Has anyone read any blog posts elsewhere written by people who are leaving their associated virtual spaces? They really are quite interesting. “Sorry Linden Lab, today I give up the fight, and in so doing, will waste no more words on your Ethics, or lack thereof.  I’m sorry Philip Rosedale chose to destroy the best [...]

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As this class is coming to an end I wanted to take a moment and reflect on my experiences and feelings about what it has been like to be an MMO noob. Before taking this course I will admit to never actually having used any type of MMO despite self-identifying as a geek. I suppose [...]

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It has come to my attention that some rather large problems are happening within the area of studying games. It seems that social anthropologists are trying to hard to be “experts” and apply things that don’t really fit onto the players. the simple fact is that despite all of their social theories and ideas a [...]

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“If you love MMO’s you’re going to want to check out Guild Wars 2, if you hate MMO’s you’re going to want to check out Guild Wars 2” The above statement is the motto of Arenanet, the developers of the anticipated sequel to the popular MMORPG, Guild Wars. Set to release in 2011, Arenanet has [...]

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So my day in a life in second life actually only lasted a couple of hours. Everything started out fine, the game downloaded no problem, a quick and easy install after already having registered by selecting my username, avatar appearance, and that basic start-up information. All that easy start-up stuff went fine and then I [...]

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The opposition between these two can be compared to some other traditional oppositions, like the opposition between the ‘real’ rules of the game and what we used to call ‘chrome’ elements (stuff which adds ‘feel’ but doesn’t change how the game ‘works’), or the opposition between the ‘real’ stuff (the stuff that affords or is [...]

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As I was saying in class the other day, Machinima (a contraction of ‘machine’ and ‘cinema’ which as far as I know no one knows how to pronounce) as found, for example, on Youtube, represents a really useful resource for representations of online environments, and is part of the ‘media ecology’ of what Mimi Ito [...]

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