Tag: games

The Art Of War

There are, obviously, no police inworld. Sometimes, self-defense is all you’ve got. Before now, I’ve had to draw a weapon and blow people off my land to discontinue attacks. Look at that sentence again. It makes me sound like I’m living on frontier land, or, perhaps, like I’ve become a mad farmer with a shotgun. Is there a case to be made for Second Life as the lawless digital Wild West, where sometimes a man has to slap leather to defend his person and his homestead from the badmen and the road agents? It’s more than a little absurd. On the other hand, being ejected out of the world is a little more inconvenient than some freak running his mouth on a messageboard.

the state of SL weaponization

Oy!

Oy is a system of between-stop informal gaming, played for small stakes, the price of a text message, or just for fun with fellow passengers onboard. Oyster card holders (London Transport’s smart travel card scheme) can sign up in their existing online account to play for top-ups to their card.

locative game that shortens the travel time on london buses by utilizing onboard GPS

Boston Panic

The discovery of suspicious objects on bridges, near a medical center, underneath an interstate, and in other crowded public places has ignited fears across Boston, snarling traffic and sending state and local police scrambling across the city.

this is what happens if headless chickens run the news.
2007-02-09: Do you have what it takes to save Boston from the Lite Bright menace?
2007-03-01:

if it’s not an american flag, it’s probably a bomb.

heh. i wonder what happens if someone wraps a bomb in a flag? will they declare a war on flags? that would actually be neat.
2013-03-31: reminds me of their war against things with LEDs from a few years back. among their bumbling peers, boston pd are the most incompetent. so funny.

Boston Punk Zombies Are Watching You! The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge: DIY indie-rock shows.

Gold Farmers

Funny yet profound:

a new trade association has been formed by Korean gold farmers and real-money trade sites to lobby the Korean government, which has been considering regulation of the sector.

2007-06-19: Should have read the nyt gold farmer story. Not just the obvious arbitrage angle, but farmers playing WoW in their spare time after 12h shifts clicking away in WoW, and 40-person guilds for hire by high-level players in need of backup for their campaigns.
2007-07-09: Creative protests

The farmers retaliated by slaying gnomes and arranging them on the ground to spell out the URLs of their gold-farms.

2008-05-08: AN explainer

Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire (“farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

Intel Game for Google Earth

Called Mars Sucks, the game really just involves navigating to specific locations based on a series of clues, whereupon your spaceship starts blowing up the invading Martian craft you’ve found. Intel’s account of making the game is interesting, though. They used the Google Earth client and server, the Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a Web server and PHP5. They’ve made the source code freely available