Intelligent Artifice: This is why I don’t have a Wii
Humorous video about the life of Miis.
All posts by markdangerchen
Two money making ideas for MMOG companies…
Thought of these last night while trying to fall asleep… No idea how viable they are but…
1. You know how monsters in WoW have loot tables? As in they have a 1% chance to drop this, a 2% to drop that, etc… What if people could spend real world money to up their chances of certain items? Maybe have a premium account which comes with better chances… The people who have regular accounts or maybe even free accounts still have a chance… just not as good a chance, so people with lots of time on their hands still can compete with those with lots of money on their hands…
2. Completely unrelated, what if those with a premium account don’t suffer durability loss from death? How much would some raiders pay for that?
LotRO
Yep… I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online this past week and think it is pretty awesome. My subscription to WoW runs out in June… not sure if I will be renewing.
Part of the reason I am finding it fun is that a couple of my WoW guildmates are playing, and I enjoy hanging out with them. Not sure yet if our social network will sustain the game, but I pre-ordered so will be playing for at least a month.
Well, that’s nice…
Last week, my advisor, Jen Stone, announced she would be leaving UW… I can still take general exams this quarter but need a new advisor come next school year. Joy.
Here’s the third part of a great series on the history of computer role-playing games. And commentary.
Spring break in Sunnyvale
A couple of weeks ago, Robin and I went down to Sunnyvale to visit family and high school friends. We ended up hanging out with Gray and Song Gong quite a bit. We also saw my brother Max and his new fiance Nancy, Chris and Hilary (who are getting married on Mother’s Day), Ian and Laura (already hitched), et. al. Oh, and Song Gong’s awesomest dog evah, Daphne. On Thursday, Gray and I drove over to visit Ted and Denine (got married two days ago!) since I wasn’t going to be able to make it to their wedding, while Robin visited a high school friend of hers Liz who recently got a job she likes much more than her last one (grats!). We also saw Robin’s brother Brian, sis-in-law Kelly, and their daughters Jessica and Natalie who are amazing. Okay, enough with the shout-outs… on to the stuff.
We went to a bunch of restaurants including a really good deep dish pizza place in Palo Alto, Pizz’a Chicago. I’d been there before (and they used to serve yards of hard cider) but for some reason this last time, I thought the pizza was fantastic. On the first Saturday we went to La Costena for their burritos (as featured in Sunset like… a decade ago) which wasn’t as good as we remember (from like… a decade ago). On the second Saturday we went to a Shanghai restaurant with my parents and I had a bunch of dishes I’d never had before. It was also very very good.
I bought three DS games while down there, Phoenix Wright 2, Final Fantasy III, and Hotel Dusk. I’ve been playing FF3 fanatically for the past week…
Song Gong lent us Arrested Development which we watched when we had downtime (almost done with the first season now), and Gray lent us Fullmetal Alchemist which I’ve been watching fanatically while playing FF3 (finished on Friday… not sure I like the 2nd half).
While down there, my parents had me update and do routine maintenance on their computers. Only… it hadn’t been done for like 2 years, so I ended up spending hours downloading Windows updates, getting new virus protection and ad-aware installs in place, troubleshooting various problems (each of 4 computers had a different set of problems!), and installing a web camera for my mom to use Skype with her brother in Rochester.
Oh, and last but not least, Lisa and I co-authored a book chapter, taking turns working on it via email. Heh. It’s called “Play my way: The politics of cooperation in massively multiplayer online games” and will appear in Play and politics. Douglas Thomas, Joshua Fouts and Shawna Kelly are the editors. (I wonder if that’ll bump my WoW paper up on Doug Thomas’ Games and Culture journal’s review list.) A draft version can be found on Lisa’s site.
Photos of our Sunnyvale trip coming soon!
Three cool webtools
Last year I spent quite a bit of time working with a set of php tools to create a public web page that had feeds from a bunch of different blogs. This year, it’s even easier with WebJam. For example, check out this webjam I created that shows the blogs of all my teacher ed students. Now I just have to encourage them to actually generate some content. 😛
Another cool tool I found recently is Macro.scopia. It generates graphs and other visual representations of data. One could, for example, recreate the VisualThesaurus using it or create an interactive search cloud… Takes a bit getting used to their site, though…
And finally, I must have mentioned this before, but I LOVE Google Reader. Half the reason why I don’t post as much here as I could is because I’m reading news instead.
MusicTonic
A web mashup for music images and videos categorized by genre.
divided loyalties in WoW?… and Jade Empire and papers!
So, two weeks ago I worked my ass off to get a key made in World of Warcraft so that I could go with a group of people from an allied guild to a 10-man dungeon known as Karazhan. I was invited because apparently the server was lacking in 70 rogues at the time (who the people in the guild like… ). Anyway, after many hours working on it, we finally went for the first time last week (Friday and Sat nights). And it was fun!
But to get there, I basically had to outrun some of my own guildies who were also working on getting keyed and solo/stealth some of the steps instead of waiting for them. Now a week later, some of them are still working on it and more are catching up to where they are. In a few more weeks, there should be enough people in my guild to go. Then I’ll have an interesting decision to make. Do I ditch the allied guild for my own guild? How permanent was my invite to the group, anyway? How will players from both guilds take my seemingly loose loyalties? Or is it a non-issue given that I was available and helped our allies and have always said that I prefer in-guild raids? We’ll see…
The past couple of days, I’ve also been playing a lot of Jade Empire. I’ll write a review soon. But I’ve also been writing papers and such for the end of quarter and now need to work on a book chapter with Lisa!
I was quoted in the local paper last week!
I was interviewed about Second Life and MMOGs a few weeks ago. The story came out on the front page of Monday, Feb 26th paper, but, like a dork, I didn’t post this tidbit to my blog. 😛
The internet version isn’t as cool because it isn’t on the front page with a quote from me in big bold letters starting the story off. But here it is anyway…
Second Life enjoys perks, problems of population boom on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Look Around You – Computer Games
YouTube – Look Around You – Computer Games
Funny parody video about the rise of computer and video games… retro!