The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Games such as The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Ultima Online, and the new World of Warcraft are huge virtual worlds where characters are free to roam, interacting with whoever and whatever they wish. This leads to interesting situations; and if you've already spent $60 - $70 on a new video game, you might as well use it to make something new for yourself to enjoy. Many new video games have a make movie feature that people have been using to record their games and to create short animated films called Machinima. The Grand Theft Auto series of games have been soundly criticized for being incredibly violent, but one of the most famous machinima movies was created on this platform. My Trip to Liberty City is a short movie produced from the point of view of a Canadian tourist visiting this place. Now it has been taken to the next level. The Sims is the most popular game ever sold and two people are using it to make a soap opera called Strangerhood. They have set up a few stereotypical characters: The Princess, Wacky Dude, Army Guy, Grouchy Old Man, and several others. These hapless characters get into all sorts of troubles. So far there are three episodes available for download. At about 6 Ð 8 minutes each, made by the same guys who created the Red vs. Blue series using the characters from Halo, they are funny and worth the download. Out of this, an even stranger rumour that has surfaced. Sims TV is supposed to be on the horizon. A TV channel which will give viewers the chance to watch The Sims world and even interact with the characters in some way. This would obviously be a first and so far it is only a rumour, but it will be interesting to see it develop. Another big piece of news from the gaming world is that EA and ESPN have signed a 15 year contract. This contract, worth a reported $150 million, gives EA the sole right to use the ESPN logo and all tie-ins such as camera footage and celebrities for the next decade and a half. A long time for any type of contract, in the computer world, 15 years is forever. Amazing that either side of this deal wanted a time period of that length. A last piece of news from the gaming world is the auction of a gaming farm of computers on ebay. An engineer owned a farm of around 12 computers which he programmed to work in the game Ultima Online so that his series of characters would do nothing but harvest gold day and night without him even having to be there. He then auctioned off the gold to other players. He published his story on ebay, along with the fact that in the previous 12 months he claims to have made over $106,000 U.S. with this setup. Playerauctions.com is an interesting site to check out even if you are not interested in games. Here people auction off all sorts of strange items their players have acquired in the games they play. Magic wands, mansions, hordes of gold, and designer jeans all for use in online games can be bought. Someone has even paid $26,500 U.S. to buy an entire island in the game Project Entopia. At last word, the buyer, identified only by the name Deathifier, had not decided if he was going to keep the place to himself or auction off oceanfront lots for a profit as the deal also included taxation, mining and hunting rights. The virtual invades reality more each day. ([email protected])
