The new trophy husband: a night elf?

 Posted by (Visited 6151 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Nov 142008
 

Taylor said she had caught Pollard’s avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: “I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned.”

The couple’s real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.

But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities…

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a “girl in America” but denied wrongdoing. “We weren’t even having cyber sex or anything like that…”

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

Second Life affair ends in divorce – CNN.com.

Almost reads like an Onion article, honestly.

From the Mailbag: Where’s A Grammar of Gameplay?

 Posted by (Visited 5474 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 112008
 

We have a game development program here at UCC, and I’ve been trying to get a copy of “A Grammar Of Game Play: How Games Work” for our library without any luck. Has it been published yet? If it has, where can we get a copy; and if not, will it be and if so, where and when?

— Bill Schryba, Union County College

It has not been published – or finished being written! 🙂 Sorry… it doesn’t quite exist yet. That said, there is material out there along similar lines, and at this point Dan Cook’s stuff is probably the most user-friendly game grammar material out there.

Some quick links I dug up:

Why I found no shirts at Target

 Posted by (Visited 4033 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Nov 112008
 

The Escapist’s new issue has an article about why I never found those t-shirts from the Experimental Gameplay Project at Target.

You know, alternate distribution methods like these are still a very good idea. But jumping straight to Target is challenging. Might the shirts have done better if they started out at something like Comic-Con instead? As of right now, few games have fandoms to the degree that they will follow a brand to a different store (my son’s Guitar Hero shirt was much admired at Cub Scout camp this weekend, but most games are not Guitar Hero).

To get crossover retail presence, the games are going to have be lifestyle brands to some degree, and be broadly recognizable enough to at least help get across tribal affiliation.

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Whirled launches!

 Posted by (Visited 6023 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Nov 102008
 

Congrats to the Three Rings crew and their cap’n — Whirled is officially launching today.

The site features 12 “example” games that show players what is possible as they create their own games.

Creators set their own prices for the goods they produce and get a third of the virtual transaction price, Three Rings keeps a third, and a third goes to the affiliate (shop owner) who initiates the sale. Typical items go for maybe 10 cents.

Since launching the Whirled beta in March, there are 15,000 active users logging in each day. So far, 60,000 have registered with very little promotion.

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Marketing in games vs web

 Posted by (Visited 11425 times)  Game talk
Nov 052008
 

One of the more interesting communication gaps that I’ve had while working on Metaplace was over the word “marketing.”

In much of the game industry, marketing is a dirty word. In fact, for a while I made it part of my personal crusade to smooth over the relationship between development and marketing both at SOE and at Origin, because there’s a historical sense of enmity there, where development feels that clueless marketers are trying to design the game, and marketers feel that clueless developers don’t care what the public actually wants.

Over in the web world, it’s different. In fact, if I had to pick the closest analogue to “marketing guy” it would be “designer.”

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