Matt Marshall of VentureBeat asked me to write a brief article on the CopyBot thing, and here it is: Investing time and money in virtual worlds: Caveat Emptor.

The audio is up for the NPR thing I did today: NPR : Makers of Gaming Systems Reach Out to Wider Audience.

There’s some new rules in town: the Library of Congress, based on recommendations from the Register of Copyrights, has decided that there are six new cases where circumventing the DMCA is OK for certain purposes.

One of them is for old games.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

Also on the list:
Read More “Library of Congress likes retro games”

A while ago David Brin lamented in Salon that Windows computers these days don’t come with an easy to use programming language, like BASIC. I tend to agree with him that this is a loss, as we have traded computer literacy for computer use literacy, a very different thing.

In response, a guy named Nikko Strom created Quite BASIC — Web BASIC programming. And lo, it’s neat. Who’s up for making games in it?