And with the introduction of next generation gaming, you can definitely see this becoming an increasing number. I actually believe there are two things involved. The first is the fact that most of us gamers that grew up with the Atari 2600 and Intellivision have moved on through the generations of gaming consoles and PC gaming to arrive at our current stage. We’re also at the age where we are parents or some are even grandparents and we still enjoy the entertainment. On top of that, we’re also creating a younger generation of gamers to enjoy it with us.

Second, gaming corporations are chasing after a more general populace of gamers. Right now, they are looking to bring in people that previously were not entertained with gaming. That changed entirely when the Wii was introduced, and now Microsoft has Project Natal and Sony has the Playstation Motion controller. The entire move towards casual gamers has not only increased the spread of interactive entertainment but it’s also found its way into the lives of people that never thought about pixel-driven fun.

As people’s living rooms become their space for winding down instead of movie theaters and the like, I believe that this number will probably grow out to around an eighty percent mark in the next decade or so. What does this mean? Truthfully, we could really be playing video games with people we have never met that live quite literally down the street from us.

These user-written books can be obtained from a crafter and will start out blank. Any player can write in a blank book, but as soon as you write the first word you become the author of that book. From that point forward, only the author may edit the contents of the book.

The EQ2 forum thread continues the thoughts with what type of original works could be penned. Ideals go well beyond fan fiction. Imagine a whole new tradeskill profession possibility in the future: the author, the printer, the publisher. NPCs as librarians are hinted. I don’t know if that is where Sony is headed with this of course, but I’m seeing a lot of very creative possibilities. Great idea and something that several people mentioned was originally available in Ultima Online.

According to this comment, Sages level 50+ will be able to quest for recipes to make these blank books. This means my toon Ratosorf, pictured above, currently a level 66 Sage will be able to do the quest when this is launched with the update.

I attempted to come up with any fantasy title that doesn’t somehow lift from D&D, and after 20 minutes of contemplation, I’m still drawing a blank.

I hear you, Earnest, I wanted to make the headline for this piece (but it just seemed a little tacky): Now Both D&D Creators Are Out Of Hit Points.

I don’t recall seeing Mr. Arneson’s name as much Gygax in the original D&D tomes, but it’s sad news nonetheless when anybody associated with the creation of Dungeons & Dragons dies. It seems behind the scenes there was significant legal tension between Areneson, Gygax and publisher of D&D TSR Games.

Arenson’s Wikipedia entry offers more information on the significance of his contribution:

In the summer of 1970, Arneson began to create a game that involved medieval miniatures exploring the dungeons of a castle inhabited by fantastic monsters. Originally Arneson played his own mix of rules using rock, paper, scissors to resolve combat, but later adapted elements from his naval rules (which had an armor class system like that later used in D&D – the lower the armor class, the harder the ship (or creature) was to hit) and the Chainmail rules, written by Gygax and Jeff Perren (which was on a similar track to what Arneson had in mind, combining fantasy elements with real-world rules albeit for medieval gaming). However, also finding those lacking, he wrote his own rules in his own play as and when needed, applying those to his role-playing game scenario.

For those who believe in Heaven, they now have one heckuva role-playing game crew up there. Dave Arneson died April 7,2009 at age 61. Too young.

http://feedproxy.google.com/Vtor-VirtualToReality

This remains a full text RSS feed, although when you look at it directly from the browser it is only showing partial feed. If you look at the source code you’ll see it’s a full text feed meaning that everything you see in this post with some mild exceptions like iframes and script embeds you’ll see in the RSS feed.

For 30 days the older Feedburner feed will redirect, but you might want to update now. Another change we’re doing which you will notice is Google Adsense ads now appearing in the RSS feed.

We are only doing this experimentally for 60 days and then our group will review the stats to see if this is worth continuing.

In December these ads will appear below the title and post body (see example above) and in January 2009 they’ll be moved above the post content and below the title.

It’s this author’s opinion that it’s not worth doing but since we’ve never tried this in the VTOR RSS feed we don’t know for certain. You are welcome to use the comments below to share your comments on how you feel about this experiment.

I clicked the big “click here” link and was taken to Funcom to login. No further message anywhere about the offer. After logging into Funcom the status message for Anarchy Online showed: “status open, log in and play the game”

And so begins the infamous and sometimes frustrating (crashed on me while writing this) patching process. The last time I played Anarchy Online was when they were offering free play until January 15, 2008. I’m curious though how the “next payment due” screen showed 2009-01-15 when I clicked through the offer on December 3, 2008. They actually are giving me 42 days free, yes/no?

Not complaining about the extra free play time, but kind of curious what is the story. There is a “play for free” link on the official site that when clicked takes you to a page that describes:

If you used to Play Anarchy Online in the past you can of course use your old install files, however you will need to create a new account to advantage of the freeplay offer.

This is kind of strange, so they are encouraging users to setup additional accounts to be able to play the new content for free? And for how long?

FUNCOM Stock (Oslo: FUNCOM.OL) is trading at $2.75 down like so many other stocks from a high of over $50 in July of this year. This was a two year low according to Joystiq (Age of Conan servers merging, stock hits 2-year low). The bump mid year in the stock over the $28 it was selling for a year ago was most likely due to the Age of Conan launch. I tried to get into Age of Conan at launch, but it didn’t grab me. Three months ago Age of Conan director Gaute Godager has departed from Funcom and was replaced by Anarchy Online director Craig Morrison (Age of Conan director leaves Funcom, Anarchy Online director given the reins).

Analyst firm Parks Associates said in a recent report that game companies should give up the fees:

The analyst found that just two per cent of gamers in the US who do not currently play MMORPGs are interesting in joining a new subscription-based game. By contrast, 14 per cent would be willing to play a game that offered free access.

If you are going to charge Sony might have the right idea by offering a station pass which gives access to all their games (including Everquest, EQII, Vanguard, Pirates,etc.), but man, $30/month seems steep considering you can only play one game at a time.

Not sure how to take the Anarchy Online offers, if they are just promoting in hard times or they are desperate. Whatever the case, players get some free time to check out what’s happened the last year.

This is bound to stoke the fires of my friendly challenge to get fellow VTOR author Darius to buy an Xbox 360. He says there aren’t enough good reasons to buy one. On Black Friday, the Xbox 360 sold 3 consoles for every one PS3.

Kotaku:

The Xbox 360 experienced “record-breaking console sales” during the post-Thanksgiving weekend, Microsoft corporately gloated today. It estimated a 25% increase in sales from Black Friday 2007 and boasted that it outsold the PlayStation 3 three-to-one.

Darius, you paying attention? No knock on the PS3 which is a sweet and infinitely more reliable gaming console than the Xbox 360 but the whole buy one for the Blu-ray deal isn’t as compelling any more when you can get standalone Blu-ray players for around half the cost of a PS3. Add to that the anemic Blu-ray library compared to DVD.

Microsoft released their fall update recently which added custom avatars (mine is pictured above, dig the suit?) while Sony continues to keep their Home project in private beta. Will they open up the beta to the general public before the end of the year? Will it make any difference?

Talk about virtual life being snubbed out quickly! It’s like you create an avatar, walk around, get to know a few places and then BAM! Gunshot to the head from some dark alley. Come on, Google, give Lively a little more chance:

Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year

Virtual world can be harsher than the real world, indeed.

the two met online in 2003 and married in 2005 both physically and in a lavish Second Life ceremony. According to Ms. Taylor they spent as much of their time together in the virtual world as they did in the physical one. When she suspected her husband’s Second Life avatar of cheating she hired a virtual private detective to catch him in the act.

The virtual private detective was a type of service in SL I didn’t realize existed and it even has its own name, cyber spying:

Last month, a 43-year-old Japanese woman killed her virtual husband after he broke off their relationship on the popular game MapleStory, where the two met. Spouses neglected by their partners’ constant video-game or Internet use have banded together, calling themselves “cyber widowers” or “gamer widows.” Cyber spying is also common.

Darius wrote about Maple Story back in October 2007 and it seemed a little too cartoonish to interest me at the time. Seems like there is more virtual to reality stuff going on there than I imagined.

Killed, seriously? I’m all for living your virtual life to the fullest and even taking some aspects of it out of the virtual world, but killing somebody for what was done inside a virtual world? That’s crazy. And if there are too many stories like this, it will just make real world courts clamp down and make the virtual world increasingly restrictive. Where is the fun in that?

While the picture above might be a bit dramatic, news has come out that in addition to the draconian Spore DRM scheme, only one player account works with one game. As Techdirt points out, the manual for Spore says the exact opposite. An EA rep admitted that the manual that comes with Spore has a “misprint” and it will be updated in future versions.

This means if my son wants to play with his Spore account I’ll need to shell out another 50 bones for another copy. After playing the game the first time and being underwhelmed, I haven’t been inspired to return so I think my recommendation to him for the foreseeable future will be to just play under my account. Does that violate the EA terms? Hope not. He hasn’t asked me to play yet though, he’s looking more forward to Rock Band 2 which comes out on Sunday for the Xbox 360. I’m with him there.

I was worried about the massive hype surrounding Spore — few games ever live up to that kind of hype — but after playing with the Creature Creator I was excited. If the game had been MMO like the Creature Creator I’d be much more interested. Sure, we’ve known it was going to be single player for awhile with only the ability to insert other people’s creations into your game but I think EA needs to come up with an online version that goes all the way to redeem Spore.

Seriously, with only a couple months of the year left, is it too early to declare Spore as the most disappointing game of 2008? It’s the #1 contender at least.

But when you look at the back the map is there:

I love little easter egg type art things like this in games. I learned a number of other interesting things about Mines of Moria:

- The Mines of Moria expansion is about 35% of the size of the existing LOTRO world

- there will be no wait times between zones in Mines of Moria (although you will still zone out to the original. Turbine was toting this as a “first” for any MMORPG. I haven’t doublechecked if that’s accurate, but I saw some pretty impressive depth in the demo. IE. a character dropping from high up to his death below (actually during the demo the Turbine rep had ‘god’ mode and couldn’t die). 12 expansive areas in total
- Lord of the Rings license extended for 9 more years virtually guaranteeing plenty of LOTRO gameplay well into the future
- level cap increased by 10 with “hundreds of new quests and monsters”
- Turbine plans to release one new expansion each year and has been working on the expansion following Mines of Moria
- the level of customization for individual items is being ratcheted up considerably with the ability to forge legendary items.

Meaning players can name their own items like say “TD Goodliffe’s Doomsword” and it is unique to the server you are on so nobody else can take your name. These customizable legendary items will level up with players. Customizations include: advancing the item’s virtues, adding runic legacies, modifying titles and forming fables.

From the Turbine PAX 2008 press kit

- 2 new solo speciality classes: Rune-keeper and Warden. The Rune-keeper can heal in one battle and hurl magic spells in the second while the warden is a medium fighter that uses combo maneuvers to unlock more powerful abilities
- There will be 3 different editions sold:

1. Complete Edition. Includes original LOTRO, all content updates since launch (books 9-14) and Lord Of the Rings Online
2. Collector’s Edition. Everything in the Complete Edition plus:
   - 3 exclusive tokens that can be exchanged for player’s choice of 8 different in-game items
   - 22×22 premium quality cloth map of the Mines of Moria
   - Special gold-plated replica of The One Ring complete with chain and pouch
   - Mines of Moria poster
   - The Lord of the Rings Online Art and Music Collection with the official Mines of Moria
   - A full color Collector’s Edition Starter Guide
3. Mines of Moria Digital Expansion. A digital upgrade with the Mines of Moria upgrade only. The press kit doesn’t indicate pricing, but this one will be the cheapest, I’m sure.

Mines of Moria game screenshots

This looks like a sweet upgrade for both new and existing LOTRO players.