For those out there looking for seasonal stocking fillers for the budding game designer, but who does not know anyone with feet big enough to accommodate Salen and Zimmerman’s magnificent Rules of Play – try The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels.

GameGirl's summary (November 10) described these assertions about workers who have played games: It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term. The truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn’t HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levels. Buy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Gold will keep your high power. On the other hand, if RMTers persuade the courts that people own what their characters own, the whole concept of a purge might be threatened.

As I posted on prompt criticality, Cory Doctorow has written "Anda's Game", a short story on Salon about MMOs, IP rights, play, and the power of the people. It is a science fiction story, although it seemed to match what Constance Steinkuehler talked about at State of Play 2, where armed mobs in Lineage 2 bring vigilante justice down on the farmers. It's also a good, quick read and IMHO gets a lot right. It's CC licensed, a first for Salon, although you have to click through Salon's annoying "read this advert to read our content" but if that 10 seconds keeps Salon alive, so be it. Games, for most journalistic outlets in the US, don't seem to justify or require anything more than that. It also raises some interesting non-design problems.

I wrote a brief article for Gamespot News about the oft-repeated "There is no spoon" comment from State of Play 2. I'll likely expand and further flesh out the arguments in future work -- I suspect that we'll all be debating this until the next SoP -- but since I thought that this was one of the most basic disagreements to come out of State of Play 2 that it was worth picking up. It also raises some interesting non-design problems. It looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-term.

Grand Text Auto discusses a really fascinating report by Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch on the internal corporate culture of Electronic Arts.

I've recently been playing a couple of games which aren't quite MMOs, but nearly are. First, the wonderfully silly Kingdom Of Loathing. Initially just the perfect tonic after a hard day's bearded discussion of brain-farts, it creates an impressive sense of community despite lacking a multiplayer core game. A multiplayer core game is one thing that Guild Wars does have and it will be interesting to see whether its reliance on instancing will cause it to suffer in the long term as Richard Predicts. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.