Blerp & Minsh: layering the web

 Posted by (Visited 10174 times)  Game talk, Misc  Tagged with: , , ,
May 132009
 

Blerp, a new property of the RocketOn folks, is a new social network with a twist. RocketOn, like Weblin, is a plugin that lets you layer stuff on top of the web. It was for avatars and MMOs, but now it’s been repurposed as a way to annotate the web. You get a frame around your browser that lets you drop text, pictures, and so on on various webpages. People you are linked to get to see the annotations, and you can slurp your networks from Facebook, twitter, etc. Blerp’s just opened its alpha, so check it out here.

Minsh is a little different; it adds a virtual worldish layer to Twitter by representing the people you follow as fish. They use little chat bubbles to tweet, and you can click directly on them to reply. I suspect that using this tool will drive users further towards synchronous use of Twitter… It’s in closed alpha, but here’s a video:

The borders of user created content

 Posted by (Visited 10834 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jan 072009
 

SusanC has a comment on a Terra Nova thread in which she observes,

So the main criterion for being considered is that there is some kind of creative expression involved. I’m OK with that, although it opens the door for arguments about exactly how much creative input is needed to qualify. Text chat, instant messages, and blog postings (like this one) clearly can be used for creative expression: so maybe these are within the paper’s scope, provided that they are sufficiently creative.

— comment on Terra Nova: New Paper on UGC.

It is an interesting problem, actually. There is hardly a site these days of any sort on the Net that does not support some form of user-generated content. But by unspoken convention, we seem to not consider chat and other basic synchronous social interaction to be the same sort of user created content that uploaded models and textures are.

I think the reason is interesting and subtle, and marks out a distinction between “extending the possibility space” and, well, “not.” So here go 1700 words… Continue reading »

From the Mailbag: hacking DDO

 Posted by (Visited 15980 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 212008
 

Got this via the website’s mail form:

Hi, Sorry to bother you, I was wondering if you would be able to help me. I play an online MMO Dungeons & Dragons Online and a program called windows packet editor recently came to my attention 🙂 I was wondering if you’d be able to spare a few moments to give me a better understanding of WPE and how it can be used to *ahem* alter packets of data so I might be able to say duplicate items or alter certain in game values in DDO. Kindest regards, [name redacted]

Sure, here’s the answer:

Continue reading »

How to hack an MMO

 Posted by (Visited 79872 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Apr 172008
 

Given the recent hack to the blog, and also given the recent news of the decompiled Eve Online client, it seemed like a good time to go over some of the ways in which a virtual world gets hacked.

The interesting thing, of course, is that all the hacks I am going to talk about are actually not hacking the virtual world at all; they instead attack the client, which is your window into the world, and also your waldo, your means of exercising control over what happens in that world. And that’s because…

The client is in the hands of the enemy.

— The Laws of Online World Design

You’ve probably heard that before — I wasn’t the first one to say it, but it constantly gets misattributed to me. That particular phrasing may have originated with Kelton Flinn, but I am sure many of us came up with it independently.

Continue reading »

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