MMOG designers concerned with griefing and other antisocial activity by players have tried a variety of strategies to cope with such practices. One of the subtle things that has impressed me about World of Warcraft's endgame, besides the fact that it's relatively easy to get to that point, is that reputation alone at that stage exerts an enormous weight on players. Reading a recent slew of outraged threads on the official forums (and elsewhere), I'm not entirely sure that Blizzard itself understands this aspect of their gameworld.

The other path is where the world changes as you climb the ladder in the world. So there you are, you pop-out of the hatch in the ceiling one day, and personal reputations count (better clean up your sloppy ways!), or more of an imposition, the crafter game you though you were in turns brutally PvP - and guess what, all new content is being used to extend the ladder vs. redecorating the lower levels: change or leave. 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.

An exchange between Timothy Burke and Mike Sellers deep in this thread suggests a question. Is there established over the course of play a "contract" between the player and the world that establishes the reasonable rate of change and the nature of change in their worlds? This question seems the more pressing for MMOGs over other game genres. Players can be considerably more invested in MMOG worlds as well the MMOG producers find themselves in long-term content commitments to their investments.

What would it feel like if with your very last hit it was not just the MOB that fell but a living breathing creature somewhere in the world died too?

A new article by Nicholas Gervassis of University of Edinburgh School of Law, from the Journal of Information Law and Technology. As for myself, I confess a secret peccadillo involving MMORPGs. If an option I like to play in windowed mode, so I can multi-task with other applications in the background at low ebbs. Furthermore, on rare occasion I've been known to play two different MMORPG's simultaneously (in windowed mode). I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time.

Old news, but in case you missed it, listen here. I wonder about the symbiotic relationship between video game developers and the home computing industry. For example, consider this hypothetical: what would happen, say next week, should Moore's law fall into bunk by some hand of physics? I submit for your comments the idea that the reason many developers have a hard time finding anything of value not only from researchers, but often from their own players, is that they are, in effect, seeing a different world, all the time. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us. It was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations.

This extension is a cheat in this regard - it can only happen because the actors are importing into the Authurian world our world, swallows and aerodynamics and all. Yet isn't it only through the whimsy of analogy that worlds and their fiction can grow at all? A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.

Purchased via an online purveyor of computing products, I recently upgraded my (home) "game" computer. My previous game machine was staggering under the load of a recent MMORPG client. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.

If you've ever watched daytime television, chances are that you've run across the show called Family Feud. It pits teams of five family members against one another trying to guess the most popular answers to a series of innocuous questions.

Wow, its hard for me to get started as I have been waiting so long for this title. So I'll start at the beginning: the Fallout games are all based on the concept that before the third world war, which basically launched the nukes, there was a series of Vaults built around the USA where "supposedly" the human race would continue. Well, unfortunately many of the vaults were stocked with people of "ahem" questionable moral fiber and in some cases, faulty equipment. So while the first two games involve peoples from vaults further West, Fallout 3's vaults, and surrounding cities/locations take place in the area formerly known as Washington DC.