Game talk

Nate Wienert alerts me to his project GameGum, another “YouTube for Games” site. It’s been around for a year, aggregates Flash games, and most interestingly, does revenue sharing with those who upload games by splitting the AdSense revenue from a given game’s earnings. Up to 50% can go to the most popular games. The suite of community tools seems fairly complete: ratings, reviews, favorites, and so on. The now-ubiquitous Digg-like “fresh list” is right there on the front page.

At this point, the whole Flash game sharing site thing seems to me to be getting a little crowded. 🙂 What’s interesting to me is that so many of these seem able to sustain a viable community.

Just got this email announcement for VW2007. Alas, I won’t be there (I have a prior commitment for ETech — I’ll post about that when the details are final) but Areae will have John Donham there. 🙂

Virtual Worlds Conference – email update – February 2, 2007 Virtual Worlds Conference takes place March 28 – 29, 2007 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.

1. Keynote address by Matt Bostwick, SVP, Franchise Development at MTV Music Group
2. Featured Speakers Announced
3. A Thank You to VW 2007 Sponsors
4 Early Registration Ends February 23rd – Save $400

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Peacemaker is out. For those who haven’t been following this serious game effort, it’s a title where you take the role of PM of either Israel or the Palestine Authority and attempt to make everyone happy enough to bring about lasting peace.

There are two good articles on it already: Ernest Adamds at Gamasutra and Sott Jennings at Broken Toys. Different takes, and they reference different classic games: Balance of Power versus Hidden Agenda.

The fact that we only have three significant games in this genre in 17 years is a little depressing.

I probably need to get this guitar-based music toy for the Nintendo DS. Press a direction on the DPad to reach different chords, and strum with the stylus. It’s an import only, but it’s not region-locked…

The default chord layout is missing the B and Bm chords. What’s up with that? No way to blues in E by default!

Here’s some videos of it:
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Nick Koranda kindly provided the MUD-Dev2 list with a full copy of the original MUD-Dev mailing list archive — 31,406 messages, 62 megabytes as a zip.

Edit: it occurs to me that likely there are many readers who do not know why this matters. MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design — which was, of course mostly MUDs, but folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well. Many of the snippets on the site come from there, and combing through these very archives was the source of the original Laws of Online World Design. There’s a lot of accumulated wisdom there.

You can get it from me here: Compleat MUD-Dev archive (62MB zip)

Or from Nick at: http://mkhh.net/MUD-Archive.zip

Edit: also mirrored now here.

For giggles, here’s the first, last, and median messages:

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