• The Sunday Poem: Flicker

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
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    It’s hard to understand, these days, how prized writing once was. Everywhere we turn there is verbal diarrhea, an endless stream of twittering: there’s blog diaries and fan fiction and political ideologues, there’s spin and truthiness and position papers, there’s stories that perhaps don’t deserve to be told. We live in a world that is abundant in writing, abundant in books, with little sense of how once each carefully formed letter was a bulwark against the collapse of civilization.

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  • Atariverse?

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    According to this article, Atari may be contemplating a user-generated content world. This is an interesting step for a publisher of IP; after all, part of why Sony’s Home is limited to user content mostly in private spaces is basically to prevent IP from being rampantly abused. Be interesting to see what comes of this.

  • Alternatives To Second Life

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 20 Comments

    Onder Skall has a nice post up entitled Alternatives To Second Life – Uber Edition which runs down lots of “metaversey’ style worlds. There are a few historical ones he missed that are still running, I think, and he missed a few upcoming ones that I think are of interest as well: Whirled and Ogoglio.

    More interesting is that list of three core requirements that he sees an SL-like world as needing to have:

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  • SL gambling question hits Korea

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    It wasn’t that long ago that we saw some Second Life players identifying the core characteristics that define, to their minds, what a metaverse title actually is. The list I saw once, but cannot find, included “users retaining ownership of IP” and “ability to cash out.”

    But today, JoongAng Daily points out that not only is online gambling banned in Korea, but that all sorts of online businesses are:

    In Korea, however, making money for commercial purposes through games is illegal. Revised laws that go into effect on April 20 have stronger restrictions on offline trade of cyber items.

    Individual players can sell unwanted items offline, since that can be seen as a part of game-playing, but if they start making money for money’s sake, it becomes illegal,” said Kim Gyu-yeong, an official at the Culture Ministry.

    No doubt the case will be made that Second Life and similar metaverses are not games, and that therefore the regulations should not apply, but I don’t know that this will make the Korean government any softer on the issue, given the Sea Story scandal.