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.

  • Virtual worlds, visiting rights and restraining orders from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 13 Comments

    Great thought-provoking post by Aleks Krotoski here.

    …now that I’ve covered the reasons hanging out with people in WoW may be more significant than hanging out in person, I’ll get to my point.

    What happens when parents get divorced? Say Parent A is given custody of Child and Parent B has visiting rights at weekends or holidays. Parent A doesn’t play Online Game X but Parent B does, and plays for a couple of hours every night with Child. Does that undermine the judge’s custody decision? Child isn’t spending time with Parent A when s/he is hanging in Norrath with Parent B, so if Parent A losing out on important time with Child while Parent B and Child are experiencing enhanced shared experience, what implications does this have for future custody rulings?

    And that’s not the doozy, either. The doozy is the one about restraining orders and what they could mean for virtual world administration.

  • Table Tennis, I suck

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 16 Comments

    Xbox 360 Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis I just lost multiple straight sets to my kids in Rockstar Table Tennis. Ugh, that was humiliating. Even worse is the fact that the kids have never played it for real at all. There I am trying to pull off my spin serves, and they just stand at the table, hit buttons, and crush me. I can’t seem to get past their octopus-like arms, and meanwhile they drive me ten feet back from the edge of the table, then cross me up and kill me.

    The final nail in the coffin, and what made me get up and post, was when Elena asked “Hey, you hit the net! How do you hit the net? And you hit the underside of the table! How do you do that?”

    You don’t want to know. I take some meager consolation in the thought that someday, your nine-year-old will do the equivalent to you.

     

     

  • Portable identity

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    3pointD.com picks up on the discussion on horses and governance (alas, without using the horse metaphor!) and offers,

    The alternative is a distributed metaverse in which a series of online spaces exist not in a contiguous pile but as loosely connected locations on a metaversal web, much as Web sites are connected today. Some of these would be public, some would be private, some would be restricted to a certain group of people. Instead of one administrator, you have thousands or millions. Instead of your inventory and avatar and all that’s associated with it existing in one place, dependent on that place’s back-end, those things exist in portable fashion.
    Read More “Portable identity”