Kill Ten Rats

PAC-TXT:

You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.

From the front page:

Wth?! Why would anyone invest the time and effort to build such a useless game?
Well, I had just got back from a party where the concept of a Pac-Man + Zork hybrid came up as a joke. So, being 2am with a little alcohol in my system, I thought it’d be funny to code it up

: Zubon

There is a long-standing question of how law deals with virtual property. Is in-game theft theft? Does a raid produce wealth of a taxable value? And then there are the questions that come from RMT, since we can translate in-game values to US dollars pretty easily. (Last weekend’s math: a set of City of Heroes’ new purple enhancement recipes was worth ~$200 at the going consignment house/RMT rates.)

Have you ever wondered if having virtual gold could get you arrested? Last month, the US government raided a group that set up its own hard currency, under the claim that having any competing currency to the US dollar is a federal crime and a form of counterfeit (no word yet about attempts to enforce this on people using loonies and pesos). Unlike your raids from the weekend, this one came away with literal tons of gold, silver, and copper coins “medallions.”

At what point does in-game currency become a competing currency that the government will attempt to seize? We already have at least one example of meatspace prostitution for cyberspace gold. Second Life has been bobbing and weaving about its relationship to property, but Linden dollars are more or less fully convertible to US dollars, and Project Entropia has bragged about how its currency connects to out-of-game value. Most games even refer to their currencies as gold coins or dollars.

The Secret Service has not let “it’s just a game” get in the way before. Nor are the Lindens protected by operating outside the US. Note that the IRS considers barter and in-kind exchanges to be taxable income, so the raid could also be done on the grounds of tax evasion.

: Zubon

I am reading Douglas Hofstadter, and I am to his chapter “The Location of Meaning.” He argues that messages have three levels of meaning: frame, outer, and inner. The frame meaning is “this is a message”: you must recognize that there is something to decode here. The outer meaning is how to decode the message, to get from marks on a page to what the writer was trying to express. The inner meaning is what the writer was trying to express. To read a message in Japanese, you must (1) realize that it is writing, not a bunch of little pictures; (2) realize that it is Japanese (and be able to translate it); and (3) read it.

There are many puzzles yet to be solved because the fact that they are puzzles is not explicit. Games Magazine hides a puzzle in each issue, perhaps in the page layout or the structure of another puzzle. At least they tell you that there is a game afoot, if only you can find it. The titular Da Vinci Code is hidden in plain sight because nothing says, “This is a code!”

Continue reading Obeying Outer Meanings

As a note to occasional Kingdom of Loathing players, the holidays are on again. You have your advent calendar and a new moon is visiting. The pirate cove has been revamped with a new quest. Really, I’m not the guy to ask about all this, since I am deeply into CoX at the moment and not paying much attention to KoL, but I thought I would mention. At least pop by to get your holiday candy at some point.

: Zubon