Abalieno has a post up at the Cesspit about The “healer” role as a byproduct of the meta-game we played till today. In it, he argues that the traditional healer role that exists in the modern MMORPGs only exists to fill a need in the core combat game system; that it is, in other words, purely mechanical, and present merely as a formal system, not because it captures the spirit of healing in any way.
Which makes me think, rather of a game where healing is the core mechanic.
For those of you who emailed me or posted about this: there was a bad character in one of the posts. It should be fixed now.
Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace is Danah Boyd’s recent presentation.
However, what I really want to ponder is “why can/can’t we replace MySpace in this paper with the word MMORPGs?”
Factoid: MMORPGs are not, demographically speaking, youth spaces as described (yes, I know you will have anecdotes to the contrary about the obnoxious 14 year old, and so on). Why or why not?
Thanks to Boing Boing making the site melt down with popularity, creating a new #1 post of all time, I see that A Theory of Fun also climbed up the charts, hitting #1 in the abstruse category of
Books > Subjects > Computers & Internet > Games & Strategy Guides > Programming. Woo hoo!
This does make it the #5 best selling game book, though, behind the strategy guides and atlases for Sims 2, EQ2, and WoW.
Johnny Wilson has gotten around to posting extensive notes on the Living Game Worlds symposium I attended a few weeks ago, including some notes on what I said.
