Photos from Multiplayer (MTV) blog

check out the photostream from the folks at the multiplayer blog (from MTV) - they have been to E3 and Comic con - lots of photos of swag, costumes, stars

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28516300@N04/

fencing in SL

You can fence in SL - this would be interesting for a group that wanted to look at sports in sl.

Here's a tutorial video


The SLCN has a sports channel - turns out there is car racing as well as boat racing and giant snail racing in world

new avatars in SL

I was playing around in SL yesterday - rooting thru my inventory and found a couple of cool avatars.

First check out this great dragon. There's a whole dragon culture in L - they have celebrations and their own islands. Imagine making architecture for dragons who can fly, walk on all 4s. Cool project topic. Here's a pic of me as a dragon.



For qualitative class I"m going to go around as a robot - a little robot with an antenna on top of its head. Here's a pic.



And for game class I'm going to go around as MasterChief for awhile. THen just back to my normal self probably. Picture coming.

Delusions of Beginning Game Design Students

from Teach Game Design blog

Here are some typical delusions seen in beginning game design students
Here are some of the delusions common amongst beginning game development students. The teacher's job is to counter these delusions. It's better to be honest, to work from reality rather than encourage fantastic "dreams".

• They'll design a game and someone else will do all the work!
• It's all creativity instead of work.
• Ideas will just come to them, floating in out of the ether--and that one idea is all they need
• AAA list games can be produced easily--they have no idea of the magnitude involved.
• They'll play games all day in the job. (Even game magazine editors cannot do that.)
• It matters that they're expert game players (it only slightly matters, and only for designers)
• They're going to have a big effect on a AAA game soon after getting a job (they'll probably never have a big effect)
• Getting a degree is going to get them a job. (They have to show what they can do, degrees don't count for a lot yet.)
• If they just make a game that includes all the currently-popular elements (a market-driven game), theirs will be instantly popular.
• They're going to be able to assemble a development team without salaries and get things done on schedule with the promise of royalties once the game goes commercial. (Though at least this happens every once in a while.)
• They'll start their career working in the position they want to achieve in the long run.
• Think the college curriculum is an extension of high school and act as such.
• If they can do just what's in the curriculum, and without any additional effort, they will have 100% of what it takes to succeed.
• They will only work on hard core games, underestimating the amount of casual game players.
• Work will always be fun and they will always enjoy playing the game they create at the end.
• They can never make a "bad" game that gets canceled.
• Testing is only playing the game, not writing long reports on bugs and flaws.
• They can sneer at and ignore non-AAA titles as though there was something wrong with them and they'd never need to work on such a thing
• It will be Easy.

All delusions . . .

Reality in the game world

First the good news: Lots of different kinds of hardware, console makers looking strong. Here's an article from reuters: http://uk.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUKN1736434220080718


Next the bad news: Lots of games get canceled during development - lots and lots. We have to be ready for that. Here's an article from the Guardian (in the UK): http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/17/it.games One suggestion - more small developers - but industry imploding, converging - big companies willing to throw away a lot of innovative designs/ideas in order to protect development that looks like more of a sure thing

We now have an immense amount of videogame stuff

Image via WikipediaOk - it seems like an immense amount to me at this point. I'm going to make a list and then eventually i'll get a picture of our amazing educational tools (games!!!)

Hardware
- 2 XBOX360 Pros with 20 gig hard drives
- 2 PS2 (yes ps2's, not ps3's, they're coming) - more games for the ps2
- 5 PSPs
- 5 DS (variety of colors)
assorted memory cards and cases

Software
For the DS (nintendo has a bunch of online manuals
- Final Fantasty III
- Super Mario Brothers
- Professor Layton - hre is the pdf of the actual manual
- Nintendogs - here are directions and the PDF of the actual manual
- Harvest Moon
- Brain Age
- Big Brain Academy

For the PSP
- God of War
- Patapon
- Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

For the Wii
- Zelda Twilight Princess
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
- Boom Blox
- Super Mario Galaxy
- Okami

For the PS2
- Singstar 80s (with 2 microphones and music that doesn't make my ears bleed)
- Buzz The Mega Quiz with 4 controllers
- Resident Evil 4
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
- Indigo Prophecy
- Shadow of the Colossus

For the XBOX360
- Halo3
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
- Bioshock
- The Orange Box (half life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal
- Mass Effect

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brand perceptions

Image via WikipediaCheck out the tag cloud for some videogame companies. The brand tag project is trying to get a sense of how consumers view/think about/consider different brands. Give us some idea of what people (some people, a small group of people, a very much not representative group of people at this point) think about videogame brands

XBox
Wii
PlayStation
Nintendo
EA Sports
SecondLife

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Cool new Museum

The Tech - a technology museum across the street from the convention center in San Jose, California - is in SL now. They're going to try to build exhibits in SL and in the real museum - get SL and RL designers working together. They have a great space to exhibit spaces and lots of room for people to work on their projects. There's even a contest with a $5000L prize.

They have an IMAX theatre to show videos. They want to have mixed reality events (which I love of course)

Right now the exhibits are about music and dance - you can play a guitar, create art together. Fun times.

Real Life in SecondLife

I saw this on another blog striking writers picketing in SL on the NBC Universal island

Other Christmas decorations

I blogged earlier about decorating hte Park Island for the winter - made it snow, covered the ground with snow, put in some dead/wintery trees.

I went over to the many Rezzable islands the other day - that's a subject for another post (what are they doing with all those islands - urban sims, vampire castles - all for RPGs?). They have the Greenies house. And now they have an island with a huge Greenies Christmas tree. Here are two pics.

Club Penguin News

I was just watching Disney channel (yeah - that's right - the disney channel!)

and they've been taking radio disney and club penguin vans around doing events. They just announced an in world charity contest. Kids play games in Club Penquin and earn coins. They can donate coins to one of three charities. There's a pool of a million dollars - Disney will split up the money in the proportions the players donate their coins.

Cool way for Disney to get started with their connection to Club Penguin. And a great way to introduce kids to philanthropy.

More pics of the island dressed for winter

Folks wanted lights and a school name - so here we go. These first two pictures show the lights and then the lights and hte name.




Here's a completed picture during the day.



This picture shows the island all dressed up and at night.

possible griefer attack?

Here are a couple of pictures I took on the Electrolux site. They're having an innovation contest.

One time I visited there were these pacman characters spewing out. I couldn't tell if they were supposed to be there (maybe part of someone's innovation?) or if they were part of a griefer attack (however lame).

Anyway - interesting to see particles this big.

Book Launch

I went to a presentation by an author of a RL book about Sl - How to Get a Second Life. The author is a SL entrepreneur - used to run a club, then a security service. Now he runs a company called SL Guides that sells small focused help booklets for doing things in SL. The new book is supposedly a guide for users from day one through experienced.

It was held on Book Island, next door to Publisher island. There are a variety of book publishers (RL and SL) there as well as authors. Interesting idea.

And there were 65 people there - another full event. (Friday I went toScience Friday and there were more than 60 people there too)

Here are some pictures.

Lazer Tag

Some students from the University of Texas designed an arena/play space for lazer tag. What a hoot. We each got guns and a game HUD (heads up display). Each gun only held so many bullets/rounds at a time - you had to get additional ammo from powerups scattered around the space. There were also shield protection and health points scattered around. Once we figured out how to play - they left a lot of important basic details out of their documentation (oh, like you had to join the group they created in order for the guns to work and you had to be in mouselook mode to shoot) but we eventually figured it out. Maybe that was part of the experiment - see how long people would struggle to figure stuff out, how long they'd stand around without being able to play...

ANyway - they created a fun space with multiple floors, things to go into, fly over, look around on. They had a good size crowd too last night. I don't know if they're doing it again. I'm going to check on monday and take my students there. It's a good example of a game built inside the virtual world.

I of course got too carried away playing the game and forgot to take pictures - d'oh. So if we go back in on Monday I will be sure to take some then.

Here's a SLURL - if you have SL running, ou should be able to click on this link and be teleported.

Some more wintery island pics

Might be a more promising headline if I'd just come back from Aruba - but no - just pics of the Park Communication island dressed for winter. I got hte snow a way that I like, I added some more items, I made an ornament that glows in the dark and put it around and some banners.

Here are some new pics of the work i did today

Gate Crasher

Today we were having class in SecondLife on the school's island. We were discussing ethics. The students had met (in world) earlier to discuss different questions. Today we came together in our amphitheatre to go over each group's conclusions.

While we were discussing, someone noticed a new avatar in the seats. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture. A white haired (on the head anyway) squirrel type furry sat down. I think the person was just looking for other folks to talk with, used the map to find people and saw our little cluster of green dots.

They didn't cause any trouble. And the group that is investigating furries is going to contact the squirrel to see about doing an interview.

And tonight on our island I met a furry from Cornell - they're a programmer working on the open source viewer. Very cool. They were a bunny with big feet. It was good to see someone actually using Cornell's island; the bunny mentioned that Cornell proper has another island that profs use for classes and office hours. I'd love to have office hours in world.

When we teach about games - wouldn't it be funny to have office hours inside World of Warcraft or Puzzle Pirates

Winter on the Park Island

I got inspired to change the season on the island. So I changed the textures for the land to be snowy. Here are a couple of pictures of the first changes.





Then I started putting out snowy trees, poinsettias, wreaths, and some roping. Right now I have been focusing on the Park School building on top of the mountain.

I did put a snowman and wreath down on the welcome center too. Here's a couple of pictures of the snowman.

There's a rumor that we'll be taking a photo on the island to use on the Park School holiday card. That will be cool.Here is a shot of the front of the park school building where we might take the photo.

this is so amazing

I just downloaded the windlight firstview viewer - hooks you to the main grid but things can be buggy

in this case it is oh so worth any bugs that might pop up - the new light and water and cloud effects are freaking amazing - real. not videogame real but real real.

go here to download the viewer - remember anything you do yo do to your real account.

then try out sunset and sunrise. go to the beach and look at the reflections on the water. check out the clouds. It is so real. hmmm - SL sunsets were always great, but now they're just incredible.

ok - maybe real isn't always good - just trying to imagine what it would look like with real sky in Bedrock - have to check that out next time

blog about secondlife freebies

amazing blog with a new post everyday about free stuff - lots of free clothes

and there's a list (link on the right side of hte page) of all kinds of freebies

this is a goldmine