On Hiatus

I am training for the Happy Valley Sprint Triathlon so will not be blogging for awhile. I'm turning 40 in the fall and this is my first triathlon. I'm still not sure how my wife talked me into this.

In the meanwhile, there are plenty of new blogs about Metaplace popping up now that it has gone open beta. So enjoy!

Village Idiot Suggests: The Day The Earth Stood Still

This is always fun: rent both the new and old versions of The Day The Earth Stood Still, then watch them. It's a hoot to compare the differences. I find that watching the new one first works better. It's almost impossible to get your kids to watch a boring black and white movie with a lot of dialog, so you'll probably end up watching the old version alone. Your youngest child might stick around and watch it with you, just because they feel sorry for you, but that's OK.

Appreciative Intelligence

I find it interesting how some people can look at an acorn and see the mighty oak it will eventually become, while others just see a nut.

There's a book about this which is a pretty good read:
http://www.appreciativeintelligence.com/about.html

Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Words

So my 11 year old kid comes and kicks me off the computer. He needs to get past a level on the video game Zelda, Princess Twilight Blah Blah. He's fighting Aragog-hooby-whatever. So I fire up IE and say “Cheatcc.com or what game cheat site?” and he says “YouTube”.

What?

So we go to YouTube and he searches for the Aragog-hooby-whaty Zelda thing and he pulls up a 9 minute video that walks him through the game level. What happened to game walkthrough books? And even game walkthrough websites? What the heck is going on?

Maybe pictures are worth a thousand words...

Village Idiot Suggests: Go Lay In Your Closet

Have you ever been on the floor in your closet? Go try this: lay on your back under your clothes. Look up at your clothes. It's really cool. You should try it.

It's even better if you hang your clothes in ROYGBIV order. And that says a lot about a person.

Breaking the Rules

So about game design and game mechanics: the veterans know the theory. They've seen what works and doesn't work for game controls, player skill advancement, etc. There are all kinds of resources for how to develop well functioning games.

Metaplace opens up game development to folks who don't know the rules. That means we're going to break a bunch of them and make a lot of unplayable games. But the cool part is when that occasional rule-breaking mechanic is a good thing, or maybe even revolutionary.

In case you do want to follow the rules, check out http://www.theinspiracy.com/400_project.htm

Simulated Reality: which of you are the NPC's?

So everybody is having fun creating their little Metaplace virtual worlds. We set them up and then populate them with non-player characters (NPC's), allowing real players to interact with the NPC's. It's a lot of fun.

I recently found this wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

Did you catch section 5.1? I know I'm not an NPC. Are you?