Author: Raph Koster

This post using my grammar on soccer is exactly the sort of analysis I hoped would be possible. 🙂 It’s so cool to see something like this out there.

Wired has a nice long Jullian Dibbell article entitled “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World”  — it’s interesting to me to see how much emphasis is placed on the Something Awful folks as a sort of cultural center of griefing, something which is a relatively recent development.

Pacific Epoch – Update On China’s Internet Shakedown

Government bodies regulating the online game industry have released new regulations regarding foreign online game companies operating in China, reports 163.com. Under the new regulation, the General Administration of Press and Publication will postpone the examination, approval and licensing of foreign company products if the companies are arbitrated or sued by Chinese online game companies. The GAPP will not continue consideration of the products until after the complaints have been resolved, according to the report.

The translation: any Chinese game company can stop a foreign company from launching in China by filing an arbitration request, which freezes the mandatory approval process.

For whatever reason, my post on core gamers and what sort of landscape they face seems to have resonated with a lot of folks, or least caused a fair amount of controversy — but in like six different ways at once. The issue of what casual is, and whether that market is serviced and whether developers are listening to that type of player, and so on, is a large and complex one; and microtransactions, whoo! — so I am going to answer a different set of comments first. 🙂

One of the threads has been “why should we think of core games as being in jeopardy?”

Read More “Core casualties”