As I have spent the last couple of years yelling loudly that the game industry (despite record years) is actually in dire trouble in a business sense (not just creatively), I have repeatedly run into one comment from core gamers. You see, I keep saying that the rising landscape has a lot more lower-budget, asynchronous, low time investment, web-based games. And the response is usually,
“But the landscape you are describing doesn’t sound like games I would like.”
Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life remains, to this day, the best book written about what it is like to live immersed in a virtual world. The fact that the world in question in text-based, and the events described happened over a decade ago, is completely irrelevant. You cannot call yourself knowledgeable about virtual worlds unless you have read this book.
Unfortunately, it’s been out of print for years. I am lucky — I have two copies, one a galley proof and one a real copy, first edition and everything. They get checke dout of our little office lending library and read by Areae employees. But for most people, it’s just hard to find.
Until now, because Julian has made it available via Lulu for a very reasonable price in printed form, and as a free PDF for download. Go get it. Read it. Enjoy.
Gamasutra has posted the Project Horseshoe report on story. Alas, I didn’t make it to PH this year. 🙁 This is a very good read.
I did an inteview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun a short while back.
It’s funny, because tidbits from the interview have been picked up as news stories by various sources. And they all led with a different take on it! Over at GamesIndustry.biz, it was how the industry needs new inspiration. But over at Virtual Worlds News, it’s all about “players will touch Metaplace soon!” About which more shortly.
One of the things is that our influences in the game industry are fairly narrow. Bioshock is one of the big hits of the year, and everyone is impressed by its core narrative influences. It’s a critique of Ayn Rand and Objectivism and all of that stuff. But if you think about it, Objectivism is common currency for game developers, it’s a nerd kind of thing. So we’re not referencing anything too far afield there, a little further afield, but not a lot. A lot of the common cultural currency is not all that diverse, and that was really hammered home for me by watching the Xbox Live trailers for the new year. I sat with my wife and she said that if she hadn’t been told that they were all different games, she would not have been able to tell them apart. They were all so similar.
Reuters reports that China’s online market grew by 23% in terms of users last year, on the back of 70 million new Internet users. But China is also going to crack down, citing in part concerns that the games are disreputable and regarded as being equivalent to opium. The tone of the quote is that of a government saving an important industry from itself.
Meanwhile, one-fifth of Internet users in China are connecting via phone.
