3pointD.com

Go now and read this piece in Gamasutra to see how one the UK’s (or anywhere’s) best games journalists, Jim Rossignol, envisions gaming (and more) circa the year 3006. A taste:

Neuroscience has long been aware that the brain is little more than a pattern completion engine, so like all 31st century denizens I carry a personalised ludic pattern box, a handy device which produces generative gameworks——patterns that are suitable for my brain to complete on a subconscious level. I play the games without conscious reasoning——a vital exercise for the more strenuous activities I will later undertake. This kind of exercise is an aspect of ubiquitous gaming that goes unnoticed in 3006.

Actually, that hardly gives you the idea of the piece, which ranges across everything from singularity to some very post-3pointD ideas. But like I said at the beginning of this post, go. Now.

Ted Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and perhaps the person who’s done most to advance the study of MMOs as an academic discipline, has launched a new Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University.

The Synthetic Worlds Initiative is a research center at Indiana University whose aim is to promote innovative thinking on synthetic worlds. . . . Our goal is to learn about this technology and deploy it for research and education. The Initiative holds a bi-annual series of conferences, the Ludium, and is building Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, a massive synthetic world.

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