Monthly Archive

Auto Assault, a vehicle-based MMO that never really took off, will be shut down tonight at midnight.

MMOs have been shutting down for 20+ years so this is hardly new but it’s still a bit sad in the same way that I find it sad to see a dilapidated, run-down house. That house was once someone’s pride and joy and it was the scene for for lots of memories, both good and not-so-good.

R.I.P Auto Assault.

Virtually Blind has a very readable interview up with Jason Archinaco, Marc Bragg’s lawyer in the case. For those unsure about the details of the case, I’ve covered it before here and then here.

Not much to comment on from the interview. Bragg’s lawyer says what you’d expect him to say, just as no doubt Linden’s lawyer would say what you’d expect him to say. I find Bragg’s arguments in general to be fairly compelling though. Linden Labs and Philip Rosedale (its CEO) pretty clearly (to my mind at least) misled consumers by repeatedly assuring the public that what you buy in Second Life is, in fact, your property, while now they’ve decided that it’s actually still Linden’s property after all and that they can take it back from you at any time. That the idea of “land” in Second Life as an object to be owned rather than a server to be accessed is fallacious to begin with doesn’t matter much to my not-a-lawyer eyes, especially when Linden made 10s of millions of dollars selling this land until radically false pretenses.

Thus, I find this line of reasoning by Mr. Archinaco to be fairly compelling. He writes, in the interview:

“Let’s say you just assume Bragg’s a bad guy. I don’t think he is, of course, but let’s just assume he is. Who cares? If somebody steals from Wal-mart, can Wal-mart’s security guys come to his house and repossess everything else he bought from them over the years? Of course not. If you have an investment account with Vanguard and there’s a mismarked stock – which happens – where you know it’s worth $50 but it’s listed at $1 and you buy all you can, they’re not going to honor the buys, but they aren’t going to say, “Yeah, we’ll keep that, and we’ll take this other $100,000 you’ve deposited with us too. See you, thanks!” For Linden Lab to point to the Terms of Service and say “Look, we have a forfeiture clause,” well, that clause is outright unlawful.”

In other words, I’m certainly willing to be convinced that Bragg has no right to the land that he “purchased” from Linden using an…unorthodox…method, but Linden seized the rest of his in-game assets as well, and since Linden had been loudly proclaiming to the world for years that what you buy in Second Life is yours I think it’s fairly outrageous for Linden to seize Bragg’s other assets.

I haven’t posted much about Earth Eternal here lately (ok, I haven’t posted all that much lately period) as I don’t want my blog to turn into a promotional device but I think the occasional post is alright. So in that spirit, I wanted to note that we released screenshots of males and females for all our 16 player races late last week.

The feedback we’ve gotten on them has been interesting. In the comments to the article Kotaku did about them, for instance, the screenshots were ripped to pieces and the comments basically turned into people alternatively bashing and defending furries (mainly bashing them). That’s hardly unexpected given the famously harsh Kotaku crowd though. On the other hand, we’ve shown the screenshots to a selection of somewhat random people ranging from 5 year olds to grandmothers, some of whom play games and some of whom don’t, and the reaction has been literally universally positive. Some of that positive reaction can be discounted based on the fact that social etiquette tends to discourage people from telling us they hate something we’ve done to our faces but many of the reactions appeared genuinely enthusiastic. (If only we had the resources to do the kind of user testing Microsoft provides for Bungie…go read this article in Wired about it. Their testing system is awesome.)

What’s kind of interesting about working with anthropomorphized animal characters is that some people see cute and accessible and others see furry, with the subtext being freakish and sick. None of us on the team are into the furry thing and we chose to do anthro characters partly to stand out from the humans/dwarves/elves crowd some and partly because we think humanoid animals are a theme that has a fairly wide appeal. Of course, it’s always possible that we’re right but executing on it poorly such that it won’t matter that we’re right. Or we could just be wrong. I don’t think we are though.

As an aside I’ll also mention that though I’ve not really had any experience with furry culture before announcing EE I’ve got a fair amount of empathy for them now. The hate speech people direct against them is often nearly identical to that which is directed against the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community and it makes me a little ill and a lot disgusted to read it or hear it. It’s going to be a challenge to come to a policy regarding what I’d consider to be hate speech directed against the furry community and do so in such a way that doesn’t alienate the non-furry players (who will be in the great majority I’m sure) by backing a “sick fetish” (not my words, but a common sentiment among online gamers, sadly).

My preference would be to be as intolerant of hate speech directed at the furry community as we will be regarding racial, sexual, or sexual-preference hate speech but on a practical level I’m unsure if we can do this. From what I’ve seen, many people who are not about to direct hateful statements at hispanics or lesbians have no problem doing the same to furries and I’m not sure we can afford to crack down on it the same way we would on most hate speech. It’ll be a challenge to manage, in any case.

I’ll just say that after a couple hours of play, I’m very impressed. It’s very standard in terms of game-play but it’s executed incredibly well and it’s clear there’s a story I’m likely to be interested in that lies behind everything I’ve encountered so far. I don’t tend to love FPS games all that much and while the mechanics of Bioshock are so far not really different from your standard FPS the wrapping is so lovely that it feels a lot more like a next-gen take on a great adventure game.

I was checking out the website for the new virtual world MyePets, in which players (likely to be largely but not entirely children judging by the promotional material) purchase a physical plushie pet (only dogs seem to be available right now) and then they get to play as their ePet in the virtual world. So far so good and this sort of real/virtual mash-up is only going to become more common in the wake of the success of Webkinz.

There’s not a lot to say about the world except that as I was watching their promotional video I noticed that the game allows you to take your puppy to the soda fountain and purchase “all its favorite treats” for it. And what are it’s favorite treats? Things that can kill it, apparently. Chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies are featured in the video promo that highlights the soda fountain part of the world.

I don’t want to be too picky but it strikes me that teaching kids that dogs love things that are easily available to children and can kill said kid’s real-life pet is really, really stupid.

From 1up.

This is just cool. It’s a video of a talk at this year’s TED conference (one of the few conferences I’m truly interested in attending…but not $6000 interested) by a very smart fellow named Blaise Aguera y Arcas in which he demonstrates software he (and his team?) have built called Photosynth (link takes you to the demo site for it). The most impressive part of the video, to me, is where Blaise shows how they scraped lots of photos of Notre Dame off Flickr and used those photos to procedurally build a sort of 3d model of Notre Dame. Google Streetview is awesome but it’s very Web 1.0, for lack of a better word. Google sends people out to take photos at street-level of various locations and as a result you can view a city from street level in the places Google chose to send people to.

Photosynth, on the other hand, works from any and all photos, procedurally. Want to reconstruct St. Mark’s Square in Venice? Scrape a couple thousand photos of it from Flickr and you’re off to the races. I’m not sure what the limits of it are but even places that are not frequently photographed could possibly be reconstructed, especially in combination with scene completion technology like this.

This post has not got a lot of purpose besides to publicly confess my habit. Ever since I bought it soon after its release on Feb 20th, Supreme Commander has occupied a little corner of my mind. I have dreamed about unleashing armies of crawling Monkeylords (pictured to the right) or turtling up and building tons of giant Mavor artillery and pounding my unfortunate opponent to bits.

Unfortunately, I think I may have a problem. They say that you know a habit has become a problem when it starts to interfere with the rest of your life. Last night I began a game at 9 pm with my fellow “users” (Chris, Martin, and Rick, I’m looking at you!) and it wasn’t until 2:15 am that Martin and I finished crushing the tenacious forces of Chris and Rick with, yea, Monkeylords, much Tier 3 Artillery, and teleporting Subcommanders. I still had some work to do before going to bed and as a result we postponed our daily 10 am meeting until noon so that we bleary-eyed victims of SupCom’s strategic and tactical brilliance could get our beauty sleep.

I don’t maintain an active top 10 games list but if I did, Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation (its spiritual predecessor from 1997) would both be on it.

From Paidcontent.

They’re paying $350 million up front with incentives that could be worth north of another $350 million.

Massive, massive congratulations to Lane Merrifield, Dave Krysko and Lance Priebe, the three founders who were also the only shareholders in the company. Talk about an amazing indie games success!