SXSW: Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

 Posted by (Visited 6317 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 102008
 

I’m not at SXSW (we have way too much going on here at work!) but there’s a great liveblog of a panel I wish I had been at, on Virtual Worlds News, about “Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds”.

Wu: Will games and virtual worlds eventually compete based not on art and storyline, but on who can offer the most rights to players?

I hope the answer is “yes.” What’s more, I hope that at some point there’s a minimum standard accepted industrywide and enforced by an industry trade body. As in, companies join the trade body and as part of that they agree to uphold a base set of practices and policies as a condition of membership.

The Sunday Poem: The BASICs of life

 Posted by (Visited 5189 times)  The Sunday Poem  Tagged with: ,
Mar 092008
 

10 Dimension all your variables, figure out their sides.
20 Remark, perhaps, on how data twirls across divides.
30 Print a hello world, as if the world could not read cursive;
40 Go to thirty, looped but still printed, not recursive.
50 For once you have some code that doesn’t do much else,
60 Next you’ll want to make it special, of yourself.
70 Data will be read, perhaps, or Fibonacci spun,
80 While you tally figures until the job is done.
90 Poke a byte, peek a bit, nybble ‘til you’re through,
100 End with too few memories, dimensions still unused.

Metaplace Stress Test: a 2d space shooter

 Posted by (Visited 5879 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with:
Mar 072008
 

Here we go, stress test number three! Stuff is starting to accelerate quite a lot here as we gear up for releases. So we’re doing another stress test. This one is for an overhead 2d space shooter that you may have seen screenshots of before. This intent this time is to stress test with some physics and a really bandwidth-intensive game. We’ve also worked some on optimizations and on browser compatibility since last time, so we’ll see how that does. We really hope we manage to break stuff this time!

You don’t need to be an alpha tester to play. Just visit the main Metaplace page at noon Pacific time tomorrow, and there will be a link to the game.

When real life becomes a game

 Posted by (Visited 5158 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 062008
 

Someone in Beijing decides to try reaching a blogger under house-arrest:

Luckily, just prior to this I had finished reading The Gulag Archipelago, so I was mentally prepared for the conditions inside an institution. However, this was still not enough, so I did a crash course in learning some criminal procedure law and investigation and interrogation methodology. Aside from that, my head was full of the first-person shooters in Delta Force and Counter-Strike—so I was thinking of what was needed for a military operation.

Global Voices Online » China: Hack into Freedom City

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