Virtual World Terms

Have you ever encountered scenarios where people talk about virtual worlds and you don't understand a word they are saying. Look no further, here are some common terms you can learn:
Avatar - A representation of the player that is used to interact in the game environment through controllers or a combination of keyboard commands and a mouse-driven interface. Communication occurs through a typed chat interface as well as animated expressions or gestures.

Bot - a subset of Farmer. A bot refers to using an automated script or computer program to
perform certain functions over and over without the need to a human to actually control the avatar.

Camp - To remain in the same physical location in the game world for an extended period of
time. Typically, this refers to waiting for a special or rare NPC to appear.

Farmer - A player who camps the same spawn repeatedly and for hours on-end for the express purpose of obtaining some game currency or item, denying others the opportunity.

MMO - Massive Multiplayer Online game

NPC - Non-Player Character. These are characters or monsters within the game world that are controlled by the game.

Petition - A method to request in-game assistance from a customer service representative.

Player Character - This is the game character controlled by the person playing the game. See also Avatar.

Spawn - Appearing of NPCs or game resource in a location within the game.

Subscribers - Registered game players.

Adapted from MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES AND THEIR VIRTUAL ECONOMIES by Gnume

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Virtual property banned on eBay

eBay is now delisting all auctions for 'virtual artifacts' from the site. First reported on Slashdot , game currency, items, and accounts/characters are being actively delisted from eBay. However SecondLife was spared in from this delisting. The rationale behind this ban was as Mr. Hani Durzy, speaking for eBay, explained due to the 'legal complexities' surrounding virtual property. Mr Duzy pointed out: "The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner." "For the overall health of the marketplace" the company felt that the proper course of action, after considerable contemplation, was to ban the sale of these items outright. There are a few conflicting points to bring out here: First most if not all MMOGs encourage users to exchange virtual properties, do transactions within the game environments. Where's the legal complexity/ intellectural property rights issu
Read more

Growth of Gaming Industry

Image
From " The Growth of the Computer and Video Game Industry " by Adam Bryzak : An interesting correlation between the computer and video game industry against the movie and music industry brought up was brought up in this article. It was compared that sales figures of the games in 2005 amount to $7.0 billion , closing up the gap against the U.S. box office which was $8.99 billion and the recording industry’s sales at $12.3 billion. Over the past 10 years , the gaming industry has evolved and growth so much that it is now a competitive entertainment medium against the traditional businesses. Through records, the gameing industry has also almost tripled dollar sales since 1996 however the recording industry has decreased sales since 1996 by more than $0.2 billion. Is the gaming industry becoming a threat to the movie and music industry? Most people wouldn't think so. I believe that all these industries are inseparable, movie inspire games, games need music, music inspires m
Read more

Hype of MMO and non-game virtual worlds

Image
Multiverse , maker of a free MMO-creation platform has plan to bring FireFly to life by turning The universe of Firefly into an virtual world environment. FireFly the US science fiction TV series that was the Star Trek of 21st-century sci-fi fandom is one of the first TV series to be developed into a MMOG. Even the entertainment media industry is acknowledging the potential of MMOGs. We see virtual worlds as an extraordinarily promising new entertainment medium." - Adam Kline, Fox Licensing's vice president of media enterprises With that Multiverse was contracted to take this project off. The potential of MMOGs is huge and according to sources some 7,000 development teams had registered for the Multiverse beta and more than 150 are making MMOs and non-game virtual worlds on a full-time basis. Considering this being still an expanding industry, it is a significant number of developers and with that many people going into it, it can't be wrong that the virtual industr
Read more