Make Money Fast in Virtual Worlds?

Yesterday, I caught most of an interesting program, The Economies of Virtual Worlds, on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a magazine format program produced by WAMU in Washington DC.

The program covered several aspects of making money in virtual words and had a good range of discussants, including Cornell business school professor Robert Bloomfield, author Julian Dibbell (”Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot”), Second Lifer Prokofy Neva, and IBM executive Linda Ban.

“It’s an emerging marketplace, worth billions of dollars, and many Americans don’t even know it exists. In virtual worlds like “Second Life” or “World of Warcraft,” members buy and sell everything from clothes to real estate for their online selves. The goods may not be “real” but the money often is. Join Kojo for a tour of virtual economies and explore the debate over whether they should be more tightly regulated.” (link)

You can listen to the show in Real Audio or Windows Media formats.

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AI in new video games

A story in USA Today, AI is A-OK in new games, reviews the use of AI techniques in current video games, including Halo 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

“Our video-game enemies are smart — and getting smarter. The artificial intelligence that guides in-game characters today leads to far more natural actions and realistic friends and foes than in the past. “As graphics improvements top out, artificial intelligence will (drive) game innovation,” says University of California-Santa Cruz professor Michael Mateas.”

Of course, sometimes seeing all these games makes me think about how focused on warfare our culture is. Could the US industry produce a game like Katamari Damacy?

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Rumors of Second Life on Google Earth

Google Operating System has an intriguing post, A Social Network for Google Earth?, making a case that Google is readying a new application combining social networking, 3D modeling and video games. Now that’s an interesting combination.

The evidence? An un-named company is recruiting Arizona State students to beta-test a new product.

The post speculates that the idea is to base a virtual world on Google earth

“The speculation about a Google Earth Second Life started last year. “The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What’s a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. (…) In Stephenson’s novel, millions of users uploaded customized “avatars,” or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse’s other denizens.” In fact, Snow Crash .” (link)

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Top ten tech challenges for game developers

Popular Science identifies the top ten technical challenges facing
game developers today.

“Today’s videogames draw on sophisticated science like biomechanics, fluid dynamics and computational geometry to be lifelike and exciting. Here are the 10 greatest challenges of making them. See for yourself—it’s virtual reality, but it’s real work”. (link)

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Randy Pausch’s last lecture

The farewell lecture by CMU graphics Professor Randy Pausch that Marc Olano blogged about earlier today is now available on you tube.

It’s hard to watch without feeling an ache.

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Game Education giant Randy Pausch gives farewell lecture at CMU

Randy Pausch got the notice of the graphics community by building a virtual reality system on the super-cheap with off-the-shelf components, then doing real user-study based experiments with it to tell which VR methods worked and which didn’t. He got the notice of the computer science community with Alice, a scripted 3D animation program to teach introductory programming. And, he got the notice of the games industry by founding the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has been a Professor of Computer Science for the past ten years.

Recently, he learned that the pancreatic cancer he has been fighting for the past year is back, and incurable. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an excellent story on his farewell lecture at CMU Tuesday.

Posted in General, News | 1 Comment »

12 year old gets $6.5M for gaming company

When I saw this on Slashdot this morning I had to check the calendar to see if it was April first and the link to make sure it wasn’t a story from the Onion.

“A Silicon Valley company co-founded by a 12-year-old has just raised $6.5 million in venture capital. PlaySpan, based in Santa Clara, Calif. says it offers game publishers a technology that lets users make payments and shop for other items. It calls itself the first “publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network.” Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader, says on his Web site that he is passionate about software that can make the game experience more “rewarding,” and that he started the company last year in his garage. He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won.” (link)

PlaySpan’s web site says that it is “based in Silicon Valley with offices in Mumbai and Shanghai.” While I don’t doubt Arjun’s role as some sort of “founder”, he’s surely a figurehead at this point. I mean, what would happen to the company if your chief executive had to take a week off to finish his big science fair project? Well, maybe he has people who do that kind of stuff for him these days. Having him as your designated “founder” certainly is good for publicity, in any case.

Update (9/20): Akshay points us to an item on VentureBeat on this. Check on the first comment: “The story about 12 year old co-founder is a big oversell…I know because I broke the story on funding two days ago. The CEO Karl Mehta and Arjun’s dad is the real guy behind it…arjun just came up with part of the idea for it, and is not really involved with the business per se. Arjun’s mention on the site is a gimmick which will be rectified soon…the release doesn’t mention him and for good reason.“

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Halo 3 release party, 7-12pm Fri 9/28 UMBC Gameroom

There will be a Halo 3 release party Friday night September 28th from 7:00 pm to Midnight in the UMBC Gameroom. The event is sponsored by the UMBC Commons Gameroom, Microsoft, and the UMBC Game Development Club. The release party will feature a multiplayer tournament (4 vs. 4) in which pairs of four-person teams compete in a Halo 3 match and winners will receive Gameroom Free Play Passes. Up to five Xbox 360s will also be available for individual Halo 3 play. Microsoft will provide free pizza and Xbox 360 games to give away. Pool will be free all night.

Halo 3, a first-person shooter game developed by Bungie Studios for the Xbox 360, will be released on 25 September. It follows and builds on the two previous successful Halo games.

Update 9/24: Matt Hurst notes that “Halo 3 is being touted as not just the biggest launch for a video game, but also the biggest launch of anything.” and backs it up with a graph of mentions on the blogosphere in a “comparison of the Halo brand with mentions of Resident Evil (the top release from last week) and The Bourne Ultimatum (one of the largest films of the summer).”

Posted in Contests, Events, GDC, xbox | No Comments »

Marc Olano to speak at October IGDA DC chapter meeting

UMBC professor Marc Olano will speak at the next meeting of the DC chapter of International Game Developers Association. The 11 October meeting will be held from 7pm to 9pm at the Westwood College Annandale Campus and focus on academic programs in the grater DC area.

“Since it’s back to school time and classes are currently in session we thought it would be interesting to check in with local Colleges and University’s to see what their current and future game/tech curriculum’s are like. Want know what type of game/tech research, study and development that’s happening in our own back yard? Then come on by, our meetings are open to all interested people.” (link)

Dr. Olano will be joined by representatives from several other schools, including UMBC PhD student (part time) Dana Wortman who heads the game-related programs at the Art Institute of Washington.

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Oldskool: King of Kong

King of Kong is a new documentary on the world of competitive arcade video machine players. It tells the story of the quest by Steve Wiebe, a middle school science teacher, to beat the record for the top score in Donkey Kong, one that was set over 25 years ago by Billy Mitchell. Steve, based in Seattle and Billy, out of Hollywood Florida, have a continent between them, but also between their approach to the game and life. Steve’s sweet family man persona is contrasted with Billy’s man-in-black WWF villainous image. It’s quite a story.

The movie is still in limited release, but is playing at The Charles in Baltimore and E street cinema in DC. The uniformly positive reviews caught my attention and I get a chance to see it tonight. I was not disappointed. It’s a great movie, teling an inspirational story about human values against a backdrop of retro video gaming.

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