This list of recent funding deals surrounding games is fascinating precisely becaue of what it shows about where the money is going. Doing the tallies:, what I see is a few mobile content development companies, a lot of mobile content aggregators, several content development studios and companies from outside the game industry making games, and a heck of a lot of game ad companies.
Bonnie Ruberg cornered me for an interview at the tables on the third floor of GDC. It wasn’t necessarily the clearest place for an interview, and it was near the end of the day and I was a little scatterbrained. The result is this interview on Gamasutra, where some of the transcript makes it sound like I was either contradicting myself or mumbling. Probably both. 🙂
A lot of the content will be familiar to folks who follow the blog regularly, I suspect. Nonetheless, there are probably a few things I say that will tick off someone somewhere, particularly on page 3.
One note, though — as usual, I got credited for a game that I don’t really regard as being mine at all. In this case, it was Field Commander, in the lead-in blurb article. It’s not fair to the folks who worked hard on that game to give me any credit — I didn’t do a lick of design or code on that game.
One more year, and our marriage is old enough to drive. Of course, one more year and our relationship will be able to vote. 🙂
Happy anniversary, Kristen! I love you.
(Hmm, it’s supposed to be crystal or watches. We would never use the crystal, and you don’t wear a watch…)
The BBC is reporting about a German police investigation into “virtual child pornography” in Second Life; in Germany, virtual depictions of underage sex acts are illegal. Linden Lab is, of course, co-operating.
Edit: There’s also this report on similar concerns in the Netherlands, and this one about virtual rape concerns in Belgium.
There’s something that almost seems self-defeating about it. 🙂 Basically, a guy is trying to set up a showcase area, a “World’s Fair” thing, for virtual worlds, in Second Life. A booth for WoW, a booth for EVE, and so on. Read about it on his blog.
Some of the biases and assumptions present in the project are certainly visible:
For each virtual world, a legal counseling service will be offered to open a business, to advertise, to start a commercial or cultural project.
I have trouble seeing those sorts of projects in WoW. 🙂
On the other hand, the YouTube based festival of virtual world travel videos seems like a nice touch.
