Virtual worlds in the ambient cloud

 Posted by (Visited 9199 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Sep 102008
 

The Web is moving towards a user-centric experience. Whereas a few years ago, it was all about visiting destination sites, now it is about destination sites spitting out data that comes to you, via RSS. The attraction of things like Twitter or Facebook lies in the ambient information that flows out and about, and in your largely asynchronous, largely placeless, largely shallow updates on what your friends are doing. You come to know them deeply not by engaging deeply with them, but by building up pictures of lots of small actions they take.

Compare, for example, the destination-like IRC versus the ambient Twitter. Hardcore Twitter fans use it almost in realtime. They answer people, with their @fred syntax convention. They have a better history, perhaps, because they can search the stream in a way that IRC doesn’t really support. But more importantly, you follow Twitter by filtering it; it’s one big stream, and you take little bits of it out. It is as if IRC were all one channel, and you happened to build an aggregate channel of just the people talking that you wanted to hear.

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A poetry lesson for Bartle

 Posted by (Visited 8315 times)  Reading  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 062008
 

Richard Bartle has a little piece on the rhyming structure of this lovely poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

Mrs Schofield’s GCSE

You must prepare your bosom for his knife,
said Portia to Antonio in which
of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,
insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch
knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said
Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?
Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death?
To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – do you
know what this means? Explain how poetry
pursues the human like the smitten moon
above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:
speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.

Sez Bartle,

Maybe I’m missing something, or I’m not reading this with the right internal accent, but calling this “rhyming” is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?

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New major study on MMO players

 Posted by (Visited 12212 times)  Game talk
Sep 052008
 

Dmitri Williams has released the first paper from an initiative that I helped get off the ground years ago, before leaving SOE. Basically, SOE gave him full (anonymized) logs of activity for EQ2.

Some key findings:

  1. the largest concentration of players are in their 30s
  2. There are more players in their 30s than in their 20s
  3. Older players also play more than younger players
  4. Female players play slightly more hours per week than male players
  5. EQ2 players come from wealthier backgrounds than average, & are also more educated than the general population
  6. have substantially different levels of spirituality than the general population, particularly are far less likely to be Christian and much more likely to state they have no religion compared to the general US population
  7. Physically, EQ2 players are healthier than the regular population. So much for the overweight geek stereotype
  8. However, they have lower indicators for mental health — particularly for depression
  9. the desire to get ahead (“achievement”) and the desire to spend time with others both predicted increased playing, whereas the desire for immersion was a predictor of playing less

More papers will be coming — they had to goto NCSA supercomputers to crunch the terabytes of data! — and I look forward to seeing what else emerges.

How Metaplace was born

 Posted by (Visited 5083 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Sep 052008
 

I got asked where the idea for Metaplace came from on our public forums. I wrote this lengthy reply, which turned into a blog post over there, and now a blog post over here.

I came from the world of muds. That means I got my start in virtual worlds in the days when anyone could download a codebase, and assuming they had a server they could get going and dive into running a world of their own.

That went away with the big MMORPGs. But when we did UO: The Second Age, there had already been a movement among players towards having “grey shard” server emulators. Some of the tools users had made to hack the UO datafiles were actually better than the tools we had in-house.

So I informally floated an idea for the expansion that didn’t go anywhere. Why not release the game server as a binary, release documentation for our scripting language (which was fantastic for the time), release our tools client, and let people make their own worlds?

You will have to go over there for the rest. 🙂

VW08: Business Guys Debate the Future, one take

 Posted by (Visited 6245 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Sep 042008
 

Dusan Writer has a take on the panel I was on, casting it as Metaplace vs Linden Lab — though to my mind that leaves out the contributions of Mike Wilson of Makena and Corey Bridges of Multiverse. That’s because Dusan is interested mostly int he clash of philosophies about where virtual worlds are going:

But it leaves a question: are virtual worlds places? Or will the technologies that enable 3D spaces become so ubiquitous that we’ll stop thinking of them as distinct places? Because in Raph’s view, the tools and technologies to create 3D artefacts, the system for managing your avatar and identity should be EXPRESSION-agnostic. In other words, we should have the tools for creating content and then be able to seamlessly publish that content to cell phones, browsers, Flash, separate clients – whatever, it’s not the viewer, it’s in the engine from which content is derived and creating standards and tools for expressing the content from that engine.

FWIW, virtual worlds are definitely “places” in my mind. But to me, clients and devices are merely windows that look onto that place. That doesn’t preclude rich 3d “windows” — I merely happen to think that multihead, flexibly represented VWs is the future. I would swap the word “engine” for “server” perhaps, or “world.”

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