EXTRA EXTRA, OMFG! Stratics Thought Police decree that links to sites that link to The Second Life Herald violate Stratics ROC!!!

by Alphaville Herald on 07/09/04 at 10:48 am

Those wacky little thought police at Stratics have done it again! Dyerbrook was recently charged with a violation of the Stratics Rules of Conduct (ROC), because in his profile he has a link to his ?Sims Out of Line? page, which in turn has a link the Second Life/Alphaville Herald. Never mind that Dyerbrook (a longstanding critic of the Herald) actually attacks the Herald on his page, the Stasi/Stratics thought police have ruled that Dyerbrook will be banned from posting on Stratics unless his Stratics profile ceases to link to a site that in turn links to the Second Life Herald. Of course, if applied consistently, this policy would also mean no linking to The New York Times, BBC Online, CNN, The Boston Globe, Terra Nova, Slashdot, Gamegirl Advance, Penny Arcade, Salon.com, GameSpot, The Detroit Free Press, and several thousand other academic and gaming blogs and news organizations that link to us. Details and all the wacky documentation follow!

Stratics, for those of you don?t know, is a corporation that is in the business of providing chat forums for Online Roleplaying Games. So, for example, there are Stratics boards available for the discussion of issues in The Sims Online, Ultima Online, Everquest, and on and on. Clearly, they are there to keep the big game companies happy, so EA and SOE have nearly infinite power over Stratics in the abstract. (Second Life has quite sensibly stayed clear of using Stratics to host their official chat sites). The moderators who often work for free, are culled from the user community based upon their undying devotion to the game owners. (Don Hopkins has compared their relation to the game companies as being similar to the Stockholm Syndrome.)

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First, I give you the message that Dyerbrook received from Milton, threatening to cast him out of the anti-paradise that is Stratics:

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Improper Stratics profile

From: Milton
Received: 09/04/04 09:08 AM
Dyerbrook,
Your Stratics profile is in violation of the following section of the Stratics Rules of Conduct.

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