Random Thoughts on Architects and Game design

Just a few thoughts I had and partly shared at a gallery talk at the Print Screen festival for digital culture on 18/4/2013.

Short version:

1. Architects build buildings, game designers build worlds. (duh)
2. Godwin's law.
3. Architects should be less creative and be more like game designers.
4. Israel is home to quite possibly the best real life example of open-world game design.
   It's Skyrim meets Ultima Underworld in the Levant.

Click past the break to find out more.

Metaverse Rising: The Global Economy

Continued from Passover and the Freedom of the Metaverse.
In the previous post I discussed how Steam allows people to be the common thread uniting different online virtual worlds.

Now let's talk about the other element which connects virtual worlds to each other and to the real world: money!

While I'm off sick...

I'm off sick but Valve is restless... it seems the company which is featured in my ongoing case study of the evolution towards the Metaverse is taking more definite steps towards immersive VR: Valve reveals mystery hardware project: wearable computing

Now I wish I had stayed in touch with John Carmack when I was still in the rocket business... I'll have to find the archived emails from before Gmail came along... *groan*

I'll be back soon with the rest of the metaverse story. Don't go far!

Passover and the Freedom of the Metaverse

Happy passover!

In case you don't know, passover is a Jewish holiday commemorating the exodus from Egypt and is commonly called the freedom holiday, referring to the release of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. This is a good a reason as any to write about the metaverse and freedom.

Some background:

Free Allegiance is the best game you've never played. I have played it and will continue to play until it becomes illegal... at which point I'll still play but vehemently deny it.

The Metaverse is a rather poorly defined concept which usually means a shared virtual universe, a collections of worlds possibly including non-immersive content (the "flat" web) and maybe even boring old regular reality.