Until this week, I thought spawn was a word that probably went out of style in academic literature with the scholastics and certainly after Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation. In the last week however, I have read half a dozen articles that use the word. It may be bad science in real life, but the rules of the real world don't apply to videogames, and thus the semi-random spawning of characters.
I also came across the word indeedy yesterday. To the best of my knowledge, this is not a real word, though I don't think it is a typo either. The "Y" key is not near the "D" key or the "N" key (the last two keys pressed by either hand when typing the word "indeed"). But when repeated twice, placing emphasis on the first syllable and using my very best traveling apothecary voice, it is a delightful sounding word.
Check out Simcountry. This appears to be a graphic-lite virtual world that tauts its economic properties. The game model seems to encourage the industrious real-world rewards of successful game play and encourages in-world economic transactions as well as inter-world trade between the game's virtual world and the player's real world. The game both a nation state simulation and a corporate raiders simulation. This seems worth checking out further.
From Penny Arcade:
John Koeing of IT Manager's Journal wrote an article discussing 7 open source business models:
Frank Heckler also wrote an older article about open source business models.
Ganesh Prasad muses over open source-onomics.
A post by Gonzalo Frasca at Watercooler Games suggests:
We should make games about anything and everything, including the more unspeakable acts. Playing with fire is good, even if we get badly burned.
My comment (cross posted):
The marketplace of video games is a creative update to Mill's marketplace of ideas. I am intrigued.
I have my doubts about truth's ability to win in the end and about economic explanations of teleology. This for another time...
My doubts do not mean that certain subject matter should be inherently off limits for a game. Just as you can use words to discuss any subject in a meaningful way, you can use the gaming medium as well. I just think the game developer has a moral obligation to structure her game as carefully as the moral rhetorician must choose her words.