Massively asks, “Are MMOs truly as persistent as they claim?”, prompted by a blog post over at Player vs Developer. The Massively piece actually takes off in quite a different direction than the original blog post, because the post is about how much game developer changes to balance and systems affect the perceived value of a given character. But the question that Massively asks is more direct: are MMOs really that persistent?
And the answer is unequivocally no.
If you happen to be in Toronto, the Hot Docs 2009 Festival is showing a documentary I’m in called Another Perfect World (which I haven’t seen yet!). It premiered last night, but there’s another showing tonight. Thanks to Tony Walsh for the heads-up.
You can go here to learn more about the film.
Another Perfect World is a documentary about digital utopias, about online worlds created as places for work, play, friendship and love.
People have always created utopias, worlds that reflect the greatest, most enlightened and noble ideas of the period in which they live. The utopias of the future will be created online, in digital worlds capable of rendering photo-realistic depictions of whatever the mind can imagine with technologies that allow people from around the world to join in. We now have the chance to build a new world from scratch.
If you were going to do so, on which principles would you establish it? What is more important: freedom of expression; an active marketplace to encourage social interaction; or laws to define the limits of social relations?
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.
Is this a first? I dunno, but it’s darn cool! 🙂
Earlier today, I had asked Grace McDunnough if she could help out one of our users, Fredriksson, try out live concert streams in Metaplace. Grace jumped in with both feet, and after we got it working (using the off-the-shelf guitar I made a while back!) she mentioned that she had a concert this very evening…!
So at the very last minute, with no prep, Grace suggested dual-streaming the show, and Fredriksson volunteered his folk music cafe… and a few hours later, there we were, listening to live music played in two virtual worlds at once!
A few folks even watched the show in both worlds at the same time… here’s screenshots taken by one of them:
Watching GraceMcDunnough’s live performance in Metaplace and then on Second Life!
Hasn’t It Always Been About Status? is a little article tracing the status update mania (such as Twitter) to AIM status messages.
I have now spent two days with Twitter, and I have decided that it is basically guild chat in Internet-the-MMO. It’s a form of /grouptell, and we’re all out slaying bookmarks instead of orcs.
