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Timothy Burke, who teaches at idyllic Swarthmore College, comments here from time to time, and had some interesting criticisms of Star Wars Galaxies a while back, has just posted a pair of papers on his weblog about design directions for MMORPGs (link link).
Continue reading "Rubicite Breastplates & Narrative Nudges" »
Via Slashdot: Dark Age of Camelot is planning to hand out loot (described here) to help casual players ("Gift of the Realm" system) and to encourage players to move to under-populated servers ("Gift of the Realm sped up" system). They plan also to ban a significant number of cheats. As discussed (Do ya a deal Govna?), deals are springing forth all over the MMO space. Why stop? How about encouraging players to role-play Middle English? Ka-ching for any text-matched against a database of Chaucer? How about a plat for every fun, vivacious adjective you use?
He was a veray parfit gentil knight.
Canterbury Tales. Prologue. Line 72.
News just in: a major UK retail group is withdrawing the game Manhunt from sale. According to a BBC news item, the game has been linked with a murder case in the UK by the victim’s parents and the product has been removed from sale as a mark of respect. So far most other retailers have not taken similar action.
Yes, Manhunt is a single player game – but a computer game is a computer game right?
Peter Jenkins has a new paper in the Journal of Internet Law that analyzes free speech issues in MMORPGs. A version is available on SSRN. From the abstract:
In the 21st century, traditional company towns like Chickasaw, Alabama, where a corporation steps into the shoes of the state for purposes of the First Amendment, are almost non-existent. This paper postulates that they have been replaced by Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG's)... The paper emphasizes that the case law on freedom of speech in MMORPG's will have a profound precedent setting effect on how the First Amendment is applied to [a] coming universal virtual platform, since the legal principles concerning new technologies tend to be set at an early stage of their development.
This is the most extensive analysis of the "company town" doctrine's application to virtual worlds that I've seen. For what it's worth, many of the TN authors here are cited.
Update: Readers may be interested in doing a contrast/compare with Jack Balkin's article around pages 33-37, where he discusses the Marsh case as well...
You can’t go anywhere in the MMO metaverse these days without someone making you a very very special offer.
Those lucky enough to be in Paris on 21 September/septembre might like to head along to this half-day symposium on intellectual property issues in online worlds. The program (en français) includes a presentation on the nature of virtual sales and the market, a paper explaining Ubisoft's position on the virtual sale of assets, a discussion of the law of virtual assets and a roundtable discussion.
Pas mal.
[Thanks Cédric]
I am at the (American Association for Artificial Intelligence [AI])AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI. A question lurks: is the AI challenge for MMOGs to develop "Game Master" capabilities that can manage/adjust play intelligently to the player experience?
Everyone hates the leveling treadmill, but the business strategy makes sense: Once people spend 800 hours to get to the great content of your game, they will be less willing to spend another 800 hours to get the great content of your competitor's game. So long as every game has a leveling treadmill, each company has considerable pricing power over its installed base. You usually don't see this in the form of higher fees (I am not sure why not), but rather in the form of cost-cutting (minimal customer service, buggy expansion packs, the developer-is-always-right syndrome*). The competitive response is, of course, to cut the switching costs. One way would be to lessen the leveling treadmill or make its effect on the fun of gameplay minimal. Another would be to allow people with powerful characters in your competitor's game to enter your game with a similarly buff toon. A step in that direction: Playvault's migration service (mentioned in this comment by Joel Hutson first), through which a company can set an explicit exchange rate between a competitor's currency and their own. The service is expanding, apparently. If you are a millionaire in Ultima, you can now switch to Horizons and still be rich. Thanks Andres for the tip.
Massive Incorporated, who specialise in the dynamic insertion of advertisements into games with an online component, has just secured an additional $5.5 million in funding from a couple of VC firms.
So w00t, big biz will soon get excited about filling virtual worlds with brands 'n banners. Let’s hope immersion triumphs, or this is what we might face..
In the late 1980's I read Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. I was charmed by the thought experiment; I was seduced by how one might create intelligence by layering the building blocks and observing the evolution of behavior within an environment... Last week I revisited Vehicles. I thought about it again, with a different viewpoint: was there a useful idea here for virtual worlds research and discussion?
Continue reading "Experiments in Synthetic Virtual Worlds?" »
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