Wired has a nice long Jullian Dibbell article entitled “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World” — it’s interesting to me to see how much emphasis is placed on the Something Awful folks as a sort of cultural center of griefing, something which is a relatively recent development.
Pacific Epoch – Update On China’s Internet Shakedown
Government bodies regulating the online game industry have released new regulations regarding foreign online game companies operating in China, reports 163.com. Under the new regulation, the General Administration of Press and Publication will postpone the examination, approval and licensing of foreign company products if the companies are arbitrated or sued by Chinese online game companies. The GAPP will not continue consideration of the products until after the complaints have been resolved, according to the report.
The translation: any Chinese game company can stop a foreign company from launching in China by filing an arbitration request, which freezes the mandatory approval process.
For whatever reason, my post on core gamers and what sort of landscape they face seems to have resonated with a lot of folks, or least caused a fair amount of controversy — but in like six different ways at once. The issue of what casual is, and whether that market is serviced and whether developers are listening to that type of player, and so on, is a large and complex one; and microtransactions, whoo! — so I am going to answer a different set of comments first. 🙂
One of the threads has been “why should we think of core games as being in jeopardy?”
I am not sure there’s a comment I can actually make here! It’s too easy a target… Ironically, Brazil has a thriving indie dev scene going on.
Counter-Strike, EverQuest banned in Brazil // GamesIndustry.biz
It’s alleged EverQuest is harmful because players are asked to accept both “good” and “bad” quests, the psychological burden of which is said to cause problems. The game was never officially released in Brazil.
Right before Christmas, I posted the lyrics to something called “Let Us Just Be.” Well, here’s some noodling around the music for it — you should be able to mostly follow right along the lyrics even though there’s no singing.
This is using my new toy, a Yamaha P70, for controlling both the cello and the piano, which are VSTs. My hands and forearms ache in ways they haven’t in years, because I am so very very rusty on piano. I am totally loving the P70 though.
