These pages will be maintained by Gwendal Simon and Remi Sussan.

To put the trend toward P2P-based virtual worlds into the context of gaming developments, please read this introduction by Gwendal Simon.

Resources

Key Articles

Games as P2P Utopia: Alexander Galloway on the World of Warcraft and Utopia

Game Modding and Education: excerpts of a thesis on using entertainment for eduction, that goes beyond the failed edutainment model.

The Power of Play: essay by Pat Kane for Soundings magazine.

Short intro but with lots of links to critical and independent gaming culture.

Key Blogs

Recommended blog: The Play Ethic of Pat Kane [1] Watch or listen to Pat Kane on the Play Ethic

Key Books

• Pat Kane reviews the book Synthetic Worlds [2]

• McKenzie Wark, whose Hacker Manifesto is a classic for our times, has published a new draft book open for discussion, on Gamer Theory, at http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

• Ed Halter's book, From Sun Tzu to Xbox "a definitive history of the longstanding relationship between games and military culture, from wargaming's roots in ancient civilizations, to the Cold War development of computing for battle, to a recent crop of Pentagon-funded shoot-'em-ups, big-budget commercial titles and homemade hacks".Website at : http://www.fromsuntzutoxbox.com/

Key Tags

Delicious Tag: P2P Gaming ; Play Ethic

Various Links

Known Distributed Systems

• NPSNET (Naval Postgraduate Scholl of Moterey)
• Spline (Mistsubishi Elecronic Research Laboratory)
• Massive (University of Nottingham)
• Continuum (France Telecom R&D)
• Score (INRIA)
• Open Source Metaverse Project
• Croquet Project
• Virtual Object System
• VREng: Interactive and Distributed 3D Application over the Internet using Unicast or Multicast

Studies on Gamers

• The Psychology of MMORPGs
• The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments

Some Open Source 3D Tools

• Ogre, open source real time 3D rendering engine
• OpenSceneGraph, open source high peformance 3D graphics toolkit
• Blender, open source software for 3D modeling and rendering
• Xfrog, a procedural 3d organic modeling and animation software program
• X3D, Open Standards XML-enabled 3D file format
• Panda 3D, a free animation system in Python, created by Disney and the Carnegie Mellon University

P2P Gaming Concepts