For those who do not recall, I had a great time at Living Game Worlds a few years ago, including quite enjoying Will Wright’s keynote. Well, this year it’s my turn… and of course, I completely spaced telling everyone in time for you to get the early reg discount. 😛
Registration is now open for
Living Game Worlds IV – Interplay: Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
December 1-2, 2008
Georgia Tech
Technology Square Research Building
85 5th Street, Atlanta, GA
In a rather unbelievable turn of events, last night the organizers let all of us know that the venue for the conference is unavailable, because someone was shot there and the police have closed it off for three days!
A variety of side events are still happening, since so many people flew halfway around the world to attend, but the main sessions are not. For example, both the SXSW party and the reciting poetry at Bartle events shall go on as scheduled. 😉
Tomorrow I fly off to London for the Virtual Worlds Forum. I will be in London until Thursday morning, when I fly back.
I am looking forward to exploring London a little bit — I have never really gotten to wander around it very much, for a variety of reasons. I have some free time on Wednesday, if anyone wants to tour me around or meet up.
I’ll also be at the SXSW party. And I do expect to corner Richard Bartle and recite poetry at him for hours and hours.
More directly related to the purpose of the trip, the conference looks quite good. I will be on a couple of panels with some great folks. i am sure that VWF would love some late registrants, so if you are up for flying to London on short notice, or if you happen to be in the vicinity, I recommend stopping by.
Gamasutra has coverage of the other panel I was on at AGDC.
Finally, why did all of these developers leave their jobs at major MMO studios for the world of the web?
Koster’s response seemed to sum up a lot of the inspiration among developers who have come to love the web as a platform.
“It isn’t so much about the size of the market, though that’s important,” he said. “And it’s not even about the six year long [traditional MMO development cycle]. To me, it’s about the greater capacity for personal expression. There’s a great capacity to touch people. it was about empowering everybody. Working on the web now reminds me of working on the internet before the web was around, where it was much more community-driven and participatory and exciting and end users have their say. It feels like you can accomplish everything.”
Dusan Writer has a take on the panel I was on, casting it as Metaplace vs Linden Lab — though to my mind that leaves out the contributions of Mike Wilson of Makena and Corey Bridges of Multiverse. That’s because Dusan is interested mostly int he clash of philosophies about where virtual worlds are going:
But it leaves a question: are virtual worlds places? Or will the technologies that enable 3D spaces become so ubiquitous that we’ll stop thinking of them as distinct places? Because in Raph’s view, the tools and technologies to create 3D artefacts, the system for managing your avatar and identity should be EXPRESSION-agnostic. In other words, we should have the tools for creating content and then be able to seamlessly publish that content to cell phones, browsers, Flash, separate clients – whatever, it’s not the viewer, it’s in the engine from which content is derived and creating standards and tools for expressing the content from that engine.
FWIW, virtual worlds are definitely “places” in my mind. But to me, clients and devices are merely windows that look onto that place. That doesn’t preclude rich 3d “windows” — I merely happen to think that multihead, flexibly represented VWs is the future. I would swap the word “engine” for “server” perhaps, or “world.”
