Today, we learned that if you take the PS3 and tell it to scan for a network when using a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router, it will (in my case at least) frotz the router and make it stop doing anything each time you scan, bringing down your whole LAN. Many power plugs were pulled and many cable boxes and computers rebooted.
I had occasion to quote extensively from Are Microtransactions Actually the Future? in response to a post from Terra Nova which heavily referenced the word “property.” Basically, I cited the part about how all this stuff is just bits and bytes on a server, and the illusion that they are objects is just that, an illusion.
I got back some varied replies I feel compelled to repost here:
So, on the one hand, a couple of folks are making fun of Interplay for stating in an SEC filing that it would cost $75m to make Fallout Online.
On the other hand, Red 5, led by Mark Kern and made up of Blizzard vets, announced $18.5m in venture funding for what seems to essentially be a content play:
Mark Kern, Red 5’s chief executive and former team leader on “World of Warcraft,” said his California-based game studio will create original games for online game operators and distributors — much as Pixar Animation Studios did in the movie world with its animated films such as “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo.”
“Pixar really showed that you can have a content-focused strategy,” Kern said of the animated film maker that is now owned by the Walt Disney Co.
Red 5 is already working on a massively multiplayer online game for Webzen Inc. The South Korean company is financing the development of the game, which Webzen will distribute.
In some odd way, the first set of stuff is an answer to the second, and vice versa. Two great tastes that do not go together. In any case, congrats to Mark & team. 🙂
And lastly, of course, comes Clay Shirky commenting on SL — or rather, on the hype surrounding it. He does it well enough, I see no need to add comment.
This arrived yesterday. And as a result, I didn’t get to sleep until 1am. But not because I was playing games.
Except that, as I read it, he’s actually saying “when you clone WoW, please fix these interface annoyances.” And no offense, Ryan, but that’s not a very deep change (as important as interface is — and it’s incredibly important — basing clone-ness on how autoloot works seems a little bit superficial to me).
