Submission of an entry does not assign or transfer any ownership of or rights in and to the content of the submission. Those rights remain with the original holder (the creator or the virtual world owner, as applicable). As a condition of entry, the entrant grants a license to the organizers of the State of Play conference to reproduce, display and perform the submission at the State of Play conference and to distribute the submission in print and on the web. There are conceptual barriers surrounding gameplay, art, etc., but those, being conceptual, are easy for some to ignore (as demonstrated by well-financed MMO projects with gameplay that hasn't lived up to its promise).

The contest submission (i.e. the public space image, movie and/or text) must be the original work of the submitting entrant. No infringing works will be knowingly accepted, and any works determined by the judging panel, in its sole discretion, to actually or likely infringe the rights of others will not be considered. Personally, I'm fascinated to see what happens when it doesn't take a million dollars or more (which might as well be an infinite amount of money for most developers who haven't managed to make a diabolical pact with a publisher) just to make a client and server platform sufficient to support a bona fide commercial-grade MMO. Creation of these games has become increasingly cut off from the vast majority of those who would like to try their hand at it. I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds.

The design competition is open to anyone 18 and older in the U.S. and abroad, except in any areas where the competition is prohibited by law. There is no cost to enter the competition. Partly because I think his expectation here invokes a common form of cyberlibertarian narrative about contemporary American politics that is at the least an over-simplified hypothesis about the development of post-1945 liberal democracies, that refers implicitly to some kind of universal tendency of individuals to surrender freedom to authority.

Entries from all massively multi-player games and worlds will be accepted, (no stand-alone 3D software please).

Ok, up to this point, this has no major dynamic world-persistent aspect to it--it's just a really simple AI routine with some obvious design problems. The next part, however, is this: I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It 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.

Once they have retreated, they will stay tightly clustered and if they sight non-orcs, all will attack at 150% effectiveness. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone 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 points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While 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 developers. And there are huge gaps in what we don't know.

Just to clarify: I don’t equate “exploring one’s identity” with “role-playing.” In fact, I think sticking strictly to “thee, thou, thy” probably limits the kind of exploration one can do. Now, chicken wrangling, on the other hand, that is an exploration of identity. Seriously. What’s so cool about that chicken that you had to have it? What does it say about you that you went to the trouble to get it? What does it say about me that I think the prairie chicken is one of the coolest things in the game, but that I just can’t be bothered to get myself one?

Roger brings up the excellent example of a teenager in their rebellious phase. These are the kinds of things we get to re-explore in these places. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone 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 points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While 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 developers.

It's fair to say that there's a wide range of opinions on whether number of users -- however defined -- is a useful measure of a virtual world's value in any sense of the word. There's been some concern that Terra Nova isn't the place to rank VWs by population, or to try to define what that population might actually be given that we have no way of verifying what a VW operator says. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone 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 points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While 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 developers.

In other online spaces though, the unity of representation and intention remains less clear. In forums, for example, male posters often use female images for their "avatars." Here, more so than in virtual worlds, it's debatable whether these images are actually avatars, representative of the speakers, or merely aesthetic accompaniments. As may be expected, it seems forum-goers who use cross-gender images commonly do not consider themselves to be practicing transvestitism.