Disclaimer All contents of this site are ©Copyright 2006- 2011 by Adam C.F. MacDonald. All rights reserved.
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December 11th, 2006 | Filed under: GamesAnyone who has spent time in EQ2′s new expansion will know the difference in landscape of it versus the original starting zones of Antonica and the Commonlands. The biggest difference is that the spaces are constrained. There is no horizon, but a closed series of ramps, levels and disruptive models that make the landscape more secretive, and ultimately more familiar to console gamers. It’s a lot easier on the cognitive load somehow, whereby you get moved along a lot more easily than large plains where running always seems too long. The fact the place seems so unique struck me when BLDGSBLOG put another shout out for entrants for their Invent-a-Micronation Conent. In 100 words or less, what, where, how, who, why, when, etc., would your micronation be…? To date, we’ve been approached by a group who “will dig a trench and fill it with ourselves”; we’ve been pitched a “politically autonomous” National Sex Garden; we’ve been introduced to a world of street barricades, built in disused quarters of the world’s cities; we’ve brushed shoulders with the “Sovereign Dictatorship of MOB”; and so on. You don’t actually have to realize your nation, by the way; you can just talk about it. And the more architecturally interesting your idea is, the better. Illustrations are both acceptable and encouraged.
I’m not a modeller or virtual architect, but BLDSBLOG is consistently one of the most interesting sites I’ve read for world development, because it’s 100% about strange places from our actual world. Some of the virtual zones we spend so much time in ought to be considered or new ones invented for this contest. Someone ought to enter Kelethin and maybe less elegantly, the auction-house&bank in Ironforge.That feeling of investing in a community in a virtual landscape actually happens, and I know from SWG with all the BaseWars raiding and city development that people take “their” land and their virtual property very seriously. I know I did. I loved my small sekret cabin in the mountains outside Doable Guerfel and worked hard to keep our bases up in our actual city. I imagine it must be the same in Project Entropia or Second Life. It sure as heck is true is Eve, where there is very sustained effort to gain and retain territory. People really believe the places they play in “belong” in some strange way to them somehow. Best example was when SOE reversed the ability for admins in SWG to “cityban” individual players, there was a huge controversy. People were angry because predictably some guilds had built cities around or in a manner to block access to certain points of interest. The best examples were around the mouth of the Krayt Graveyard and the Imp base on Dantooine. With /cityban the players who ran these cities could force individuals they didn’t want from entering the city zone. Which they did, alongwith luring people often into their cities, banning them, and then having the NPC guards to attack them till cloning. All in all, people spend a lot of time organizing their land online, and maybe it’s a natural process to want to govern something.
December 8th, 2006 | Filed under: GamesStuff this morning on MMO Blogs, celebrity-dom and celebrity MMO Titles. New games in dev, new business models at work (?), new games expansions I’m playing or will play. 1) Firefly AAA MMO?
Via Ethic on KTR via Wired comes news of a Firefly MMO in the works. Multiverse, maker of a free MMO-creation platform, plans to announce Friday morning that it’s struck a deal with Fox Licensing to turn the show into an MMORPG in the fashion of Star Wars Galaxies or Eve Online.
At the AGC, John Landau of James Cameron’s shop went on pretty well about Hollywood and games and what Cameron and he are up to as investors/customers in Multiverse. But he never mentioned a Fox title.This must not be them and something from Multiverse biz dev independently. Landau kept mentioning a “unique” IP and franchise. But who knows? Firefly the MMO won’t be Avatar, but again, who knows? 2) Commercializing the Amateurs
Because of a couple of recent events, I have to mention I found Dundee’s clinical view of the MMO blogosphere a little disturbing. First, Tobold gets plagiarized or at least not given a courtesy reference; Second, a couple of us have been contacted to contribute to gaming and MMO versions of Weblogs or the Blog Herald a few times now; and thirdly, the overwhelming rush of people to commercialize the cooperative and social space of discussing games. Maybe Dundee’s just curious since he’s moved to a new sekret gig and wants more coverage, and everything he presented is already commonly available. I guess it just made me uncomfortable because blogs obviously provide an important outlet for professionals to discuss, inform and promote their creations, but seeing mine and some friends amidst the paid pros… well, let’s just say I can sympathize with Darniaq going quiet. Reason I’m uncomfortable is maybe twofold: First, do we need Blog celebrities? And if so, who does that benefit? In gaming it’s the developers that get the most attention, because obviously they have the most info I’d want to see as a gamer.But the next level with the unpaid amateur is maybe the person who either blogs the most, plays the most popular games, or provides the best perspective or game relevant info. Are we at the point where someone can deliberately try to satisfy those criteria for personal gain? Do we have splogs written by humans? Secondly, reason I ask is because there’s a lot of quiet commercialization going on in blogging, which is cool for individuals, a la AdSense, but there are some people I’ve been wondering about for awhile if they aren’t getting paid to post and advertise without disclosure. People can get remunerated directly from ad firms, or most likely, from startup aggregators who have ad deals. I think that’s pretty much payola — being a fanboi or stirring shit just to publicize some new game. Or more often, some unreleased game that’s in development. That’s something to watch out for. With developers or reporters who blog, I know where they stand. And there’s nothing wrong IMO with someone earning some coin via AdSense or private RMT etc. but people should come clean if they have a business plan behind it.[Dec.12 Update: Via Washington Post FTC is ordering viral marketers and undisclosed bloggers to come clean: "The FTC said it would investigate cases where there is a relationship between the endorser of a product and the seller that is not disclosed and could affect the endorsement." Funny how things go.][Dec.13 Update: polite and restrained, F13 on the awkward “I-didn’t-know-we-were-in-competition-thread”. 3) What I’m Playing
Since I just play games and don’t have an MMO or franchise deal or speaking deal or book or advertising network coming soon, here’s what I’m up to.EQ2 EoF – the hype is true. The expansion of 1-70 new areas is great fun. With the introduction of tinkering and transmutation the economy has taken off. This means lowbies like myself can make great money selling Adept spell drops. That speeds up and enhances a person’s whole progression. The physical world of Kelethin et al. is also more interesting and easier to navigate. No more one-way plains of overly connected chained mobs, no more one-way (Qeynos->Ant->TS) levelling arcs. Feels a lot more cozy. And the gf actually resubscribed and moved her WoW gathering OCD to Kelethin where she says the best part is “jumping off stuff”. Tipa and MrrX have great personal blogs about the expansion and what you can do. Fable — love it. Got it for PC and almost finished it before playing EQ2. I was sceptical at first last year when I got it and reached the Guild of Heroes to train, but pushing through that phase it’s been fun. Needs more quests though. Star Wars Lego — for the DS. Great fun, but may need some spoiler/walkthrough, which I don’t want to do. So need more time on it.SWG — yeah, SWG. Probably right now the most underrated game (maybe along with CoX). Other than some recent UI model selection changes, the game is stable and really balanced. I had a ball going back as a CL80 veteran jedi soloing up to CL90 and I can now pretty much solo everything in the game. That’s not a bad thing. I can’t always do Ancient Krayts or other, and I get owned in PvP. To me that means the game is balanced I got both expansions and had a great time running through the ToOW (Musty expansion). I hope to go back and run through all the Legacy Quests, which take you from 1-55+. This was not a paid announcement. You can blame Yivvits & Mr.Bubble for getting me back it.WoW 2.0.1 — taking a break, but got the expansion working. Still want to see the PvP and mods worked out before taking any time to reTalent my Pally.Eve Revelations – also on pause. Need to join a new corp or get a timecard (RMT) cash injection. Still stuck on my caracal and [...]
December 5th, 2006 | Filed under: GamesUpdates on yesterday’s updates. 1) Social Network Inflation
Curse Gaming has launched an impressive update today. Impressive because of the scope and strategy of their changes, timed to match the WoW 2.0.1 patch upgrade today. Curse has become a Gaming News and Resources website completely integrated in a portal system. The biggest change you as the viewer is presented with is that there is content and portals for multiple games available — and more in the making… each portal completely houses its own unique content in form of wiki, file/image/video hosting and also forums… Almost all of the content at Curse is now user driven. This means that anyone can post/submit news articles or guides… In the same tradition of allowing all users to submit news and content to the website, we chose the same approach to content moderation. For each news post, or forum post, you will find a + and a – sign next to a number. This is our user based rating system. The way it works is that if a certain forum or news post gets a certain amount of negative rating over a given period, it will be hidden. Should the amount of negative rating for said posts or news be majorly negative it will get deleted automatically…In an effort to further improve [WoW mods] section of our site, we have chosen to allow an all out files hosting not simplly limited to addons. Screenshots, Fanart, Custom Videos/Movies, Patches etc. are just some of the content we now allow our users to submit and share with the community. The biggest change to this is that this section is no longer unique to World of Warcraft. It is now a feature available to every game/portal we set up on the website.
They also have remade their forums, added syndication to favorites, reformated their db presentation and claim to plan to include in the future alerts, user recognition awards, and a Thottbot-like item db (maybe with a log scraper?) and YouTube-like machinima and FRAPS uploads. All in all, big and smart changes. Add to an already large mods community Digg-like news and content ratings, Flickr-like image sharing (?), YouTube-like machinima sharing, etc. Anyone else trying to imitate this for gaming (like IGN, Warcry and friends) better get moving. What will put Curse ahead of their competition is exactly the community assets from modding for WoW. That’s near impossible to replicate, unless someone buys some of the other similar services out there already. We’ll see if mods and smart content sharing will sustain Curse long term.[Edit]BTW, here’s the page to today’s 2.0.1 patch to download from them.
[Dec 7 Update] Well it’s two days since I wrote the above and Curse seems to still be having bad hosting issues (“Server Error”). A few hours after my post I went back to look around and things were unavailable. They were still unavailable yesterday and this morning. I guess it’s the old entrepreneur dilemma: build for launch or build for scale. 2) The Run Costs of Second Life
The overhead of running SL is getting more and more press. Nick Carr tries to do some estimates to discover how keeping persistence up and running costs Linden Labs, compared to offering electricity to people in Brazil. Who knows if this is accurate, but the operations of SL are certainly getting more press. I don’t know if this is deserved, but bottom line with PR — live by the sword, die by the sword. Inviting wholesale media attention will get you coverage. Just difficult to maintain the message you want. Reason I say this may be unfair is that to offer even the idea of SL the Lindens had to offer a full 24×7 environment that offered persistence to every corner of the egoverse. There’s obviously some major optimizing and refactoring that has to be done, but online services demand high degrees of availability and scalability and that costs, a lot. Thing is, I just never hear anyone investigating anymore Blizzard’s uptime or run rate. And from what I heard at the AGC in the corridors and through friends elsewhere, Blizzard’s China hosting is out of the door. They are losing there. I’d like some data and forecasting of how Blizzard is able to sustain itself, particularly what it’s doing with AT&T. i{content: normal !important}
December 4th, 2006 | Filed under: GamesHere’s a few updates, and then my opinion at the botton about a growing trend in games. 1) Social Network Everything
Forums, spoilers, mods, chat, grouping, DKP… Basically, everything gamers have been doing on their own quite well and with little economic import forever is being commercialized. Just like RMT, I have no problem with players individually, or even in small groups running their own mod sites with PayPal links, but I am uncomfortable with large companies doing it. Sorry, but someone is making money off your gaming time and the communications you’re having about it with your friends. I think it is disengenuous for large service providers to rely on gamers (their customers) to create materials to help other gamers with the game, and for someone then in concert with them (or at least in tacit acceptance) to capitalize on that work. Without acknowledgement or renumeration, of course.Witness the original WoW MySpace clone I mentioned earlier, now a big budget version by ex-Napster founder, and a similar version by GarageGames for developers (the Great Games Experiment). The best example of this, of course, is M$FT’s XBLA and gamecard, Xbox Live, and Xfire. All these are in competition with IGN, Alla, Warcry, who are in turn owned by the same (Fox, IGE) companies. 2) Forums Redux
And speaking of forums, Dundee posted some new thoughts on them, with comment back and forth with Lum. Wonder what they think of people working to create unique businesses on top of their work and broaden the foruming game. 3) SL as a Going Concern
Courtesy of Matt Mihaly from The Forge, a post from a professional VC (who probably did not invest in Linden Labs) that thinks SL is not sustainable. My take on that with the same title a while back. Only thing to note there is the recent interest over trying to Open Source SecondLife. And I believe CopyBot was originally a product of an Open Source project for SL.The common thread in each topic is a conflict between having open, inclusive, amateur opinion and creations and a service provider desire to monetize them. Amateur sites and blogs like I have and have listed in my blogroll exist for a reason, and that’s a personal desire to communicate and share information built on enjoying a game, or set of games or issues. I don’t know what to make of people going full tilt into wanting to monetize that interest. We will have to see if they are successful and if that changes the landscape.But FWIW Playerep has been and is still intended to be non-commercial.
December 4th, 2006 | Filed under: GamesNew work, Beautiful Evidence. Tufte, Donald Norman and Martin Gardner are all writer’s I’ve read, but I don’t feel I know them well. Only Gardner has too many books I could purchase reasonably, but otherwise all of the works by these three I’d like to have for a home library. Via the gf, who knows all things Soviet, check out the cover of Tufte’s essay on PowerPoint.
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