Blogs

Phew. More Drupal updates today, and I think I have most of it under control now. In the process I've added a Creative Commons licencing scheme, a blogroll, direct access to the content categories, and a few other goodies. Still no news on the monitored sites list (using Drupal's Weblinks module); I've manually added a list of sites to the right sidebar for the time being.

Other updates also continue. Today was the start of week three of semester, but I'm already having to update unit outlines for next semester (when I'm again teaching the Creative Industries unit at QUT, as well as New Media Technologies). NMT (in which students produce the M/Cyclopedia of New Media) still requires more development; I'm exploring ways to translate the wiki knowledge structure of the M/Cyclopedia into the unit content structure and delivery. How do you teach new media without falling into the trap of providing a simplified linear history of new media - how do you show the complex interconnected nature of new media concepts and issues instead (and enable students to explore them for themselves)?

OK, I've updated my Drupal installation to the 4.6 RC version. Looks like most things are working - still waiting for an updated weblink module to appear, so the links to the Robert Fripp and Sid Smith diaries are gone for the time being. On the upside, trackback should work again. I've also taken new action against a persistent online poker site which has kept spamming me both through their frequent accesses to this site (presumably to get themselves listed in the site logs, even though they're not public) and through a couple of bouts of trackback spam. Well, their IP is banned now, so we'll see what happens.

This morning I'm doing a live chat with Trebor Scholz in New York, for his New Media and Arts Education programme. The chat transcript will also be online at the site soon. We've just managed to connect up via Apple iChat; on my end using a Powerbook which my colleague Peta Mitchell has lent me - thanks Peta! (Not sure if there's any way for others to link into the Webcam chat itself - you might just need to wait for the transcript...)

I've finally written my review of the new Paatos album - this has been sitting here for some months now, and I just never got around to it. It's now been published on M/C Reviews, but here it is as well:

We're on to the last panel session of the conference now - a summary panel with Larry Lessig, Stuart Cunningham, and Sal Humphreys as well as conference host Brian Fitzgerald. Larry starts by pointing out that what's happening in the computer games field is real, it's common, and traditional property owners have exactly the wrong intuitions in dealing with it. For one, there is a significant monetary value being generated in the online environment (there is even a story of sweatshops in Mexico developing gaming assets and selling them profitably on eBay). It is also a very common activity - and one which is a voluntary form of play as work, much along the same lines as free and open source software development.

Responding to the previous presentations, Brian Fitzgerald and Nic Suzor now outline some of the legal issues involved here - games users' rights are governed generally by end-user licence agreements (EULAs), and these go right to the heart of the question here: in buying a game, does one buy a copy of the game, or a licence to use it? This then influences whether players own the content created in their interaction with the game. Indeed, the nature of the EULA may also influence what players are attracted to these games types.

Some legal cases of note here: in Blizzard vs bnetd, a group of players developed a replacement game server system for the Blizzard product Battle.net. While this is reverse engineering and prohibited by the EULA, reverse engineering is seen as a form of free speech by US courts - but this did not sway the courts' decision in favour of the reverse-engineers. An appeal against this decision is currently underway. In an Australian context, any restriction of reverse-engineering appears unlikely to be upheld in court.

John Banks - academic and ACID researcher as well as Auran staff member - is next, talking more about the Trainz experience in particular. He notes that there is a certain amount of accountability of the games publisher towards the game users, stemming from the massive development efforts which the users have made. There is an emergence of new ecologies of production here: of new kinds of distributed organisations and ad-hoc networks. In John Hartley's words, there is a value drift, a blurring of barriers between producers and consumers - a new participatory culture (Henry Jenkins term) is emerging.

The post-lunch sessions of this conference constitute a mini-conference on computer games and the law. It is opened by Greg Lane of the Brisbane-based games developer Auran, responsible for titles such as Dark Reign and Trainz. The computer games industry is significantly large - twice the size of the movie industry, and growing twice as fast. In its multimedia inputs it's also a classic example for creative industries production, which involves massively interdisciplinary inputs into its IP 'asset creation', as Greg puts it. Interestingly, too, games are increasingly involving user co-production or co-creation. This is the case with Trainz, a train simulator which enables its users to produce rolling stock models, physical environments, and action scenarios to be used in the game - and interestingly more content was produced by users for Trainz (which sold some 3-400,000 copies) than for the only competitor project by Microsoft, which sold ten times as much, due to Microsoft's reluctance to engage fully with its users.