mssv

  • Studied

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    1–2 minutes

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    3 comments on Studied

    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…

  • GamesFilter

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on GamesFilter

    What with yet another release of a MetaFilter engine clone, I’ve gone and registered gamesfilter.com. It’s not active yet, and probably won’t be for a while until I’ve experimented with various engines, but eventually I hope to turn it into a MetaFilter-esque forum for interesting and breaking news regarding massively multiplayer online games. And let…

  • One Thousand Days Later

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    10–15 minutes

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    No comments on One Thousand Days Later

    With the image of immersive fiction games becoming increasingly negative, and the competiton to attract players for massively multiplayer online games becoming increasingly fierce, how can the genre survive? Other than improved content and organisation, it needs to use new technologies and modes of thinking to its full advantage, and the prize is creating a…

  • The lament of the immersive fiction gamer

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on The lament of the immersive fiction gamer

    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.

  • All wrong

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on All wrong

    This BBC News article about collaborate immersive fiction games would normally be a cause for joy, considering the great publicity it brings to the genre. However, the article is so wrong that it’s painful. For example: The first stage of the challenge, which had a $25,000 prize, was supposed to take people a month to…

  • Uplink

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    1–2 minutes

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

  • SimCity 4

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    No comments on SimCity 4

    I’m seriously considering buying SimCity 4 at the moment; all the reviews I’ve read have been fairly positive and it seems that with a bug patch the game should be very playable. Plus, I’ve always been a big fan of SimCity. The most interesting thing that I’ve read so far is that the best way…

  • Rewarding Behaviour

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    2–3 minutes

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    No comments on Rewarding Behaviour

    While browsing through hot-shot Cambridge lecturer and security expert Markus Kuhn’s homepage, I came across these two articles about the detrimental effects rewards can have on performance: For Best Results, Forget the Bonus and Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator. While some may view these articles as part of the backlash against behaviourism, I do…

  • TerraQuest Axed

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    1–2 minutes

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    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…

  • Stepping out

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    2–4 minutes

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    No comments on Stepping out

    So for a couple of hours this evening I tried to replicate the Dance Dance Revolution experience using my PC. Waiting for me at Cambridge today were two nice new Playstation gamepad USB adaptors that I bought off Ebay; I was intending to hook my two dance mats up to the computer via USB, download…