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Virtual worlds increasingly generated by software, not made by artists Here's Far Cry 2 technical director Dominic Guay talking about the importance of "procedural content generation" for massive online games -- basically, using software to create worlds that had previously been hand-built by artists. It makes a lot of sense, but what fascinates me is the narrative possibilities for fiction about games: these procedural systems have or will shortly attain a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict their outcomes. It's the Halting Problem -- worlds where software off the rails could generate impossible situations, upside-down worlds, treasure heaps, cowardly monsters and brave grass. I'm thinking especially of abandonware worlds where only a few players remain and the gamemasters have stopped paying close attention. What odd maps might be drawn as the die-hards explore the outermost reaches of these worlds? "Another big benefit [of procedural content creation] is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn't do otherwise," Guay continued. "It opens up innovation fields. If you're creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you're doing, and you can bake in some limitations." "Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree," he said by way of example. "It's actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices." Creating those tools allowed artists to define trees based on characteristics gleaned from extensive photo reference, more than to create a number of discrete tree variants based on those references... When a team member made a seemingly minor after-hours change to the ecosystem, it ended up increasing the asset density of the game world by 25 percent -- resulting in more than a few headaches. "If I'm tweaking a jungle procedurally, maybe I'll just tweak it in my test map," Guay said. "But when I integrate it into the game, somewhere in the 50 square kilometer game world, maybe in just three small areas, it might cause problems, and we won't find those problems until QA uncovers them." MIGS: Far Cry 2's Guay On The Importance Of Procedural Content (via /.)... FCC Transition Team co-chairs are virtual worlds nuts, too Wagner James Au sez, "Not only are [Obama's FCC Transition Team leaders] Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford great Net Neutrality advocates, they're also into online games/virtual worlds-- Werbach belongs to not one but two WoW guilds, and Crawford calls herself a "big fan" of Second Life. Agreeing with his guildmaster Joi Ito, Werbach's also a big supporter of WoW as a model for the future of work and software development." “What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world. I think MMOGs will be, at a minimum, a significant testbed for these new technologies, because users see a direct benefit and are willing to experiment with new things.” Unsurprisingly, this perspective extends to virtual worlds like Second Life, which has been an important component in Werbach’s Supernova technology conference. On her own blog, Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.) Obama’s FCC Transition Team Co-chair a WoW Player See also: Net Neutrality fighters to head Obama's FCC transition team... IT Crowd third season starts on Friday! Hurrah! This Friday marks the return of The IT Crowd, my favorite sitcom/nerd media EVAR, back for a triumphant third season! Although Reynholm jumped out of a high window in the last series, his playboy son Douglas (Matt Berry) shows every sign of carrying on the family name (plundering the pension fund, putting flakes of gold in the drinking water, etc) and more or less takes over tonight's very funny opening episode. That leaves our IT-department trio of geeky Moss, lazy Roy and uptight Jen slightly overshadowed. But the sweet scene where Moss and Roy try some role-play to help Moss deal with park bullies just about makes up for it. The IT Crowd (Thanks, Alan!)... LIFE and Google bring us 10 million historic images LIFE and Google have teamed up to put 10,000,000 historic images online -- about 20 percent of the images are live now. The Disneyland images are great -- here's the old Submarine Ride. LIFE photo archive hosted by Google (Thanks, Neil and Slashdot!)... BBtv: SELK Bag, Boing Boing Gadgets review with Joel Johnson This week, Boing Boing tv is debuting regular product reviews produced with Joel and the crew, and we'll blog 'em here on Gadgets first. What better way to kick the series off than a lulz-filled analysis of the Lippi Selk Bag, a sleeping bag with arms and legs that makes our Joel look like a bespectacled Gumby? The funky-chunky "sleepwear system" ranges in price from $169 to $399. I imagine they'd really come in handy at one of those outdoor all-nighter raves, unless you get lucky -- interpersonal intra-bag intercourse might be logistically difficult in these. Tell Joel what you think of his Gumby impersonation in the Boing Boing Gadgets comment thread for this video. And here is a direct MP4 link, if you prefer a downloadable video to the Flash embed above....

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