Our PS2 died a few months ago which totally sucked and I put off replacing it because it just didn’t feel justified with the PS3 about to come it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that my likelihood of forking out $$$ for the PS3 was very slim in the immediate and medium term future. We don’t have an HD TV and the whole Blu-ray revolution does little for me. I don’t buy a huge amount of movie DVDs anyway and there isn’t one must have PS3 exclusive title. But we still had lots of playable PS2 titles and enough PS2 titles that were on the covet-list so yesterday we got a new PS2 and I don’t feel even the slightest bit bad about it.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a couple of stories on how there are only 3000 active Australian Second Lifers and companies buying up islands there are just wasting their money. Well, duh! I’m actually surprised it is that high.

The Mashup article compares it to Tumbarumba Shire on the border of New South Wales and Victoria which has a similar population. It’s an obtuse comparison because the inhabitants of Tumbarumba Shire aren’t anywhere as influential or hip as those of Second Life. If you’re a tech or a communications company then it’s imperative that you have your little stake of SL so you hang out with the cool kids. Or at least stand somewhere near them. Of course many of the cool kids in SL are super geeks in real life, but enough of them are not. Even better, some are famous and rich. If you’ve got the money to blow then hey, why not? It’s probably better spending it building something in SL than on making a fake blog or some other pathetic “viral” campaign that will just prove an embarrassment later down the track or illegal if Europe has its way.

For the record, I can’t stand Second Life. Give me Warcraft any day.

The story of Anshe Chung, Ailin Graef’s avatar’s penile assault made the rounds a while ago, now the story of her sending people hosting images/video of the incident cease and desist emails. Groan, what a prat. It’s almost midnights (sic – see I’m tired) so I won’t write a whole heap about it now. Here are some online articles that do:

The legal rights to your ‘Second Life’ avatar:
“Since the general theory (in Second Life) is that you own what you create, she completely owns the copyright in her avatar,” said Schultz. “But that said, she absolutely has no rights under fair use to stop people from taking screenshots or screen captures of her avatar in Second Life.”

Freedom To Differ: Do you own your avatar?: “This means that there would not be a general defence for using someone else’s avatar under Australian law, it would have to be a fair dealing for research or study, criticism or review, or reporting of news.  In this particular instance, the Sydney Morning Herald’s use of the avator was for reporting the news, but would be harder to rely on that exception to excuse the posting of the clip on YouTube.” Disagree, think you can view YouTube clips as news, and this was footage of an incident, albeit virtual. Don’t see it as any different if you were taking footage in Pitt St Mall.

Bogus DMCA Claims Fit Right In With Bogus Numbers In Second Life: “This is, honestly, no different than the case from a few months ago where the EFF sued some guy for using the DMCA to force sites to remove a photo of himself on Fox News. The guy didn’t own the image of his likeness, and this couple doesn’t own images of their virtual likeness in the “public” areas of Second Life. It was a news event in a public place, and they have no control over the matter whatsoever.”

Anyway, then I read this interview with Joi Ito, a pretty clued up guy who said this:

Ito: I think it’s great that Second Life allows people
to use Creative Commons licenses and has a terms-of-service (agreement) that grants ownership of content to the citizens. I think it’s a huge first step.

Right now, to get a screenshot cleared from Blizzard–which publishes World of Warcraft–for instance, I have to go through their legal department and sign an agreement that I would need a lawyer to review. But copyright is really complex, and we need to develop processes and practices that we’ll only figure out by doing. And Second Life is a perfect place.

Well I guess that grant of content ownership to citizens is now trying to bite us all on the bum. Sometimes citizens suck. While I love the concept, I personally hate playing Second Life and haven’t gone past the training ground because of glitches. I love Warcraft, maybe because hampering all that industry makes for a better gaming environment for the casual gamer (ie me). That aside, was a little worried about his experience of getting clearance for WoW screenshots but I’m wondering if it’s just his Second Life bias that overstates the case. There’s not much argument that in the US, most if not all uses of mere screenshots would be covered under fair use so I’m not sure why he’d even bother asking for their permission. Also Blizzard actively encourage you to take screenshots and the making of machinima and I haven’t heard of them trying to crack down on use so I just don’t get what he’s going on about.

Some more (unrelated) gaming links:
UK minister: We need a gaming academy: Shaun Woodward, the UK Minister for Creative Industries & Tourism [How cool would it be to be Minister of Creative Industries?] has “called for the creation of a UK games academy that could train the next generation of developers”
Girl Gamer Makes a Killing: Love this quote: Their motto: “We may have boobs, but that doesn’t make us nØØbs.”
Sony, Microsoft hit game console targets: “Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday they hit sales targets as their PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 video game consoles battle for top billing in the $30 billion game market.”

Game Revolution has posted a list of the 50 worst video game names of all time. My top ten (in no particular order):

• Divine Divinity
• Wild Woody
• Catechumen*
• Beyond the Beyond
• Sticky Balls
• Booby Kids
• Wargasm
• Nuts and Milk
• If it moves, shoot it!
• Irritating Stick

*”A catechumen is a person receiving instruction in the Christian religion in order to be baptised, making the concept for this first-person shooter nearly as bad as its nigh unpronounceable name.” [link]

Gamasutra and GigaOM have written articles questioning whether the big push towards HDTV from Sony and Microsoft is really going to pay off. One of the major worries is that the games are produced with the minority HDTV market in mind, leaving those with standard definition a poorer than normal product much like how TV broadcasters broadcast (and film) with widescreen as their priority so that if you have a 4×3 TV, you’re often missing half of a caption or someone’s head. It also raises the concern about the amount of money that goes into the technology over developing the gameplay.

Gamasutra – Feature – “Analyze This: Are Gamers Really Saying ‘I Want My HDTV!’?”
GigaOM – Lack of Definition, HD that is

The “cutscene dilemma” is an interesting one, because it gets to the heart of problems regarding immersion, embodiment and character in video games.

Unless you’re playing an RPG with a Lvl 1 character from the age of 0, the game is going to have to drop you in the deep end somewhat. There are innumerable tricks of the trade to get the player up to speed (let’s see if I can squeeze another cliché in there): amnesia, slow reveals, etc.; but the easiest is probably the cutscene.

If you take our cutscenes, you take our ability to work out what the hell is going on. Or, to put it another way: You can take our cutscenes, but you can never take our freedom (not to buy your confusing game)!

I have to retract some of what I said about Adventure gamers in the previous post. It seems that I’m not the only person in the world immune to the ‘charms’ of the game.

That said, they’re still a bunch of hopeless no-hopers, who would step over their own mothers just to get their next fix of adventuring.