Can this thing be real? I’ve looked at it closely and, from all appearances, it certainly appears so. How can anyone hit the crossbar like that? Clearly, you have to be Brazilian, but still… comon this is just off the map cool.
In the following picture, you see Yoda with a bug on his head. The bug sits upon the head of Yoda. Upon Yoda, the bug sits. Sits bug Yoda on. On Yoda bug sits. Sitting bug Yoda involved. Bug sits head Yoda. Yoda has bug involved in head area.
Butler took me over to the new swimming pool and beach facility they built in the middle of the UT campus. It was crazy! The scene was of the scale and quality level of some of those higher-end pools in Vegas. Inside is one of the nicest and largest gym/workout facilities I have ever seen, and the whole thing costs only $450 for the year. I’m pretty sure my tax money goes to subsidize this, but I don’t want to think about it.
I read this interesting book called Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova on the plane to GDC and I was shocked when I got to chapter 7.
The book is basically about virtual worlds and how they have real economies and the willingness of people to put their real life on the back burner because they consider these virtual worlds to be a more fulfilling experience. I’ve seen all of this first-hand, of course, but it was interesting to read the professorial Castronova’s analysis. Among other observations, he first made notoriety in gaming circles for determining that Norrath (the virtual world inside Everquest) has a real world GDP slighty larger than Bulgaria. That is, the average worker in Bulgaria would be better served playing Everquest all day; they would make more money.
Chapter 7, in particular, talks about the merging of real life corporations and in-game communities. The chapter begins by quoting from me, yes yours truly, albeit while in character as I wrote our in-game corporate website. Although I am not attributed at all (which is strange, but I am not mad), the entire chapter talks about “Taggart Transdimensional” and the corporation we built for the online space-based MMO called Eve Online. There is a previous post about this here. We created this virtual company for a virtual game that was based on a real corporation. We took this approach because of the sophisticated nature of the game itself, which demanded that an organization have various disciplines work in concert: mining, industry, defense, finance, trading, etc. We had to do everything a real corporation does from HR to accounting to recruitment; and the organization was constantly evolving (see high level org chart).
Anyway, it was a very surreal experience to be reading that chapter on the plane and read about Castronova’s analysis of what we built in that game and how it is a harbinger of the real-life merging of out-of-game and in-game organizations.
We were entertained by the stylings of Smarty Pants yesterday. And yes, that link is worth clicking on. He’s great for kids’ birthday parties and the balloons he made were really amazing. I think he is also available for funerals and Mexican riot pre-parties, but I am not totally sure.
In that second picture, he is sporting a Darth Vader Balloon Mask.
I snapped these pictures last night after I played Oblivion way too long. But I can’t wait to get back into the world tomorrow night.
Here is a long overdue picture of the living room that we repainted a few months ago. Well, this is actually a picture of some lemons, but they are in the red room. You might remember that during the initial race war, my son almost ignited a race riot in our foyer.
This game is just incredible. I can barely believe something can be both so broad and so deep at same time. Oblivion is by far the best RPG ever made. I am actually shocked at how much I am enjoying playing it on the XBox 360, when I am traditionally a mouse n’ keyboard kinda RPG guy. It’s very nice to lay back on the couch with a blanket and the wireless controller and jam it loud on the stereo. It kind of annoys my family, but not my virtual family in Oblivion.
Maybe I have been playing too much Oblivion, but that is all I can think of when I look back at this picture I took from GDC last week.
