mssv

Collective Play – Justin Hall’s notes on a recent conference at UC Berkeley on ‘collective gaming’ (read as: massively multiplayer online games of the AI/Majestic ilk). Interesting to see that the academic world is thinking about this sort of thing, and it appears that Sean Stewart (author for the AI game) was a speaker there.

Geeks Without Borders – a mildly interesting article by Steven ‘Emergence’ Johnson at Slate, about immersive fiction games and related genres. Quite positive, for a change.

This Is Not a Game: Collective Subjectivity and Immersive Entertainment – a paper by Janes McGonigal at UC Berkeley. Seems interesting, although I find its comparisons between drug-taking and immersive gaming to be a little sensationalist, but perhaps worthwhile in some way. I’ll take a proper look later today. Jane is no stranger to immersive…

Dan’s just written a new article entitled The curse of massively multiplayer immersive games. “To be blunt: they have all, to a greater or lesser extent, sucked.

Something tells me that Uplink would make a marvellous massively multiplayer immersive fiction game, or at least a decent component of one.

TerraQuest game axed. I talked about TerraQuest earlier in mssv.net. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised about this development; not only were they offering a $250,000 grand prize, but also six prizes of $25,000. The total prizes alone are $400,000, and that doesn’t even take into account the production costs. Sure, they said they had…

TerraQuest – an “online interactive game [that is] a blend between a mystery and a scavenger hunt.” Launching this fall, it looks a bit like the AI game although I found the trailer to be considerably cheesy. I don’t know how they’re going to limit the game to people over 18, either. But it has…