Year: 2007

The Forge · 40,000 Blowjobs – Real or Second Life

Here’s Splume.

It’s free and it’s in open beta. “Metamo” is their shop/mall sort of thing. Looks sort of Habbo-ish. But of course, it’s all in Japanese; fortunately, I have someone fluent sitting about six feet away. I’ll update this post as I learn more.

edit:

Custom protocol for streaming 3d assets. Nobody was around, but it’s 4am in Japan right now. You had to register, and a client download for this custom browser. The sign-in process was a bit clunky. Lots of graphical glitches, z-sorting problems, etc. We couldn’t figure out how to chat, but there were lots of emotes. We were a monkey in a floating crab flying saucer thing, with robots arms. There were 5 avatars to choose from. Very cutesy art overall. Doesn’t look like it’s really expected to be played outside Japan right now — we had to pretend we were from Hokkaido, and it wouldn’t take a non-Japanese name.

Via 3pointD.

With news that now Shanda, one of the biggest Chinese MMO companies, is planning on making a metaverse world, it’s a legitimate question, If the flavor of a metaverse is driven largely by who is connected to it, then population will surely have a disproportionate impact on the overall flavor of the space. It might be that we say goodbye to the libertarian sorts of approaches that currently define the ideals of some virtual worlds, and arguably underpin the whole field (cf Bartle’s take on how the “hacker ethic” informed early MUDs).

The motive for Shanda is of course crassly commercial; after all, HiPiHi has already entered beta. In fact, the sheer lack of content here is reminiscent of the recent talk from Atari about making a virtual world: basically, not even an announcement, just the hint that maybe they are consdering one.
Read More “What if the Metaverse were Chinese?”

This list of recent funding deals surrounding games is fascinating precisely becaue of what it shows about where the money is going. Doing the tallies:, what I see is a few mobile content development companies, a lot of mobile content aggregators, several content development studios and companies from outside the game industry making games, and a heck of a lot of game ad companies.

Bonnie Ruberg cornered me for an interview at the tables on the third floor of GDC. It wasn’t necessarily the clearest place for an interview, and it was near the end of the day and I was a little scatterbrained. The result is this interview on Gamasutra, where some of the transcript makes it sound like I was either contradicting myself or mumbling. Probably both. 🙂

A lot of the content will be familiar to folks who follow the blog regularly, I suspect. Nonetheless, there are probably a few things I say that will tick off someone somewhere, particularly on page 3.

One note, though — as usual, I got credited for a game that I don’t really regard as being mine at all. In this case, it was Field Commander, in the lead-in blurb article.  It’s not fair to the folks who worked hard on that game to give me any credit — I didn’t do a lick of design or code on that game.