Archive by Author

The pets will help. Not!

A lot of Alpha denizens have told me that the game will improve a lot when the pets and jobs come online this week. Sorry to crush your hopes, but that isn’t likely. I’ve been in Test Center for a while now and have seen it all. The pets are fun for a week, but [...]

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Right on the Money

Nick McCrea has put up a wonderful article about his appropos reactions to the current state of the MMORPG industry. Please saunter on over here and have a gander. Nick is the first person I have encountered to have hit the nail on the head when he describes what I, and many others, have felt. [...]

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Dibbell’s chat with PayPal

In the Oct. 17 entry of his web log, Jullian Dibbell has a hilarious transcript of a phone conversation with PayPal in which he presses them to explain why virtual goods cannot be covered by their Seller Protection Policy, while say tickets to a football game are. A lot of you will have read this [...]

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Review of On the Internet, by Hubert Dreyfus

Forthcoming in Teaching Philosophy Peter Ludlow (aka Urizenus) The first time I saw a talk by Jacques Derrida, he was expounding on a claim (which he attributed to Heidegger) that the sign of a great thinker is that he has but one thought. I think his point was that leading intellectual figures can take one [...]

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An 8-step Program for Saving TSO

Maxis thinks this is just a computer game, and while it is a computer game, it is not just that. One immediately sees the problem here. The move from the offline version of the Sims (which was the most successful computer game ever) to The Sims Online (which has been a massive disappointment) is arguably [...]

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A Letter from the Publisher: Our Mission at The Alphaville Herald

In a recent study, Edward Castronova at California State Fullerton calculated that if the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) Norrath were “real” place, the per capita gross domestic product of Norrath would make it the 79th richest country in the world (per capita), just behind Russia, but ahead of Bulgaria.

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Hello!

Hello all! Before we start “seriously” blogging we thought you might like to know who we are. At the moment there are three primary authors of this blog. Glenn Given, aka squirrel, (friendster, RSO, blog) Graphic Designer for HippoPress, ne’erdowell and amateur philosopher. He is the editor in chief.& Peter Ludlow, aka Urizenus (friendster, RSO, [...]

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