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.
This is for the geeks among you. A while back I was interviewed by Nick Landry for a lengthy article on XNA (along with a bunch of other well-known developers, all of whom have far more experince with XNA than I!), and today he tells me that CoDe Magazine has posted it on the web.
Virtual Worlds News has an article about ads to kids in VWs, stating that the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK has decided that it is OK to market to kids within VWs as long as the ads are happening on “sponsored land or sponsored activities.” Basically, stuff in the “public realm” such as lobbies is restricted.
Given that most of the kids’ worlds are entirely sponsored at this point, this is a dubious distinction. What exactly constitutes a public lobby in a branded world where every bit of art is branded, and you can log in and play for free? What about sponsored land that is right over there and that you can see from where you’re standing?
We as a culture and industry need to think hard about this sort of issue, because it’s basically a trap laid for us by circumstance, just waiting to blow back and cause bad press and ill feelings from parents.
Erik Bethke’s LiveJournal has a recent post stating that he’s offering a $5000 bounty to those who can help him draft the legal form of an avatar rights document for GoPets. Among the clauses he intends the service to sign up to:
Maybe I’ve found my next prediction: over the next few years, more and more services will find themselves pushes towards adopting some form of the Avatar Rights document, in part because more and more platforms will be open, permit user businesses, and in general be treated as places and not games.
So, what would you change and update about the Declaration, given that 7 years have passed?
Totilo strikes again, witha great interview of Jonathan Blow.
…I feel like unearned rewards are false and meaningless, yet so many people spend their lives chasing easy/unearned rewards. So there is a very conscious decision that you only get collectibles in “Braid” when you solve a puzzle, and you only get one per puzzle. Some of the puzzles are easy, some are hard; but you did something very explicit to get the reward. It’s not like “Mario” and every other game since then, when there are gold coins sprinkled everywhere, and you get them just by walking along a path or jumping up to some blocks, and that satisfies your reward-seeking reflex for now and pacifies you into continuing to play the game. I actually think that Skinnerian reward scheduling in general (which you see in most modern game design, MMOs being the canonical example) is unethical and games should not do it…
