Toby Buckell, author of Crystal Rain, Sly Mongoose, Ragamuffin, and the sixth Halo novel, The Cole Protocol, and lots of other work, will be live on TheStage in Metaplace tomorrow at 2pm Pacific as part of our Creative Series. I’ve written before about his books, so you know I am excited about this.

Here is his blog post about it.

To attend, just click this link (register first, so you don’t go through the newbie tutorial at the last minute). TheStage is linked off of the theater in Metaplace Central.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of The Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist.

Locus reports that Paul O. Williams has passed. Seems like many of the authors I read as a teen are leaving us. He’s best known for The Pelbar Cycle, which is a seven book post-apocalyptic series that can be somewhat hard to get into, but was still kind of mindblowing for me when I was a kid. It’s rather obscure now, but well worth reading. They are set in a clearly recognizable America well after some sort of nuclear holocaust, and are remarkable for their characters and the emphasis on describing cultures and rebuilding, rather than destructive aftermath.

Start with The Breaking of Northwall, and work your way through all seven. Heck, I remember building a Lode Runner level based on The Fall of the Shell…

He apparently only wrote one more SF book (though many of poetry), which I now have on order.

Yesterday I had a real urge to play some guitar for people. It used to be that I’d get to do a few hours of playing songs for people at every Cub Scout camp-out — but David is into Scouts proper now, and I don’t go on the camping trips. So I left the office saying, “I might do a concert thing in Metaplace this weekend…” A few folks said to let them know if I did.

Which just added to the pressure! I had never tried it before! So I figured that I should do a dry run first. And I did it last night, and you know, it was a heck of a lot of fun — but also pretty different. So here’s what I did and what it felt like. I am sure some of this is old hat to those of you who have done lots of this in Second Life, but it was new to me.

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Check out this great pixel poster of gaming history!

Offworld says it went out in issue 203 to all subscribers. Alas, I won’t be getting it. Anyone from EDGE read the blog & wanna send me a poster?

WebWars has gone public, finally. It is another entrant into the “web overlay” space, sort of a cross between the game stuff in The Nethernet (formerly known as PMOG) and the “layered web” tech used with Weblins or RocketOn. It has a very soft anime look to it, and the fiction is cute: little faeries keep the Internet humming along – gotta catch ‘em all.

You can sign up for beta testing here.

The moment the first human connected to online space, a spark flickered in the vast emptiness and the first Webling was born. Though we have always been oblivious to their existence, all of the uncountable communications that make up our Internet experience are only possible thanks to the Weblings. They are the guardians and shepherds of online information. Fueled by everything from fashion gossip to current affairs, the Weblings change and grow, influenced by the information they carry.

As the Internet has grown, what was once a wilderness has become a war zone. Bugs, viruses, and other malevolent creatures have free rein on the Internet, where they attempt to distort and destroy information online. Even worse, they have created a way to imprison the Weblings forever – trapping them within mirror gates, then shattering and spreading the mirror shards throughout the Internet. The Weblings need our help to find the scattered shards, reassemble the mirror gates, and help them become strong enough to defeat their foes forever.

So this gang of bullies strongarms a guy in an Internet cafe in China, and extorts a bunch of virtual goods and a pile of QQ coins from him. He gets caught, and the court rules that since the virtual goods were purchased, this was a valid case of extortion. Thee of the gang got fines, and the ringleader — three years in jail!

According to the Xinhua news agency, the man, along with three others, assaulted another man in the cafe, forcing him to give up various virtual goods and 100,000 yuan ($14,700) worth of the virtual currency known as QQ coins. The coins are the currency utilized by the major Chinese web portal, Tencent. It is used for the purchase of online goods and premium services for supported titles.

– Virtual Currency Extortion Leads to Three Years of Prison in China.

It isn’t too surprising that this sort of thing is getting taken seriously there; industry experts in China assess the virtual goods market there as being 25 times the size of the US market. (You can download an interesting report on this here, or just check out this slide show).

Gamasutra has an article up — “What Are The Rewards Of ‘Free-To-Play’ MMOs?” — that I was interviewed for. During the interview it became clear that many in the traditional AAA games community still have questions around whether this model is viable financially, and the article is centrally about the fact that yes, it can be.

Yes, good money can actually be made in the rapidly-growing world of free-to-play massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), but just how much can micro-transactions actually generate? Unfortunately, average revenue per user information is often concealed behind the fog of competition by privately held game makers reluctant to report either very high or very low results.

To add to the confusion, some developers choose to report their “average revenue per paying user” (ARPPU) which, by definition, is always more impressive than their “average revenue per user” (ARPU). (Both of these statistics relate to monthly logged-in users, and the amount of monthly logged-in users cited in ARPU is often a fraction of total registered users — a common metric used in press releases.)

Regular blog reader mrseb has a blog post up on emotional avatars in virtual worlds inspired by this NYTimes.com article (it’s behind a reg wall).

In short, the research is about how important blushing is as a social lubricant, as evincing embarrassment or shame serves to reinforce the social rules held in common by groups of people. It’s a sign that the person knows they are transgressing to some degree and is sorry for it, and people judging them tend to treat them less harshly.

Which leads Sebastian to ask (emphasis mine!),

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars?

It’s not that the question hasn’t been asked before. For example, back in 2005 Bob Moore, Nic Ducheneaut, and Eric Nickell of PARC gave a talk at what was then AGC (you can grab the PDF here)., which I summarized here with

The presentation by the guys from PARC on key things that would improve social contact in MMOs was very useful and interesting. Eye contact, torso torque, looking where people are pointing, not staring, anims for interface actions so you can tell when someone is checking inventory, display of typed characters in real-time rather than when ENTER is hit, emphatic gestures automatically, pointing gestures and other emotes that you can hold, exaggerated faces anime super-deformed style or zoomed in inset displays of faces, so that the facial anims can be seen at a distance… the list was long, and all of it would make the worlds seem more real.

I was at that talk, and in the Q&A section, which was really more of a roundtable discussion, the key thing that came up was cost.

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Stippled red striated speckles buttered deep
In cocoa, aloe; the slide of cloth on skin
Searing scars of sun and sand.

Skin in sheets, shed sly like sidewinds
Scrubbing rocks, sloughing like cicadas,
Scattered food for mites.

So starts the metamorphose, stretching
To a higher self, a sentience sophisticated
Now for SPFs of sixty-plus.

I have written about The Wisdom of Crowds before many times (see here, and here, and here…). In short, given a problem with a fully objective, quantifiable answer, taking the average of many, diverse people’s estimates will give a more accurate answer than the estimate of an expert.

Now there’s a new study that shows that you can provide multiple estimates yourself, by putting yourself in a different frame of mind — then average them. And that average is likely to be more accurate than either of your two guesses, though not as accurate as involving another person. Neat mind hack!

…participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?… Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.