Briefly noted
(Visited 5527 times) Game talk
Jul 102007
- Richard has a great rant on computer games education at the university level in the UK.
- Toontown is moving to an ad-supported model, sez Mediaweek. Over at Clickable Culture, Tony asks, “They can’t handle chat, but we can throw ads at them?”
- Some stats from another article on the same topic: Wow, Nicktropolis is taking off fast. 1.4m monthly uniques, beating Toontown’s 1.1m.
- The Economist suggests that perhaps Multiverse may be the Netscape of virtual worlds.
- That pesky E3 thing is going on, but it’s some other E3 that somehow isn’t attracting any of my attention. How odd.
11 Responses to “Briefly noted”
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[edit:] Thank God. http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9249157 If I were a believer, I’d say this is a sign from God. However, I know better, because it came from Raph Koster. https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/07/10/briefly-noted-2/ *snicker* I have all the Multiverse stuff downloaded. I just haven’t had the time or the inclination or the creativity to start learning it. It’s going to hurt when I do. But I can. And it will be awesome.
That’s unsurprising to me. If you browse GameDev.net long enough, you’ll find that there are hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands, of kids (sorry, kids) in that age bracket who are working on cool and advanced stuff that you would expect people in their twenties and thirties to be working on. I don’t remember the last time I could find an indie game project that wasn’t staffed with teens or even tweens.
I was involved with a project called “Centaur Force” awhile back. The game was to be your everyday story-driven first-person shooter, but the lead programmer was 14 and was developing the game/graphics engine from scratch. At the time, Doom 3 was making headlines with its graphics innovations, so what he did was duplicate those innovations for our project. Carmack would have been proud.
Wildfire Games is also doing some incredible things with their real-time strategy game project “0 A.D.” (See video.) Although many of the team members are no longer in their teens, when the project started five or six years ago, they were.
That pesky E3 thing is going on, but it’s some other E3 that somehow isn’t attracting any of my attention. How odd.
Admit it: you miss booth babes.
Who would want to be the Netscape of anything?
Of course its this strange confusion that 3D is central to virtual worlds. The key “bits” for virtual world proliferation are in the areas of identity, payments, paying creators and IP protection, etc…. none of which are addressed by Multiverse. Secondary issues are better authoring and 3D navigation (if you are into that 3D thing).
When I first read the Economist piece, this part caught my attention:
“Now”?
As with Forbes, BusinessWeek and too many others, I now don’t think too much about what the mainstream media has to say on the topic.
More importantly, the article seems to be missing a few recent announcements and developments; from the lesser discussed Croquet to SL’s “grid of grids” effort (which will likely/possibly address the issue the Economist raises).
Interesting. Which means now I won’t be able to let my daughter play toontown because she will click the ads even though we tell her not to…
The Virtual Worlds News piece says:
I wonder what the nature of the “increased user response” is? The way it’s phrased, the impression is that Toontown players are chomping at the bit to get more ads…
Richard
Yeah you know 8-12 year olds… always about the advetising… click, click, click.
Ok so I totally misspelled advertising. It was actually a typo because I’m not awake yet!
If you look at the Wikipedia entry for Disney’s Pirates Online, you’ll see a statement along the lines of being able to “play for free as long as you like.” I’m guessing the model for both games will be: 1) ad-supported free play with 2) subscription up-sell. I very much doubt Disney will cut their subscribers loose and hope they click on ads. Bird in the hand and all that.
Then again, I could be wrong: http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/07/10/disney-drops-subscription-adopts-ad-model-for-toontown/?rss1
Ok so I totally misspelled advertising. It was actually a typo because I’m not awake yet!
Is okay. Sounds like Havad-style speech. =P