The Funeral of WoW Gold

To back up a bit: Blizzard makes World of Warcraft the insanely popular online multiplayer fantasy game(*).

MDY makes and sells a program that plays the game automatically (called a “bot,” for “robot”). Many players resent bots and botters, and Blizzard has waged war against them for years. However, the bots are popular. Apparently over 100,000 copies of MDY’s bot, called Glider, have been sold at $
35 a pop.

The question raised in this case, which was just decided in an Arizona court, are whether Glider violates the DMCA by “circumventing protections” as Blizzard claims. It appears that all sides agree that Glider does not decrypt anything, hack anything, nor break any security. It uses the legitimate credentials of the player.

Timothy Lee, at ars technica, calls this “DMCA hairsplitting” and I think he’s right. I further think he is correct in pointing out that Judge Campbell has made a decision with some bad implications. This gets a bit detailed, so bear with me…

Campbell drew a distinction between components of the game, thus: the bits stored on disk (called “literal elements”) and the bits encountered by the game player during the course of the game (called “non-literal elements”). Part of the World of Warcraft （ Buy wow gold ） client ensemble is a program called Warden that attempts to control how the client operates and can be accessed while it’s running. Campbell decided that Glider did not violate the DMCA with respect to the literal elements, but because it attempted to evade or circumvent detection by Warden while the game was running, it did violate the DMCA with repect to the non-literal bits. Confused yet?

MDY’s argument rested on the thesis that these non-literal bits were not protectable by the DMCA because they don’t constitute a separate copyrighted work. If that’s true it doesn’t matter what interaction Glider and Warden have. Campbell rejected MDY’s contention that the non-literal bits were too ephemeral, since they could be captured by recording software. That seems reasonable - all kinds of ephemera have been ruled copyrightable for various reasons. More interesting to me is MDY’s contention that the ephemera weren’t solely Blizzard’s work. The ephemera are created in the interaction of the game and its many players.

This is significant as it describes pretty much every “Web 2.0″ content-sharing site such as Facebook or LiveJournal. In these sites, too, the named software company provides a vehicle or environment into which users place their content interactively. For example, LiveJournal strongly resembles a blogging system in which individual registered users write postings on which other people add comments. Attempting to apply Campbell’s logic to the blogosphere would be troubling at best.

Judge Campbell also agreed with Blizzard that violation of the game’s EULA meant that the gamers no longer had a license to play the game. This is extremely troubling in that the logical extension of this reasoning is that any violation of a EULA involves forfeiting your license to that software. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I’m quite certain I’ve violated more than a few EULAs and am probably in violation of some right now. I don’t think that means I give up my licenses to those software programs, nor do I think it means I’m infringing the copyrights of those programs - or at least I don’t think it should mean that.

Finally, there’s an additional twist in that Cambell ruled that MDY’s founder Michael Donnelly, who wrote the Glider bot, was also personally liable for the infringement because he should have known that his and his firm’s actions were illegal. Donnelly’s good faith argument was rejected.

Lee makes the point that Blizzard is misusing the DMCA in this case. A law on copyright is not an all-purpose behavior-control mechanism. Sherwin Siy, Staff Attorney for Public Knowledge, made this case pretty clearly last year when PK filed its amicus brief in the case. Blizzard appears to have won on merits other than the DMCA and I hope they’ll withdraw this claim before it has to be appealed up.

(*) Your humble author is himself a confessed WoW addict, who has spent more than a few hours battling botters and other in-game cheats. I’m not at all impartial on the topic, just in case you had any illusions.

The efforts of Super Bowl advertisers and NBC at providing 3-D programming fell flat, but Nvidia is seeing a little more success in the 3-D arena. HP showed off an impressive green commercial printing effort, and the Badaboom transcoder earned product of the week honors.

Last week was an unusually interesting week. We started the week with one of the biggest 3-D attempts ever — both Super Bowl ads and an episod of “Chuck,” both of which showcased the problems with 3-D.

At the same time, I was playing “World of Warcraft” in 3-D, and that was working just fine. Toward the end of the week, HP (NYSE: HPQ) Labs showcased a way to cut dramatically the cost and ecological impact of printing, and Lenovo went from what was effectively a two-CEO company to one CEO. This is a tough year, and the firms that will stand out are those that can execute under that framework.

We’ll close with my product of the week: my favorite transcoding product, Badaboom.

3-D Hit and Miss

Doing 3-D during the Super Bowl and for last week’s episode of “Chuck” was an incredibly gutsy move, but unfortunately, it didn’t work very well. On the other hand, this was the first attempt to use a 3-D technology that actually didn’t totally screw up the 2-D image, and it does show promise — it’s just not ready for general use yet. I hope Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) keeps trying, though.

With all of the focus on doing 3-D, DreamWorks announced it will go 100 percent 3-D. For instance, we will be seeing a lot of it going forward and, done right, it can enhance the viewing experience quite a lot. I’m struggling with the new “Monsters vs. Aliens” movie , which was also previewed in Marginal 3-D (the real movie, I’m told, looks vastly better) because I’m kind of up to my neck in cute cartoon characters and want the real Monsters and Aliens back. I’ll probably still see it, though.

Last week I was testing Nvidia’s 3-D Vision product on “World of Warcraft” and some strategy games, and it works vastly better than the Super Bowl experience. While this is a big step in the right direction; playing with this all week does showcase where additional work still needs to be done in creating the games themselves.

In “World of Warcraft,” the 3-D glasses and software really do add a lot of depth to the game, but you miss the physics and depth of true 3-D objects, largely because the game was clearly written for two dimensions. It just isn’t at the same performance level as some of the titles you’ll find on the Xbox or PlayStation 3, where trees and grass actually move. To really make 3-D shine in a massive multiplayer, first-person shooter or role-playing game, I think the environment needs to be more dynamic and interactive because I really missed things like wind, and some of the objects (mostly plants) looked fake.

On the other hand, strategy games that were supported by the technology were wonderful because the pieces and characters looked more like little models, making them a lot more fun to manipulate and watch. Movies were stunning, but content was really light and your existing TV probably won’t support this technology anyway.

However — and this is something to consider when picking up a new TV — some of the TVs will and an increasing number are 120 or 240 Hz, which eventually should allow them to work with 3-D. You can find the monitors and TVs that support this today here — I’m seriously thinking of picking up one of the TVs because they are on sale at Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) at the moment.

If you find a display of the Nvidia 3-D Vision in a store, take a moment to try it out. That’s what home 3-D can look like, and it’s coming.

HP Does Green Industrial Class Printing

HP had a lab event last week and — as it typically does — hauled out the green dog-and-pony show. Of all the vendors I follow, HP is the most religious about this green concept, going as far as developing sensors that help calculate the carbon footprint related to shipping parts and raw materials. If everyone was this rabid about green, we probably wouldn’t be worried about global warming — we’d be worried about the effects of too much clean air and water.

One of the concepts HP presented caught my eye this year, and that was the idea of green printing. You see, the one part of HP I struggle with when it comes to green is the printing unit, because the whole idea of cutting down trees to make paper is inherently un-green. Yet the reality is, e-books aren’t really ready for the mass market yet (though I love my Kindle) and we are likely stuck with paper for a while yet.

HP’s idea was to eliminate a lot of the waste that currently occurs by printing things that specifically contain what you are interested in reading. For instance, when I get a newspaper, I throw most of it into recycling unread because there are large parts I’ll never read and have no desire to pick up. Same with magazines — for instance, I take a lot of car magazines, and I love the reviews of hot cars and SUVs but couldn’t care less about racing results, economy cars and mini-vans. The newspapers and magazine companies could save a lot of money and conserve a lot of paper if they just printed what I wanted to read.

And this was HP’s concept — printers that would, in high volume, print and package custom publications designed specifically for the reader. The concept means ads that the reader would actually be interested in, and the publication would be heavy in the content they wanted to see and contain little or no content they weren’t interested in. That would not only save money for the publishers, it would save resources and likely result in more loyal customers as well. There could be money in green, and I know that green works best when there are economic incentives. I still think HP should do an e-book, though.

Lenovo Cuts Number of CEOs in Half

This is turning out to be a tough year, and it is forcing a lot of companies to look introspectively at what is working and what isn’t. Lenovo’s quarterly results put the company into the red; and while it isn’t in as bad a shape as Sony, is it was clear they needed to do some things differently.

For a while, Lenovo has felt like two companies; one that is largely consumer and exists in
China, and one that is everyplace but China and mostly enterprise. It actually has a nice consumer line of products under the IdeaPad brand, but they are hard to find in retail. This has put them at a competitive disadvantage against Ace, which has recently passed Lenovo in market share largely as a result of stealing Packard Bell out from under its rival.

In addition, while most PC vendors are either in the smartphone market or about to enter, Lenovo was there first but exited, moving against the market trend. All of this was likely at least partially due to the split leadership problem.

Now the company is back to one CEO and has a new CMO, Mike Sievert, who used to run Windows marketing and can help position the company well on top of the coming Windows 7 launch — which is expected to be the biggest since Windows 95. The thing isn’t even out yet and there seems to be a love fest for the offering.

Lenovo still has to execute, but hard times got it to rethink its structure, and the new one should be more able to move more quickly on opportunities and have a greater likelihood of taking the share it has lost back.

Product of the Week: Badaboom Transcoder

Badaboom brought out the first transcoder that uses the graphics card rather than the CPU to do transcoding, and it is now both fast and reliable. I’d started using this product in beta but it was a little flaky. With the current release it works like a charm.

Transcoding is what you do with a video file to make it fit on an iPod, cell phone, or store it to watch on an Xbox, PS3, Media Extender or Media Center. Badaboom covers each of these devices, and it is both easy to set up and very easy to use. The product requires Nvidia Cuda, which means you need a current Nvidia card, but if you have one and need to transcode, you’ll love this thing. You can download the trial for free on the Badaboom site above.

The developers of “DC Universe Online” explained how they’re making their new DC Comics MMO more appealing to women. They also talk about how their game differs from “World of Warcraft.”

***

When I spoke with Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley last year, I asked if the company had any plans to make their MMOs more appealing to female players. He said, “We are going out of our way in ‘DC’ because we saw that women were really the largest part of the audience for ‘The Dark Knight‘ [movie].”

Certainly the publicity and the widespread acclaim surrounding the latest Batman film couldn’t hurt, but creative director Jens Andersen and senior producer Wes Yanagi told me some specifics of how their game will appeal to the ladies.

MTV Multiplayer: A few months ago, I spoke with John Smedly and he said that “DC Universe Online” is trying to be more female-friendly. Can you elaborate on that?

Creative Director Jens Andersen: Well, we definitely want to make sure that people can participate in the action. Obviously, it’s a comic book game, right? So there’s a lot of punching and stuff like that. A lot of my friends play with their significant other or spouse, and they usually like to play the stuff that’s not so up-front combat-wise; they like to do the healing, the support, the buffing, and that sort of group management. So we made sure that we tried to make that more than just watching people’s health bars on the side of the screen. It wasn’t just playing the interface; it was actually still just playing the game. So our concepts for having the support people involved are very different from what other MMOs have.

And also, we don’t have death in the game; we just have knock-outs so when you do “die,” you can get right back up again and into the fight. So there’s less critical failure points for people who are more casual and aren’t necessarily as into a hardcore of an experience. It’s a lot more forgiving in a lot of ways. And it’s not a necessarily a male-female thing so to speak, but it’s just what I’ve noticed when it comes to what characters females tend to gravitate to gameplay-wise as opposed to men.

Wonder Woman is in our game; she’s one of the most recognizable female characters in the world. So the appeal that we have as far as just female presence in the [intellectual property] is very large. The amount of customization that you get to do — we’re taking a lot of care in terms of like what types of characters and archetypes that women gravitate to when they play — have the cute character, we have the motherly character, we have the sexy character — all the different kind of traits you can kind of choose from and can identify with.

MTV Multiplayer: Have you had a lot of women try the game?

Andersen: We actually have a lot of female team members, but certainly, they’re outnumbered by the males on the team for sure. And since we’re not in the open beta or anything like that, it’s typically been skewed towards men but we do let people play our game at all the conventions that we’ve gone to. I would say that the response is both good from men and women that have played the game. And we’re also live within the company, so there are a lot of females in the
San Diego office that have played the game, too. and I think that they’ve responded to it very well.

MTV Multiplayer: Do you find it challenging making a game that’s aimed at hardcore MMO gamers and the more casual gamer who’s just a big DC fan?

Andersen: This game is about the DC universe, bu it’s not just about the DC universe fans. We’re not making specifically for that one gorup. We’re making it for everybody including that group. So we have to inlcude a lot of mainstream concepts. Like what’s the ideal version of Batman, right? It’s Bruce Wayne as Batman. If they’re writing a story in the comics where Batman’s back has been broken and it’s actually this other guy playing Batman right now — several people have actually played Batman — it wouldn’t be Harvey Dent as Batman. That doesn’t make sense [for this game].

What we’re trying to do is make a game that is for the action gamer and the MMO gamer. there’s a market there already, and what we want to do is bring a new take to the space. We want to make people that like playing that long-term game, we want them to not play the same game only with capes.

Senior producer Wes Yanagi: I think your question is also about function or usability as opposed to the design. Maybe “World of Warcraft” would be the best example — people say it’s easily accessible, right? And I think it’s really because their usablilty at the early stages was really well done. If you took someone’s “WoW” character at level 70 — even if they didn’t use any interface add-ons and if it was just their default interface — you’d be overwhelmed because there’d be too many options. But what [Blizzard] did, they did a good job at gradually teaching you how to become an expert at that game. And I think that a lot of other games, especially MMOs, don’t do that very well.

Andersen: You do need to teach people how to play your game early on. Product knowledge is really important — to know what’s great and not great. But we’re such a differet game fundametally [from "WoW"], like how you play moment-to-moment is completely different, how you team up with a player or tactically fight against another player because of the physics nature of our game, how you target things is completely different because we’re not pointer-driven. So there are certain things that we can’t take from them. But we can say overall, “Hey they did a wonderful job in ramping players up on how to play their game.” We should that. But how we do it is dependent on our game.

Use games to hone marketable skills while blowing off some steam.

“Organized and led my 50-member guild through three successful back-to-back Nexus runs.” You don’t see that written on anyone’s résumé, but apparently some folks do list the level and class of their World of Warcraft characters. This might seem a little far-fetched, but associate professor–and director of MIT’s Education Arcade Program–Eric Klopfer says that a number of recent studies have examined what practical skills a person can pick up by playing electronic games. Can you legitimately learn something from WoW besides efficient techniques for slinging fireballs at foes?

Klopfer points to Constance Steinkeuhler’s work at UW Wisconsin. She is “showing that people are developing and applying all kinds of useful skills in World of Warcraft （ Buy wow gold ）  –data collection and analysis, collaboration, planning, resource management and even team management.” Remove the “WoW” identification from the place of employment, and all of these accomplishments look fantastic on a résumé.

“It’s just too bad that gaming still has this stigma attached to it in the modern workplace,” says Ethan Mollick. A researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and coauthor of Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, Mollick believes that many employers view video games as some scarlet “S” for slackery. After all, Gears of War 2 is no replacement for vocational training unless you happen to own a chainsaw. There is evidence that task-specific educational and corporate training games can vastly improve real world performance (Mollick points to a study concluding that executives were at least 25 percent more effective months after playing Virtual Leader — a game about virtual meetings. yay.), research into the effectiveness of mainstream games is still in its infancy.

So, considering the miserable state of the economy, what can you do? Well for starters, you need to blow off some steam. And while you’re doing that, maybe we can try to level up a couple of traits. In that spirit, I asked Klopfer, Mollick, and David Edery (Mollick’s coauthor on Changing the Game) to help revisit some time-tested résumé bullet points and see how some games might provide an upgrade.

[ The following suggestions are intended for mental calisthenics, not as talking points in a full-court-press job interview--unless you're looking for employment in the game industry. And even then, you'd have to convince the interviewer that you play games during off-hours and not on the company dime. So let's just keep this between us for now.]

“A Born Leader”

You know how to make a commitment and you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty to achieve team objectives. The experts agree that an MMO guild is the best place to start (though some guilds are better than others). You devote time and energy to your guildmates, prioritize quests, and pull long hours for glory (not to mention epic loot). While you could form your own guild and cut out the middleman, working your way up through the channels and receiving promotions is a better way to hone you ability to lead others–and to strengthen your interpersonal skills in the process.

“Strong Communication Skills”

A big part of any MMO involves learning how to express yourself and how to work well with others. Here’s something else to consider when you join a guild: Today’s online games could be tomorrow’s golf courses, where business deals get made between holes — I mean, dungeons. I’m not saying that the surly dwarf you just resurrected could be your next boss–but you never know. At least one CEO I’ve met rallies against The Horde when he isn’t closing major deals. And this guy doesn’t even work in the video game industry.

My two cents: Even single-player games offer you a chance to refine communications and how you react with others. Take last year’s hit, Fallout 3. It’s a huge, open world with lots of open-ended conversations. There is no patently “right” or “wrong” way to go through that postapocalyptic world–but the things you say and do alter how people perceive you, just as they do in our preapocalyptic world. Ally yourselves with some folks at the risk of angering others. Try to resolve conflicts without firing a shot. It’s no match for real human conversation, but it does immerse you in the practical experience of cause and effect.

“A Team Player”

Rainbow Six: Vegas 2–or just about any other team-based first-person shooter–provides excellent team-building exercise, too. Think of it as the digitized version a white-collar corporate retreat with paintballing coworkers. Hey, there’s a reason that the military experiments with using FPS games to train soldiers. Experts agree that all team-based games help foster small-group dynamics–provided that everyone wants to work together. You’ll still need to weed out any griefers you find along the way. A who? Griefers live to cheese other people off and get their own teammates killed. In World of Warcraft, the best-known example is Leeroy Jenkins. It’s hilarious to watch–though not so much if you’re the victim.

More than dealing with occasional haters, you’re navigating through seas of people–some mature, some not. I’ve played team-based shooting games in which I voluntarily muted my teammates. Because who needs to hear people cursing like Tourette’s patients on speed and failing to work together? But once you have a cohesive crew that takes it as seriously (or jokingly) as you do, you’ll learn how to rely on your teammates and back them up when needed.

“Detail-Oriented, Analytical”

Klopfer raises a great point about kids who play card-collecting games like Pokemon: They get a light course in statistics each time they play. As players get older, and the games get more complex, there are more numbers to crunch. Dedicated WoW players, for example, collect and analyze everything. Want to know the optimal times and places to find loot drops? Need to know the odds on how to win specific battles? Want to help calculate the best going rates for gear on a game’s open market? People are trawling through reams of data to provide answers. Is this a replacement for Statistics 101? Unlikely, but I find it interesting that gamers pay monthly fees for the privilege of gathering more statistical info. You’d have to pay me!

“Able to See the Big Picture”

Ask people who’ve spent nights on end sweating out each turn in Civilization IV or beginning urban planning from scratch in SimCity whether it has taught them something (besides the perfect no-doze cocktail recipe). Over time, they pick up the ins and outs of mapping-system dynamics and the way varying factors influence each other. You try to plan for every eventuality and streamline city planning, but something inevitably goes haywire. Meteors, floods, Godzilla–whatever. This is where it’s easiest to say that players are learning how to process data and figuring out how it fits together in game form. And of course many Sim or Tycoon games offer equally effective practice in managing big projects and juggling multiple variables–everything from budgets and salaries to stocks and bonds. Mollick half-jokes that they can also teach practical lessons. He credits Europa Universalis for teaching him European history. Me? I can relate more to The Beer Game. This four-player, browser-based simulation walks players through the logistics involved in producing, distributing, and selling suds. That’s entertainment!

By the same logic, you’d think that real-time strategy games such as StarCraft and Command & Conquer would be able to teach players all the same skills, along with how to multitask in real time. “If anything, the real-time strategy games could teach you about how to divide your attention,” says Mollick. “But whether that’s good or not is an open question.”

“A Problem-Solver”

There’s no consensus yet about how effective brain-training games really are. One study suggests that Brain Age improves math skills in children by 19 percent–but so do pen-and-paper activities. As Edery observes, “the research leads to a negative conclusion that video games aren’t anything special, but that misses the point entirely. Brain Age is wildly popular–people voluntarily play it. Any activity that increases math skills by 19 percent sounds good to me!” (The article notes that other research reported 50 percent improvement.)

Similarly, games such as Professor Layton and Zack and Wiki introduce a new generation to puzzle-solving adventure games. Unfortunately you can’t measure how any of those puzzle-solving skills transfer to the real world. “Within game worlds,” says Klopfer, “you need to solve problems in different ways. You’re learning to apply variants of strategies. But there is no easy way to measure that skill you’ve learned outside the game.” You’d have to sit and observe all sorts of behaviors before and after using the game for testing. But, as I alluded to earlier, there remain more questions than answers.

If this helps anyone take a break while prepping for a new job, then I’ve done mine. And to anyone out there hit hard in these past couple of weeks, my thoughts are with you. Good luck and keep at it. Until next time….