Spore Spreading The Content

There’s an excellent Will Wright interview on Popular Science (Link) discussing the much-anticipated game Spore. It’s long and I recommend reading the entire piece, but here’s Will Wright explaining how the user-generated content gets distributed:

Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. Continue reading

Of Non.Object And Gizmos

nonobbook2

Consider this a kind of follow-up to my previous post linking the One Laptop Per Child project with Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age “primer” concept. MoCO Loco posted an entry a couple of days ago titled “non·object” (Link) that included an iPod/book-ish looking picture. The image had that primer-grey, CG-rendered look I’m accustomed to seeing and which admittedly gets my attention; I suspected the object in it was modeled in 3D Studio Max but rendered with Brazil or VRay. Curious, I stopped back in this morning to learn more.
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The Book of the OLPC

A few days back when I was trying to learn more about the Euphoria demo shown at the Game Developers Conference, I did a search that landed me on the OLPC News site (Link)… for no good reason other than I’ve been following OLPC development for some time now and was curious about that search engine hit. Anyway, that’s where I first learned of the One Laptop Per Child Game Design Challenge (Link). Interesting news, but I didn’t consider it especially relevant to this blog, even though I saw related news pop up on 3pointD (Link) and then later caught mention of that on “The Click Heard Round the World” blog (Link). Though I’d read enough to know better, I still thought of the OLPC in terms of design (with a little “d”*).
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design:related

Last week I was lucky to catch some news over on Mashable (Link) mentioning a new design-centric social website called, appropriately enough, design:related (Link). I have to admit that the social networking arena is moving faster than I can track so I can’t really comment on the service in the context of what other services in general might offer, but it does seem as if it might be trying to offer some competition to stalwart design website Core77. Like Core, design:related is offering portfolio hosting, a job board, and design networking, but also infers that it’s trying to build something more cohesive, inspirational and perhaps a bit viral in nature. I’m not sure that’ll be enough as Core is extremely well-known and enjoys a mutually-beneficial partnership with BusinessWeek which further raises the site’s profile.
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