Intro Movie Illidan: Betrayer. In truth, it was I who was betrayed. Still I am hunted, still I am hated. Now my blind eyes see what others cannot. That sometimes the hand of fate must be forced. -Several Naga arise from the depths. They stop before Illidan.- Illidan: Now go forth, unleash the tides of doom upon all those who would oppose us. Well hello everyone, and welcome to Mech Beta''s guide to the warlock, affliction spec. Playing a warlock 1-70 has taught me a lot, and now I would like to share, now, sit back, don''t relax, hunch your back over and read the guide!

MMORPG players are already used to grinding, so why not have the "Write to Senator Clinton and tell her you won't vote for her if she doesn't spend the time to learn about video games"-quest? Or tools built into MySpace to write your Representatives and Senators? Facebook in particular, with millions of educated college students, should be able to mobilize the kind of lobby that should terrify both local and national politcos. After all, who do you think runs the government? It isn't the members themselves, but the army of dedicated, young graduates scurrying around the House and Senate office buildings. The same type of people who have Facebook and MySpace accounts.

Xinhua Online reports on the second lawsuit brought against Bejing Arctic Ice Technology Company by a disgruntled gamer who claims he lost 5,000-yuan worth of virtual weapons and equipment. Li Xuguang complained in his petition that his virtual property in the popular online computer game Qiannian, or Millennium, was looted by a hacker and then locked up by the server. Readers will recall the same company (though a different game) was the losing defendant in the real world's first judgment finding an actionable interest in virtual assets. I imagine that ice cream would have a sedating effect. And if that's the only factor I am looking for, I will dutifully report "Study shows ice cream reduces violence in children." But how MUCH? Is it enough to be concerned about?

Wired news has coverage of an event many Terra Novans attended at State of Play, the roundtable on eRulemaking. It covers some of the discussion, has a couple of quotes from Raph, credits Professor Noveck appropriately, but in some ways mischaracterizes the discussion. The government wasn't there to get opinions from game developers about how to improve their process. Instead, they were there to solicit ideas on how to use games to educate citizens about the process. What's unfortunate is that they ignored the obvious flaws in their design. After all, they were just talking to a bunch of game designers and developers. The flaws are probably obvious to any TN reader. By moving away from publicizing rules and proposed rules in the Federal Register and allowing responses by snail mail towards electronic publishing and commenting, the government is hoping to broaden democracy and to allow more participation.

Back in September, I posted something about authorship in virtual worlds. Last week, at Henry Lowood's fun conference in Palo Alto, Kevin O'Hara from the Star Wars Galaxies team made an interesting comment with regard to authorship that got me thinking about authorship issues again: In addition to community building, O'Hara stressed the importance of player interaction in developing content and stories for the virtual world. O'Hara explains that, while there is a live events team that creates monthly story lines, it is not a very cost effective way of creating fiction on-the-fly. Instead, Sony tries to leverage the community aspect of the game to encourage players to create the content for the game themselves. Full article here. That's not really news in itself. Mr. Farmer actually made a quite similar observation way back when -- designing narrative "content" for massively social VWs is not easy.

Gearing up for Valentine's Day, thanks to Andrew at GTA for pointing out an interesting article from The Christian Science Monitor "If you kick a robotic dog, is it wrong?" The question posed by the article is "How should people treat creatures that seem ever more emotional with each step forward in robotic technology, but who really have no feelings?" Here's the opinion of Peter Danielson, director of the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, as quoted in the article. It seems to me there's a whole ethics of fiction and toys that we're thinking through. Are you telling me I ought to treat something that looks like a kitten, but is actually a piece of plastic, better than I treat a pig, which is actually a sentient and intelligent being? You're building a taboo system that gets further and further from the actual value.

Second Life began auctioning its virtual land for $US in December. (View player to player auctions here.) "Buying land" really means buying the right to build things on the land, and on top of that you still have to pay a maintenance rent on what you buy. Buy an entire server's worth of land, and the rent becomes $200 a month. In January, reports embedded journalist Wagner James Au, a certain 'Fizik' won a hotly-contested auction for an entire server. The price was $1200. That's right, Fizik was willing to pay 2L $1200 plus $200 monthly in perpetuity, in order to make software objects that would live only in the virtual world. It turns out that 'Fizik' is a marketing agency with clientele in the fashion industry. Not everyone was happy at their arrival. Read more in Au's Notes From a New World. Pick up some general discussion here. To be clear, I don't see this as an avatar rights issue at all.

Uru is the latest installment of the pathbreaking graphics-intensive puzzle game Myst. Uru Live was supposed to be a massively multiplayer implementation of the basic Myst idea (beautiful scenery, deep mysteries, hard puzzles). It seems to me that the live service wasn't open for long at all, and in any case I never got the chance to explore it. But it didn't get enough subscribers, apparently - even though it was free - and now it will close. I wonder if anyone in the development community here knows what they were trying to do, and why it didn't work? The issues presented by robots are different. There is no puppeteer pulling strings on the bot -- except the original author of the mass-produced program/machine. So Floyd from Planetfall is designed to self-sacrifice and Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde are designed to be eaten alive (except for their eyeballs). Obviously, people do feel emotional attachments -- just see some of the letters on the GTA Post that Andrew received about Petz.

Perhaps the economists among TerraNova’s readership can help me out here. Courts routinely issue fines based on offenders’ ability to pay. Last week, the UK government narrowly avoided defeat over its flagship education bill by effectively conceding that the cost of a university education would be made variable depending on the ability of students to pay. What if we translated this into virtual worlds? What if objects cost more money depending on a character’s ability to pay? Instead of pricing the sword at 500 units of currency (UOC) it would be priced at 500 UOC + 0.01%? For transfers between players, the percentage factor would be transformed accordingly, but only when the rich bought from the poor (to stop muling). Example: I have 1,000,000 UOC, you have 10,000 and I buy something from you for 500 UOC + 0.01%. I lose 500+100=600, you gain 500+1=501.

If you happen to be driving your BMW or Mercedes through Palo Alto this Friday, it looks like a detour to the Cantor Center would be warranted. They've managed to somehow get computer games under a "sociological microscope." (T.L. should explain how they did this!) Story here. Event schedule here. Some choice quotes from Henry Lowood, curator for Stanford's History of Science & Technology Collections and cohort of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, e.g.: "Computer games and simulations are the emerging narrative form and communication medium of the early 21st century." Kudos to Mr. Lowood for noting that games are an emerging communications medium, but doesn't he really mean "emerging ludological form"? -- just kidding. Here's another: "You just have to snap your fingers on this campus and undergraduate students who are interested in this topic start falling from the trees." And those are, quite possibly, palm trees!