Mobile and Serious Games at GDC

Gamasutra's coverage of GDC this year is top notch, and they have several excellent pieces on the Serious Games Summit and GDC Mobile '05. Machine Learning details how game AI developers are turning to real life academic studies on decision making trees to make their work more realistic. A rundown on the Serious Games Summit Panel reveals answers from people who are making games for non-entertainment purposes. Finally, Final Fantasy for Mobile is an analysis of how the Square-Enix folks are planning to take the best-selling franchise to mobile devices. Meanwhile Alice's Wonderland blog continues to be the most immersive coverage here this year, with run-downs on Cory Ondrejka's Building Serious Games with Second Life talk and THQ's Tips from a Mobile Publisher session.

Comments

Second Life

[MrWa]

Second Life, of all the MMORPG's that have come out in the last 5-7 years, seems to be the closest thing to the Metaverse that Neal Stephenson envisioned. The majority of content is user created and there isn't really a game per se - it is more of a virtual world that is what the residents make of it.

The subscription/cost model is a little difficult to understand, though. I understand that you must buy land and IP of anything you create in Second Life belongs to you (I assume they mean copyright when referring to IP - hard to tell). What about the servers, though? Until they allow interconnections and expansion outside of their server farm, whatever they say about IP and user rights go out the window if they go belly up. Which means that there is the strong chance of designer intervention and not necessarily in the best interests of the residents, if that is what you want to call them.

Overall, though, I think that Second Life is one of the more interesting concepts in MMORPG's and one or two generations later may lead to some real advances towards a Metaverse type world.