Inside my mind

Just a note before we begin, the planet Antario was created by my Venture (writing class for dyslexic students) teacher & me way back in 1995. I'm using this as an example of a fictional nation. Also this blog will attempt to stay bias free.  Outside the Spiral More than likely you're fed up with the way things are run in RL (gamerspeak for real life) and think you can do better if you're handed the reins. Or maybe you just want to escape reality and create your own city/world/planet/universe where you are the ruler/deity/sovereign. There are games for that. On Facebook for example, the Zynga games of Pioneer Trail, Castleville, Cityville and any other *.Ville that the red dog logo'd company can come up with, allow the player to create their own virtual "Homestead" (Pioneer Trail), "Kingdom" (Castleville), "City" (Cityville) where with the help of free gifts from neighbors and the friendly NPCs giving you quests to advance the st

Just a side note before we begin, any entries that have KIFF: as the first word are part of Keeping it Family Friendly.  This week we'll be in and out of the Spiral. Outside the Spiral Gamers are able to help scientists come up with cures for cancer... there is a game called Foldit  where gamers can use their visual spatial skills, honed by many hours of gaming, to fold proteins. Since diseases and a slew of other organic stuff is made up of protiens, one tiny change in the structure of the protien could alter the molecule and change a disease into a cure. you have to download the client to start playing though. (for more detail please click on the word Foldit, it will take you to the website)   Last year, the horrible earthquake and tsunami attacked Japan. The Zynga game Farmville let you plant Daikon radishes on your farms. Each daikon planted raised money to help the Nihon-jin (Japanese people) it was part of the Japan Earthquake relief event  (needless to say, sinc

I just want to give a shout out to the Girl Scouts of the USA! I was a member of both Circle T & Sierra Cascade councils. (both have changed their names now) in the 1990's. Congratulations on 100 years!

This week we'll drift away from the spiral in our discussion on Crowdsourcing. in a nutshell crowd sourcing is what happens when companies ask the general public for their input on future content. A huge example of this is Capcom_Unity's Devroom.  The Development Room or Devroom was created in 2010 by the Dev team to have the Megaman Legends fans input their ideas for the, now cancelled as of 7/19/2011, upcoming Nintendo 3DS game Megaman Legends 3. The purpose of the site was to have the fans signup as Servbots and participate in contests, on the forums ect. The fans would give their insights and while nothing majorly plot related was disclosed, fans could interact with the developers via UStream and play the first Legends game. The UStreams were hosted by Gregaman and Snow. This blogger herself was/is Servbot #002276 While fan interaction was a really innovative idea, Capcom never gave MML3 the greenlight and ultimately canceled the project. Capcom cancelled th

Disclaimer: Kingsisle and Dipity.com are not affiliated with each other. This week we won't focus as much on the game play of Wizard101 but on at least one way to write your character's biography. Wizard101 doesn't require its players to keep bios on their characters. It's a children's card game based game after all. Kids generally don't like to have to keep time-lines or journals on virtual characters. One website that could help is  http://www.dipity.com/   Dipity lets users create timelines about absolutely anything. The dates range from 9999BC to 9999 AD You just input the date an event happened, and any video/pictures that go along with that event. It's similar to the time-line on Facebook. For example, if I were to create a timeline of my first wizard Jessica Starweilder, lvl 70 Storm. event #1: Started playing Wizard101. event #2: Jessica Starweilder is born...  I would keep adding events pertainent to that wrizard's life. The most