Heard about this indie game that Bill Viola (a pretty well known video artist) has a hand in. I remember watching a video of his back in college… hmm about 13 years ago. Anyway, it was really a lot of nothing yet entrancing at the same time. Like watching fire.
All posts by markdangerchen
Tabula Rasa’s Ethical Parables – Kotaku
Dev Diary: Tabula Rasa’s Ethical Parables – Kotaku
Kotaku shared the “essay” a Tabula Rasa dev wrote about the ethical decisions in the upcoming MMOG. I sure hope they do it well. Richard Garriot has a big name to live up to. I wonder if there is some sort of reputation system with monetary or loot rewards for ethical choices or if it is completely left to players to value intangibles. Let’s say an unethical choice gives you the best loot. How does someone instill a sense of value for the intangibles that make up for lesser loot? I suppose some sort of marker or flag or reputation system without tangible rewards might be enough… the community of players would need to be rich or big enough or whatever to support that sort of rep system.
See also previous posts on games and ethics and what MMOGs need.
Two cool new sites
A bunch of cool sites and news
Pop Cosmopolitanism and the Terra Nova post
First off, Constance and her folk at the U of Wisc-Madison started a blog about learning in virtual worlds. Obviously, lots of cross-over with some of the stuff I’m trying to do. I wonder how they collect and analyze data and whether I should try to collaborate/share my data with them…
We also have in recent games news the announcement of Metaplace (via an email from Joey Lee and a post at Terra Nova), Raph Koster’s new big work. As far as I can tell, kind of like Second Life except that it is even more open and flexible for user generated content and that the tools for making content is specifically geared toward making games (so one would assume rules and goals factor in there somehow unlike with Second Life). Alice, as usual, has a nice write-up about Metaplace.
Lee Wilson posted his article about the Myths About Video Games In School.
And Richard Carey has a nice post about Games and Web 2.0.
Twitter, Facebook, WordPress… OMG!
I’m messing around with Facebook and WordPress plugins today. I think I can get a feed from my self-hosted WordPress blog onto Facebook with a plugin called Wordbook!
Speaking of addons/plugins… it amazes me how many there are for Facebook. How do certain ones rise to the top? It’s even more Wild Westy than World of Warcraft addons because at least with WoW you could argue that the successful ones are the ones that most manage players’ cognitive load or whatever… With Facebook, it’s all so whimsical.
I have been contemplating getting rid of my MySpace account because of the spam friend invites I get (about 2 a week). But then someone out of the blue found me there and posted about Bill Winn.
Bioshock: why is it so engaging?
Robin kept asking me why I was playing Bioshock last week (after Grey had left and I repartitioned my hard drive and all that stuff so I could play it).
Well, the art was amazing (you can get a sense of it at the Cult of Rapture downloads section. Also scroll down the Updates page for download links for the soundtrack and the artbook.). The enemy AI was pretty good. Hacking is always cool (and done in Bioshock through a neat mini-game which is probably what caught Robin’s eye).
But at the same time, I didn’t really have a good answer for Robin… It was engaging but still felt a little lacking in something. I don’t know what. System Shock 2 and Deus Ex seemed at the time to be more fully engaging (though I probably can’t go back to those graphics these days, sadly). I wonder if it has to do with Bioshock being released on a console (Xbox 360) at the same time–whether that caused the team to “dumb down” the game mechanics at all?
Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition Review
So, while I was uncharacteristically sick earlier this week I played a relatively unknown game called Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition by Cypron Studios. It is a strange mix between Western themes and Japanese style turn-based combat with a dose of space flight-sim style trading thrown in. Maybe a love child from the marriage of Betrayal at Krondor or Final Fantasy and Elite. But then cover it up with the always slightly odd aesthetics of Eastern European developers.
Ok, if that sounds rather esoteric, well… yeah. I’m guessing no one who actually reads my blog will have any idea what I just said. 😛 Kudos if you do. For the rest of you (all 2 of you), I’ll try to tease that out a bit.
Continue reading Gods: Lands of Infinity Special Edition Review
Serious Eats: Pizza Hack: Broil Your Pies
Serious Eats: Pizza Hack: Broil Your Pies
Mmm pizza…
Steampunk Tree House
My brother went to Burning Man (per usual) and was part of the Oakland-based team that built this!
My cousin Lee-Hom is in the new Ang Lee movie
He’s looking dapper.
[Edit 3/1/08: joke about him helping me and Robin with getting a new car removed, because obviously I was kidding… but it seems kind of weird to just remove it without saying that I removed it. I had done so for about a day but then, out of curiosity, I went to look at my blog stats and noticed where all these new people have found my blog post about Lust, Caution. I can’t read Chinese, so I threw the url into a translater (thanks again, Google!) and saw that someone made mention of my joke… so out of archival purposes, I threw this note in here. 🙂 ]