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An Xbox Live-like Service For Open/Indie Gaming?
Byrne Reese writes "Amidst all the crazy ideas in online video entertainment in the past year, there is a small company called Arena Unlimited that is taking an interesting approach to gaming economies. As near as I can tell, they're trying to open up a multitude of online gameplay services (e.g., opponent matching, free market item trading) to the masses (i.e., open source and independent PC game developers). (I shudder to think what would happen if one could actually introduce a legitimate and real free market economy into The Sims.) It's no Xbox Live, and their list of supported games is pretty small, but if they can do all that they say they may one day support, then sign me up."
There will always be fanatics to a certain game that will devote the time necessary to create a place for followers of the game with all these services. PC gamers tend to have longer-attention spans than console gamers and stick to usually at most 4 online games at any give point. I just dont think that the market is there.
I would have to agree overall.
Even though it's a pay for use network, and a lot of gaming companies dont like Microsoft getting in their online future business (EA for example), it's still is one of the best systems you can find on a console, and its game portable, which makes it really nice when you want to play more than one game with all your friends.
And seriously, the one year price at roughly the price of a game is a whole lot better than monthly. Especially considering the value that it does bring to the online gaming table.
Even the PC is going Live like. From the looks of things, it seems like Steam is trying to be a Live device for all things Valve, since it has buddy lists, automatic updating of content, and online voice chat intergrated. If they can work all the bugs out of it, It would be a whole of a lot better than most online gaming to date.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
I've been playing online games since what - 1997?
How is an open games service any different from something like Gamespy, All Seeing Eye, or even just finding a server and logging onto it? yes, I know there are the issues with scoreboards and ranking and whatnot, but stuff like Raven Shield does that anyway.
So, to cut my rant short: what makes X-Box Live so great that it needs to be open-sourced?
Secondly, if X-Box Live is so groundbreaking, why the hell do I always hear about open source ripping off other people's models? I mean it's embarrassing! We bitch so much about Microsoft, but spend most of our time copying them: Media Center, Mono, Office, and now an online gaming community... way to go guys...
Being an economist is definitely a dismal science
If you aren't familiar with it you might want to see if you can track down a copy of Stephen Leacock's (Professor of Economics- McGill University) "Too Much College" for his view of what the field of economics was becoming, circa 1939, as well as his views of a number of other fields and education in general.
There's a good chance your library will have this.
Of course there's another reason none of these political/economic theories has been tried in their purest form.
They simply don't meet the needs of people. Capitalism and democracy work great in the market place. They really don't in the private home where oligarchy is the only workable system. Communism works great in the monastary and group farm, but only when imbedded in a larger social framework that allows dissenters to leave freely and not distrupt the communal ethic. In the early days of America we experimented with privately held roads and bridges. It sucked. It sucked a lot. Socialism is the only really workable way to deal with such infrastructure.
Some "political realities" have reality.
KFG