Here are the pictures from the blessed event. Note the lack of vomit and the lack of upskirt shots on the fabulous wedding dress.

The bride and groom, New York couple Noah Fulmore and Erin Finnegan, are huge sci-fi fans according to a June 2 press conference the couple held to discuss their extraordinary wedding plans. They wanted to do something sci-fi-ish and weird for the wedding — so who better to oblige them than the creator of Tabula Rasa?

The zero-g ceremony was facilitated by the Zero G Corporation, a federally-approved tourist flight service that simulates spaceflight by flying in parabolic arcs between 36,000 and 24,000 feet. (Flying up, then dropping down and then going back up again.) The flight costs $5,200 per person.

Couple married in zero gravity [Reuters]

Sources tell us that today many of the Tabula Rasa team were let go. The plug has also been pulled on the game, according to both our sources and the official Tabula Rasa website:

To the Tabula Rasa Community,

Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we've achieved that goal. Tabula Rasa has some unique features that make it fun and very different from every other MMO out there. Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected. The development team has worked hard to improve the game since launch, but the game never achieved the player population we hoped for.

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009.

Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while. For more details about what we are doing for Tabula Rasa players, please click here.

Stay tuned for more information. We thank you for your loyal support of the game and encourage you to take us up on the benefits we're offering Tabula Rasa players.

The Tabula Rasa Team

Our sources tell us that only a handful of people from the original Tabula Rasa team will be sticking around to maintain the game until it is shut down.

Update: NCsoft spokesman David Swofford confirmed to Kotaku that the game has been shut down and that there will be lay-offs.

"We’re going to be scaling down the TR team in preparation for the end of live service. But for now Brian, we currently don’t know how many people will be affected by that."

Horrible times. Horrible times.

SPACE ADVENTURES’ CLIENT, PRIVATE ASTRONAUT RICHARD GARRIOTT, RETURNS TO EARTH AFTER COMPLETING MISSION TO THE ISS

Garriott Makes History as 1st Second-Generation Astronaut

Vienna, Va. – October 23, 2008 – Space Adventures, Ltd., the only company that provides human space missions to the world marketplace, announced today that its orbital client Richard Garriott and his crew successfully landed in the Kazakhstan steppes after a visit to the International Space Station (ISS). Garriott returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft with Expedition 17 crewmembers Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, who both spent six months aboard the ISS.

Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, made history during his mission by becoming the 1st second-generation astronaut. The flight back to Earth marked another historical milestone as Garriott traveled with the 1st second-generation cosmonaut, Sergei Volkov.

“This mission to the ISS fulfilled a lifelong dream to experience spaceflight as my father first did 35 years ago; it’s an honor to be the first American to follow a parent into space,” said Richard Garriott. “This experience made possible by Space Adventures – from my training in Star City, to lift-off, orbit and finally docking with and staying on the ISS – has been more gratifying than anything I could have ever imagined.” Garriott continued, “While in space, I had the opportunity to conduct scientific experiments and environmental research, but what was most rewarding was speaking to students. Growing up in an astronaut family, I firmly believed that every person could go to space, and now I have. I took this opportunity to inspire them with my adventure and let them know they can achieve their wildest dreams as well with hard work and perseverance.”

Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, said, “We’re proud to have assisted Richard in achieving his lifelong goal of spaceflight. This history-making mission not only made Richard the 1st second-generation astronaut, but also opened the space frontier to commercial opportunities, which truly demonstrates the reality of private space exploration.”

On October 12, Garriott launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-13 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He joined Expedition 18 crewmembers Mike Fincke and Yuri Lonchakov, for the flight. They arrived at the space station on October 14 and were greeted by the Expedition 17 crew.

In preparation for his spaceflight, Garriott completed a cosmonaut-training program at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center located in Star City, Russia. During his stay aboard the ISS, Garriott focused on scientific and environmental research, as well as educational outreach:

Garriott communicated with students associated with the Challenger Center for Space Science Education via a NASA-sponsored teleconference, HAM radio downlinks and through videotaped experiments. Garriott also conducted a HAM radio downlink and two science experiments designed by primary and secondary students from the United Kingdom in partnership with the British National Space Center.

In cooperation with NASA, Garriott performed a series of experiments that examined the physical impact of spaceflight on astronauts. Garriott observed the reaction of the eyes to low and high pressure in a microgravity environment; the effects of spaceflight on the human immune system; and astronauts’ sleep/wake patterns and sleep characteristics.

On behalf of The Nature Conservancy, Garriott photographed a number of ecologically significant places on Earth. The photographs will be compared to shots taken 35 years ago by Garriott’s father while in space. Together, Garriott and The Nature Conservancy will review the images to document how the Earth has changed in one generation.

Garriott worked in cooperation with the European Space Agency to perform a series of experiments that observed early detection of osteoporosis, vestibular adaptation to G-force transitions and the occurrence of lower back pain.

Garriott supported a number of commercial partners. He assisted the biotechnology company ExtremoZyme, co-founded by Owen Garriott, by conducting Protein Crystal Growth (PCG) experiments. Additionally, Garriott tested a SEIKO Spring Drive Spacewalk watch, specifically designed for use in space. Garriott also conducted a physics experiment as part of an initiative sponsored by DHL, planned as an educational contest that will take place at the DHL Innovation Center in Bonn, Germany.

Garriott has been chronicling the details of his mission, from training to landing, on his Web site www.RichardinSpace.com with photos, video, audio, in-depth blogs and answers to questions posed by visitors to the site. Now back on solid ground, Garriott will continue to share his experiences on his site, expanding upon his time aboard the ISS and providing insights into his landing and return to Earth.

Not plucky Lord British, though. No, the good lord is safe in his heaven and has found the time to transmit a coded message of hope to us earth-bound types.

The multisquillionaire held up a card containing the message shortly after reaching orbit - the message is encoded in Logos Elements - the fictional runic system used in Garriott's game Tabula Rasa.

Fans of the game have now decoded the runes and found it to be a quote - hit the jump to see what Lord British thinks we ought to know.

"Earth is the cradle of humanity but mankind will not be in the cradle forever."
-Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (Soviet Rocket Scientist)

Wow, that's like, really deep.

Richard Garriott Sends Message During Launch

But today we have a different story for you with a very different ending. The fact of the matter is, according to The Library of Congress, video games are just as important to our historical past as literature, movies and music. And at the moment, the LoC is teaming up with major universities across the country to begin a 2-year initiative with the sole intent of figuring out just how institutions can preserve video games for years to come, while making the content accessible for use and study.

So our story today doesn't present some artificial controversy ending in a sad, bleak future of debate and wasted efforts. Our story today is about the very real victory for game developers, enthusiasts and scholars, in which the top library in the nation has said they're part of this video game fad for the count.

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"We're taking baby steps here," confessed Beth Dulabahn. She's the Director for Integration Management at the LoC. "No sense on making it harder on yourself that you have to."

In truth, the Library of Congress has been collecting games since the 1980s. Due to their advantageous position—the Copyright Office is part of their organization— they've come across various collections just by receiving copies of published materials as mandated by copyright law.

"Many people would probably be surprised at the kinds of things we have here," Dulabahn explained. "For example, we have probably the US's largest comic book collection, over 100,000 comic book issues that have come in through copyright."

While their collection is currently small, only encompassing around 2,000 titles that are 100% the result of copyright deposits (as opposed to formal acquisitions or donations), they aren't yet ready to collect more. What? But we just said that the Library was crazy about video games! This brings us to the initiative and what's going on now.

The Initiative

At the moment, there are a few forces affiliated with the Library to answer a fundamental question before they can begin serious acquisition: How does one build a video game archive in the digital age?

Within the Library itself, you have the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. One can decipher their responsibility from their apt title. Now relocated to a new facility in Culpeper, VA, the division has pulled those 2,000 games out of temporary warehouse storage, and specialists are using their new lab space to examine hardware preservation while doing R&D for future solutions of game archiving.

"One of the facets we want to document with videogames [as we did with film] is not only having the actual games themselves, but many of the associated material to have the real sense of the full gamut of what videogames and the industry meant in cultural terms," said Senior Cataloger Brian Taves. Yes, he means the sweatshirts, the posters and the shoes. They want all the cultural materials they can find.

These specialists aren't just film and audio buffs who were roped into video game preservation for grant and funding purposes. On the contrary, the two members of the division I spoke with were extremely enthusiastic about the prospects of a video game archive, likening the challenges to those already faced in film and broadcast, and the cultural importance to that of any other artistic medium they archive.

"It is one way, a bit like the fabled discovery of the library's paper print collection back in the 1940s. When they found, in a closet, films that had been deposited for copyright of otherwise lost films in the very early days of filmmaking that proved to be a real treasure," said Taves. "And for us, that's what this has turned out to be and we're really excited to see this collection growing.... The Library's been collecting films for almost 70 years now on an active basis, so we see videogames now as part of that whole body of acquisitions."

So that's one aspect of Library game preservation, but at the moment, it's the smaller part of what the Library is working on. The larger initiative is called the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project.

The National Digital Information Infrastruction Preservation Program is a huge initiative interested in digital preservation. This encompasses basically everything imaginable on Earth. Under that, there is the Preserving Creative America initiative. Here is where you see the Library's interest in preserving all sorts of creative works, like film or books, into digital formats. Then, one of the eight grants under this Creative America umbrella is the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project.

Preserving Virtual Worlds

Spearheaded by the University of Illinois, the Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a 2-year program starting in 2008 that will hopefully build a model of game and interactive fiction archiving. In a partnership with Stanford University, University of Maryland, Rochester Institute of Technology, and one commercial institution—Second Life makers Linden Lab— University of Illinois hopes to create metadata standards to make content manageable before moving forward to create case studies (ie test examples) of actual video game archiving.

I sat with the University of Illinois faculty/Project Coordinator Janet Eke and Principal Investigator Jerry McDonough recently and talked more about Preserving Virtual Worlds over lattes.

"This project is really about how do we begin to preserve this type of content, answering some fundamental questions of how will we even begin to do this," explained Eke. "And what we will begin to preserve is a huge question that will certainly come along...but we're really starting with how."

It may all seem like a load of bureaucracy - all these committees, initiatives, grants, 2-year chunks of time, etc. And then on top of it all, those running the study claim that they are nowhere near being ready to archive video games. But there really are a multitude of problems that need to be sorted out before archives can move forward on a mass scale.

Take copyright, for example. While the Library worries less about copyright due to their relationship with the Copyright Office, organizations like the University of Illinois aren't granted immunity with products that show up at their door, despite partnerships with the Library.

"... if I own a physical copy of a piece of IP, I can dispose of it as I wish," McDonough explains. Aptly, he'd been (legally) streaming the BBC in HD just moments before on his Mac. "I can sell it, I can give it to somebody, but I can't copy it. Copyright is just that, you're not allowed to make a copy without the permission of an IP owner unless it's gone out of copyright."

And to archive, McDonough thinks that copying is an absolute necessity. Because while consoles should and will be preserved (somewhere in the chain of archiving), they probably won't provide the most practical way for users to experience and research content.

"Things on five and a half inch quarter...hardware is getting scarce and the medium has almost no longevity. The only way we can make sure the stuff stays alive is getting it on an active computer system with demons monitoring it that make sure were not suffering bit corruption," says McDonough.

It's a frustrating situation to be in, but the irony is not lost on us: Copyright is meant to protect an IP, but ultimately, that copyright may prevent researchers from saving a work from extinction. Microsoft once explained to me the difficulty of tracking down IP owners to reproduce their games as XBLA titles. Protip: If Microsoft can't find the source of an IP, nobody can.

The only way to solve copyright issues moving into the future is to bring commercial partners on board. Whether or not you like Linden Lab and their game (?) Second Life, there's no doubt that it makes for an excellent archival model for the project. On one hand, we get a case study of a library teaming up with a commercial venture. On the other, we get a model for MMO archiving, if such a thing is even possible.

Brenda Gunn can explain the significance of libraries partnering with commercial groups better than I, a mere blogger ever could. She's the Associate Director of Research & Collections at the UT Austin's Videogame Archive. She's not directly related to the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, but she's keeping an eye on the study because it's the hot topic right now in video game archiving.

"This is a significant point in that [LoC] is saying libraries and archives can't do this alone; the funding simply is not there...the level of ongoing support for this videogame archive will have a direct impact on the what level of access [we] can provide."

That's why at UT Austin they've teamed up with partners like NCSoft's Richard Garriot, FPS legend Warren Spector, or even "The Fat Man" himself, video game music legend George Sanger. According to Gunn, before such partners approached Austin, a game archive "wasn't on our radar at all."

Research libraries will absolutely need the support of commercial video game publishers to archive their work. Whether it's to help create metadata (companies provide information on everything from the engine they used to their plotline) or just supplying access to those precious IPs, the commercial aid is not an option, it's a necessity.

"If you're going to do any game preservation on a large scale, it has to happen with [commercial] help. If for no other reason, they control the IP. They don't give us the content, we can't preserve it," explains McDonough. "So the question is, do they have strong enough interest in preserving the content to contribute any of their own resources towards it. How much do they care about their own game alive?"

Shimmering Hope

We opened this feature with a bang. We told you that the war was won, that the governmental and academic library community was on gamers' side. And then we went into a list of reasons why archiving still wasn't ready to happen and scared you with words like "copyright" and catchy Wall Street slogans like "IP."

But trust us. If nobody cared, they wouldn't have all these headaches. The freaking Library of Congress is onboard. And this is a major, major win.

"Perfection, we don't know what that is," says Project Coordinator Eke. "You're striving to succeed, and that striving will define what it means to succeed..."

Hmm...it sounds like they get MMOs, at the very least.

[image source]

Ethical Parables in Tabula Rasa

Players of most massively multiplayer online role-playing games today usually aren't faced with any great variety of missions that really impact your character or how you play. The most you're faced with is what kind of reward you'll get or, at most, which of the two factions you'll support against the other. It doesn't really have any effect on you in the grand scheme of things and you'll probably forget about the whole thing in a month or so. Instead of that static, boring type of storytelling, we wanted to create a more immersive story with Tabula Rasa, one that the players could interact with, where their actions could have long reaching consequences. We call this form of story-telling interaction the ethical parable and it is one of the hallmarks of a Richard Garriott game.

Ethical and moral dilemmas are something we definitely wanted to incorporate into the design of Tabula Rasa from the very start. The entire goal is to give you pause and allow you to think about the choices that they make in order to accomplish a mission. This way, at times, you will not be limited to one single path but may have multiple paths. We want you to think about the larger story and how your actions can affect this story down the road. Now you have the ability to play the game the way you want to play it. This in essence is the parable—a type of story that allows you to explore moral lessons or decisions.

We won't be throwing these ethical parables at the players in every mission, but we definitely want players to get a taste for them early on in the game. We've placed a few on, the first major landmass that players will encounter in Tabula Rasa. One of these early missions involves the delivery of pharmaceuticals to soldiers on the front lines. While the supply commander, a rather straight-laced and stand-up kind of individual, would rather these pharmaceuticals be distributed to the soldiers in a formal, organized system, there's a man who stole a whole bunch and has been selling them to the soldiers for a nice profit. Your decision to either turn in the thief, or help him distribute the stolen goods, not only affects the mission outcome but determines how the NPC soldiers will interact with you from then on.

Another mission of note is for players with levels in the mid-teens. As you progress though the game and are redeployed to Foreas Base, you're told that the AFS has a Bane prisoner who is currently undergoing interrogation. This will start a chain of missions as the Bane prisoner reveals more and more information, allowing you to attack the local Bane base, kill a key Bane soldier, deal with some traitors, and possibly even defend the prison from attack.

At the end of this mission chain, you're now left with the choice of what to do with the prisoner. On one hand, he's one of the evil Bane, who wiped out most of humanity and forced people like yourself to fight for survival on a few scattered alien worlds. It doesn't deserve to live... or does it? As a mere soldier, the Bane was just doing what it was supposed to do, no more and no less, and cannot really be held responsible for what the leadership of the Bane did to Earth. What would be the harm in letting him live, and more importantly, what more could you learn from him? If you were a prisoner, wouldn't you want to be treated humanely, instead of being executed for telling you what you wanted to know?

These are a couple of examples of the parables we will present in Tabula Rasa. Some of them will have little or no long-term impact, and others may influence the way you experience the game. We want to give you the choice to play the game the way you want to, without hemming you into one specific path. This way, we've created a better, richer, more immersive game experience for you to enjoy.

Instead of creatures just reappearing out of thin air, they're beamed down from dropships, they're hitting the ground and bounding out of dense woodlands, they're pulling themselves up from underground. Yes, they're still "spawning," per se, but at least an effort's being made to make them do more than just "blink" into existence.

One option Jaffe proposes is an MMO-meets-Burning Man mash up game awards ceremony:

We need to embrace the very tech that we are celebrating! We need to take our awards online because THAT is where the fans will meet us; that is where the folks will care. That is where people will WANT to see Lord British give a speech upon being inducted into the Academy Hall of Fame; that is where people will WANT to see the game gods walking a red carpet (albeit a virtual one) and get the chance to chat with them in real time.

As long as it's not some eyesore played out in Second Life. I don't think I can take a low poly model of a body-painted, rat-tailed Richard Garriot, but I suppose it's better than bloated speeches from screenwriters. Scratch that. It's the stuff of nightmares! Michael McWhertor

Oscar Is Dead! [JAFFE'S GAME DESIGN]

The brothers Garriott, Richard and Robert. spoke at DICE about their crystal ball of predictions for the MMO industry. The prognosis wasn't good and Next Generation was there to grab the details. From Next Generation and Richard Garriott: "After a period of growth, opportunities are closing, budgets are increasing to tens of millions of dollars, and companies need global infrastructure in order to publish. My guess is that over the next 3-5 years, only five companies will operate in this business, and unfortunately, many of the startups will be gone." Garriott also maintains that MMOs now need to be polished and slick visually like FPS games to keep up - where in the past some regressive visuals were tolerated because of the gameplay experience.

The Garriotts Predict MMO Shake-Up [Next Generation]