Archive for 'Opinion'
T. Liam McDonald blasts EA: “Pull the Plug on TSO Now!”
In a passionately argued article in MaximumPC magazine, columnist and game critic T. Liam McDonald has called EA to task for its unstructured game design, maintaining that it leaves nothing for users to do except “mischief and sex”. Indeed, McDonald argues that this has plagued TSO from the very beginning: “When I first covered The [...]
Full StoryA Free Gamer’s Manifesto
by Elias Artista A specter is haunting the world of online roleplay gaming. That specter is the free gamer – she is the rogue gamer that rejects the narrow thoughtless rules of play imposed upon her by the Corporate Monoliths that claim to own the games. She collaborates with her friends to create her own [...]
Full StoryDiary of a Newbie #3: the bleakness of crowds
by Montserrat Tovar sometimes i wonder why i am writing this. i say this because it seems like there is not much to say about sims: the play of simming becomes a predictable sequence: eat, sleep, skill, bathroom. sometimes you shop for something to wear and there is nothing interesting to buy. smeared throughout this [...]
Full StoryDiary of a Newbie, part 2
by m.tovar in thinking about my infancy as a sim, it has been hard for me to express myself about it, even to myself. i go to the sims place and i see so many things. it is hard to know what to write down first. right now i am most tempted to use the [...]
Full StoryOp/Ed: Grudges, Trashing , And Tagging Oh my!
By Kahuna12 I?m sure by now you?ve all heard of the Armone and X-Mafia families, which are currently allied in Alphaville, and the Black Hand Mafia in Alphaville, which is allied with the Blazing Falls Syndicate. If you read The Alphaville Herald, they you probably also know that there has been longstanding tension between X-Mafia [...]
Full StoryEditorial: Stop the Cheetah-Deleting Madness!
As the dispute between Polie Bear and Nick spins out of control, we have to ask ourselves: why on earth did EA take sides in this and exacerbate the problem? In effect, the dispute between Polie and Nick is a dispute between two 14 yr old friends (sometimes best friends, according to Polie). Whatever the [...]
Full StoryLondon Times Essay: Griefers and Group Formation in Alphaville
by Peter Ludlow About two months ago I was asked to write an essay for the Times of London on my thoughts about the situation in Alphaville. What The Times wanted was something that recapitulated the BBC Online article about how letting people be what they wanted led to anarchy. What they got from me [...]
Full StoryOp/Ed: Stop Blaming the Techies!
By Anonymous B Enough is enough. After reading several posts and comments in this blog, I just had to chime in and say you people are badly misdiagnosing the failure of TSO. TSO is not failing because of EA tech people, it is failing because the suits in marketing and legal don’t want it to [...]
Full StoryDiary of a Newbie part 1
By Montserrat Tovar one day curiosity got to me and i became a sim. you could say that i joined the crowd materializing into the ether instead of walking to walsingham. first thing i had to do was create my sim. it was interesting to do because in spite of pages and pages of parts [...]
Full StoryEssay: The ESRB game rating system is broken
By J I recently wrote an article for the Alphaville Herald on how I believed that Electronic Arts had misled the Electronic Software Rating Board (ESRB), as well as consumers and parents alike, about the rating of their popular MMORPG, The Sims Online. My criticism was met with a variety of comments from readers of [...]
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