“WE’RE PANDERING TO THE BASEST INSTINCTS OF MAN? AWESOME!” [Author: Lum the Mad]

The New Yorker has a story up about the evolving of the seamier side of Ultima Online (which would be, um, most of it).

Certainly hyperinflation and mass extinction are not, while they are happening, a lot of fun, and U.O.’s designers acknowledge the commercial costs of the game’s many crises. At the same time, they seem as a group proud, in a Jurassic Park sort of way, of what has gone wrong. Starr Long, the co-creator of U.O., remembered his own reaction when he learned prostitution had been introduced: “Awesome!”