Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

  • Retro Remakes hacked, where to find ’em

    Hours Categories Game talk, Mailbag
    Comments 4 Comments

    Gabe McGrath writes,

    Hi Raph,

    Found your blog via Technorati, whilst searching for more “retro remakes”. I hit this page. Don’t know if you (or your readers) would be interested, but the RR site was hacked recently, so your link to the downloads *won’t* work. I have compiled all the “off site” links I could find (for each remake author) and put them on one blogpost. So there you go. Sorry if you’ve already “moved on”. (Thought it might be of interest.)

    PS: Funny – I stumbled on your page, and couldn’t work out where I knew your name. Then I saw the book cover – OF COURSE! “Theory of Fun” – read about it on Boing Boing ages ago. Alas, it’s still sitting safely in my “amazon to buy list” as the Aussie dollar has tanked against yours. Hopefully it recovers soon, so I can build my game-related library. All the best 🙂

    Hacked… that sucks. 🙁 Hopefully they recover quickly, it’s one of my favorite indie projects.

  • Wikipedia, muds, and where the sources are

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc
    Comments 31 Comments

    Edit: slightly updated with one more “what have I learned” and a few more links. But I could add links to this for hours. 😛

    So at this point, the whole kerfuffle over the MUD articles on Wikipedia has reached a fever pitch, and I am a bit exhausted by it all. Of course, not so exhausted that I can’t write 2500 more words about it.

    But it has been an interesting education for me in how Wikipedia works, and I’d especially like to thank Adam Hyland for his patience explaining it all. I am a bit dismayed that both Richard & I were tagged by some in the debate as biased or “canvassed” or whatever the term is, when I think we both acted in good faith… but there are plenty of folks on the AfD discussion who have pointed this out.

    Me being who I am, it of course led me to dig deeper into citations there in Wikipedia (hey look, ma, I’m a reliable source! No, wait, I’m not!). I think at this point that in theory, I’m a valid source. This may seem like an odd thing to wonder about or worry about, but hey, how can I help issues like this if not? I mean, this is right at the top of the whole MUD category:

    MUDs and Notability — It Ain’t Gonna Work

    Alright, I’ve been pondering this for several days, and I gotta tell you, I’ve got next to nothing. I’ve been in the Mudding community for over eight years at this point, and I’ve been a Mud administrator/coder/builder for over four years. I’d like to think I know the community pretty well. Here’s the dilemma: wikipedia guidelines require that articles on subjects maintain a certain level of notability. That is there are sources not directly related to the subject of the article. In the case of Muds this means we need to find some sort of third party source (be it a review, a listing, etc…) for each and every MUD listed on wikipedia that wasn’t written by players or staff of the MUD in question.

    Well, that’s bloody near impossible.

    — from the Talk page for the entire MUD category

    So I decided to take a look at sourcing. I picked LegendMUD and my name, because though I may not be able to edit those articles, I do know the topics! In fact, I am an expert on me, though biased. 🙂 Read More “Wikipedia, muds, and where the sources are”