Child Online Protection Act Overturned

 Posted by (Visited 10248 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jul 232008
 

COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, has been overturned by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This is actually upholding a lower court ruling from a while ago.

It will be interesting to see what effect this might have on virtual worlds, given the parental pressure for safe worlds and the ongoing political crusades, and the continued rise in kids’ worlds (and in kids who try out worlds not meant for them).

Edit: since there is some confusion about this, here’s a link that points out the differences between COPA and COPPA. In short, COPA is the replacement to the Communications Decency Act, and has to do with publishing adult material on sites minors can get to. COPPA is the Children’s Online Protection & Privacy Act, and has to do with collecting personal data from kids.

Zynga gets money, buys Yoville

 Posted by (Visited 13369 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 232008
 

Zynga has raised a bunch of money to keep going after their target of building a network of more casual games — a sort of Internet version of a publisher. In fact, ex-EA Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon has joined their board.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says:

He is super-involved in product strategy, brings the gaming DNA to us, and is an amazing CEO coach. He’s already stopped us from doing stupid things.

Like what?

Stupid things like build a PC downloadable MMO game that would cost anywhere from $5 million to $30 million, and would be free to play with virtual goods.

Meow. 😉 But hey, 1.6m daily users can’t be wrong. It’s a serious challenge to the status quo, an example of the mammals going after the dinosaurs. That said, Pincus also says that it’s likely that costs will rise and production values have to improve as more competition and richer experiences enter the arena.

They also picked up Yoville, the Facebook MMO that gets 150,000 daily uniques (see a video), with a 13% tie ratio (today’s stats) — just since May. Those are stats that again, most of the “mainstream” MMOs would love to have.

From the other side…

 Posted by (Visited 6656 times)  Reading  Tagged with: ,
Jul 222008
 

DuoCenti: The Murloc’s Family

This late in the evening, Mrgurlargl was the only one still awake. The others were curled around the campfire, full of wine and food and sleeping soundly. He couldn’t sleep, though, he was too proud, too excited to sleep.

“Die murloc filth!” Loldude247’s assault was swift. His sword sang death even as his shouts roused the sleeping family.

Stumbled across this when checking out trackbacks. Of course, it reminds me of this.

More on WebFlock

 Posted by (Visited 5118 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 212008
 

For those curious about the tech behind the Electric Sheep’s WebFlock platform, here’s a glimpse from a comment posted on Clickable Culture:

…the avatars are typically created in Maya or Max but they are rendered into sprites. That doesn’t prevent avatars from being individually personalized, but we haven’t finished that capability yet in our feature set.

You can still have a very 3D feel with our rendering engine (less toylike than isometric in my opinion), but you don’t have full camera control. Personally, I think that is a feature you DON’T want right now (unless you are doing enterprise simulation/training or mirrorworld stuff) — if you’ve ever watched people try to learn the camera controls in your typical full-3D virtual world, it is sheer pain.

The environments are also created in Maya or Max and then exported to Collada.

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