Winning and losing

One of last year's stickiest, fastest-growing, most thought-provoking, and purely enjoyable online gaming properties was Bogglific -- the homegrown, free, networked version of Boggle on Facebook.

There are many creative ways that Hasbro could have handled its intellectual property concerns without alienating the thousands of passionate users who used Bogglific every day.

Sadly, as of today, they went with a plain ol' cease and desist.

From the Bogglific home page:

Bogglific to Close Down :-(
Hasbro, Inc. has sent a DMCA notification notice to Facebook regarding Bogglific. They claim it violates their trademark, and violates copyright over the Boggle rules.

I'm no lawyer, and can't see how it violates copyright. But I have neither the time nor the money to fight this, and Facebook has given me a grace period of 48 hours to shut the application down voluntarily.

You might be interested to know Scrabulous is in the same boat, but they have the resources to fight their battle. Hopefully they will be successful.

Sorry, guys. It was great fun while it lasted. You're a fantastic bunch, and it's a pity that Hasbro doesn't realise that Bogglific helped its Boggle sales by introducing all your Facebook friends to the game, not hindered it. That is sadly how the litigious US works.

Note that the Bogglific forum will be deleted by Facebook, so you may wish to post further discussions to the Bogglific Addicts group (which is not run by me.)

BP and EA bring climate change to SimCity

I love the concept. Eager to see whether the game's climate change models are realistic, but at least it's a start. Thanks to Dan for the link.

Sustainability and the Metaverse

I attended the first 3pointD Think Tank on Sunday to discuss Sustainability and the Metaverse. It was a good night, with insightful debate on community building, interoperability and standards, and "dirtworld" sustainability. I was of course most passionate about the latter:

"Group #4 discussed the challenges of making the back-end infrastructure that runs the metaverse more environmentally friendly, and also whether there were ways to use the metaverse to make the rest of the world more '“green,'” including virtual conferencing and the like that might cut down on fuel and other costs. One of the ways to accomplish the later might be to speed adoption of metaversal platforms by improving interoperability or finding a 'killer app' that promoted use (just as Amazon.com and eBay have promoted Web use). It was agreed, though, that despite past attempts at things like '“the paperless office,'” resource use has only continued to grow."

For complete notes from the meeting, check out 3pointD.

WoW as third place

NYT article on World of Warcraft.