Chat between Metaplace and Second Life

 Posted by (Visited 8874 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Apr 092009
 

As the news has hit a few blogs in the last couple of days (New World Notes & DIP’s Dispatches from the Information Age), I thought I might as well elaborate a bit on something cool that has been going on in Metaplace lately. We’ve had a fair amount of Second Life users coming in lately, and one of the things that is much on their minds is interoperability.

In short, we have had not one but two users make real-time bridges to SL chat lately. The first was by KStarfire, who used Metaplace’s ability to act as a web server to create a simple object-based chat bridge. I asked him a few questions about it:

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Apr 072009
 

Boy, am I neglecting blogging lately. Even my Twitter has gone mostly silent.

There have been several stories that caught my eye. For example, this one about musicians making decent gig money in Second Life was interesting, in part because some of what a virtual environment provides is an easier way to do marketing. As I have said before, I think the future of a lot of the arts is around personal relationships with their fans because of the way the landscape is shifting around information and money, and there’s something about virtual worlds that helps build fandoms.

Speaking of personal relationships, while at the IGF and GDC awards, I was struck by the clear signs of “celebrity” that some of the event had. Some of this was due, no doubt, to the fact that Tim Schafer’s performance as emcee was funnier and more entertaining than that of the emcees for any televised awards show. Some of it, though, was the evident fact that the creators of indie games are getting known as names, in large part because they produce quirky and individualistic games at a rapid rate. Which brings me to mention The Croopier, just because it’s a neat project.

Which reminds me that there’s a new documentary premiering on journalism in virtual worlds — talk about a profession that is in upheaval thanks to changes in business models and the value of information! I’m halfway through a galley copy of Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, in which a journalist figures pretty prominently… and struck by how prescient Bruce Sterling was when he said “information wants to be worthless.”

Which leads me to idly speculate… if anything that can be digitized will be, and anything that is digitized becomes worthless, then what will eventually remain both undigitizable and therefore monetizable?

Nintendo claims customers dislike used items

 Posted by (Visited 5839 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Apr 012009
 

This is severe disconnection from reality. The used game market is certainly an issue for the games industry’s business model, but claiming, as Reggie fils-Aime does here, that consumers simply don’t like used items, and that used items do poorly in other media is just… nuts. Did he really never browse a used record store while in college?

“We have products that consumers want to hold onto. They want to play all of the levels of a Zelda game and unlock all of the levels. A game like Personal Trainer Cooking has a long life.”

He continued: “Describe another form of entertainment that has a vibrant used goods market. Used books have never taken off. You don’t see businesses selling used music CDs or used DVDs. Why? The consumer likes having a brand-new experience and reliving it over and over again. If you create the right type of experience, that also happens in videogames.”

via Nintendo: Used games aren’t in the consumers best interests // News.

Of course, even for games, the proof is in the pudding; it wouldn’t be such an issue for the industry if buyers didn’t like to spend the money there. Not to mention that most games these days are not designed for replayability…

Edit: OK, first I thought it was real, then I thought it was an April Fool’s joke, then… I thought it was real.

YoVille almost at 8m?

 Posted by (Visited 8303 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Apr 012009
 

Virtual Worlds News tallies the latest YoVille numbers and arrives at 7.8 million monthly uniques. This is by summing the MySpace and Facebook usage reported by GigaOM, which likely means that there’s overlap in users. But still — impressive monthly growth given that it was less than a month ago that I wondered if YoVille was bigger than WoW in North America.

While at GDC, I talked with a lot of folks about YoVille, and generally the comment was “but it’s just nto very good!” Unlike WoW’s dominance in the AAA MMORPG space, I do think that YoVille is vulnerable to competitors; the audience has been only lightly exposed to the variety and possibility that exists in VWs, so there’s a lot of potential for other experiences to come in and grab lots of users.