One session I attended yesterday but forgot to comment on was the WildTangent session.  They presented basically a sales pitch for their upcoming launch, which is pure digital distribution of games to PCs, including console games.  I'm assuming it means console games will be played through an emulator, which to me means they'll only be able to distribute older (pre-NextGen console) titles.  They signed up quite a few publishers, including THQ and Activision (I think).  Very much an iTunes buy-my-TV-show model.

It's certainly the right direction to be going in.  But at this stage I get the impression the major publishers are only populating it with their back-catalog and other older offerings, partly because of the technology limitations I mentioned but also because they're still testing the waters of digital distribution.  They'll have to ramp up quickly and get top titles fast, otherwise they're not that different from GameTap. 

Linden Labs put out version 1.10.5 of Second Life yesterday [release notes]. After the upgrade, the first time I logged in (actually the first 2 times I logged in, weirdly) I was prompted to accept a rather long new Terms of Service agreement.

VTOR has some commentary on the the ToS (along with some biting remarks on the scalability and stability of the platform), and NWN has commentary on another of the changes in the new version - the fact that you can now see whether a user is a paying customer in their profile.

It’s a long ToS and I’ve not analysed it in detail to work out whether the changes significantly impact my activities playing around with LSL and random objects I might choose to create. Comments?

There’s another new change, which is that LL have increased the number of categories of place types - see this forum post.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a great post in his blog this week about “life and business in the virtual world”.

“Finally, with IT all around us, it is very important that we leverage all that powerful and inexpensive computing power so that future applications will be much more human-like, realistic and “immersive.”  We see this future emerging most clearly with computer and video games, especially with the new generation of game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation 3, as well as with massively multiplayer online environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft.   “

Tags: Second Life , WoW , mmog

The second day of the NetGames workshop was a bit more relaxed for participants as the program consisted of just technical sessions (see the preview and impressions of the first day here). But the impact of industry participation on the first day was clear — several speakers (and questioners) referred back to some of the comments by the panelists and keynote speaker in their presentations. Day 2 focused on networking, which is the general research area of much of the NetGames community.

Each year NetGames has a session devoted to how network effects impact gameplay in different types of games and this year’s papers studied the effect of latency on MMORPG and racing games. In addition, there was a session on network measurements of games in which the goal is generally to develop a traffic characterization of a certain type of game in order to develop models or just to gain some understanding of the network behavior of games. This work is a bit controversial in that some folks don’t find much use in just measuring network behavior without some ideas about how to improve that behavior, or identifying the implications. I disagree with this view a little (I’m also biased in favor of network measurement work in general) — it takes quite a bit of effort to do a solid traffic characterization. And though it would be nice if these papers could go further, this first step is a necessary one that, if well done, is enough for a full technical paper (in my opinion).

General feedback on the workshop was very positive. As we hoped, the inclusion of significant industry participation was appreciated by the researchers who are very interested in understanding the prospects of their work actually having an impact in real games. For their part, the participants on the industry panel were also very encouraging. One thing that stayed with me was the comment by Grantley Day that one reason why the gaming industry is overtaking the movie industry is that it has a research community contributing to it.

IBM Research is hosting the 2005 NetGames workshop next week at the TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. The NetGames workshop is primarily attended by computer science researchers from academia who share an interest in understanding networked games and in enabling the next generation of online games. Despite the proliferation of games-related courses in university curricula, gaming is still developing as computer systems research area (this is the 4th incarnation of the workshop). The participation, however, is worldwide with about 80% of this year’s accepted papers from institutions in Europe and Asia-Pacific. The explosion in online gaming in Asia, for example, has resulted in govt. funding for games research which I think is largely responsible for the growing research participation from that region.

This year’s sessions continue some of the research trends of past workshops, and also reflect some new emerging areas. There are several presentations on mobile gaming, for example, describing work in modeling gamer mobility, programming mobile games, and measuring game traffic on handhelds. A new research area that has emerged over the last couple of years is providing auxiliary services for online games. In that context, we’ll have presentations this year on ranking services, intelligent server selection, and content distribution.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the program this year is direct participation from folks in the gaming industry. In the past, the workshop has been light on industry participation which makes it hard to judge which research areas are really useful or important for games publishers or developers . Greg Costikyan’s keynote on the future of mobile games should be very interesting — I’m hoping to hear what he thinks the big problems are in mobile gaming, especially since we have quite a bit of interest in mobile/handheld games in the research community. Also, given the business model for wireless access in the US (i.e., high priced data access), I’m curious if he thinks connected mobile games will ever materialize here. Greg just finished a stint working for Nokia research advising them on mobile games. The panel session should also be very useful for the attendees, as we’ll have varied points of view from the gaming industry including online game development, production, technology, and marketing. This is where I’d like to see the industry give it’s feedback to the researchers as to what work they find useful (or useless), and where they think things are going in the areas of networking, security, voice, and others. Finally, we have a lunchtime talk from David Brandt, one of the lead network programmers on EVE Online, the MMORPG from CCP Games. David will describe the design decisions that went into the networking architecture of EVE, as well as how they addressed scalability challenges. Overall, I’m looking forward to a great workshop this year.