Geek Gestalt

Beth Noveck is deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. Her path to that role began with putting together the first academic conference on virtual worlds and led her to create what may be the first open social networking project in American government history, a re-working of the U.S. patent review process known as peer-to-patent.

(Credit: Flickr user Joi Ito)

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of articles discussing how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and state governments.

Can you chart a logical path from a 2003 academic conference on the legal issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games to Barack Obama's first executive action as president?

Beth Noveck can.

If you're not familiar with her--and few outside her specific professional and social circles would be--Noveck, a 38-year-old lawyer originally from Toms River, N.J., is Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government.

Precisely what "open government" means probably depends on whom you ask. But in her official role in the current presidential administration, Noveck framed it as an attempt to make our federal institutions embrace technology in a bid to share information with the public.

"Open government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent," Noveck explained, "that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory."

On January 21, as many in Washington, D.C. were still shaking off hangovers from the inaugural parties the night before, Obama, in his first official action as president, signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open government, a short document that declared, "We shall work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government."

Noveck (see video below) was a principal contributor to the memorandum, and the first member of the Obama-Biden transition's Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform team, which advised the president-elect on ways to incorporate technology into his larger reform goals. So one could say that the new president's adoption of these concepts was a very high-profile validation of years of Noveck's work on a wide range of issues revolving around technology policy and using technology to help craft policy.

Indeed, her work over the years has won her not just an office in the White House, but the professional admiration and praise of some of the biggest names in technology.

"With a compelling blend of high theory and practical know-how," Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a back-cover review of her 2009 book, "Wiki Government," "Beth Noveck explains how political institutions can directly engage the public to solve complex problems and create a better democracy."

Or, as former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown put it in talking about the "constitution" of new technological systems, Noveck "has a very long history of being one of the most advanced thinkers on how...you change institutions to make a big difference."

State of Play
Noveck earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard University and then both a law degree from Yale Law School and a doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck. Throw in a fellowship at Oxford and it's easy to see that she was headed toward a career in academia. While she worked for a time as a telecommunications and Internet attorney, she eventually settled into a position on the faculty of New York Law School.

It was there that Noveck first began attracting public attention. In 2003, not long after the virtual worlds Second Life and There.com launched, and as massively multiplayer online games like Everquest were becoming established in the mainstream, Noveck put together the first State of Play conference as a place to talk about whether these relatively new digital fun houses might actually be used to help change the world.

"My supposition is that virtual worlds are going to be the best training ground for teaching the practices of democracy, not simply simulations that passively demonstrate something," Noveck said at the time. "They offer a playground for complex social interactions and collaborative decision making, according to a set of rules defined by the game space."

It might have been tempting to laugh, but Noveck's brainchild attracted lawyers and academics from some of the best schools in the country, eager to talk about what they saw as one of the newest and most exciting fields of study.

After all, outside of a few research papers and articles, almost no one had ever bothered to put any real thought into the idea that virtual worlds could foster real society, and all the legal, financial, intellectual, and social opportunities and problems that come along with that.

"It was the first conference that took virtual worlds seriously," said Dan Hunter, today a New York Law School legal studies professor, but back then at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It felt like the Woodstock moment for all these people and...a catalyst for people to start writing about it and for people like me to start looking at the legal and governance side of it."

Added Hunter, Noveck "managed to realize what no one else had (understood) all that clearly, that there was an opportunity to bring people together, and that there was a nascent movement there....(That) was kind of characteristic of her. She's really fast at picking up on movements and ideas people can come together around."

Peer to patent
For Noveck, being the prime instigator of a burgeoning intellectual field of study was a career boost. But it was likely another big move of hers that got her to the big time.

In 2005, still at New York Law School and still running State of Play, she began thinking about a different, though related, set of issues.

In her Introduction to Intellectual Property course, she put students through a grueling look at the American patent law process. One glaring hole, she knew, was that while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employs thousands of trained examiners, few are versed in the cutting edge of technology and scientific research.

"(An examiner) does not necessarily have a Ph.D. in science, and there is little opportunity on the job for continuing education," Noveck wrote in "Wiki Government." "As an expert in patent examination, she is not and is not expected to be a master of all areas of innovation."

This problem clearly bothered Noveck, and it was partly responsible for a huge backlog causing lengthy delays in the patent review process.

Inspired, Noveck crafted a blog post, Peer- to-Patent: A Modest Proposal, in which she argued forcefully that the patent review system was woefully broken and that if social software--a fairly new concept in 2005--was applied to the process, it could make the system work better. Wouldn't it be better for countless experts to weigh in on applications rather than a single examiner, she argued?

The idea, like so many others born in blog posts, might have died there. But, alerted to her groundbreaking idea, a top IBM intellectual property attorney contacted her and asked to talk. This was no small development. IBM is the Patent Office's single biggest client, receiving more than 3,000 patents a year. If Big Blue thought there was something to her idea, she had found the right partner.

A little IBM grant money later, Noveck found herself pursuing the project and, she wrote in her book, "running the government's first open social networking project."

Other corporate titans followed IBM's lead: First Microsoft, then Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and others. Each offered to submit their patents applications through Peer-to-Patent, and to provide funding. On June 15, 2007, Peer-to-Patent went live as an official U.S. Patent Office pilot project.

Now, the Patent Office is studying the pilot's results. And while it's not clear what the outcome will be, it is certain that Noveck continues to have friends in the right places, in this case, the new director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, who had served as the chair of the steering committee for Peer-to-Patent.

Open Government
As someone with a core belief--and the record to prove it--that technology can help re-shape government, Noveck decided to get involved in the 2008 presidential election as a very early volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign. Through a friend, Seth Harris, who was helping the campaign on labor and employment and disabilities issues--and who is now the deputy secretary of labor--Noveck found herself in a position, and with the access, to apply her unique set of skills.

"He knew that I knew a lot about technology and technology in government, in particular," Noveck recalled, "and helped to make the introduction so that I could share (that) expertise both on the issue of how to use technology in the campaign...and also how we think about technology and governance and the open government work that we are doing now to help shape that agenda."

Noveck speaking with Tim O'Reilly at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

(Credit: O'Reilly Conferences)

Clearly, her efforts were appreciated--and rewarded. And the rest is history.

On December 8, 2009, the Obama administration's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra and chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, held a live Web cast to formally announce out the Open Government directive. Stemming from the president's January 21 executive action, the directive spelled out the administration's philosophy on achieving openness, transparency and collaboration.

It called for, among other things, each federal agency making publicly available, within 45 days, three "high-value" data sets; that within 60 days, the White House will launch an online dashboard intended to hold each agency accountable for the contents of the directive; and that within 120 days, each agency will create its own open government plan geared toward meeting the directive's philosophies.

Examples of projects the administration hopes for that are already in the works are an Army program under which its personnel can use wikis to collaboratively recraft the service's field manuals, and a Federal Aviation Administration program which made flight departure data publicly available, enabling a member of the public to build an iPhone app that lets people see the most accurate departure and arrival information.

Though many people worked on the directive, Kundra and Chopra named, and praised, only one: Noveck. To observers of the administration's open government efforts, this doubtless came as no surprise.

"It's clear that they have very firm intentions and that the administration does have a commitment to making very fundamental changes," said John Wonderlich, the policy director at the watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation. "One of the ways we can see their commitment is that they have brought on someone like Beth to serve as a central point of contact for transparency issues."

Wonderlich also pointed to Noveck's Peer-to-Patent work as proof of her understanding of how to incorporate technology and wide public involvement in at least attempting to make government work better for the people at large.

Out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway
One reason she may be succeeding in government is that she's seen to be bringing new thinking to stodgy Washington.

"The deal is that she's bringing this...out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway," said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who has worked with Noveck since Obama took office on open government issues involving the federal Veterans Administration. "She's one of the hubs of this, people who see how things work in Washington and see how things work in Silicon Valley, and bringing the best of both."

So how does all her work tie together? For Noveck, it begins with the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question of how to apply technological innovations for the greater public good.

"State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion," Noveck said. "And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems....And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer-to-Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit."

On Tuesday morning, the Obama administration formally unveiled its Open Government directive, an effort aimed at weaving the philosophies of openness, transparency and participation into the DNA of the federal government and its agencies.

That directive comes as a direct result of President Barack Obama's first executive action, on January 21, only hours after the hoopla from his inaugural parade and parties had died down, when the new chief executive issued the so-called Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.

Beth Noveck, director of the Obama administration's open-government efforts

(Credit: New York Law School)

That document, which began, "My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government," was a forceful opening move by the new president, and one intended to make good on his campaign call for reform and openness.

For Beth Noveck, Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government and a principal contributor to both the original Open Government memo and Tuesday's formal directive, this is more than just a chance to watch the new administration attempt to reverse decades of ingrained government reticence at letting the public get too close to policy discussions. It is also a chance to take a stab at changing the world.

Noveck, who for years has been a faculty member at New York Law School, had begun volunteering for the Obama campaign in early 2007, offering up her expertise in technology policy and in how to use technology to make policy. And when Obama won the 2008 presidential election, she quickly became the first member of what was known as the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform team, which was focused on thinking about how to actually bring about open government.

She's an accomplished law professor, and someone who gained some notoriety as the organizer of the State of Play conferences, which examined the legal, social, and intellectual issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games. But Noveck may have best secured her place in the Obama campaign and, later, the administration, with her groundbreaking work on the Peer to Patent project. That effort--which began in 2005 and became the subject of Noveck's 2009 book, "Wiki Government"--was aimed at applying the expertise of individual members of the public to the vastly overworked U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Today, Noveck is the director of the administration's open-government efforts, and was the one person that the administration's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra called out by name during their Tuesday event to unveil the directive. Last week, she spoke with CNET about that role, about what her major goals are while in Washington, and about why transparency, collaboration and participation are so important to government working better for the American people.

Q: Describe, in your own words, what Open Government is, and what the administration's goals are for it?
Beth Noveck: Open Government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent--that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory, engaging people in how government makes decisions and policies, earlier in the process, and with the benefit of input from more and more widespread stakeholders, not just people in Washington. And the role of government becomes more collaborative, working together across government institutions, and then across levels of government.

This is something that is pretty much possible today because of the Internet, correct?
Noveck: Absolutely. There have been efforts in every generation to bring about government reform, to create government that works better and more efficiently. But what's really a sea change today is that technology is making available this kind of open collaboration that we've never had before. Now we can get more information up as close to real time as possible and make it available not just on the Internet, but make it available so people can download it, look at that data, mash up that data, and derive greater meaning from it, and hopefully also, hold government more accountable as a result.

What makes you think that the public is ready for this kind of opportunity?
Noveck: Previously, you had only a few ways in which you could engage with government. You could vote in an election. Maybe you could write a comment in response to a rule that a federal agency might put out, like what's the appropriate fuel efficiency for trucks. You could write a letter to your Congressman. Now what we see is the opportunity to do things like get involved in a policy forum, not just by writing a comment that you have to mail to a federal agency in Washington, but by much more easily and quickly responding to a discussion about information technology in health care, and electronic health care records on a Health and Human Services Department blog. You may, for example, have technical skills and take some of the data that's being made available on Data.gov, like the flight record data that the FAA is putting out, and make an iPhone app that allows consumers to track when flights are on time. Which someone did.

The process you're in is not finished yet. What have you achieved so far with the Open Government initiative?
Noveck: We're by no means finished. And what we've been able to achieve is to transition from something that was the work of a handful of White House offices to something that is really the work of every single official across the government. Now, we are moving towards an open-government directive, which will instruct every government agency to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative according to these specific milestones and instructions. And what we're seeing is that across the government, every department and agency has begun already to undertake initiatives to put more data up online, to begin to consult the public in new ways and to get the public engaged in policymaking in new ways, to use new technology to undertake collaboration, and competitions, and initiatives like, for example, Health and Human Services running a competition to design the best public-safety announcement in connection with the H1N1 flu vaccine.

Do you think that this culture shift will become permanent?
Noveck: This is really core to the president's vision of government. This points to the ability to use new technology to hard-wire this kind of reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can't be undone in the next administration, so that we're not simply asking for data transparency now and then we're going to go back eight years from now. Really, the idea is when you're using technology to put information up online, it becomes very hard to take it offline without people noticing it.

Your work was pretty evident in the president's memorandum, correct?
Noveck: We had something called the Technology Innovation Reform Team--which was focused on how do we actually think about bringing innovation into government--as one of the core planning groups that was created during the transition in order to focus on such issues as open government. I was the initial member of that team, and that helped to produce a lot of the early work that we've done, including the creation of the role of a chief technology officer, the creation of a whole set of policies and projects that we've been undertaking over the course of the early stage of the administration. We all worked as a team.

On a personal level, can you talk about what it's been like to work in the White House?
Noveck: This is without a doubt the greatest honor and the greatest challenge of my professional career. Even for someone who likes to be busy and likes to multitask, working in the White House is an unbelievable challenge because of the range of issues that we deal with on a daily basis. It means that I'm working on a Health and Human Services issue at 9 o'clock and at 10 o'clock, talking to the Department of Labor, at 11 o'clock, I'm talking to the Department of Education. The advantage to that kind of breadth is the ability to help foster collaboration and knowledge exchange across department and agencies, so we can say to the Department of Education, this is what Health and Human Services is doing to bring innovation to the way they work. Or, Department of Labor, here's what's going on in some other area of government. So that ability to be at kind of the intersection of information exchange is incredibly valuable.

What is the status today of Peer to Patent?
Noveck: The Peer to Patent team did its own assessment after a two-year pilot, and now the Patent Office is studying it. The chair of the steering committee for Peer to Patent, is now the new undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and the director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, so he is very much a friend of the concept of citizen engagement and participation in Patent Office practice, and so now the office just has to assess for itself how they are going to institutionalize the concept of citizen engagement and participation in the work that they do.

Stepping back to earlier in your career, can you talk about the connective tissue between your work with the State of Play conferences and what you're doing now?
Noveck: Over the last decade, we've seen the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question is how do we take the latest technological innovations and apply them to the betterment and strengthening of our democracy? State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion. And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: Create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems and to do so in peaceful ways and ways informed by the best quality information. And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer to Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit.

SAN FRANCISCO--It will likely come as no surprise to anyone familiar with virtual worlds and online games that they can be hacked. But what might come as a shock is the sheer breadth of types of exploits that are possible.

That was the broad message of a Thursday panel called, appropriately, "Exploiting Online Games" at the RSA 2009 security conference here.

Moderated by Gary McGraw, CTO of software security consulting firm Cigital and an author of several books, the panel took the audience on a deep dive into the diverse ways that hackers and others have figured out to either skim real money or to gain game play advantages not available to normal players.

McGraw opened the panel with a brief explanation of the fact that there are real, functioning economies in virtual worlds and online games, and that players cash in their virtual goods for real money, to the tune of more than $1 billion a year. This, of course, is old news to those in game playing circles, but for many of the security experts in the room, it may well have been eye-opening.

And, McGraw said, it's the very fact that real money is at stake that often gets otherwise uninterested game players to pay attention to the security risks they face every day.

"There's a whole bunch of normals (those not steeped in knowledge about computers) using games, and they don't care about security," McGraw said. "But they like their stuff, (and) when their stuff gets taken, that really hurts the hell out of them. That's a way to start a conversation about computer security with normals, because almost everybody knows somebody who plays online games."

The first panelist to present was Greg Hoglund, the founder of Rootkit.com and the CEO of the consulting firm, HBGary. He explained that online games are regularly under attack by two discrete types of cheats: exploits--actual bugs in games that clever hackers have figured out how to mine in various ways, and bots, which are essentially automated macros that can be used to perform mundane tasks again and again and again, and very profitably.

The bugs, Hoglund said, often exist "at the borders of systems," and are used for things such as duplicating gold, or leveraging poor synchronization between back-end databases to extract money out of a game economy or even to gain teleportation powers that otherwise don't exist.

Hoglund also recalled a security expert who figured out a hack that allowed him not only to filch Second Life users' virtual currency--which is directly convertible to US dollars--but also to get ahold of users' credit card information and then use it to buy more of the currency to trade in. That exploit, Hoglund explained, was done only to prove that it could be done, but it underlined some of the significant risks facing players of online games and virtual worlds with functioning economies, as well as the publishers of those titles.

He also talked about bots, and explained that they, too, are often employed to gain an advantage most players don't have. They are almost universally prohibited, but Hoglund said creating them and using them is remarkably easy for those who know what they're doing. And he talked about one he had written to use in World of Warcraft that allowed his character to stay safe from attack from the rear, while also luring in loot-bearing enemies to kill. Once killed, the enemies would be regenerated by the bot, allowing Hoglund's character to kill them and pick off all their loot over and over again, a process that netted him significant profit, he hinted.

Similarly, he explained that games like World of Warcraft have vulnerabilities that allow savvy hackers to tap into the games' code, allowing for all kinds of new abilities, like being able to perform 15 charms at once, not available to the public at large.

Hoglund said companies like WoW publisher Blizzard are always actively trying to stop players from employing bots and ban those they catch, but added that for those who know what they're doing, detection is not something to worry about. And that, of course, is one of the explanations behind the so-called gold "farmers," often teams working in third-world countries whose job it is to run multiple accounts simultaneously, usually employing bots to perform gold-earning tasks and essentially just making sure that their in-game characters don't get "lodged in a tree."

Courts weigh in
Next up was Sean Kane, a partner with the New York law firm of Drakeford & Kane, and a leading voice on issues surrounding the law and virtual worlds.

Kane talked about two specific cases, one that is several years old and one that is much more recent.

The older case, Bragg v. Linden Research, focused on whether Linden, the publisher of the virtual world Second Life, was right to shut down the account of a user who had discovered an exploit allowing him to buy virtual land at below-market prices. Mark Bragg, the plaintiff, demanded $8,000 in restitution and eventually won a settlement from Linden in which his account was reinstated. But that only happened, Kane pointed out, after a federal judge ruled that the arbitration clause in the Second Life terms of service was onerous and one-sided.

At the time, the entire virtual world community had been watching the case closely, as many thought it would be the case that for the first time established the real-world value of virtual goods (and despite the fact that Bragg, himself a lawyer, had filed his suit in state court with a hand-written form), However, the settlement, not long after the federal judge's ruling, side-stepped that outcome.

But what many found interesting at the time was that Bragg had argued his hack was fair game, since all he did was exploit a feature hidden in the Second Life code. In effect, Bragg argued, code is law, and anything that players can do with the tools at their disposal is legitimate. Linden obviously disagreed, but ended up settling anyway.

Kane also focused on another case, MDY Industries v. Blizzard, in which MDY had created a bot, called Glider, that allowed players to level-up their characters without even having to be playing.

Blizzard sued for copyright infringement, arguing that bots like Glider were prohibited under its end-user license agreement (EULA) and that only that license actually allowed players to run WoW. In essence, the argument said that by running WoW under circumstances that violated the EULA, Glider was supporting copyright infringement.

Ultimately, though many argued that Blizzard's argument was beyond specious, the courts ruled in favor of the publisher, awarding it $6 million. But, not surprisingly, the outcome is on appeal.

Hacking Disney
Aaron Portnoy, a researcher with Tippingpoint security research, took the microphone next and talked briefly about his experiences hacking the Python code of the Disney online game, Pirates of the Caribbean. He explained that because Python is a dynamic language, he and a colleague had needed just a couple of days to reverse-engineer all of the game's code, and were able to use their exploit to get their in-game characters to do things that were otherwise impossible.

During a panel on exploiting online games, Tippingpoint's Aaron Portnoy talked about how he and a colleague discovered that Disney's online game Pirates of the Caribbean was written in Python, a language that allowed them to reverse-engineer the game's code in just two days. The result was that Portnoy's character was able to fly high in the sky, whereas everyone else in the game was limited to jumps of just four feet high.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

For example, Portnoy said, he was able to easily get his character to jump high in the air, while the standard maximum jump was just about four feet. Or, to jump out of a pirate ship, walk on water at a speed faster than sailing ships in the game could travel, and attack at will.

"Everybody could see my guy jumping over buildings for miles," Portnoy said.

And, given how easy he and his colleague found it to reverse-engineer the code, Portnoy said, "It's almost like (Disney) didn't even consider security."

Gaming the games
Last up was Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins. He talked, also relatively briefly, about how easy it is for some cheaters to exploit the game of online poker.

Essentially, Rubin argued, a hack called a Sybil attack--which employs fake people participating in games--makes it possible for online poker players to gain a big advantage over their opponents. That works, he said, by making it possible for a single player to control multiple hands in a game, allowing that person to see more cards than they would otherwise, and get a better handle on the odds of their own hand.

For example, he said, in a game of Texas Hold'em, a player employing a Sybil attack on an online poker game could control multiple hands and see things like whether the fives or eights they need to complete a full house and beat an opposing player's flush had already been played.

Rubin's point, then, was that game operators need to work harder at identity management, in order to keep players from employing such exploits. He didn't, however, offer any solutions as to how to do that.

All told, the panelists made it clear that just about any kind of online game or virtual world--especially those where money is on the line--is subject to some kind of hack or exploit, and that for those with the skills to launch such attacks, the barriers stopping them are easily surmountable.

The lesson, then, is that publishers of such games need to think harder about how to manage their players' actions and expectations. Otherwise, players may find themselves in games that are so compromised that the economies collapse and the fun disappears.

With Metaplace, almost anyone can build their own custom virtual world. Its tools make it simple to script any object with various actions. And every object and world in Metaplace has its own URL.

(Credit: Metaplace)

Why play someone else's virtual world when you can build your own?

That's the major premise behind Metaplace, a new browser-based virtual-world platform from, among others, former Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer Raph Koster.

Built to run inside the browser on any Internet-connected machine, Metaplace employs a simple, 2D, Flash-based graphics system that fronts for a fairly sophisticated set of content creation tools and what may one day be a complex open-ended economy built around user-created content.

In fact, because of the 2D and Flash nature of Metaplace, it's easy to miss that the platform offers users some of the easiest virtual-world building tools that have ever been made available. And while Metaplace has been in closed beta since October, it is expected to emerge into a public and open beta period sometime later this year. See below for an invite to the closed beta.

The company, which was formerly known as Areae, raised a $6.7 million funding round last October, led by Charles River Ventures. In total, it has raised $9.4 million.

Rising to the top
Metaplace has a little something for everyone. For the casual users, it has any number of user-created worlds to play, and there's a basic central Metaplace world that is an easy gathering place. Each can be rated, and the highest-rated rise to the top, allowing users to skip messing around with the system's chaff and instead concentrate on the wheat. But for those who are interested in creating their own virtual world, Metaplace offers a cornucopia of tools and choices that make it quick and easy to get a brand new world up and running.

Of course, as with any user-generated content system, the good creations are far outweighed by the bad. As Koster himself put it, "There are more than 25,000 Metaplace worlds, most of them are empty and most of them are crap."

But if it sounds like Koster is bashing his own system, he's not. Rather, he's touting how easy it is for anyone to start a virtual world that itself can be accessed by anyone on the Internet in mere seconds. Indeed, it's not an exaggeration to say that just about anyone could have a rudimentary Metaplace world up and running in less than five minutes.

'Battle' is a 2D, real-time, combat-oriented, multi-player, Flash game that will be the showpiece for a series of innovations for Multiverse Network, among which will be to give people the ability to interact between 2D and 3D versions of the same game.

(Credit: Multiverse Network)

Developers of 3D virtual worlds and multiplayer games may soon have access to tools that would allow them to build connected, promotional 2D, Flash versions of the same games.

These new tools are at the heart of Battle, a simple Flash game being released Thursday by the Multiverse Network, a virtual worlds middleware company.

A simple Flash game that runs on Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Kongregate, Battle is really the showpiece behind new Multiverse technology that could, for the first time, make it possible for developers using its platform to build full-scale downloadable, virtual worlds or online games to create scaled-down, 2D, browser-based versions of the same titles and let players compete between them.

At the same time, Battle is also an example of what Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges said was one of the first-ever multiplayer, real-time, action- or combat-based Flash games. To date, nearly all Flash multiplayer games have been turn-based, meaning only one person plays at a time, or have very basic game mechanics.

And while, as a platform company, Multiverse isn't in business to create games itself, Bridges said Battle shows that a wide selection of games that previously had to be played using a downloadable client could now be played in the browser.

"Now, you can have proven genres of video games, really popular games, like shooters, real-time strategy, sports and things that exist on consoles or specially installed games," Bridges said, and "those types of games can live in your Web browser without a download."

The immediate appeal to game developers of this innovation is being able to use the Multiverse tools to bring a wide variety of existing types of games to Flash, games that in the past required downloadable clients. And that could mean opening up such titles to far larger audiences, since many people don't want to have to install special software in order to play casual games.

As a tools company, Multiverse is not in the business of building games. But Bridges said the point of its building Battle itself was both to show off the latest set of features the platform offers, and to go through the process of using its own tools, so those inside the company know what its clients' experiences are like.

Multiverse offers its development platform free of charge to anyone who wants it, and hopes to make money by levying a commission on any game made with its tools that charges a fee to play. To date, there are no publicly-launched games built with the Mutiverse tools, though Bridges said several are in beta and are close to being launched.

To some observers, the best thing about the technology underpinning Battle is the marketing opportunities game like it can offer larger, more complete 3D, downloadable multiplayer games and virtual worlds.

"The real benefit of this is that nobody's ever created one tool that lets you have two views," both 2D, in Flash, and 3D, into the same game, said David Fox, vice president of technology at casual games developer, iWin. "This lets (game designers) have a free trial version on the Web and a download for the 3D experience without having to create everything again."

Fox did add that he was "dubious" that Multiverse could deliver on that promise but, not knowing very much about the initiative, said, "the proof is in the pudding."

But Bridges indicated that proof is just around the corner.

"We've got a very small handful of our existing developers taking their (in-development) 3D worlds," Bridges said, "and these developers are making a window into those worlds that can be done in Flash, and that's a pretty interesting new way of thinking about a virtual world experience."

Indeed, he added that he sees the 2D to 3D cross-over element of the tools being a good way to get players hooked on a game concept before convincing them to upgrade to a full 3D version. Yet, they would be able to play against people running the full 3D game in order to get a sense of what the entire experience might be like.

"This demonstrates that Flash is well on its way to becoming the default real-time interaction platform for the Web," said Raph Koster, founder of Areae, which is making Metaplace, a platform that lets anyone design their own Flash-based virtual world, "and it enables more kinds of games than people generally think possible."

As of today, Metaplace is in closed beta, but hopes to be opening up to the general public before too long.

Koster said that it's clear that Multiverse is making important strides in developing new kinds of real-time, multiplayer Flash games, but said that others, including Metaplace itself, have created games enabling such types of play.

Still, Bridges said he differentiated Multiverse's tools by their ability to create real combat action in a game like Battle.

Peter Haik, a co-founder of the virtual worlds development company, Metaversatility, which is using Multiverse's tools in some of its projects, agreed with Bridges' assessment of the Flash games market.

Haik said there are other multi-player Flash games, but they tend to be casual titles aimed at kids.

Multiverse's tools, he suggested, are geared mainly toward producing full-scale virtual worlds or massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), and therefore have much more scope for being used to create crossover between rich 3D games and 2D Flash versions.

"The true innovation" of the Multiverse tools, Haik said, "is that it's sort of an agnostic client, where if someone is in the Flash application, and someone else is in the 3D client, they can interact, and it doesn't matter what the other one is running."

And he said, Multiverse brings serious server technology to the table that runs separate from the various social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, and that is what enables the rich crossover experience.

One other important element of the toolset Multiverse provides, Bridges said, is a rendering engine that allows developers to generate Flash assets using the items from their 3D virtual worlds.

"It's really cool," said Bridges. "We have a Web-based automated system where a development team just uses a Web page, uploads a 3D model, and back comes the generated Flash files. It's a really quick way to convert a 3D game into a Flash game and make it look really, really good."

LAS VEGAS--MindArk, the developer of the science fiction-based virtual world, Entropia Universe, has announced that it is spinning off the functional game side of its business into a separate company.

Known as First Planet Company, the new entity will be a stand-alone company that will run the actual virtual world, which it is calling Planet Calypso. MindArk will continue to operate the platform side of its business, focusing on tools that it can make available to partners looking for a custom virtual world.

In recent months, MindArk has put a lot of its energy in developing relationships with outside entities that want to build their own planets in Entropia Universe. To date, it has signed up five partners.

But as part of the spin-off arrangement, announced here at CES, First Planet Company will be treated as one of those partners.

Among others that have set up shop in the virtual world are a Chinese company that is investigating using the virtual world for cultural purposes and a firm that is looking at using Entropia Universe as a virtual theme park. And still another is looking at giving the game's players immersive environments based on hit Hollywood films.

A scene from 'Lively,' the virtual world Google launched in July and which it said Wednesday it is closing at the end of the year.

(Credit: Google)

Once thought to be its answer to virtual worlds like Second Life, Google's Lively launched this summer to much fanfare.

Lively was Web-based and allowed anyone to set up virtual spaces, such as rooms, that could be embedded onto blogs or Facebook pages.

But the project never picked up much steam.

Now, Google has decided to shut the project down.

"Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year," Google said on its official blog Wednesday evening. "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

The post said that those who were working on the Lively team would be reassigned to other areas within Google, suggesting that the move does not mean layoffs.

Google also said that because the project is being shut completely down, it is encouraging "all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms."

Disclaimer: My wife works at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

Focus group testers play Gaia Online's forthcoming casual MMO, 'zOMG,' at the company's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. The new game, which is scheduled to go into public beta in a couple of months, is an adjunct to Gaia's existing casual virtual world, which has more than 7 million users.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN JOSE, Calif.--How do you fine tune a game that has been long in the making and is just a couple of months from going public?

That was the central question behind a focus group I sat in on Tuesday, as the developers behind the wildly popular casual virtual world Gaia Online invited seven devoted players to put zOMG, their new massively multiplayer online game, through its paces.

During the session, which lasted about two hours, the seven players--five women and two men ranging in age from 19 to 25--were asked to pound away at zOMG in a bid to help the designers see just what was working at this point in the development process, what wasn't and to discover whether the players would recommend the game to friends.

Already, the Web-based Gaia Online has more than 7 million unique monthly users, and an auction system with more than 100,000 transactions per day. Gaia is mainly a social environment without a deep goal-oriented gaming element, but now, with the planned launch of zOMG, the company is adding an MMO that will be a separate, but adjunct, gaming environment that will essentially have direct paths into the company's larger virtual world and which will be peppered with references to the original environment.

The Tuesday focus group wasn't the first Gaia has held at its offices, and it won't be the last. But it was the first time the company had allowed a reporter in the room to witness the proceedings, a risky move if the testers said they didn't like the game.

In the end, I'd say that the testers I watched were generally pleased with the game. They liked its mechanics and the way it tied into the larger Gaia Online world, but they did have some sobering comments for the producers about why they would recommend it to their friends.

But more on that later.

Gaia Online co-founder Derek Liu looks on as the focus group testers play the new MMO.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The session was hosted by Kate Pietrelli, an account manager at TriplePoint, Gaia's outside PR agency, and was attended by several members of the game's development team, as well as Gaia Online co-founder Derek Liu. Throughout the two hours, she directed the players through the game and peppered them with questions about what they were experiencing.

She began the session by asking the testers how they felt about using the trackpads on the PC laptops they'd been given, rather than mice.

One tester, 25-year-old Crysta Coburn, said she was happy with the trackpad, and that she tended to be using it when moving around from place to place in the game, but reverted to using keyboard commands when fighting.

But four other testers said they wanted mice for a better experience, and the producers handed them over a minute later.

At one point, the players were all in what is known in the game as the "Village Green," and Pietrelli asked them how difficult it was, particularly when they were engaging with "the gnome," an enemy non-player character.

"When you get out of the sewers, it's kind of challenging," said 21-year-old Alex Lapin.

"How do you deal with that," Pietrelli asked.

"Run," Lapin joked.

"You hope that there's nice people around" to help out, added Sara Newman, a 24-year-old tester.

Pietrelli wanted to know how the social elements of the game were working, so she asked how many of the testers had joined groups, rather than playing solo.

Most of them said they had.

"As soon as I signed in," said Coburn, "I was like, 'Who wants to join a group?'"

A scene from 'zOMG,' the new casual MMO from Gaia Online. This is the null chamber, the place where players go if they die in the game.

(Credit: Gaia Online)

A 19-year-old tester who called herself Malo added that one of the benefits of being in a group is that players can see the attributes of everyone else they team up with, which is helpful for collectively combining skills and talent.

Malo also said that she liked that it was easy to see a symbol that identified which player had initiated a group.

And Desire Lyon, a 24-year-old tester, said that she felt that being part of a group was beneficial when the game gets complicated because "you kind of need someone around to help."

One of the main tools in zOMG is a series of rings, each of which bestows on its wearer different skills and powers.

Pietrelli asked the testers if they found that the game made it easy to switch rings when they were in the "Null Chamber," the place they go after they die in combat.

Lapin responded that, "Maybe (the producers) should make it so you can't switch rings for a minute after you die."

But others didn't like that idea.

"I don't know about that," Coburn said, only half-joking. "You need to pipe down a little bit over there."

As with any MMO, an important part of zOMG is the accumulation of treasure, or "loot," and Pietrelli asked the players what they felt about the system for accruing loot.

Coburn said, "Honestly, I'm paying absolutely no attention to loot...I can't figure out what it does."

The so-called village green, in 'zOMG,' the new casual MMO from Gaia Online.

(Credit: Gaia Online)

That seemed like a useful bit of feedback to senior producer Dave Georgeson, as he responded, "Well, that's a good note right there."

A few minutes later, the testers were asked what level their rings were at, and most answered that they were still just at the first level.

Coburn, however, had a different take.

"Whenever I have a choice of rings, I'm like, 'Where's the selfish bitch option?'"

And Lyon added, "I like the 'Improbability' ring, but only because I like the name."

She was referring to the obvious allusion to the Improbability Drive from Douglas Adams' series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

To which Georgeson added, "You can tell by the descriptions (of the rings) that we like the books, too."

Then, Pietrelli asked the testers about their thoughts on the balance between areas of combat and other areas.

"I think it's really well done, actually," said 19-year-old Sierra Payne.

"The mobs aren't so bad if you have people with you, for sure," said tester Stephen Welch, also 19.

Georgeson started to explain that the mechanics of the game were such that players were rewarded with more loot by working in groups than they would be by working alone, and asked if that meant that the testers would be more motivated to join groups.

Around the room, the testers echoed out, "Oh, yearh."

And Lapin joked, "Join my krew or I'll break your arm."

Face-to-face encounters
A little later, the discussion turned to the balance between using the in-game communications system and talking face-to-face. Lyon said that she thought talking face-to-face was less likely.

"We're all in the same room, within three feet of each other," Lyon said. But "it's easier to talk on the Internet than face-to-face."

To which Lapin added that he'd like the game to feature hotkeys that would produce battle cries and taunts such as, "Fear my leet skills."

Soon, the discussion between the Gaia team and the testers got very interesting.

Pietrelli asked the testers whether they would recommend zOMG to friends who don't already play Gaia Online, and if so, why.

"Probably (I would)," said Coburn, to "the ones who play (World of Warcraft) but can't afford (that game's $15 a month fee)...It's free. That's the only sell (of zOMG)."

"Wow," said Pietrelli, clearly taken aback.

Lapin seemed to try to change the subject slightly by adding, "I'd probably get some of my friends from Magic: The Gathering and say, 'Instead of kicking your butt there, you can help me out here.'"

Later, I asked Pietrelli about Coburn's comment.

"I think she probably didn't explain herself very well," Petrielli said, "and I moved on from that quickly (because it's a large group). I can follow up with her later."

But before letting the testers leave, she did return to the subject with the group still in the room to ask Coburn to elaborate on her comments.

"I think that's the biggest selling point, that it's free," Coburn confirmed, adding when I asked her to say more that zOMG would be competing with many other casual MMOs, and that its game play alone wasn't setting it apart as much as the fact that there was no charge to play.

She tried to soften her comment, but only slightly.

"It looks nicer, too," she said, "and the game play's better. And it's free."

While the testers broke for a quick pizza lunch, I pulled Petrielli aside and asked her about the value to Gaia of this session.

She explained that it was just one of several such focus groups the company had held with players, and wouldn't be the last. But she said that every bit of feedback the development team could get from players, especially as the game is just a couple of months from being opened for its public beta, is worthwhile.

"I think it's very helpful," she said, "especially for the development team, because they've been so heads down...So getting feedback from uses is a priority for Gaia in the development of the game."

As the testers returned from their pizza break, Pietrelli put a few more questions to them.

And before she finished, she asked if there was anything else the players wanted to say to the development team.

"We love you," said Welch. "Now work faster."

And with that they all dove back into zOMG, and didn't look like they had any plans to depart, despite the end of the two hours allotted for the focus group session.

"It's gong to be difficult to get them to leave," Petrielli told me. "They won't stop playing."

Places, a new initiative from the Multiverse Network, will offer users the ability to connect through Manhattan's Times Square. Earlier this year, the company first demonstrated the Times Square environment, at the time to showcase its graphics capabilities and to explain how many users it could fit on a single server.

(Credit: Multiverse Network)

The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.

Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.

The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.

The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse virtual world software--will be able to enter the Times Square environment and connect and socialize with friends, play games, view interactive entertainment, and meet and greet in personal, private destinations.

This is notable for two reasons, and seems to be a culmination of much of what Multiverse has been working on the last couple of years.

On the one hand, until now, Multiverse has fashioned itself strictly as a platform provider, offering others the ability to build virtual worlds using its software. On the other, Multiverse last year unveiled a prototype of the Times Square environment as a showcase for its ability to host large numbers of people on a single server.

But from the beginning, Multiverse offered the promise of tying users of all the virtual worlds built on top of its platform together. It was never entirely clear how that would work, and to date, there had been no publicly available, completed worlds made using the software.

Now, however, it is clear Multiverse is using the Places model to showcase its technology and demonstrate that its platform is capable of supporting a 3D social virtual world, somewhat along the lines of Second Life.

Disclosure: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

Another interesting piece of Places is that it is, as Multiverse puts it, "an open-source virtual world." This means, the company said, that developers can "access, modify, and add to its user interface, avatar behaviors, menu system, art assets, avatars and--most importantly--its game play or structured interaction capabilities."

This would seem to indicate that Multiverse will be allowing users to make wholesale changes to the Places virtual world along the lines of the kinds of modifications and content creation that is possible in Second Life.

What's not clear is the scope that developers will have with these tools and whether they will be able to make adult content.

This is interesting because one way that Multiverse has tried to position itself to corporate clients wanting to build a virtual world on its platform is that those clients wouldn't have to worry about their own users encountering objectionable content.

In a separate announcement also made Wednesday, Multiverse said that Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron--a member of the company's board of directors--plans to use the platform to build a virtual world based on his film, Titanic.

Called Places in Time: Titanic, it will be structured as an educational environment in which users can explore much about the voyage and fate of the doomed ship.

The Titanic virtual world will be a "destination" for users of Places and is clearly meant to demonstrate how third-party developers can expand upon the platform.