Today’s Real Life Comics
Real Life Comics – The Online Comic ©1999-2008 Greg Dean.
Just yesterday I was commenting to someone that I haven’t actually seen or spoken to Richard in a few years now…
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Man beats WoW
Well, sort of. All the achievement points. Not all the achievements. He cheated on one. Which is somehow fitting.
To reach the milestone the Taiwanese power-player killed 390,895 creatures, accumulated 7,255,538,878 points of damage, completed 5,906 quests (that’s 14.62 quests per day, apparently), raided 405 dungeons and hugged 11 players.
The achievement hasn’t arrived without some controversy though; WoW-heads point out that technically he’s still missing one illusive, event-tied achievement (called “BB King”), but he’s managed to dodge it via a glitch awarding one extra, false achievement point.
— News: Man ‘finishes’ World of Warcraft – ComputerAndVideoGames.com.
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Game-guilds and street gangs both driven by team formation
I am unsurprised to see that there is a fresh paper out that states that there are strong mathematical commonalities between gang formation and guild formation. (I am also unsurprised to see Nic Ducheneaut and Nick Yee among the authors of the paper).
In particular, we find that the evolution of gang-like groups in the real and virtual world can be explained using the same team-based group-formation mechanism. In contrast to the quantitative success of our team-based model, we find that a homophilic version of the model fails. Our findings thus provide evidence that online guilds and offline gangs are both driven by team-formation considerations rather than like-seeking-like. Interestingly, each server’s Internet protocol (IP) address seems to play an equivalent role to a gang ethnicity.
— “Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic”
The source data comes from WoW guilds and from Long Beach CA street gangs — and with lots and lots of data points to boot.
What’s the mathematical model underlying the two? Well, it’s a basically pragmatic approach to team-building:
Read More “Game-guilds and street gangs both driven by team formation”
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I’m playing a live acoustic concert nowish
Another month, another concert. This one is for Charity Day, another MacZ event in Metaplace. It runs from 2pm-4pm Pacific time. You can get there at this link: http://www.metaplace.com/thestage/play
Or right here, if you can see this world embed:
(event over)
Head up the stairs and through the triple doors by the meep with the bow tie.
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Playing live web concert tomorrow
I am playing a live web concert tomorrow, from 2 to 4 pm Pacific, in Metaplace. The set list will be completely different — no overlaps — from the Halloween show. As before, it’ll be just me and a guitar, streaming live to the world.
I’ll have the world embedded here on the blog, like last time.