Venting thoughts!

Otherwise my Easter has been spent lying on the couch ignoring social circles because ‘I’ve got so much work to do’ and watching tv and letting my eyes wander warily over to my computer with a passionate hatred!

I’ve kinda gotten myself into a sticky situation, which I’m either overthinking or I just need to drop it all together. Let me share it with you! I’m trying to explain the attachment we feel to our virtual assets in MMORPGs and I thought I’d found the perfect example. Now, let me point out that I want to go on to explain the distrust of the coding authorities (excellent word, Castronova!) to rectify such situations. So let me just vent out here:
Madelaine, a player in The Sims Online (TSO) loves to build houses! One time she had spent a lot of time, love and effort on a house which was fabulous! A friend of hers was constantly hassling her with wishes to buy it. Madelaine was flattered and in the end gave in! A few days later Madelaine came to me quite distraught. She had just found out that her friend had copied the house from Alphaville to Blazing Falls (another virtual city in TSO) and was passing it off as her own design. Madelaine was quite distraught, and rightly so in my opinion. So this is where I get into trouble! I don’t understand Intellectual Property Law! I thought this was a perfect example of that, and the more I think about it, the more I think it has to do with copyright.

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Liveblogging raids

This is interesting and oh my! how ambitious!

This adventurous WoW’er is going to be liveblogging a Blackwing Lair (nfc) raid on Saturday!

Being a non-WoW’er (I’m still not sure if I’m proud or ashamed of this fact) this could be a great window! I’m looking forward to it!!

Stolen from Clickable Culture, as usual!

OMG – THIS IS SOOOOOO COOL!!!

Stumbled on to this great HipTech Blog which features this great video!! It’s a demonstration of how a table-top touch-panel and speech recognition could function for Warcraft III! It’s called ‘DiamondTouch’ and it’s by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratiories – yet another example of how computer games are contributing to innovation, if you ask me!! Enjoy!!

Blogject

I suppose deep down inside I knew it was coming, but now that it’s here I’m kinda freaked out!

So my new word for the day: Blogject.

And here’s the Xbox360 Blogject! It’s basically ‘blogging’ your gameplay on the Xbox 360 – gathering your data and putting out a mix of words that really freak me out:

(I am an Xbox 360, and I can talk)
Owner: lil haf dead
4/10/2006
lil haf dead showed up yesterday ready to dominate. Total gamer score stands at 660. That is a gain of 10 points over last time! He played Tiger Woods PGA TOUR06, Perfect Dark Zero gaining 1 achievement, and did it while drooling over my awesome graphics and sound.

Maybe I’m not ready for this type of thing just yet!

I suppose I agree with Clickable Culture really: “The end result is that the Xbox 360 develops a designed personality. While the console currently appears to be rather peppy. I’d rather see an enraged, depressed, or paranoid console”

I suppose I’m more for leaving personality out all together! I mean doesn’t playtime, scores and game preferences speak for themselves? But I suppose if they absolutely HAVE to do this, why oh why does it have to be the chirpiness equivelent to those always enthusiastic hardcore aerobic instructors? Freaks me out really!

Computer Game violence is fun!!

So I’ve been rather social the last few days! It was very odd and also extremely weird to talk to people who didn’t know what FPS is or even Wikipedia for that matter (can you imagine?). It’s good to get out every now and then amongst ‘normal’ people, helps me put some things into perspective and also reminds me that there are other things going on in the world that aren’t necessarily ‘connected’!
But there’s one thing that always gets me, though! No matter which generation I’m talking to, when I mention that I’m looking at computer games (yeah…I simplify for the ‘normal’ people) I always seem to get the exact same comment: “The thing that gets me about these games is that they’re so violent! Why do they have to be so violent!” – and well, I’ve tried explaining that violence is fun, but I always get apprehensive looks when I go into detail about how fun it is to blast off your guns and see blood splattered all over! The freedom and the glory of torturing pixelated people in the most violent manner you can think of! Of sitting here frantically banging on your keyboard and screaming “Die you MF! DIE!!” followed by an evil laugh as this task has been accomplished!!! Oh the joy!!!

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