Peter Ludlow's expulsion from The Sims Online may well be the highest-profile player ban in the history of video games.
His tale of being thrown out of the virtual world by Sims' developer Electronic Arts – which he maintains stemmed from having exposed the participation of underage players operating in-world brothels on his blog, which was formerly called The Alphaville Herald – was written up in scores of newspapers and online publications.
Because he knows something about being at the whim of faceless decision-makers at profit-minded gaming companies, Ludlow is a big fan of an emerging concept in massively multiplayer online game circles: the open-source metaverse. Built by independent contributors, the open-source metaverse is an infinitely extensible virtual world with few rules and no oversight from corporate overlords.
"Instead of the game being developed by a game corporation, it would be developed by multiple users donating time in sort of a wiki style," said Ludlow, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. "This is a different picture, one in which the games would emerge in a bottom-up kind of way. The structure wouldn't be dictated, but would emerge from numerous people trying to extend the game space."
Ludlow acknowledges that his vision of a fully open-source virtual world is a couple of years off. But it's not total fantasy. There are already at least three groups implementing some form of open, metaverse-like platform: The Open Source Metaverse Project, or OSMP, the Croquet Project and MUPPETS.
MUPPETS, or Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study, is the brainchild of Andy Phelps, an assistant information technology professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He uses the project to immerse new students in their coursework even before they develop sophisticated programming skills.
"It's like a virtual street and a virtual desert," said Phelps. "You're basically given a plot of land ... and you can do with it what you will, and you can build objects that will interact with anyone else's objects in the world."
Students taking part in the project have built player vs. player games and three-dimensional structures that could be used as settings for gaming.
Phelps said that while MUPPETS participants do adhere to some basic academic codes of conduct, such as avoiding slander, obscenity and threats, they are otherwise free from restrictive terms of service or end-user license agreements.
"We haven't gotten involved in true policing of people using the system," said Phelps. "We're a little different from most commercial games in that respect. It's more about research and giving someone space to create good content than about binding people to a specific game or a specific story like in EverQuest."
Hugh Perkins, developer of the OSMP, says his initiative is also about giving participants a way to create an infinitely extensible 3-D environment that is free from outside control.
"My desire in making the project open-source is that the project can grow organically with time as more people come in to use it (and) bring their own ideas (and) ways of working," Perkins said. "They would be entirely responsible for the content they provide. The OSMP software is somewhat analogous to a web server in that regard."
To Ludlow, the dream is that one large open-source virtual world could be created by stitching together work created in environments like MUPPETS, the Croquet Project and the OSMP.
"Inevitably, there would have to be certain protocols that people would have to adhere to to fit into this space," Ludlow said. "Maybe there're portals between them. Maybe you could walk between them."
But the important thing, he hopes, is that users of any individual open-source project will create sophisticated games that can be played by users of any other. And, free from the constraints of terms of service, such efforts could eventually result in something infinitely more compelling than what a game company can produce.
"The theory is that you would get better games from it," Ludlow said. "You've got a thousand people out there developing stuff. And somewhere, someone is developing a game you want to play or adding features that you want.... You've got more people introducing more kinds of content, and the popular content attracts more players."
