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.
I am flying off to New York in about two hours for State of Play VI. If I have the chance, I will liveblog some of the sessions… but last few conferences, I failed miserably at that, so we’ll see. 🙂
I’ll be giving a keynote all about Metaplace, and also be on a panel on the issue of whether or not virtual worlds have hit a design plateau.
I plan to be live in Metaplace tomorrow around 9:15am Eastern time, so if anyone wants to show up in Central around then, you can wave hi to all the conference folks!
Why is this important now? After all, MMORPGs give you real human interaction on a grand scale. Why simulate it?
While I am a huge fan of the potential of virtual worlds, I don’t think this kind of experimenting could be done in an online environment using other players. MMOs aren’t a recreation of life as The Sims is. Nobody is in danger of starvation, nobody is living a difficult life in a virtual world, and if you tried roleplaying it, you wouldn’t get genuine responses.
We’ve worked hard to make Metaplace as easy to use as possible, but there’s still people with different learning styles and who prefer to be shown something rather than learn from tutorials or experimentation.
Users Chooseareality and KStarfire are running interactive classes on basic building, using the Behavior Tool (one of the coolest Metaplace features, IMHO), editing the map, etc. The next one is on Friday, and is about
…how to use the tools under “Shape The World”, such as resizing and coloring your map, place properties, tiles, camera settings, and terrain tools.
You have to sign up for these in advance, because these guys have made very cool interactive classrooms for them, where each user gets their own “workstation” to try stuff out.
I don’t think I have written about the Behavior Tool before… The cool thing about the Behavior Tool is that it gives an easy way for non-scripters to add behaviors to objects without needing to code. Not just stuff like “play YouTube video” (though that’s in there, of course!) but also things like AI behaviors, web integration, game system stuff — whatever.
What’s more, many of the scripters create behaviors for this tool and put them on the marketplace. So you can buy something like a movement system, or an aggro behavior, or a dialogue system, and attach it to objects this way. Scripters can decide what fields are exposed for casual users, and they show up as simple sliders, type in fields, color pickers, that sort of thing, so the behavior can be easy to use. There’s a nice Wiki tutorial on using the BT here, and Lunarraid, one of our users, has been adding tutorials for each of the standard behaviors.
Alice and Kev is a marvelously well-written story in blog form documenting the lives of two Sims who are homeless: Kev, a father who suffers from mental illness (and who is also a jerk), and his daughter Alice, who is a good person but also rather unlucky.
It’s rather amazing to read, and the screenshots really make it. Go check it out.
Toby Buckell, author of Crystal Rain, Sly Mongoose, Ragamuffin, and the sixth Halo novel, The Cole Protocol, and lots of other work, will be live on TheStage in Metaplace tomorrow at 2pm Pacific as part of our Creative Series. I’ve written before about his books, so you know I am excited about this. 🙂
To attend, just click this link (register first, so you don’t go through the newbie tutorial at the last minute). TheStage is linked off of the theater in Metaplace Central.
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of The Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist.
