Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application

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Oct 272008
 
Dan's STARS model of game atoms

Dan's STARS model of game atoms

Dan Cook continues to outpace me on game grammar work, now with a delicious set of slides on applying skill atoms to application design. I already mailed it to several folks here in the office.

Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides.

I just saw that a book was released the other day that teaches people how to use GoogleDocs. The more complexity that you add, the closer you get to something like Word. When we add ‘features’ we hurt learnability and end up turning off users.

Hacks:

  • Segmenting features by user skill level,
  • Layering less commonly used or expert features so they are out of the way.
  • Creating a unifying UI metaphor that lets users understand new tools more easily.
  • Elegant information architecture and clean visual design.

Laundering money in MMOs

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Oct 272008
 

It’s starting to happen, after there being years of rumors and little concrete evidence. And where it happens on large scales, regulation cannot be far behind.

Last week Korean police arrested a group responsible for laundering money generated by Chinese gold farming from Korea back to the mainland. Over 18 months, the group wired $38 million from Korea to a Hong Kong paper company as payments for purchases.

— Virtual Worlds News: Group Laundered $38M in Virtual Currencies in 18 Months.

To repeat one of my favorite quotes, heard at a conference years ago, “well, that’s not drug kinds of money, but it’s certainly terrorist kinds of money.”

Game folks vs web folks

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Oct 272008
 

I missed this blog exchange a few days ago between Andrew Chen (web guy) and Adam Martin (game guy).

“4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people” is where Andrew says,

  1. Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
  2. Distribution vs. Content
  3. Utility vs. Experience
  4. Open vs. Content gating

And then Adam says in “Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers”:

Continue reading »

Enterprise VWs already slowing?

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Oct 272008
 

I had the distinct pleasure of attending the recent Virtual Worlds London show as the guest of Chris, Joey et al at Virtual Worlds Management this week. To say it was a mixed bag would be an understatement. The media, kids and games sessions where alive and vibrant, and absolutely full of excitement The enterprise sessions were lackluster, stale and unconvincing.

–Stagnation in the enterprise virtual worlds space | Clever Zebra

Text of the ruling in the Dutch VW property case

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Oct 272008
 

VeeJay Burns of the MindBlizzard blog has kindly translated the Court Ruling in the RuneScape Case that was the subject of a post a couple of days ago.

As the virtual amulet and virtual mask as defined in the case at hand meet the aforementioned criteria, the court is of the opinion that these virtual goods are to be included in the concept of ‘goods’ as provided for in Artcile 310 of the Penal Code and belonged to the declarant.

What is most curious to me is how shallow the treatment of “possession” is here:

Case law has previously determined the foregoing is not applicable in case of a PIN number, computer data and phone call minutes in a subscription bundle. In this case the virtual goods, namely a virtual amulet and a virtual mask, were in posession of the declarant. Only he had actual control over these goods.

Manifestly, Jagex has greater “actual control” but the issue of Jagex’s interests in the case doesn’t seem to come up at all.

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