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Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in thewindof's InsaneJournal:

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    Thursday, March 19th, 2009
    9:41 am
    World of Warcraft Arena Tournament Pass Giveaway

    Have you ever said to yourself "If I had a level 80 toon, I could own all of these guys in PvP!" Well, now is your chance. Blizzard has been kind enough to grant us with two (2) Arena Tournament passes to give away. Obtaining one of these passes grants you access to a special server where you get to create a premade level 80 character with PvP gear, enter the Arena Tournament, and eventually compete to win $100,000 (and other in-game stuff - a special Armored Baby Murloc pet and "The Vanquisher" title!).

    The rules for entry are simple:

    You must already own the latest version of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and have an active account in good standing.

    You must be ready to play by next Tuesday, March 24th - this includes finding and joining an arena team.

    You must be a registered member of The Escapist or the WarCry Network. To sign up, CLICK HERE.

    This is a limited-time contest. Entries submitted after 9:00 AM EDT on Friday, March 20th will be disqualified. Winners will be chosen in the morning on Friday the 20th, and contacted at the email associated with their Escapist / WarCry account. If you are one of the winners, you will need to respond to these emails ASAP to accept the prize.

    9:40 am
    Mountain Dew goes World of Warcraft

    What is a 15 hour session of World of Warcraft without a sugar filled, cavity inducing, and caffeine loaded soft drink?  My days of WoW have come and gone, but I can easily recall the many late nights fueled by my lust for Alliance blood and that sweet, sweet nectar of life, Mountain Dew.

    Blizzard announced today that this summer, you’ll be able to see World of Warcraft characters in a new place — the beverage aisle.

    The Mountain Dew Game Fuel will launch in two World of Warcraft inspired flavors, Alliance Blue (wild fruit) and Horde Red (citrus cherry).

    I can picture the scene at Store 24, I reach down for the Horde flavor and I am met by a member of the filthy Alliance and in that moment PvP has created an entirely new meaning.

    This marketing scheme also begs some very interesting questions; does my in-game loyalty bind me to a particular flavor?  Will I be hated based on the drink I hold?  Will World of Warcraft guilds and raids bleed into the real world?

    Blizzard promises more details soon.

     

    9:39 am
    Date my avatar

    I have this gamer friend, a 17-year-old knock-out with strawberry blond hair and a J. Crew style, who looks nothing like the dark warrior she professes to be. I'll call her "Svenna" — after her gaming avatar — and say that she makes me feel older than the 10-odd years that separate us. Her e-mails are peppered with an Internet slang that is both hip and incomprehensible, so that I'm secretly glad when I puzzle out a new one but feel old and passé when another stumps me. She spends her waking hours glued to a MacBook, interacting online in ways I can only imagine.

    Svenna once tried to explain the dimensions of her game of choice — the weaponry, the characters, the geography. I asked about points and lives, as if World of Warcraft were an updated version of Pac-Man. Finally, she offered to let me watch her play, as though seeing Internet gaming in action were the only way to make my outmoded brain understand.

    Svenna showed me her avatars and their gear, the outfits they wear and the powers they wield. She introduced me to her world of night elves and gnomes, pointing out the long-limbed, heavilymuscled trolls. "Trolls are kind of hot," she said. Choosing her healer avatar over one of her warrior characters, Svenna spent the next 30 minutes tending to the online wounded, stopping to chat with other players and blowing kisses at passing trolls.

    Do people ever get together through World of Warcraft?" I asked.

    Svenna nodded her head, never taking her eyes off the screen. "It definitely happens," she said.

    Which got me to thinking: What a great way of meeting people. True, dwarves and elves are not exactly my taste, but wouldn't dating be easier if we could have a trial run in the virtual world, where our egos are less fragile and we have a chance for greater boldness?

    With this in mind, I turned to the great Google, intent on tracking down an avatar-based dating site. I wasn't disappointed.

    Soon, I was signing up for a free trial

    membership with OmniDate.com, a Toronto-based online dating site where members select one of six digital representations and then go on virtual dates. According to the site's promo literature, this gives daters a chance to interact before a face-to-face meeting. For my own avatar, I chose a thoughtful-looking brunette, bypassing a cartoon blond in a low-cut dress. From the registration page, I went straight to the profiles list, slinging cyber date invitations left and right. My real-life self would never be so forward, but I had discovered dating freedom in the virtual world. So what if all of my invitations were denied? After all, it was my avatar who got dissed, not me.

    Following this trend, Nomoredates.com, a site tailored for "young, stylish, urban professionals," has partnered with OmniDate to offer virtual dating to its online love-seekers.

    "The whole thing is a little bit geeky," said No More Dates founder Vekrum Kaushik in a Toronto Star article. Still, he hopes the experience catches on. As for me? Next time, I'm choosing the blond.

     

     

     

    9:38 am
    German Social Affairs Minister Wants WoW Rated "Adults Only"

    Mechtchild Ross-Luttman, the Minister for Social Affairs in Lower Saxony, is calling for tougher age restrictions on videogames in Germany, including a reclassification of the hit MMOG World of Warcraft to "Adults Only."

    Ross-Luttmann wants the age restriction imposed not only on "killer games" like Counter-Strike and other FPSes but also on games with particularly "addictive" qualities, like World of Warcraft. A recent survey of 44,610 ninth grade students by the KFN, the criminal research institute of Lower Saxony, classified 14,000 of them as addicted to games and another 23,000 more in "serious danger of becoming addicted" - an 83 percent rate of addiction or near-addiction that, at face value, makes videogames among the deadliest and most destructive creations in human history.

    Ross-Luttman said she would present her figures and proposals to other youth and social ministers at their next national meeting. "Parents must know what danger potential exists in their children's bedrooms," she said.

    But even that irony-laden statement isn't enough for some, including Sven Petke, acting chairman of the Christian Democratic Union party in Brandenberg. He wants all violent games banned outright in Germany along with inappropriate internet content, for which he believes ISPs should be held responsible. "The time for excuses is over," he said. "We need web filtering by the ISPs to operate."

    This latest uproar against videogames comes in response to the murders of 15 people in the German town of Winnenden by a 17-year-old teenager who played videogames including Counter-Strike and Far Cry 2. Excited media reports following the killing spree made a point of mentioning his gaming habits and while German authorities appeared eager to place the blame on violent games, there appears to be little concern over the fact that he was a troubled youth who was receiving counseling for depression and apparently had ready access to his father's collection of 15 firearms.

    9:34 am
    Internet Growth Driven By Online Gaming

    German Social Affairs Minister Wants WoW Rated "Adults Only"GI is reporting that the rising popularity of online gaming is currently a great influence on the overall growth of internet usage, which increased by approximately 50% in the past 12-18 months.

    "You get companies not related to gaming which are interested in hooking up to our network because there are certain games which run on our network that make it relevant for end-users," said Vlad Ihora, head of gaming at TeliaSonera International Carrier the company that looks after Blizzard Europe's networking solutions for World of Warcraft .

    "It's not like certain of our customers aren't feeling it already, but investments in, or maintaining of Internet presence or services that people use from our side are essential. The Internet is no longer a luxury to have, or experiment in - it's a really established sector, and this sector will only benefit from a streamlining of costs in other sectors which are far more exposed to general changes."

    The man has a point. Where would this world be without the World of Warcraft?

    Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
    10:31 am
    Gazillion's quest: A killer Lego online game, World of Warcraft-style
    Nirvana for the video game industry looks a lot like World of Warcraft, except without the arcane rules that mystify the average player.
    That vision is the driving force behind Lego Universe, a new online game based on the building bricks franchise that's scheduled for release in 2010. Developed by a San Mateo company called Gazillion Entertainment, the game is designed so even your 5-year-old and his grandfather can play together. Gazillion, which has been operating in stealth since 2005, is also working on an online superhero game based on its license with Marvel Entertainment.
    The goal is to make virtual world games that anyone can play. It's a financially hazardous terrain, previously explored by many companies before Gazillion, including NC Soft, whose Tabula Rasa game, designed by Ultima Online creator Richard Garriott, shut down March 1. These types of games are difficult and expensive to build. They're even more arduous to maintain once tens of thousands of players pile in, uncovering and exploiting every bug in the game.
    The potential payoff is a glittering pot of wow gold Consider World of Warcraft, a game ...
    ... developed by Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine. It has 11.5 million subscribers, each paying about $15 a month to play. That's $172.5 million a month, more than $2 billion a year, in fees alone. The game disc, which makes a regular appearance on the weekly list of top-10 best-selling PC games, brings in another $20 a copy. Not bad for a title that's more than 4 years old.
    It's no surprise that the game genre, known as Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, is a hotbed of development. MMORPG.com lists 253 such games, many of which are in development. With such a crowded field, one way to cut through the noise is a well-known license. Both LEGO and Marvel fit that bill, said Ted Pollak, senior analyst with Jon Peddie Research in San Francisco.
    "I think there is a big opportunity for mass-market MMO’s, especially when they are connected to recognized brands," Pollak said. But, he warned, "the quality of the game must be top notch, which is not an easy undertaking."
    Gazillion Chief Executive Rob Hutter said his company has recruited 300 developers, many of whom have worked for Sony Online Entertainment, Blizzard, NC Soft, Walt Disney and other seasoned MMO studios.
    "We worked hard to create a game experience that is easy to learn, but also offers depth for even the hardest-core players," said Hutter, who said his developers spent some time figuring out why Nintendo's Mario franchise continues to pull in new players while maintaining its base of serious gamers.
    Among the changes Gazillion made: shorter game sessions so players can jump in and out in five or 10 minutes, easier ways to move around the virtual world, more intuitive menus and fun ways for old-timers to interact with newbies.
    "When you look at World of Warcraft, it's largely a hard-core gamer phenomenon," Hutter said. "We think there's an enormous opportunity for an MMO that can penetrate the mass market."
    A worthy quest.



    Spectral Safari Tournament Results, World of Warcraft Miniatures
    Saturday, March 14, 2009, Battlezone Comics hosted a World of Warcraft Miniatures tournament called Spectral Safari. The first place prize was the coveted and highly prized, Spectral Tiger loot card, which gives one character a spectral tiger mount.

    There were 32 contestants with a multi-layer elimination grid. The competition was fierce, especially because no one was able to bring in their tried and true teams from previous competitions. Each player received a single booster pack and had to make a team with two of the minis from that pack.

    The competition started at 12:00 p.m. and lasted until around 7:00 p.m. that night. After many games, a winner was declared. Derek Campbell won the tournament of 32 contestants, with a record of seven wins and one loss. The miniatures he used were Thangal, a Tauren druid, and Ji’lan, a Troll rogue.

    This was the only tournament in the city, in the state, and the first of such tournaments at Battlezone Comics. This was also Derek’s first win in a tournament of such magnitude.

    To protect the card, it will be shipped to Derek directly from the company. The first 25 contestants to sign up received a special edition Ashenvale map. And there was a drawing for a Red Bearon Loot Card, which is also a mount card. The winner of this drawing was Christopher Burns.

    Chris said he was going to take the card to his home, log into the game and add it to his main’s list of mounts. He intended to raid with the mount and show his guild what he had won.

    Derek, though he really wanted to keep the card, has decided to offer it for sale and make an investment into a family business.

    On a personal note, not as an Examiner, but as a parent, I am proud to announce that Derek is my son and it is my own business that he will be investing in. He has made the entire family proud, not only with his decision, but because he was able to play a game he really enjoys and win at it. We wish him the best of luck in all future tournaments and will support him in his future attempts.

    Congratulations, Derek!





    10:27 am
    A Look At The World of Warcraft Profession Engineering
    Engineering is a very playful and fanciful profession. You can produce all sorts of insane things that are fun to use and also amuse and bewilder other players.If you are planning on becoming an engineer, you should likely already be a miner. Miners gather ore and smelt ore into bars to make the bulk of engineering items. Engineer recipes frequently include jewels, which are encountered in a variety of places. Typically, most engineers purchase or are given rare jewels from other players.Engineering is used to assemble metal and stones into components necessary to build explosives, guns, scopes, bullets, mechanical dragons, aquatic helmets, and much more. More than any other profession, engineering products demands several steps to be finished. Buy cheapest wow gold here !
    The engineering trainer has some very cool engineering plans. Nevertheless, there are many more interesting and desirable plans out there to find from monster drops.Trainers are located at springspindle fizzlegear found in ironforge, tinkertown for the alliance. For the horde, roxxik is located in orgrimmar.After you think you have mastered engineering, you are offered a chance to specialize in either gnomish or goblin Engineering. You must first reach 200 skill and level 35. Alliance players can then speak to lilliam sparkspindle in stormwind city. Horde players can talk to tinkerwiz in ratchet. Then you will be offered some quests to open new recipes for that school of engineering.
    Engineering is a very playful and fanciful profession. You can produce all sorts of insane things that are fun to use and also amuse and bewilder other players.If you are planning on becoming an engineer, you should likely already be a miner. Miners gather ore and smelt ore into bars to make the bulk of engineering items. Engineer recipes frequently include jewels, which are encountered in a variety of places. Typically, most engineers purchase or are given rare jewels from other players.Engineering is used to assemble metal and stones into components necessary to build explosives, guns, scopes, bullets, mechanical dragons, aquatic helmets, and much more. More than any other profession, engineering products demands several steps to be finished. Buy wow gold here !
    The engineering trainer has some very cool engineering plans. Nevertheless, there are many more interesting and desirable plans out there to find from monster drops.Trainers are located at springspindle fizzlegear found in ironforge, tinkertown for the alliance. For the horde, roxxik is located in orgrimmar.After you think you have mastered engineering, you are offered a chance to specialize in either gnomish or goblin Engineering. You must first reach 200 skill and level 35. Alliance players can then speak to lilliam sparkspindle in stormwind city. Horde players can talk to tinkerwiz in ratchet. Then you will be offered some quests to open new recipes for that school of engineering.


    10:26 am
    The First Real MMO
    For my part, I saw Ultima Online as a logical next step from the MUDs I played in college in the early 90s. I was pretty far gone into a couple of TinyMUCKs back then. (I just checked and I do, in fact, still have my wiz bit on PegasusMuck.) When called on to date the start of the MMO I usually give two answers: UO was the first commercial success.
    This morning I read a post by Dusty Monk where he described the forces that were working to push the Halo MMO toward "WoW in Space":
    "For me personally, this was probably one of the most conflicting parts of working on Titan. Don’t get me wrong — I’d wanted to work on an MMO for as long as long as I’ve been in games, and this was the dream game of a lifetime. But while there were a few of us that had played MMO’s before WoW, by far and large, as the team grew, most of the people on the team had never played a single MMO before WoW. This led to a dilemma that the entire team struggled with throughout the lifetime of the project. And it’s a dilemma I think every team out there that’s designing an MMO today has to struggle with, and the actual point of this post, which I’m only just now actually getting around to: How much do you copy the genre leader?
    Dusty's actual question is a good one, but that isn't what really caught my eye. You see, while we were building Pirates of the Burning Sea we had a similar dynamic to our team. World of Warcraft came out two years after we started, so nobody had played it.
    Instead we had one designer who figured that the MMO genre started with EverQuest where most of the rest of us pegged that event at some earlier game. This guy refused to acknowledge Ultima Online as a "real" MMO despite its hundreds of thousands of subscribers and massive success. He thought even less of the games that came before it: The Realm, Meridian 59, and the thousands of MUDs.
    MUDs (starting with MUD1, I guess) were the origin of the design genre. To me the distinction is important because of all the ways that MUDs break when your playerbase is counted in the tens of thousands instead of hundreds. UO was really the first game to deal with that kind of scale in the design, so it was the first "real" MMO.
    It shouldn't surprise me that there are people working on MMOs today that consider World of Warcraft the first real example of this kind of game. It has thirty or fourty times the number of subscribers that EverQuest had at its peak.
    That increase changed the dynamics of the game just as much as the previous 30-40x jump made EverQuest and Ultima Online different from the games that preceeded them. My only fear is that this will drive more companies into direct competition with WoW (and the $40 million plus games that are intended to compete with it) instead of toward building a nice tidy business aimed at a niche of 100,000 to 300,000 players who are craving something different.
    What is your answer when you are trying to come up with the first real MMO?


    10:25 am
    Counter Strike does not teach teen violence
    Intense debates are being held after the Winnenden tragedy over how acts of violence by teenagers could potentially be prevented. Lower Saxony wants to inhibit the illegal sales of violent video games to minors. Experts believe this to be wrong.
    The Public Attorney’s Office of Stuttgart has launched an investigation into the father of the 17-year-old Winnenden gunman for manslaughter. Tim K.’s father, a member of a shooting club, had 4,600 rounds of ammunition stored in the family home and the weapon used in the shooting spree was kept in the parents’ bedroom – against regulation – and not in the safe with the other 14 weapons he owned.
    Tim K. took the unsecured weapon from the bedroom. The Public Attorney’s Office believes that Tim’s father should have recognized his son was proned to violence because of his diagnosed depression.
    In the meantime, debates are running rampant about what measures could prevent future acts of violence by teenagers. Lower Saxony is demanding a major change in the manner in which the addiction of computer games in minors is dealt with. The underlying reason for this is a survey undertaken by the Kriminologischen Forschungsintituts Niedersachsen (KFN – the criminal research institute of Lower Saxony), through which it has been determined that 14,000 9th graders in Germany are addicted to video games, especially to computer role games such as World of Warcraft as well as so-called killer games like Counter Strike.
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    The state government wants to contain the sales of violent games to minors through under cover test sales. According to investigators, Tim K. was playing a so-called killer game the night before the rampage.
    These test sales are set to function in the same way as they do for uncovering the sales of alcohol to minors. If a game is illegally sold to a minor the shop owners or salesmen could face a fine of up to 50,000 euros.
    In the survey, presented by KFN Director Christian Pfeiffer, 44,610 9th graders were questioned about their internet and computer game habit. The survey found that 4.3 percent of the girls and 15.8 percent of the boys had an “excessive” playing habits with more than 4.5 hours spent on the computer every day. 14,000 9th graders were classified as addicted to computer games with 23,000 more in serious danger of becoming addicted. The total number minors that have been classified as addicted to computer games, Pfeiffer said, was around 50,000 to 60,000.
    Minister for Social Affairs Mechthild Ross-Luttmann said she would present her suggestion of the under cover test sales at the next national conference with other youth and social ministers. It is shocking, she said, how easily children have access to games that are not appropriate for their age.
    Ross-Luttmann also aims to achieve a general age restriction for addictive computer games. World of Warcraft, for example – available to minors at the age of 12 – might in the near future only be sold to adults. In addition to this, parents need to be further sensibilized. “Parents must know what danger potential exists in their children’s bedrooms,” Ross-Luttmann said.
    Computer game expert and author of „Digital Paradise“ Andreas Rosenfelder is rather skeptical about demands like this. “I don’t see a connection between digital role playing games like World of Warcraft and shooting sprees,” he said. World of Warcraft is a game set in medieval times in which the protagonists can take on the roles of dwarfs, elves and wizards. There is no shooting in this game.
    "In heated debates there can easily be some confusion,“ Rosenfelder said. Games like Counter Strike – where the gamer plays through the eyes of a heavily armed character and kills as many enemies as possible – need to be kept an eye on. These types of games are called Ego Shooter. Rosenfelder says an excessive consumption of these games will have side effects.
    A cultural pattern has come into existence because of the school shootings in the years gone by. Rosenberg says, though, that this pattern can not be stopped just because things are now to be forbidden. He believes that whoever has the potential to see the world through hateful eyes will find a way through which to get rid of the aggression – whether it be through computer games or something else. The behavior that could lead to a shooting spree, Rosenberg says, can not be learned through a game like Counter Strike.



    10:24 am
    How To Become A Video Game Tester - Can You Really Get Paid To Test Games?
    This article will deal with the age old question: “How To Become A Video Game Tester?!”, which some people say is possible and others say it is like an urban legend.
    Well what is the truth?
    Can you really become a Video Game Tester?
    Well yes you can!
    Although it is not as easy as just going down to your local job center and looking through a list of vacancies, as I am sure you will already know you do not see many video game tester jobs there!
    Although that is not to say that they do not exsist!
    You can get a video game tester job and all you need to do is start looking up some major software companies online and writing to them asking if they have any vacancies.
    Obviously if you have some good ranking on an online game like Halo or World of warcraft then by all means let them know!
    Another way you can start becoming a video game tester of sorts is by making a blog and reviewing the top games and also getting involved with the major gaming communities like gamespot.com and other major gaming websites.
    Of course this is alot of work and if you are truly serious about learning How To Become A Video Game Tester then it is a good idea to find a guide that will not only tell you how to do this step by step but more important then that it will give you a full database of video game tester job vacancies and the number and email to contact them!
    You can work your way up to making a nice income from being a video game tester and don’t get me wrong you MUST enjoy playing games ALOT but it can be very rewarding and an excellent stepping stone on to different jobs within the industry!
    Click the link below and find out more about how you can land your first Video Game Tester Job within a week:


    9:53 am
    Conference kicks around serious work of gaming
    Turns out video games are serious business.
    Just ask the hundreds of developers, educators and gamers who attended yesterday's Game-based Learning and Simulations Conference at Red River College's Princess Street campus.
    The event, hosted by Game On Manitoba, featured a full slate of speakers who specialize in developing video games as education and training tools.
    "Remember the first time you played Tetris, how you dreamed about it afterward? That was your brain getting smarter," said Khal Shariff, CEO of Project Whitecard, a Winnipeg company specializing in so-called serious games.
    Though it's still a burgeoning field, serious games -- computer simulations, in particular -- have already been used to train surgeons, soldiers and even astronauts.
    Health-related games like Nintendo's Wii Fit are already a hit with pre-schoolers to senior citizens alike, and now serious games are being embraced as educational tools in the classroom.
    "They have the ability to engage people, to interest them, to influence their behaviour and all together, (they) prove to be more effective than traditional ways of learning," said David Wortley, director of the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University in the U.K.
    Shariff's Project Whitecard is already working with the Canadian Space Agency on a game that will deliver mathematics to Grades Five and 11 classrooms, and he was recently tapped by NASA to help develop a new massive multi-player online game -- something he says will be on par with World of Warcraft.

    9:50 am
    The Lonely Crowd
    Get too comfortable with the constant forum chatter, 24-hour news and viral marketing initiatives, and it's easy to forget that the first videogames were meant to be experienced in relative isolation. Developers presumed that when you stepped up to the arcade cabinet or plopped down in front of your TV screen, you knew little more than what the game told you. While you toiled away with their creations, they remained firmly behind the curtain.
    In such a relationship, you could easily overlook or even willfully ignore a game's faults. When I played the original Mario Kart, it didn't really register with me that only half the racers were competitive past the 100cc difficulty level. That was a "feature" to me, not a game-balance issue. I also hardly noticed that certain weapons in Doom were basically game-breaking, effective at almost all ranges and against all enemies. If you hoarded enough plasma rifle ammo going into it, the epic confrontation with the Cyberdemon became a one-minute massacre.
    Before the internet created the collective gamer and allowed for the post-release patch, developers could get away with anything short of a Battlecruiser 3000AD-level meltdown. Their jobs became a lot harder when gamers ceased to be a lonely crowd and started behaving like a hive mind. True, most of the gaming community's collective effort has traditionally been wasted on machinima and fanboy wars, but it only takes a small group of passionate fans to dissect a game and expose everything that makes it tick.
    For example, take the three-way relationship between a studio like Blizzard, its mass audience (which includes me) and its hardcore fans and critics. While my own ability to unearth World of Warcraft's or StarCraft's secrets is nonexistent, Blizzard has to face the certainty that there are thousands of people who are eager to explain anything and everything that I might have missed.
    People like my friend Zach, who became intolerable as Diablo II's release date approached. Almost every time I connected to the internet, an AIM window would pop up with a link to the latest bit of information he'd mined from the fansites.
    "Check it out: Some guys cooked up this program that lets you plan your character," he would say. "I've got my necro planned up through Level 30. He's going to be unstoppable."
    "Yeah?" I was really sick of hearing about it.
    "Yeah. But here's the thing - I've worked through all the possible class-skill combos and I'm pretty sure he becomes game-breaking if he's paired with a paladin casting auras."
    "Really."
    "So here's what I want you to do ..."
    "I have to do something?"
    "Not much," he quickly assured me. "Just roll your paladin right now."
    At the time, I had no intention of getting Diablo II. It wasn't really my bag and frankly, my friend's dedication frightened me a little. Think about Jonestown, or Tom Cruise on Oprah, and you've pretty much got the picture of him before every Blizzard release since Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
    "Man, I dunno. We don't even know when it's coming out for sure."
    "Look, just roll your paladin. I've got to see how these two go together."
    "Why can't you do it yourself?"
    "Because you're going to be playing the paladin, and you need to be comfortable with the character. So make him yours. Then let me know how you spec him."
    Guys like my friend Zach are the reverse of Cypher in The Matrix. They stop seeing the games and start seeing engines, probability tables, dice rolls and modifiers. He once interrupted my account of a recent StarCraft match to explain the absurdity of my Firebat-centric strategy.
    "Look, unless you've got a guy coming at you with Zerglings, the Firebat is just taking up space in your bunkers. That fire animation looks nice, but that's about all it has going for it." Then he went into a detailed explanation of how StarCraft calculated splash damage, did a range comparison of the Firebat to other units like Hydralisks and finished by explaining that after their first armor upgrade, Zerg units were far less vulnerable to area-of-effect weaponry.
    By the time he stopped talking, I had failed shop class.
    People like Zach are also likely to participate in betas and leave detailed (some might say obsessive) messages on the developers' forums explaining exactly what they feel is out of whack, how that one small problem drastically upsets the balance of the game and what should be done to fix it. Although developers are free to ignore these observations, it's telling that Blizzard has instead become notorious for tweaking its games for years following release.
    Prior to the internet, someone like Zach could only deconstruct so many games at once, and he couldn't share his knowledge with more people than he could corner at school. But once we were all plugged into the same the stream of information, he and his kindred spirits began to change gaming. The reality of gaming in the last 15 years is that gamers can instantly find help with a difficult section of a game - or, at the very least, some assurance that others have experienced the same problem. The game is stripped bare by the collective scrutiny of the smartest players and the suspicions of the laymen.
    Last month I played a mediocre action game and came to an infuriating boss fight that forced me to fall back on a walkthrough, a tactic that always leaves me feeling a little dirty. The first link from Google read, "OK, now get ready for the crappiest boss battle you've ever played." Five minutes later, I uninstalled the game. It had been exposed as a fraud, relying on an unreasonably punishing enemy that required several levels' warning and preparation.
    There is no longer any hiding the sins of game design. If a game uses cheap tricks, takes shortcuts to artificially challenge the player or contains extraneous or redundant elements, a few people will catch on - and they'll be more than happy to tell plenty of other gamers who would likely never have noticed anything was wrong.
    That's not necessarily a good thing. I sometimes worry that we're all turning into amateur game designers and forgetting to be good audience members. I never heard the phrase "game balance issues" in my first decade as a gamer, but now it comes up constantly. I recently read a great piece on Steve Gaynor's blog about what a good shooter combat arena looks like, which contributed enormously to my understanding of why I've loved certain shooters and been left cold by others. His understanding of how we play and approach encounters in a shooter is superb, but once you've read his explanation you can't help but see the landscape of every shooter you play through the new, more critical lens Gaynor provides in his piece.
    It doesn't necessarily lessen my enjoyment of games like F.E.A.R. or Half-Life, but it gives me an unshakable sense of intentionality. Because I have access to so many people more thoughtful and analytical than myself, the people who made my games have started to become a part of my experience. When I'm sprinting across some machine gun-swept plaza in a Call of Duty game, racing for an abandoned car or a heavy planter to hide behind, I now sense the designers' hand behind my next piece of cover. Suddenly, the maelstrom of war begins to resemble a carefully laid-out playground, as meticulously planned as a paintball court - and about as threatening.
    On balance, however, I happily welcome the game-makers and skill-players into my experience if it means I'm getting a better product. A carefully structured game may seem a little too perfect, too devoid of reassuring chaos, but it will likely be more fun to play. It will also probably continue to get better as Zach and the rest of the gamer Overmind commence their exploiting, flaming, whining and explaining.

    9:45 am
    Fishing for rewards: New patch geared to fishers

    One of my favorite secondary professions in "World of Warcraft" is fishing. While some might find it way too time-consuming or even boring, for me it's a good break from doing dailies, running dungeons and fighting in raids.
    Fishing is important because some of the best foods that provide buffs to statistics are made from one or more kinds of fish that can be caught in the various zones.
    This is particularly important for raid situations, in which one of the best food buffs is the Fish Feast, which requires three different kinds of fish plus northern spices. The feast can be dropped before fights and every player in the raid can sit down and "eat." After 10 seconds, all players get boosts to attack power (for melee classes) and spell power (for casters), as well as an increase to stamina by 40 points.
    My guild depends on me, and a few others, to have Fish Feasts available for every raid, and enough of them to last throughout the raid, so I spend a lot of time fishing.
    You also can catch crates that contain ore, leather scraps or cloth, all of which can be used or sold on the auction house for some extra money. And since many payers can cook recipes but either don't want to spend time fishing or don't have a high enough fishing level to catch needed fish, some types of fish sell quite well in the auction house -- up to 50 or even 65     wow gold for a stack of 20.
    New quests
    There currently is one fishing quest available as a daily quest, which gives     wow gold and other rewards. However, it's an Outlands daily, so not too many people complete it regularly.
    That's why it's good news for many, including me, that the 3.1 patch will include a Dalaran fishing daily, which will feature five different quests for Northrend areas.
    The reward for successful completion of the quest will be a Bag of Fishing Treasures, which can include any of a number of goodies, including three new fishing poles, high quality gems to boost abilities, novelty items and grey-colored "junk" items that can be sold to vendors for anywhere from 1 gold to 100 gold.


    Other changes
    According to MMO Champion, the following changes to fishing will also be made in the patch:
     There will be a very rare mount that can drop from    · Northrend fishing pools.
     You can now fish in Wintergrasp. The giant    ·     darkwater clam can be fished up in Wintergrasp. It has a higher chance to drop pearls, and gives up to five times the regular amount of clam meat.
    ·     Artisan fishing no longer requires the Nat Pagle quest, which instead will give a special superior-quality fishing pole.
     It will take less time to catch    ·     fish.
     You can now fish anywhere, no matter what your skill level is. All    ·     catches can increase your skill, but if you fish in areas too high for your current skill, you're likely to catch junk items.
     Fishing skills once    ·     taught from books are now taught by fishing trainers.
    So if you don't already fish or have a high enough level of fishing ability ... start leveling it now to be ready for all the goodies offered by the patch.
    Duane M. George is Digital/Community Editor of the Pacific Daily News and a "World of Warcraft" addict.

     

    Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
    10:48 am
    Death leaves online lives in limbo

    Blizzard wants your best stories set in the company's own worlds, and is offering some very nice prizes. Take a step away from Azeroth, write a story about your adventures, and send it in for your chance to win an epic weapon while regaling the Blizzard staff with tales of your daring.

    World of Warcraft players often have—how do I put this kindly—intense inner lives. Blizzard is now giving fans an excuse to put some of their epic stories to paper, as the company is hosting a writing contest centered around its various properties. What can you win? A trip to Blizzard! Signed copies of Blizzard games! Respect from your peers!

    The rules are simple, as is the challenge. "Whether you conjure stories in your free time or write for a living, you’re encouraged to participate. This contest is open to entrants from around the world, and will be judged by Blizzard Entertainment’s own writers and masters of lore," the site states.

    "To enter, submit a 3,000 to 10,000 word story written in English and set in the Warcraft, StarCraft, or Diablo universe by April 12 and earn your chance to visit the Blizzard Entertainment headquarters and meet the writers and staff behind the lore seen in the games and books."

    You can't tell me it wouldn't be cool to put your Guild into a story and use the misadventures of your friends to weasel your way into Blizzard for a lunch and a sword to take home with you. The bad news? You'd have to leave your house. The good news? You get a sword. That's not a bad deal.

     

     

    10:48 am
    Death leaves online lives in limbo

    NEW YORK

    When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

    It wasn't easy, because she didn't have her father's "World of Warcraft" password and the game's publisher couldn't help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father's friends by asking around online for the "guild" he belonged to.

    One of them, Chuck Pagoria in Morgantown, Ky., heard about Spangenberg's death three weeks later. Pagoria had put his absence down to an argument among the gamers that night.

    "I figured he probably just needed some time to cool off," Pagoria said. "I was kind of extremely shocked and blown away when I heard the reason that he hadn't been back. Nobody had any way of finding this out."

    With online social networks becoming ever more important in our lives, they're also becoming an important element in our deaths. Spangenberg, who died suddenly from an abdominal aneurysm at 57, was unprepared, but others are leaving detailed instructions. There's even a tiny industry that has sprung up to help people wrap up their online contacts after their deaths.

    When Robert Bryant's father died last year, he left his son a little black USB flash drive in a drawer in his home office in Lawton, Okla. It was underneath a cup his son had once given him for his birthday. The drive contained a list of contacts for his son to notify, including the administrator of an online group he had been in.

    "It was kind of creepy because I was telling all these people that my dad was dead," Bryant said. "It did help me out quite a bit, though, because it allowed me to clear up a lot of that stuff and I had time to help my mom with whatever she needed."

    David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has had plenty of time to think about the issue.

    "I work in the world's largest medical center, and what you see here every day is people showing up in ambulances who didn't expect that just five minutes earlier," he said. "If you suddenly die or go into a coma, there can be a lot of things that are only in your head in terms of where things are stored, where your passwords are."

    He set up a site called Deathswitch, where people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify, like once a week. For $20 per year, members can create up to 30 e-mails with attachments like video files.

    It's not really a profit-making venture, and Eagleman isn't sure about how many members it has -- "probably close to a thousand." Nor does he know what's in the e-mails that have been created. Until they're sent out, they're encrypted so that only their creators can read them.

    If Deathswitch sounds morbid, there's an alternative site: Slightly Morbid. It also sends e-mail when a member dies, but doesn't rely on them logging in periodically while they're alive. Instead, members have to give trusted friends or family the information needed to log in to the site and start the notification process if something should happen.

    The site was created by Mike and Pamela Potter in Colorado Springs, Colo. They also run a business that makes software for online games. Pamela said they realized the need for a service like this when one of their online friends, who had volunteered a lot of time helping their customers on a Web message board, suddenly disappeared.

    He wasn't dead: Three months later, he came back from his summer vacation, which he'd spent without Internet access. By then, the Potters had already had Slightlymorbid.com up and running for two weeks.

    A third site with a similar concept plans to launch in April. Legacy Locker will charge $30 per year. It will require a copy of a death certificate before releasing information.

    Peter Vogel, in Tampa, Fla., was never able to reach all of his stepson Nathan's online friends after the boy died last year at age 13 during an epileptic seizure.

    A few years earlier, someone had hacked into one of the boy's accounts, so Vogel, a computer administrator, taught Nathan to choose passwords that couldn't be easily guessed. He also taught the boy not to write passwords down, so Nathan left no trail to follow.

    Vogel himself has a trusted friend who knows all his important login information. As he points out, having access to a person's e-mail account is the most important thing, because many Web site passwords can be retrieved through e-mail.

    Vogel joked that he hoped the only reason his friend would be called on to use his access within "the next hundred years or so" would be if Vogel forgets his own passwords.

    But, he said, "as Nathan has proven, anything can happen any time, even if you're only 13."

     

    Monday, March 16th, 2009
    9:44 am
    WoW gamer kicked from guild, too dead to log in

    After a heated argument during a raid with his guild, World of WarCraft player Jerald Spangenberg went silent and logged out of the game.  When he didn't sign back on for the rest of the week, his guild assumed he had deserted them and decided to boot him from the group.  Little did they know that Jerald had a reasonable explanation for not showing up -- he was dead.

    Jerald had apparently suffered an abdominal aneurysm, went AFK (away from keyboard, an in-game indicator letting people know you aren't at your computer), and was automatically logged out after 10 minutes.  The other guild members were pretty upset with Jerald for abandoning them in the middle of a raid but thought that he would be back after he cooled down from the argument that had just occured.

    Because of the semi-anonymous nature of online gaming, nobody had any way of knowing that Jerald, in real life, had passed away.  Assuming Jerald was just being childish, the guild decided to remove him and continue on without him.  Needless to say, they felt horrible three weeks later when they finally found out what had happened from Jerald's daughter, Melissa.

    To combat this type of scenario from happening in the future, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman set up a website called Deathswitch (which is unintentionally pretty hilarious).  The site requires you to check in to your account periodically to prove you are still alive.  Not doing so will result in your assumed death (or coma, or other serious incident that would render you "critically disabled"), in which case emails are sent out to predetermined individuals.

    The purpose is to let loved ones know your bank account numbers, passwords, locations of critical files or paperwork, etc.  It can also be used, such as in Jerald's case, to let online friends know why you haven't been around.  The Deathswitch website even suggests using it to "reveal unspeakable secrets" or to get the last word in an argument.  You can also attach video files and pictures, though that's part of the 'premium package' and costs $20 per year.

    Even though it seems pretty morbid, how would your fellow guild members or online buddies ever find out that you had died?  If not for the determination of Melissa to protect her father's reputation, Jerald's guild would have harbored ill feelings toward their friend and just assumed him to be a jerk. 

    With so much of our lives taking place online and so many "friends" that we've never met face to face, it's actually an important topic to consider how death affects our digital selves.  In real life, there is no Spirit of Redemption.

     

    9:42 am
    SXSW 2009: That Doesn't Suck! Inspiring Creativity With Spore

    Although Spore's ship date has come and gone, many people are still fervent about creating new creatures, vehicles, buildings, and more for the game, and they've chalked up over 86 million users creations and counting so far. This panel was about the the wealth user created content out there, and also served as a springboard for talking about the first full Spore expansion pack: Galactic Adventures. Caryl Shaw is a producer at Maxis, and she showed off the new expansion pack, and talked about the tools that Maxis and EA strive to give users so that they can create their own open-ended adventures, which is what Galactic Adventures promises to do. She tooled around inside the game for a bit, showing off the planet terraforming features and a combat-focused user created adventure. But what caught our eye most of all was the sheer amount of extremely creative user creations that just stagger the imagination.While Spore might have come out and disappointed some, this panel was enough to make us want to bust it out again when we get home and either get busy creating, or get busy exploring some of the jaw-dropping user content. Check out the highlights after the break.
    Shaw explained that the general rule of thumb about user created content is that, "The vast majority of it is crap." So one of Will Wright's goals that the Maxis team tried to do was provide tools that were deep enough to raise the bar in hope that there wouldn't be as much crap to wade through. However, if you take a spin through     Sporepedia, you'll notice that there is indeed a lot of crap in there. But where there's a lot of crap, there's also a lot of wow gold. (Wow, that almost needs to be on a poster somewhere).The goal of Spore was to make the game divide up into a three-part pie of 1/3 Create, 1/3 Share, and 1/3 Play, which is why they spent so much time on the user creation tools, and released the semi-expansion pack Creepy & Cute Parts Pack. They underlying tenet was to get from "zero to smile in three clicks or less," although with the deep amount of customization available in Spore, that's like 300 clicks or less, right? In the upcoming Galactic Adventures you can change every aspect of a planet, including the atmospheric density. In their Adventure Creator, you set your acts, choose from tons of objects (like hand grenades) to toss into the mix, and can even choose what type of music plays at different dramatic moments.Shaw booted up an adventure called "Mothership Down" to show us how the interface works, then imported a ship captain and dropped him into the game. It looked slightly like World of Sporecraft, and quickly devolved into a combat situation, which Shaw trying to escape with her captain's jetpack, although she was killed valiantly in action... shot in the back. It's definitely something that we'll have to spend more time with to get a better grip on, but we imagine a LittleBigPlanet situation where thousands of "Adventures" will appear online, but only a few will be very good.

    9:40 am
    PC games: Better once they cool off

    Hamburg  - The principle of "higher, faster, further" seems to have been taken very much to heart by computer game developers. They strive valiantly in a never-ending quest for titles with better graphics, "never before seen" game play and everything else ratcheted up a notch over the last generation - at least in theory.

    The reality is that many home PCs groan under the strains placed on them by resource-hogging games. And the much ballyhooed, new content often turns out to be much ado about nothing. Even the technology doesn't always work as planned for many new games. Yet there are alternatives: Many of the games currently touted as the hot thing will soon be discounted in just a few months - and have some of the glitches ironed out as well.

    PC gamers with a taste for only the latest games are probably used to being a bit light in their wallets. That's because new titles usually cost around 50 dollars during the first few weeks after they're released, and they often require an investment in current hardware as well. In many cases, the gaming fun is relatively brief, with the entire game "played through" in just a few hours. The only option then is another investment of 50 dollars to install more current titles.

    The alternative is patience. Those willing to wait a bit can save both time and nerves. Most newly-published games still have some rough edges in the form of programming errors, known as bugs. These require small programs to fix them, known as patches. Those who buy during the first days are forced to install patch after patch to get the game working right, but latecomers can usually simply install all of the previous patches in one rolled-up package.

    Wait long enough and there's no need to patch at all because a few months after first appearing, many formerly hot games drop in price to 10 or 20 dollars, with all the fixes already on the DVD.

    There are lots of titles to choose from in that price range, from recent hits to modern classics. Many gamers are currently waiting for the continuation of the Anno colonization series from Ubisoft, for example. Yet while the developers are currently tinkering away on Anno
    1404, its well-respected predecessors Anno 1503 and Anno 1701 are both available for cheap.

    In some cases they are even offered in bundled, special edition packages, containing not only patches but also game expansion packets that were originally sold separately.

    Role playing game fans can also find lots of interesting titles from the recent past. The recent title Gothic 3 was considered by many a let-down in terms of gaming quality and bugginess. Yet its forebears Gothic and Gothic 2 are currently being offered for pocket change. While the earlier versions are noticeably less cutting edge in terms of graphics, they do run well even on average computers.

    Graphics aren't everything, after all, as attested by the success of game maker Blizzard. The company is more than just World of Warcraft. Fans with a longer memory still speak fondly of classics like Starcraft or Diablo 2. Both titles are currently slated to receive sequels. Yet many retailers often carry the original titles, guaranteed to provide tremendous enjoyment for anyone who hasn't yet played them.

    The same could be said for the upcoming title Mafia 2. Its predecessor Mafia set new benchmarks for atmosphere and staging of an action game, putting players in a US city back in the 1930s. When it first appeared in 2002, Mafia required a powerful computer. As with Gothic, however, almost any computer can easily handle its needs nowadays.

    Those whose computers are considered peppy by today's standards will really be able to put the high-end games of the past through their paces now. The action game Bioshock, for example, lured players into an underwater, Art Deco-inspired world. The fascinating visuals only serve to highlight an unusual and effective story - and are now available for just 10 dollars.

    The list of potential alternatives to expensive new games seems endless. Those waiting for the latest Empire: Total War can revisit still fresh older titles like Rome or Medieval 2. The same holds true for the legendary Lara Croft games and the many others as well. In other words, it's not always all about "higher, faster, further." (dpa)

     

    9:36 am
    Top 10 best things about the web

    The world wide web is celebrating its twentieth birthday. Over those last two decades, the web has changed the way society works, plays, and interacts..

    The pedant in us wants to reaffirm that this isn't the 20th anniversary of the internet as such. The internet itself is nearly 40 years old but the web was what took it from a simple data exchange service to something that everyone could use.

    When Tim Berners-Lee first decided to build a system that would allow a freer exchange of information he really didn't know what an effect his system would have on the world. No-one did, but we are only feeling the first effects of it.

    This week we look back on the best that the web has brought. Beyond just one site or service, this list ranks the best ways in which people have been able to use the internet.

    10. Video

    Shaun Nichols: Prior to the web, video was hardly a democratic medium. If you wanted to reach a large audience, you had to own a studio of some sort and have a large enough budget to distribute your creations. For the individual user, videos were more or less an archival tool to collect family memories.

    The web changed that by simplifying the means of distribution. Webcam technology and services such as YouTube allowed users to become their own broadcasting station, and video was morphed into a communicative tool. Video is no longer divided between home movies and studio creations, there is a solid middle ground between the two which has become occupied by the internet.

    This has also changed the way in which studios operate. Independent filmmaking has blossomed over the web, and indie studios are in some cases eschewing theatrical and television deals entirely to just work with web videos.

    Iain Thomson: You can point to many things web video has done but the most importatn is the democratisation of online content.

    20 years ago the idea of ground breaking video was limited to what the networks would show. The footage of     Rodney King getting beaten sparked the worst riots America had seen for a generation but these days such footage is commonplace,

    No longer can violent people rely on their crimes being forgotten, they are recorded and broadcast around the world in seconds. The convergence of digital media being cheap for all and web access have led to shared experiences that shape generations.

    This goes twice for events of historical significance. Zapruder's footage of the Kennedy assassination took years to come out in its full detail, the next one will be around the world in seconds.

     

     

    9. Humour

    Shaun Nichols: One of the most appreciated characteristics of the web is its ability to bring a good laugh. Whether it's a funny video or a nicely written piece of satire, the amount of comedy available on the web is nearly limitless.

    Perhaps it is another nice side-effect of the democratization which the internet affords. That funny joke or witty observation you heard in the office can be posted online and exchanged with others.

    The web has also allowed humour publications such as the     Onion and Cracked, which were previously limited to what and where they could distribute as print copy, to not only expand readership but to greatly advance their content offerings.

    Iain Thomson: It is said that humour is the world emotion. I'd agree; life would be poorer without     XKCD, LOLCats or the Fail blog.

    This has of course led to some discord. Not everyone feel;s the same things are funny and one only has to look at the furore cause by cartoons of Mohammed to see that not everyone enjoys a giggle at the same things.

    But honour is an indisputable important part of human life, and the web helps export that to all. Laughter is always better than anger.

    8. Gaming

    Iain Thomson: In the days before the web computer games enthusiasts were a small cadre of lonely, and predominantly, boys and men who spent days alone in their rooms hunched over a keyboard obsessively playing and replaying game scenarios.

    With the advent of the web and online games there are now millions of people who still spend hours a day crouched over their computers but they are no longer so lonely, as they can talk and interact with other players online. I know of at least one marriage that has come about between two gaming clan members who would never have talked to each other if it hadn't been for a computer game.

    The social nature has also broadened the spread of gamers, so that the sex imbalance is a lot less of a problem than it was. While you could argue that it's better that people who spend 12 hours a day playing World of Warcraft don't breed you'd be wrong, we all need someone to love, and maybe frag occasionally too.

    Sociability aside, the ability to play other humans without them being in the same location has also improved gameplay exponentially. Even the best computer software can't match the inventiveness, unpredictability and downright devious nature of the human brain.

    Shaun Nichols: The immediate benefit from web gaming that comes to mind is the ability for the socially awkward to better connect and enjoy the hobby that has largely isolated them in the first place. The average gaming geek probably has a much larger circle of friends thanks to the web.

    But what it has also done is open a new hobby to those who otherwise would have been turned off by the isolation and loneliness involved. One of the main reasons why online RPG's have sold and thrived exponentially, better than their local PC and console-based predecessors, is that playing them is no longer a solitary activity.

    If you were to tell many of the players out there today that they had to complete quests by themselves or with computer-controlled characters, you would like see the gamer ranks thin out substantially.

    For other genres, such as first person shooters, the web also added a completely new challenge and dimension to gameplay. AI for most shooters involves simply tweaking the accuracy reaction times for computer-controlled characters. Playing against a skilled human player is far more challenging and engrossing than simply fragging a bot.

     

     


    7. History

    Shaun Nichols: Historical preservation is one of the more underappreciated aspects of the web. But never before has there been such a powerful vehicle for people to share their collective history not only with new audiences, but also more thoroughly with future generations.

    Name an important event in history, chances are there is an extensive amount of information on the event the likes of which rivals the mind of any local specialist. Granted, there's also a greater volume of false and misunderstood interpretations on events, but a good researcher will find libraries worth of good information on pretty much any event through the web.

    One of my favourite examples is the Denver Public Library, which over the last decade or so has been working to digitize its entire photo archive, containing hundreds of thousands of photos telling the story of the state's history. Galleries which had previously been available only to professional historians are now open online to everyone in the world. Now, even the Brits can learn about local hero "Buffalo" Bill Cody.

    Iain Thomson: As part of my history exams at 18 I spent hours going through census records and historical diaries trying to understand generations that had gone before.

    Rather than sitting in front of a microfiche reader everyone can now examine the records of times past from the comfort of their own home. It's a blessing to future generations.

    It will also help future generations understand their forebears. Too much data is stored in paper, microfiche or on discs that are incompatible for reading. The web storage of such data is vital for keeping our history live.

    6. Culture

    Iain Thomson: One of the most profound consequences of the web has been the plethora of cultures it has spawned, and will continue to do in the future.

    Before web took off there were already subcultures developing online. Bulletin boards catering to particular interests used their own languages and conventions to spot people who didn't belong, the lack of physicality made for a more egalitarian outlooks and users began to experiment with different organisational structures.

    Social networking has taken this phenomenon mainstream, and is continuing to effect how people organise themselves today. Take a look at something like Facebook for example. People nbow routinely let their friends know about breakups and divorces by clicking a box rather than calling them up or writing a letter.

    This has of course led to some teething problems. How long into a relationship does one change their status from 'single' to 'in a relationship'? Is putting 'It's complicated' instead indicate you're just in it for the sex? Al these questions are being worked out online.

    Moving beyond this some online networks are already using the idea of received status as a way of ordering within a group. This involves people who do things for the group being publicly recognised by its members, either in the form of an icon with sites like Popbitch, or with awards as the new Quake Live site is trying. It's an interesting take on the old phrase 'By your actions you will be judged,” and often a more effective guide to character.

    Shaun Nichols: Aside from nurturing and legitimizing many subcultures, the web has also led to the creation of entirely new structures and groups.

    People now become involved in tight-knit communities developed over a shared interest in an online game, or simply from posting on the same web forum at the same time. Groups are no longer based on a shared proximity. People will routinely tell you that relationships developed online are often more substantial than those shared with co-workers or associates.

    This has also changed the way some people view the nature of love and commitment. Some people become smitten with their in-game companions, and the end of a web-relationship can devastate some people as deeply as losing a physical friend or partner would.

    While in extreme cases this can be very bad, it's also hard to argue against anything that can give you a sense of camaraderie with someone on the other side of the planet you would have otherwise never met.

     


    5. Activism



    Iain Thomson: Activists were very quick to spot the power of the web, and the internet before it. In the 1989 Velvet Revolution in the old Czechoslovakia computer messaging was a significant factor in spreading the message of protests and getting people out onto the streets.

    Professional activists recognise that strength comes in numbers and organisation. It's difficult to organise a group without electronics since they have to be physically present, which makes things unwieldy and easy to crack down on by the authorities.

    Using the web activist groups have not only been able to organise more effectively but also share information and campaign literature. In more mainstream protests the online petition is gaining credibility and services like theyworkforyou.com in the UK have made it much easier for people to get in contact with their elected representatives.

    The politicians may hate this, but they notice it. It's an old adage in politics that for every letter they receive there's around ten people who feel the same way on the subject and they'll be talking about it to ten people each.

    Special interest groups in the US too have been very active in using the web to coordinate correspondence with those in power. Say the wrong thing and a politician's inbox can be flooded with messages reminding them that people are listening.

    But it's not just politics – the web has made consumers more active as well. Had a bad experience with a supplier? There's sites to let people know and businesses are increasingly monitoring to see where they are falling down. In the past you could only tell your friends and family if you got ripped off, or were treated exceptionally well. Now everyone can know.

    Shaun Nichols: I would add that the web has not only empowered activism, but it has also changed the concept of what an activist truly is. Activism was previously very limited by geography and surrounding demographics which could often reduce it to only the most dedicated individuals.

    Because of the web, protest and activism have spread into the realm of moderates, and truly brought the sense of "power to the people." Those who would have otherwise been either unable or unaware enough to organize on their own, or intimidated about speaking out in a potentially hostile environment, can now make their voices heard because of the web.

    As with most things on the web, this cuts both ways. The web has also empowered hate groups to spread their message, but even then, people are able to safely speak their minds and counter the ugly arguments with more enlightened points of view.

     

     

     

    4. Ecommerce

    Iain Thomson: In a lot of cases ecommerce took existing old-world businesses and used the web to make them accessible to all.

    Auction houses for example were only able to cater to people who could actually turn up, or afford the services of a phone bidder. Internet auction on the other hand are open to anyone online. This broadens the buying base and ensures the best price for the seller.

    However, ecommerce has also forced plenty of industries to change their business models. Take journalism for example. Back when I was working on a dead tree (paper) publication we sold a magazine on the news stand for some revenue and then made up the rest with advertising. Now we give our copy away for free and use the expanded readership from being online to boost advertising revenues.

    This is fine for some industries which accepted the change and worked with it. Others, like the music industry, have tried to force people to ignore the web and are reaping the heavy cost of ignoring change.

    But by in large the popularity of the web has been a huge advantage to business. If you look at the value of ecommerce it makes up a seizable minority of the money being used in the economy and that percentage will only grow. At some point in the future, be it years or decades, the bulk of business will be carried out online.

    Shaun Nichols: Not only have businesses seen the advantages of ecommerce, but consumers have benefited greatly as well. Just as a store owner can now sell an item to a buyer in another corner of the country, a consumer can buy a specialized item from a store hundreds of miles away that would have otherwise had to be special ordered at a premium cost, or painstakingly purchased through a catalogue service.

    Then there's the bargains. A service such as Amazon would never have existed in the real world because doing so would have resulted in a sort of flea market layout that covered the entire state of Kansas.

    With the web, users can compare prices from dozens of retailers in multiple locations from a single screen. For things such as travel and hotel prices, it would be nearly impossible to match the efficiency of bargain-hunting web sites.

     

     

     

     

    3. Neutrality

    Shaun Nichols: Current debates aside, the idea of a neutral and level playing field is one of the most admirable traits of the web.

    As anyone who follows cable news in the US can tell you, presenting information in a completely neutral light is extremely difficult, if not impossible. On the web, however, it's a much easier task. Not only does the accessibility allow one to consult multiple sources with different viewpoints, it also allows those viewpoints to be in the same space at the same time without coming to blows.

    Often, this devolves into trolling contests or pointless back-and-forth, but when it does work, the web can become a truly excellent forum for debate and as reliable of a method for presenting an issue from a neutral point of view as there ever was.

    Iain Thomson: Net neutrality was built into the foundations of the web, and long may it continue.

    The idea of an open playing field is something that would warm the heart of Adam Smith. Without neutrality we'd have no Google; lesser search technologies would have paid their way to faster access and we'd all be poorer for it.

    The very idea of a totally free market is a logical impossibility; like communism it's a concept rather than an actuality. But net neutrality is the best idea we've got for ensuring good ideas come to the fore.

    When you get people in their twenties coming forward with business plans that seem insane and yet earn millions one might think that it's unfair. In fact, it's capitalism at its best.

    People need to innovate, and the web allows them to do that. We all benefit from the result.

    2. Entrepreneurship

    Shaun Nichols: From the rise of Silicon Valley to the dotcom and web 2.0 eras, the web has done more to restore the entrepreneurial spirit and power of an independent business than any event or innovation this side of the industrial revolution.

    Fifty years ago, starting a small business meant either opening a restaurant or a local retail shop. A handful of people were able to expand those operations into regional outfits, and even fewer were able to go national. But when the web exploded, so did the prospects for entrepreneurs.

    Now, starting a new business can be as easy as purchasing a domain and placing your code online. No longer do college students dream of landing a mid-level position with a large company and climbing the corporate ladder. Now, an ambitious individual can build his or her own corporate ladder from the top down.

    This has truly changed the way people define a successful business career and the methods in which one can attain it.

    Iain Thomson: New technologies are a young person's game. The old guard didn't get the internt until too late and so a new generation of entrepreneurs came forward.

    It's slightly gutting to those of us who grew up in the era to see people with shakey business plans making millions while we just wrote about it.

    Nevertheless fair play to them, they took their chances and we have all prospered from it.

     

    1 Information

    Iain Thomson: This was an easy pick for the number one spot on the list. The web is, was and will always be about the dissemination of information.

    The web is, in my view, more important to human development than the invention of the printing press. After all, while the printing press with movable type proved vital in making information accessible to more people it still had physical limitations – books could only be moved so far.

    With the web everyone has the ability to let everyone else know facts and data. This ability has opened people up to stuff they never even thought about and has greatly expanded the ability of educators, researchers and businesses to go about their businesses.

    It has also democratised the information process. In the past newspapers could censor, publishers refuse manuscripts and governments could ban writing. Now, with the ability to put all of this stuff online and spread it around the consequences for human societies will be huge.

    For a start representative government depends on an informed electorate. Certain governments still try to keep their citizens uninformed about events and action but the web makes that more and more difficult. The Great Firewall of China for example is pretty good at censoring the web but it is far from perfect and people are working around the clock to defeat it. Sooner or later the wall, like its Berlin predecessor, will fall and the resulting tsunami of information will sweep all before it.

    Educators have in the web the ultimate encyclopaedia. This does not abrogate their responsibility to students, indeed in some ways can make it harder if people just cut and paste from Wikipedia, but they are getting smart to this. Teachers need to use the web, but should also teach students to be more critical of the information they receive. As my old history teacher was fond of saying, “Before reading anything consider three questions: who wrote this, why did they write it, and who's paying for it?”

    Finally businesses have benefited hugely from the information now available on the web. It helps in sourcing suppliers, developing new products, finding business contacts in similar industries and even meeting online with people they couldn't ordinarily meet. Need a new widget for a product in development? Now you don;t have to travel to meet the supplier, you can email or videoconference and get the parts more quickly and most likely at a lower cost.

    Information does come with problems (see the Top 10 worst things about the web) but these are either systemic or simply birthing pangs of a new age that the web has wrought.

    Shaun Nichols: It can be said that just about everything else in this top 10 list stems from the basic principle that the web is a massive storehouse of information.

    Now, anybody in the world can take computer science courses from MIT, or learn how to brew their own beer. These seem like obvious and trivial things now, but try and imagine what would be required to archive all of that information in a physical space.

    Even with the early storage and networking tools that are now considered privative, collecting and browsing huge archives of data can be performed at a speed incomprehensible just a half century ago, while news can be spread at a fraction of time and cost required by any form of communication since.

    That, at its base, is the core empowerment that the World Wide Web has brought to humanity, the accumulation and availability of vast amounts of both old and new information.

     

    Friday, March 13th, 2009
    10:58 am
    IGG Interview: 2029 Online Is Like Diablo And WoW

    For those of you who frequent our site, you may have noticed that there’s always something here posted about 2029 Online, the upcoming MMO, RTS, RPG, dungeon crawling action game. Before the game officially starts its alpha-test, we thought we would ask the Product Manager for IGG’s MMO, Edwin Huang, a few questions about the game first.




    Blend Games: Based on what has been shown in the screenshots, 2029 Online looks a little bit like Dark Eden Online, gameplay wise. Insofar of the actual gameplay, does 2029 Online share any of the gameplay likenesses of Dark Eden?

    2029 Online: Actually, Dark Eden Online is a MMO based on a vampire story.     2029 Online is a Sci-fi based MMO. The storyline in Dark Eden Online is about vampires engaged in enslaving all humans, while 2029 Online is about the conflicts between races representing a highly industrialized culture. As for the computer graphics style and views, its 3D computer graphic techniques are adopted to deliver the playing environment closer to reality than Dark Eden Online. What’s more, it is just a mix of Diablo and World of Warcraft . So, as you said, players who enjoy grabbing up tons of items and weapons, customizing their player and staying engaged with hours of dungeon crawling quests, 2029 Online just might be your kind of game.

    Blend Games: In some of the press sheets we’ve been informed that the game will feature RTS elements. Exactly how will it work and how much control will players have with commanding units and resources?

    2029 Online: Well, the RTS elements make the combats in     2029 Online the most realistic, tactical and operational product, to simulate the circumstances of real time operational warfare and military tactics. The fun of RPG and the intensity of RTS are well blended in combat, which will help the player reap more engaging fun when playing this game.

    Players can make decisions about the race and profession of their characters. Also the Refinery system and Corsair DIY in the game will allow our players to possess their dream gear and corsair.

    Blend Games: It’s mentioned in the press releases that 2029 Online will feature the option to attack other player cities and resources. Does this mean that there can be as many cities as there are guilds?

    2029 Online: Not actually, in the game, players can attack cities that have been taken possession of by other players. But it does not mean we have the same number of guilds and cities. Only limited cities in the game are available for attack and control. Guilds can make applications to take part in siege war fare without any limits on their membership numbers, which also means that only the best guilds can win. Players from the defeated guilds must do their best to make their guilds become prosperous once more and help them to stand out in the next siege war fare.

    Blend Games: Leveling up skills and grinding has always been an important part of the MMO model. Often times, though, the grinding can become tedious and boring. What is being done to ensure that level grinding is both fun and challenging?

    2029 Online: Exactly, it is really an important part. In     2029 Online, it is easy for players to hit level 10. When beginners start out their game play, the system will give them hints to complete their quests. Players will develop their character by completing these quests. When they hit level 15, their further character progress will become much harder and slower. Quests in the game are designed to give players fun playing hours. Players will receive prizes for completion of quests. All main quests will push players closer to the final chapter of plots against them and the best adrenalin pumping adventures. If players are not qualified to enter the higher level maps; then the main quests will not be available for them.

    Besides, these action packed mainline quests, players are also given some hot rhymes and racy actions by taking part in our branch quests and quests triggered by random events. We help our players to calculate how many quests they have completed via our Quest Count. They can check their quest completion process by toggling on the function of Track. If they are in a team, they can share quests with their teammates.

    Blend Games: What are some of the skills players can learn and how many skills are expected to make the final cut of the game?

    2029 Online: In the game, each race will have four types of skills available for players to learn. For example, players with a Human character can learn: Gun, Assistant skills, Grenade and Rifle; Players with an E. Elf character can learn: Fire, Electricity, Magic and Ice. And, players with a Dryad character can learn: Fistfight, Assistant skills, poison and cannon. For each of the Dryad characters, they can not only use cannon to wipe out their enemies but also a sword to chop their enemies’ heads off. So, they can get access to various skills. Maybe, there are more skills as the development. So, just let’s wait. Our team will not let you down.

    Blend Games: The Armored Fighting Vehicle is an integral part of the game, it seems. Do these vehicles only support one player, or are there vehicles that can house multiple players at once?

    2029 Online: Yeah. The Armored Fight Vehicles are also called Corsair in the game. Corsairs play an important role in players’ gaming experience. Only one player can ride on each Corsair. If players are in a team, they can select one player to lead them and take control of all of their Corsairs. It’s pretty cool to hang around with a fleet of showy Corsairs.

    Blend Games: While we’re on subject of the AFVs…How many different vehicle parts and vehicles will players have access to?

    2029 Online: AFV is really cool thing. Isn’t it? In     2029 Online, players assuming different roles at different levels in the game will have diversified options for Corsairs. To begin with, we will give our players a low level Corsair. Players will be granted limited access to power up their Corsairs. When players are at a higher level, they will receive much cooler Corsairs. Players can customize their Corsairs by adding little gadgets to upgrade their attack power, defensive force or movement speed. These little gadgets like Corsairs can be upgraded to add to the overall power. As for players who enjoy the thrill of racing, then the racing system is just waiting for them to take it for a spin.

    Blend Games: How many players can join on a team and how many players can do battle in the PvP areas?

    2029 Online: Err, only six players are allowed in a team. But there are no limits to players’ population in PVP arenas, in this way we can enable more players to go straight into the thrilling massive PVP combats against overwhelming odds. It is better for them to team up and fight against players from the opposing realms. The teams who win all PVP combats must be teams formed by players of different races, each of whom is of high team spirit. I want to make it clear to our players that they can’t view mini maps in the PVP arenas. The best bet for them is to be familiar with the map before entering the combat zone, which will help them to avoid any unnecessary losses. We recommend that all of our players take part in PVP once they have hit the higher levels.

    Blend Games: We’re looking forward to playing 2029 Online here at     Blend Games. Did you have anything else you would want gamers to know about 2029 Online before the alpha test begins?

    2029 Online: The first official Beta for     2029 Online will be released on March 17th. Bugs in the Alpha version will be fixed before the launch of Beta version; where new maps and tougher Bosses will be waiting for our players.

    We appreciate the concern and detail you paid to our game and are happy to find that so many players are giving us such positive feedback about this game. The Alpha version will be out for testing purposes in middle of March. We have been holding many events     (http://forum.2029.igg.com/viewthread.php?tid=234&extra=page%3D1) to give out more Alpha Keys.

    Events posted there are for players to participate in and win Alpha Keys. We recommend players log into our     official site for more game info before receiving an Alpha Key.

    We also want to suggest our testers have a basic understanding about the overall story, race info, maps, newbie guides and features in the game to gain a better start. We are waiting for testing it with all players.

     

     

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