I surmise that the other folks on the MMOs Past Present and Future panel who disbelieved that media companies are coming into virtual worlds in a big way also probably discount the toy companies. Well, as QBlog points out, they shouldn’t.

This is neat: this site promotes indie developers by giving away a downloadable game each day; the game is only available for one day, and before and after, you have to buy it. Link: Game Giveaway of the Day.

Richard Bartle reports that

Today’s issue of The Times [London] contains an 8-page pull-out about World of Warcraft, plus a cover disc giving a free account capped at level 20.

The Times! Such august territory was once reserved for the likes of department store catalogs and flyers for electronics sales!

The Wall Street Journal has a good article entitled QQ: China’s New Coin of the Realm?

I have been tracking the QQ currency for a few years now — but I don’t think too many here in the West have paid much attention. So go read!

This was “one of the other YouTube for games” sites. Unlike Kongregate, pjio is for arbitrary executables, not Flash games. So the indie game developer community that develops in well, whatever, can upload stuff there. The downside is there’s a plugin required to play stuff. That said, you gotta check out the insane Bullet Candy if you like shooters.

pjio™ – Free video games – upload, tag, share and play games.

Click here.

I have only read two of the five novel nominees, guess I have some catching up to do! Glasshouse is sitting on my shelf waiting though.

Blindsight, Peter Watts (Tor)

Eifelheim, Michael Flynn (Tor)

Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace)

His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik (Ballantine Del Rey; Voyager as Temeraire)

Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (Tor)

BTW, congrats especially to Naomi Novik — game developers know her as one of our own, formerly of Bioware.

I have uploaded the slides for my keynote at Etech 2007. You can get them in two ways:

• Read it as a webpage, with lots of images to load.
• Download the PDF (1.9MB)

While I was at it, I put up links to “Influences” and “Where Game Meets the Web” on the Presentations page. Any others I have missed?

I’ll try to post the slides tomorrow, but in the meantime, here’s the write-ups. You should be able to get a pretty good sense of what I said in aggregate

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/28/raph_koster_describe.html

http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/etech_07_raph_k.html

http://graemethickins.typepad.com/graeme_blogs_here/2007/03/etech_day_2_the_1.html

http://celso.arrifana.org/2007/03/28/etech-2007-session-the-core-of-fun/

http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/03/the_core_of_fun_ralph_koster.shtml

http://www.downtheavenue.com/2007/03/fun_is_a_chemic.html

http://depts.washington.edu/etech/?p=31

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4752

http://artific.com/202/2007/03/etech_2007_day_2_am_sessions/

Seth Raphael – MIT

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke.

What does it mean? We have a very very tiny idea of what technology is here. Using your hands is a kind of technology.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

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Here’s some links:

• The Viacom keynote, introducing the new buzzword “4DTV,” and giving a ton of stats on the new Nicktropolis world, which appears to be really booming fast.
• “Platforms andTechnologies”, wherein SL talks about opening the server.