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.
Virtual Worlds Forum Europe Conference Programme has the scoop. I’ll be on a panel, and I hear we may be doing a small demo…
Also, don’t forget that I will be at Virtual Worlds Fall next week, too.
Yes, the traveling is wearing me down. 🙂
Over at the Cisco Virtual worlds blog, Christian Renaud is unhappy about the various bogus numbers being tossed around for virtual world populations (pointing out that if you blindly add up all the figures being reported, you end up at about a half a billion people, more than the population of all of North America). So far, so good — after all, I have complained about this myself.
But he, like Moorgard recently, is upset by the use of terms in the industry right now:
There needs to be an agreed common taxonomy of virtual worlds. You can slice and dice the market by 2D vs. 3D, web-based vs. client software, apples vs. oranges, but we need to find a common set of language by which to differentiate the QQ and Cyworlds from the ActiveWorlds and Kanevas from the Metaplaces and Toontowns. Until then, you have emoticon-on-steroids avatar chat in IM and Social Networking sites being compared apples to apples with narrative driven virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Runescape. It’s not apples and apples at that point, it’s apples and orangutans.
Now, while I have no idea why Metaplace is lumped in with Toontown (OK, we get the message, we’ll redo the site’s graphics!) I have to disagree somewhat with this point… apples and orangutans, really? For systems that share over 99% of their core technical architecture? Surely at most we’re talking the difference between chimps and humans. And in practice, I think there’s a good case to be made that we’re really talking about the differences between a college professor and a pro athlete.
I learned about Mini Friday from this Guardian article today, which is perhaps misleadingly titled “why Habbo held back on a mobile world.” Misleading because, well, they have 110,000 registered users in one already!
Habbo has held back launch of its own mobile product because of concerns over data costs and the quality of the user experience on mobiles, he said.
But it looks pretty good! Very much in keeping with the pixel graphics that Habbo uses. Looks like right now, it only works on specific Nokia phones.
Virtual Worlds News reports on yet another virtual world coming out of China, this one called UWorld, from a company called UOneNet. I’m struck by how many of the latest virtual worlds look kinda like There.com did at the beginning: all plastered over with brands.
Burning Man these days is starting to look a little more like Vegas.
SF REVIEWS.NET: Halting State / Charles Stross
The story opens in the very near future in Edinburgh, where police sergeant Sue Smith is called in to investigate a bank robbery. The catch is, the robbery has taken place, not in the real world, but in gamespace, in the online environment of Avalon Four, an enormously popular MMO. A band of marauding orcs plus one big dragon have virtually invaded a virtual bank and virtually made off with all manner of virtual loot. It seems absurd at first, until the possibility of very real corporate espionage is raised. In-game assets can make you real-world money. (I’m a casual gamer, but not an MMO guy, and I was personally stunned to hear some years ago that people were making some pretty damn good coin selling fully-developed high-level Everquest characters on eBay.) The bad news for Hayek Associates, the company whose job it is to oversee security issues for Avalon Four, is that once word gets out of the game’s vulnerability and the loss of so much digital loot, the game loses players by the millions and everyone’s stock prices take a nosedive.
Oh, I definitely have to read this. 🙂 Glasshouse is still in my backlog pile…
