The Dream is Alive – metaplace.com

I’ll let game-design god Raph Koster do the talking:

This is the future of the internet: open-standard virtual environments. “Anything that you do on the web… just works in Metaplace, because we work the way the web does.”

Alpha application ends Monday. www.metaplace.com

Do Hypersheep Dream of Virtual Universes?

The universe is incomprehensibly big. It takes millions of years for anything significant to happen on a cosmic scale.

Might beings of hyperdimensionality sufficient to perceive time as a lower dimension be able to construct entire universes?

To what end?

Leeroy goes Viral

The Live Action Leeroy virals have truly gone viral, including a front-page mention at worldofwarcraft.com:

Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder for blogging them (along with some kind words) at boingboing.net

They even made it to the front page of Digg.

Goddammit Leeroy

This is one of three promos I directed for Spike TV’s Video Game Awards. The others are

Elevator
Stacy’s Birthday

These were written by the hilarious Johnathan Gabrus, who also stars as Leeroy. That’s Brian Fountain as the unfortunate client and Andre du Bouchet as the group leader.

Many thanks to Kara Klenk and Ethan Rom (as Stacy and Stan), Christine Lu, Adam Wade, Kari Kim, Val Bontrager, and Chris DeLuka for all their help.

A Wrinkle in Second Life

Seifert Surface has built a tesseract in Second Life.

He built his model of the 4-dimensional cube as a Victorian home. Here’s what you’ll see if you visit the home in SL:

Not exactly astonishing. You appear to just loop around and wind up back where you started. But stay with me here.

A tesseract is the extension of a cube into 4-dimensional space, and it’s very difficult (if it’s even possible) for humans to conceptualize it. Try to think of it geometrically, not realistically. As the square is to a line, and a cube to a square, so is the tesseract to the cube.

Another way to understand it is to imagine the vertices. In a square, each vertex extends in two directions. In a cube, each vertex extends in three directions. What happens when you add another dimension and extend the cube’s vertices in four directions? That’s a tesseract.

Hard to conceptualize, right? Take another look at someone walking through Surface’s tesseract house, this time with the camera zoomed far out:

Is it making more sense? Of course, this isn’t really what a tesseract looks like, but it’s an effective illustration. As in a cube, where each side of its component squares adjoin another side, each face of the tesseract’s component cubes adjoin another face. To represent a 4-dimensional object in 3-dimensional space,* the cubes move so their faces can adjoin.

Meg and Charles Wallace Murray never had it so good.

If you really want your mind blown, here’s a functional tesseract version of Rubik’s Cube.

SL users can portal to Surface’s “Crooked House” here.

More info here.

Still too pedestrian for you? A 5-dimensional Rubik’s Cube here.

*Technically, this is representing a 4D object in a 2D representation of 3D. But lets keep it simple.

“Uru” Comes Back to Life

"Uru: Ages Beyond Myst," one of the many spin-offs of the classic game Myst, was originally intended to evolve into the MMO "Uru: Live." Alas, developer Cyan and pubisher Ubisoft closed the book on that unwritten chapter, citing insufficient numbers.

But Game Tap announced at E3 last week that it'll be picking up where Uru left off, launching the live game by Christmas. This should delight the many Uru enthusiasts who have kept the game alive by creating their own Uru facimilies in the MMOs There and Second Life. Details on cnet.

NY Times Reports New Alliance Race/Second Life Sued

Seriously. The New York Times.

Somebody recently said, "Warcraft is the new golf."

This article comes one day after Mark Bragg issued a press release announcing his lawsuit of Linden Labs, makers of Second Life. Mark, an attorney, alleges that immediately after investing thousands of real-world dollars in a virtual land deal, Linden Labs cancelled his account, "without explanation, without citing any violation of community policy, and have since refused offer a credit or a refund."

This could be a landmark case in the legal and popular understanding of virtual worlds. So far, there's been no response from Linden Labs. I, for one, hope Mark wins. If people are going to be investing millions of RL dollars in Second Life, as Linden Labs hopes they will, these entrepeneurs will need basic legal rights to protect their investments.

Viacom Buys XFire, Microsoft Buys Massive

"The thing that is interesting about these two more recent deals is that they speak to virtual worlds as an ecology of businesses rather than as just one business, a subscription service."

-Raph Koster

I was just saying to Thomas tonight that 2005/2006 are years I'll remember as very significant in the maturation of the gaming industry.

“Seed” in Public Beta This Week

Denmark-based developer Runestone opened their MMO “Seed” to public beta this week. I’d previously applied to the beta, so I got an email this morning and I’m creeping toward a client patch as I type this.

Seed takes place on the colony world DaVinci as the colonists, cut off from Earth by interstellar distances, struggle to survive amidst a massive population explosion and conflict of ideologies. Players will have the ability to influence the course of the story and game development.

With my new Razer Copperhead gaming mouse (smooth like butter!) and a video card on the way to breathe some new life into my aging AGP gaming desktop, I’m chomping at the bit to get in some game time. Though glancing over at the SEED patcher, I’ve got about 16 hours or so before their snail of a patcher finishes its 325 MB download.

House of Uster in the “The Onion”

It’s quite a day for House of Uster, my World of Warcraft Guild. Long-time guild member Mark “Hammuster” Lee is featured in two different Onion articles today, in various ways.

In Drunk Will Show You, Everybody, Mark plays the drunk in the photographs.

Baby, You Mean the World of Warcraft to Me reads: “I would climb the highest peak of Mount Hyjal to toil for 100 days and 100 nights in the mines in order to extract the precious ore so that I may fashion you a necklace of the finest thorium. My warrior, Hammuster, devoted his game’s life to the professions of mining and smithing just so that I might accomplish that very thing.”

The love-letter also mentions “I’ve introduced you to my comrades-in-arms in the Ulster guild, and they all accept you as kin,” which I take to be inspired by “Uster.”