• Ray Bradbury, RIP

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 2 Comments

    It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

    Douglas Spaulding, twelve, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream. Lying in his third-story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him, riding high in the June wind, the grandest tower in town. At night, when the trees washed together, he flashed his gaze like a beacon from this lighthouse in all directions over swarming seas of elm and oak and maple. Now . . .

    “Boy,” whispered Douglas.

    – Dandelion Wine

  • GDC Online 2012 Call for Speakers

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    I’m on the Advisory Board again this year. Submit your talks!

    GDC Online 2012 Call for Speakers Open through May 2

    The call for submissions to present lectures, roundtables, full day tutorials and
    panels at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Online 2012 is
    now open through Wednesday, May 2nd.

    GDC Online focuses on the development of connected games including
    social network titles, free-to-play web games, kid-friendly online
    titles, large-scale MMOs, and beyond. The event returns to Austin, Texas
    on October 9-11, 2012.

    The advisory board is seeking submissions from social & online game
    professionals with expertise in any of the following tracks: Business
    & Marketing, Design, Production, Programming and Customer Experience.
    We are also accepting submissions for the four summit programs; Game
    Narrative Summit, Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, Game Dev Start-Up
    Summit and GDC Gamification Summit.

    *Please see our submission guidelines and full details here:
    http://www.gdconline.com/conference/c4p/index.html

    *Submit a proposal here:
    http://online2012.gdc4p.com/

  • Do auction houses suck?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 62 Comments

    Once upon a time, there was a game set in a science fiction universe where the economy was very important. Its name was not Eve.

    In this game, players could, if they so chose, run a business. They could

    • designate a building as a shop
    • hire an NPC bot to stand in it
    • give the bot items to hold for sale
    • specify the prices at which those items would sell
    • customize the bot in a variety of ways
    • make use of advertising facilities to market the shop
    • decorate the shop any way they pleased

    With this basic facility, emergent gameplay tied to the way that the crafting system worked resulted in players who chose to run shops being able to do things Ike build supply chains, manage regular inventory, develop regular customer bases, build marketing campaigns, and in general, play a lemonade stand writ large.

    The upshot was that at peak, fully half the players in Star Wars Galaxies ran a shop.
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