So, last time, I had left off with the simple flapping prototype, with broken sideways movement. Where did I go from there?
Well, mostly, I went into two modes at the same time: one, thinking about the play experience, and the other, focusing on fixing the feed back that the model was giving.
Sorry, no fresh version today. 🙂 But read on for the thoughts I had:
Unggi Yoon on Terra Nova reports that
As Ted Castronova notes, these do seem like two incompatible approaches. The former also begs the question of whether taxable RMT means that the servers need to up their security and their reliability and their practices and start turning into banks (yikes).
The latter is interesting because it means someone in government is advocating the game side. A game player themselves? Not out of the question, seeing as some new stats are out:
I went too long without doing a book review post, so here we are with the latest from Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Jacqueline Carey, and Susan Matthews. I also have some thoughts on Julian Dibbell’s new book about Real Money Trade in MMORPGs, a comic series that caught my eye, and my (so far) favorite SF novel this year — and no, it’s not up for the Hugo.
There’s some debate these days about Wikipedia and the wisdom of crowds. Then again, there always seems to be debate about it. The thing that I keep noticing, though, is people using a generic definition of “wisdom of crowds” that is quite different from my reading of the empirically verifiable parts of Surowiecki’s book.
Technically, Surowiecki’s conception of “wisdom of crowds” is ONLY applicable to quantifiable, objective data. The very loosey-goosey way of using it to discuss any sort of collective discussion and opinion generation is a misrepresentation of the actual (and very interesting) phenomenon.
I don’t know why, but it came to me as a picture, a bit over a week ago: a bird made of light, flapping on a screen with hand-drawn artwork. It trailed a few particles of light as it flapped, mostly white, but some of them pink or pale blue. What was interesting about it was the flapping, the way in which it had to twitch one wing in order to slide sideways against the wind currents and the gravity.
Say, rather, that YOU had to twitch one wing. It was a game about flying by flapping. What you did, I wasn’t sure — collected stuff from the world, avoided collisions — whatever made sense for a game about flapping. The key thing was the sensation of flapping and flying — perhaps because I have been playing a lot of Joust both on XBox Live and on my phone.
