Regruntled.com

I’ve been playing Evony, a massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game, much in the spirit of Age of Empires and Civilization.  Late middle ages, pikes and bows against knights.  Catapults and trebuchets.  Massively as in 100 planets with 100,000 players each.

In other online games, such as World of Warcraft, a black market arose where people in low-wage countries played the game, accumulated resources, and sold the resources to other players on eBay.  Evony co-opts the black market by making it part of the game.  You can buy game resources directly from Evony with real money using a credit card.

This raises some interesting strategic questions (it’s a strategy game, after all).  The game is “free” in that you can play without spending real money.  It’s also clear that spending real money gives a player a significant advantage.  Would I pay $30 to win the game?  Yes, of course!  Would I pay $30 to lose to someone who spent $60?  Not so much.  And of course I have no idea how many people are paying for advantages because presumably they wouldn’t advertise the fact.

Some reviews:

• Ebony - a patchwork of stolen parts
• Ebony

This is pretty cool. I was actually able to follow the instructions and make something that worked on the first try. I used 4-inch squares of paper and 2-inch packing tape, just about right.

It’s not clear from the video, but you end up with 6 tetrahedrons joined edge to edge in a circle, sort of an angular torus that turns inside out.  The faces of the tetrahedrons are colored so you see 6 same-colored faces at the same time, and the color changes as you turn the torus inside out.

Bill Turnbull of Jakarta has an automated solitaire program that he uses to test different strategies.  As a computer nerd, I can appreciate what he is doing.  And yet, after setting up his program and watching it grind through game after game, I am struck by the hilarity of the whole idea of automating solitaire.

Bill’s program shares a web site with artist Rozi Turnbull, presumably Bill’s wife.  She describes herself:

I am the middle child of a musical and artistic family from Dorking in Surrey, England.

So.  Solitaire, programming, art, and Dorking are all connected.  The Googleverse is abundant.