The Telegraph reports today that Playstation Home has been hacked, less than a week since the launch of the open beta.  These hacks allow users to manipulate the environment on their personal machines to display content other than intended, as well as providing access to download any file they want from Sony’s webservers.

More scary, however, is a hack allowing users to upload or delete any file they want from the Home Server.  This presents the opportunity for hackers to send malware to every single Home-enabled PS3 on the planet, or to perform DDOS attacks using PS3s.

That’s pretty much the worst case scenario for a console environment, short of leaking customer PIFs and credit card numbers.  Sounds like Home needs a security review before they let it out of Beta.

You know, in addition to the fact that it’s basically useless.

Club Nintendo has finally launched in North America (or at least in the US and Canada).  You can go visit it here.  If you’re compulsive like me, you probably already have a “My Nintendo” account where you’ve been registering your games for some reason, in which case you can migrate that account to the new Club Nintendo site.

Unfortunately, logging into the site after you’ve migrated that account seems to be booched right now.  It either just sits there, swirling a ring around, or tells me I don’t exist.  This is probably because the entire free world is hammering on that site all at once, and hopefully it will be fixed soon.

I can’t remember if I’ve ranted about my feelings on Twitter in the past, but Penny Arcade tends to sum them up.  Nevertheless, last week I decided to sign up, mostly because I don’t want to be the guy that bitches about something he’s never tried (MySpace still fails hard).

The first thing I will say about it is that, despite the horrid banality, Twitter is extremely addictive.  There are folks who mostly write about whatever boring shit they happen to be doing, but you don’t follow those folks.  Unless of course they’re celebrities.  There is definite VOYEURISM going on in Twitterland, and Voyeurism is something that hooks into the general population with serrated barbs.

When email became widely available, people stopped sending letters, because it was easier to send shorter, more frequent emails, rather than go through the trouble of using snail mail.  When IM became widely available, email became relegated to text that either was longer or more complex, or needed to be ‘on record’.  Instant messaging means extremely short messages and conversations can be played out in real time.  Twitter (and derivatives) is another mutation of this.  Conversations are essentially asynchronous, but they are also public, which combines the traits of both IM and blogging.  You write about things that are odd or banal because you can, and because they’re not directed at anyone in particular.  Things that would never be said in IM get twittered because there’s no inherent expectation that a specific person may care, just that somebody _may_ care.  Likewise because you can write only 140 characters, things that would be too short to warrant a blog entry (or would be off topic) get written on Twitter.

This creates a very odd noosphere.

My twitter feed is an motley assortment of Facebook-like updates on what my friends are doing, game industry tidbits, and bizzare arcana, mostly coming out of Warren Ellis and Lore Sjöberg.  Because it can be read from or updated on the fly from your phone, it provides a sort of constant link to the interwebs, like a methadone drip for a heroine addict.

I guess I’ll be hanging around there for a bit longer.

I’ve always wanted to go to the Child’s Play Charity Auction, and since I’ve now moved to Seattle, it became a possibility for the first time.  Armed with several hundreds of dollars, I planned to carve out a stake for myself in gaming memorabilia and meet a few new folks.  I definitely had the chance to do the latter, and as for winning some auctions, I learned a few things.  Like that these folks are not fucking around.

The silent auction consisted of probably around a hundred lots of various items, gaming packages, paintings, often signed by the developers.  I was easily outbid in all of these, in one case by a rather intimidating ten year old girl who had staked out a pair of cthulhu plushies from the Steve Jackson game Munchkin Cthulhu.  Any bid was promply replied with by a higher bid from this sniper.  I’m pretty sure she was actually Kristin Lindsay’s daughter.

Chasened, I headed into the Live Auction, hoping to maybe pull through in that arena.  You may have seen the comic for today.

That’s not exactly how it went… exactly.  The price ended up being more around the $4500 mark.  That’s a lot for an awesome statue.  One dude paid literally ten grand to be immortalized in a Penny Arcade comic.  Another paid $4000 to be invited to the Penny Arcade office warming party.  Jerry offered to write a song about how awesome you are, and sing it at PAX.  That cost a cool $4300 as well.

Now, my personal favorite was an object you’ve probably never heard of before.  These are made by a local designer, and truely are a phenomenon.  The Sultan Gaming Table is essentially the epitome of table top gaming surfaces.  It has four player stations, each with a compartment for your books, a holder for your drinks, and a bay for your dice.  The central surface has several different acrylic sheets with hex grids or whatever that you can sandwich your maps underneath to protect them.  The whole thing is recessed so you can put leaves over top of it and eat dinner without taking apart your game.

It also doesn’t fit in your house.  I think ownership of one of those puppies contractually obligates you to build an underground lift that it will emerge out of after pulling on a candelabra, like in Goldfinger.

Overall, around 50k was raised during the live auction alone, and the night overall raised about $200,000

If you’re a gamer, and you’ve got some cash to throw around, the Child’s Play Auction is a definite must, and I think I’ll be attending a little more prepared next year.

As NXE has launched and I spend less time at work, I’m trying to concentrate more time on side projects and game demos.  The first of these is what I call the Friendship Game.  Not all of the below features have been implemented as of right now.

I’m planning to revamp the site a bit to have a space for all my designs and prototypes, but for now you can find the current version here.

Technical Bits

The Friendship Game is built in Silverlight 2.0, using the Farseer Physics Engine.  The ball interactions are performed using custom springs that emulate electrostatic dynamics rather than spring dynamics.

Controls

You have a colored ball.  Your ball lives in a large triangle.  By clicking and dragging on your ball, you can pull your ball in the direction of the mouse.  Clicking on other balls will create a linkage between your ball and the other ball.

Rules

Balls may attach themselves to other balls.  Balls score points for each other ball that has elected to attach itself to that ball (e.g. if ball A attaches to ball B, ball B earns points).  Balls have a limited number of attachments that can be made at once.  If two balls become sufficiently distant, any attachments will be severed.

Balls have color.  Different colored balls interacted electrostatically, either by attraction or repulsion.

Each ball has a particular region of the map which is its goal region.  Balls score points for being in their goal region.  This region may change shape or location over time.

Balls also get points for being near other balls.  The amount of points allocated increases with the number of balls and the proximity of the other balls.

Concept

This is a game about personalities and relationships. 

As each ball is trying to maximize its own ‘happiness’, there are conflicting forces between life goals (regions of the map) and maintaining close relationships (attachments) to other balls.

A ball may, for example, be forced to destroy relationships with another group of balls in order to pursue life goals (and rejoin other balls with similiar life goals).

Dynamics of groups may change depending on the introduction of new balls or the removal of existing ones.  For example, in a group of balls with colors that are all attractive, some of them may be ousted completely, or pushed to the periphery by the introduction of a new ball that is only attractive with some of them.