Playspan Inc. and Gala-Net Inc. announced the launch of beta service for Upshift StrikeRacer, an online racing game.PlaySpan's system integrates into the game inside a widget. As an official, publisher-sponsored service, the application is a secure and reliable way to buy and sell goods without leaving the game.
Launched a new Tournament for racing gamers:
http://www.playspan.com/tournament/main.html

Playing the Massively Multi-player Online game (MMOG), you can play in virtual matches online against other people around the world. The key differentiator is that you only get to control your player. The remaining players on your team and the opposition are each played by a different person online. The exception are the goalkeepers, which will be controlled by artificial intelligence.

Judging by the quality of the game-play, I highly doubt this is going to effect sales of soccer games such as EA Sports FIFA series. Instead, it seems that the draw will rely on the community and "off the field" aspects of the sport.

If you’re interested in Football Superstars, register for the game today so you can be notified when it’s launched. Or visit the Football Superstars website for more details.

PX Interactive has been pretty quiet to-date, as we have spent all of our time focusing on getting NetDog ready for customers.  But all that is about to change!  At Austin GDC we will have a booth and will announce ourselves formally to the game development community.

Over the next few months, we'll be trying to meet as many developers as possible, telling them about the scalability, performance, flexibility and ease-of-use of NetDog.  We think we have created a useful product that will let developers jump-start MMO development, while giving them the flexibility to develop the game or Virtual World they want.  NetDog will impress its users with its scalability and performance, which are as good or better than the top competitors. 

But equally or more important for developers, NetDog is significantly easier to use, and much more flexible than any of our competitors.  Want to use Unreal - no problem, NetDog will integrate quickly and easily; Your game would look better in Crytek, not an issue; want to use Trinigy, we have a partnership with near-seamless integration; prefer to use an open-source engine or one of your own, also should not be an issue, as NetDog is built on C-bindings with underlying Object and Event models that can easily integrate with any tools.

Most importantly - NetDog has several game-changing features.  The first, NetDog is fully cross-platform - developers will be able to create games that can be played across PC, Mac, PS3, Xbox 360, and even iPhone.  Network messages will work regardless of the platform, bringing more gamers into each game, and providing unique gameplay options. 

The second is the core of NetDog's architecture, our patent-pending distributed networking solution.  With small setting changes NetDog can be used in a variety of network topologies - from a full client server mode to fully peer-to-peer, with a variety of network computing options in-between.  Developers will have the option to off-load some or all of their game processing to the clients in their network, and can choose which functions and events will be handled where.  This will help build for bigger, more efficient networks with lower latencies.

We look forward to meeting you all, and hopefully working together to create big, high performance virtual worlds and MMOs

L'Université du Texas à Austin vient de recevoir une subvention de 255 040$ par l'Institute of Museum and Library Science dans le but d'étudier la préservation et la collection des jeux en ligne, plus précisément les MMOG (massively multiplayer online game).

Avec l'augmentation de la popularité et les constantes mises à jours de ces jeux en réseau, la tâche sera de taille. À titre d'exemple, le très populaire World of Warcraft compte plus de 10 millions de joueurs actifs à ce jour¹.

Le projet consistera donc en une collecte de données qui permettra de conserver non seulement le code, mais aussi les commentaires des développeurs et l'expérience des joueurs. On veut également s'assurer que ces MMOG puissent demeurer accessibles pour les générations futures.

"Using ethnographic research techniques, Dr. Winget will seek to better understand the video game industry’s methods, behaviors, and attitudes for the purpose of building more meaningful models of collection and preservation of complex, community-built digital creations. This research carries the promise of informing a wide array of issues in digital preservation, from digital media art to immersive learning environments."²

Avec un projet de cette envergure, force est de constater qu'il y a une préocupation archivistique dans des domaines insoupçonnés.  

Pour en savoir davantage, vous pouvez lire les articles suivants:

Article: http://www.gameculture.com/node/669

Entrevue avec la responsable du projet: http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=talkbackCommentsFull&talk_back_header_id=6546329&articleid=CA6582968

Autres développements du "Digital Librarianship" à l'Université du Texas: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2008/07/17/information_digital/

Sources:

1-http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Of_Warcraft

2-http://www.imls.gov/news/2008/061708_list.shtm

;) commy

Fresbo World has some nice features, Users can chat with other Users with Their cute anime-like Avatars, Shop for clothes to customize Their Avatar's appearance at the mall, Hang out with others at the Park, Decorate Their own virtual homes with furnitures, and It has Mini Games Users can play to earn Points (Points is the main currency in Fresbo World), and It also has Credits which you can earn by spending real money.

I'm usually spending my time a lot at the park because theres many people there that I can chat with, and also looking at their profiles, Sometimes at the school answering those hard(for me) Mathematics questions. Theres a nice little feature here that I like the most, when you mouse-over the users Avatar a little star-like image will appear above them and when you click it you can see their profile, The Primary picture in Their Social Networking Account is also Their picture in Fresbo World account.

Try the Game if you like playing a cute MMOG 3D virtual world. It is also Available on Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. It is in Public Beta now so I think there are more updates to come.

So, it looks like the date got pushed up. Multiple sites are now showing the Collectors Edition of the game is due to ship on Sept 16th, and they are listing that the servers will go live on Sept 18th.

That sounds a little more solid than a guess. 

Fully 80%+ of game publishers are exploring monetizing their games via in game currencies and commerce. A couple of quick definitions to help make sure we are singing the same song, including the monetization strategy;

1. subscription based games - monthly recurring subscriptions provide enhanced levels/attributes/game play in exchange for paying a monthly subscription. These have been common in the US and are not popular in Asia or EU (more on that later). Recently, US companies are combining free2play models as the lure to get gamers into subscription services. When we think of subscription models we invariably thing of World of Warcraft (WOW) and the like.

2. Free2play -  exactly as it sounds...play for free and  have the opportunity to buy additional items/assets/resources with virtual currency that is earned or via hard cash (if you want to save time) in either the primary or secondary markets (see below). In Germany, one of the most successful and least known companies is gameforge.de, who have an awesome and impressive stable of cool games!...and 70M users! Yes, you read correctly 70 M-I-L-L-I-O-N subscribers. If you are a US publisher and you want to license your game to EU, these are the guys to contact (Lars Koschin - President of N.America)...as they can get instant eyeballs on your game!

3. Primary Market (publisher to gamer) - sale of virtual items or currency (usually via micro payments = sub $5 purchases). These games are highly addictive and as often as I don't want to spend the money to play, find myself buying virtual currency or items to get me to the next step in the game more quickly. This is the standard of play in EU and Asia...which is coming in droves to the US as imported games and as US publishers are developing their games with this concept in mind.

* If a publisher doesn't have their own primary market, they can always turn to the two primary companies in this space (Live Gamer, which is owned by Mitch Davis of Massive fame and Play Span, which has both a primary and secondary market solution + have recently acquired PayByCash to combine alternative payment options with their offering).

4. Secondary Market - a.k.a. known as Player3Player or Peer2Peer transactions - think of eBay and you get the point. Player 1 has a cool virtual item and wants to sell it...and along comes Player 2 to buy it. The publisher who maintains the virtual marketplace receives a percentage of the sale price. Briliant concept because virtual items have a zero cost of manufacturing, can be created in unlimited quantities if necessary, have 100% profit margin and their value is directly relational to the need for the item. The only legitimized player in this space is Play Span, as they offer both primary and secondary marketplaces for virtual currencies.

Geo Considerations - generally speaking, these rules apply...

US - was subscription and now easily 85%+ of publishers have virtual currency and virtual items as part of their development road map to include the free2play model with either primary or secondary market sales.

EU - free2play with primary market place being the key revenue driver...with companies like gameforge.de leading the way.

Eastern EU - ditto EU - a recent development there has been the creation of www.astrumonline.ru, which rolls the four largest publishers (Nival Online, Territory IT, Nikita Online and Time Zero) under one umbrella corporation, run by Robert Johnsson.

Asia - in a games heavy culture...monetizing via primary and secondary markets are king!

Alternative payments - game publishers, more than any digital industry on the planet understand how to localize their products abroad while offering the maximum ways to pay (localized payment methods). If you don't believe me...go check out Habbo Hotel (Sulake Corporation) which quite simply offers every possible payment method known to man!

Alas fellow campers...it is late...time for bed!

All the best

Jamy

After multiple delays and push backs EA has announced the release date for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. September 23rd. Link Here. I am excited. You should be too.

Set to be released this fall, the game will incorporate characters from the network's many shows. Given the Cartoon Network's enormously popular web presence (5 million monthly uniques in the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen/NetRatings), FusionFall could be huge. I think it's also a giant affirmation of the web as a viable platform for MMOGs, as opposed to downloadable clients (which take time and effort to install) or the software sold at retail (which are more costly for consumers and publishers.)

The Cartoon Network's game is being developed on the Unity graphics engine, which is architected to run video game-quality 3D graphics on the web. Separately, Unity 3D said today that Funcom, developers of the retail-driven MMOG Age of Conan, are developing a casual MMOG on their web-based platform. In last year's GigaOM Top Ten MMO list, at least half were browser-driven. I'm guessing that when we next update it, web-ified MMOs will dominate even more.

Image credit: www.fusionfall.com

This led to a paper that is worth looking at to see how they extracted the data for the network analysis.

The website WoWRiot has an interesting article up today about Funcom stocks and AoC's performance. I think a lot of us who played the game have been expecting this, and I am also predicting an even bigger drop on the 20th of this month (the chart only goes to the 15th), as the 20th is the 2 month mark for people who subscribed on release day, and thats the day peoples accounts would have expired if they canceled after their initial free month. The 20th was the day my account went inactive.

Here is some more from the article, it seems pretty biased against Funcom, and I couldn't tell you how much is actually fact, but interesting never the less.

It has been hard to separate the truth from the spin in the ongoing Age of Conan saga, but we're seeing more and more evidence that neither players nor stockholders are satisfied with Funcom's campaign of misinformation.

After repeated misleading press releases, Funcom still has no answers for people wondering where all the players are going.  Populations on all servers are down, forum activity is dropping, and the community at large seems content to simply pack up and go home.  Funcom refuses to acknowledge this fact, and seems comfortable giving no response to its waning Conan fanbase.

This negligent treatment of customers has investors fleeing in droves, dropping the share price of FUNCOM.OL down by 60% since Age of Conan's launch (see image above).  In a climate where customers are outraged and the "company line" reports no problems, serious trouble is the unspoken implication.

You can see the rest of the article after the jump.

The Official Age of Conan Forums have become even more of a joke lately, as moderators aggressively lock and delete threads that mention anything negative about the game.  Serious gameplay bugs, technical problems, questions about future content, and billing questions are all hidden away in an attempt to preserve the illusion of customer satisfaction.  Feel free to try for yourself; forum threads on any of these topics (and several others) are systematically locked or deleted by Funcom's "moderators":

Female Swing Speed Discrepancy

The DPS discrepancy for female characters appears to be an unintentional bug, but developers stonewalled players on the subject to a ridiculous extent, finally breaking down and admitting to the error after a month.  Discussion of this topic results in a locked thread and account ban.

Account Billing Beyond Cancellation

Cancel your account, and get billed later anyway!  Given the prevalence of electronic credit card fraud, and the already-shady nature of Funcom's subscription numbers, this is a very serious matter.  Ask on the forum why you are being charged for a new month despite having canceled your subscription, and your thread will be deleted along with an account ban.  Is this how Funcom justifies that 700,000 subscribers figure?

Server Consolidations

The "ghost town" status of many servers in the world of Hyboria has caused concerned players to inquire about server consolidation to improve the feel of the community.  Once again, they are stonewalled -- bring up this subject and your thread will be locked immediately.  Any reference to reduced player activity is not allowed whatsoever. Don't ask, don't tell, I guess?

Questions About New Content

Players are incredibly bored with both the leveling process and the current "endgame" in Age of Conan.  Large content gaps at mid levels, along with missing PvP content that was promised at release, has lead some players to ask about the status of this promised game content.  Any answers?  We haven't seen them yet.  Instead, those who ask are banned and their threads are deleted or locked.  Anything to keep customers happy!

One month ago, I wrote about how Age of Conan was desperate for subscribers, and many naysayers felt I was lying or exaggerating.  While it seems some of my sources may have been compromised, I stand by my claims about the quality of this title.   Subscriptions are dropping like flies, activity continues to fall, and customer satisfaction is at an all-time low.  If you're not convinced, think about these facts:

* Funcom is already working on a new MMO using the AoC engine
* Funcom released inflated subscription and sales numbers to the press
* Funcom is allowing billing to continue past account cancellation
* Funcom squelches any dissent in its official forums

The strategy at this point is clear: Funcom is finally starting to realize they completely dropped the ball on this game, and they are cutting their losses.  They will continue to string a few suckers along with promises of more content and continued development, but those promises will just be broken like so many others have been.  If many players don't notice that they were charged an extra month after canceling, well, that's more money in the bank as well.

Xfire activity statistics (another topic that will get you banned on the Age of Conan forums) continue to reflect Age of Conan's decline in popularity.  The Xfire population doesn't represent everyone, but it's a very reasonable sample if you're wondering about activity trends in the game.  As the player activity level goes, so goes the Xfire activity level, and so goes the Funcom stock price.

Since development costs are already sunk, Funcom's best bet is to sell as many copies of the retail box as possible, knowing that no sane person will actually pay for a continued subscription to Age of Conan.  When the "new game" sales finally drop down to zero, the next MMO will be nearing release, so development efforts are better spent on content for the new game than the "already broken" Age of Conan.

Knowing this, do you really want to spend more of your time leveling one or more characters in hopes that a few of your friends will return to AoC, and that "maybe someday" there will be something else to do?  Good luck with that.

Funcom can delete all your threads and ban you for asking questions on its official forums, but you can still let them know you aren't satisfied.

Hace unas semanitas descubrí este juego navegando por ahí, el PMOG.
La principal caracteríscita de este juego es que, como su nombre indica, es pasivo. Es decir, "juegas" mientras navegas por Internet.

En este juego, cada jugador tiene asignados tres asociaciones dependiendo de las acciones que hace, como:

- Benefactors: Son aquellos que lo principal que hacen es ayudar a los demás.
- Seers: Usan portales.
- Destroyers: Basan sus acciones en hacer mal a los demás colocando minas.
- Pathmakers: Son los guias del juego, creando misiones para los demás.
- Vigilantes: Los "polis" del juego, contrarrestando a los destroyers.
- Bedouins: Se protegen de las minas con armadura.
- Shoats: El comodín de los novatos.

Os cuento la mecanica del juego:
Por cada dominio que visitas, ganas 2 datapoints, que puedes usar para gastarlos en la tienda de el juego, comprando minas, portales, farolas, armadura...
Los destroyers usan las minas plantandolas en diferentes páginas webs, para que cuando otro jugador entre, le explote en la cara.
Los seers usan los portales para trasladar a la gente a las páginas que ellos quieran.
Los pathmakers usan las farolas para crear misiones. NAvegando por la web, puedes encontrarte con una misión, que tras aceptarla, te van direccionando a diferentes páginas relacionadas con la misión.
Por último los cofres, los benefactors los usan para dejar por Internet regalitos a la gente.

Optimizado exclusivamente para Firefox, Utiliza una barra que instalas mediante su addon y con la que  ves tu status, y direfentes opciones del juego.

Ahora tán sólo te falta navegar un poco, e ir subiendo niveles. Pruebalo, seguro que te resulta interesante!!
Si os registrais, yo soy PuToKoLgAo en el juego, agregadme como amigo!

Enviar a meneame

For those of you who signed up for the guild beta of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning better check your inboxes. Mark Jacobs has announced the beginning of the guild beta.

“WAR’s Guild Beta is here and some of the world’s most experienced MMO players will now get a chance to play one of the most anticipated MMOs of all time,” said Mark Jacobs, vice president and general manager of Mythic Entertainment. “We look forward to seeing them beat, bash and burn their way through the world that we have created for their enjoyment. It’s going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to be glorious!”

Hit the jump for the full press release.

FAIRFAX, Va.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Mythic Entertainment, an Electronic Arts studio (NASDAQ:ERTS), today announced that the Guild Beta for Warhammer® Online: Age of Reckoning™ (WAR) has begun. Over 10,000 guilds applied and those selected will have the chance to experience the game’s most expansive beta phase yet.

An historic 750,000 applicants have signed up for the opportunity to enter WAR’s closed beta, and the selected guilds will join tens of thousands of new participants as the game enters the final phase of its closed beta test. Guild members, many with long histories playing a multitude of massively multiplayer online games, will test WAR’s recently added Guild and Heraldry features, as well as Public Quests™, new dungeons, Scenarios, user interface updates and more as the MMORPG advances towards its launch later this year.

“WAR’s Guild Beta is here and some of the world’s most experienced MMO players will now get a chance to play one of the most anticipated MMOs of all time,” said Mark Jacobs, vice president and general manager of Mythic Entertainment. “We look forward to seeing them beat, bash and burn their way through the world that we have created for their enjoyment. It’s going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to be glorious!”

Based on Games Workshop’s epic and longstanding tabletop fantasy war game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning features revolutionary Realm vs. Realm™ (RvR) gameplay that immerses players in a world of perpetual conflict. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is scheduled for launch on the PC in the fall of 2008.

Some pretty big news came from an interview with Mark Jacobs this morning. I am not going to beat around the bush. Here is the news.

1. They are going to use Punkbuster.

2. Four of the six capital cities have been cut from release. Might be patched in later. Currently the Empire and Chaos cities are going to be the only capital cities for release.

3. Four of the classes have been cut, because they couldn't make them great. The four cut classes are Greenskin Choppa, Dark Elf Blackguard, Dwarf Hammerer and Empire Knight of the Blazing Sun.

Full interview text after the jump.

 

First, Mark Jacobs, the VP and General Manager of Mythic Entertainment, announced to MMORPG.com that the studio has partnered with well-known anti-cheat company Punkbuster in an effort to make sure that their upcoming RvR game (Warhammer Online) is as free from cheaters, hacks and the like as possible. 

“As you know,” said Jacobs in an interview, “we have fought a long battle against hackers, cheaters and other assorted slimeballs who think that it’s both fun and fair for them to have an advantage over other players.” 

“We obviously did a lot of things in Dark Age of Camelot that worked,” he continued. “ We banned cheaters whenever we found them. We made a tremendous effort to sort out and deal with hackers and companies or individuals who promote this sort of stuff. Did we do a perfect job? Absolutely not, nobody does, but we did a pretty good job.”

In 2008 though, he said, Warhammer is seeing a much wider distribution than its earlier counterpart and the landscape of MMOs has changed, leading to more and more people who look to cheat. Rather than facing down these cheaters and hackers on their own, Mythic is taking on a partner in Punkbuster, a company with a strong reputation in the online gaming world. 

Says the company website:

“Welcome to Even Balance, Inc., home of PunkBuster™, the original Anti-Cheat system for online multiplayer games. We daily battle the selfish little punks who want to ruin your favorite online games and the hack-writers who supply them with cheats. Our goal is to keep the playing field as even as possible so that PunkBuster-enabled games are played the way they were meant to be played.”

The company currently supports such games as: the Battlefield franchise, the Call of Duty franchise, the Quake franchise, the Rainbow Six franchise and others, but Warhammer Online will be their first forray into the realm of the MMORPG.

“We think this is a huge win for the players,” said Jacobs of the partnership. “We are an RvR-centric game and anything that gives a player an advantage over another player in an RvR-centric game is a very bad thing. We take this stuff incredibly seriously, our history shows that. We wanted, by doing this deal with Punkbuster, to show the players that we’re willing to go an extra step for them.”

Jacobs went on to say that they want their players to have the best RvR experience possible, and that no matter how good they are as a company at resolving issues to do with hackers and cheaters, there will always be someone better out there who wants to get past it. That is why Mythic is going to both the effort and expense of gaining an ally in the fight.

The technology, we are told, has already been implemented into the game’s beta, though it hasn’t yet been activated. They will work with Punkbuster throughout the beta process to be sure that the technology is working properly. If not, Jacobs says, the technology can be easily turned on and off without hurting gameplay. 

“The key is a great RvR experience,” said Jacobs, “and this is important to know: We’re going to continue our own efforts as well. If we were to just rely on them, that would also be a mistake. It’s not that they’re not good at what they do. They are. But we’re here every day, working on the code, so by having the combination, if we have to disable it for any reason or if they miss something or if we miss something, we’ve got a second set of eyes.”

Take, for instance, an idea I had as a Freshman in High School in 1997, the same year the Nintendo 64 gaming system was released.  The idea began brewing long before then, but I know for sure that I began imagining the particulars during that first year of High School.

My idea really took off that year because we got our first glimpses of what some of our favorite games could be like in a fully three dimensional world.  Playing Mario 64 I was impressed with the level of freedom the extra dimension offered, but I still felt limited.  So I began imagining my own version of the perfect game.

It began with my version of the perfect Mario 64 game.  In stead of levels limited at the edges by invisible walls or impossibly steep hills, why not connect all of the levels?  There could be extra terrain blending the different environments that each level contains, and the whole thing could be one massive world.

On that note, my logic continued, why not make the whole thing into a giant planet?  It could be the Mario 64 world.  A whole planet filled with Mario levels.

Then we got a new game, Mario Kart 64.  This, being another Mario game, instantly began crowding its way into my already busy imaginary Mario world.  In the Mario Kart game, one track takes place in the same setting as the beginning of Super Mario 64 - outside the Princess's Castle.  I thought it would be cool if you could get out of your race kart and enter the castle.  Of course, in my imaginary 3D Mario world, this would be possible.

The next game I remember getting and loving completely changed my imaginary game forever, and that was Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire.  This game allowed me a visual companion that took my 3D game into new galaxies.  Of course, it didn't happen so fast.  At first, I saw the opportunity to have other planets and space ships that could fly around in space, allowing you to land on other planets.  Then, another game (this one for the PC) got me thinking even more.

I just spent the last half hour researching and trying to find the name of this game I used to love playing, but found nothing.  I have no idea where I got it, but it was a shareware game where you controlled a small ship and tried to conquer a galaxy.  There were two or three star systems, each with planets in orbit.  It was a simple, 2D game but I loved playing.  You used the up arrow key to fire a single thruster, left and right to rotate and orient the craft (like Asteroids) and the down arrow key to fire your weapon.  The physics reminded you that there is no friction in space, and gravity can pull you off your course.  The planets weren't all that much bigger than the orbiting landing platform you began on.  You moved out from your planet and found unclaimed planets to make your own.  All of your planets worked on upgrades for your ship such as new weapons, shields, etc.  There was a complicated system for colonizing and developing your planets, but it seemed to take care of itself in the background as long as you kept flying around claiming more planets.

The trouble was with your opponent, who was constantly trying to attack and conquer your planets.  Anyhow, there was a little more to it that that, but I think you get the point.  I decided my game had to have aspects like that.  You could either play around on the surface, or you could go from planet to planet and try to gain control over as many of them as you could.  Then I got to thinking about other jobs, tasks, and so forth that could keep a person busy in a universe like this.  People could play the game to race, to run around on missions like in Golden Eye 007 or Perfect Dark, try to save people like the Star Wars game, fly people from planet to planet, compete for money, use the money to buy ships, cars, and other things...  The list kept growing.

Eventually, I realized this sort of thing would be more fun with other real people if they could be connected over the Internet.  In a recent letter to a loved one, I wrote the following (this person is still using a dial-up connection to the Internet):

Too bad you're on dial up still.  I was just remembering dial up this week when I was recalling my first experiences with the Internet.  My dad's place of work had supplied him with a  notebook computer and he had some responsibilities online.  He subscribed to AOL for Internet service at home, and I remember hearing about websites and pages from friends, on television and at school, and wanting to check them out online.  So, I would occasionally ask my dad if we could go on the Internet to look at one thing or another.

Every time we went online it was an adventure.  Not from the discoveries, learning or witnessing of new technology as one would hope.  The experience was an adventure because our connection would get refused a couple of times, then we'd get on with a painfully slow connection speed, and lose the connection five minutes later, only to repeat the whole process again and again.  I remember my "last straw" was when we decided to try filing our taxes online for the first time.  It took many, MANY hours.  Again, not because it was confusing or difficult, but because our connection was unreliable and slow.

A few of these "adventures" and I was convinced that the Internet was a useless, frustrating fad that would pass before I graduated high school.  That was one of my last wrong predictions.  As soon as I heard about "T-One Lines," "Cable Modems" and "DSL," I realized that the Internet didn't have to be a slow, unreliable pain in the rump and a whole flood of possibilities became apparent.

Among that "flood of possibilities" was the idea that the Internet could connect gamers so they could interact in the same virtual world or universe.  Little did I know, but online games were already in existence, and at around the same time as I was developing my ideas for an online multiplayer game, MMOG's were also developing into the 3D worlds they are today.  Now, games very similar to the final version of my idea exist (and they are making their creators a lot of money), but they lack the personality and flavor of my imaginary universe.

Spore and Second Life are two examples of ideas like mine that were capitalized on rather than sat on.  In Spore you get something more complicated than what I imagined but more centralized and less ambigous.  However you get the same level of scale and interactivity.  In Second Life you get the social networking, interactivity, creativity, ambiguity and freedom, but you still don't have the video game style play.  I just think the themed worlds would be fun (imagine a Link and Zelda world).  I also think playing as your favorite video game character should be an option, as well as the traditional creation of an avatar.

In the end, though, my idea is still an idea.  I'm writing about this because I am once again faced with an idea that keeps escalating.  If I don't squelch the proliferation of ideas soon, my idea will once again become too impractical to create.

Once again, my idea is for a game.  It is a simple game this time though, one for children or adults.  At first, while designing the code on paper, I realized that a modular approach would be easier to work with and make the whole project more flexible.  Then I decided I would like the program to help create the code for the game, making the game easier to edit and change.  I thought it would be good to make the game files separate from the code so it wouldn't be hardwired into the actual program.  Then I decided to integrate the editing function into the final product so users could create their own games like mine, telling their own story.  Then it just got more complicated and more intricate until I realized I was going to have to back some of the features out if I'm ever really going to program this thing.

Only once did this tendency of mine to escalate ever pay off.  I was in High School, designing a program to help decode some encrypted messages for a contest I was working on in the evenings (instead of doing homework at home).  It worked out because I started getting the extra ideas while I was actually executing the project.  I started with a simple program that helped count characters and plot a graph to help me decode substitution ciphers by character analysis.  Then I got involved in a harder, multi-alphabet substitution cipher that required yet another function in the program to facilitate its decryption.  Eventually I got it to work, and it did its job beautifully.  I was very proud of this program, and to this day I regret the harddrive crash that wiped away every last line of its code.

The dilemma I am faced with is one of practicality.  Is it better to cut off an idea before it gets out of control to keep it feasible, or is it better to dream big, aim high and resign myself to a life full of ideas that I will never bring to life?  I like dreaming big, I love my ideas, but they are too big to execute.  This world we live in moves so quick that if I don't do something about an idea fast enough, someone else will think of it and do it before me.  I have had numerous ideas that became big a few years after I dreamed them up.

Am I an overambitious, lazy and unrealistic dreamer or am I an under-ambitious genius who lacks the necessary gumption to do something about his ideas?  What do you think?