported back into the war zone and they’d be shot again. So, they took three of the properties and eliminated the war gaming there.

Au: Someone created a game within a game and charges people to play it. And he retains all the IP to the game.

Ray: We like to see where our players are going and then build it in. We’ll watch the boards. What are they talking about? That’s what we’ll fold back into our stories.

Ray: I’d like to see great sandboxes.

Au: Uru [Myst 4, I think] shut down [It promised playuuer-created narratives], so players are recreating it in SecondLife.

Q: Some parts of the world are gorgeous, but some parts look ugly. How do you control that?

Au: Some people agreed to create their dream community and created criteria. They have community meetings.

Q: What will happen as the consoles go online?

Ray: Console titles will go online the way Halo did: The controls lend themselves to twitch games. They won’t be willing to pay a monthly fee because they can go online and play for free.

Q: Online games have become like work.

A: We could spend hours on that! Make the treadmill fun. Eliminate the treadmill. If they’re using a macro, we should do it for them.

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Mike Slone lists blogs from sxsw.

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Last night, at the EFF party at sxsw, I got to talk with Don Turnbull, a professor at the U of Texas. We talked about metadata, a topic he is very learned, thoughtful and interesting about.

This morning, he sent me an email with helpful links to some of the topics we’d talked about (including how the online WorldBook handles tagging entries from the ’30s that talked glowingly about that young, dynamic German leader, Adolph Hitler). Excellent. But I’m on the road, so the message came into my laptop’s Outlook receptacle, which is a message ghetto in relation to my desktop machine. So, without a trace of irony, I found myself thinking that it’s too bad that Outlook doesn’t have categories for messages so I could tag Don’s message as “Metadata.”

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Dinah Sanders of Metagrrrrl is the moderator.

Liz Lawley: Her mission is to convince people that librarians are relevant to IT.

Cynthia Hill is a librarian for Sun.

Tanya Rabourn is an info architect with MetLife.

Jon Udell is the InfoWorld blogger. He’s here because of his “library lookup” project, which is very cool. It’s a bookmarklet that will show you if a book you’re looking at on the Web is available in your local library. (The URL of the page you’re on has to have an ISBN in the url.) It requires no integration effort on the part of the library.

Hill says that librarians know how to authenticate information, which makes them valuable behind the corporate firewall.

Liz: Libraries are brick and mortar reputation management systems. She recommends del.icio.us, a shared bookmark system. She points to the emergence of shared vocabularies for talking ’bout stuff there. Librarians are good at managing controlled vocabularies.

Rabourn: Librarians used to be intermediaries. Now the end users are doing the searching.

Sanders: Libraries are starting to catalog web sites the way they catalog books. Just that something is cataloged gives it a certain weight.

Liz: Tanya said something about “information-seeking behavior.” One of the things that’s fascinating to me about del.icio.us is that it’s an emergent vocabulary. We can see how people are describing information. That’s an unusual opportunity.

Jon: You can see this in dmoz also.

Liz: Dmoz is different. Del.icio.us allows an emergence in which you have multiple views of things and then you can refine them.

Liz: Libraries have over-invested in proprietary IT. And our user licenses often prevent us from hacking them, making them less useful.

Jon: And there are other reasons to go to the library. It’s an interesting social space.

Liz: Our library took a page from Borders. You can even get food. And now people hang out there to talk.

Hill: People come to libraries also because they’re stable and they’re neutral.

Dinah: Could libraries become a magazine, aggregating local sites?

Liz: Libraries need to allow annotation. I want to be able to see the notes my colleagues have left. Libraries have been very reluctant to allow users to supply content.

Liz: Libraries are in trouble. In general they’ve done a very bad job of adopting to new technology.

Jon: I discovered my weblog was censored by one of the net nannies. Initially I thought it didn’t matter but it does because libraries are required to use net nannies.

Q: I can get recommendations from Amazon, also. What do librarians that makes them better at it?

A: That we’re not doing it to take money out of your pocket. Also, we can localize it.

Dinah recommends www.theshiftedlibrarian.com as a blog about libraries.

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AKMA has a provocative “semi-random” trio of statements about our powerlessness in the face of signifying. 1. Everything we do signifies (projects meaning), he says. 2. Signifying always escapes our ability to control it: Your wearing of an orange jacket on St. Patrick’s day will be taken as having a particular significance whether you intended it or not. 3. From this AKMA concludes that there can be no ethic of signifying, just as there’s no ethic of gravity. (Pardon my recapitulation. Read the original. It’s written with AKMA’s usual clear-eyed panache.)

The main point of his conclusion is (and I trust AKMA will correct me if I get this wrong) that because signifying isn’t something we do, and isn’t something that we even fully understand, there’s no “real” signification, intended or otherwise, that we can authoritatively unearth. Our simple model of communication (inner thought expressed in outer signs) misrepresents the actual situation.

My question for AKMA: Within the broad swath of signifying, some of it is on purpose (as AKMA acknowledgeds, of course), so shouldn’t we be held responsible for it? Does he general law absolve us of responsibility in particular cases? Somehow I doubt it, but I don’t understand the connection.

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Here’s an article from Planetwire, forwarded from a friend who prefaces it by saying: “In case you were on the fence about who to vote for…”

New York City: This week the Bush Administration sought to reverse historic agreements that have significantly contributed to advancing the rights, economic status and health of the world’s women. The United States was the only country to reverse long-standing support of the historic agreements reached in Cairo in 1994 and Beijing in 1995.

“This is a devastating blow to women around the world. The actions of the Bush Administration means more women will continue to die because of inadequate reproductive rights and health programs,” noted June Zeitlin, Executive Director of WEDO, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization…

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Dan Gillmor has posted the draft of the second chapter of the book he’s working on and is looking for comments. (I’ve been running into Dan every hour here at sxsw. That justifies the trip, as far as I’m concerned.)

And speaking of people you count yourself lucky to run into, Howard Rheingold and I interviewed each other for 20 minutes for TechTV. It was streamed and will be posted somewhere sometime. Smart Mobs Loosely Joined.

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Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes is talking about some anxieties he has about the current generation of youngsters. For example, this gen is delaying marriage longer than any in American history. They are, surveys show, more “out for themselves.” “They are freer,” Ethan says, “than any other generation”: Free from the commitments of their parents, freer from parental control, free of long-term commitments to jobs and places, freer in the available social options, free of commitment to national movements, free of a sense that they’ve been chosen from some higher mission.

We’re living in an unprecedented era of personal choice, he says. Where’s the fanfare? We’re living out the freedom that the Baby Boom broke the ground for but only play-acted.

So, what are we doing with that freedom, he asks. Are we squandering it, the way commentators have said? No, Ethan wrote his book in part spurred by such commentaries. They don’t describe his life and friends.

He says that we haven’t developed the narratives that allow us to give credit to friendship. We (i.e., Ethan’s gen) make households with our friends. We’re increasingly erasing the line between workmate and friend; we go into business with our friends. We create rituals like Burning Man. If we had narratives, we would see that we’re less apathetic than we seem.

How might these urban tribes create a landscape across a city. Urban tribes maximize “weak ties”: acquaintances at the edge of our circle friends. These become important when you try to find housing, a job, a romantic partner, etc. One layer away, says Ethan, are “shadow ties”: People who may come into our lives with a piece of information that will change our lives. Urban tribes maximize shadow tribes. “You end up with a network of thousands within which you can maneuver and navigate city life.”

These social networks are very hard to see. It’s a type of “dark matter”: a force that’s hard to see but that holds everything together. But they can make a difference: A web of weak acquaintances resulted in the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

So, Ethan says, Robert “Bowling Alone” Putnam is right that Ethan never joined a bowling league, but in any single nighht, he can tap into a network that allows him to do anything from playing frisbee to engaging in political action.

“I could almost make the case that this form of social network is better” because it’s continuous, not a set of monthly meetings. “It requires personal and constant involvement.” Within these groups, we don’t even think about the fact that we’re giving of ourselves. It’s more like social barter than social capital.

So, what has his gen done with their freedom? “We’ve had this massive experiment in the meaning of friendship, asking whether friendships can be enough sustain us emotional and bind together large communities.”

Q: What do you define as your gen?

A: 20-40 years old.

Q: You missed two important freedoms in your generation: Freedom of health and freedom from fear. The H-bomb was born the same year I was.

A: Yes, but now we’re beginning to realize how good that freedom from fear was.

Q: One of the strengths of weak ties is that they bring new stuff into your network. What do you mean by “shadow tie”?

A: I made up the term because I think I misrepresented the original meaning of “weak tie.” Shadow ties are people who we don’t currently know but who may enter our network.

Q: This is supposed to be an interactive but everyone is attached to their laptops.

A: The extent to which these groups can live exclusively via technology is a question I’m not prepared to answer.

Q: You’re mischaracterizing Putnam’s weak ties. They enable patterns of service.

A: Putnam simply didn’t see ultimate frisbee and Burning Man.

Q: You should characterize what you’re talking about as social currency, not social capitalism.

Q: How about dating?

A: Your most likely chance of finding someone to die is through weak ties and shadow ties. When you try to match people up one to one, you lack the trust that comes from working through intermediaries.

Q: What happens when you get married? [He’s asking my question off the IRC!]

A: I’m married and we had a baby 5 months ago. [He shows a picture. The baby is in a hat. Can’t get much cuter than that :)] I felt I had to step away from role in my tribe to take the risk of relationship. You invest in the relationship. And then you can step back into the group in a new way. It’s unclear what that new role is. I won’t be the person who plans the trip, but I’ll be a participant. For the tribe relationship not to just disappear, people have to recognize it, and give a name to it. [So, how many nights a week is Ethan thinking he’ll be away from his family? Just curious.] .

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I got to meet Craig Newmark of Craigslist here at sxsw. Craigslist is a model of letting the ends connect and getting the center out of the way. Ultracool.

And, Craig reports in his blog that he got to meet Rob Corddry of The Daily Show at the show biz side of sxsw. So, in an Orkutian Friendsterian way, I now am Rob Corddry’s friend! Ultracooler!

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I’m a panelist in this session.

I begin by saying: The Titanic couldn’t get help because its signals were interefered with. So the government regulated frequency. But it turns out that interference is a myth. In fact, “interference” happens because our devices aren’t (weren’t) smart enough to discriminate signals well. From the metaphor of interference comes the idea that spectrum is something we consume, that it’s scarce and that it’s property.

But we should be learning that assigning frequencies — literally assigning colors — is based on metaphoprs from the grwoth of spread spectrum. the information revolution (spectrum is transmitting information that is not a hard-edged good), the Net and the development of software-defined radios.

If we get out of the metaphor, we could end up with a world in which we all have equal access to unlimited bandwidth.

Cory Doctorow of the EFF (you’re a member, right?) is up now. He says: More speakers is more speech. The FCC believes, on the other hand, that if you have too many speakers, you have chaos and less speech. But, no, less control is more speech.

Eric Blossom plans on shipping software-defined radios for $65.

Cory says the government is now looking into regulating all digital-to-analog converters and all analog-to-digital converters in order to prevent unauthorized use. The third piece, he says, is the mandate that computers support “trusted computing” that only runs software “signed by a bureaucrat.” But we (the EFF) has always said that code is a form of speech.

Jim Snider of the New America Foundation says the politicians won’t unlicense spectrum because it is the most value “resource” in the information economy. Only 1% of spectrum under 2gH is unlicensed.

The commons can be done in different ways, Jim says: XG from DARPA allows the “opportunistic use” of spectrum. You can dedicate frequencies for open use. Or you could do unerlays, such as ultrawide band, but the incumbents hate this. (A source he mentions: www.spectrumpolicy.org.)

Q: Should the legislature get involved?

Jim: It’s too involved. It’s owned by the broadcasters. But there’s great enthusiasm at the FCC for granting more unlicensed spectrum.

Cory: Legislators throw hard questions over the wall to administrative agencies like the FCC which are supposed to be rendering only factual opinions.

[Sorry, but i got involved in the conversation and can’t simultaneously blog…]

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