Game talk
This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
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Another MMO dev blog
JZigishness is from Ben Zeigler, a dev at Cryptic, and it’s been added to the sidebar.
…there are two basic rules. First, if you screw up something, always give players back more than what they lost. Second, if you get this urge to teleport a player into the sun, don’t do it. Even if they’re being an asshole. Seriously, not worth it.
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MMO addiction study
Another day, another study. Today it’s “Addiction and the Structural Characteristics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games” over on Gamasutra (the full study is available here (PDF). [Edit: link fixed.] It looks to use Nick Yee’s work as a starting point. Key findings:
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SL-mediated tinysex
No, not the ordinary sort, I mean with hardware.
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Some musings on ephemeral pop
The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations.
In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” The Brosnan Bond movies of course answered that question; the 1995-era sense that history had ended was turned on its ear in not too many more years.