I met him once, at GDC, and was immensely flattered that he knew who I was. He struck me as a kind and friendly man.
The best obit I’ve found is this one: Between battles, the story: Dave Arneson has passed on.
And the last episodes will only be on DVD.
‘Dollhouse’ Cancelled and also here.
I have to admit that the show felt like a miniseries, not a long-running series. But after it got past the frist few episodes, it was a good miniseries. I’ll preorder the DVD for sure, and my kids will be greatly disappointed.
Edit: updated info from Whedonesque:
Media reporter Alan Sepinwall tries to clarify Dollhouse finale limbo. He writes “Fox network won’t decide the fate of “Dollhouse” until Upfront week, near the end of May, and the decision not to air “Epitaph One” has nothing whatsoever to do with renewal”.
Edit two, from Tim Minear:
Because we scrapped the original pilot — and in fact cannibalized some of its parts for other eps — we really ended up with 12 episodes. But the studio makes DVD and other deals based on the original 13 number. So we created a standalone kind of coda episode. Which is the mythical new episode 13. The network had already paid for 13 episodes, and this included the one they agreed to let us scrap for parts. It does not include the one we made to bring the number back up to 13 for the studio side and its obligations. We always knew it would be for the DVD for sure, but we also think Fox should air it because it’s awesome.
And more edit two, there’s plenty of reports elsewhere now saying that it isn’t cancelled.
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:
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?
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.
