Altberg told me that they’re looking at options to turn this into real money one day. Users can buy designs from their peers using the apps’s longstanding in-game currency, which, along with real money, can be used to buy new kits of parts, from dinosaurs to G.I. With their most recent release, Linden Lab has taken the sharing aspects to the next level. Some people create visual art some, narrative. I watched this firsthand at Maxis, and it’s clear that Blocksworld is touching that same nerve. Sharing your creations, learning from creations you download, telling stories with them, and recruiting help from others to augment your skill set can create a powerful community. More interesting than the creativity tools, to me, is the online sharing community they’re building among kids, again something that Mitchel Resnick considers to be a key component of Scratch. I confess to not being very adept with Blocksworld, where you build static, dynamic, and anthropomorphized objects out of chunky blocks and guide them through a somewhat floaty physics engine, but never underestimate an artist’s determination: a browse through their highlighted videos is inspiring. I guess visual programming environments aimed at kids end up with analogous designs.
Programming your Blocksworld story uses an interface mildly reminiscent of MIT’s Scratch, though the Linden folks I talked to weren’t familiar with it. When I spoke to CEO Ebbe Altberg about the app, which Linden Lab targets to the 6-12 age range, I was immediately struck by its similarity to the wonderful Galactic Adventures add-on for Spore: build or download creatures and vehicles and control them in small stories where players navigate actions and dialog trees. But Blocksworld has been out for a couple of years now, building momentum on a slow burn. I had, by coincidence, downloaded the app just the week before when Children’s Technology Review gave it a rave mention. While my recent visit to Linden Lab was focused on Project Sansar, I also chatted with them about Linden’s current iOS title, Blocksworld.
0 kommentar(er)
