AGDC08: Moving From MMO To Web: What’s The Story?

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Sep 222008
 

Gamasutra has coverage of the other panel I was on at AGDC.

Finally, why did all of these developers leave their jobs at major MMO studios for the world of the web?

Koster’s response seemed to sum up a lot of the inspiration among developers who have come to love the web as a platform.

“It isn’t so much about the size of the market, though that’s important,” he said. “And it’s not even about the six year long [traditional MMO development cycle]. To me, it’s about the greater capacity for personal expression. There’s a great capacity to touch people. it was about empowering everybody. Working on the web now reminds me of working on the internet before the web was around, where it was much more community-driven and participatory and exciting and end users have their say. It feels like you can accomplish everything.”

ExitReality

 Posted by (Visited 8473 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 172008
 

ExitReality launched in open beta today and there is coverage in a few places. Virtual Worlds News has detailed coverage with lots of interview questions, while CNet has a slightly more critical article.

What does it do? It automatically grabs web content and sticks it into a 3d space. You can shape the 3d space if you want, but it does it by default — no work for the site owner. It also slurps 3d content of all sorts from basically anywhere to let you build with it. I don’t know what the scripting is like, and it (like most all the 3d solutions) is based on a plugin, and one that as of yet is still limited to Windows. But that seems like an obvious thing to want to remedy.

I haven’t tried it out yet, but it does seem like an important transitional step in some ways. It’s still the notion that people want to see websites in 3d, which I think is basically wrong, but it does it in a manner that is much more like the web than past attempts.

It will be interesting to see where this one goes.

AGDC: Bruce Sterling keynote

 Posted by (Visited 15213 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 162008
 

Again, sorry for typos.

Bruce Sterling, Future of Entertainment

Hello, thanks for having me into your event today, and thanks for that intro. Though there is a problem with that, I am not Bruce Sterling. He couldn’t make it, he sent me instead.

The reason he couldn’t make it is that in 2043, Bruce is 89. Dr. Sterling is too frail to get into a time machine to talk to game devs, so he called on me to do it. I am one of his grad students. I volunteered, sort of, to journey back in time using some of our new technical methods. It wasn’t exactly easy, and I am here and fully briefed.

Before I get started about computer entertainment 35 years from today, even though that is a very interesting topic and I am writing my thesis about it, I think I should level with you. I should tell you a few things first confidentially.
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AGDC08 / WiM: Google Lively keynote

 Posted by (Visited 8301 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Sep 162008
 

Liveblog, hurried and it was hard to hear and muffled so lots of typos and elisions.

Kevin Hanna, Creative Director, Google Lively

About a year ago the first rumors hit about Lively. My favorite was one where some bloggers decided to debunk the rumor, presenting arguments as to why Google would never go into this space. At the end the question is why would Google do this?

So we are here to answer the question of why is Google in this space?
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