minecraft is an ok game, i guess.
Tag: virtualworlds
Wormworld Saga
It all kind of started with a painting that I created in 2006 called The Journey Begins. A young boy finds a magic painting that transports him into another world. This world already existed in my mind because I had toyed around with world building for several years without a specific goal in mind. The Journey Begins provided me with a protagonist and from that point on, things started to escalate in my head. And the painting had a second, very important, effect. It attracted people on the internet and raised interest in my work. I even started to sell prints of The Journey Begins to total strangers and suddenly I was that boy again, who sold copies of his own work. Only that the school yard had become a lot bigger this time.
stunning
the mongoliad
stephenson’s new epic shared universe. still pretty bare. will need a lot of work before it reaches the scale of orions arm.
Motionscan
32 hd cameras capture every angle of an actor’s performance at 30 fps. It generates a fully-textured 3D model that incorporates every nuance, mannerism, and emotional detail from the performance.
World of Warcraft Sociology
virtual worlds might allow the social “sciences” to become scientific by controlling for a huge number of factors, and customizing the environment.
extreme SimCity
TheImperar’s over-meticulously constructed Sim City 3000 island paradise/hell is “inspired by the wheel of life and death” and supports an apparently unheard-of 6m population
re: the recent point about supremely motivated gamers. if you could get this level of excitement out of 9-5ers…
Cinema Fantastico
the camera in
always gives epic shots by obeying the law of thirds and other tricks. this is more mediated cinema than gameplay, but: awesome.
Exodus to the virtual world
Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live–both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.
Interesting read. Argues that as more people experience virtual worlds, they will demand the apt policy design in games to be applied to the real world. Result: a fun maximizing society.
Game End
Game designers are realizing that ending their world in a dramatically satisfying way is actually a very interesting logistical, ludogical, and emotional trick. In essence, we’re slowly seeing the emergence of eschatology as a design challenge.
World Builder
what sketchup could become, if it did not waste all its time sucking.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 