http://slcongress.com

SLJustice

i’m the alt.

Bye the way, it’s true. AJ is my alt. But I never admit it when using my alt account.

Not sure whether either of us should be flattered or insulted!

Apart from both having/had sims in TSO, I can’t think of anything else that would indicate that we are one and the same…. we turn up in the same arguments time and time again because I’m usually on ‘the other side’ of whatever TNP is saying, ah well.

aj

I have nothing personal against Uri, I’m sure if by some quirk we ended up chatting over a pint somewhere it would be an interesting chat… I just continue to feel that much of the stories are sensationalised beyond their importance, and without the ‘professor’ status adding some false sense of credibility to the issue it wouldn’t have even hit the headlines in the first place.

Does anything useful come out of things like this ‘state of play’ convention, or are they just nobodies talking about nothing of value?

aj

Here’s the most important thing I learned from hearing Uri live and un-sound-byted: the name “Urizenus” does NOT rhyme with the word “anus” as I used to think — Uri-ZANE-us, and which provided endless hilarious fodder for Uri-spoof characters in-game like YourHisAnus and YourAGenius but instead, boys and girls, rhymes with the word “penis”: Uri-ZEEN-is. Live and learn! Maybe they didn’t pronounce the Blake poetry right in my university?

I also learned that you pronounce MMORPG as “MORE-pegs”. Wow. I never knew that. I always wondered how you pronounce that mouthful. I really need to go to Game U!

Did anyone ever find out whether that guy’s little sister really did have her jaw broken?
Did AVH ever interview any actual customers of the Hotel Erotica who can provide actual testimony of whether they used cyberprostitution?

This conference is really a Horatio Alger success story. AJ, you’re being far too cruel! Uri-ZEEN-us is engaging, low-key, and educational as he talks about all his yellow-journalism type activities in TSO. It shows that balding middle-aged professors from Michigan with flat mid-Western accents fooling around with games can, through the glory and magic of that great new leveler and democratizer, the MORE-PEG, come and be equals to tony Harvard and Yale East Coast establishment figures who pride themselves on being non-gamers. Don’t you love America!

Ultimately, I would have to tend to agree with AJ, even though he appears not to live in America or have any in-depth understanding of US First Amendment law. Private clubs can set any policies they want — campuses, companies, etc. do the same thing. We pay an entry fee into this private club with our subscription and sign up for the TOS. We could ask some larger questions of whether MORE-PEGS taking over public spaces and using common carriers have certain obligations to the public weal but if anything, player pressure from below isn’t about more free speech, it’s usually about more game company suppression — such as the ATITD fake tempest in a teapot, and the more realistic problem at SL raised by a player who faced racist and hateful language repeatedly from another player without (so far) any Linden reaction.

The most important issue raised here isn’t about the putative broken-jawed sister or the putative brotheling Evangeline, but about the right of players to have discussion about the game on forums so that they can form their own community consensus. These forums are even more public than the games, and also have issues of common carriers/public spaces, etc. but as we’ve learned from the story of the TSO and Stratics boards, they can be more restrictive of speech than the internal games themselves. These companies routinely censor speech criticial of the companies themselves — as we know, at Stratics, even links unto the third generation web site away from the original link can come into Stratics over-reach and lead to banning.