Archive for 'Philosophical Issues'

Leaving the Party

In the Clay Shirky article post below is the following passage, which I found interesting, and worth pondering out of context. “You’re at a party and you get bored — it’s not doing it for youanymore. The people you wanted to talk to have already left, you’vebeen there a long time, you’d rather be home [...]

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Clay Shirky on Mutable Rules for Games

Clay Shirky rocks, what more can I say. Oh, maybe this: following is a copy of an essay he’s been giving since the State of Play conf., on the plausibility and desirability of games that give players themselves the ability to change the rules as the game evolves. There are technical issues, of course, but [...]

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AV Election Analysis by MIT’s Technology Review

Even before the dust has settled on the AVG elections, MIT’s Henry Jenkins (author of Textual Poachers among other mind-blowing bits of academic excellence) has keyed a piece on the Alphaville elections, which just appeard in the MIT Techology Review: “Playing Politics in Alphaville“. The article is interesting in that it attempts to probe the [...]

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My View of the Alphaville Elections

By Peter Ludlow I’m dropping out of character and writing this under my real life name so that people will understand that I am being serious, but also because I am discussing this at a “meta” level. These comments are about the game; they are not in game.

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A 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 [...]

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Diary 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 [...]

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Diary 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 [...]

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Diary 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 [...]

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Essay: Whoring in Alphaville

by The Pat Caliphia once wrote a paper called ‘Whoring in Utopia’, suggesting that a great number of virtues could be accrued for both john and prostitute if whoring were to become an acceptable practice. Caliphia reckoned that the openness in sexuality would result in net benefit; the whores would be safer and those in [...]

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Interview with John Suler on Griefers and How to Manage Them

John Suler is a PhD in Cinical Psychology and is currently Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rider University. He has worked on topics ranging from mental imagery to psychoanalysis and eastern religions, but he is best known by netizens for his work on the psychology of cyberspace and in particular on the psychology [...]

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