Apparently, Candyland, Battleship, and Asteroids were optioned for movies. To my surprise, everyone focuses on Asteroids. “How can they make a movie of that??” People keep saying this but they’re wrong!

A motley crowd of ethnically diverse people thrown together by circumstance are traveling in a hermetically sealed spaceship with an incredibly valuable cargo. Inside it is dark, and sweaty, and clangy. The cargo must reach Earth before everyone there dies of the mysterious alien plague. The clock is ticking. Then — SABOTAGE! The ship falls out of hyperspace in the midst of a huge asteroid field, full of giant tumbling mountains, with deep dark crevices and deadly pockets of methane gas that spout forth in majestic geysers. They must jet and shoot to stay alive, and find fuel to get them back out. The ominous alien ships are circling, just waiting for them to make a mistake, and unbeknowst to them, one of the crew on board is a traitor to the human race…

Battleship, now, that movie will suck.

Dara Roesner’s Wordpress plugin for embedding Metaplace worlds is now up on Wordpress.org. So you can grab it there, or you can go to your Dashboard, click Plugins, click Add New, and search for “metaplace.” There will be two results, actually, because SignpostMarv’s MetaverseID plugin also supports Metaplace.

In any case, from there you can install the plugin automatically! It supports both a sidebar widget and a tag for putting worlds within page or post content.

A few other embedding options have popped up already, by the way. There’s a phpBB setup walkthrough here as well, which will add [metaplace][/metaplace] bbCode to your forums. A few folks have also put it in an iGoogle gadget.

Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs on Gamasutra is an excellent and in-depth look at RPGs.

I do miss at least some mention of MUD or DikuMUD, rather than jumping direct to World of Warcraft as the sole exemplar there; almost all MMORPGs today draw from those roots. And there’s also a curious lack of mention of the influence of free-form stuff or more storytelling-based RPGs, even in pen & paper.

Still, an excellent article.

The whimper at the end of an era.

CompuServe, the corporate entity, dates to 1969 but the CompuServe Classic online service for consumers debuted in 1979. In 1987 it was the flagship of online services with 380,000 users. A 1991 TV commercial trumpets CompuServe as the only online service with more than a half-million members.

Unfortunately time, and its acquisition by AOL, has not been kind to CompuServe. In recent years it has barely been marketed. Its Web site looks like a throwback to the (gasp!) 20th century. The “build” date on version 4.0.2 of CompuServe for Windows NT, the latest version of the access software for CompuServe Classic, is January 11, 1999.

– The Paper PC: CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend.

I was never one of the hordes of truly hardcore gamers who hovered around the CompuServe and GEnie games — no money, you see. I was in high school at the time. Every once in a while I could sneak on for ten minute snatches — my dad was always horrified at the bill. He used TheSource too, because it was “more useful and had less games and distractions” I seem to recall.

CompuServe 2000 will still be around, but I am not sure anyone cares.

The PlaynoEvil blog has the best summary i have seen of the key issues — and they still have wideranging implications!

- If the service is shut off, customers are entitled to a refund of unused currency.

- “virtual currency should be exchanged only for virtual goods and services provided by the issuer of the currency” (this would cause problems for a lot of the third party currency folks here in the US and elsewhere)

- Companies already involved in virtual currency trading are required to register with the local cultural affairs bureau within three months.

- Minors may not buy virtual money. THIS IS POTENTIALLY HUGE. If enforced, this would essentially shut down most MMOs that use the Free-to-Play business model.

– via Chinese Government DOES NOT ban Gold Farming – Puts Free-to-Play in Jeopardy Instead – PlayNoEvil Game Security News & Analysis.

What it has banned is spending virtual currency for real world items. In other words, it is more about defending the real world currency than anything else. I have mentioned in the past that many people in China regard the QQ coin (Tencent’s virtual currency) as solid enough to put savings in. Sounds like maybe the government thinks that is a bad idea.

This is a government restriction on the use of the quasi-Paypal-like currencies (mainly QQ coins) that are used extensively in China to pay for virtual game stuff. As announced they can now only be used to pay for virtual stuff, and you can’t buy real things with them as game companies were allowing to happen, nor can you gamble. This therefore is not about what gold farming clients do: use real money to buy these virtual currencies; it’s the mirror image. And it’s not about the major trade in gold farming such as World of Warcraft, which relates to other types of virtual currency. And it’s not about buying/selling in-game items. And it’s not about the power-levelling of avatars. Bottom line: it’s not about gold farming.

–ICTs for Development

[via a commenter, via Blue's News]

Dave Perry has a pretty compelling video demo of Gaikai, his new venture, on his blog. Like OnLive, this is also a “play a game remotely, stream a video and send controller data back over the wire” system, apparently just using Flash as the delivery mechanism.

(1) No installing anything. (I’m running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)

(2) This is a low-spec server, it’s a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.

(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that’s where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it’s not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don’t notice it anyway.)

(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I’m not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.

(5) We don’t claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn’t take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don’t need them, and so our costs will be much less.

(6) We designed this for the real internet. The codecs change based on the need of the application, and based on the hardware you have. (Like Photoshop must be pixel perfect.)

(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)

– DPerry.com: Gaikai – Video Demo.

Vid after the break:
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I’m doing a fireside chat sort of thing with Cory Ondrejka as part of the Metaplace Creative Series. You can log in to TheStage above at 2pm Pacific to participate — we’ll be taking audience questions too. We’ll be having a nice conversation about the future of virtual worlds. Cory, of course, was a prime mover at Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, and today is at EMI (yes, the record company!). The chat will be embedded on his blog as well.

Today is a big day. We’ve released a feature that I personally think is highly significant for both Metaplace and for virtual worlds in general. As of now, you can embed a virtual world on pretty much any webpage, just like any other widget. It’s a small embed code, much like a YouTube video — and in fact, it’s smaller than a YouTube video in terms of download size. And because of the capabilities Metaplace offers, you can do some very interesting things with it:

• You can use it as a gathering space for your community — on forums, for example, or as this user has done, as a way to foster community for her comics shop.
• You can make it the central gathering spot for a Ning community, as 3DSquared has done for the Digital Workforce Intensives in Louisiana.
• If you’re a musician, you can hold your live shows right there on your site, complete with streaming audio and an audience, as Grace McDunnough plans to do.
• Over time, crazier uses will come about, such as this experiment in using virtual worlds to annotate the real world by embedding a Metaplace world on a geolocation in Google Maps.

Check out the CNet Webware write-up of the feature here! Or you can head to the Metaplace Wiki to learn more about it.

There are some limitations yet, of course; you can do communication between the world and the web, but it’s still a bit hard. There’s no SNS apps just yet. And yes, you do need a Metaplace account at the moment. But as more usecases emerge and we get more virtual worlds splattered all over the Net, I expect we’ll see these limitations fall away as we keep marching towards making virtual worlds a first-class citizen of the web.

I’ll be talking about this and other virtual world issues live with Cory Ondrejka (EMI, formerly Linden Lab) at 2pm Pacific on TheStage — and I will have it embedded right here! In the meantime, stop by my place in Metaplace, embedded here using the freshly released Wordpress plugin by Dara Roesner (Miki in Metaplace), which makes it incredibly easy to drop a world onto a Wordpress post or page:

Press release after the jump:

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Wow.

In addition to its ongoing crackdown on Internet porn, the Chinese government has declared that virtual currency cannot be traded for real goods or services.

Virtual currency, as defined by Chinese authorities, includes “prepaid cards of cyber-games,” according to a joint release issued by China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce on Friday.

– China Bans Gold Farming — InformationWeek.

This is going to have huge ripple effects.