Year: 2007

I was in NYC  over the last day (only on the ground for 16 hours or so! Apologies to all my New York friends whom I didn’t get to even call to say hello). I got up yesterday morning and it snowed on me.

Among other things, I was there for an interview for CNN International. Expect to hear about a  Future Summit show on virtual worlds in June… current tentative date is June 13th, and it’s supposed to be a 20 minute package. I did 25 mins or so of interview, which I am sure will be trimmed to 45 seconds.

I also now know about TV pancake makeup first-hand.  No fun. My lower eyelids still feel bruised.

Anyway, I snapped the following in Times Square; the giant video screen right next to it showed clips of avatars frolicking, but alas, I snapped the shot a bit too late and managed to instead get an advertisement with someone cutting a cake instead.

It was definitely a zeitgeist sort of moment for me — a “we’ve arrived” kind of sight.

After the recent coverage, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see this announcement on the official Linden blog.

Edit: PlayNoEvil has the analysis I didn’t write.

BTW, it is disturbing to read the comment thread on the Linden post. “First the ageplay, now the casinos.” Boggle.

This one aims at really looking at core elements: Gameplay Deconstruction: Elements and Layers. It’s interesting, IMHO, mostly for asessing what core verbs, tokens and actions you have, and how tweaking them could result in major differences.

Towards the top of the diagrams it gets a bit fuzzy, in that it isn’t quantitative — one of the nice things about the way game grammar is starting to evolve is how quantitative it is getting — the Scottish effort in particular (something I should write about from GDC!).

Courtesy of Mike Rozak comes a pointer to this story about how Cursor hackers target WoW players. As you all know, Windows recently turned up a vulnerability in cursors that prompted security alters. Well, if you’re going to hack random users, what are you trying to get that is of value?

The answer seems to be WoW passwords and accounts, for sale on the gray market.

I think we’ll be seeing more of this as the gray market continues to thrive and the value of virtual currencies keeps going up.