Declaring the Rights of Metaplace Users

 Posted by (Visited 17038 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Sep 152008
 

As has already been mentioned online, today at the Austin Game Conference Metaplace announced that its Terms of Service will be modeled on my 2000 article “Declaring the Rights of Players.” What does that mean?

It means, in a nutshell, that we are signing up for the following:

Rights of creators

  • Freedom of expression
  • Ownership, including earning money & running their own world
  • Privacy
  • Develop their own TOS

Rights of users

  • Freedom of speech & assembly, privacy
  • Rule of “law” and due process
  • Ownership of their IP

Responsibilities of creators and users

  • Don’t break the law

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AGDC08: Lane Merrifield, At Their Service

 Posted by (Visited 10258 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Sep 152008
 

At Their Service: Making a Difference by Putting Players First
Lane Merrifield, Club Penguin

(liveblog)

Thank you for allowing me to be here, a huge honor. It wasn’t to omany years ago that I was just an avid fan dreaming of attending this conference. Going to try to keep it brief so we can have time for questions.

I had a few plane issues last night, landed at 4:30am, if i am slow, it’s not because I am Canadian.

Why would I fly to Austin to listen to someone talk about serving others? If we can truly learn how to put the player first, we will have better customer support, and we will build better games, stornger teams, and better businesses.

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Sep 152008
 

Measuring & Metrics: the Online Gaming Audience, Edward Hunter, Comscore

(these are just rough notes, not a liveblog transcript).

Gamers used to be 18-24 males, now there are online gamers in every demographic. Exponential increase in spend for advertising to reach the gamer. 9 out of ten calls to ComScore are about ads.

Metrics asked for:
– reach and frequency
– genre prefs by demographic
– market size
– demographics: ideal targets for a game
– exposure targets — how many did you reach, what is the kind & level of engagement? What actions do they take? (Do they interact with the ad or just see it there but focus more on the game?)
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Sep 142008
 

I am here in Austin for AGDC, after a difficult day of travel. My last-ditch attempt to make it to Rudy’s for some BBQ before they closed missed by 20 minutes thanks to various flight delays. So here I sit with Sonic cherry limeade, melancholy, a Marriott substituting for a garret, to write a Sunday poem for you… 😉

When is a rhyme a rhyme? A pair of words
Vibrating twain and twin, a homonym
A scanty, scarcely fraction time, a blur
Of vowels assonancing on a whim…
Half verb, the penult, higher ante, quill
That sometimes speaks in halves and sometimes sprung,
And in the clumsy piling on of syll,
The ables and alliterate undone.
Is all it is the music? Nothing else
applies? The quatrain’s break, the plosive sound,
The prayer on the couplet’s open verse?
The sense of it, the consonance profound?
The algorithm elegant, the twinning still sublime,
Is it still a poem, if we forget to rhyme?

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