« Lots on lurking |
Main
| Salon article on echo chambers »
February 19, 2004
Games 'R' Not Us
Posted by Clay Shirky
Yahoo has a
rather bland overview of the intersection of games and academic work, which reminded me to drop an editorial overview in.
We here at Many-2-Many rarely ever use phrases like "we here at Many-2-Many" -- we are small pieces loosely joined, most of the time. However, I've noticed we have a de facto policy here of writing only rarely about games, despite their obviously profoundly social components. For my part, and, I think, for my colleagues, this is because the subject of games is itself enormous, and because other places do it better than we ever could.
So, for the record, the best sites I've found for tracking the social dimensions of games:
Terra Nova -- Game-theory All-Stars
Ludology.org -- Academic study of games
Slashdot -- Search for all articles relating to 'MMO' (massively multi-player online games)
Whenever work from the gaming world becomes a crossover hit (e.g.
Flikr, which came out of
Ludicorp's game work), we'll blog it like mad, but to track social work in the game industry, the above linked sites are the places to go.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: social software
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Spolsky on Blog Comments: Scale matters
- › "The internet's output is data, but its product is freedom"
- › Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites
- › knowledge access as a public good
- › viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
- › Gorman, redux: The Siren Song of the Internet
- › Mis-understanding Fred Wilson's 'Age and Entrepreneurship' argument
- › The Future Belongs to Those Who Take The Present For Granted: A return to Fred Wilson's "age question"
1. Michael Pusateri on February 19, 2004 7:40 PM writes...
Several years ago one of the focal points of the MMORPG community that discussed the broader issues was at the Lum the Mad site and in the forums there.
The Lum the Mad (LtM) site evaporated as the man behind Lum, Scott Jennings, went to work in the game industry.
The archives are available here: http://brokentoys.org/private/
Many of the refugees of the LtM forums, found a new home at http://waterthread.org/ . The name 'water thread' in an inside joke from the LtM days.
There is a reasonable amount of serious discussion of the social aspects of the MMORPGs there. There's also a lot of chatter, but you will find the hardcore community of MMORPG people there.
These are the people actually play in the games, not outsdiers looking in, so the passion over design, implication of change, the future of MMORPGs is high.
These circles are quite different the Clan communities found in first person shooter games. Having a persistent world makes quite a difference.
Permalink to Comment2. Liz Lawley on February 19, 2004 7:54 PM writes...
And if he ever gets his blogging groove back on, Andy Phelps' Got Game?, next-door here at Corante, is worth putting on the list.
Permalink to Comment3. Greg Lastowka on February 20, 2004 7:40 AM writes...
Thanks for the link and endorsement!
We're keeping close tabs on you MtM Social Software All-Stars and trying to apply the concepts to virtual worlds. One qualifier about our putative All-Star status -- while most of us follow the game theory literature, we focus on VWs, which are kind of borderline games. There are often questions about whether certain MUDs and VWs are games, or primarily multi-user spatial software platforms for social interactions through avatars. I think Ludicorp is a good example of a company that really gets the social dimensions of VWs.
And re Waterthread. Michael is right -- it is a great resource and displays a lot of passion and incisive commentary from the serious player perspective. There's a lot of humor too, and even more exclamatory explicatives.
Permalink to Comment