I started crafting a report back from the AAR on the flight home, but first an essay by randomos published on Terranova. It's a nice little cap-feather for him. And an interesting piece. More later...

Randomos has been off at some nifty conferences these past two weekends. Last weekend, he attended Ludium the inaugural conference of the Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds--a hand picked group of 35 of both industry and academic virtual world/online game industry folks --at Indiana University organized by a fellow in the telecommunictions ( Read more... )

Found this discussion on TerraNova as to why magic and fantasy narratives are more popular means of creating a sense of 'non-ordinary' or 'alternate' reality than, say, science fiction in most online games. Many of the comments assert that magic is the less 'logical' of the two, therefore game designers can more easily 'get-away-with' scenarios ( Read more... )

There’s talk of starting up a peer-reviewed journal for the study of MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) on Terranova. All just talk at this stage, but that's what's interesting--differing opinions about whether such a publication is needed, how to balance the needs of the industry and the academy, and whether it should be online or in print ( Read more... )

Bumped into these two folks over the past couple days:

Richard Pocklington will be teaching a continuing ed course on Burning Man at Stanford this summer. (found via the home grown lj/bman community here).

And R. met Celia Pearce at E3 last week--apparently her dissertation is an ethnography an Uru Live refugee community in There.com. And ( Read more... )

More, via the folks at TerraNova: Disney has created a virtual magic kingdom. It's a simulacrum after all?

Furthermore, to extend one of yesterday's comments, one of R.'s good friends in the online gaming universe is the lead designer on a new Pirates of the Caribbean MMO, and we've decided to engage in a wee bout of culture jamming and send her ( Read more... )

Okay, this is really treading into R.'s territory, but is also where my world starts to meet his. Mostly I just want to track the existence this for my own purposes ( Read more... )