Yzabel / January 31, 2006

Self-Printing In A Virtual World

I know I haven’t done much in terms of blogging this past week, but this is something I plan on remedying to. Somehow, this mini-break was a good thing anyway.

In the meantime, I’ve found (completely by chance) a few interesting things in Second Life. I’ve had an account there since the summer of 2004–I like building houses and creating clothes, it helps in furthering my graphic-related abilities–and although I’m a casual player most of the time, there are moments when I like to explore and see what the world has to offer. This is how I stumbled over a system called THiNC, that allows a player to create and distribute their own book in world.

It’s not regular writing, of course. The book itself must be made of textures, which means that one needs to prepare it offline in images before uploading it all, and this can take a lot of time. Albeit very basic, the result is interesting enough–a book that can appear as an item, and which pages can be flipped. Nothing to do with simple text, since the author can give it whatever look and paginating s/he wants.

Another interesting tidbit: last summer, Cory Doctorow allowed his book Someone comes to town, someone leaves town to be distributed in Second Life, under the shape of an animated book and under the Creative Commons license.

Reading this way is special, to say the least, and I’ll still prefer printing a PDF of the book; on the other hand, it’s interesting to see that the online boundaries of writing don’t stop at websites and blogs, but also extend to other means of distribution.

Yzabel / September 18, 2005

Virtual Disease in a Virtual World

Even though I haven’t found many sources yet to confirm this, it looks like World of Warcraft now has to deal with a disease spreading to other players’ characters, and bearing the charming name of “Corrupted Blood”. Here’s what pigz at Shacknews has to say about it:

Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players. 

As a person who’ve dabbled in MMORPGs for a few years, although I’ve never played WoW, I find this quite fascinating. Is this an intended feature that’s working too well, or a serious coding bug, if there’s ever any difference between the two, in this case? We’ve all heard of viruses that spread from computer to computer through the internet, and of course of biological viruses, but this is a premiere to me; I don’t think that any online game has seen such collateral damage occur, and while it can sure be fascinating from a purely roleplaying point of view, it also has the potential to be a serious bother to players.

I now wonder how Blizzard will handle the matter, yet above all, I wonder how this could happen. What piece of code was needed for the Corrupted Blood to become so virulent? How come that such an event could occur in what’s supposed to be a completely human-controlled environment? Somehow, I can’t prevent but thinking that this is a perfect example of chaos in motion. It’s so similar to real life that it’s almost frightening.

(Link found through Clickable Culture)

Yzabel / August 20, 2005

Orion’s Arm: A Science-Fiction World in the Making

Sisyphean posted an annoucement about this at Writers Blog Alliance, and after taking a peek at the webpage, I thought it’s a pretty interesting project, worth being advertised a little more.

Without further ado, let me thus introduce you to Orion’s Arm, a collaborative project aiming at creating a science-fiction universe, complete from breeds to timeline, while following currently accepted science matters.

Our goal is to create a dramatic far-future universe that is internally consistent and abides as much as possible with the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. Thus matter cannot travel faster than light, matter and energy are conserved, no evolved humanoid aliens have been discovered, future ultratech social issues are likely to be very different to those of today, and so on. We embrace speculative ideas like drexlerian assemblers, mind uploads, posthuman intelligences, femtotech, magnetic monopoles, wormholes, as it is proposed that future sciences, technologies, and developments will make these possible. And we attempt a logical explanation for even the most fantastic-seeming elements in OA. We aim to paint a future that is plausible at every level, from the scientific to the social to the psychological.

While this may seem too scientific to one’s liking, for an author who’d like to write science-fiction, this approach can turn to be a very valuable one. Indeed, science-fiction is not just “something easy to write: you can invent anything”. Let’s not forget the word science in it, and that when creating our own little pocket universes, basing them off real scientific theories is a necessity, in order to make them more believable to our readers. I’m really not a scientific type, but grabbing a magazine here and there has taught me a few invaluable things to add in my stories.

It’s all about credibility—and seeing such a world being created is anyway a fascinating enough process in itself to at least take a few minutes and have a look at it.

Yzabel / August 3, 2005

The Daedalus Project

Some may have noticed that I’ve added this link in my list in the sidebar of this blog. The Daedalus Project is indeed worth a visit, and repeated ones, even, from whomever is interested in surveys, statistics and psychology about the world of MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games).

Articles and research include various themes, such as The Rise and Fall of Guilds, Communication/Relationships Skills, Elves, Ogres and Drama Queens: Stories of Digital Intrigue and Drama or Games, Life, and The Pursuit of Happiness.

If by chance you’d feel like helping with the surveys, taking part is easy and won’t take you more than a few minutes.

I’ve always found this website pretty fascinating, if only for the general behavioral patterns it has outlined over the past years. Whether it’s about EverQuest, World of Warcraft or any other MMORPG, many times they remain exactly the same—sometimes worrying, sometimes enlightening, but never boring. A beautiful sociocultural analyzis, in fact.

Yzabel / July 4, 2005

Games, Choices, Morality?

Reading the news at lunch today, I spotted what seemed to me like an interesting article in the Toronto Star, raising quite an amount of questions regarding moral choices in games:

Her husband notices you watching his tryst. He begs you not to tell his wife, and offers you cash to keep his secret. So, what do you do? More than that, what is the right thing to do in this situation? The “good” thing to do? Do you tell the wife, destroy the marriage, and leave just as broke as you were before? Or do you take the money in exchange for your silence? Is that right? 

Yup, it’s a scene from Fable, and it’s a choice that indeed is to be taken in the game. What would a player do? What is the right choice? The wrong one? Sure, it’s “only a game”, yet it still calls at some sense of morality that everyone is supposed to have. People want less linear games, games in which we’d really be able to change the course of events through our own choices, and not by simply following the directions set by the developers; when they get it – or as close to it as technically possible – they’re faced with the fact that doing whatever they want necessarily implies that our choices can also be the wrong ones (not as in making them fail to solve game puzzles or quests – “wrong” as in “morally questionable”, sort of).Read More