The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Matt Mihaly wants to know what’s wrong with twinking.
One argument the anti-RMT crowd puts forth, however, has always puzzled me insofar as it strikes me as fairly hypocritical: The idea that Player A giving something to Player B in exchange for real-world money somehow harms Player C and thus should be banned, but that Player A giving an item to Player B in exchange for real-world friendship (or familial connections, etc) does not harm Player C in the same way.
Who knew that when Bill O’Reilly would kickstart the annual ‘War on Christmas’, the first battle would be with… all the cool toys this Christmas!
Not content to leave the video game bashing to Democrats like Hillary and Joementum, Bill O’Reilly has decided to turn luddite, and open fire on gaming and technology, in the process demanding that all of you kids get off of his lawn.GamePolitics has the story, complete with money quotes:
Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality – ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they’ve created their own reality…
Wizards of the Coast have been running an ongoing card design contest – the winner will get to become a design intern – the low man on the totem pole of a Magic the Gathering card team. I’m actually jealous – working on a Magic design is one of my dream gigs. Continue reading
Today, I enjoyed one of my finer wedding presents – I drove up to Dallas to see the Cowboys-Colts game, a game that Dallas won, ruining the Colts otherwise perfect season. As we left, those wearing Colts gear tried to cover up, while Dallas fans were all around me, chanting ‘9 and 1!’ – a reference to the one loss which now mars the Colts otherwise flawless record. Continue reading
As expected, Kotaku is all over the latest in the console wars.
The PS3 has launched in Japan and so far…. fewer games have sold than consoles. The clear winner so far… RIIIDGE RACERRRR, with 21K units sold. Continue reading
Wanna know what it’s like to live in the Star Trek universe, where anything and everything you possibly could hope to ask for is one replicator function away? Then perhaps this Second Life script is for you!
Copybot is able to perfectly reproduce objects, along with their textures. The statue or piece of furniture one worked so hard to create in hopes of selling it can be recreated flawlessly by Copybot. Recreated flawlessy but not identically – the creator field will be different, the version produced by the Copybot proram will show the name of the account the Copybot program used to log in with, not the person who actually created the object design.
It seems like a good time to point out this very good, albeit old, article about the Playstation 3, and how Sony is pinning all of their hopes on it. Wired is pretty gloomy on PS3’s prospects, as am I, but you know the console wars have gotten wierd when Slashdot and Wired start rooting for Microsoft as the ‘agile’ one.
The article came to mind reading some of the comments around the web about the PlayStation’s launch. If you think the FANS are mad about the PS3 launch, consider who else has reason to be pissed off: Continue reading
SlashDot has an article about Gamestop basically saying they won’t have enough units to fill all the preorders. By chance, I was at Gamestop to get a new Guitar Hero II disk (a friend rocked a bit too hard this weekend), and I asked about it. The Gamestop employee said that North America PS3 shipments are being cut from their original 400K number by 60%.
If true, is this now officially the most botched hardware launch ever?
The company that made the ultimate stat-oriented MMO is apparently set to acquire the company that made pretentious gothness cool among the gamer set. I didn’t see this coming, but I’m actually quite excited. I’ve been trying to convince people for years that World of Darkness is perfect fodder for an online world.
Seriously: read my AGC presentation and tell me it doesn’t fit pretty well. Maybe now it will actually happen.
How well the two companies will merge is interesting. At their face, the ultimate spreadsheet-like game merging with a company fanatically devoted to roleplaying seems like a stretch. One thing that both companies does share is a laser focus on owning their own niche, and being as true as possible to the original vision, which I think has led to success for both companies (and WW’s more catastrophic failures can be seen as examples of them diverging from that). It will be interesting if the marriage here is a good one.
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