This post starts out being about very gamey things like damage per second, and ends up on a speculative note. So if you’re the sort who comes here for stuff about social virtual worlds, read on, because this is relevant to you too. 🙂

Over at The Cesspit, Abalieno argues that “the mudflation from the perspective of those who build these kinds of games isn’t THE PROBLEM. The mudflation is THE SOLUTION.” The logic is simple:

• it’s inherent in the model
• consumed content leads to shared experiences, and being able to go back and see something that was once powerful and is now trivial helps that, and both of these feelings are core to the value offered by this style of game
• by rendering older content “useless” from a game point of view you re-establish the horizon for players, making the game have fresh goals

All of this is true. But…

Read More “More on ‘flation and the future”

Nabeel Hyatt has an interesting article today asking whether 2007 is the year that gaming gets greater attention in the mass media as a result of common metrics shifting off of impressions and towards time spent. He has some neat graphs showing Pogo versus YouTube on various axes, such as impressions, time spent, and a quickie ersatz “rating” he cooked up.

Read More “Is 2007 the year of the online game?”

Ah,, let’s just mash up the copyright violations into one big ball and see what happens… World of Warcraft Dance Dance Revolution.

I should make a category for Areae-specific stuff! Not that I want it to take over the blog, of course. I didn’t bother linking to every bit of coverage from the announcement because there was so much of it. But this interview with the Guardian ended up being much about overall topic than about specifically the company and the project. Longtime blog readers will probably see some stuff that echoes things I have said before…

Lest anyone doubt that major media companies are serious about the virtual space, I have to point out that MTV’s announcement of ‘Virtual Hills’ means that they will shortly have more MMO titles launched than Cryptic or Blizzard (well, unless you count CoV as a full game). Disney’s at three, which puts it ahead of much of the pack and tied with Turbine. EA has launched four and SOE five. In NC’s case, it depends whether you count the Korean ones and the “casual” games…

More importantly, this is MTV’s second one in six months. At this rate, you do the math.