Year: 2008

  • VWs go to Washington

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    As several game news sites are reporting, having connected the dots, virtual worlds are starting a new level of integration with Washington — with the naming of Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach to lead Obama’s FCC transition team, there are now two knowledgeable denizens of the virtual world helping set some policy.

    I first met Kevin at a social policy conference that was themed in part around virtual worlds; I first met Susan at State of Play, the wonderful legal conferences around VW issues. Both are associated with Terra Nova. Kevin is also a Tauren Shaman & a Night Elf Rogue, and Susan is a Second Lifer, plus she has me on her blogroll (hey now…!).

    What will this mean for VWs and MMOs? Nothing right now, I am sure — net neutrality is sure to be a bigger issue. But it’s sure not going to hurt to have people who know the field in the governmental mix.

  • Why are corpse runs bad?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 34 Comments

    In a recent discussion over at f13, folks are cataloging “design errors” from past MMOs. And one of the ones cited was the notion of a corpse run. For those not familiar with this concept, this is where your character dies, leaves all of their stuff at the corpse, and you have to run back to where the corpse is to pick up your gear.

    I argued that corpse runs shouldn’t belong on this list. It’s like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were (mostly) all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of “don’t change what works” would have been everyone’s default choice back then.

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  • The Sunday Poem: From Kabul to Kandahar

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 1 Comment

    …The highway between Kabul and Kandahar was supposed to be a success story. Completed in 2003, it has instead become a symbol of all that plagues Afghanistan: insecurity, corruption and the radical Islamic insurgency that feeds off both.

    —Aryn Baker, Time Magazine, Oct 31, 2008

    “This is my road,” Saboor says: a dust
    Track gone the long way through the desert rocks.

    He drives the bus, two times a week, trusting
    Life and face to dirt he smears across

    His lips, a beard to baffle Taliban.
    He wears mechanic’s clothes: a claim the road

    Then makes on him, a thieving in the sand,
    The way last week the robbers burst and stole

    The crates with chickens, goats a-leash, the wealth
    That masquerades as dirt itself, the greens.

    I ask him, does he fear insurgent’s stealth,
    The bark of guns, the bullet’s code, the dream,

    When east Sarobi’s tea shops dish fruit cold and sweet,
    Pomegranates, porcelain plates, nuts and honey treats,
    The scent of lamb in stew, the simmering of the meat –

    He shrugs. Stolid, fleet. He says, “This is my road.”
    It is a dust track where the accent makes the meaning.

  • Game Informer on “Impostor” games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 49 Comments
    Is Wii Music a game?

    Games That Aren’t Really Games…Should We Be Concerned? is an article on the Game Informer website (and maybe the mag too, for all I know) that explores the area of games that aren’t really games, such as the recently released Wii Music.

    Curiously enough, the article leads off by using A Theory of Fun to try to figure out what a game is. 🙂 They arrived at this definition:

    …for our purposes we needed something solid, and settled on several qualifications mentioned in his book. Ultimately, we chose the most important elements and decided that games are formal systems with rules that require choices, are competitive, have explicit goals and quantifiable outcomes. There…that is a little easier to swallow isn’t it?

    They note that I myself think many of the distinctions are sort of irrelevant. Why? Let’s say that you have a game with a quantifiable outcome — Quake, perhaps. Now strip all semblance of score or feedback from it, but still track that stuff internally. What you have left is an activity wherein you shoot, but cannot tell if you hit; and if you hit, you cannot tell if you are doing better than other players. Read More “Game Informer on “Impostor” games”