Year: 2007

Linden has released a cool survey of developers providing 3rd party services in the Second Life platform. At SXSW, Reuben Steiger of Millions of Us was very upfront about calling himself “an ad agency,” and that’s what some of these folks do — certainly many of the ones making big bucks. The value isn’t so much in the eyeballs they get in SL, it’s in the publicity that ensues when the build for some company gets picked up by a wire service and plastered all over the news.

Anyway, a few of the stats:

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It’s not just media companies getting into the MMO biz, now it’s government agencies too. You can read NASA’s full CFP here (16MB PDF).

Of course, NASA is a Johnny-come-lately to this party; the military has been exploring MMOs via partners for a very long time, as well as maintaining its own robust multiuser simulation community.

(via 3pointd)

Edit: Got this email from NASA: “Thanks for mentioning the NASA Learning Technologies ICPI on your site.  At this time the solicitation is being postponed.  I regret any inconvenience.” Oh well. 🙂

Yes, meetings (and pitches!) like this actually happen.

Read More “This is non-fiction”

Looks like Understanding Games: Episode 3 is up at Kongregate now. This one is about how players build mental models: hypothesizing, experimenting, and getting feedback from the game as to whether they are playing correctly.

I mentioned in my discussion of Jon Blow’s Nuances of Design session that to my mind, Rod Humble’s The Marriage was clearly a game that was intended, and succeeded, at being art. Well, now you can download it here, and come to your own conclusions.