Adina then thrusts the question of the experience of multiplayer games and MMOGs into the social software scene: There's a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that's going on around us, and that's worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn't have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems. 

Is there any way to know counterfactually what difference a launch date really makes, to answer the question "what might have been"? If you just had to think about the corporate bottom line, would SOE's approach make good sense?

Sounds genteel doesn't it?

This year's work includes a piece by Langlands & Bell titled The House of Osama Bin Laden. It's a multimedia piece commissioned by the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum where the artists have recreated one of Osama's actual residences using the Quake engine.

Yet another recurring discussion about the economics of virtual worlds that spans the era from the earliest MUDs to contemporary MMOGs has been percolating in the Terra Nova comment threads. He's put together a collection of Fiesta Online PowerLeveling geared towards new players. Deep down in the discussion of Randy Farmer's upcoming State of Play paper, Dmitry Nozhnin complains about the one-to-one relationship between time investment and economic payoff in massively-multiplayer worlds. Richard Bartle replies, "If you don't like it, don't play it". This seems to me to sum up the state of this particular long-running discussion, and yet, I can't help but feel that here, as so often, people are talking past each other. On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. By catching rare fish, collecting and refining ores, or selling skins to merchants you are sure to earn some extra Tales of Pirates Gold. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.

Brain Building Games: With Words and Numbers Reviews