Julian Dibbell in Second Life

Today, Raph published a link and a quick quote from an interview event in Second Life with Julian Dibbell. For a man with so much history and commentary on the genre, and a new book, I found his interview very readable and entertaining.

And it's not just because they talk about RMTing.

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E3 Cancelled?!

Well, according to Next-gen.biz anyway.

Edit: And they were apparently quick to judge. Please read comments below.

Read on.

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Look beyond the diku

There's a certain core group of genre veterans that define the genre itself by extensions of EQ and UO. They therefore deem "success" as those who have extended upon EQ. Every so often someone in that core group reminds them that EQ itself was based on even older conventions. This core group is, in many ways, the web of sites and people that either extend directly from Lumthemad, or were inspired by the type of conversations that happened and therefore have a similar feel and tone.

Occasionally, games like Space Cowboy and Habbo Hotel will become know to this core group, and some will play them. But the core, I feel, looks for similarity and differences only at the experiential level, and by comparison to EQ and UO. 

But then there's the rest of the world.

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Niave question: MUDs and MMOs

As usual with such threads that grow into many pages, the current version of the SWG topic over at F13 has meandered into many sub-topics. The discussion got re-invigorated with folks having read Raph's interview at Escapist. He stopped by to make a comment about dikus and MUDs in general and from there discussion ensued.

And it prompted me to ask a question, the inspiration for which was a comment Haemish made in response to a sentence from Raph's entry.

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Escapist interviews Raph Koster

I am not a big reader of Escapist, but every so often a topic evolves into good discussions within various communities.

Their interview with Raph Koster is likely to become one such topic.

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Games and Graphics Engines

I posted this over at Grimwell the other day, but didn't get a chance to run it here until now.

By way of GameSpot, I have long wondered, in a number of places, about this fascination with creating graphics engines from the ground up for MMOGs. That has felt to me like a big money sink for results that, to the average end user, are more different in aesthetic and style than in any nuance of performance and scalability.

There's good reasons to make an engine of course. That scalability for one, owning it being another and being able to tweak it for your exacting needs a third (not in order).

Yet, SOE is licensing the Unreal Engine 3 from Epic Games for use in the DC Comics MMO.

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Are you a market?

In a pretty good abstract discussion at F13, evocative of old Waterthread days, we're talking about the state of the MMOG genre. 

Some of the folks within the thread are asking for stuff either they or others before them have been asking for years. In the face of so many recent events though, and being reminded of something that occured to me last June, I got to wondering:

Are they even a market anymore?

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Convergence: Game vs Lifestyle

Over at TerraNova, Lisa Galarneau posted an interesting article about comments by Thomas Bidaux of NCSoft Europe and his take on what we know about MMOs. I recommend reading both that article and various links from the folks who commented, in particular, the MetaVerse Roadmap.

The whole discussion reminds me of many convergence discussions. Will cellphones become better media players or will media players become between telecom devices? Will cars fly or personal aircraft drive?

Knowing where things are going is as important as understanding who we'll get there. In that regard, I consider the future of VR from two distinct angles.

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Ingame Advertising and Microsoft

Checking up on the daily update ring, I found this article over at Gamasutra interesting for its information on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. Then I read a shocker at the bottom:

Microsoft bought Massive Entertainment.

Ok, so where the heck have I been since May when this came out?!

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Lifestyles attracting Gamers

Just had a quick thought in discussing Favoring the Prepared over at this discussion thread:

How virtual lifestyle experiences were previously advertised and why that may not have been the best way to do it.

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