G4M3RS, a documentary (2002)

Jane McGonigal

G4M3RS, a documentary

I served as associate producer and researcher for this 2003 feature-length film about competitive Counter-Strike players. The documentary, produced and directed by Kiyash Monsef as part of The Gaming Project, follows two Counter-Strike clans (top-ranked team The Speakeasy Offensive and underdogs Second 2 None) in their quests to capture the top prize of $25,000 at the Summer 2002 Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) Championship. G4M3RS had its world premiere at the Summer 2003 CPL Championship in August has received rave reviews from top gaming sites and publications. It is currently screening at film festivals and is available for purchase on DVD.


G4M3RS, which PC Gamer magazine called "Chicken soup for the gamer's soul," looks at how the game has affected the friendships and family lives of its most dedicated players. In addition, it addresses the issues of in-game cheating, women in Counter-Strike, and corporate sponsorship of CS clans. The film features tournament matches with top teams from around the world, including Schroet Kommando (Sweden), fzer0 (Australia), Evil Geniuses (Canada), and Domain of Pain (USA). Gamers also includes interviews with Counter-Strike co-creator Jess Cliffe, CPL founder Angel Munoz, Gamespot.com executive editor Greg Kasavin, and others. In the photo: This screenshot is from the clan CSArt. Counterstrike fan art is one of the subjects addressed in G4M3RS: The documentary.

Success in MMOGs: Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling

Success in MMOGs: Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling

Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling



Source: DFC Intelligence



Next month DFC Intelligence will be publishing its latest research on the massively multiplayer online game (or MMOG) market. This is a well-established, but often misunderstood, segment of the interactive entertainment industry. The success of World of Warcraft (WoW) from Vivendi Universal Games is leading to interest and investment in the segment that is far above what its current market size and usage can support. Therefore we feel it is critical to look at some of the factors that could separate the handful of winners from the many losers.



Perhaps the most important point to note is that there will be a great deal of money lost. Since the emergence of the current MMOG market, which we pegged as 1997, there have never been more than a handful of hit products in a given market at the same time. In North America there has been one product (Ultima Online, then Everquest, then World of Warcraft) which stood head and shoulders above a small group of second tier products that had 25-50% of the top game's subscriber base. Never in the over thirty year history of massively multiplayer games has there been more than five top-line products in existence at one time in a given market. Even then, the top two or three games have always commanded between 85% and 90% of the market



Below that level, there have been niche efforts and upstarts. Despite the increasing variety and number of MMOGs in the market, this quasi-network effect appears to be strengthening, not weakening. The good news, thus far, is that the overall pie does seem to be expanding. That is to say, the niche efforts now sometimes have 50,000 subscribers instead of 5,000 and the mid-level games have 150,000 subscribers instead of 50,000.

...

more information in the original article

Hackers target TK Maxx customers

Sounds like an "Uplink"-News...



Hackers target TK Maxx customers

Hackers target TK Maxx customers
TJX sign at headquarters in Framingham, Ma
Stores in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Puerto Rico are affected
Hackers have stolen information from at least 45.7 million payment cards used by customers of US retailer TJX, which owns TJ Maxx, and UK outlet TKMaxx.

In a statement to US watchdogs the firm said it did not know the full extent of the theft and its effect on customers.

TJX added that the security breach may also have involved TKMaxx customers in the UK and Ireland.

But the company added that at least three-quarters of the affected cards had expired or data had been masked.

Question marks

The company also told the BBC that 100 files were moved from its UK computer system in 2003, and two files were later stolen.

However, a spokesperson admitted that the firm may never know what was in those files.

"We don't know what was in those files - the technology the hacker used prevents TJX from knowing, and also the fact that TJX system routinely deletes files," the spokesperson added.

Success in MMOGs: Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling

Success in MMOGs: Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling

Careful Planning Vs. Wildcat Drilling

Source: DFC Intelligence

Next month DFC Intelligence will be publishing its latest research on the massively multiplayer online game (or MMOG) market. This is a well-established, but often misunderstood, segment of the interactive entertainment industry. The success of World of Warcraft (WoW) from Vivendi Universal Games is leading to interest and investment in the segment that is far above what its current market size and usage can support. Therefore we feel it is critical to look at some of the factors that could separate the handful of winners from the many losers.

Perhaps the most important point to note is that there will be a great deal of money lost. Since the emergence of the current MMOG market, which we pegged as 1997, there have never been more than a handful of hit products in a given market at the same time. In North America there has been one product (Ultima Online, then Everquest, then World of Warcraft) which stood head and shoulders above a small group of second tier products that had 25-50% of the top game's subscriber base. Never in the over thirty year history of massively multiplayer games has there been more than five top-line products in existence at one time in a given market. Even then, the top two or three games have always commanded between 85% and 90% of the market

Below that level, there have been niche efforts and upstarts. Despite the increasing variety and number of MMOGs in the market, this quasi-network effect appears to be strengthening, not weakening. The good news, thus far, is that the overall pie does seem to be expanding. That is to say, the niche efforts now sometimes have 50,000 subscribers instead of 5,000 and the mid-level games have 150,000 subscribers instead of 50,000.

WoW Trialkeys in London Times

My life as a bearded dwarf-News-Tech & Web-Gadgets & Gaming-TimesOnline

Buy The Times on Saturday for your free trial version of World of Warcraft plus an eight-page game guide

When Keith at the office gives me World of Warcraft, bidding me to “spend a bit of time with it — it’s really addictive”, I do that special thing that women can do whereby you roll your eyes inside your head, secretly, to show that you know more than the men. Yeah, right, I’m going to get addicted to World of Warcraft. Yeah, right, I’m going to join a worldwide online community of more than eight million people, running around a gigantic and complex fantasy world, engaged on a series of quests. It’s all highly unlikely. If I had to marry one of the cast of The Lord of the Rings, it would be Sam Gamgee — the completely prosaic, normal, nonmagic one, who comes across like the owner of a garage in Cricklewood having a particularly bad day, what with this vexatious epic quest and all.

In a nutshell: dragons embarrass me.

PMOG-passively multiplayer online game

PMOG: Help - FAQ

About this PMOG

Huh?



What is this? Who Built It?



This is a passively multiplayer online game - there's more background information here, on our about page.

Is this all there is?



What you see is what you play! And you can make more of the game yourself. So users are adding stuff all the time, and so are we. Re-open your sidebar to see what's new!



PMOG Extension



This PMOG is all about you scoring points for surfing the web. So we need a way to gently follow you as you travel online!



We've crafted a Firefox extension. Firefox is a web browser that is available for just about every computer, and you can add stuff to it to make it more useful.



Our Firefox extension sits in the status bar, the gray bar at the bottom of your screen. There should be a small "P" there, if you've installed the extension properly.



A list of quests can be found here:

http://bud.com/quests/

PS3 on sale for under £400

PS3 on sale for under £400 // GamesIndustry.biz

PS3 on sale for under £400
Illustration
Ellie Gibson 11:01 (GMT) 27/03/2007

Aria slashes price for limited time only

Just days after the European launch of PlayStation 3, UK retailer Aria.co.uk has slashed the price of the console to under GBP 400 - more than GBP 25 below the recommended retail price.

The 60GB PS3 launched in Europe last Friday with an official RRP of GBP 425 / EUR 599. However, it's now available on Aria's website for GBP 340.38 excluding VAT, or GBP 399.95 inclusive.

Based in Manchester, Aria.co.uk specialises in selling PC components and peripherals. The company sells to distributors and other retailers as well as individuals.

Gamasutra.com Features - Rethinking the MMO

Gamasutra.com Features - Rethinking the MMO

You already know all about the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) phenomenon: the GDC panels, the rants, the spectacular failures and successes, the addictions, the “Make Love, Not Warcraft” South Park episode, the ubiquitous elves, and especially the profits. Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, though, here’s a brief explanation of why MMOs are important.

World of Warcraft is a rather successful MMO. Its subscription model gives it a trump card against software pirates, and its massive subscriber base guarantees continued revenue for the next few years at least, if current trends are to be trusted. Even World of Warcraft’s older, poorer cousins, such Everquest and Ultima Online, continue to turn profits many years after their initial release.

On the other side of the PC gaming coin, non-subscription retail games face increasingly grim prospects as customers turn to pirated software and parasitic games such as the aforementioned World of Warcraft, which more than one executive has blamed for slow PC game sales. And they appear to have a valid complaint: retail sales of PC games have fallen every year since 2001, while revenue from subscription fees has skyrocketed.

Clearly, the trends show that the future of enthusiast PC gaming lies with games that can hold a player’s interest over long periods of time; at the very least, these games commute PC gaming’s death sentence for a few years, until game consoles can provide the features, depth, flexibility, and convenience that PCs allow.

The thing is…we all expected these games to evolve. We looked at Everquest and its addictiveness and reasoned that surely someone would improve on this formula, creating a breed of entertainment that the entire spectrum of gamers could enjoy. Instead, we have seen a parade of copycats that fails to appeal to a large portion of the potential market, despite far bigger development budgets than any offline games.

What’s the problem? Is it that MMO developers choose to design their games for a niche audience? Or are the designers, who often have little to no experience with traditional video game design, simply incapable of designing anything but a nerd-fest? I can’t answer that, but here are a few questions on the subject I do want to try to answer from the standpoint of a traditional game designer: What exactly is an MMO? Will the current MMO formula hold up over time? What is holding this type of game back from more universal success, and how can it be improved?

...

more in the original article

google tech talks - Google Video

Results for google tech talks

Human Computation

Human Computation - Google Video

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, ... all » where
he also received his Ph.D. in 2005. Previously, Luis obtained a B.S. in
mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a
Microsoft Research Fellowship.




ABSTRACT
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to
challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk
introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve
problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to
solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel
approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games.
For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable
online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people
play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords.
These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of
image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but
because they enjoy it.




I describe other examples of "games with a purpose":
Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and
Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a
general approach for constructing games with a purpose.

A Beginner's Guide to Creating a MMORPG

DevMaster.net - A Beginner's Guide to Creating a MMORPG

A Beginner's Guide to Creating a MMORPG
Radu Privantu
06/08/2004

This article will focus on the first steps in building your own Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). It's target is the indie game developer, with limited resources and experience. After reading this article, you should know what it takes to get started, and some advises regarding what to do and what not to do. The very first step is to assess your skills, and your resources. You need to be honest with yourself, because it can be frustrating to waste your time trying to build something you just can't.

Step one: Assessing your skills

Play Understanding Games: Episode 3

Kongregate: Play Understanding Games: Episode 3

Understanding Games: Episode 3
Created by: Pixelate pixelate
Game Description (Game Uploaded on 2007-03-20):

Episode 3 is the third of four games trying to raise awareness for the basic concepts of computer and video games. It deals with the principles of learning in computer games. Please note that you’ll need the Flash 9 plug-in!
Game Instructions:

Follow the in-game instructions of your hosts Bub and Bob. You can skip the text using the space key. Click on the equalizer in the top right to mute sound/music.

Timeline Generator

Timeline Generator



Simply type in the name of your kingdom, the starting year for your timeline, the years between each major event, and the number of events to generate, then click the Generate Timeline button. It's just that easy!

Pandora Internet Radio - Find New Music, Listen to Free Web Radio

Pandora Internet Radio - Find New Music, Listen to Free Web Radio

Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask:

Can you help me discover more music that I'll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.

Guru.com - The world's largest online marketplace for freelance talent.

Guru.com - The world's largest online marketplace for freelance talent.

Rent a Coder

How Does it Work for Buyers?

Need a coder to help you create the next 'killer app' or answer questions? Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

Kongregate: Play Free Online Games & Upload Your Own

10 MMOGs you shouldn't make (originally published in Develop magazine at the 2005 GDC)

Turing Machine: 10 MMOGs you shouldn't make

10 MMOGs You Don't Want to Make
(originally published in Develop magazine at the 2005 GDC)

The buzz about massively multiplayer gaming oscillates like a broken TV set. Last year all we heard about were MMOGs being abandoned, even in development; this year has begun with World of Warcraft proving "too" successful for its servers to cope.

The MMOG genre does have some peculiar qualities, which suggest it really could cause a sea-change in the business models of developers. One of the most alluring promises is that studios can create an ongoing revenue stream that requires no marketing(everything's viral), no distribution (everything's downloaded) and where revenues are predictable (a fat cheque being deposited in the studio's bank account each month, without fail).

Who could fail to be excited by that? Better yet, MMOG game design was originally thought to be simple RPG fare (familiar to developers from past projects), allied with the implementation of simple FPS-style 3D engines with humanoid characters running about a pretty LOD-managed landscape. Easy! Except ... it's turned out to be much more complex than that, not least because of several cunningly disguised pit-traps that studios keep falling into (some even jumping down the same trap, several times in a row). Here's a guide to what NOT to make:
1 The MMOG which is also an Engine
The Idea
Make a game and some MMOG middleware at the same time. If one is a commercial disaster, the other will make up for it.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
Making a successful game is very risky, and making a new genre of game which requires lots of tenhology you have no experience with is even riskier. But selling middleware to other people is, surely, risk free. So balance the risky development wit hthe risk-free one. If the middleware is any good, it can be licensed for millions of dollars a time, just like id Software did with its Quake engines.
But you didn't realise...
The main reason that here's not much good MMOG middleware around is that it's very hard to make. Most middleware sales will probably fall through, yet they are costly even to attempt, making it a high-risk business. Hardly any less so than selling the game.
So what actually happens is...
You thought you'd be working on a game and getting a 'free' middleware product at the same time for almost no extra development cost. In fact, you find you're trying to do two development projects on a budget intended just to cover one of them. Worse, the middleware ususally costs much more to develop than the game, so you've only got the budget to fund the lesser of the two projects. And selling middleware is far from risk-free. It may take six months of hard negotiation to sell just one licence. Anyway, most people won't even buy your middleware because your rushed game "sucked". So you'll need to develop a second, better, game to convince anyone to buy your engine - or else write off a huge waste of money.
2 The Server-less MMOG
The Idea
Networking is fairly simple. We'll get on with the client, and hire someone towards the end of the project to do all that networking stuff.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
With experience in writing multiplayer games (eight-player RTS's and 16-player- FPS's) you might think networking is simple, so long as you know the pitfalls, how to minimise latency, and so on. The techniques are easy to re-use and almost universally applicable. Also, when it comes to publisher milestones or gaining funding, it's not an invisible server that convinces, it's a flashy graphical demo. It's not worth spending on something you don't need (yet).
But you didn't realise...
There really aren't many people who can write you an MMOG back-end from scratch, even in a couple of years. There are very, very few teams who'd have a chance of coding a simple basic working system in under six months - even without most of the features.
So what actually happens is...
You discover late in the project that your dev servers are utterly useless under real-world loads, and that no-one knows how to make a better one. You hire someone who works in distributed systems to make the server, and they can't believe you need as much done as you tell them you do, so they assume you don't really mean it. When six months later you ask them for the working system, they laugh. Then, slowly, the realisation sinks in and you stare at each other, realising you've either got to ask for another 12 months dev time, or cancel the project (and the client dev was going so well!)

Alternatively, you outsource the server development early, and when they go bankrupt (or just decide they cannot feasibly complete your game-server and choose to bow out), you find yourself with a beautiful tech demo that has no logic (no server system), just a few months before launch. Again, beautiful client, no server - and no-one can possibly get you out of your hole.
3 The MMOG in a Single-Player Retail Box
The Idea
Aim to make most of the sales in the first three weeks, at retail, just like you would with a normal game. All the marketing is arranged for the big, spectacular, launch.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
You can have your cake and eat it: the multi-million income from the firs few months will pay off most of the development costs, maybe even providing profit - but then youu'll get masses of profit over the coming months from the subsrvier income. Server-hosting costs and support costs (customer support, administration, in-game management) are terriffyingly large, but big launch sales will pay for this. Anyway it's even easier to patch an MMOG post-release than it is to patch CD-only single-player games; as all the players have to be online with decent connections just to play, force-streaming updates will be easy.
But you didn't realise...
The last two MMOGs to launch before yours gained twice as many players in the first few weeks as you'd stress-tested for; there's no way your servers are going to cope. When a server overlaods, but he time it's rebooted, a backlog has built up. One server crash soon brings down all the others, as the backlogs get passed on from server to server.
So what actually happens is...
You only tested your systems for "average" load. On the first day of release, with 30,000 players waiting to log in at once, the 24-hour average may be within what you expected - only they are all going to arrive in the first hour, giving you a peak 20 times what you expected. You spend the rest of eternity fire-fighting, spending all your mopney on trying to fix bugs, with non spare to increase your staff. As a result everyone is always overworked and you never make any progress.
4 An MMOG that wants to be a Single-Player Game
The Idea
Develop an MMOG as if it were a single-player retail title. Most of the efoort will go into the client-side engine, the game design and the client-side testing.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
You had no idea what you were doing.
But you didn't realise...
You therefore had no idea what stress-testing was. You had no idea why developers complain about "general non-determinism" and "non-deterministic failure modes". You thought that MMOGs could *and should) be written single-threaded, running on a custom soft Real Time scheduler, like most computer games.
So what actually happens is...
Sooner or later, the soft brown sticky stuff hits the rotating cooling-device, and the result is not pretty. The next 12 months will be a nightmare if the project isn't cancelled immediately.
5 The Silent MMOG
The Idea
Community management is hard (and what the hell does it mean, anyway?) and all the players are evangelists. Policing communities is near-impossible, and they'll all chear and use AIM/email/teamspeak. So you let them organise themselves.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
Analysing MMOGs and trying to be cunning to avoid the hard problems through better design reveals that most of the headaches seem to be about resolving "griefers". Most conclude that static balancing a game with thousands of humans and cheaters is almost impossible.

It's also often noted that players are the best testers. They will work out every aspect of your game: every algorithm, every secret and every loophole. So why not use this as a force for good? Pit players against each other. Those who would normally try to understand and break the system can do so, and be given the power to fix it. A self-organized game-community (a "game without rules, save those you make yourself") sounds like a great USP.
But you didn't realise...
The volume, skill and dedication of people who want to "make the (game) world a better place" are all vastly outweighed by the volume, skill and dedication of those who want to spread chaos. Spreading chaos is just so much more fun, it seems - especially if getting caught depends upon nothing but your own skill.
So what actually happens is...
Local governments come down on you for failing to police laws on hate-speech, rape fantasies and so on. The game-world becomes a wasteland because the player-run society is fundamentally unstable, and the players soon break it beyond all hope of salvation. Customer support and refund costs go through the roof; class-action lawsuits appear on the horizon.
6 Massively-Multiplayer-Simulation
The Idea
Instead of faking and shortcutting, just simulate everything.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
Even with 60 game-designers producing new content as fast as your 500,000 players can play through it, it's going to be very expensive, if not impossible, to keep the players occupied. Also, the developers are always blamed for all unpopular gameplay decisions and any random events that are "unfair", because the players "know" it has all been pre-ordained.

Instead, by using mathematical models and letting emergent behaviours take over, you will provide a never-ending, always-changing game at little or not cost - and changing yourself from the players' enemy into their ally.
But you didn't realise...
While players love to play with your simulation, by "play" I mean "see how many ways they can break it". Imagine a four year-old left alone with a hand-built model of the Cutty Sark for half an hour, wondering how it's put together.

Simulations never work in the long-run. No-one has yet produced a true, non-trivial simulation that the players can't quickly wreck.
So what actually happens is...
The players collude and destroy your simulation. Just like the Millennium footbridge in London, where every single pedestrian subconsciously started walking in time until huge vibrations built up, your players will all do at once whaever one thing is the most damaging thing to do to your system. It's like everyone on a ship running over to one side to look at the dolphins, and so causing it to capsize. Except that most of your players probably did it deliberately.
7 The Object-Oriented MMOG / DOA MMOG
The Idea
Using the design rules and 20-plus years of OOP design and development experience, you will make a clean, three-tier architecture - all nice and neatly encapsulated, and so easy to manage and maintain.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
OOP is good, OOP reduces maintenance costs and makes design simpler. An OOP-esque server is very easy for humans to reason about.
But you didn't realise...
A server architecture that is easy for humans to reason about is almost impossible for a cluster of machines to execute efficiently. Fundamentally, the system that is most natural for humans to invent is one with huge amounts of abstraction, which means high-latency.
So what actually happens is...
Even on your local LAN, the latency to get the server to do simple calculations is being coutned in the tens or hundreds of milliseconds. This is before you add-on the 50-250 ms roundtrip-latency imposed by general internet connectivity.

Everyone wanders off, bored.
8 Everquest Evolved: The Best Bits
The Idea
Take Everqyest, copy it and fix the ten most "obvious" mistakes they made in the design.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
Everquest (EQ) was the benchmark by which all other MMOG successes were measured, and it continues to be spectacularly popular and commercially profitable, despite its age and simplicity. But it had lots of small problems that turned out to have a huge negative impact on players. With the benefit of hindsight, these can ALL be fixed without too much effort.
But you didn't realise...
In the main, the hundreds of thousands of people who continue to subscribe to Everquest are not doing so because they like the game, but because they are already there. They have invested thousands of hours of play in building up their characters, and have large social networks that exist mostly in that game.
So what actually happens is...
Your game takes many months to develop, and by the time it finally comes to market, it's panned by critics for being ugly, simplistic and utterly indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd, not to mention EQ. Your game makes few sales; and the EQ players carry on playing EQ and bitching louder than ever. This despite the fact that your game fixes ALL the problems they are bitching about.
9 The Players MMOG
The Idea
Make the perfect MMOG, determining throught lots of player interviews and from discussion boards what players actually want.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
Everyone is trying to make a mass-market MMOG. Sony pinned its hopes on the huge appeal of the Start Wars licence, and it failed. What's the secret? Well, every game has thousands of fans bitching constantly on the boards, in public view, often with very similar complaints - and for every one who complains, there are probably 100 more who don't bother. You plan to listen to them.
But you didn't realise...
As Richard Bartle has recently pointed out, the things players complain about bear little actual relationship to the things that need to be fixed to make the game better.

Moaning doesn't qualify players as game-designers. Why is it that after years of confidently telling players that their "brilliant" new game ideas have already been thought of hundreds of times by professional developers, we suddenly cave in and act as though vociferous jobless students who spend all their life playing one single online game are somehow automatically better at seeing what makes a good game?

Besides, the best community-building force is shared suffering. Without suffering, it's harder to rouse people's emotions and harder to get a real community going.
So what actually happens is...
Your game gets a lukewarm reception on launch and none of the viral marketing gets you many players. Your die-hard supporters are few indeed, and most people condemn you with faint praise: they simply never got hooked.
10 The Outsourced MMOG
The Idea
Outsource all the stuff that is unique to MMOGs: clustered servers, in-game custoemr support, monthly billing, even network layers. Concentrate on the stuff you know best: gameplay and making fast, beautiful, clients.
Why it seemed a good idea at the time
Analysis of previous MMOG failures shows up some common patterns. The most common is that while the 3D graphical client is perfect and the game greate, the non-traditional stuff (launch, customer support, patching, server management, bandwidth provisioning, and so on) fails for simpel reasons.

MMOG's don't fail because of incompetence by the developers, but rather ignorance in certain areas. So you will avoid those areas entirely.
But you didn't realise...
It's out of the frying pan and into the fire: you're turning your studio into an outsourced programming contractor. You might (finally) have escaped the strictures of being beholden to a publisher, only to put your masterpiece into the hands of a third party just as soon as initial development is complete.

And once they've got you by the short and curlies, they ain't gonna let go.
So what actually happens is...
The middleware providers suddenly get very unhelpful and start blocking each and every request for improvements to the system, because if they do nothing they make lots of money with little expenditure - and so it's just not worth the hasssle to them to change things. You lose creative control over your game: someone else is doing the in-game administration, and all the promotion and customer-support that seemed so much hassle suddenly - very obviously - becomes the major thing shaping how the game can develop.

Worst of all, you've got no contact with your customers; someone else is billing them. It's their logo on the monthly statement, their contact numbers, their branding on your success. They have an exclusive, free, audience of paying customers (of hundreds of thousands) to whom they can pump large amounts of advertising and cross-selling.

Weep as you watch them displace you entirely in the money-making side of the game.

GameOgre.com's 2006 Online Game Awards

2006 Online Game Awards

This year was notable for the continuing rise of the Free MMORPG genre as more games moved to a model where there are no subscription fees, but premium items can be bought with real money. As far as the awards go, there are a few new categories: New Free MMORPG of the Year, Most Anticipated Game for 2007, and Non-Fantasy MMORPG of the Year. That over with, let's get to the awards!

List of free MMORPGs

List of free MMORPGs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

list of free Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. See List of MMORPGs.


Contents
[hide]

* 1 3D
o 1.1 9Dragons
o 1.2 Anarchy Online
o 1.3 Conquer Online
o 1.4 DarkSpace
o 1.5 Entropia Universe
o 1.6 Eudemons Online
o 1.7 Flyff
o 1.8 KAL-Online
o 1.9 Knight Online
o 1.10 PlaneShift
o 1.11 Rakion
o 1.12 Regnum Online
o 1.13 Rubies of Eventide
o 1.14 Shadowbane
o 1.15 Silkroad Online
o 1.16 The Universal
o 1.17 Trickster Online
o 1.18 Turf Battles
o 1.19 VATSIM and IVAO
o 1.20 Voyage Century Online
o 1.21 Yulgang (Scions of Fate)
o 1.22 Xiah
* 2 2D
o 2.1 Club Penguin
o 2.2 Daimonin
o 2.3 Endless Online
o 2.4 GoonZu Online
o 2.5 MapleStory
o 2.6 Monster and Me
o 2.7 Puzzle Pirates
o 2.8 Tibia
o 2.9 Free trial only
+ 2.9.1 The Realm Online
* 3 Browser based
o 3.1 Bitefight
o 3.2 Civ-Online
o 3.3 The Crims
o 3.4 Dark Throne
o 3.5 HellWars
o 3.6 Kingdom of Loathing
o 3.7 The Last Knights
o 3.8 Legend of the Green Dragon
o 3.9 Londinivm
o 3.10 OGame
o 3.11 Outwar
o 3.12 Pardus
o 3.13 The Prophet's Song
o 3.14 RuneScape
o 3.15 Seafight
o 3.16 Star Wars Combine
o 3.17 Travian
o 3.18 Urban Dead
o 3.19 World of Warlord II

Scott Miller about WoW (2006)

Game Matters

The REAL secret to WoW's success?



I haven't played since hitting level 60, over a year ago. But I'm certainly anticipating The Burning Crusade, simply because it raises the level cap to 70. I'm expecting those new ten levels will take 80+ hours or longer of actual quest time. I hope so at least. Because once I slam into 70, I will deactivate my account, putting my character into cryogenic sleep again until the level cap is raised again.



There's one overriding reason I played WoW, while I never played previous MMOs: I could solo all the way to the top. Not once did I group to enter an instance. Occasionally I grouped with players in the same area doing the same quest, and occasionally with a friend to share a quest, but 95 percent of my experience was as a solo player. And that's how I prefer it. I like to be able to jump into the game and play without waiting to form a group, getting right down to the business of fun.



People might ask, why not just stick with single-player games then, like Oblivion or Titan Quest? Why bother with MMOs? Simple answer: I love being in a game world populated by other real people. It makes the world seem that much more real and alive.



I've heard that WoW is the first major MMO that lets players solo from bottom to top. I asked this question to peers before I bought the game, and I was assured I could do it. Otherwise, I would have never played the game. I strongly suspect that many people feel the same way I do about this.



So, if you're working on an MMO that does not allow soloing the whole way up the level ladder, IMO you've seriously crippled your chance to create a WoW-like success in this market. MMOs are social games, yes, but not necessarily are they for people who like group play.

Call for papers opens for Leipzig GCDC // GamesIndustry.biz

Call for papers opens for Leipzig GCDC // GamesIndustry.biz

Call for papers opens for Leipzig GCDC
Illustration
Ellie Gibson 11:01 (GMT) 20/03/2007

Speeches, lectures and discussion ideas wanted

The organisers of the Leipzig Game Developer Conference have issued a call for papers for this year's event, which is set to take place between August 20 - 22.

GCDC is now seeking ideas for keynote speeches, lectures and panel discussions. There is a particular need for speakers with real world development experience who can evaluate new technologies and provide market insight.

"Our goal is to continue to present a high-quality program of accomplished speakers in the areas of game development, business, and emerging technology for videogames," said Frank Sliwka, project director for GCDC.

"This year we have added more sessions and developed additional tracks to ensure we are showcasing an even greater variety of topics for our attendees."

To submit a paper, visit the event website.

GCDC 2007 will take place at the Leipziger Messe conference centre once again this year, and will be immediately followed by the Leipzig Games Convention. Last year's GCDC featured speakers including Peter Molyneux, Bill Roper and Don Daglow.

Online Gamers can now pay with their blood

Online Gamers can now pay with their blood | Weird Asia News

An online game operator has demanded that banned players donate blood to be allowed back into the game. Moliyo, which runs a 3D massively multiplayer online game in China, made the demand after banning 120,000 players who attempted to hack the game.



More than 100 players had already signed up to exchange half a litre (1 pint) of blood for game accounts. The company has also offered free accounts to ordinary players who give blood.



According to the announcement, the players must attend a public blood donation drive in the city of Nanjing tomorrow afternoon. Locked accounts will be reopened within 3 days.



Chinese hospitals have had increasing difficulty attracting blood donors in recent years after scandals in which thousands of donors and blood recipients contracted HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. Blood donors in China are usually paid about 12 dollars per donation.



Moliyo arranged the event in an attempt to “create a civilized society, and enhance online gamers’ appreciation of social responsibility and public welfare.”



The games company banned 120,000 players of the popular game Cabal earlier this month, because they used unauthorized software to artificially boost their standing in the game. Moliyo operates several games in China, including Cabal, and Tales of Pirates.

Bow Nigger

www.alwaysblack.com home

"Bow, nigger." he typed.



I kind of hunched uncomfortably over the keyboard at that point. Not that I should've taken offence, really.



For one thing, my screen name has nothing to do with my ethnicity and for another, it's only a game and the fascist doing the typing is probably hundreds of miles away and far beyond anything you could call an actual influence on my life.



But still... It's not very nice is it?



What to do?



I circled around him warily.



JKII: Jedi Outcast does one thing very, very well, and that's lightsabres. In fact, it's probably more accurate to say George Lucas et al did lightsabres very well in the Star Wars films and Outcast does a good job of recalling the memory of those flashing contests. The emulation is near perfect, from the initial hiss as it slowly rises from the handle, the sweeping motion-blurred visuals to the pitch-shifting, threatening hum.



Throughout the game you can choose which perspective you choose to view the action from. The game defaults to first-person for projectile weapons but drawing your lightsabre switches to third-person ass-cam and this is by far the best configuration. Leave it alone.



Third-person allows you to fully-appreciate the acrobatics of the sabre fighting animations. You can swing away in one of three 'styles', fast, medium and heavy, all of which allow you wrestle mouse movement and direction key presses to produce jaw-dropping combinations of slashes, chops and stabs that risks you forgetting any question of your actual opponent as you stare in disbelief and whisper 'Did I just do that?'.



"Bow" he types.



Hmm. Problem. For all of the excellent sword-play animations, Raven seem to have omitted any of the more mundane actions you could envisage your avatar performing. There is no 'bow' button.



What my socially retarded friend is being so insistent about is something else, and that's a form of 'physical' expression that grew up out of the enthusiasm of some of the more ardent Star Wars fans who play JKII online. Some people take their fiction VERY seriously and wannabe Jedi Knights are among the most serious. The faithful, in order to be more true to the 'Jedi Code of Honour', crouch before each other and duck their 'heads' down as a mark of respect before enjoining battle. Some people think that's silly.



I thought it was silly, the first time I saw it. Then I saw everybody was doing it. And then I felt silly not doing it. It's strange how much weight the actions of your peers can bring to bear, even when your social medium is only a bunch of really fast maths on a German server.



I'm currently in 'heavy' style. This affords me the most damaging attacks at the expense of much slower swings. When you're not attacking it also provides the best defence, parrying is handled automatically. The best defence is wise while I'm facing off with this wanker. We've been engaged in our duel for two or three minutes and neither of us has come close enough to hit each other yet. This is a period of 'sizing up'.



Sometimes rash headlong, attacks can be exploited by a player of a reasonable skill level and you'll find yourself ghosting and waiting for another turn before you know what hit you. If you've never played a particular opponent before it pays to feel him out a bit.



First, though, there are the formalities. I crouch and duck my head, a 'bow'. Vulnerable.



Stupid? Yeah.



But you know what? I entered in to it willingly and 'why?' is a very interesting question.



I'm a big boy now and I don't want to be a Jedi Knight when I grow up. The Star Wars films are great, but they're also just that, films, a form of entertainment to be enjoyed during breaks from my very real and financially challenging life (mortgage, two cats, a broken gutter and a car that needs some attention. Cheers.)



So I didn't bow because I wanted to 'roleplay' the Jedi of the game. It was an act of defiance.



Duelling is not new. Any multiplayer game can leave you with one opponent on either side and I've played that scenario out in many games. The difference with lightsabre duelling, Outcast-style, is that it's so very personal. These aren't detached sniping matches across the width of the map or rocket-spamming blast-fests to see who can respawn the least. JKII duel is 'winner-stays-on' and you can be floating around for anything up to half-an-hour on a busy server waiting for a game. This makes your game 'life' actually worth something and it makes it worth fighting for.



Into this potent mix you can toss in the fact that while you're a ghosting spectator you have time to chat and actually get to know the people you're playing, even on that usually most impersonal of beasts, the public server. Even during actual fights, play can swing from bouts of thrust, slash and parry to more distanced, wary sizing-up, searching for an opening that will allow you to get a sucker-hit in before your opponent can counter, time to talk and taunt.



But perhaps most personal of all is the close proximity you have to come to damage your opponent. I'm an avoidant player at the best of times, but JKII lightsabre duels just don't allow you to hit and fade from range. You have to be right in there trying to give the other guy a laser enema if you're going to avoid watching the show for another six games.



So I bowed. Not because I was naive enough to think he'd give any significance to the gesture. Not because he was commanding me to from his pillar of arrogance. I bowed /despite/ his taunts. For all his goading I did 'the right thing', to show him I wasn't going to come and meet him down on his level.



Blammo.



SONOFABITCH! Jesus, all my shields and forty health from one big heavy-stance overhead chop before he spun away, back to the other side of the map.



"LOL! nigger"



He goes into a 'blender'. Every style has a selection of 'special moves' that can activated by combination key presses, set pieces taken from notable moments of the films. Unfortunately, because JKII is based on the Quake III engine, the macro scripting of that seminal of all first-person shooters is easily migrated across. This means that all skill or effort can be eliminated from the execution of these moves by a few simple scripts that can be readily downloaded and bound to a key. A 'blender' is the heavy-stance 'backsweep' move, or several rather, chained together, causing the model to spin unrealistically like a top. Fatal if you get too near it, but very difficult to use in an actual fight, as you're unable to do anything until the animation has finished. It's a shame that exploits like this would eventually lead to the ultimate downfall of the multiplayer game.



He's showboating. He's demonstrating how 1337 he is.



"Are you really black nigger?" he types.



"Why?" I replied.



"Because it matter." he says.



I ignored that and edged closer by a circuitous route. Don't want to get caught out by one of his lame keybinds. I switched down to medium stance, my favourite and the best balance between speed and damage.



"I know I hurt you by the things I say." he says.



I hit 'T' to talk and the chat icon appears above my head. But I hesitate. I wanted to say something, but with the little underscore blinking away there my fingers stopped over the keys. Say what? "No, you don't", "No, you aren't", "How can you when your insults are meaningless?", "Fuck you, asshole"?



And SLASH. Bastard.



In chat mode you're powerless, like most other games, your typing fingers can't do much about an assault by a conscienceless typekiller. In all my years of twitch-gaming my fingers have never moved so fast across the keyboard, escaping the trap of chat mode and rallying my defences against his lightning fast slashes.



Almost too late I put distance between us. Almost too late but not quite. Five health points remain and I know I haven't even hit him yet. Five health means you're nearly dead. A brush from the tip of a sabre that is just held idly will remove five health points from you and take you out of the game. Shit.



It's really, really unfair. I mean, alright, I've asked for it, haven't I?. I was aware from the outset what kind of player I am facing, and still I insisted on performing the ritual courtesies and still I fell for the oldest trick in the book, cut to ribbons while I answer a pointless taunt. I've only myself to blame.



But for the most part JKII multiplayer isn't like that. Mostly, JKII players are like players everywhere, they just want to have a blast and enjoy the competition. They'll show each other a degree of respect that is just absent from most other multiplayer games and they express that respect in a variety of ways, from the odd little emergent bow to ad hoc lessons from complete strangers to clans adopting the padawan/master relationship outlined in the films. Most of the players are good guys.



This is why it's unfair. The game allows 'bad behaviour', this is a good thing. It means that by avoiding 'bad' behaviour you can demonstrate how 'good' you are. Virtuous. A lack of virtue is unfairness in the unofficial 'rules' of the game but the only answer you have is to fight back. You too can be 'unfair', but, um, some people don't like to play that way... They make a choice.



This one does. This one is a bad guy, and he isn't messing about anymore. I guess he must've run out of tricks, or perhaps he'd done a few quick mental calculations and realised that I'm probably on the ropes, because he starts spamming the heavy-stance finishing move informally termed 'Death From Above'. This begins with a long flat leap and ends with an overhead chop, get caught under it and it's fatal no matter how many shield or health points you have remaining.



Which is a mistake on his part. It's total overkill, even though he doesn't know I have only five points left, and I happen to know that the very end of the move leaves you very vulnerable indeed. He has underestimated me and who can blame him? I've hardly been the epitome of laser swordsmanship thus far. I'll rectify that impression just now.



A quick swap down to fast style and a crouch-forward-attack puts me into a lunge, catching him with the uppercut. By no means fatal, but I rocked his world there for a moment. He thought he was dominating and now he's lost a whole lot of health and he wasn't ready for that.



He actually 'reeled'. There's always scope for projecting a little extra personification onto a computer generated character, but I swear to god he had shock on his face. Entirely too rash for my current health level, I went into a little whirlwind of fast-style slashes and probably dinged him a little more in the process as he beat a hasty retreat.



No chatting now. No more insults. Collision detection in JKII is a little flaky. Sometimes hits do far more damage than you'd have thought. I can hope. He comes at me and we have at it.



The lightsabres hiss and fizz when they come into contact with each other. I rolled and dodged and parried for all I was worth. Five health only. Nearly dead.



A little something personal about myself: I don't sweat. Never have. Not under normal, sat-at-the-computer, circumstances anyway. Obviously, physical exertion makes me sweat, running, jumping, swimming etc. But not just sat in a chair.



We spun around each other, bouncing off the furniture of the map. My concentration was absolutely intense and never before have I tried so hard to 'be the mouse'. I felt a trickle of wet run down from under my right armpit.



You see what this has become? It's not just a trivial game to be played in an idle moment, this is a genuine battle of good versus evil. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or Jedi Knights or any of the fluff that surrounds the game's mechanics. I played by the 'rules' and he didn't, that makes me the 'good' guy and him the 'baddie', but this is real, in the sense that there's no telling who's going to win out here. There's no script or plot to determine the eventual triumph of the good guy (that's me, five health), there's no 'natural order' of a fictional universe or any question of an apocryphal ultimate 'balance'. There's just me and him, light and dark, in a genuine contest between the two.



And there it is. I don't even know what it was. Some chance slash or poke in all of the rolling and jumping around and his lifeless avatar, with all his racist stabs and underhand duplicity, goes tumbling to the floor vanquished by the guy who even in the face of all of that, played by the ‘rules'. Only one health point remains but I win.



I'm a fucking hero. A real one.



A beep and a server message: Wanker has disconnected.



I can only dream of the howls of anguish so far away.



My next opponent spawns. And bows. A chat icon appears.



"Awesome" he types.

My adventures in Second Life

Toothpaste For Dinner blog

My adventures in Second Life
02/19/07 by toothpaste

Yesterday I downloaded something called Second Life. It is like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, except you can't shoot anyone, and you can't hit people. You just walk around. There are no prostitutes, and everything costs real money, and you can't rob anyone to get money. You have to use your credit card, with real money, to buy fake money to use in the game. It's not actually like Grand Theft Auto at all.

Second Life is free to play, and I keep seeing people referring to it in the news, so I had to take one for the team and just dive on in. I knew it probably wasn't going to be intriguing when I got to the signup part and couldn't even make a one-word name. I had to use some fantasy-ass last name and I couldn't even use cusses. The best I could do was call myself Wenis.

Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I hit people
Foxbrand Leprechaun: You can't
Wenis Swindlehurst: I need that shit you drive.

My character came pre-loaded as a "cybergoth". Most people I saw in the game, jerkily wandering around, also had fantasy-ass names. They also had fantasy asses. Perfect, round fantasy asses. Which left me with only one choice: I had to become what they were not. Slowly, because everything in Second Life is painfully slow, I removed all components of my clothing, including Cybergoth.Armwarmers and Cybergoth.Boots. I even removed Cybergoth.Facetattoo.

After a half-hour of pulling on sliders, I had transformed from Wenis Cybergoth to Wenis Pale Corpulent Bulldog-Man. I shortened my torso and gave myself man-handles. I made my hands puffy. I enlarged my jowls to the maximum, and beaded my eyes down to... well, little beads.

Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I fly
Foxbrand Leprechaun: Press Page Up

The sight of a fat, naked white man flying over Introduction Island (because the game makes you complete a boring tutorial, to make sure you don't play the game if you want to have fun) aroused absolutely no suspicion, probably because most Second Life players see the same thing when they go in for their weekly sponge-baths. The first thing I learned after I began to fly was that many zones in Second Life are un-enterable. You'll fly right up to it, ass and all, and then, bam. NO ENTRY ALLOWED. I flew around for a few minutes, but was eventually walled in by invisible walls. Second Walls, if you will.

Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I find better things to look at?
Foxbrand Leprechaun: Teleporting

So I opened up the "teleport" menu. The most popular destinations are strip clubs. So I went to one, and hey, more fantasy asses. To see the asses up close - yep, you guessed it - real money for a fake lap dance. I'd already seen enough fantasy ass for the day, so I used my newfound flight skills to fly up into the virtual DJ booth.

The thing about Second Life that nobody mentions is that nothing in it is detailed. It's not like you can roll up into a club and there are objects around you can do stuff with. Nope. It's just a bunch of cyber-lap-dancing. The DJ booth didn't have anything except rectangular objects decorated with a bunch of old JPEG files on the outside. It wasn't like you could scratch on the Second Turntables, or that there was a mini-game that you could click on.... nothing.

I walked up the staircase to explore the back of the club, and heard an alarm go off.

Lady Disastra CLUB AREOLA VIP: The back room is for employees only.
Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I hit people

I watched Lady Disastra, who had her polygon of a titty hanging out of whatever kind of polygons she was wearing, fly up into the DJ booth, and head towards me.

Lady Disastra CLUB AREOLA VIP: You are banned from Club Areola.

Everything went black, and I was transported back to Initiation Island. I thought I'd poke around a little more, to see what was available. There was a place called Freebie Warehouse that I teleported to, which was full of.... cubes... with bad JPEGs on the side.

You can click on the cubes and download scripts, which make you do something, or make your guy move around, or wear something. It was retarded. Imagine that every time you bought a shirt from a store, you had to install Windows on your torso. Pretty fun. I walked around in the Freebie Warehouse, trying to strike up conversations, but most people were preoccupied. I suppose in hindsight they probably had to reboot their avatars after installing Rainbow.Armwarmers, or Dragon.Dick, or whatever.

Wenis Swindlehurst: I got kicked out of Club Areola
Rizien Wolfmaker: mayb cuz u r naked lol

What? I can't be naked in Second Life, life of the naked, the life of the naked fantasy-ass?! I flew up and out of the Freebie Warehouse, and landed in some quasi-construction zone. There were walls and floors scattered about the landscape. Occasionally, I'd come upon a red dot, which I'd click, and it would make my character do some kind of humping motion. That's what I came to do. Hump in the construction zone.

Everything in Second Life seems to be coated in a preteen's understanding of sex. It was very titty-booby pee-pee doo-doo. From the fantasy asses to the cyber-ruins surrounding Freebie Warehouse, there really was nothing but clumsy cybersex. I wandered through this wasteland for a while, until I finally came to a normal-looking store, with windows, and people inside, so I went in.

The store sold penises, and penis avatars. I didn't actually get to see what they looked like, because I didn't have any fake money to spend (and I wasn't really interested in chipping in twenty bucks to these cats' weird sex trip.) A pet penis, which would follow you around and "come on command" (I'm guessing you have to right-click and load a script and wait thirty seconds is what they mean by "command") was 100 fakebucks, which converted to US$0.68. Okay, that's not bad.

You could transform yourself into a giant penis for 200 fakebucks, but one could argue that you do that anyway by spending time in Second Life. I quit the game at this point, because my wife was sitting on the couch, and we were about ten minutes deep into a conversation about how we did not enjoy our Second Life. She installed it at about the same time I did, except she got bored and quit before leaving Initiation Island.

"You missed the pet penis," I told her. "For sixty-eight cents, you could have had a pet penis that followed you around."

"How do people play that all day?" she asked me. "And how do you hit people?"

Life and Incredible Adventures of Optimus Keyboards

Life and Incredible Adventures of Optimus Keyboards

• Every key, including the space bar, has a display.
• Each display is 32x32 pixels full-color OLED.
• Each key is user-replaceable.

More information in the original article.

Blade Runner

Wired 15.03: Blade Runner

His legs were amputated when he was a year old. Now Oscar Pistorius is on track to make the South African Olympic team. Is he an engineering marvel — or just one hell of a sprinter?

By Josh McHugh

I first hear it as I’m coming out of a turn on the track at

the University of Pretoria’s High Performance Centre. It’s 100 meters

to the finish line. I’m pumping my legs as fast as I can when a sort of

snick snick snick snick starts getting louder, like I’m being

chased by a giant pair of scissors. At 50 meters to go, the sound is at

my left shoulder, and then Oscar Pistorius blows past me; the snick snick

fades away ahead. By the time I cross the finish line, the South

African sprinter has already turned around and is catching his breath,

leaning forward, hands on his knees.

He ran 200 meters. I ran only 150; he spotted me the difference.

Still, his win comes as no surprise. Two years ago Pistorius ran the

200 in 21.34 seconds, matching the women’s world record time set by

Florence Griffith Joyner in 1988 and missing the qualifying time for

the 2008 Olympics by just three-quarters of a second.

“Nice running, bru,” Pistorius says in his Afrikaans-tinged lilt.

Then he turns his attention to a pair of sprinters from the women’s

track team, stretching before their workout. He suggests they upgrade

to more streamlined running gear: bikinis. “Naughty!” one of them

squeals, tousling his frosted curly hair.

Pistorius and I grab bottles of water, and then he trots to the

infield. He sits, undoes a couple of straps, and tosses his legs onto

the grass. The Cheetahs, elegant, swooping lengths of carbon-fiber

composite, are better at running than walking.

I’m not the only runner who has learned to dread the

scissoring sound of Oscar Pistorius. Marlon Shirley and Brian Frasure,

both of whom are below-the-knee single amputees, were the world’s top

two runners going into the Athens Paralympics in 2004. Shirley finished

in 22.67 seconds, breaking Frasure’s world record for a one-legged

amputee. But they were racing for silver. Three strides ahead,

Pistorius had demolished them both, clocking a time of 21.97.

....

More information in the original article

Writing Great Design Docs

http://www.zenofdesign.com/Writing_Great_Design_Docs.ppt

IGN: GDC 2007: Why Does Everyone Like World of Warcraft?

IGN: GDC 2007: Why Does Everyone Like World of Warcraft?

A Korean professor tackles the burning question.
by Charles Onyett

US, March 8, 2007 - What made Blizzard's MMO such a sales behemoth? At GDC 2007, Jong Hyun Wi, Ph.D, president of the Game Contents Research Center at Chung-Ang University, Korea, gave a presentation emphasizing the differences between Eastern and Western gaming interests. His numbers were based on polls taken from communities of gamers from both territories, asking about their motivations for hopping into the online space. Though games from countries like Korea and China have started to catch on in the United States, cross-pollination between the two territories has yet to see a major integration with one exception, World of Warcraft.

According to charts shown during the presentation, World of Warcraft is currently the most popular MMO in the United States, number three in Korea, and number six in China. Though Eastern MMOs have been gaining more and more popularity in the United States, Western games, such as EverQuest 2, have failed miserably at trying to establish an Eastern user base. The reasons behind World of Warcraft's successful exportation includes playing to a number of different MMO aspects, including PK (player killing, or PvP) opportunities and the rationale behind gamers' decisions to enter these virtual worlds (item acquisition versus questing).

Dr. Wi's data compared gamers from China and the United States, as he said they showed the most diverse results. When he asked gamers if they'd experienced PK gameplay, 91.3 percent of Chinese gamers said they had, compared to only 34.7 percent of Americans. He concluded Asian gamers consider player versus player combat to be an integral part of the gaming experience.

Gamers from both nations differed even more when asked what they looked for in a game experience. American gamers said they preferred attractive graphics and logical quests above diverse character customization options and a wide variety of obtainable items, which the Chinese held in higher regard. Korean and Asian markets, according to Dr. Wi, are more focused on end results, or item acquisition. In contrast, gamers in the United States are more interested in the process of obtaining those items.

Ideas about the functions of online communities differ as well. 71.13 percent of Chinese gamers polled reported they joined in-game guilds for a play advantage, while only 20.69 percent of Americans chose the same answer. When asked if they joined guilds to make friends, only 14.81 percent of Chinese gamers reported in the positive, compared to 48.68 percent of Americans. Dr. Wi drew the conclusion that American gamers are looking to foster a community and communicate with friends, whereas Chinese gamers are more focused on achieving end goals.

World of Warcraft's success, according to Dr. Wi, is that World of Warcraft managed to capitalize on these cultural gaming divides. It effectively combined party and solo play, questing and PK gameplay, and online community integration to create a game that's appealing worldwide. Other factors not mentioned include Blizzard's use of particularly stylized graphics, attractive to Eastern markets accustomed to super-deformed style MMOs. Blizzard also had the advantage of an existing brand recognition in Eastern territories, which was mentioned in a different panel discussion entitled MMOs, Past, Present, and Future, featuring MMO experts Mark Jacobs, Daniel James, Mark Kern, Raph Koster, and Gordon Walton.

Jonathan Frome: Representation Reality

Jonathan Frome: Representation Reality

Representation, Reality, and Emotions Across Media

We read fiction because we enjoy the emotional responses it generates. Through fiction, we can delight at a clever and subtle use of language, deeply sympathize with characters, or marvel at a plot twist. Even tragic stories are, in some sense, enjoyable. Feelings motive us to engage with other dramatic media as well: we go to the theater, watch films, and play videogames in large part to feel emotions. Yet, the wide variety of media and the emotions they generate challenge our ability to understand exactly how media generate emotions. In this paper, I argue that current theories are inadequate for most fruitfully understanding our emotional responses to artworks. I propose an alternate theory that suggests we can understand our emotional responses to art by integrating a multi-level theory of mind with an analysis of the key differences between representational media and reality. Based on this theory, I present a model of emotion that can both describe our affective responses to a wide variety of representational media and help us compare different types of media in terms of their ability to generate emotions in different ways.

I. Current Theories of Emotional Response

Imagine that you are holding a lottery ticket, looking intently at it, and listening to the winning numbers announced on TV. Number after number matches, and when the final number, 'fifteen', matches your final number, you have won millions of dollars. You look up at the TV screen, and you suddenly realize that what you heard as 'fifteen' was actually 'fifty'. You have won nothing. Your overwhelming positive feelings are quickly replaced with a strong sense of disappointment. This scenario helps us understand the common-sense notion that our emotions are based on our beliefs about the world. You were thrilled when you believed that you had won the lottery, but when you came to believe that you had lost, your positive emotions quickly changed to disappointment.

The role of beliefs in emotion gives rise to a central question about fiction. Why do we respond emotionally to fictions when we don't believe that their contents refer to the real world? When you read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you feel great sympathy for the protagonist, and, if you find the novel moving, you are very sad when she dies. But you don't believe that there is or was a person named Anna Karenina, and you don't believe that Anna Karenina is an account of actual events. Given that you don't believe in the narrative, why should you respond emotionally to it? When you stop believing that you won the lottery, your happiness disappears. Why doesn't your sadness disappear when you attend to your lack of belief in the reality of Anna Karenina and her situation?

Two theories that attempt to explain this apparent paradox are the illusion theory and the pretend theory.1 Both are based on the premise that emotions are caused by beliefs. The illusion theory holds that when we engage with fiction, we are temporarily under the illusion that what we are seeing or reading about is real. Readers or viewers have emotional responses to Anna Karenina because, in some sense, they do believe in its reality. Unfortunately, this theory does not seem to accord with our experience of fiction. Consider someone watching the film Alien (1979) and being terrified of the film's alien monster. The illusion theory would hold that the viewer is scared because as she watches the film she, in some sense, believes that the alien is threatening and dangerous in reality. But if she truly believes that the alien is real, even temporarily, we would expect her to run out of the house and call the authorities to report the horrible deaths she just witnessed. She does not. Her lack of action precludes the explanation that she is under an illusion that the film is real and thus undermines the viability of the illusion theory.

The pretend theory holds that the viewer does not believe that the alien is real; she knows that it is fictional. Therefore, she cannot really be scared, because people can only be scared of things that they believe might actually hurt them. More broadly, since it is absurd to think that we actually believe in fictions, the pretend theory claims that our emotional responses to fiction are not really genuine emotions. Rather, they are part of a game we play with fictions. When we read a book or see a film, the theory claims, we engage in a game of pretend, much like children playing cops and robbers. Just as the children might pretend a cardboard box is a car, a film viewer pretends the images and sounds of the film are actually a threatening alien. The viewer's heart races, she thinks of the awful things the alien might do to her, and she screams. But this reaction is a response to her imaginative make-believe, rather than a genuine fear.

The pretend theory is unsatisfying because it conflicts with our intuitions about how we read books or watch films. We do not consciously pretend to feel emotions, and what we feel feels real. The pretend theory attempts to address these problems by positing that the viewer's pretend fear is involuntary and feels just like real fear. Posed in this way, the pretend theory offers a seemingly viable explanation of how we can feel emotions in fictions: what we think of as real emotions are not real, they are pretend, so they can plausibly be generated without belief in the things that inspire them. Yet this theory raises as many questions as it answers. When children sit in a box and pretend to be driving a car, their pretense is voluntary. Indeed, part of the concept of pretense is that the person pretending is consciously choosing to treat one thing as another. The notion that the film viewer is involuntarily pretending seems to stretch the meaning of pretense past its limits. Further, pretending is an activity that seems to invite wide variation. One child may pretend that the cardboard box is a car, while another pretends it is a fort, an oven, or a stage. In contrast, when faced with a horror movie, almost all viewers pretend to be scared of the alien. None pretend to be proud of the alien or in love with it. The pretend theory cannot explain why viewer responses based on games of make-believe would have so little variety.

The illusion theory and the pretend theory are both based on the notion that emotions rely on beliefs, yet they explain our responses to fictions through opposite strategies. The illusion theory holds that since we have emotional responses to fictions, we must believe in them. In contrast, the pretend theory states that since we do not believe in fictions, our emotional responses to them cannot be genuine. Since neither theory appears plausible, we may need to reject the premise on which both are based: that real emotions can only be generated by beliefs. Rejecting this premise is the central feature of philosopher Noël Carroll's theory of emotion and art, which he calls the thought theory.2 Carroll argues that emotions can be generated just by the thought of things, even if we do not actually believe in them. Carroll gives the example of vividly imagining that we are on the edge of a dangerous precipice. If we actually visualize this scenario, we can be genuinely scared by it even if we believe that we are firmly on safe ground. The thought theory can begin to explain the initial question of how we can be emotionally moved by fictions. On this theory, we can be made sad by just the thought of Anna Karenina dying; we can be scared just by the thought of a monster, without believing that it is actually a threat.

Unfortunately, the thought theory does not fully explain the scenarios described above that motivated the question of why we respond emotionally to fiction. If the thought theory is true, why are we not just as happy with the thought that we have won the lottery as with actually winning the lottery? Why are we not just as upset with the thought of a friend dying as we are by his actual death? Carroll provides no answer. The thought theory is also unable to answer two key questions about how we respond to media. First, why does the way an artwork is presented affect our response to it? Our response to Alien will be very different if we see it on a small portable DVD player than if we see it in a large IMAX theater. Yet both presentations prompt the same thoughts about the horrible deaths of the crew on the Nostromo, so according to the thought theory we should expect the same emotional responses rather than varied responses. A second unanswered question is, why do different media excel at generating different emotions? I think the premise of this question is intuitive, but I will motivate it with a few examples. Literature excels at generating rich characters with full mental lives. This is not to say that film cannot portray rich characters or that all literature does this, but literature seems to be best at this task. Our examples of characters who have a full, complex psychology that seem to approach the depth of real people come overwhelmingly from literature. Film excels at presenting exciting action sequences. Of course, literature can also have intense action scenes, and a brilliant painting may be able to evoke a sense of intense action, but films are advantaged in this task. It takes an exceptional book or painting to arouse the reader or viewer into an excited state through a depiction of action. Yet a second-rate Hollywood action film can do it easily. Or consider the emotion of regret. Can a film make you feel regret? Yes, in rare cases. A film might stir regret by reminding you of the romantic partner you let get away. But videogames excel in generating regret; it is common for gameplay to be punctuated with regret as the player realizes that different choices could have resulted in victory rather than defeat.

The thought theory does not help us understand why different media have different strengths in generating emotions. The concept of the alien in the film Alien and the book based on the film is the same, but our emotional responses to the two media are different. The failure of the thought theory to explain these features of our engagement with artworks suggests that we need a different, more nuanced theory.



...



more information in the original article.

GDC Dilemma: Luring the Non-Gamer

Wired News: GDC Dilemma: Luring the Non-Gamer

Mar, 09, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO -- As the 20th annual Game Developers Conference wrapped up here Friday, programmers and designers took home with them the daunting puzzle of how to win over a target demographic crucial to the industry's ongoing success. And guess what? It's not you.

It's your mom, your little brother, your girlfriend -- anyone you know who would never dream of calling themselves a "gamer," but who, if properly motivated, would happily spend time -- and money -- playing games just the same. Developers who never really concerned themselves with expanding beyond their core audience are now realizing their very survival may depend on wooing consumers who've never held a controller in their lives.

MobyGames designer Warren Spector broke it down during his Wednesday afternoon presentation on storytelling-in-gaming: As games get more and more expensive to produce, any company that can't crank out a blockbuster is in serious jeopardy, and counting on significant sales volume from the core audience is a risk that developers can no longer afford to take. His suggestion for luring a new segment of players was, not surprisingly, to tell better stories.

"Stories can be key to reaching non-gamers," he said, "but they have to be emotionally satisfying and truly interactive."

The problem, as Spector sees it, is that too much of a typical game's budget goes to flash -- graphics and physics, for example -- which have next to no appeal for the typical non-gamer. That doesn't leave enough money for those elements that would matter to a larger audience, like believable characters or realistic dialogue.

The success of the Nintendo DS and Wii is due in no small part to the company's dedication to the "expanded audience," as Shigeru Miyamoto, the company's top game designer, pointed out in his keynote on Thursday morning.

To illustrate his point, he referenced his "Wife-o-Meter," his way of judging a game's potential appeal by getting his wife to play it. If developers want to expand their audience, Miyamoto said, the one thing they should consider when designing their game is "How fun it is for people who don't play them."

Relentless Software's David Amor knows all about the power of what he refers to as the "other 90 percent," a number he admittedly pulled out of thin air to represent the chunk of the populace that doesn't consider game playing an important part of their lives. His game, Buzz, a simple Jeopardy-type quiz game that comes packaged with four buzzer controllers, has sold in numbers that would make any developer salivate.

More than a year after its release, Buzz is still selling at full price, a rarity in a market that usually sees a title's price slashed just a few weeks after its initial release. In a presentation on Wednesday, Amor was direct with his audience that they needed to change their attitudes about playing to the non-gaming market.

"These types of games are considered very unsexy by the industry," Amor said. "But these games are more important than Gears of War. These are the games your girlfriend buys and starts to play."

Wired 15.03: Be More Than You Can Be

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html?pg=1 />

Wired 15.03: Be More Than You Can Be

Be More Than You Can Be
Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.



The lab is climate-controlled to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and 66
percent humidity. Sitting inside the cramped room, even for a few
minutes, is an unpleasantly moist experience. I’ve spent the last 40
minutes on a treadmill angled at a 9 percent grade. My face is
chili-red, my shirt soaked with sweat. My breath is coming in short,
unsatisfactory gasps. The sushi and sake I had last night are in full
revolt. The tiny speakers on the shelf blasting “Living on a Prayer”
are definitely not helping.

Then Dennis Grahn, a lumpy Stanford University biologist and former
minor-league hockey player, walks into the room. He nods in my
direction and smiles at a technician. “Looks like he’s ready,” Grahn
says.

Grahn takes my hand and slips it into a clear, coffeepot-looking
contraption he calls the Glove. Inside is a hemisphere of metal, cool
to the touch. He tightens a seal around my wrist; a vacuum begins
pulling blood to the surface of my hand, and the cold metal chills my
blood before it travels through my veins back to my core. After five
minutes, I feel rejuvenated. Never mind the hangover. Never mind Bon
Jovi. I keep going for another half hour.

The test isn’t about my endurance; it’s about the future of the
American armed forces. Grahn and his colleagues developed the Glove for
the military — specifically, for the Pentagon’s way-out science
division, Darpa: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For
nearly 50 years, Darpa has engineered technological breakthroughs from
the Internet to stealth jets. But in the early 1990s, as military
strategists started worrying about how to defend against germ weapons,
the agency began to get interested in biology. “The future was a scary
place, the more we looked at it,” says Michael Goldblatt, former head
of Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office. “We wanted to learn the
capabilities of nature before others taught them to us.”

By 2001, military strategists had determined that the best way to deal
with emerging transnational threats was with small groups of
fast-moving soldiers, not hulking pieces of military hardware. But
small groups rarely travel with medics — they have to be hardy enough
to survive on their own. So what goes on in Grahn’s dank little lab at
Stanford is part of a much larger push to radically improve the
performance, mental capacity, and resilience of American troops — to
let them run harder and longer, operate without sleep, overcome deadly
injury, and tap the potential of their unconscious minds.



check the original article for more information

The first commercially available Brain Computer Interface - gizmag Article

The first commercially available Brain Computer Interface - gizmag Article

from Wearable Electronics (68 articles)



March 11, 2007 The evolution of the Computer Human interface may seem to be rooted in the infernal keyboard and its recent travelling companion, the mouse, but much work is being done in the areas of virtual worlds, voice recognition, handwriting recognition and gesture recognition to give us a new paradigm of computing. It now appears we are on the edge of another brave new virtual world – the direct interface between the brain and the computer is here. One of the Holy Grail’s of research, there are many such projects going on around the world at present. Now the German g.tec (Guger Technologies) group has taken the technology out of the lab and into the real world with a complete BCI kit, and amazingly, there’s also a kit for a pocket PC - a super-low-weight biosignal recording system “g.MOBIlab” is used to measure the EEG and the data processing, analysis and pattern recognition are performed on a commercially available Pocket PC or in this case, your windows PC. The first BCI system will enable the composition and sending of messages, and control of a computer game. There’s also an invasive (implanted) option still being trialled in the laboratory – this is significantly more effective abnd the system can already accept and process input from both the embedded array and the cap array. Though the first work in the area is focussed on enabling paralysed humans to communicate far more freely, the potential to enhance one’s communications quite freely is clearly not that far away. There’s also the potential unlocked by putting such a device into the hands of thousands of eager and capable amateurs who will no doubt broaden the understanding of the human mind with their pursuits. The BCI system is nominated for the 2007 European ICT Grand Prize.



In several research projects patients have used the device to successfully produce control signals to select letters and words or to control specific functions of a wheelchair or prosthetic device.



The activity of the brain is recorded with a EEG (Electroencephalogram) electrodes mounted onto the surface of the head.g.tec has developed a sophisticated biosignal amplifier which allows the acquisition of the signals with very high accuracy. The amplifier is plugged into a USB port of the notebook for signal acquisition. The big advantage of the ECoG recordings is the better signal quality. Even a single electrode overlaying a specific brain region can generate a reliable control signal for a BCI system. On the surface of the head the EEG measures the activity of millions of neuron to extract the control signal.

Spore Video

YouTube - Spore GDC 2007

Spore GDC 2007

Online creatures, great and small - teddies and MMOs

Massive numbers, 2,5M unique users/month for Webkinz, 4,5M for Club Penguin. Check the original article for more information.



Online creatures, great and small - The Boston Globe

Online creatures, great and small



By Irene Sege, Globe Staff | January 20, 2007



NEWTON -- Eight-year-old Madison Block sleeps with a small stuffed animal, a cat she calls Coco whose back is torn from wear. She has 11 more little creatures, including Fluffy the poodle and Doodles the panda, that she keeps on a closet shelf set up as a dollhouse or on her bed or in a doghouse on the floor. Down the hall, her 11-year-old sister, Dylan, has 14 animals seated on an overstuffed chair in her bedroom, including the polar bear Frosty that she sleeps with every night.



As cute as the animals are, being soft and cuddly is not their main asset. These are Webkinz, stuffed animals sold with a secret code that gives children access to an online world where the toys' virtual versions can socialize, play games, decorate their dwellings, and change outfits. Webkinz.com, along with similar sites such as Club Penguin, combines the shared-space, real-time interaction of "massive multiplayer online games" usually aimed at teens and adults with the pets-on-the- Web kid appeal of Neopets .



Webkinz and Club Penguin , which features animated tuxedoed birds without a stuffed animal tie-in, are two of the newest and hottest entrants on the juniors scene. The buzz has spread so quickly through the grade-school grapevine that, barely 18 months since they were launched, webkinz.com attracted 2.5 million unique users in December and Club Penguin drew more than 4 million.



"There is just a fascinating network of word of mouth," says Ellen Seiter , author of "The Internet Playground. " "To get to this point of enlisting kids into these [massive multiplayer online games], they've already been gaming online extensively. They've already been participating in the chat function and downloading."



Ganz , the Canadian gift wholesaler behind Webkinz, has been selling lots of the stuffed animals since introducing them in April 2005. Webkinz.com passed 1 million registered users last summer. "That number," says Ganz's Susan McVeigh, "is way in the dust now." So far Ganz has rolled out 41 Webkinz animals, including two it has already retired, and 25 smaller Lil'Kinz. Each user typically owns more than one of the animals, which are selling faster than many stores can keep them stocked. "It was a Webkinz Christmas," says McVeigh.



In Brookline the other day, Henry Bear's Park had only the $10 pegasus Webkinz and $7.50 unicorn Lil'Kinz on hand, and the nearby Magic Beans had none. "They're the next Beanie Babies," says Henry Bear's manager Jean Oliveira.



When the Block sisters log onto Webkinz or Club Penguin, they often put a friend on speaker phone for a virtual playdate that's part online arcade and part online paper dolls. Madison likes to sit a real-life Webkinz beside the computer.



"Me and my friend, we first discovered Club Penguin, and we got a lot of people on it," says Dylan. "Mostly all of my friends do Club Penguin and Webkinz. For Webkinz it's mostly girls. For Club Penguin it's both."

Mitch Hedberg Quotes - The Quotations Page

Mitch Hedberg Quotes - The Quotations Page

Quotations by Author

Mitch Hedberg (1968 - 2005), American comedian



I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.



Mitch Hedberg

I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone wants to get a hold of me, they just say 'Mitch,' and I say 'what?' and turn my head slightly.



Mitch Hedberg

I know a lot about cars. I can look at a car's headlights and tell you exactly which way it's coming.



Mitch Hedberg

I like rice. Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2000 of something.



Mitch Hedberg

I like to play blackjack. I'm not addicted to gambling, I'm addicted to sitting in a semi-circle.



Mitch Hedberg

I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down.



Mitch Hedberg

The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.



Mitch Hedberg

With a stop light, green means 'go' and yellow means 'slow down'. With a banana, however, it is quite the opposite. Yellow means 'go', green means 'whoa, slow down', and red means 'where the heck did you get that banana?'



Mitch Hedberg

You know, you can't please all the people all the time... and last night, all those people were at my show.



Mitch Hedberg

I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporaly out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.



Mitch Hedberg, Comedy Central Presents

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.



Mitch Hedberg, Mitch All Together

Guerrilla Mail - Disposable temporary e-mail address

Guerrilla Mail - Disposable temporary e-mail address

Guerrilla Mail provides you with disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 minutes. You can read and reply to e-mails that are sent to the temporary e-mail address within the given time frame.

~ Zero Carbon House ~

The Zero Carbon House is a low energy demonstration project to

show how renewable energy can create a unique living experience on a remote island in a severe climate. A holistic approach has been taken to eliminating household carbon emissions that would normally result from heating and powering the home, running the family car and growing and transporting food.



The house is based on a standard design from a timber frame company. Timber is a low embodied energy, renewable material that will be sourced from Scotland to minimise transportation costs and impacts.



The house will be constructed to very high levels of energy efficiency. Heating will be provided by an air-to-water heat pump serving an underfloor heating system and providing domestic hot water via a heat store.



Power will be provided by two on-site wind turbines and can be stored in a Redox Fuel Cell system to even out fluctuations in generation and demand. Power can also be stored in the electric vehicle's battery system. A grid connection will be retained as backup but the power storage system will maximise the use of renewable energy on site rather than exporting power to the grid. This improves the project





economics as well as minimising impact on the local electricity distribution network.



Zero carbon heat from the heat pump will augment passive solar collection in a doubly-insulated greenhouse to provide suitable growing conditions for a range of fruit and vegetables grown in a hydroponics system. The availability of fresh affordable food is a major concern on Unst and other remote islands in Scotland. The erection of the first greenhouse will demonstrate production of locally grown food to reduce food miles and to give the community fresh affordable produce to improve the dietary habits of the community in line with the Scottish Executive's objectives.



The project has been designed to be self financing after 3 years through establishment of a horticulture business, training and education facility. Real time monitoring of the system will be made available to the general public on this web site, including information on costs and pay backs.



This project is highly replicable and addresses social economic and environmental issues that are of relevance across the whole of Scotland, the UK and beyond. Support is being provided by Communities Scotland, EST Scotland and Shetland Enterprise.





Support Organisations



Energy Saving Trust in Scotland

Communities Scotland

Shetland Enterprise





For further information, contact:



Michael Rea

Auld Batavia

Uyeasound

Unst

Shetland

ZE2 9DL

Tel: 01957 755 309

Email: michaeljrea@msn.com





I



Duncan Price

Energy for Sustainable Development Ltd.

Fourth Floor, West Entrance

1-3 Dufferin Street

London

EC1Y 8NA

Tel: 020 7628 7722

Email: duncan@esd.co.uk