Broken Toys

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Scott Jennings

Virtual Economies, Real Bureaucracy

Scientific American weighs in with this month’s “OMG THE IRS WILL FIND OUT ABOUT MY EPICS” story, this as much other mainstream media interest apparently driven by Second Life’s relentless publicity machine. (The story refers to Second Life and World of Warcraft consistently in that order, for example.

He Offered To Pay Me $100 To Post This

I recently got an email offering $100 to post a guild ad. Unfortunately my price is somewhat higher (note to gold farmers: $100,000 gets you a long, emotional post about how your company is the only ethical choice in responding to poorly designed diku derivative time sink systems! US

ARMY SMASH PUNY TERRORISTS RARRR!

The US Army’s new slogan is: ARMY STRONG.\’c2\~ I’m not kidding. See, this is why we’re the bestest country ever. Watch out, you countries that think you’re so smart with your superior command of the English language – since the Soviet Bloc collapsed we totally pwn

Links, We Got Links and Things

Spent a small amount (very small) of time maintaining the List O’ Links. Some new additions, lots of deletions due to inactivity timeouts!

“It All Comes Together: Our Players Post In Cretan Linear B!”

Timothy Burke of Terra Nova weighs in on the “Playing the Boards” discussion with some very interesting insights on how to treat MMO boards as a historical record. Not sure how it applies for actual data-mining (the title of his post) but does give some guidelines in how to dispassionately

Get Your Game On, Miguk

The NYT has an article about Korea’s quite frightening “ten years in the future” gaming culture. \’e2\’80\’9cToo often I hear people say \’e2\’80\’98South Korea\’e2\’80\’99 and \’e2\’80\’98emerging market\’e2\’80\’99 in the same sentence,\’e2\’80\’9d said Rich Wickham,

Playing the Boards

As Tide spotted on his blog, SWG Creative Director Chris Cao unloaded with both barrels on the SWG boards re: the topic of, well, the SWG boards. The money paragraph: Roughly 80% of the people who play SWG never read these boards. We know this from our own internal metrics