“In the Sandbox with Raph Koster” is IndieCade’s take on the talk. It’s interesting to see it getting a different slant from Ben Medler’s — part of what happens when you deliberately give a diffuse talk, I suppose! 🙂
Virtual Worlds News points to the latest Gartner report, which shows virtual worlds (primarily from an enterprise adoption point of view, maybe?) as being on the trough of disillusionment, but going mainstream in 2 to 5 years or so.
I wonder where Gartner would put the gaming worlds?
Ben Medler has a decent summary of my keynote speech at Sandbox/Web 3d. I will see about getting the slides posted up, but honestly, I am holding out for video or audio because I suspect the slides won’t make much sense on their own — this was a highly verbal talk, with mostly static images and hardly any text on the slides.
Most attendees are probably still at SIGGRAPH proper, so more summaries might trickle out over time.
One question that came up at the cocktail party, and also in Ben’s summary is the issue of advancing technology. Isn’t it true that even the postage-stamp-sized screens are going to get more powerful? Yes, to a degree. But we shouldn’t forget that tech often gets powerful enough for a niche, then stops. Indeed, for many consumers, PCs are currently “powerful enough” and there isn’t a compelling reason to upgrade at the same rate as we have seen in the past. I don’t know where that line is for mobile devices, but I do know that the answer is typically less than techies want it to be.
There is also the question, I think, of Moore’s Wall, and whether people are empowered to use that tech in creative fashions.
Finally, there’s the question of whether powerful 3d tech on a postage-size screen actually looks and acts the same as the same tech on a large screen. I submit that the answer is no; there are affordances and restrictions provided by the cultural context in which the devices are used that must alter our design approaches, and there are plain old usability questions as well.
Robin Hood & Maid Marian, poster from 1880
Oh Marian maid, queen of May, born a shepherd girl!
What have they done? Your flock is gone,
Your ballad’s of a different world.
Once you stood alone, you know – you were not just a foil,
But instead you played the central maid
As Yorkshire festivals you toiled.
And then dependency came in, for propriety’s sake,
For maids alone cannot be shown
Lest women proper place mistake.
French, then Saxon, poor and back to Norman blood,
You stood apart and pined your heart
For loves you never needed much.
Your love, your boy, your shepherd boy, now lord made rough outlaw.
Your good French name Leaford became,
And you an archery prize for all?
From play to film and back again, your shape a-shift and formless raw,
And now you’re dead as roles are shed
And actors move through dialogue.
Do you wander alleys now, and shop at big box stores?
Do you worry mortgages, or giving to the poor?
Your ballad flows and we all know that stories grow and change and more;
You may have spent some time with bad boy Robin Hood
But given time we’ll see the shepherdess back home in her own wood.
Marian is always there in thought, be she queen of May or not.
Tor.com has the list of this year’s winners, including
Oh, and that Scalzi guy won something too. 😉
