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.
The in-game economies of virtual worlds are being hijacked by criminals who attempt to hide their profits through the exchange of virtual currencies, Dr. Igor Muttik, a senior architect at McAfee’s Avert Labs says in a white paper entitled “Securing Virtual Worlds Against Real Attacks–The Challenges of Online Game Development.”
Rising fraud threats in virtual worlds | News – Security – CNET News.
Gosh, i am behind on reporting stuff. Anyway.Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds is out.
It’ssort of my book, because I have a chapter in it. But it isn’t really mine. 🙂 it’s more Erik Bethke’s and Erin Hoffman’s. And really, my chapter is just another reprinting of the Avatar Rights piece, which at this point is in a lot of books.
As you may or may not know, they’ve been spearheading a project called Better EULA which tackles the issues of user rights in virtual worlds (there’s a blog too). I am on a panel with them about it at AGDC in a couple of weeks.
Once upon a time, there was an acronym we used for certain sorts of virtual worlds. We called them PSW’s, for “persistent state world.”
Most virtual worlds today don’t actually have persistent state. Oh, your characters do, but not the world. In fact, the ability to affect the world has fallen dramatically since the days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online. M59 featured shifting political balance, and UO had full world state persistence. If someone killed Bob the baker, he was gone. If you dropped something on the ground, it stayed there until it rusted away (or more likely, someone came along and grabbed it — and that someone was just as likely to be a monster as it was a player).
It took half an hour to 45 minutes to save all of the world state in UO, by the way. Which meant rollbacks to your character if the server crashed. 🙂
If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.
Ben Smith’s Blog: Goldfarb keeps experience points – Politico.com.
Just Leap In is yet another browser-embedded 3d environment using a plugin. This space is certainly getting crowded. Read More “Just Leap In: new browser-embedded 3d world”
