China Virtually Clueless

Oh dear:

Worried that virtual currencies from online games could undermine the country’s financial system, Beijing has taken steps to restrict their conversion into yuan and use to buy real goods, and banned the opening of new Internet cafés.

Beijing is struggling to rein in the hot money flushing around of the country, hoping to keep the yuan from appreciating too fast against the dollar.

The measures against virtual currencies, announced by China’s state news agency Xinhua in a joint communiqué by 14 government agencies, were said to be aimed at preventing them from wreaking havoc on the real-world economy.

Titled, “A notice about further steps in strengthening the management of Internet cafés and Internet gaming,” it says that the redemption of virtual currencies in value exceeding their original purchasing prices will be banned to prevent attempts to realize profits. It also says they cannot be used to buy real goods, only virtual products and services provided by the gaming operators who issue the currencies.

Which means, of course, that as well as being virtual, all this dosh will now go undergound, making it even harder to control.

Sun's Darkstar Joins the GPL Light Side

Sun continues its progress through the ranks of open source supporters, hurtling fast towards top-spot as Richard Stallman's Number 1 friend. The latest move is the open sourcing of its Project Darkstar:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced plans today at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to open source Project Darkstar, a ground-breaking online game server platform written entirely in Java technology, at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The company also announced the opening of registration for the Darkstar Playground, which will enable developers to create a wide variety of games that can be provisioned through a single server platform.

...

"Project Darkstar is proving to be an important technology foundation in the exploding multiplayer online game marketplace," said Chris Melissinos, chief gaming officer, Sun Microsystems. "By open sourcing Darkstar technology, we will help enable the widest possible market for online game developers and remove their burden of having to build enterprise-grade server solutions, leaving them to do what they do best—build great game experiences."

Game developers can download the latest version of Project Darkstar at www.projectdarkstar.com. This new release of Project Darkstar features a simpler programming interface for increased productivity; plug-in APIs to facilitate integration of third party extensions; and enhancements for scalability , robust performance, and fault-tolerant operation. The source code for Project Darkstar will become available under a GPL license in the coming months

Aside from underlining Sun's support for the GPL, this announcement is also interesting for the light that it shines on the increasingly mainstream nature of online games. The fact that Sun has such a project is surprising, but open-sourcing it makes a lot of sense in an increasingly competitive market. For one thing, it bolsters Java, which stands at a critical juncture in its development. If Sun can build up enough momentum behind it, Java could well enjoy something of a second coming.

Now We Are Five: HTML5, XHTML5

Anything that talks about HTML5 and XHTML5 gets my attention pretty quickly. I don't pretend to understand all the implications of this, but it sounds cool:

This specification introduces features to HTML and the DOM that ease the authoring of Web-based applications. Additions include the context menus, a direct-mode graphics canvas, inline popup windows, and server-sent events.

...


The scope of this specification is not to describe an entire operating system. In particular, hardware configuration software, image manipulation tools, and applications that users would be expected to use with high-end workstations on a daily basis are out of scope. In terms of applications, this specification is targetted specifically at applications that would be expected to be used by users on an occasional basis, or regularly but from disparate locations, with low CPU requirements. For instance online purchasing systems, searching systems, games (especially multiplayer online games), public telephone books or address books, communications software (e-mail clients, instant messaging clients, discussion software), document editing software, etc.

I can't wait. (Via Vecosys.)

La Vida Es Sueño

For those who dismiss Second Life as "just a game" here's a thought:

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating "only a game" so much. If you google "only a game" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it's only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn't like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it's only a game" is like saying "this isn't how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain't no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

(Via Terra Nova.)

Word of the Day: Ganking

Raph Koster has an interesting meditation on another interesting meditation on, er, ganking:

Ganking is defined as “someone powerful attacking someone weak.”

including this wonderful peroration:

true gankers were rewarded by fading into nobodiness, unable to attack or eventually even interact. Blank-faced, and eventually incapable of interacting at all. Insignificant, unranked, not even recognizable. The thought was, if you ever actually did render ganking as meaningless as its victims call it, the gankers would fade away, snarks and boojums all.

Mmmm: Meta-Guilds

I'm such a sucker for a good bit of meta:

A meta-guild -- i.e., a guild with a presence across a number of virtual worlds and/or MMOs -- allows a group to share their experiences of gameplay in various environments, and eases the process of traveling among such worlds for the individual.

MMORPG in a Box

Raph Koster points out that setting up a MMORPG is pretty cheap these days: even the top-end SmartFox system, which is Java-based, costs just 2000 Euros. Already there's a number of games based on the code. And, of course, all this will run on a GNU/Linux box also costing peanuts. The only downside is that, like many online games these days, the SmartFox approach is to use Flash.

Prague: The MMORPG

If online games and virtual worlds are becoming realistic to the point of blurring the boundary with the real world, it is perhaps inevitable that the real world itself should turn into an MMORPG:

This is the Prague Files, the first "live game" from Live Games Network, and I spent two weeks in December playing through the title with other players from across the US. It's a new kind of web-based game that enlists players as secret agents, but it's not all virtual—when several players from New York head down to the accident site, they actually find a crashed car and an unsavory thug keeping an eye on it.

Playing a Different Kind of Open Game

As the boundary between online games, online worlds, and even the real world all starts to deliquesce, here's an interesting essay on what the author, Jesper Juul, calls "open games":

According to a widespread theory, video games are goal-oriented, rule-based activities, where players find enjoyment in working towards the game goal. According to this theory, game goals provide a sense of direction and set up the challenges that the players face.

However, the last few decades have seen many things described as "games" that either do not have goals, or have goals that are optional for the player: Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) has no stated goals, but is nevertheless extremely popular. The also popular Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Rockstar Games North 2005) is superficially a goal-oriented game, yet the game allows the player to perform a wide range of actions while ignoring the game goal. San Andreas isin many ways as different from Sims 2 as can possibly be: Where Sims 2 has no goal, San Andreas contains an explicit goal. Where San Andreas is infamous for being immoral and violent, Sims 2 is famous for its family-friendliness. Yet San Andreas and Sims 2 are fundamentally similar in that they are top-selling, open and expressive games, games that let the player use them in many different ways, games that allow for many different playing styles, for players pursuing personal agendas.

Not quite the openness that we know and love on this blog, but definitely a kissing cousin.

It's Only a Game

One of things I have come to appreciate, albeit rather belatedly, is how gamer culture is going mainstream. By that, I don't just mean that it's more acceptable to be a gamer, or that more and more sectors of society are playing games, but that the gaming world-view is starting to seep into other areas of life.

Take Amazon's new Askville, for example:

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new everyday or help and meet others using your knowledge. Askville even helps you learn by giving you cool tools to help you find information online while you are answering questions. It’s all about sharing—what you know and what you want to know—so go ahead and meet someone new today and Askville!

But most interestingly:

Every time you answer a question on Askville you will earn or potentially lose experience points in the topics that were associated with that question. Askville uses experience points to determine how knowledgeable a user is in a given topic. Experience points are broken up into various levels. To reach a certain level you need to have earned a certain number of experience points in that topic. Go to Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins in the FAQs to learn more about experience points and levels.

Which, of course, is precisely how a game works. In other words, Askville is a game. Life is a game. (Via TechCrunch.)

No Net Neutrality, No Virtual Worlds

Here's a thoughtful analysis of another harmful knock-on effect of the loss of network neutrality:

What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment – particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. Furthermore, a large — even overwhelming — portion of the value of these offerings comes from their “network effects” — the tendency for the game to become more enjoyable and valuable as larger number of players joins the gaming network.

And that means things like Second Life and all the other virtual worlds that are currently under developmentwill also be hit. So, net neutrality is concretely about the future of the Internet, not just abstractly about the importance of preserving an online commons. (Via Terra Nova.)