Musings on the Oculus sale

 Posted by (Visited 35144 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 252014
 

four-square-1Rendering was never the point.

Oh, it’s hard. But it’s rapidly becoming commodity hardware. That was in fact the basic premise of the Oculus Rift: that the mass market commodity solution for a very old dream was finally approaching a price point where it made sense. The patents were expiring; the panels were cheap and getting better by the month. The rest was plumbing. Hard plumbing, the sort that calls for a Carmack, maybe, but plumbing.

Rendering is the dream of a game industry desperately searching for a new immersion, another step in the ongoing escalation of immersion that has served as the economic engine of ongoing hardware replacement, the false god of “games getting better.” It was an out: the plucky indie that bucked the big consoles but still gave us the AAA. It was supposed to enable “art.”

But rendering was never the point.

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Avatar Kinect

 Posted by (Visited 10450 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jan 062011
 

New World Notes calls our attention to Avatar Kinect, which basically brings graphical chat rooms to the XBox Live platform.

This is indeed a powerful development. The Kinect has been selling like hotcakes (8 million of them in sixty days), and as a result, there’s now a pretty substantial install base that could get into this.

It’s clear to see the potential for sales of virtual goods and the like; right now, they offer scenes in which you can conduct your chats, but over time, adding in the features to make those into virtual apartments is not at all hard to picture. Add in robust enough objects to buy and the ability to customize your space, and you start getting something that feels like, well, Metaplace.com or Second Life with voice chat and kinesthetic controls. But for now, it’s more like IMVU or Lively, probably, and we shall see how it goes.

One thing that is interesting is that Live is centered on avatars that are pseudonymous but strongly identifiable; there’s an intrinsic extant reputation system there that this system will effectively plug into and leverage. This may reduce the amount of prurient chatrooms and the like (which something like the Kinect surely invites!). It is also telling how little the video centers on technology and how much it centers on women.

Given the connectivity, I cannot help but ponder why avatars as an intermediating technology, rather than video chat.

  • Avatars intermediate; this lets you put all participants in one environment, rather than stitching together disparate couches and living rooms
  • There may well be plans to leverage the pseudonymity into synchronous social game experiences
  • The avatars do allow for a more radical expression of personality that video would, essentially making for a richer profile; I can’t have my weird pet from Limbo cavorting around me in a video call, but I could here.

All in all, an interesting development; I look forward to trying it out.

Are virtual worlds over?

 Posted by (Visited 52091 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Feb 262010
 

Dan Terdiman at CNet engages in some handwringing over the fact that kids worlds and social games are taking over the hype that used to belong to virtual worlds.

But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

The innovation lies in making something that matters to ordinary people.

Now, I am a virtual world person, obviously. I don’t see much distinction between the game worlds and the non-game ones like Second Life. I have been working with them since the text muds, for over 15 years, which doesn’t exactly put me in the true old dino category where Richard Bartle and Randy Farmer reside, but I think it is fair to say that I have been closely identified with the space for a long long time now.

And I think that they aren’t over, but the form that they have taken is.

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Top 20 influential MMO people 2009

 Posted by (Visited 7304 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 282009
 

Beckett Massive Online Gamer has once again put together a list of the 20 most influential people in the MMO industry. The list seems to be half new faces, and half returning. I’m flattered to be among the returnees this year, landing in the #11 slot (down 2 from last year, eep!) Grats to all the many folks I know on the list. 🙂

The full list:

1. Rob Pardo
2. Hilmar Pétursson
3. John Smedley
4. Jack Emmert
5. Mark Jacobs
6. Todd Coleman
7. Jim Crowley
8. Andrew Gower
9. Chris Cheung
10. Michael Capps
11. Raph Koster
12. Rob Seaver
13. Jeffrey Steefel
14. Russell Williams
15. Gaute Godager
16. Richard Garriott
17. Min Kim
18. Gordon Walton
19. David Perry
20. Jeff Hickman & Paul Barnett

There’s also some honorable mentions, but I guess we need to get the magazine for that! As well as the justification for these names, of course. The print issue hits retailers this week…

For reference last year’s list is here.

New Metaplace interview

 Posted by (Visited 5149 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Jan 252009
 

The Metaverse Journal has a new interview with me up. It’s all about Metaplace, the industry (games and virtual worlds), and what my five desert island discs would be. They call me an “elder statesman,” and then comment I probably wouldn’t like that, and they’re right. 😉

In re-reading the answers, there’s one minor correction I want to make:

Lowell: As a writer, has anything recently in virtual worlds stood out for you as high-quality writing?

Raph: To be honest, I don’t think that writing has ever been a huge part of social virtual worlds. It’s had far far more of a presence in the RPGs, where it is really starting to get much better.

That should, of course, be “a huge part of graphical social virtual worlds” — since writing was the key form of expression in the text-based ones! (Also, I am not minimizing the good writing work some are doing — it just doesn’t seem to be a major current in the field right now).