Gamasutra - E3 Panel: 'Massively Cross-Platform Games'
Speaking at E3, John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, predicts:
"Things are going to start converging in a weird way. What about a MMO movie? You watch a movie together with friends through headsets even if at different locations. Your own online Mystery Science Theater 3000. Budgets are exploding, so you'll start seeing weird things like that."
PlayOn is a Xerox Palo Alta Research Center (PARC) project to investigate the social dimensions of MMOGs and virtual worlds. PARC is famous for having invented such notable thingies as Ethernet and the GUI so worth keeping track of this one.
Alex writes:
Find all those Social Network Sites like MySpace,Tribe and Friendster a little limiting in terms of interactivity? Well here's a couple of slightly more progressive sites based on the idea of fusing The Sims with Social Networking to create a full-scale virtual world for you to inhabit and play around in, rather than just jumping from one Profile Page to another ad nauseum.
Wootanga: All registered Wootangian citizens are invited to explore a web-based world which merges advanced social networking with the immersion of a complete alien society. You will be rewarded with Participation Points and items for your personal usage by interacting with others. By becoming a full Wootangian citizen you'll also be able to engage in a player-driven storyline and change the outcome of the world by taking part in epic community-wide quests.
Second Life : (not to be confused with 'Half-Life') is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe. 'The Marketplace' currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.
It had to happen. Now that virtual economies are big business in the real world , the question arises - will you be taxed on your online possessions? Under US law it seems that the answer is yes. That treasure horde in WoW may be less valuable that you think, and an admin nightmare...
Missed this one. BBC journalists Jeremy Paxman and Paul Mason broadcast part of the Newsnight programme from within the MMORPG Second Life.
This Wall Street Journal article looks at the strategy behind XBox Live and outlines the challenge in convincing anyone other than hardcore games to gather to play online. The article suggests that Microsoft may have got it wrong with their huge investment and missed the point when it comes to why many play games - to escape from social interaction, not to seek it.
WSJ.com - Microsoft Places Big Bet On Multiplayer Gaming
It's a good point to raise but what about all the soft stuff around the games? The text and audio linkups, the webcast potential. Control without defined goals can be provided more and it will be. It's just that businesses and minds creating game consoles are overly focused on the audience segment that plays the most. That doesn't mean that the rest of us, casual gamers & non-games alike, won't appropriate these kind of systems. They're expanding the framework of online entertainment and I don't think you can ever discount the degree to which this will affect people.
What happens in five years when the concept of broadband channels are mainstream and old hat? What about networked performance? What about live events that reach out and poke you? Cinema link-ups? The first time that I used XBox Live a few years ago, chatting to other players with my voice masked so that I sounded like a kid, it was obvious that the scenario spelt out in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where networked thespians bid for online gigs, was yet another step closer.
An Xbox subscription looks far more compelling once the titles that make more than a token effort to de-emphasise interactivity outnumber the 'games'. At some point we wil look at 'interactive' and 'online' and think what quaint expressions. Computer game jiggery-pokery will mean even less than it does now to the success of a title. Trillions of polygons? Sophisticated AI? Bollocks.
We've demonstrated a primal capability to vege out in front of the box and I'm not convinced that this has been taken on board. The next paradigm shift may not come from game makers but more technically-naive linear programme makers who can lead unfamiliar audiences into a more participative space with smoke and mirrors. It will all involve game technology sure enough so a reasonable bet that Live will stay up for a while and someone will work out how to make money out of the concept..
Did you know that Flickr began life as a massively multi-player game called "Game Neverending"? This and other interesting factoids in this interview with Eric Costello, lead client-side developer, on the evolution from game to Yahoo service.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000519.php
Wired News: Matrix Online: Gaming Repackaged has very few nice things to say about the latest MMORPG.
"The Matrix Online manages to make elevators in the game work more poorly than they do in real life."
Massive happens to be the name of the crowd animation software used to spectacular effect by Weta Digital in the Lord of the Rings movies. Popular Science magazine has published an article on Massive.
Speaking of massive crowds in Middle Earth, what will ever happen to Middle-earth Online, the MMRPG that was touted last year? Not much besides lawsuits it seems.
From http://mevault.ign.com/thegame/overview/
Middle-earth Online, a massively multiplayer role playing game, was announced in mid 1998. Nearly a year later, Sierra underwent a reorganization, which resulted in the cancellation of several game titles and the restaffing of the Middle-earth Online project. Since then, Sierra Studios has been tight lipped about the progress of the game but has repeatedly stated that it is being worked on and that new staff is being hired for the project. The current state of Middle-earth Online is not known at this time, but we'll keep you updated as things develop.
"Several million people currently have accounts in massively multi-player online games, places in cyberspace that are effectively large-scale shared virtual reality environments. The population of these virtual worlds has grown rapidly since their inception in 1996; significantly, each world also seems to grow its own economy, with production, assets, and trade with Earth economies. This paper explores two questions about these developments. First, will these economies grow in importance? Second, if they do grow, how will that affect real-world economies and governments?..."
Everquest, the popular MMRPG from Sony, is to become a board game along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons which inspired it.
The idea is that today's feature films may end up being little more than trailers for the virtual worlds that follow. Business 2.0 article illustrates the point.