Net Games - New Book from Creators of Net Guide From: editors@ypn.com (Michael Wolff) Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 22:58:34 +0000 We've just finished our new book Net Games--a guide to the world of online games. It's stuffed with addresses and hints for playing games over the Net from chess to Doom to FurryMUCK. We've put up a sampling of pages from the book as GIF's that can be downloaded from ftp://www.ypn.com/pub/pages. Feel free to upload these pages anywhere on the Net. For more information about Net Games, our first book Net Guide, or our upcoming books Net Chat, Net Money, Net Trek, Net Sports, and Net Tech check out our Web site at http://www.ypn.com/. BTW, we're looking for freelance Netsurfers and writers (we even pay!). Here's the press release that the publisher, Random House, sent out: New Book Charts Entertainment Revolution What's Playing in Cyberspace?�� Net Games, a new release from Random House Electronic Publishing and Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., is the first book to document the revolution taking place in interactive entertainment--at any hour of the day millions of people worldwide are online playing games with each other in Cyberspace.� Most do not know each other. Few will ever meet each other. And yet, online camaraderie and competition rival the intensity of contact sports. Night after night, old hands and newbies meet at the electronic equivalent of parks and sandlots where they blast away at each other, sit on opposite sides of chessboards (with thousands of miles between them), or create elaborate adventure worlds together. Not only do the players fiercely compete, but as they play they talk (or type back and forth), bragging, complaining, and sharing their lives.� Where the first generation of video games pitted human against computer, the new breed of games takes advantage of the Internet and other computer networks to bring human rivalry and team spirit directly to your screen. Net Games is a guide to more than 1,500 of these new computer games, including: �� - Multiplayer virtual scrimmages like Air Warrior, Cyberstrike, Doom, and Bolo, which combine the local color of a hometown bowling league with the massive firepower of a Hollywood action movie;�� - Chess, go, bridge, backgammon--even Jeopardy--servers that function as anytime, anyplace meeting spots for novices and masters alike to get games going at any moment of the day--or night;�� - MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes--participatory narrative adventures (the true post-modern novel)--wherein players build and explore virtual worlds from gaslit San Francisco to the USS Enterprise, from worlds based on Anne Rice's vampire chronicles and sci-fi classics like the Dune series, to FurryMUCK, an anthropomorphic world where players experience polymorphous pleasures. (There are more than 400 virtual world games which, at any hour of the day, have as many as 200 players!);�� - Play-by-mail strategy classics like rotisserie baseball and Henry Kissinger's favorite game, Diplomacy, that travel over email lines.� By some estimates more than half of online time is spent playing interactive games. Indeed, games are proliferating around the Net at such an astonishing rate and are gaining so much popularity that some universities have begun to control the bandwidth games take up on their mainframes. On commercial services, games are one of the fastest growing offerings. GEnie players of Air Warrior, a flight simulation game, have spent up to a $1,000 a month. It is no coincidence that shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought Delphi, he also bought Kesmai, one of the largest producers of online games.�Besides the games people play online, Net Games also covers the thousands of free computer games and demos that people download from online archives and the modern-day mutual aid societies that share cheats, hints, and walk-throughs for mastering home and arcade hits ranging from Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam to Sim City 2000 and Doom (and even the daily crossword puzzle).�� Net Games, the second book in the Net Books Series, is by the creators of Net Guide, the best-selling guide to Cyberspace that Wired editor Louis Rossetto called "the TV Guide to Cyberspace," and USA Today called "the liveliest most readable online guide yet!" In addition to Net Guide and Net Games, the Net Books Series includes:�� - Net Chat, a map of salons and meeting places in Cyberspace, to be published in �November;�� - Net Money, a handbook for using online personal finance resources, to appear in time for tax season in January;�� - Net Trek, a directory of the online Trekkie universe, to arrive in bookstores in March.� �� -- Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., 1633 Broadway, 27th floor, New York, NY 10019 Vox: 212-841-1572 Fax: 212-841-1539 Email: editors@ypn.com To order books or find out more about our new Internet service, YPN-- Your Personal Network, call toll-free 1-800-NET-1133 Up