Richard Bartle: When I say "play", I mean something quite complex play can be play as in acting, as well as in activating toys however, I use it as a shorthand for "engaging in a virtual worlds" same as I use "players" to mean "a RL person attached to a character"
The films are essentially the same, except that Cameron Crowe's English-language version of Alejandro Amenábar's Spanish film is less successful, largely due to Crowe's overly-sycophantic reliance on Amenábar's original and of course the presence in the English version of the hideous Cameron Diaz. (But I digress: Perkies do that do you...but while I'm digressing can I urge you immediately to rent Amenábar's "Mar Adentro"/"The Sea Inside". The range and ability demonstrated by Amenábar and his screenwriter, Mateo Gil, makes me feel ill with jealousy. Amenábar also directed "The Others" in between these two films, which I found less interesting, though still beautiful, smart, and inspired: together these three films represent an unbelievable batting streak that makes A-list Hollywood directors look like they're playing in the bush leagues.
His waking-dream is, of course, not far from the topic of this blog, virtual worlds. But it's a specific example of virtual world design, one that is fairly recent: I'm talking about instanced worlds. As anyone who plays newer-style MMOGs has experienced, there is a trend away from wholly persistent worlds, where the content is available to all, to instanced environments where players are locked away from the rest of the world. Since that time, while budgets have risen to incredible, sometimes ridiculous, heights ($30 million to develop The Sims Online? On what did they spend all that money, anyway? Not the art, that’s for sure), we seem to have stopped innovating, for the most part.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that 1999-Present is also the period when publishers really became interested in MMOs and started throwing around money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. All of us in the Old Guard waited 15 or 20 years for those humongous budgets. To put this in proportion, between 1989 and 1992, I produced six MMOs for GEnie, three of them with graphic interfaces, for less than one third of one percent of the budget of TSO and every single one of those six games had something new and untried in it. Mythic, then AUSI, did its first game for GEnie in 1989 for the lordly advance of $3,000 and GEnie made back well over one hundred times that advance before I left in 1992. Believe me, by the mid-1990s, developers had had enough of living on passion and dreams; the publisher money was welcome, thank you very much.
For many years, suggestions have been made by politicians and in the media that there is a link between the playing of computer games and the committing of acts of real-world violence. On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation. We talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.g. of Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state). In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence... "butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon.
I’ve posted a new paper about member developed business brands in There and Second Life to SSRN, available for download here. This is something that grew out of last year’s more general Advertising & Branding in Social Virtual Worlds project, this time focusing on four “DIY” brands developed by members themselves. On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.
Via a bunch of blogs, The Monster Engine is a site of paintings by Dave Devries based on sketches of monsters and superheroes made by kids. On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation. We talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.g. of Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state). In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence... "butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon.
Reminiscent of Marvel v. NCSoft, but just without the lawsuit, Katie Dean writes for Wired about how players in SWG don't have the freedom to play virtual instruments because IP makes that possibility too dangerous for Sony Online: A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.
Where did it all begin, you ask? I started out as a third assistant to an assistant of the assistant file librarian on GEnie’s Apple II RoundTable in 1986, played Stellar Warrior from Kesmai in beta test that same year and, with eighty of us blasting away at each other and my hands literally shaking from the tension of successfully defending a planet with a crippled laser cruiser, decided on the spot to change careers. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.
Overly dramatic, perhaps, but the content of the question is a serious one. From 1986 to about 1997, when the market was still relatively small and development money was very tight, we made quite a bit of progress in the design and development of MMOs. Small groups of innovative developers pretty much had free reign over their designs and it showed in the work. Each new game was, well, different, sometimes in startling and exciting ways. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions.
