Character Design Sketches
May 25, 2008 — kristyprauseAs part of our final outcome, we are designing a character to be the ‘face’ of Addictive Play and our awareness campaign.
Below are some of our character design sketches..
Crafting the Social World
May 4, 2008 — kristyprauseA quick summary of notes taken while reading the Crafting the Social World section of Synthetic Worlds. There was too much to include in one post, so feel free to view/download the complete notes here.
Elements of the MMORPG formula-
- Roles
- Advancement
- Status
- Risk & Danger
- Scarcity & Forced Cooperation
- Messaging
- Personalized Content & AI
Examples of virtual world activities and social interactions that have been carried into the ‘outside’ world-
- Group formation
- Conversation
- Events and social happenings
- Politics
- Economics
- Culture
- Violence, conflict and crime
- Sociology
- Solitary activities
Our New Worlds
May 4, 2008 — kristyprauseA couple of weeks ago I watched the talk “Earth in it’s final century?” by cosmologist Sir Martin Rees (view here). While it’s not related directly to video games, I found the speculation he made (approx. 6 mins in) fairly interesting;
“…our 3-dimensional universe may be embedded in a higher dimensional space… so there could be another universe, just a millimetre away from ours, but we are not aware of it because that millimetre is measured in some 4th spatial dimension and we’re imprisoned in our 3[rd dimension]. And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we would normally call our universe…”
(I had to copy this by ear, so some wording may be incorrect)
[Virtual worlds] may become just another place for the mind to be, a new and different Earth. (Castronova, 2005)
Hearing this made me think about MMORPGs and the virtual world. It made it much clearer to me; they are our self-made ‘universe’, an extension, or ‘parallel’ of our reality. No longer do people simply dream of doing the impossible – living in a different era, slaying monsters, being a different species, etc, they can actually experience these things. It may not be manifested physically before us, but the level of immersion that can be achieved in these virtual worlds (though we still have some way to go) is something more believable and real than our traditional means of ‘escape’. Virtual worlds not only place people within art, music and story, but allows them to interact and influence the world too.
People go to the synthetic world because it offers emotional joys that the Game of Life does not. The Game of Life, on Earth it seems, is not a very good game at all, at least not for some people. (Castronova, 2005)
With this thought, it does not surprise me that people are turning to virtual worlds, and some are becoming addicted. If you felt that some aspects of your life were dull, boring and unfulfilling, would you not look for an outlet to fill it with excitement and purpose again?
