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Ask Massively: Ruining the internet

Brianna Royce — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:00:00 EST

Filed under: Business Models, Culture, MMO Industry, Opinion, Massively Meta, Ask Massively, Community Q&A, Livestream, Miscellaneous, The Stream Team

Last week, Massively's Larry Everett finished off a miniseries of articles designed to help interested readers learn to livestream. Streaming has become a major part of Massively's purview; we stream about 20 hours a week. So why not use our expertise to help friends and potential future colleagues learn how to play for fun and profit?

Not everyone shares our idealism, apparently. In fact, one commenter told us we are ruining the internet.

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Ask Massively: Ruining the internet originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Soapbox: Remembering that games are games

Mike Foster — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:00:00 EST

Filed under: World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Opinion, Guild Wars 2, Free-to-Play, Wizard101, World of Tanks, The Soapbox, Miscellaneous

I think it's safe to assume that we all love games. If we didn't, I wouldn't be in this crowded, noisy coffee shop writing this and you wouldn't be blowing off some sort of important responsibility reading it. We're all here together, engaged in this somewhat-anonymous internet back-and-forth, because games have touched our lives. It sounds corny, but it's true.

For many of us, games have a deeply personal and specific meaning. We like the games we like not so much for their craftsmanship or content but for the way they engage our minds and spirits. Games create incredible, irreplaceable moments infused with emotional resonance, and it's only natural we would feel some sort of personal connection when a piece of digital entertainment syncs just right.

It is precisely this personal connection that leads many of us to act like total morons.

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The Soapbox: Remembering that games are games originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MMO Family: Video game violence provokes aggression in some kids but not others

Lisa Poisso — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST

Filed under: Kids, MMO Family, Family, Miscellaneous

MMO Family is your resource for leveling a gaming-specced family ... From tips on balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate niches for every family member, MMO Family offers you advice on MMO gaming of the family, by the family and for the family.

Sensible parents have long recognized that the way kids react to video game violence varies according to their personalities. A recent post at Bitmob illustrated one parent's recognition of the innocence with which his four-year-old son approached an opportunity to play Grand Theft Auto. "I understand not every kid is like mine, so I wouldn't recommend that every parent allow their child to play Grand Theft Auto," he wrote. "But I would recommend that you listen and pay attention to your little ones to determine what they are capable of handling and what they are not ready for yet."

Now, new research tells us how to determine exactly that. A report in the June issue of Review of General Psychology has pinpointed the factors that determine why violent video games provoke hostile behavior in some teens but not in others.

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MMO Family: Video game violence provokes aggression in some kids but not others originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MMO Family: Screening "screen time"

Lisa Poisso — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:30:00 EST

Filed under: Kids, MMO Family, Family

MMO Family is your resource for leveling a gaming-specced family ... From tips on balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate niches for every family member, MMO Family offers you advice on MMO gaming of the family, by the family and for the family.

One of the first topics we tackled here at MMO Family is how to tell when kids have had enough gaming time. As parents who game, we should be in a unique position to appreciate, respect and guide our children's attraction to games. But in the crush of day-to-day living, it's all too easy to let a few extra gaming minutes slip into half an hour ... past an hour ... into the evening ... into a habit that's begun eating away at family balance.

Some families keep a rein on gaming overdoses by instituting strict limits on screen time. What's considered part of the screen time quota varies from family to family; TV time is the bottom line, with movies, internet use and gaming time lumped in or added on top according to each family's habits and needs. We talked to Dr. Kourosh Dini, author of Video Game Play and Addiction: A Guide for Parents (now available completely online) and himself a gamer, for some professional perspectives on how to keep things in balance.

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MMO Family: Screening "screen time" originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Korea institutes nighttime shutdown for underaged MMO players

Rubi Bayer — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:00:00 EST

Filed under: Culture, MMO Industry, News Items

"You've been playing long enough, it's time to do something else now." It's a statement you'd expect to hear from your parent, but from your government? The Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has introduced a set of policies known as "nighttime shutdown" for underage users -- an enforced six hour blackout time. According to today's report in the Korean Herald, kids can choose the start time for their six hour window -- midnight, 1:00 a.m., or 2:00 a.m., and internet access will automatically shut down at that time for six hours.

The point of this new "curfew" of sorts is to help curtail video game addiction among Korean citizens, a problem that's been making headlines off and on for a while. While it's only in the testing phase at the moment -- it affects four games right now, including Dungeon Fighter Online and Dragon Nest -- it will eventually expand to include 19 of the most popular online games in Korea, such as Mabinogi and MapleStory. The new policies aren't limited to nighttime shutdown, either. If an underage player is online for a significant amount of time online, a "slowdown" will come into effect, throttling back the user's connection speed and presumably making it much more difficult to play.

You can read the full story in the Korean Herald.

[Thanks to Amana for the tip!]

Korea institutes nighttime shutdown for underaged MMO players originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chinese game addicts seek help in progressive Internet addiction centers

James Egan — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:00:00 EST

Filed under: Culture, MMO Industry, News Items, Virtual Worlds

As the Chinese race ahead to catch up with the West, they do so with the intent of creating better lives for themselves. The past several years have been characterized by rapid progression, but all those perks of modernization come with a price, which some of China's citizens are beginning to pay.

As incomes rise, so does the prevalence of the various maladies of modernization we've come to know well -- not limited to obesity, substance abuse, and addiction. While an addiction to a substance has a physiological aspect to it and is rarely disputed as a true addiction, non-material addictions to work, sex, and even shopping are on the rise in China. Such issues have been difficult to officially label as actual mental illnesses in the country. Others, like Internet addiction, have only recently been classified as such in China.

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Chinese game addicts seek help in progressive Internet addiction centers originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T says internet data caps and overage fees 'inevitable'

Kyle Horner — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:00:00 EST

Filed under: MMO Industry, News Items, Opinion

Is a time really coming when internet use in America will be capped? AT&T sure seems to think so and we're inclined to wonder if they're right. Internet service providers could go about capping bandwidth in a couple of ways. They could be reasonable (hah!) and set the cap up high where it will only hurt people who're constantly downloading large amounts of files through P2P networks or -- and this is more likely, we think -- they could setup a tiered system. This could be problematic for online gamers depending on how the tiers are setup. A higher cap means a higher price. So then depending on your gaming, surfing and -- most importantly -- downloading habits you could feel some monthly bill-burn. If you were recently involved in the Age of Conan betas just think back to all that downloading you did. Consider all the game trailers you've either streamed or downloaded. Also, one computer playing an online game may not hurt much but we're fairly certain there are plenty of homes with upwards of two or three computers hooked up to the network.

Another issue is how this system reeks foul of classic greed. As time goes on and the internet infrastructure hopefully improves throughout America, will the internet service providers fairly adjust the monthly, weekly or daily caps to represent that? We also have to wonder whether or not this problem is stemming from a lack of infrastructure investment from these companies to begin with, which is a possibility as well.

AT&T says internet data caps and overage fees 'inevitable' originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reproducing isn't nearly as much fun in Second Life.

Shawn Schuster — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:00:00 EST

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Interviews, Second Life, Academic, Education, Virtual Worlds

This quote and many other gems are showcased in a recent Esquire article featuring Vint Cerf: the infamous "Father of the Internet". He talks about his views on everything from the future of the internet, pornography and a vindication of Al Gore's claim to have invented the Internet. He also expresses his concerns on spam and what he remembers as the first spam message ever. He says it was possibly as early as 1979 when the Digital Equipment Corporation sent a note around announcing a product demo, and Cerf's team didn't appreciate the advertisement in a business setting.

What we feel as one of the most interesting and pertinent parts of this assemblage of quotations is his thoughts on World of Warcraft being an actual benefit to the parenting process. He says "It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play World of Warcraft with your son. But you're actually interacting with each other. You're solving problems."

[Update: link to actual product demo spam added]

[Thanks Dan!]

Reproducing isn't nearly as much fun in Second Life. originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PMOG beta opens up for passively multiplayer fun

Mike Schramm — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:30:00 EST

Filed under: Betas, Business Models, Launches, New Titles, Tips and tricks

PMOG, the "passively multiplayer MMO," has been seeing some action around the virtual Massively office lately -- the game is basically a Firefox extension that sits in your browser, and lets you deploy mines, leave goodies, and create quests out of the actual webpages that you visit, and since we visit lots of pages around here, we're some pretty good players.

And now, after a showing at SXSW this week (which we should hear about soon), PMOG has opened its doors to the beta -- if you haven't started playing yet, you can sign up on their main page. In fact, here's an even better deal: I'm working on an achievement in game for inviting people, so you want an invite, leave a comment below, and I'll send you one myself.

It remains to be seen how the folks behind PMOG are going to fund this thing, but while it's in beta, things are ad-free and passively fun. The virtual landscape is still a little empty (most geek sites are pretty much plotted out, but some of the farther reaches of the net are completely quiet), but the more people that get in the beta, the more fun this game promises to be.

PMOG beta opens up for passively multiplayer fun originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet payment plan based on usage to be tested in Texas

Chris Chester — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:01:00 EST

Filed under: Business Models, Economy, MMO Industry

In a chilling bit of news for any net aficionado, Time Warner is reportedly planning to try out a new billing scheme where they would charge customers based on the amount of bandwidth they consume, instead of the more traditional flat service fee. According to the report on MSNBC, the measure is aimed at keeping the internet tubes clear of traffic caused by a small minority of "heavy users" who, while making up only five percent of total internet users, account for more than half of the total traffic. While bittorrent users are the most conspicuous target of this policy, gamers would most assuredly feel the pinch as well.

What I find particularly striking about this announcement is that they are testing it out in Beaumont, Texas. Now, I can't say I know anything about Texas first-hand, because I've never had the privilege of visiting, but for some reason my intuition tells me that a town in southeast Texas between Houston and New Orleans isn't going to be the most connected area of the country. For all we know, their internet might very well be on a truck. It just seems like a bit of a sneaky tactic on the part of Time Warner to garner favor for a plan that will affect groups like gamers (and especially MMO players) disproportionately.

[Via Guild Cafe]

Internet payment plan based on usage to be tested in Texas originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FOX cautions meetings between "cyber gaming" friends

Chris Chester — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:30:00 EST

Filed under: MMO Industry, News Items

Though I'd like to think that I grew callous to the treatment of MMOs in the mainstream media a long time ago, there's this bitter little flame deep inside me that is stoked every time I read a piece in the newspaper or see a bit on TV that's sensationalist, ill-informed, or just plain stupid. In the latest article to raise my ire, Fox reports on how MMOs create a uniquely unsafe environment, that puts online predators and mentally unstable people at an advantage in stalking their prey. Specifically, they claim that while people tend to have their guard up when surfing other online portals like dating sites or MySpace, people let are more at ease and trusting when it comes to bonding with guildmates, and this leaves them open to exploitation.

The article seems to be a reaction to the recent "Baby Grace" case, which really had less to do with the fact that the couple met on World of Warcraft and everything to do with the fact that they were complete sociopaths. While there are some positive stories buried in the article -- including the 40 married couples who made the transition from guildmate to soulmate between Everquest and Anarchy Online, author Catherine Donaldson-Evans just can't rein in the hyperbole, concluding her article by referring to the internet as a modern-day pandora's box. (I can't seem to find the roll-eye emote here...)

[Via MMORPG.com]

FOX cautions meetings between "cyber gaming" friends originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What's new with Metaplace?

Michael Zenke — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:30:00 EST

Filed under: Business Models, Culture, MMO Industry, New Titles, Free-to-Play, Browser, Casual

Last week MMOG development veteran Raph Koster updated his site with some insights about his newest project, Metaplace. The extraordinarily unique mmo-in-a-website concept is proceeding apace, with their Alpha test now closed and furious systems development work continuing in the background.

Raph highlighted some of the recent posts that have been made to the Metaplace website. For the non-technical, you'll want to check out their business plan or the interview I did with him right after the initial announcement. Artists will be interested to learn what the framework's art integration process is like. Those of us who can only draw stick people can also enjoy the perty pictures. And, if you are technical, you can take a gander at the description of the Metaplace event system - the guts of how gamer input is handled by the framework.

Think all of that sounds fascinating? They're hiring! They're looking for an experienced Flash Programmer, a Software/Client Engineer, and a LAMP Dev.

For an overview of the whole situation with Metaplace as it stands, Next Generation has up an interview with Raph nailing down the particulars of the project in layman's terms: We have a motto: build anything and play anything from anywhere. But Metaplace isn't built solely around massively multiplayer games. You can make single player games as well. We've already made things like puzzle games, 2D overhead space combat games, and we're working on RPGs and MMORPGs, so really it means any of those things. I don't doubt that there'll be things that the platform can't make, but we'll figure out ways so it will.

What's new with Metaplace? originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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