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[zhai]

I do live! According to recent reports, anyway. I've actually been trying to post this for a week, but am only just now getting to it. I have a lot of things to catch up on, and hopefully am getting to a portion of them this weekend

Comments

[jetfx]

Very interesting article. Much of what you discussed in your article about in game law was explored in Charles Stross' novel Halting State. More interestingly, government regulation of MMOs was discussed in the book Play Money, where the author mentions in game taxation by the IRS, as goods and services produced in game can be exchanged for real money to the point where some make a real living from it.

In my opinion, I don't see MMOs as simply the future of gaming, but as a huge social and economic event in the making, especially as cheap, portable computers begin to proliferate the developing world.

[zhai]

Hi, and thanks for your comment. :)

Yeah, it's terrible, but I haven't read Halting State yet, though I have it downloaded to my Kindle. If you like fiction in this vein you may also want to check out Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup and Dervish is Digital. I have read Play Money, and one of the pieces from it is actually installed in Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds (so there's my plug in case you didn't have that link yet -- you may also be interested) -- Julian Dibbell has been a favorite author/culture analyst of mine since My Tiny Life, and he was very gracious to give us "Dragon Slayers or Tax Evaders?" for SettlersI agree with you regarding the "social and economic event in the making" -- Bruce Sterling (who is much more eccentric and British than I was expecting, in person) gave a futurism keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference and talked about this. While I do agree that they're a massive and unavoidable phenomenon, and certainly have value in the context of discussing them as such, I'm more interested in

[jsridler]

You Rock.

JSR

[zhai]

<3

[devilwrites]

Many congrats! :)

[zhai]

Many thanks! ;)

[realthog]

Help! What are DRM, RTFA and MMOs?

[zhai]

Ahah. Thank you, this comment kind of made my day. :)

The common hottbutton DRM refers to 'digital rights management' and is (standard disclaimers, IMHO, etc) a rather ill-advised method of copy protection currently being used on many newly released software projects. Most recently there was a lot of backlash against its use in Spore, the latest Will Wright game. In the course of attempting to prevent piracy it restricts how many copies of a piece of software you can install, whether on different personal machines or on the same machine with a different setup (if you reformat, alter hardware, etc). DRM is just starting to really hit major games now, so there's a lot of resistance to the way it does business, connecting to a server during play to authenticate

[realthog]

"this comment kind of made my day"

Always glad to oblige, ma'am.

Many thanks for the explanations. I did in fact know what DRM was, having come across similar discussions in relation to music and movies, but didn't recognize the term in this alien context -- my bad.

Knowing nothing of gaming, I hadn't realized MMOs had come on so far. Someone tried to get me involved in writing companion novels for one of these early on (before, I think, the acronym was in use), but the notion kind of petered out for reasons I can't now remember -- probably because I was too busy working on Paper Tiger stuff at the time.

[zhai]

I was throwing a lot of acronyms, so thank you for the reality check. :) (The term is especially appropriate when it comes to MMO geek-speak...)

Yeah, a couple of years ago the companion-novel thing kicked into high gear, and there were a lot of opportunities. There's some interesting stuff being done now in the space, especially when it comes to the science fiction games (I'm thinking of Halo and Gears of War in particular). That's another expanding area that I really wish more experienced writers would get into -- it represents a vector into an entirely new audience, an opportunity to get the very wide gaming group into novel reading. The Escapist recently printed an excerpt of Karen Traviss's Gears of War novel that looks very promising.

[leahbobet]

Yay sales!

[zhai]

*does the "sales" dance*