Askville to Questville

 Posted by (Visited 26941 times)  Game talk
Jul 052007
 

I don’t know if you have all seen Askville, Amazon.com’s post-questions-and-get-answers site, but it’s very very clearly inspired by games (XP, levels, etc!). Enough so that one blogger already wondered aloud if they were inspired by my ETech talk (I personally doubt it, but if it’s so, I’d love to get royalties 😉 Amazon gift certificates would do…).

Well, Virtual Worlds News is reporting that this system, which is based on winning virtual currency, is designed to hook into something called Questville which will launch this year. And that Questville will be a virtual world of some sort. Details are thin on the ground though.

Metacrasher: bridging virtual worlds

 Posted by (Visited 8187 times)  Game talk
Jul 052007
 

Metacrasher.com is the site for a new company that seems to be trying to create bridging software so that tools and the like will work across multiple different virtual world platforms. The website seems a bit broken in places, and there isn’t much info, but I was highly amused to see that they apparently support Areae’s texture-mapping format. 🙂

Jokes aside, the idea is interesting — essentially, creating a directory of places in worlds, and presumably wrapping software so that you can “see into” various different worlds. They have tests going with Ogoglio apparently.

Player sues player over user-created content

 Posted by (Visited 6122 times)  Game talk
Jul 052007
 

Maker Of Virtual Sex Toys Takes Online Dispute To Federal Court — happening in Second Life, of course. And over sex toys, of course. Porn is always on the bleeding edge of technology…

This is a good example of exactly what Linden wanted to happen — redirecting disputes like this away from customer service and to the real-world dispute resolution process.

At issue is actually a trademark dispute, apparently; Stroker Serpentine, the person suing, makes around $40,000 a year selling “Sex Gen” beds that permit sexual positions between avatars, and he accuses the other party of copying it and selling the copy for a profit.

NPD offers a new gamer demo study

 Posted by (Visited 7579 times)  Game talk
Jul 052007
 

I blogged about the original pass of this study. Now there’s an update. It’s focused on gamers specifically, and it looks like it was a pretty deep study — over 11,000 folks surveyed.

  • Avid PC Gamers: 33%. 13.6 hours a week mostly on computers, and buy 1.4 titles a quarter.
  • Secondary Gamers: 22%. 6.8 hours a week, again mostly on computers, and buy 0.8 titles a quarter. Only a third of this group owns a PS2.
  • Avid Console Gamers: 20%. 10.7 hours a week, and they own 1.6 consoles and 0.8 portable platforms. 1.9 titles a quarter.
  • Mass Market Gamers: 15%. 8.9 hours a week, mostly on PS2 and PC. They own 1.8 consoles — more than avid console gamers, probably because they don’t sell their old consoles for store credit. 😛
  • Casual Kid Gamers: no % given, I deduce 8%. Kids 6-12, owning 1 console and 0.5 portables (which doesn’t match the kids I know, all of whom have Gameboys of some stripe). Just 3.6 hours a week of playtime, probably because of pesky parents. 0.8 games per quarter.
  • Heavy Gamers: 2%. 39.3 hours a week, mostly on 360 and Wii. Own 2.8 consoles and 1.9 portables. And they buy 13.1 games a quarter, or around 4.5 a month.

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Gold farmers get creative about advertising

 Posted by (Visited 32037 times)  Game talk
Jul 042007
 

Kerri Knight writes,

Using the age-old client-side memory hack, or ‘teleport hack’, gold spammers have reached a new low (albeit a creative one). Using the exploit, they caused level 1 gnomes to rain from the sky in Ironforge near the bank and auction house (typically the most frequented area on a server). The bodies died upon impact and remained in the world, after a short time it became clear they were dropping in a such a way as to spell out the name of a gold-selling website. I’ve not been able to locate any news of the incident (its late, and tomorrow…err today, is a holiday). So I can only leave you with a Blue response to the issue on the CS forum for verification. (see link below)  May have been inspired by this amusing comic. Oh, and Happy Independence Day! :9


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