2005-10-08

Misc

A comment in the state of the industry talk:

"There" has in-game shops, including deals with Nike and [someone else] to
make shoes and clothes and sell them. If your avatar is wearing Nike shoes, it
can run a little faster than avatars that aren't.

Another comment: In Korea, property can be magnetic records, which can be
moved and owned. [That's a lovely piece of abstraction. Whereas, in-game and
online, references are non-rivalrous, magnetic records are physical. A really
good way to pin the virtual to the physical world.]

From last night:

Jessica Mulligan, in talking about her new game, Rhizome (which is going to
allow people to use the creatures, avatars, rules, etc, outside the main run
of the game, but not yet allow you to make maps, because maps are really hard
to create), said "terrain is the first level of exploitation".

Actually, all of Mulligan's language was interesting to listen to. Whereas I
talk about frameworks and unfolding - a basis of physicality and
transformations - Mulligan spoke in a very animist way. She said that a
concept was a "chimera"; she talked about a value "soaring".

Everyone talks about "game balancing" which is another great concept--but
better, it's a great way of expressing the concept. Something I mentioned
yesterday was that we need touchstones to talk about complex social or system
ways-of-becoming. We use terms from myth now (it's like X, it's like Y), but
maybe if there were fun small games in which you deferred decisions to an NPC
which would both do what you want, but also operate in its self-interest, then
we could use that as a touchstone when we talk about politics. Games could
give us the language to discuss the world we live in.

More from last night:

Richard Bartel pushed distributed MUDing: what is the www to the AOL, of MMOs?
Second Life Cory said that in the future they won't be able to host all the
servers they need, so that's how it'll happen.

Random thought: It feels bizarre to prevent copying DVDs, because that's what
DVDs do--they can be replicated. But the thing which can't be copied is a
game. One day, somebody will invent a system for copying a game by sending
character probes into it, and raytracing the narrative. It'll be low-res to
begin with, but then we'll invent HD narrative which is reflexive and harder
to copy. At that point, people will start banning game copying with the legal
system, and we'll move onto the next thing.