This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
Polygon Gmen -Transmover-. Yummy. You need a key to get out the door. You have a gun that swaps places: you swap with whatever block you shoot.
It really does feel like Portal meeting Lode Runner. I need to go to work, or else I would keep playing. 🙂
Akoha is an interesting idea — one bound to run right up against the qualms of those folks who dislike using games for social engineering.
You buy a deck of cards for about $5. It has missions in it, like “buy a couple in love drinks,” “donate an hour of your time,” or “give someone a book.”
Once you do the good deed, you give the card to the reicipient of the good deed, and they “play it forward” — the mission is now theirs. They also go to the website and register the deed so that you get credited with points. You can track the movement of the cards across the world, kind of like how you can track dollar bills with Where’s George.
You gain points, you level up, and eventually you unlock perks like the ability to create your own missions — the plan is they will print your own custom deck of cards for you. Cory, here’s your whuffie.
If you look at their “learn more” link (engagingly done as a photocomic) you can see that they do envision this being mostly played among friends, although mention is made of strangers. In that sense, it is less a serious game than it is a social game, but the pay it forward element, should it offer enough incentives, has interesting potential. I could easily see something like this catching on among the sort of widely dispersed tech-savvy folks who make up the web and gaming communities…
At SXSW, Susan Choe of Outspark stated (and was promptly tweeted as having said) that Outspark manages to get $60 ARPU, which is quite a respectable figure.
The challenge there, of course, is that you have to know on what basis this is being measured. I immediately asked “was that ARPU or ARPPU?”
So, the commercials definitely caught my eye; vibrant colors, isometric artwork done in pencil lines but apparently inspired by those awesome eBoy posters,that chirpy soundtrack. It was clearly a videogame aesthetic. But they were also terrible at marketing what they were actually marketing… half the time I couldn’t remember what company they were for.
Much less did I even notice that what the actual product Comcast was attempting to market was a virtual apartment builder and virtual interface to their services!
As reported by many sites, Linden Lab is going to move all adult content to its own continent.
Snarky folks may wonder what will be left on the main continent, but that’s really unfair. There’s a ton of stellar content in SL that isn’t sex related.
Access to the new continent will be gated by real world age verification — credit card, ID, that sort of thing. The challenge, of course, is rating the content. Apparently community feedback will be gathered on establishing guidelines. Edit: more details here.
This is an area where SL’s embrace of the tyranny of geography has made things a bit more complicated for the Lindens, of course. Let’s say that there’s something borderline on the main continent. It goes along fine there, until enough people protest the rating. Then it gets moved. Then it gets appealed, and moved back… possibly not to the same place, since the old location may have been taken… It doesn’t take walking through usecases for very long to find ways in which the ties of spatial contiguity complicate matters.
The flip side, of course, is that the discoverability of walking from one sim to another (or overflying, or whatever) can lead to serendipitous discoveries that are often the neatest moments in SL.
We’re in the midst of implementing our own handling of mature content in Metaplace, so I’ll be following this with some interest!
