You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2006.
O
ne of our text MUDs/MMOs - Aetolia, the Midnight Age - recently implemented a system that I wanted to mention purely because I think it’s cool. Aetolia has a number of different divisions within its playerbase, but one major one is undead vs. living. (Any race/class can be undead, but some classes do not function while undead, which is reversible with some effort, and vice-versa.) The undead have living players who have chosen to ally with them, but for the most part, the living players oppose the undead players.
Lately, the war between spammers and anyone protecting an online community from them with CAPTCHAs (the portion of registration in forums or a social network or whatnot where you typically need to type out the distorted letters displayed to verify that you’re a human and not a bot) has intensified, with MySpace apparently re-working their algorithms every couple of days and the spammers moving just as quickly to adjust.
It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens to social networks now that the barrier CAPTCHAs erected to stop automated spammers is about to completely crumble.
Raph Koster has a lengthy and generally excellent post up that touches upon microtransactions, virtual asset sales, DRM, copyright, and more. I wanted to comment on a couple things in his post.
He writes:
since anything that can be seen by our senses can be reproduced, for better or worse, all digital forms of enforcing copyright are doomed to fail. Every form of encryption is moot, because everything must be decrypted in order for us to see it. At some point, the data is in the clear, and then it can be copied.
I played a fair amount of Guitar Hero 2 and the original Guitar Hero this holiday weekend with friends, and I’m pleased to report that I’ve managed to finally beat all the songs in the original on expert level. “Bark at the Moon” and “Cowboys from Hell” had been plaguing me for quite some time, but they fell on the field of battle this weekend, at Casa de Matt. Woot! Just 8 more songs to go on expert in #2.
Warning: Food post.
This is my first year hosting Thanksgiving (which is Thursday for those of you who aren’t feasting that day), and even though it’ll only be five people (me, Eileen, my parents, and a good friend), it must be done well. I have finalized the menu (though I started cooking some of it on Monday) and present it here for no reason other than that I haven’t made a post about food in a couple weeks, and I’m doing a lot of cooking this week:
- Homemade cheddar crackers - 2 types: black pepper and caraway seed. (They’re really mainly butter and cheese, baked. They rock.)
- Carrot and ginger soup
- Escarole, baby lettuce, and shaved fennel salad
- Roasted turkey w/ gravy made from its drippings, of course. This one will be coming fresh from a farm.
- Chestnut and sausage stuffing
- Cranberry conserve with apples, walnuts, and orange zest
- Green beans with pancetta
- Mashed potatoes with white truffle oil
- Root vegetable, leek, and gruyere gratin
- Creamy pearl onions
- Pan roasted Belgian endives
- Apple pie
- Macadamia-coconut tart
And, on the beverage side, champagne, followed by wine, followed by port.
A feastin’ we will go….a feastin’ we will go…..
RMT (or Real Money Trades) refers to the practice of players trading in-game currency or items with each other in return for real-world money. It has many supporters and many detractors among both virtual world developers and users, and as with most things that don’t involve Bill O’Reilly, both sides have some valid arguments.
One argument the anti-RMT crowd puts forth, however, has always puzzled me insofar as it strikes me as fairly hypocritical: The idea that Player A giving something to Player B in exchange for real-world money somehow harms Player C and thus should be banned, but that Player A giving an item to Player B in exchange for real-world friendship (or familial connections, etc) does not harm Player C in the same way.
This makes zero sense to me. In both cases, the item is being traded for something outside of the ‘magic circle’ (ie it’s an out-of-character, out-of-virtual-world resource). In both cases, the impact is precisely the same: Player B has something as a result of an out-of-game factor. Why is this acceptable when that out-of-game factor is friendship rather than money? How is the theoretical harm to Player C any different? Is the only argument against this that one is against the EULA in many games and one isn’t? That’s a fine argument to make, but would these same people argue for the EULA with the same vehemence if the EULA prohibited, say, gifting in-game things to anyone you know in real life (your wife, your child, your best friend, etc), or would they start inventing justifications as to why the latter is ok but the former isn’t? I know which one I’d bet on.
So, besides “the EULA prohibits it” arguments, can anyone make a coherent argument for me as to why player B getting an item because of an out-of-game relationship has an effect on player C that differs in the slightest from player B getting an item because he spent out-of-game money? Keep in mind that we’re talking about the demand side of the equation here, not the supply side. The behavior of gold farmers has nothing to do with this argument. Assume that player A is me and player B is my mother. (Neither of us are gold farmers.)
A couple of weeks ago I posted about how Jagex, the creator of Runescape, was threatening the owner of a website that purports to offer tips on how to earn gold quickly in Runescape. I also mentioned the name of one Mohammed Khan, an employee of Jagex. Someone(s) at Jagex must read this blog, as I received an email from them this morning regarding that post. I am quoting it here verbatim:
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to our attention that you are running further stories about Jagex Ltd., which of course, in the interests of free press, you are welcome to do.
I would like to politely request, however, that you remove any details (name and contact for example of our employees). Mohammed Khan is involved in the community management team at Jagex Ltd. and has the same rights as you or I to privacy. We recently discovered there is an article on your site that discusses various actions Mohammed has taken on behalf of our company with regards to the protection of our intellectual property rights.
In the interest of privacy we would ask that you please remove his, and the details of any other employee, from your site.
We hope you understand our concerns, and that you will help us in this matter. We would appreciate your help greatly. Thank you.
Chris Rayner
Unit Leader
ICU
Customer Relations Department
Jagex Ltd.
Here’s the thing, Chris: I do understand your concerns. I also appreciate the fact that your request was worded so politely, but I’m afraid that it’s not in my nature to react well to requests that I censor what I want to say, regardless of how good-natured in tone and trivial in nature the censorship would be.
I’ll make you a deal though: If Jagex stops harrassing the poor guy at GamingPays! and sends me an email stating that it will not pursue further action against GamingPays!, I’ll take Mohammed’s name off my blog and scrub yours off my blog too. I have no relationship to GamingPays! and have never corresponded with its owner, incidentally. Clumsy attempts at censorship just irritate me.
A
pparently, Bush is a huge fan of Runescape. Although he started as a pure mage called Prezp00nage he quickly realized that he was going to continue to get pwned in the wildy (wilderness) at higher levels, and has started a new character named Leg0Las666. Avant News caught up with him in-game. The full (short) interview can be found from the above link, but it appears that his major goal for his last two years in office revolve around getting a “Full set of phats” and “a lava cape.”
It should also be noted that two days after the interview took place, Leg0Las666 was claiming he’d been hacked and asking to borrow some gold. Anyone else sense an opportunity for Iran or North Korea to extract some concessions from the US?
There was an interesting (to me at least) post recently on this Terranova thread (which started a couple weeks ago) from someone named Heather Sinclair. She’s either a player or a developer on Dungeons and Dragons Online. Can’t tell which. In her post, she talks about the apparent rampant superstitions that run through the playerbase of DDO. She writes:
In an earlier post 
I gave a pretty mediocre review (aside from the quality of the graphics and sound) to Gears of War. I retract! I retract!
This game is simply awesome. No, it’s not innovative in any way, that’s irrelevant. Both the co-op and the multiplayer are a total blast. We had six people from Iron Realms playing PvP against each other last night and it was hysterical, barely-controlled chaos. Tons of fun. I still maintain that some of the enemies could have been made to have different visual profiles than you and your allies (I shoot at the wrong side sometimes as a result), but other than that, I really have almost no complaint with the game.
So CliffyB (Gears of War’s designer): I am sorry. You were right. I was wrong. Your game kicks ass.
“The Boondocks” has explained today
why the pro-censorship forces in Congress prefer to attack games as a cause of real-world violence rather than, say, going after the guns that fire them. Riley sums it up succinctly, “Who would you rather start beef with - some nerd who makes video games or some dude with a warehouse full of AK-47s?“
Gamasutra has the article. Looks like they’re going to do a World of Darkness MMORPG.
In an article on Gamasutra 
announcing that MTV and Nexon are partnering to promote Maple Story, Kart Rider, and Audition, it was also revealed that this partnership will also result in Neopets (which thus far has not taken money from users, preferring to garner 100% of revenue from ads), will begin selling virtual items to its users.
This is big news. Neopets, while not a virtual world, is an online games community that has a larger reach than any of the big three Western virtual worlds: World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel, and Runescape. For what it’s worth, its Alexa ranking is 150 vs. 566 for WoW (lower is better) and 821 for Runescape. Habbo Hotel is split across multiple websites, so there’s no number to compare there. (Take those numbers with a big grain of salt. Alexa is not horribly reliable except as a general indicator of website traffic. People have to access Runescape and Neopets via the website, but not WoW.) However you stack it up though, Neopets is absolutely massive, and it’s pretty big news in the virtual asset sales department to see them adding this model onto their existing model.
We’re all aware of how Linden Labs plays fast and loose with its “active user” numbers in
order to attract publicity and investment money. According to the Second Life Herald, that’s not the only kind of bullshit they engage in.
Apparently Linden actually counts ANY “Linden Dollars” passed between characters as part of their “economy,” allowing their PR flaks to make claims like, “A gazillion dollars is being spent every day in Second Life! Join the commercial bonanza!” This is equivalent to Iron Realms claiming that “A gazillion dollars is being spent every day in Achaea!” because a lot of gold (which can be traded for credits - the equivalent of Linden dollars - on the formal gold/credit exchange market) changes hands in Achaea.
Gears of War is being touted by Microsoft as the “must-have” 360 game. Naturally then, I must have it, and have it I do. I played the online co-op mode for about an hour last night with a friend and came away with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it’s simply gorgeous. The environments, in particular, are epic-feeling. The 5.1 surround sound is equally delightful. It’s easily one of the best-looking and sounding games ever made.
I 
was quite pleased with the results of yesterday’s elections in the US, but one race I was quite interested in wasn’t decided until today, when it was announced that seven-term Representative Richard Pombo had lost to challenger Jerry McNerney. I don’t live in Pombo’s district, and I don’t know much about McNerney, but I do know this: Richard Pombo hates the environment.
I don’t mean that the greasy little weasel (with links to Jack Abramoff, of course) doesn’t care about the environment, like, say, the President. I mean that he hates it like it broke into his house and stole his Bible, and he seems to consider it his personal mission in life to attack the environment whenever possible. This is the guy who once proposed selling off National Parks. (His staff also tried to scrub references to Pombo-Abramoff links from Wikipedia, which is amusing and typically Pombo.)
Suck on your defeat, Pombo. Suck on it good and long. I hope a tree decides to fall on you.
After a few months where I felt like I had to look hard for games I wanted to play, I suddenly find myself knee-deep in a vertiable corncucopia of games I’m excited about. Too many, in fact, as there’s no way I have time to play them as much as I’d like. Right now I’ve got:
- Splinter Cell: Double Agent (360) - Fantastic stealth game with a story I’m actually interested in. I’m playing on the default difficulty setting and it’s still hard. I also end up getting obsessed with getting high stealth ratings, so I end up repeating parts of some levels many, many times to find a way to do what I have to do without getting caught. The AI is reasonably intelligent too, which means that there are some slightly emergent elements to the tactics you have to use, at times. (At other times, it’s quite linear, but presented so well I don’t mind.)
- Read the rest of this entry »
EMI label Innocent is set to debut their new boy band ‘365′ in Habbo UK this week. I don’t find this particularly interesting in and of itself, but the contrast between the pre-event coverage this has received and similar coverage the same event would likely receive in, say, Second Life is interesting…and depressing, considering Habbo is at least 30-40x the size of Second Life, with comparably larger cultural influence.
I sometimes wonder if the fact that Habbo is made for kids causes such a big industry blindspot for so many journalists and commentators. I wonder the same thing about Runescape, which is only about 30% smaller than Habbo. I talk to a fair number of people whose positions would normally cause me to assume at least basic knowledge of the virtual world space (VCs looking to invest in it, for instance) that have no idea what either Runescape or Habbo Hotel are. I’d assume their ignorance isn’t willful and results instead from the fact that they simply are rarely talked about in virtual world circles.
T
his isn’t a game review site and I’m not going to get into doing ‘proper’ reviews of games, but given how often I’ve mentioned Guitar Hero on the Forge, I felt I should at least provide my impressions.
First off, this isn’t a sequel in the traditional sense. It’s more of an expansion in the sense that there aren’t really any changes to the fundamental gameplay beyond adding three note chords. Sounds unimpressive, but in fact, the original Guitar Hero was missing some obvious peripheral but useful features, like the ability to play multiplayer but on different difficult levels and the ability to practice particular passages of songs at various speed levels in order to master them. Guitar Hero 2 fixes nearly all of these omissions and simply adds polish to everything else.
I have picked up my copy of it and it is sitting next to my tv, waiting to be cracked open at 3 pm when Chris Kohnert, Iron Realms’ CTO, arrives for an afternoon of shredding, followed up by an evening of rocking (with girlfriend participation once they get off work). Review to follow tonight or tomorrow morning!
I don’t tend to be a big fan of old-school French cooking with its rich, heavy sauces, but this is one classic dish I can’t get enough of. It’s also easy to make for one person, which is handy, as I often dine alone during the week. Be warned: This is not a recipe for those on a diet.
For 1 Serving.
6 ounces veal scallopine, preferably formula or milk-fed (see note below)
1/8th cup flour
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp olive oil
2/3 cup chicken stock
3.5 tablespoons cold, unsalted butter, cut into small chunks
1 teaspoon chopped parsley
1/2 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Step 1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees F. Take your scallopine and put it between sheets of plastic wrap (”Saran wrap”). Pound it with the flat end of a tenderizer (or any other heavy, flat object that is at least 1.5-2 inches in diameter) until the scallopine is very thin - no more than 1/4″.
Step 2. Pepper and salt both sides of the scallopine, then drench it in flour, shaking off the excess. Don’t leave them lying in the flour.
Step 3. Heat the oil in a pan wide enough to hold all your scallops on medium-high heat. When oil is heated (do not let the oil start to smoke…it’s too hot at that point) put the scallops in the pan in a single layer and let them fry for about one minute per side. If the of each side are golden brown, you’ve cooked them properly. Take them out of the pan, put them on a wire rack and put them in the oven with a baking pan underneath to catch any drippings. If you don’t have a wire rack, you can just put them directly on the baking pan. You’re just keeping them warm in the oven while the sauce is made. It’s nicer to use the rack because that way both sides are exposed to air and the slight crispyness of the brown bits won’t turn soggy as quickly.
Step 4. Pour the chicken stock into the pan you used to cook the scallops. Scrape any bits of meat/flour that were stuck on the pan up so that they are stirred around in the stock. They add flavor! Simmer the stock for 5-10 minutes until it’s reduced to about half its original volume, and then add the small butter chunks, a few at a time, until they’re all melted in the stock. Add the lemon juice, and salt and pepper to your taste, then cook a little more until thickened just a bit more. Then add in the parsley and stir.
Step 5. Take the veal out of the oven and put it back in the pan for a minute to reheat, then it’s ready to be put on your plate and eaten. (If you’re especially clever, you’ll have put a plate in the oven so that it’s heated nicely and won’t immediately start cooling your food too much.)
Notes: This recipe is all about the quality of the veal and the quality of the butter. I don’t think veal is even worth eating unless it’s high-quality. It’s just one of those ingredients that can’t be done well inexpensively. Look for “formula-fed” or “milk-fed.” Stay away from “free-range” or “grass-fed” veal if you can, as all those mean is that the meat will lack the buttery tenderness of good veal.
When it comes to butter, spend a little extra and get something good. There is a real difference between butters, and while it may not matter as much what kind of butter you use to make a cake or cookies with, when butter is a major portion of a sauce, you want tasty butter. I recommend a brand called Plugra. It’s one of the more commonly available of the premium butters. Honestly though, let’s face it: Butter is yummy. Even if you don’t have premium butter, you’re going to enjoy this dish, if possibly slightly less than with a nicer butter. Oh, and use unsalted butter just generally when cooking. You can then salt as needed, rather than having to have a minimum amount of salt as defined by how much salt your butter has. Salted butter is good for spreading on toast or a muffin, but it’s not good for cooking with.
An excellent side to this dish is steamed carrots. The simplicity and lack of any sort of oil balances out the richness of the veal and its sauce.
I was perusing Nintendo’s new list of “launch window” titles (titles that will be released within 5 weeks of the Wii launch) and found myself quite disappointed. It is chock-full of no-doubt crappy movie/tv licenses like Spongebob Squarepants, Ice Age 2, Cars, The Ant Bully, and ports like Farcry: Vengeance, Need for Speed: Carbon, Call of Duty 3, and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.