Comcast Town

 Posted by (Visited 8486 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 152009
 

So, the commercials definitely caught my eye; vibrant colors, isometric artwork done in pencil lines but apparently inspired by those awesome eBoy posters,that chirpy soundtrack. It was clearly a videogame aesthetic. But they were also terrible at marketing what they were actually marketing… half the time I couldn’t remember what company they were for.

Much less did I even notice that what the actual product Comcast was attempting to market was a virtual apartment builder and virtual interface to their services!

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The Sunday Poem: Working Late

 Posted by (Visited 7269 times)  The Sunday Poem  Tagged with: ,
Mar 152009
 

Birds stud the late night lot, move like skipping stones.
The bi-illumined trees huddle parking lights, dance
the empty parking spots, waltzing without parts, alone.

We click, we clack, we open, close, liquid crystal glows.
We do the work we love, the love is like a trance.
Birds stud the late night lot, move like skipping stones.

The stairwell window’s open. The breeze is cold and stone.
The smokers huddled there and overlooked by chance
the empty parking spots, waltzing without parts, alone.

Last lights are off. Hallway’s dim. The music of alarm tones.
We promised not to stay so late, not to see sunset’s hands
scatter birds, the late night lot, moved like skipping stones.

But it works. Assembly is complete. The work, it can be shown,
a tiny victory; a dinner lost, traded for the midnight glance
at empty parking, spouse waltzing without partners, lonely.

We move like skipping stones through dances grown
To dreams; we work for dreams we only hope enhance.
We stud the late night lot. We move like skipping stones
past empty parking spots. We waltz our parts, and do not dance alone.

Linden to put adult content on own continent

 Posted by (Visited 10577 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 122009
 

As reported by many sites, Linden Lab is going to move all adult content to its own continent.

Snarky folks may wonder what will be left on the main continent, but that’s really unfair. There’s a ton of stellar content in SL that isn’t sex related.

Access to the new continent will be gated by real world age verification — credit card, ID, that sort of thing. The challenge, of course, is rating the content. Apparently community feedback will be gathered on establishing guidelines. Edit: more details here.

This is an area where SL’s embrace of the tyranny of geography has made things a bit more complicated for the Lindens, of course. Let’s say that there’s something borderline on the main continent. It goes along fine there, until enough people protest the rating. Then it gets moved. Then it gets appealed, and moved back… possibly not to the same place, since the old location may have been taken… It doesn’t take walking through usecases for very long to find ways in which the ties of spatial contiguity complicate matters.

The flip side, of course, is that the discoverability of walking from one sim to another (or overflying, or whatever) can lead to serendipitous discoveries that are often the neatest moments in SL.

We’re in the midst of implementing our own handling of mature content in Metaplace, so I’ll be following this with some interest!

Worlds.com threatens

 Posted by (Visited 7641 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 112009
 

The headlines kind of say it all:

This is in tandem with the recent news that Worlds.com was recently awarded a third patent which is a continuation of the earlier two.

The specific things that are being cited in the articles about it reference solutions for scalability.