Lila Dreams: a very cool concept

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May 302008
 

Lila Dreams – Home

What the heck is Lila Dreams? It’s a massively multiplayer online game where you become a mental entity (called a “memekin”) and live out an adventurous life inside an 11 year-old girl’s psyche.

They also have a blog with interviews and the like; looks like it’s in Flash and will be on Kongregate. Based on the concept art, I’m betting it is a side view game…

May 292008
 

It’s Phil Harrison’s turn to get beat up, and PCWorld begins the process.

Of course, in the process, they beat up on me a little bit too, saying that I only advocate multiplayer for the money in it, or something. 😉

For those just joining this particular multiplayer game, you may want to read these older posts of mine:


May 292008
 

Greg Costikyan over at Play This Thing! has a list of “eminent game designers” that refreshingly crosses over into boardgames, ARGs, and other areas of the field. No bios or justification given — not even some short credits, alas — so looking up the folks you don’t know may prove a tad challenging. The comment thread is gathering more names and suggestions — go participate!

 Comments Off on Another list: eminent game designers

I’m #9

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May 282008
 

Massive Online Gamer coverBeckett Massive Online Gamer has selected a list of the “Top 20 Most Influential People in the MMO Industry.” I came in at #9.

  1. Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment
  2. Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer, Turbine
  3. John Smedley, CEO, Sony Online Entertainment
  4. Hilmar Pétursson, CEO, CCP
  5. Jack Emmert, CCO, Cryptic Studios
  6. Rob Seaver, CEO, Vivox
  7. Min Kim, Director of Game Operations, Nexon America
  8. Scott Hartsman, Formerly Senior Producer, SOE
  9. Raph Koster, President, Areae
  10. James Phinney, Lead Designer, ArenaNet
  11. Richard Garriott, Creative Director, NCSoft
  12. Starr Long, Producer, NCSoft
  13. Cory Ondrejka, Formerly CTO, Linden Labs
  14. Mark Jacobs, GM and VP, EA Mythic
  15. Sulka Haro, Lead Concept Designer, Sulake
  16. Sage Sundi, Global Online Producer, Square-Enix
  17. Jess Lebow, Lead Quest Designer, Carbine Studios
  18. David Perry, CCO, Acclaim
  19. Sanya Weathers, Director of Community, Guildcafe.com
  20. Daniel James, CEO, Three Rings Design

Quite flattering, and it’s really great company to be in.

ExitReality: another VRML world

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May 282008
 

ExitReality Launches With Carl’s Jr Deal, and it looks like another attempt to commercialize VRML, much like several of the other projects we have seen over the last couple of years.

The comment thread is interesting precisely because of its mix of reactions:

This is really nice! Really love to check it out. It can turn any web page into 3D space? How can this be done? Amazing stuff!

to

I’d like one double failburger to go.

One commenter makes the point that has to be made about any plug-in based approach to the problem: what about adoption of the plug-in? Most people simply say no to all plug-in install requests. This is a significant challenge across the web — it takes really compelling content to drive adoption.

In any case, ExitReality seems to have some nice features that seem to rapidly be becoming de rigueur: HTML on a polygon, video on a polygon, etc. Not sure how they did the Burger Time emulation — Flash on a poly? Most interesting is the “install and automatically make a 3d space from your webpage” thing that is hinted at. It’s not that hard to do, really — pass in the URL to the world, and have the world scrape the page for assets to use — but it potentially makes a page a bit more compelling.

Edit: Apparently there’s a MySpace app as well, which connects to the branded worlds.