Virtual Worlds

Almost every week for the last few years, it seems, I've gotten a press release or a pitch touting some company's great new Facebook games network or kids' virtual world.

And why not? Companies like Zynga and Playfish are making money hand over fist with their collections of massively popular social games, and 2D Flash games aimed at children like Club Penguin, Webkinz, Habbo Hotel, and others have garnered vast amounts of virtual world investment dollars in recent years.

But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

To find the answer, one has only to do what investigative journalists were always trained to do: follow the money. But while Facebook games like FarmVille and Who Has the Biggest Brain, and social worlds for kids or teens like Gaia Online make financial sense, they aren't all that satisfying intellectually.

After all, while Second Life had no end of technical problems and was about as inviting to mainstream audiences as obscure European philosophy, it had a complex economy, a deep social structure, sophisticated politics and always seemed, to me, at least, as the jumping off point for truly groundbreaking technology.… Read more

World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday announced that it has begun closed beta testing for its real-time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.

StarCraft II has been a long time coming. It is the sequel to the 1998 hit, StarCraft. The new game will feature an entirely new 3D graphics engine, and like its predecessor, will focus on the battle between the protoss, terrans, and zerg. Blizzard said StarCraft II should launch sometime in the first half of 2010.

Already, the company said in a release, there are thousands of people in the beta test. One of … Read more

Back from a stint in outer space--literally--famed video game designer Richard Garriott has returned to his roots with a new social gaming start-up, Portalarium.

Known as "Lord British" and considered one of the industry's legends for his pioneering work on Ultima and Ultima Online, as well as his leading roles on Lineage, City of Heroes, and Tabula Rasa, Garriott most recently grabbed headlines by paying eight figures for a trip aboard a Russian rocket to the International Space Station.

Now, Garriott has come back home, literally and figuratively. On Wednesday, he formally announced his next venture, a … Read more

Last May, I began a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield about Tiny Speck, the company he and three partners had just started and the game they were working on.

That game, which they announced on Tuesday is called Glitch, has been in the works since last March and much has changed about it in the interim--the artistic styles, the back story, the core game mechanic and the size of the team building it.

Glitch is a social online game that takes place in the imaginations of 11 ancient giants and tasks players with essentially growing an … Read more

On Tuesday, as reported first by CNET, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's start-up Tiny Speck announced its new online social game, Glitch.

As described on Glitch.com, "It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the 'glitch'--a grave danger of disemprobablization. This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and … Read more

Last July, TechCrunch ran an item about Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's recent tweet that his new company was hiring.

"Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it," he tweeted. "Work with me." And based on that tiny little missive, his until-then unknown start-up Tiny Speck was flooded with job applicants hoping they join Butterfield as he and his partners made a second attempt at catching lightning in the Web 2.0 bottle.

Of course, no one knew at that point what Tiny Speck was up to, beyond the fact that the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.

For nearly a year, they'd been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they'd sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.

But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two … Read more

For a 10-year-old, The Sims has had quite a lifetime.

Launched on February 4, 2000, The Sims has proven one of the industry's most enduring and popular game franchises. Offering players the ability to live a virtual life, the game has launched a slew of sequels, traveled to different countries, and rewarded Electronic Arts with $2.5 billion in sales.

The Sims, Sims 2, Sims 3, and its various other spin-offs are available on a variety of platforms, including PCs, Macs, game consoles, portable devices, and smartphones. The original game can now be found in 60 different countries and … Read more

Update at 2:10 p.m. PDT: This story has been modified to reflect both Jon Landau and James Cameron's membership on the advisory board of virtual world platform developer Multiverse.

Since the release of his massive hit "Avatar," director James Cameron has gotten plenty of deserved attention for his filmmaking innovations, having invented a camera system that captured live footage of his actors and integrated it immediately into fleshed-out scenes from his fictional world of Pandora.

But movies may not be the only medium Cameron's innovation is pushing toward the future. In fact, the technology … Read more