Let’s face it, WoW totally fails the multiculturalism test when it comes to holidays. The calendar year of Azeroth is littered with events designed for waspy American geeks. You’ve got Christmas and Easter, the Christian holidays. Then you’ve got the American holidays: Valentine’s day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and a slight smatter of geek days like TLAP. [...]
The New Yorker has a “nice talk by Jane McGonigal”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal if you want to hear more about her work on Alternate Reality Games.
“Compulsive gamers not addicts, says head of Europe’s only clinic to treat gaming addicts”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7746471.stm The mountain of evidence and consensus in this topic is getting so huge it might actually start to penetrate public opinion.
“Premature Deathcoil problems”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4665388392&sid=1&pageNo=1 almost as good as “I think my tank is grouping with someone else, and we have three DPS so I can’t just leave him”.
Ta-nehisi has an “article in Time on Warcraft”:http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1577502-1,00.html. It’s good and captures the ambivalence that a lot of people — especially adults — feel about WoW. Good on him.
I have been thinking about what makes people want to play — and particularly group and even more particularly raid — with other people in World of Warcraft and perhaps this is obvious, but the three things it comes down to are gear, skill, and fun. The first and most obvious thing is that you [...]
There is a “good article on who played what last year”:http://www.massively.com/2008/12/29/gamerdna-and-massively-look-back-at-the-mmo-year-in-review/ on GamerDNA — useful. Note to self.
What is up with the “om nom nom” meme? I have been hearing it for the past two months at least. As a piece of slang it is meant to signal positive evaluation of an object through the onomatopoeiaic sounds of devouring it. For instance: “[cuffs of ridiculous spell power] omnomnomnom” I think there is [...]
I’ve given up my plan of developing an expertise in WoW in China — although its something that I’m keeping my mind on. Luckily, the project is in better hands than mine. There is a nice “piece on Bonnie Nardi’s work”:http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/wow-in-china-and-us.html as well as a “shorter earlier piece”:http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/2008/09/11/uci-tackles-world-of-warcraft-mystery/. Bonnie is great and I’m looking forward [...]
“The Pimp MMOG”:http://the-pimps.de/ By Germans, even.
“Graeme Kirkpatrick”:http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/graeme.kirkpatrick/publications writes on games and computer use. Unfortunately the link to his piece at “Max Weber Studies”:http://www.maxweberstudies.org/issue-2-2.htm? 404s. Kiri has “another article on GTA”:http://digiplay.info/node/3214 Digiplay in fact has a “listing of articles on WoW”:http://digiplay.info/search/node/warcraft most of which I know about, but not all of them. Every couple of months I relink to “Henry Lowood’s [...]
Ap is “reporting on a new Pew study”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080916/ap_on_hi_te/tec_video_gamers_2 that shows that over 95% of all teenagers play video games. The “Pew study itself can be found here”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/263/report_display.asp
I’m making a little list: “Virtual (Br)others and (Re)sisters: Authentic Black Fraternity and Sorority Identity on the Internet.”:http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/5/528?etoc Matthew W. Hughey. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 37, No. 5, 528-560 (2008) DOI: 10.1177/0891241607309987
The sound track to World of Warcraft is now downloadable off of iTunes for a buck a pop. Because I play with the sound off so much of the time it is maybe not as evocative as it could be for me, and I have to admit I’m left wondering who is going to download [...]
“McFarland Publishing”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/ has a really fascinating list, including volumes like “The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Autor”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-2822-9 and “two”:http://www.gamingcultures.com/ “volumes”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?isbn=0-7864-2832-5 by “J. Patrick Williams”:http://www.jpatrickwilliams.net/. I will have to try to get ahold of some of this stuff…
The first number of “The Journal of Virtual Worlds”:http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/issue/view/38 is out and it looks like they did a great job of it. Although some of the pieces included are old favorites — “Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat” for instance — the new stuff looks worthwhile as well. There are always lots of approaches to the study [...]
Its official — World of Warcraft has “over 10 million players”:http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080122005155&newsLang=en — 2.5 in the US, 2 in the EU and 5 million in Asia. Quick and easy statistics!
“It’s Comforting To Know That No Matter What You Do In Life, It Will Never Be As Awesome As This Picture “:http://www.unc.edu/~jmspille/images/awesome3.jpg Also in re: the continuing expansion of the WoW Activity System: “WoW Radio”:http://www.wcradio.com/
This time the New York Times reports on “Korean internet addiction recover centers”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/technology/18rehab.html?_r=2&ref=business&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
MIT has published “The Ecology of Games”:http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/dmal/-/3?cookieSet=1 which features a bevy of Macarthur-sponsored, usual-suspect authored papers on games and learning.
I’m fascinated by theorycrafting websites and was just turned on to “maxdps.com”:http://maxdps.com/ — amazing geekery.
342 messages in the thread right now — a true piece of Outsider Art: “how could they do that to our shoulder?”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1272322392&sid=1
A BBC article on “post-WoW mmogs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6619875.stm is the leaping off point for a new Gamasutra article entitled “The Academics Speak: Is There Life After Worlds of Warcraft”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php?page=1 which features, among others, “Jeff McNeill”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php?page=3
The “latest edition of New Media and Society”:http://nms.sagepub.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/content/vol9/issue4/ is a special issue on women and games/The Intarweb featuring an article by “Shoshana Magnet”: on “Suicide Girls”:http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/577. Very Boing-Boing.
Here’s one more piece from Reuters on “the AMA’s attempt to pathologize playing video games”:http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2425415820070624?sp=true.
Here’s Julian’s piece on “gold farming in China”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?ex=1183089600&en=1e6c650df0b49c03&ei=5070 as well as some “errata”:http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/recalculating-t.html. And speaking of errata, “so much for Internet addiction”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/fun.games/06/25/addiction.video.games.reut/index.html
13 designs to choose from! The “WoW Visa”:http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/visa/. Just when you thought virtual economies and real economies couldn’t get any more intertwined…
Here’s a space I know about but have never explored (read: perfect BA or MA project): all these graphical chat spaces like “Zwinky”:http://zwinky.smileycentral.com/, “Stardolls”:http://www.stardoll.com/en/, “Gaia”:http://gigaom.com/2007/04/22/move-over-myspace-gaia-online-is-here and “all the others”:http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/kids-and-teens-have-pushed-at-least-6-immersive-online-worlds-to-over-2m-uumth-in-the-us/. If anyone figures all this out, let me know.
I admit: “Battlestar Galactica Credits, WoW Style”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfeYnI_lvYA&mode=related&search=
Those of us who grew up in the tail-end of the Cold War know Greg Costikyan as the Leonardo da Vinci of serious gamer geekdom. He didn’t just _write_ games, he wrote _great_ games like Paranoia. And the games he wrote were smart, funny, and insightful. Since then he’s gone on to produce popular fiction [...]