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Buffy Online Gaming: Some Assembly Required?

Yesterday I was talking about a Buffy-universe immersive online game – whether it could hope to make any money and whether or not it could hope to be successful or interesting. Since then, the debate’s really taken hold – particularly on the sites of Dan Hon and his brother Adrian – both of whom were involved to varying degrees with the cloudmakers that was responsible in large part for the community that grew up around the AI game. The sheer scale and intelligence of their responses is quite beyond my ability to summarise, so instead I thought I’d link through to the individual posts in as-close-to-chronological order as I could manage, which brief thoughts as and when they occurred to me:

  • Dan Hon’s “I’ve Got A Theory”
    Probably the best thing published on the web in the last twenty-four hours, Dan Hon’s article (because it has to be seen as such) is probably the best online guide to some of the costs and techniques involved in a good immersive interactive game that there is.
  • Adrian’s replies
    While Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, is undoubtedly a nice guy who would give this sort of game a second thought, I assume that Fox holds all the rights to Buffy…”
  • Bronwen joins in
    “Think of it this way: last week, ratings for BtVS were 3.8/6. To put that into perspective, JAG won the time slot with ratings of 11.0/16. Now, make any sort of guesstimate whatsoever about how many of those BtVS watchers would go online to read something about the show, and compare that to the JAG percentage. “
  • Dan Hon’s “Once More With Feeling”
    A follow-up to Adrian’s post, attempting once more to explain why such a game might be a practical thing to attempt.

I can’t emphasize enough how interesting Dan’s first post above is, or how insightful it is. Read immediately. Useful stuff…