Nice article here on How the Wii was born that sounds very much like my Age of the Dinosaurs talk in some ways, and includes a lovely graph of rising costs for game development.
For some reason, Tide’s Horizon seems to be the only MMO blog talking about the possible impact of the US ban on online gambling. But he’s right, the implications are possibly far-reaching on virtual worlds.
This list of 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website has plenty that is applicable to developing online games and game communities. I won’t bother to do the translation, because in most cases it’s very obvious.
What’s interesting is how much is different from the way online worlds do it. Is it that the Web world and the online world-world are so different? Or that we aren’t up to speed on current thinking? (After all the Web world moves at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of online world development.)
“I used to have a unicorn.”
It was a strange thing to say in the morning,
But she said it anyway, talking into the pillow,
And her voice was sad, and it caught on the words,
Even as she caught my hand.
Last night we went to see Ellis Paul at the AcousticMusicSanDiego series. Antje Duvekot was the opening act, and she also joined Ellis on stage for much of the last set.
Ellis Paul is, bar none, one of the best songwriters in American music today. So naturally, the concert was excellent. You walked away feeling disappointed that so many great songs went unperformed — “Paris in a Day,” “Did Galileo Pray?” “Speed of Trees,” “Angel in Manhattan,” and so on… but so many great songs did get performed that you quickly realized there simply wasn’t enough time in one concert to do his catalog justice.
