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Does anyone know if MS will act the way Sony, Sega, and Nintendo do, and demand both approval and a hefty cut of the royalty stream from game publishers?

Lets hope not. While one can argue that the production values of games have improved since the Japanese takeover of the console industry - one can only imagine the cool games that would have existed if the barriers to entry were less, and if freedom of expression prevailed.

For a humerous indictment of the corporate game censorship mentality, check out Doug Crockford's story about Maniac Mansion.

Basically, it was a similar system, "back in the day", (although obviously nowhere near as interactive or as advanced). This paper documents some of the lessons they learned about how people interact in a "virtual environment". It will offer some interesting insight on why EQ people just "don't get it", and I recommend if any of them are reading this... hey, YOU .. go read that article.

For example, there was a situation where a normal player got a "DM only" weapon (a weapon that could kill anyone instantly). How they handled that situation was ingenious, inventive, and consistent with the rules they had laid out for "The reality". The EQ people need to understand these things before they go passing edicts like this.

What's the opinion on fancier chat systems - CU-CMe, voice chat, avatar chat, as compared to IRC-type systems? Would you prefer voice over typing? Video/voice over voice only? Avatar worlds with chat? If you had voice chat, would you want a voice-changer option? Does existing voice chat suck? What if you have decent bandwidth? What happens in a group of people? Do the social conventions change with the technology? Do you want role-playing with your chat? Or would you prefer vanilla IRC? I might have to do some work in this space, and I'd appreciate comments.

I'd like to second that recommendation. Marc based his book on a lot of the ideas that have swirled around this group (hypertext, idea futures, real computer security, smart contracting, etc.).

By the way, bidirectional linking is not new to the Web. It was new in 1997, when it was introduced by CritLink. I encourage you to check that out, too. It lets anybody annotate any public web page using any browser -- no software required.

-- ?!ng

I was the project leader for Habitat at Lucasfilm and it was me that adopted (I won't say "coined" as the word itself is of course older than anybody here) the term "avatar" to denote the embodiment of a persona in a virtual world. My collaborator in this, Randy Farmer, and I wrote a fairly lengthy post-mortem which you can find at http://www.communities.com/paper/lesson s.html and which has had a lot of influence on people in the field.

-- Chip Morningstar

Larry has a consistent philospohy behind the design of Perl (or rather, the intentional lack of overall design.) It's an interesting idea, certainly, and one that I think hasn't been consciously applied to a programming language before. However, if Perl is the kind of language that that approach produces, then I think the experiment is a failure.

While Larry is a smart fellow, the problem is that he is also a linguist. And having spent a few years working with linguists (doing a natural-language understanding boondoggle), my experience is that linguists should never ever be allowed near computers.

Computer languages aren't really languages, not in the sense that linguists know languages. Computer languages are formal mathematical systems, which are a totally different beast. Computers are very literal-minded, not fuzzy at all, so one must talk to them precisely. The fuzziness that appears in human languages is inappropriate in a computer language.

The ``language'' of mathematics doesn't have linguistic drift. Where is the ``slang'' in arithmetic? Where are the ``dialects'' of algebra? It doesn't happen, because mathematical systems exist by design, not by evolutionary pressure and random mutation.

Accretion works well for some things, like DNA, forests, and cities. But I for one am glad that my car's engine was designed to be efficient and self-consistent, and I prefer the software I use (including languages) to be the same, rather than a sprawling Winchester Mystery House of a language like Perl.

Of course, I end up using Perl anyway, because often it's the most convenient tool for the job for any number of not-very-good reasons. The way Perl manages to suck so bad and yet still be marginally useful is probably what makes it the perfect complement to Unix itself. Worse is Better, after all.

Actually, now that I think about it, Tcl is even more horrible than Perl, so it's a wonder it hasn't taken over.

Maximal obscurity! Now!