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.
I’m fond of pointing out that these days, Penny Arcade has more reach (and much more street cred!) than many of the print mags. Now comes an article on Gamesindustry.biz giving some hard numbers on just how dire the situation is for print games outlets:
There’s been some derision at Joystiq and even a slight tone of “duh” from Nerfbat over the recently resleased results from a study showing that MMO games “promote sociability and new worldviews.”
For example, Joystiq’s Kyle Orland says,
You can always count on scientists to confirm through painstaking study what most people can figure out using common sense.
This is an entirely wrongheaded view.
(Link is work-safe).
And it ain’t pretty. It didn’t connect with this reviewer, who commented,
I think I am just more into having a simpler and more direct experience when I am on social networking sites like MySpace. Don’t get me wrong, I love customizing my page. However, I would never go as far as to create a pretend or mini version of myself or home. Though it may not be for me, Cyworld is worth a look.
A couple of responses to the Harper’s Forum have popped up on the blogosphere, one at The Aspidistra and another at ideant. This latter one prompts a reply, as it comments,
the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:
KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)
Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation.
