EchoDitto

So this is my first week at EchoDitto, and one of the most important things you should know about me is that I love rice pudding. And I’m not picky. Kozy Shack? Yes. Kheer? Yes. Homemade? Yes. The kind at the bodega with a half cherry on top? Absolutely.

Which is why the email from my friend Phillip with the subject “Rice Pudding” probably caught my eye. And the URL was www.freerice.com. Free rice pudding? Sign me up.

Well… I don’t want to ruin it for all of you, but it’s not free rice pudding. Instead, it’s a vocabulary game that donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program for every word that you get right. Amazing. (My nerdy love of word games took the edge off my rice-puddingless-disappointment.)

I didn’t truly appreciate Facebook applications until a few weeks ago. With the first applications I was interested but skeptical. I installed a few and ended up deleting most after discovering they were either pointless, or just didn’t work.

That is, until I found Scrabulous.

To give this some background, a few months ago Atari games sold the digital rights for Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleship, Boggle and Yahtzee back to Hasbro for 19.5 Million dollars. Most users of the site and games didn’t care about the money – all we cared about was that we could no longer play the games online. Many players were just like me – we only played Scrabble. Yes, I am a nerd. After work, I thoroughly enjoy watching the news, eating dinner, and playing a game of Scrabble.

Like about 37% of adults, I'm an avid gamer. But like I've said before, I'm a bit of a odd duck when it comes to gaming. I'm pretty bad at first-person shooters, and most of them don't appeal to me. My bent is towards simulation games. Those are common enough but only occasionally do I come across games that also involve another interest of mine, like political simulation games.  

So, I was surprised and intrigued to learn of a game that incorporated another interest of mine: Buddhism. And when I found out it was a game about Buddhist ethics, I decided to check it out. After all, it's a game where you lose points for killing (including animals). How could I not check it out?

I read an article today, pertaining to the evolution of the gaming industry. The article stated that soon, manufacturers will be attempting to target a wider audience of enthusiasts, by creating games that are focused more in the online arena, yet are shorter than the games available on the market today. This disappointed me.

It seemed to me that this had already been a fledging trend, harking back to the release of Halo 2, and continuing more recently with Gears of War. Games, my friends and I finished in one night each, and were left with a sour feeling of expectations unrequited. Consider it comparable to Tom Clancy announcing he would only write books that were half as long as the ones he had written in the past, but would attempt to retain the same amount of involvement in each story. It doesn’t work that way.

I continue to be obsessed with the social and political implications of video games - in America, but I've started to get interested to their implications in China. China has a game called Legend of Mir II (frequently called Legend2). It's what's called a MMORPG - Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. That means that thousands of people play it simultaneous on the internet, meeting up with each other in the virtual world and talking to each other. It's basically a virtual world where people meet to communicate and collaborate. At given minute, Legend2 has approximately 600,000 concurrent users online (and sometimes more than a million). Legend2 has over 20 million monthly subscribers and is owned by Shanda, the largest Chinese online entertainment company. The company has over 140 million subscribers across all of their games. By the way, that completely dwarfs American MMORPG numbers.

A digital virus spread by terrorists left bodies on the streets and cities quarantined by the government.

As mentioned at SecurityFocus, among other places, Blizzard's hugely popular World of Warcraft MMORPG was hit by an unexpected viral plague. A new gameplay area was introduced that could inflict a contagious plague onto players. However, game designers did not anticipate the rapid travel of the plague throughout the whole game universe -- potentially tens of thousands of players on each "realm", or server world. Whether intentional or accidental, soon thousands of lower-level players were unable to keep from dying as the plague ran rampant through city streets.

The recent ruckus over the "Hot Coffee" hack for the popular computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Fault, which allows users to play a mini-game involving illicit animated sex scenes,  brought to mind an awkward moment I experienced while shopping for computer games a  while back. It was a few years ago. I was standing in the middle of Electronics Boutique, at a D.C. area mall, perusing the shelves and trying to decide what -- if anything --  to buy. At that time, Electronic Arts had just come out with a new expansion pack for The Sims, called Hot Date. The name was a hint at what the the expansion offered. The characters in the game, called Sims, now had the ability to "play in bed" (now a standard feature in the 3D sequel to the original game, Sims 2).

EchoRadio's second podcast, recorded last night, posted this morning. Tim, Nicco, Justin and Joshua discuss World Of Warcraft and why The Legend Of Zelda is the Otis Redding of videogames. We should not be enjoying this so much.

Via David Cohen, friend and colleague of EchoDitto, writing from the University of Virginia's School of Law.

Visitors spend an average of twenty hours a week here. Twenty-two percent of her tourists wish they could spend all of their time here. Forty percent of her guests would like to quit their jobs or studies and go to work here, and twenty percent of these people even claim to spend most of their lives here. But you won’t find this enticing destination on any map. You’ll need a keyboard, not a compass, to find your way around.