I found it on the newsstand! It’s the January 2008 issue. We’re even on the cover (as a small “Make Your Own MMO” blurb in a circle in the lower left).
Pretty good article, I thought — almost two full pages. And in case you are wondering, that one-eyed dinosaur critter is called a sqronk. Expect to hear more about him in the future.
Dean Takahashi has a nice article up on the makers of Warbook. It’s a great example of games built under that “design for everywhere” pattern that I have been talking about for the last few months.
Exclusive: Webs.com comes out of nowhere with Facebook games with a billion page views
For instance, Street Race is a new SGN game that has no graphics. You simply sign up, get $1,000 in play money, buy a car, then race. In the race, you click on another user. Then nothing happens. Nothing. The next screen that comes up tells you if you won or lost, how much money you earned or lost, and the skill points you earned. As your skill points grow, you win more races and get more money to spend souping up your car. The social part comes in where you can get more money by inviting 20 friends to join.It’s simple and easy. That’s why the game has gotten more than a million page views on its first day. You can play a round in about one second.
So I got an email announcing ChatBlade, a new MMOG chat system middleware package; a specialized enough need that it would have been kind of inconceivable a few years ago as a business. Which leads to speculation on where we are headed in terms of innovative virtual world tchnologies. And now, I have to open this post with an anecdote (even though they say to write for blogs the way you write for newspapers: put the lead first!).
Once very long ago (“long ago” here defined as circa 1995), I logged into some random LPMud. I don’t remember which one it was, but it had an idea I liked a lot and decided to steal for LegendMUD. In that mud, you see, they had simple moods & what today gets called by some “say alts” — commands that were exactly like the SAY command, only you could grunt or groan, wail or whine, and these say alternates carried emotional content that you didn’t get with plain old SAY, WHISPER, SHOUT, and TELL. I went back to Legend and designed a speech system that handled moods and say alternates.
Yeah, the Xbox 360 is dead. Red Ring of Death. Error code 0102, which apparently means “send it back.” Nice timing with the holidays… sigh.
Getting serious | Economist.com
I don’t really have any comment, except to say that seeing names in there that weren’t from TerraNova was almost jarring. 🙂
