Virtual bank licenses??

 Posted by (Visited 8036 times)  Game talk
Jan 092007
 

I have to admit, this boggles my mind. Plenty of people seem to have doubts about Entropia Universe already (just today, Scott Jennings quipped “Ponzi scheme? Probably”). When it was announced that they had partnered with financial institutions to get bankcards made, eyebrows were raised. (For those who don’t know, you can get an Entropia bankcard and use it to withdraw real money from your RPG account — basically, cashing out your currency).

Today there’s a press release saying that they intend to auction off to five users “virtual banking licenses.”

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Sorry, Jeff — MTV gave me your line

 Posted by (Visited 6825 times)  Game talk
Jan 092007
 

An interview with MTV News just went up, mostly about the overall landscape of MMORPGs and how they have and haven’t changed since the MUD days.

When doing the interview, Stephen Totilo said to me that an Austin designer had told him that I measured MMOs based on “time to penis.” I told him, “I think I’ve heard that, but I don’t think I said it. But it’s a good metric!”

Now, of course, we know the term is properly called “time to cock” and it can be credited to the fertile (er, sorry, must pun) mind of Jeff Freeman (whose recent post about thermostats interfaces is a must read for game designers. No, really. Ponder it next time you look at your character sheet).

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Utne Reader cover story on games

 Posted by (Visited 7811 times)  Game talk
Jan 082007
 

It’s available on the web, and it argues that games may be driving gamers to be more conformist — because they teach you to solve the problems presented, not to break out of patterns and truly innovate. As part of the basis for this argument, the author uses my book a fair amount.

But I think it’s a mistake to perceive the ordinary daily play of games as being the only way to engage with games. In the book I presented a grid of engagement that was derived from this old post to MUD-Dev. I think that even though games may primarily teach you to, well, move through the game, they also encourage engagement in other ways — these days, often explicitly. So I don’t have nearly as negative a takeaway here as the author of this piece does, though I do think that it’s important to consider what limitations games have in terms of how and what they teach.

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