Toluu : The Forge

The Forge

A blog on virtual worlds, games, and digital content, from Matt Mihaly

There’s this company called Seriosity. They produce some sort of software that integrates with MS Outlook to help you sort through your email more efficiently. Specifically, they have a virtual currency system using a currency they call Serios. They use their virtual currency like this:

Each user generates for himself a fixed amount of Serios per X time period. It’s equal for all users.
When you send an email, you can attach a certain amount of Serios to it.
Your email client can/will display the emails with the greatest number of Serios attached on top.
You keep the Serios attached to emails sent to you you (though presumably they’ll have to implement some sort of tax or other way to take currency out of the system as otherwise they’ll have massive inflation problems).

Essentially, then, they’re creating a currency of attention. The more emails you get, the more Serios you’re likely to get, giving you the ability to send more Serios to other people than you would be able to otherwise.

I’d never heard of this until today, when I got an email from an acquaintance. He had sent an email to a lot of people he knew letting people know that from now on he’d be prioritizing whom he responded to by how many Serios were attached to the emails to him.

Here was my response:

“If I didn’t respect you and know that you mean well, I think m

My Favorite Books of ‘08December 27 2008

I’m not so interested in when a book is released, so this is a list of the books I read in ‘08 that I enjoyed the most, regardless of when they were published.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” - Junot Diaz. Fiction. I rarely re-read books until at least a couple of years have passed, but I’ll almost certainly re-read this one in a few months. Mr. Diaz somehow manages to pack a book of epic scope, spanning multiple generations of Dominicans, in a few hundred pages. The humorous references to Star Wars, Tolkien, and comic books were a great counterpoint to the rest of the book, which is often somewhat dark. This won the Pulitzer for a reason.
“The World Without Us“- Alan Weisman. Non-fiction. A book that asks, “What would happen to the earth if humans disappeared tomorrow?” and uses the answers as a way to explore the impermanent (skyscrapers, roads, etc) and vastly more permanent (plastics, nuclear waste, etc) effects that we’ve had on the Earth. It also highlights what we’ve lost - forests filled with birdsong and reefs so thick with fish that vision is obscured. Examples of these may still be found but essentially only in places humanity does not occupy (such as

Seeking MMO Content Designer (Sparkplay Media)December 16 2008

I don’t post most of our job openings here, but this one is a good opportunity to potentially break into design. You can find the job specs for this junior-level position here.

If you’re someone who loves the idea of designing content for MMOs (quests, NPCs, items, etc), are in the Bay Area or willing to move here, and want to work with people who came from companies like Valve, Blizzard, LucasArts, and of course Iron Realms, send your resume over. You can find instructions on our jobs page.

Sanitized ViolenceDecember 14 2008

Gene Endrody penned a comment in my “Games Cannot Be Evil” thread that got sparked a brief thought. He wrote:

“In many MMO’s the premise is genocide if you take a step back and look at it from a high level. I think that’s more an accident of the grind mechanic and it’s not done with a great deal of gore in WOW. Visually it’s not hardcore; a typical teen rated game and I don’t think torture fits.”

I wonder: Is this kind of santized violence actually likely to be better or worse? Seeing the gore that comes from hacking someone apart is no doubt unpleasant, but could it be better for you to have to face the consequences of simulated murder than to be taught that killing can be turned into little more than a statistical exercise?

In real life, it’s the ability to perform sanitized violence that helps, psychologically, to let some people to kill great numbers of other people. Let’s use the example of America nuking Hiroshima, without worrying about whether it was a justified act or not. Could Americans, from the President on down, have stomached having to shoot 100,000 mainly innocent children, women, and men in the face, one by one? I’d suggest that except for some some outlying hardcore racists, very few Americans could tolerate watching that or even the idea that American soldiers were coldly lining up tens of thousands of kids a

SurvivorDecember 14 2008

I know I’m late to the game here, but I’ve recently started watching the reality series Survivor, and I’m addicted. The current season (not sure which one that is…11th maybe?) in Gabon is the first I’ve watched and I’m enjoying it far more than I thought I would. The gamesmanship is fascinating to watch, and I wonder if this show is popular with the rest of the gaming community or not.

Survivor melds together cooperative with competitive social play as well as I’ve ever seen done. Watching a group of five people come together to destroy the other four members of their tribe, all the while clearly plotting to betray each other, is a lot of fun. In the current season we’ve seen things like deals based on fake immunity idols, someone sent to “Exile Island” a record five consecutive times, and more. I’ve always felt that Diplomacy was one of the “purest” games, and Survivor ends up playing like a very elaborate version of it.

I’m enjoying this season so much, in fact, that we Netflix’d the first season of the game and started watching it tonight. It’s really interesting to watch how different the game was played in season 1. In most cases so far, it was barely addressed as a game at all by most of the participants. They’re more concerned with satisfying the fiction of the g