With news that now Shanda, one of the biggest Chinese MMO companies, is planning on making a metaverse world, it’s a legitimate question, If the flavor of a metaverse is driven largely by who is connected to it, then population will surely have a disproportionate impact on the overall flavor of the space. It might be that we say goodbye to the libertarian sorts of approaches that currently define the ideals of some virtual worlds, and arguably underpin the whole field (cf Bartle’s take on how the “hacker ethic” informed early MUDs).

The motive for Shanda is of course crassly commercial; after all, HiPiHi has already entered beta. In fact, the sheer lack of content here is reminiscent of the recent talk from Atari about making a virtual world: basically, not even an announcement, just the hint that maybe they are consdering one.
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Bonnie Ruberg cornered me for an interview at the tables on the third floor of GDC. It wasn’t necessarily the clearest place for an interview, and it was near the end of the day and I was a little scatterbrained. The result is this interview on Gamasutra, where some of the transcript makes it sound like I was either contradicting myself or mumbling. Probably both. 🙂

A lot of the content will be familiar to folks who follow the blog regularly, I suspect. Nonetheless, there are probably a few things I say that will tick off someone somewhere, particularly on page 3.

One note, though — as usual, I got credited for a game that I don’t really regard as being mine at all. In this case, it was Field Commander, in the lead-in blurb article.  It’s not fair to the folks who worked hard on that game to give me any credit — I didn’t do a lick of design or code on that game.

The BBC is reporting about a German police investigation into “virtual child pornography” in Second Life; in Germany, virtual depictions of underage sex acts are illegal. Linden Lab is, of course, co-operating.

Edit: There’s also this report on similar concerns in the Netherlands, and this one about virtual rape  concerns in Belgium.