Terra Nova: World Persistence

What if MMO environments were more responsive to the players actions? What would happen if, depending on the situation, the NPCs would respond differently to their player driven opponents? Timothy Burke over at Terra Nova asks the TN community this questions and probes their intellect further by asking what are technical (not design) implication of such a dynamic environment.

When I've ventured out before on this topic, I've found a reasonable degree of consensus on this point among scholars, developers and players, that dynamic, changing, responsive synthetic worlds are what we need. I've also heard on many occasions that they simply are not technically possible at the present time.

Head over at Terra Nova to read more about it : World Persistence: One In A Series of Queries. It's a very interesting post and the comments are even more so.

Terra Nova: Virtual Transvestitism

A lot of the characters I play in games are female, though I do play male characters from time to time. I've never given it any thoughts. I mean basically it comes down to esthetics: if I'm going to spends hours a week playing and looking at an avatar, it might as well be pleasing to the eye.

Over at Terra Nova, a great blog on virtual worlds, there's a very interesting discussion (Terra Nova: Virtual Transvestitism: An Introduction) on this subject and some of the implications one has to consider.

I suggest heading over there and giving it a good read. It's worth your time.