Bloginati

I’m not a social MMO player. I prefer to play solo, and perhaps get together with a few friends to take on particularly challenging adventures. That said, where the hell did the social go in MMOs? Why do I feel like I’m playing a solo game among anonymous (N)PCs, no longer the intentional outsider within a community? The social must have gone somewhere. Let’s investigate… Old massively multiplayer games required cooperation. Man did I hate that! Most characters had to play with other characters most of the time. In Ultima Online, if you weren’t working with others, you were a … [Link]

Always sad to see an online world close. It is with a heavy heart that we author and post this message. This message serves as the Official Announcement for the Termination of the vSide service. Please read this entire message carefully for important information regarding the next week. vSide is shutting down. The last day of vSide operation will likely be Thursday July 16th, 2009. It’s possible that the service will become unavailable before then, but we’re going to try to keep it up until then. It’s also possible that it will stay up a few days after 7/16/09. – … [Link]

The Guardian has been giving us a free Spanish phrasebook this week. Today's installment concerns "family & relationships". I don't know what it is about people who write phrasebooks, but they seem to be frustrated authors. The ones they gave away in The Independent a couple of years ago had little narratives in them, and so does this one from The Guardian: If you spoke so little Spanish that you had to use a phrasebook, what possible use would it be to you to be able to say, "At least I don't attract everyone's attention by walking around half-naked"? The … [Link]

The curious case of the poorly behaved professor continues, as in his blog, he poses the question – was his CoH’s character’s behavior in violating social norms while remaining within the letter of the game’s rules “worthy of wrath”? I’ll let you remain in suspense as to how he’d answer that… oh, wait. I can only note that all the things Twixt is accused of doing in descriptions like the above are simple, mundane, and easily mimicked in-game things that really aren’t much fun and really aren’t in the spirit of the game rules at all – game rules that … [Link]

The curious case of the poorly behaved professor continues, as in his blog, he poses the question – was his CoH’s character’s behavior in violating social norms while remaining within the letter of the game’s rules “worthy of wrath”? I’ll let you remain in suspense as to how he’d answer that… oh, wait. I can only note that all the things Twixt is accused of doing in descriptions like the above are simple, mundane, and easily mimicked in-game things that really aren’t much fun and really aren’t in the spirit of the game rules at all – game rules that … [Link]

I bought a new cartridge for my colour printer today: Hmm, so if I obeyed the security protection sticker do you think I could sue Sainsbury's for the price of a replacement microwave oven? [Link]

Every morning when I drive my wife to the station, at one point I pass two houses opposite each other. The one on the left has four red cars outside it; the one on the left has four silver cars outside it. I've been meaning to take a photograph of the phenomenon for months so I could blog it (yes, my life is that sad), but by the time I've dropped my wife off and come back, one of the silver cars has gone. Unfortunately, it's not a picture I shall ever be able to take now, because the people … [Link]

Great question. The blog post announcing it says it’s for netbooks, really, and that the development platform “is the Web”: Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps … [Link]

Now that I can remote embed and share worlds to everyone…I’ll start showing a few I have made! This is WoWtest. This was my attempt at creating a side scrolling WoW clone, complete with art ripped directly from the game. No, there isn’t really anything to play. If you keep walking to the right eventually you’ll get to a horribly-coded battle in which you fight a murloc. I haven’t actually worked on this game since last year, so if you notice anything funky that is why. Check it out below (lazy folks in RSS readers, you gotta click to come … [Link]

Andrew Woolridge has gotten the Metaplace client embed up and running inside of Titanium, which means that you can now grab a downloadable Metaplace client for Windows, Mac, or Linux: MetaTanium. In his own words: Titanium is a kinda open source alternative to Adobe AIR that I’ve been toying around with. As soon at the ability to embed Metaplace worlds was announced I wanted to combine two of my passions into one: MetaTanium lets you choose a world to run as a desktop app. You can even run it fullscreen! It’s in an alpha state, but please give me feedback … [Link]