Spreading the Pun Fun; Plus, Weird News in MMORPGs

Aki Järvinen released his GameGame, a card game about making games (along the lines of the Understanding Comics meta-approach), which is available for download here. Also available for download is the following line from andrew at gta:

Good deal! I haven’t meta game this cool in a while. ha ha. what a card.

I wanted to share. You know, in case there weren’t enough puns in the world.

The other big news right now seems to be Greg Costikyan’s debut of Manifesto Games, a distribution and marketing company for independent game developers (Motto: “PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Retail Chains!”).

Meanwhile, two things I meant to blog last week, but never found the time (so, really, just old news to most). First of all, the characters of World of Warcraft have a plague on their hands. I think it’s been mostly fixed now, but apparently characters contracted a disease during a battle with the god of blood Hakkar during an new instanced adventure (named Zul’Gurub, for those interested in specifics). The disease, a curse called Corrupted Blood, is contagious and passes to nearby characters to spread the infection. The disease escaped the confines of the instanced event and got pulled back into the towns, effectively spreading plague-like from character to character. [report from shacknews]

File that under “unintentional events resulting from complex code” (a favorite topic of mine that one day might shape up into an article: “Putting the Wi in Weird: Decoding Complexity”).

The second MMORPG news bit: the September issue of PC Gamer included an article about Eve Online, in which it described how the Guiding Hand Social Club infiltrated and, after a year of careful planning, completed an enormous heist valued at about 17,000 US dollars (after converting assets from in-game currency and goods). The article is a good read (and was once online, but has since been removed). TerraNova has an old thread on the topic here.