• Club Cooee: 3D Avatar Chat & Virtual World Messenger

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    Club Cooee went open beta today… and it looks like a better-done Lively, but running on your desktop as a widget. Basically, it turns the VW experience into a desktop IM client. Or vice versa, perhaps — they describe themselves first and foremost as a messenger client.

    Looks like it’s free, depending entirely on the sale of virtual currency for monetization (they run a two-currency system, like most virtual worlds do today). You can buy items and animations, and build your own rooms to some degree. My favorite feature, though, is drag and drop sharing of music and pictures from your desktop.

    There’s gaming pedigree here — the company was founded by the guys who did The Settlers and AquaNox.

  • The Enigmatrix: another diagram of games & stuff

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    The Complex Universe of Games and Puzzles, Simplified, claims Wired. I think I disagree mightily with many many of the links and clusters (code and math are way more tightly related than that! And I can’t tell why they see Board Games and Games as separate nodes. And…

    But it’s a cool visualization, and there are lots of cool gems hidden away. Ah, look, there’s Sprouts, a game I always forget the rules to.

  • Google 3D Web plugin

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    Add one more competitor to the race to create the standard for web-delivered 3d. This time, it’s Google, with a new API called O3D.

    The O3D plugin leverages hardware accelerated rendering, which means that it is powered by the GPU and can deliver strong rendering performance. The API supports loading 3D models, much like Mozilla’s high-level C3DL library. Google has published several open source demos which show how the API can be used to build interactive 3D Web applications with JavaScript. One of the demos even features a JavaScript physics engine.

    — Google joins effort for 3D Web standard with new plugin, API – Ars Technica.

    It’s not compatible with Mozilla’s Khronos effort, but Google says they intend it to converge over the course of a few years. And yes, it is fully cross-platform. There’s a shader language (again, non-standard, doesn’t match HLSL or Cg), and of course it supports loading SketchUp as well as from Max and Maya. It also can run inside an OpenSocial gadget, or run offline in Gears.

    It’s a developer release only, found here. But it’s very worth keeping an eye on. Google has to get it adopted, of course, and that will take using powerful distribution leverage, the way that Flash uses YouTube and Microsoft uses NetFlix and Windows Update to push Silverlight.

    Here’s a video.

  • A Model of Play

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    A Model of Play is a fascinating poster (available as a PDF or as images) that takes what seems like a very game-grammar point of view on the concept of play — even freeform play.

    In play, one of the primary goals is to have fun — to continue engaging in the conversation that creates fun. Individuals choose the means for achieving that goal; they choose the topic of conversation, for example, which game to play. Within a topic, they choose different strategies and pursue a series of sub-goals, adjusting means according to their effectiveness. Goals and sub-goals and associated means form a tree (or web) of possibilities for action.

    Among the grammar principles that are mentioned is the notion that play always requires two, even if the second person is a “virtual person.” The notion that interactivity is inherently a conversation can be traced back to at least Chris Crawford, of course.

    Also cool is the “step by step” logic version found here, which builds the poster argument by argument.

  • Flash on TVs

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Just briefly noting that the Open Screen Initiative, which I have mentioned before (1, 2), seems to be moving into higher gear.

    The company will on Monday announce its latest version of its Flash multimedia platform that will essentially put its technology in Internet connected TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and other digital home devices. The main purpose of the TV and consumer electronics optimized Flash is to allow viewers to see high-definition video, interactive applications and new user interfaces right on their TVs.

    As part of the announcement, the company revealed a number of partners that plan to use the technology, including, Intel, Comcast, Disney Interactive, Netflix, Atlantic Records, and the New York Times Company.

    …Developers will also be able to create “widgets” for TVs to help bring Web content onto the TV screen. Widgets are specially designed Web applications that can easily be added to consumer electronics devices.

    — Adobe’s Flash comes to TVs, set-top boxes | Digital Media – CNET News.