Mssv

So I’ve finally arrived in San Diego. The flight over from Manchester to Washington Dulles was surprisingly pleasant, perhaps because they had these incredibly nifty touchscreen LCDs in the back of every seat, which were playing about 20 video channels and countless Gameboy games. I was even more impressed when LCD screens started to fold [...]

Israeli media article on mmoes (PDF translation). I recently found out that there’s an article online at some kind of Israeli website (feel free to read it if you can understand Hebrew) all about the Cloudmakers, AI, Lockjaw and mmoes. I was quite happy about the way it linked to all the appropriate websites and [...]

Rich emailed in to tell me about a Japanese MUD called Habitat that has over one million users. This MUD was started in 1990 by Fujitsu and upon a cursory inspection appears to have one of the most complex game communities around; Habitat even had its own Yakuza-run casinos! (note that Habitat was originally developed [...]

Six player Puzzle Bobble Online! And it’s completely free! While it’s a bit difficult to decipher the Japanese webpage, it’s easy to find a download link. Given that I’m leaving for San Diego on Thursday and it’s a 7MB download, I might pass until I get back home.

The Apolyton Civilization 3 Democracy Game. This combines two of my gaming loves – Civ3, and mmoe. The premise is that over one hundred people are democratically playing a game of Civilization 3, electing a cabinet, detailing a constitution, forming numerous political parties and even newspapers. It sounds a little far-fetched but at only 14 [...]

Collective Detective is set to be an subscription-based community website that will host areas dedicated to different alternate reality games/mmoes. Developed by players of Microsoft’s AI game, it will be released in early July and it has an impressive featureset geared towards making discussion and playing of games as easy as possible.
It should be a [...]

USA through, nation nonplussed – the BBC writes a perfect send-up of America’s indifference to the world cup and their style of sports writing.

(Warning: Ramble ahead)
Earlier today, I was listening to a guy describe a project I might do next year for neurobiology, trying to figure out some of the characteristics of Golgi neurones in the cerebellum. The way you can identify these neurones, other than looking at them under a microscope, is to insert a super-thin electrode [...]

Just finished reading The Princess Bride. What a wonderful book! Extremely funny, romantic, adventurous, dashing, with enough sorrow and cynicism to balance it out. I don’t think I’ve read a fantasy story like it anywhere else. It makes me wonder whether this type of story can be adapted for alternate reality games/mmoes. I suspect that [...]

Why is the lunar month exactly equal to the human female menstrual cycle? This is a question that came up in the New Mars forums, and if you click on the first link, it turns out that it is not exactly equal in the first place.