ncyoung.com

barcamp portland was fun.

I dug up a photo of me demoing jQuery and firebug

I found out about openID, adobe spry, wagn, the glass plate game and some other neat stuff and spread the word about moonedit a bit because I love multi-user simultaneous editing.

I found out that other people like jQuery for the same reasons I do. Also affirmed that javascript libraries are evolving for different niches and that there's room for at least 5-10 to coexist very neatly.

I described my professional persona and technical interests an absurd number of times (20? 40?) which was a suprisingly useful exercise.

I wrote a saying on the whiteboard before my session and then saw it on Brad's blog which I saw when he sent me to his identity page when he was explaining openID during that session. These cirularities are kind of neat, but I'm feling like this and other open threads need to be fully connected and closed this week and I haven't had time.

movies made with game software: http://wired.com/news/games/0,2101,53929,00.html



the new pc Baang article







from :

http://gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/



CP: Right (Laughter..) I’ve been talking to people a lot lately about the idea that we now have this new genre of experience where consumption and production are synonymous. So in a game like EverQuest or The Sims, where the consumer buying the entertainment is buying the ability…



WW: …to produce….



CP: …their own entertainment… Ken Perlin came up with the term "conducer" to describe this kind of hybrid consumer/producer. What do you think, in terms of a model of the media universe, in terms of going from that broadcast and cinema idea of consumption into this consumption/production hybrid? Where do you think that’s going? I mean where do you see it going with your work and in general in the game industry?





also:

http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/technology/contamination.html



and:

http://www.machinima.com/

from http://reason.com/0003/fe.jw.copy.shtml
Americans are not mere passive consumers, dully absorbing images invented in distant corporate laboratories. We hatch our own ideas and compose our own stories, drawing on pop culture without absorbing it blindly. We should look with disfavor on any law that tells us to shut up and get back on the couch.

VRML has lost its hype, but the navigation of virtual worlds is developing in leaps and bounds in the realm of video games.

Po posted about the Doom interface to system administration and the New Adventure Shell. We had an interesting chat about games as interface.

In an article about EverQuest, Edward Castronova maintains that Sony has plans to sell real estate and make an API available to online retailers, such that they can open real stores in the virtual world of Norath. From there, the EverQuest "protocol" could gradually grow to provide interface to more internet resources. It would be extreme but perhaps not impossible to imagine EverQuest becoming an alternate interface to the internet.

Here's my previous post about Castronova's article.

By coincidence, I ran across this interview with Will Wright, the creator of Sim City et all. He talks about the website that lets players upload and share their own Sims families, and his ability to do an incredibly detailed demographic study of the families that have been uploaded. What's especially interesting is that he views this as a way to evaluate the model his players have of the game, so that he can feed that information back into his next version of the game. In interface terms, it would be like looking at a vast number of shell sessions and then designing a new generation of unix command line tools. I imagine this has been done, but have no source for it. Anyone else know?

Wright does a great job of articulating the way that we mentally model systems, how our model of the system drives our interaction with it, and how our interactions provide information that can further inform our model.

From that perspective, what the game designer is doing is trying to build a system on the computer that creates the most interesting structure in the player's mind.

I could just about quote the whole article, go check it out!

I had forgotten about the pinball construction set for the apple II, that was great.

Edward Castronova, an economist at Cal State Fullerton, studied the economy of the world of EverQuest, a multi-player online game. The game and all associated data including characters that people create and the virtual possessions of those characters are technically the property of the Sony corp., but that doesn't stop the players from selling those possessions and even the characters themselves for real money.



By compiling data about EverQuest stuff that has sold on Ebay and other auction sites, Castronova has extrapolated the virtual economy of the virtual world of EverQuest into real world terms.



The per capita income is about $2,000, between that of Russia and Bulgaria. The GNP is 136 million. The article explains how these numbers were produced, and admits that it's somewhat arbitrary. There are several methods presented and they all come up with different results. But who thinks that high level economics is really acurate in the real world either? The case is clear that there is real value that people care about and will pay for.



There is shock value and absurdity in putting this virtual world in the economic context of our real world and finding out it compares favorably with many real nations, and if the article were limited to this subject it would be an interesting one.



But the article is also a social and practical report on the online community. It's literate and funny.



20% of EverQuest residents consider it their home. Really. They agree with the statement "I live in Norrath and commute to RL". Norrath is the virtual world inside EverQuest. RL is "Real Life" folks.







Here's the article