Raph Koster

MetaverseU time capsules
March 28, 2008 Game talk
18 Comments
Henrik Bennetsen cornered everyone he could at MetaverseU and asked them a set of questions about the metaverse:
- What excites you about current metaverse technology?
- What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
- What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
- What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?
Now he’s posted all the videos of all the answers — and there’s some good stuff in there.

Here’s my answers:

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Metachat is on Facebook now too
March 27, 2008March 27, 2008 Gamemaking
22 Comments

You can get it here.

This actually connects to the same chat world as the one on MySpace, and the one on our forums. So it’s all one big happy cross-SNS virtual worldlet in Flash.

We also got a bunch of forums interested in trying to integrate a Metaplace world on their forums… it’ll be one based on Metachat to start with, though it can of course change later. It’ll be their own world, though.

Last time I mentioned this little app on here, people challenged the question of whether it was actually a world or not. Well, it supports hundreds to thousands, there’s physics, a sense of place and space, you can kick a soccer ball, interact in real time… the background could scroll, and you could have avatars instead of profile pics. So… close enough, to my mind. 🙂

BTW, we’re going to start spotlighting community members and their worlds. The first spotlight is up now — Tachevert (of WorldIV) and his world “Danser,” which is one of my favorite MP projects so far.

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Work in Progress!
March 27, 2008March 27, 2008 Misc
6 Comments

Trying to upgrade since the header file got hacked again today. Sorry for the interruptions. Hope to have things back to normal in a bit.

ETA: ok. turned the plugins back on for now. Things should look ok again. We’ll keep an eye on things and replace the header again if need be. Upgrades seem to be stalling out for no apparent reason.

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And now, the unbalanced take (the Byron Report)
March 27, 2008March 27, 2008 Game talk
35 Comments

So the UK has “accepted all recommendations” in a commissioned report by Dr. Tanya Byron, best known as a psychologist on various reality shows about troubled kids on British TV (not a knock — she does seem to be quite qualified in the psych arena). The bottom line of the report? Internet sites get a pass and “we need more education,” whereas packaged games get the BBFC ratings put on them in addition to the PEGI ratings already there. The BBFC will now have to review most games made, instead of only the couple hundred they used to.

This is a blow to the games industry — it shuffles their self-regulation efforts (PEGI) off to the back of the box, and puts governmental regulation front and center. The Times Online describes it as “cigarette-style health warnings.”

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A balanced look at violent videogames
March 26, 2008March 26, 2008 Game talk
3 Comments

It’s nice to see more balanced treatments of the complex subject of videogame violence starting to make it both into the scientific community and the educational community. I’ll have to track down this book, Grand Theft Childhood.

From the interview on Open Education:

A number of our findings went against common wisdom. One surprise was how many preteen girls played M-rated video games. About a fifth of girls rarely or never played video games. But another fifth had played Grand Theft Auto “a lot in the past six months.” Based on some of their comments, we suspect that girls play these games differently and for different reasons than boys. Since we bought into the myth that girls don’t like violent games, we didn’t recruit them for focus groups in this set of studies. We hope to talk with GTA-playing girls in future studies.

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