If one more conference asks me to provide an avatar headshot for their website or materials, I may shoot myself. The last few articles for gaming magazines asked, and it’s common with all the MMO/VW centric conferences too: “Please supply 150 word bio, and a picture of your avatar.”
Things get even busier for me starting tomorrow at 6:40am, when I fly out of San Diego and up to Stanford for a Metaverse Roadmap Meeting and the Metaverse U event at Stanford. At the latter I’ll be participating in a nice long on-stage conversation along with Cory Ondrejka and Howard Rheingold.
Then I am off to GDC. First up, I am opening the Worlds in Motion Summit:
Why Gamers should Care about Virtual Worlds
Speaker(s): Raph Koster (Areae)
Time: 10:05am – 11am
Virtual worlds may be a nascent medium, but already lessons on user behavior, open worlds and content democratization have begun to surface, promising to provide new insight and evolution on the way we play and socialize. Industry pioneer Raph Koster, whose company, Areae, is set to join the revolution in a big way, saw these new insights coming before wider adoption had even begun, and he will discuss why virtual worlds and online spaces are more than a fad—and why you absolutely should care.
On Friday afternoon, last session of the week, the redoubtable Sean Riley (lead programmer for Metaplace) and I will be doing an “antemortem” of sorts on building Metaplace. It’s called a postmortem in the program, but really, we’re not done yet, so… 😉
Halo 3 – Wii – Guitar Hero – – New York Times
The showcase example is BioShock… one of the most acclaimed games of all time… Yet it failed to crack the Top 10 in sales…Similarly, the role-playing masterpiece Mass Effect, the fabulous mythology vehicle God of War II and Valve’s excellent compilation the Orange Box all failed to crack the Top 10. There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games would have made the list. Now they have simply been crowded out of the top echelon by less intimidating fare like Guitar Hero.
And perhaps it is not a coincidence that BioShock, Mass Effect and God of War II are all purely single-player games. You can’t play any of them with friends, either over the Internet or on the couch. Nine of the 10 top-selling games of 2007 include a significant multiplayer component…
Virtual Worlds News: Sanrio Launches Hello Kitty World
Gosh, I remember when we were all talking about how huge this would be, a few years ago.
Interestingly, it’s downloadable. Perhaps because it got going a few years ago. 🙂
For Males, Video Game Rewards Are All in the Mind – washingtonpost.com
New research from Stanford scientists shows that the part of the brain associated with reward and addiction was more activated in males than in females when both genders played a game whose object was to acquire more territory.
There were relatively few areas of criticism of my book A Theory of Fun. One of them, however, was that it was sexist, in large part because I suggested that many of the core characteristics of most games were things that cognitively biased them towards systematizing minds (to use Simon Baron-Cohen’s term) — which statistically, biases them towards males.
