SXSW: Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

 Posted by (Visited 5986 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 102008
 

I’m not at SXSW (we have way too much going on here at work!) but there’s a great liveblog of a panel I wish I had been at, on Virtual Worlds News, about “Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds”.

Wu: Will games and virtual worlds eventually compete based not on art and storyline, but on who can offer the most rights to players?

I hope the answer is “yes.” What’s more, I hope that at some point there’s a minimum standard accepted industrywide and enforced by an industry trade body. As in, companies join the trade body and as part of that they agree to uphold a base set of practices and policies as a condition of membership.

A new year, a new millenium… whee!

 Posted by (Visited 11818 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Jan 072001
 

Let’s see, what’s up.

I’ll be speaking at the end of January at Entertainment in the Interactive Age. The official invite looks like this:

The University of Southern California’s

Annenberg Center for Communication

&

The Interactive Digital Software Association

Present

Entertainment in the Interactive Age

Join leading game designers, critics, researches and educators for a

two-day exploration of the art and craft of interactive entertainment

and game design.

For conference information and to register online, visit our web site

at:

http://www.annenberg.edu/interactive-age

Some of the other folks who will be there include Geoff Zatkin, Warren Spector, Will Wright (keynote for him, of course!), Drs. Greg & Ray from Bioware, Janet Murray of Hamlet on the Holodeck, Hal Barwood, Tim Schafer, and more. It should be a lot of fun, and it’ll be nice to see some of these guys at a place other than E3 or GDC! The project is going well, but I can’t talk about it. But check out the official Star Wars Galaxies website for info. I have been posting there under the name Holocron. Yet another handle to add to the ever-lengthier list… *sigh* I have a bunch of updates to the Online World Timeline to do, but I didn’t get it done for this update. I kinda want to rearrange how I did the timeline, since it seems to have turned into a somewhat more widely used resource than I expected.

Crossroads of WWII Online recently reprinted a little thing I wrote on monthly fees being necessary for online games as part of their FAQ. I hear it also made the news at Evil Avatar. Maybe I should add it to this site too. 🙂

Got a note asking to use Declaring the Rights of Players as a debate topic in a debate society on Cybertown. That should be interesting, but I never heard about it again…

Recent News

 Posted by (Visited 10165 times)  Game talk, Writing  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Nov 022000
 

As usual, I did the annual live storytelling thing on LegendMUD this year. Every year since 1994, I’ve gone to the graveyard there, and in front of an audience, improvised a spooky story on the spot. This year the story was called Sugarheart, and I’ve posted it here under Stories/Live.

If you like these stories, head on over to and check out the spooky story contest. Alice is one of my favorite online comic strips, and voting ends today–the prize is some original artwork from the strip, I believe.

I got permission from the Rantings of Lum the Mad site to reprint the Roundtable on Fiction in MMORPGs so look for that under the Gaming/Talks section. I also reprinted the RPGVault interview I did a little over a month ago. You can find it under Gaming/Talks, as usual.

I’ve also updated the Online Worlds Timeline with a bunch of new info from folks like Daniel James (formerly of Avalon & Middle-Earth Online), David R. Woolley (long-time developer on PLATO), and a great set of dates for Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project supplide by KaVir aka Richard Woolcock. And more… so if you’re into the whole history bit like I am, you may want to check out the latest there. There’s even one new law, named Dundee’s Law, since he spotted it fly by on Mud-Dev.

Lastly, today I found a UO emulator shard that is using the “Advice to Virtual World Admins” from the article on Declaring the Rights of Players as the basis of their code of conduct. Yipes.

Recent News

 Posted by (Visited 10268 times)  Game talk, Misc, Writing  Tagged with: , ,
Aug 272000
 

Well, a major new essay is up. I hope I don’t get in too much trouble over it. 🙂 We’ll see! You can find it under Gaming/Essays/Declaring the Rights of Players.

I have several big updates to do to the Online World Timeline; I just got in a bunch of new data on PLATO to incorporate.

The machine the website is hosted on moved locations today, from Austin to Chicago. The domain names should still work fine, but the IP address has changed.

There’s now a search facility on the main LegendMUD site which also spiders these pages, so if you need to search the site, you can do it from there.

It’s time to submit talk proposals to the Game Developer’s Conference again. Any developers out there who have requests for topics to cover, post on the Guestbook and I’ll see if I can get it past Alan Yu! 🙂

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