Metaplace game jam
Go follow @metaplace on Twitter… we’re doing a little 6 hour game jam, and we’ll have updates posted throughout the rest of the day. It starts nowish… 🙂
Game talk
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.
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EU says games good for kids
A report from the European parliament concluded yesterday that computer games are good for children and teach them essential life skills.
via Video games are good for children – EU report | Technology | The Guardian.
Saw it via a Tweet from Steven Johnson this morning. I asked him, “Do you think our books were read as part of the debate?” Or those of Jim Gee, Marc Prensky, etc… The article does say experts in games were brought in from numerous countries, so maybe.
There is discussion of the issue of stimulating violence, but the conclusion was that legislation was not warranted.
More interesting in terms of online, which is poorly regulated right now, was the notion of a mandatory way for users to report online games to PEGI:
The growing market for online games needed to be better controlled, the MEPs said, and online games should include a red button on the screen which children or parents could click to disable the game.
Manders said the button could also be linked to the administrators of the Pan-European Game Information age rating system, so that when a game player presses it, PEGI is informed and can investigate potentially disturbing games that are available through the internet.
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The EVE upset
Edit: I don’t actually play EVE, just watch from afar. I’ve corrected some errors below that players of EVE mentioned to me. 🙂
A few days ago, everyone wanted me to write about the massive destruction of the Band of Brothers alliance in EVE Online, and how Goonsquad GoonSwarm finally triumphed via an act of betrayal.
But honestly, another day, another giant EVE scam. Ho hum. Is there anything really good to say about this?
For the uninitiated: there was a huge aliance named Band of Brothers. There was another clan named Goonsquad GoonSwarm who hated them (edit: well, everyone, really) and worked against them, but was not nearly as big or powerful. Goonsquad GoonSwarm would recruit BoB members in order to scam them. A BoB member joined under these false pretenses, but then chose sides and rather than be scammed, asked to join for real — and offered up BoB as his price of entry. He was a high-level admin of BoB, and he basically disbanded the whole thing, destroying it from within, and Goonsquad GoonSwarm made piles of virtual money.
The most intriguing aspect of the whole thing to me isn’t the way it happened, but the overall social dynamics of it — the fact that it was completely inevitable. There’s been lots of talk about how this was basically a sort of exploit, that one person should not have enough power to destroy the work of thousands. But I’ll make the case that this is exactly what CCP should want to have happen.
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Great primer on comic book balloons and lettering
Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering exhaustively goes through dozens of variations of word balloons and lettering choices in them.
I have often argued that in dealing with chat bubbles in MMOs, we should just steal these conventions, because so many people are familiar with them just by osmosis, even if they are not comics readers (many of these conventions are used in the funny pages too).
We had huge debates on SWG about whether to use “plain chat bubbles” or to invent something that was styled more like Star Wars. Plain won, in the end — and we ended up supporting regular, shout, thought, whisper, musical, caption, and more.
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Twitter, status, and /tell
Hasn’t It Always Been About Status? is a little article tracing the status update mania (such as Twitter) to AIM status messages.
I have now spent two days with Twitter, and I have decided that it is basically guild chat in Internet-the-MMO. It’s a form of /grouptell, and we’re all out slaying bookmarks instead of orcs.