Evening Reading
by Nick Breckon, Aug 13, 2009 6:00pm PDTQuakeCon is upon us. Having fun yet, guys?
News:
- Check out that new Rage trailer
- Onyxia is coming back to World of Warcraft
- Doom 2 is headed to XBLA
- ARMA 2 standalone expansion announced
- Team Fortress 2 classless update goes live
- Brutal Legend multiplayer impressions are surprising
Chatty: Diablo III, Dragon's Dogma
FileShack: Unity of Command, Skyjacker
Daily Filter: Planetside 2, Deadlight
Weekend PC digital deals: strategy-o-rama
38 Studios, Harry Potter Kinect - Shacknews Daily: May 25, 2012
"Virtual Property" is a legal debate/concept over whether people should be able to "own" something in a virtual world, money wise. I just realized that the debate is entirely worthless. You want to own something, monetarily speaking, when it has physical value. Value here being based on a ratio of scarcity to other peoples desire for it. But since virtual anything isn't scarce at all, it just being ones and zeroes, there's little use in it as a product. Just look at every website in existence, you don't "buy" amazon, or google, or any of them. They're all services, even the shack can be seen business wise as a "service". This is the same reason movie retail and music sales are in the dumps, they've taken forever to realize the basic economic principle of scarcity no longer applies to their industries. Beyond the music or movie in question being produced the reproduction and distribution of them are so cheap people willingly give them away to each other, all scarcity is lost.
But wait! You might say. There are plenty of scarce virtual things in video games. Who doesn't want their epic mount in WoW or a damned hat in TF2? The response I've realized is we don't want them so much because they have monetary value, but because we see them as having effort value. An epic mount is a status symbol "look at me, I put in the effort and now I have this virtual flying tiger with the head of a duck!" you will yell. The only reason it might have any value monetarily is because companies like Blizzard try to ensure that gold farmers and the like stay out, so the "effort" value people place on it is still there. This is the reason why high level player bitch about Blizzard making stuff easier to get in Wow, because it devalues there own "virtual property".
But consider then making such property monetary. Suddenly all "effort" value is lost, anyone with enough money can buy it, and the psychological effect disappears. That awesome Crimson-Blue penguin sword you just got no longer has any value if you know it can simply be bought.
TL;DR: Monetized Virtual Property can't work, because monetary value is derived from physical scarcity, and virtual items aren't physically scarce
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I have added the following custom campaigns to the Dallas boxes:
Death Abroad
http://www.l4dmaps.com/details.php?file=33
Heaven Can Wait
http://www.l4dmaps.com/details.php?file=177
To bring these up, in the console type:
callvote changelevel aircrash for Heaven Can Wait
callvote changelevel l4d_deathabroad_prison01 for Death Abroad
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I've played that, Zenonia and Peggle. Any other great iPhone games I should be aware of?
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I met felicia and askedrelic and tastywheat and dahanese and mike and overlordUT and kbnerd and omnova and the archvile and amrbean and rikkitikki2, nyranger66, and a lurker. Felicia made me and tastywheat carry her heavy funcom box. Everyone make sure you get a plastic conan sword, I worked hard for those SOBs. :D
I spent an hour and half playing SFIV on the projector + LCDs + PS3 setup on the far right hand side of the byoc. Nobody there including me was that good save one sandbagging El Fuerte player who did run stop fierce. Bottom tier weekly shack tournament players would wreck us all. I'm in the texangamer's SFIV tournament but I'm pretty sure that it overlaps with the shackmeet at gameworks so I probably won't be in it. :(
I had something else to say but I forgot. Everybody I met was cool and I hope to see you guys at gameworks and beyond tomorrow!
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I don't understand why there is competition between mozilla, google, microsoft, apple and all the tons of other smaller ones? Is it only to get their brand name out there or some such?
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http://www.teamfortress.com/classless/hidden/today_is_a_good_day/
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A friend of mine is trying to register on the site but hasn't gotten confirmation emails (she's tried with both a Gmail account and a Yahoo account). Nothing in the junk mail filter either. Not getting a warning that the user name has been taken either. We are confused. :|
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Running Windows 7 8gb ram Geforce 8800gts I got the settings as high as they'll go. The game starts to load, says hit any key to continue. But i don't even push anything, the mouse pointer pops up and i see it's locked up. Then it goes back to desktop, theres a window that's up when it goes back but it's gone so fast i can't see anything of what it says. I thought maybe i had the wrong res or something, but checked again and it's at 1680x1050. So what could be going wrong?
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hahahahah! That is fucking awesome
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http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/174244
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I really hope I get some game time this weekend :(
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http://www.mycrysis.com/newsdetails.php?news=42277
Crytek will be presenting some exclusive information about Crysis 2 on the EA GC Booth Stage at GamesCom on Thursday 20th August (under a week away!) at 3:15pm.
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At least I beat someone in SFII. Good times though, enjoyed meeting everyone. I'll probably see everyone tonight at the Shackmeet.
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It's 5AM on the east coast. I've been up all night and need to stay up all day. What do I do?!
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