This is the second time in a few days that someone has linked me to this presentation, so I figured I should share it even more widely. It’s a bit Singularitarian, but it’s deeply relevant on so many fronts that I do think everyone should read it.

Shift Happens – SlideShare.

Last week, Democrat Rep. Joe Baca introduced “The Video Game Health Labeling Act of 2009.” If passed, the bill would create a new rule in the Consumer Product Safety Commission forcing developers to affix a warning on any game rated Teen or higher. The label would read, “WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.”

via Don’t pretend video games are as bad as cigarettes | The Digital Home – CNET News.

Link to his press release, which incorrectly asserts that the link between violent video games and increased aggression in young people is solidly established. (To be more precise, there’s plenty of evidence for emotional arousal, not for a more sensible definition of aggression).

Link to his proposed bill. Looks like it would only apply to games rated T or higher. Not that that makes this any more sensible. Section 1c seems aimed at handling digital distribution cases, whilst ignoring that most digitally distributed games are not, in fact, rated by the ESRB. Oops.

Baca (D-Rialto) represents California’s 43rd District. So now you know who to write to and call.

After the whole Threshold deal with Wikipedia and losing mud history, a new Wiki was created on Wikia in order to preserve mud history.

I’ve put up a detailed LegendMUD entry with a bunch of citations. Yeah, it’s a conflict of interest, and I am sure I am misremembering stuff or letting my bias show. But it’s also the only way some of this history will be preserved.(And wow, I had forgotten a lot of this stuff!)

Go there, and jump in, and help. And hey, if people do the hard work of finding sources and the like here, then some articles can maybe migrate back to Wikipedia.

By one estimate, about $1 billion in real dollars changed hands in computer-based environments called ‘virtual worlds’ in 2005. … IRS employees have been unable to respond to taxpayer inquiries about how to report transactions associated with them. Economic activities in virtual worlds may present an emerging area of tax noncompliance, in part because the IRS has not provided guidance about whether and how taxpayers should report such activities. To improve voluntary tax compliance, the National Taxpayer Advocate recommends that the IRS issue guidance addressing how taxpayers should report economic activities in virtual worlds.

– from the report summary (PDF) of this year’s recommendations from the national taxpayer advocate.

Via Kotaku, Slashdot, WaPo…

The whole thing is large, if you want to read about everything else beyond virtual worlds.

Developing behaviors via genetic algorithms of various sorts has been around a long time now. You come up with a basic environment and ruleset, then you let loose millions of generations of simple AIs to keep trying to surivive. You then have the AIs tweak themselves based on what survived well, attempting to evolve the best survivor.

This can be used for lots of purposes — and now it’s being applied to game design. Starting with a simple Pac-Man like environment, researchers are generating zillions of procedural games, and then testing to see which is most fun. But how to measure the fun?

It should be pretty straightforward to see how game rules can be represented to be evolved: just encode them as e.g. an array of integers, and define some sensible mutation and possibly recombination operators. (In this particular case, we use a simple generational EA without crossover.) For other rule spaces, some rules might be more like parameters, and could be represented as real numbers.

What’s the much trickier question is the fitness function. How do you evaluate the fitness of a particular set of game rules? …

Our solution is to use learnability as a predictor of fun. A good game is one that is not winnable by a novice player, but which the player can learn to play better and better over time, and eventually win; it has a smooth learning curve.

via Togelius: Automatic Game Design.

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I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives.

– a comment from Daniel Speed on Broken Toys » Wikicrap.

Glossing much here… Edit: this article is getting updated on the fly as people add comments and reminiscences.

DikuMUD was derived from AberMUD, which was similar mechanics, but had more of a scavenger hunt mentality in some ways.

At its core, it is a class-based RPG with the principal classes being fighter, healer, wizard, thief. (Later codebases added more). It was heavily based on the combat portion of Dungeons and Dragons. Advancement handled by earning experience points through combat, reaching a set amount of points, returning to town and “levelling up,” which unlocked new abilities. Classes were immutable (though eventually systems such as remorting, etc were added). Rewards for killing things also included equipment, which affected your stats and damage capability. If you reached the maximum level, common cultural practice was that you were invited to become a game admin (this practice dates back to much earlier, and existed in some form in MUD1).

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I’ve mentioned many times here my love of Neil Gaiman’s work. Well, check out what happened to this other blog that apparently mentioned it more times than me.

A little over a month ago I was privileged to be able to share with you an interview with artist Lisa Snellings. The last comment (currently) in that post was from someone named ‘Coraline’ that read, “Hi there! I’ve got a question for you – can you please email me at [email address removed]“. The link to Coraline’s name took me to a website featuring information on the forthcoming film of the same name based on the beloved contemporary children’s classic by author Neil Gaiman.

With great anticipation I sent off an email and quickly received a response from one of the members of the Coraline Team, the group of animators who worked with director Henry Selick to bring Neil Gaiman’s book to life.

I was informed that the Coraline Team would like to send me “something special. Something handcrafted. We only made 50 of these something specials, and we think yours will be right up your alley.”

– Stainless Steel Droppings » Blog Archive » An Unexpected Pleasure.

Here’s a cool, very game-grammary approach to board game design that is inspired, as my initial game notation work was to some degree, by music.

What I arrived at was a series of “discoveries” or “conclusions” about specific models of game design that I assert can help one in the process of identifying not only problems in a game design but also what may be lacking or not present yet that could help a game reach the next level. As I arrived at these conclusions, I found that they felt very much like many of the typical principles of composition that I encountered while studying music.

via Reflections Across the Board: The “Music” of Game Design: Part 1.

The bulk of the article ends up examining a particular “atom” called the “Tri-Level Resource Exchange Model.” Atoms like these are usually termed “design patterns” in software. The article lands at identifying the number 5 as apparently very important in this model; I don’t think it is coincidence that it fits nicely in the famous 7 +/2 range.

Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term. What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?

So I started reading a bit about it. It basically means running a bunch of parallel databases and looking into the right one, rather than trying to cram everything into one.

Near as I can tell, a quick Google seems to say that the term came about because of a guy who worked at Friendster and Flickr, and seems to . Wikipedia has only had an article for a little while. In the comment thread at Lessons Learned, there’s mention of the term being used in 2006.

Flickr, of course, was born as an MMO called Game Neverending. In fact, I was quoted in Ludicorp’s business plan, and Stewart Butterfield had asked if I could be an advisor, but I couldn’t do it at the time because of my contract with Sony. Sigh. Anyway, I would be shocked if the term “shard” hadn’t been thrown around those offices… because in MMOs, of course, “shards” has a very specific meaning and history.

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Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

* Blueberry Garden

* CarneyVale Showtime

* Dyson

* Night Games

* Osmos

via The 11th Annual Independent Games Festival – Finalists & Winners.

Some great stuff on the lists in all categories!

I promise, I will get to my “faves of 2008″ post soon!