• David Eddings RIP

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 14 Comments

    The Guardian is reporting that David Eddings has died.

    I stopped reading Eddings long ago, but for me mention of him or The Belgariad (books 1-3, books 4 & 5) will always conjure up sundrenched days in Barbados, where I lived when I first read him. We haunted Cave Shepherd (a duty-free department store) on Broad Street searching for imported American paperbacks, because most bookstores in Barbados carried just “beach reading” at the time, and that meant almost nothing a budding geek would read.

    They were sunny books, in the end, part of that wave of light fantasy in the late 70s and 80s when there was a lot less gore and a lot more humor in your swordplay (well, except for the Thomas Covenant books, which I read at the same time). I remember a frisson of awe when I thought that The Prophecy that guided the action in the novel (unusually, a speaking character in the books) was actually the author himself talking straight to his protagonist. I also recall my disappointment when it became clear that the book wasn’t nearly as gutsy as that. By the time we got to The Malloreon (books 1-3, books 4 & 5), my writerly mind had started mapping the action chapter by chapter, noting that there was actually the same set of characters and even broadly the same set of actions occurring in the same order — talk about a formula!

    But it doesn’t matter — like so many other books, they were perfect for an age, and an ageless time in this case — 15 years old and bicycling around, hacking away at some game programming, a light introduction to metafiction and a paperback in my back pocket.

  • RezEd Podcast: Metaplace, Quest Atlantis

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    I’m on the MediaSnackers Rezed Podcast#33 today, for maybe five minutes worth of talk about Metaplace, particularly uses for education. The bulk of the podcast though, is about the fascinating project Quest Atlantis out of the Indiana University School of Education.

    For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company). In making these decisions, students engage in projective consequentiality: they have to consider what their use of particular tools tells them about the context that they are working with. After making a recommendation, students travel 20 years forward in game time, and see the results of their recommendations (experiential consequentiality). At that point students are asked to reflect on the implications of their disciplinary recommendations on the context, thus serving to re-couple content with context.

  • Worlds.com patent update

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Virtual Worlds News has a report that tomorrow may see some developments in the Worlds.com patent case; apparently Article One Partners, the folks who were crowdsourcing finding prior art, will be posting something…

    …announcing the outcome of a Patent Validity Study it conducted on the Worlds.com complaint.

    “With verification of outside counsel, Article One Partners has identified prior art that can show the Worlds.com patent to be invalid,” the organization said in a statement. The group said it would post the prior art on its web site, although at press time the art had yet to be posted.

  • Defining persistence better!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    Still confused about this use of the word persistence; coming here with the dictionary meaning and trying to understand a seeming contradictory concept.

    — David, in a comment in the earlier post

    The technical sense of the term arises from “persisting something to the runtime database.” The base states are usually in a template database of some sort, along with all the other static data. The template database is read-only as the game is running, and only developers get access to it. The runtime database is where everything that players do goes. (See here and here for more).

    The base data in the static template database doesn’t count as “persistent” or “persisted” because it’s actually baked into the world’s rules in some fashion, as a starter state. Delete everything in the runtime database, and that map will still be there, usually. You will have playerwiped WoW, but the world of WoW will still be there: every loot drop, every monster, every quest, every house.

    The virtual world definition of the term means “to save changes on top of the base dataset.” So a base character starts with no real gear and newb stats, and a designer sets that up in the template database as the definition of a newbie character. But we save their advancement. That’s persisting a character to the runtime database. The stats and gear might go up OR down, but they are different from the base.
    Read More “Defining persistence better!”