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- Another game mag bites the dustYesterday
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This time it’s EGM. 1up is also severely affected. The news is all over a bunch of gaming sites — here’s Gamasutra’s coverage.
We’re going to keep seeing this sort of thing happening. Print media is in a terrible place right now.
- The borders of user created contentYesterday
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SusanC has a comment on a Terra Nova thread in which she observes,
So the main criterion for being considered is that there is some kind of creative expression involved. I’m OK with that, although it opens the door for arguments about exactly how much creative input is needed to qualify. Text chat, instant messages, and blog postings (like this one) clearly can be used for creative expression: so maybe these are within the paper’s scope, provided that they are sufficiently creative.
– comment on Terra Nova: New Paper on UGC.
It is an interesting problem, actually. There is hardly a site these days of any sort on the Net that does not support some form of user-generated content. But by unspoken convention, we seem to not consider chat and other basic synchronous social interaction to be the same sort of user created content that uploaded models and textures are.
I think the reason is interesting and subtle, and marks out a distinction between “extending the possibility space” and, well, “not.” So here go 1700 words…
The ability to chat in real-time has been part and parcel of MUDs (and by extension virtual worlds of many stripes) since the very beginning. It was just one of
- Flash on TVs and set-top boxesJanuary 5
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A long while ago, I blogged about Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which is a big consortium pushing Flash onto as many devices as possible. Well, here appears to be some of the first fruit of it:
Adobe® Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and Intel Corporation today announced plans to collaborate on the development to port and optimize Adobe® Flash® technology for the Intel® Media Processor CE 3100. This effort is expected to provide consumers with richer and more seamless Web-based and video viewing experiences through advanced Intel-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail connected AV devices….
They go on to mention plans to ship this chip within 2009, as well as an initiative around Air. We’ll see what comes of this… Intel has to get that chip adopted, after all.
In the meantime, I also noticed over the holidays that Microsoft is beta testing a new download center that requires Silverlight — that’s a way
- Newlively!January 5
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Newlively is a VRML-based clone of Lively, based out of China. And I mean clone, they claim one done in a month. Not yet feature complete to match the original, but apparently actually backed by a company with funding (though the website doesn’t say who).
Not surprisingly, looks like there’s Lively folks moving over already.
We are often emotionally moved by thoughts of past experiences and occasions. Likewise, if we could create a cyberspace environment and an Avarat where users are already familiar, we help lessen the impact of loneliness and disappointment. After the closure of Lively, there is no greater happiness than to duplicate Lively for the sake of the Lively users. We understand that this activity would generate a certain degree of legal risk. However, whenever I remember the disheartenment and disappointment of that many Lively users, this risk is worth taking and the users will support us. Google is a great company. Its greatness develops upon quality customer care. What we create is similar to Google Lively, which the users like. Based on this, there should be no problems. We want to prove it. Google Lively’s concept is great and good. Besides, we are not using any codes whatsoever from Google Lively. The entire platform was created new from scratc
- Losing MUD historyJanuary 5
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QBlog writes on the controversy going on over the possible deletion of the article on Threshold MUD. I’ve run into the fact that Wikipedia isn’t a great resource for research into the history of virtual worlds many times before; the articles are of wildly uneven quality, and a recent crappy game can have pages and pages worth of content, whereas historically interesting stuff doesn’t.
LegendMUD’s entry was deleted without even a debate a while ago, despite there being other articles that reference it and point to it, including a whole page on the Karyn affair. Worlds of Carnage has no page at all, despite it serving as the incubation place for scripting in DikuMUDs and for many developers who went on to work on the first wave of MMOs in the US. At least there’s a good DartMUD page.
Curiously, I am used as a reference or citation many times in Wikipedia, yet I suspect my writings would not meet Wikipedia’s guidelines. The challenge here is creating material that does — with so much existing only as oral history or as community-driven sites, little will qualify to be