So, who really owns the computer games people play?

One thing I've always found fascinating about online games with persistent worlds (games where the world doesn't change, but lots of people can interact together in the same world) is the concept of who actually owns the content. I don't mean the overall game itself, because that is obviously owned by a company that made the game, but the specific property that each character owns within the game.

Think of it this way: If you're an elf who owns a +5 Sword of Death (I'm sure some game has something named like that), and you log out, that sword is still in your in game inventory somewhere. When you sign back on, that sword is still there with your character. Some other player doesn't get to just go into your private inventory and steal it (unless you're playing some twisted game where you can do just that, but I have yet to see a successful one that has survived longer than a few hours with that kind of play style). So, do you really own that sword, or is it the property of the company that makes the game?

That's an issue that has been argued back and forth since the creation of games like Ultima Online, long before World of Warcraft and the latest Star Trek Online. The game companies will always argue that THEY own the property within the game, and that you are just playing in THEIR world (Sony Online Entertainment used to make that argument of "You're in OUR world now" on their marketing materials for Everquest). But that's an easy argument to make before getting into the nitty gritty. A customer IS paying money for the experience of playing the game, and there is a somewhat legal precedent that as long as the company honors its commitments (meaning all of your stuff is there after you leave and return to the game), your business arrangement remains. There are any number of customers who have ended their business arrangement with a company when the company has lost their equipment (thus, they have felt a breach of unwritten contract was reached). Therefore, in legal terms alone, a company that runs a computer game may have been making the accepted agreement of honoring that unwritten contract by continuing to take money for services. The challenge is convincing a judge of exactly what those "services" actually were.

But that's going further than I wanted with this post. What I was really wanting to talk about are these people who sell their accounts, convinced that the property within the game is theirs. I actually find myself somewhat fascinated by the advertisements they make on Craigslist and other such places. A lot of these ads involve the most popular game on the block, World of Warcraft, and way too often someone tries to sell his or her account for hundreds of dollars. What caused me to want to write about it was how someone actually had the nerve to write: "You are paying me for the time I put into making this character." In other ads, I've seen words such as: "I wanted to get something back for all of the time I put into building this character."

Now, I play World of Warcraft, and I have a lot of fun playing the game, as I believe many other people do as well. Not once have I ever thought that I was producing work, that my tribulations were actually part of the process I must endure before I have a commodity that I can now sell back to another customer who will value the time I've have endured in this game. No, I had fun doing what you do when you play a game, and never was it thought of as work. Oh sure, the quests might have been difficult, and I might have been frustrated from time to time, but it's not a job, and trying to convince someone that he needs to pay me hundreds of dollars for my account because of my "work" is just ridiculous.

But I see it all of the time. What is even more interesting is that selling one's WoW account is not authorized by the Blizzard, the company that owns the game. Nor is buying or selling of gold, the currency used in the game. Yet people still do it.

And I've often laughed at the arguments people make to justify it. Here are some of my favorites:

1. It takes a lot of time to accumulate money in the game. I work hard in my regular job, so I should be able to use that money to save time in the game because unlike the kids who play this game, I don't have as much time to waste on the game.

If it's wasted time, then don't play the game. Part of the challenge of the game is being able to accumulate wealth in the time that you're actually playing it. Being a CEO of a company OUTSIDE of the game shouldn't suddenly make you a god in the game. Cheating in the game is cheating in the game.

2. Buying gold (or a character) doesn't hurt anyone else, so why should they care?

Buying gold actually causes massive inflation in the game so that those who play the game must pay outrageous prices for items they buy from other players. Essentially, that CEO with his outside money is making it impossible for anyone to play the game without investing outside money into the game to bring the game back to an even playing field. It does affect other players, and it ruins the experience of the game. Also, Blizzard has pointed out that people who partake in the gold selling community also contribute to illegal programs in the game that are used to accumulate money through exploits. It also causes a lot more hackers to play the game who go after legitimate players and take over their accounts, selling their goods when they take over their accounts and then going onto the next victim.

There are a lot more points to make about this, but the main point is that virtual worlds are living worlds of their own that do much better without outside stimulation that brings outside forces into the inner dynamic. While some games welcome microtransactions that benefit the game making company, virtual economies do not benefit from profiteers who try to link outside money with internal money economies. Even the microtransaction models of some games out there ruin the experiences for normal players. This type of behavior practically destroyed the Ultima Online housing market because you couldn't get a home unless you were able to buy it through Ebay, back during the hey day of UO. When new housing opened up, that Ebay market died almost overnight. People who used to make $150 for a keep (large house) could no longer get that, so they let those properties just collapse, and then players were able to place homes for the price of housing that existed within the game. It practically changed the market within the game overnight, which was a great thing.

Anyway, that's my rant for this topic today.

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The Hobbesian Model in Retrospect: A case study approach to studying creation of government in online games, such as Ultima Online

One of the hidden attributes of philosophy is the realization that no matter how much stock you put into a theory, the chances of that theory ever being challenged by real world circumstances are so miniscule that such events will either never happen or happen so far after someone’s lifetime that criticism is irrelevant anyway. Well, let’s take a look at one of the fundamental concepts of political philosophy that even non-theorists are required to study ad nausea: Why do societies and civilizations come together in the first place?

We all know the Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau models that stem from these conversations, and we all know how one buys into one theory or the other as to why people get together and allow themselves to be ruled over, or why someone gains power in what should be an almost impossible act of acquirement. I mean, what rational person gives over his or her power to some total stranger all in the name of protection from danger and a desire to avoid loss of belongings or life? If you look at that dynamic today, it seems almost ridiculous because why should any normal person feel that others should be in charge of him or her just because one is a part of every day society? Political scientists like to think they have it all figured out, depending up on what their particular bent is on the theory, but what I’ve always found fascinating is how little the average person thinks about these things, because the average person is the one who gave up power in the first place and continues to do it on a daily basis every day he or she does exactly what government tells him or her to do.

But before going off on that tangent, who was right? Did we get together to create a society for the sake of community, or was it something even more basic like Hobbes projects, and we just got together because we’re scared to death of each other, feeling that we’re probably a lot better off with some neutral administrator than we are trying to fend for ourselves? Unfortunately, we’re so far into the game that we no longer have to even ask why we got into it in the first place. We’re incapable of getting out of it, so why should it matter why we got into it way back before we even started writing histories about it?

Fortunately, there was a stable platform where this question was being asked, and there were a lot of people participating to give us exactly the answers we might be seeking about this situation. To find the answer, we have to go to the one place that scientists are still apprehensive about going: Computer games.

The problem with trying to test political theories, or even just philosophical theories, with computer games in the past is that they have mainly been seen as an environment that gives us access to children, and of course there is the stigma that we are almost always talking about a game of some sorts. Thus, scientists avoid being seen in that medium, because it then indicates that their science isn’t scholarly, so we miss a lot of information that is both fascinating and ground-breaking. Fortunately, we’re a little more enlightened these days concerning such issues, so a lot of scholarly research is coming from the genre of computer games.

But even more important is that games have evolved into sharing an agenda with another one of those new areas for exploitation, and that is the world of social networking. With the advent of Myspace, Facebook and other networking tools, scientists are now finding themselves with access to a lot of social data that they only conjectured about before. In the past, a scientist would study a bunch of students at some particular college or series of colleges, almost to the point where we probably know more about sophomores in college than any other entity on the face of the planet.

But something new happened in the 1990s, and it passed by a lot of social scientists without them even realizing it was happening. One of these games that came along was called Ultima Online. It was created by a group of computer gaming professionals at a company called Origin, and it was the culmination of a series of medieval setting role-playing games, called Ultima, which had, at the time, recently received resounding success with its seventh version, Ultima VII. It would continue on with several other continuations, specifically Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, but when Ultima Online was released, it was to the fanfare that was created from the global success of Ultima VII, a game where you arrived in the world of Britannia as the immortal avatar, a human who has achieved a sense of full enlightenment and brings that enlightenment to the welcoming, and not so welcoming, people of Britannia. The originator of the series, and the owner of Origin, was Richard Garriott. He would come to be known as Lord British, the sovereign who lived within the lands of Britannia.

Ultima Online was one of the first graphically enhanced multi user dungeons, where many people could play the same game at the same time. To handle the expected player capacity, different “shards” were developed, which housed exact duplications of the world of Britannia. The explanation was that the wizard Mondain had broken a gem that shattered into shards, each one being a different representation of the known world. The entire world of each shard was identical, but once the game went live, the world would change demonstrably, so that if you lived in one shard, you might not recognize the environment in another. An example was an early misunderstanding of this fact when I found a house near the city of Yew that had a training dummy in it I could use to train my fighting skills. Being on another shard, and not recognizing this nuance, I found myself wandering that same area near Yew, wondering why I could not find the training dummy house, no matter how much I searched.

A feature that made Ultima Online unique was that you could be attacked by other players, if you were wandering around outside of the safety of a protected town. In town, the guards would kill anyone who committed a crime, like stealing or attacking another player without cause, but outside of their protection, you were pretty much on your own. In the game, they called this player killing, or “pking”. At one point, a new player would realize that leaving a city could be dangerous, and thus, would either stick close to town, or be very cognizant of surroundings when traveling.

This brought about an interesting dynamic that leads to the focus of this study. At one point, there was the realization that going outside of town might be dangerous, but there was an entire world out there to explore. Either you hid in town and missed everything outside of town, or you took a chance. In the beginning, you took a chance alone, and after some time, you were probably killed by someone who made his or her livelihood by preying on unsuspecting tourists. But slowly, something emerged that acted as a compensation to this sort of behavior: The player town emerged.

The player town was a collection of self-made homes that its owners banded together to create a small society. Leaders were elected, commerce was developed and encouraged, and, most importantly, security was developed. Players did not have the advantage of automated guards appearing in their towns when criminals appeared and acted in such interests, so players had to become the guards themselves, often serving as militias that acted against anyone who worked against the interests of the town. As these towns grew stronger and larger, the security they offered grew as well. If a town member was attacked near town, the town militias would band together and go after the pkers. Eventually, these militias became armies, and from time to time, an attack against town members, or to people allied to the town, would result in a force of players who would travel to the power base of those who orchestrated such negative actions, often leading to deadly force.

In a very short time, players banded together and created small civilizations within the game that had their own leadership, and quite often their only reason for banding together was the protection of all. Others would join to engage in safe commerce, because it was often difficult to find customers outside of major cities, but customers often sought out player cities rather than game-run cities as the venders in player cities were a lot more accommodating to dealing economically than a system that was mainly computer driven (the major cities, which would not allow the placement of player venders).

For years, this was the model of city creation in Britannia. Some cities rose or fell based on how they handled outside elements. Some of them became famous, while others lasted mere moments before disappearing forever. An example of one of these cities that lasted for several years of renown was Shannara, named after the famed novels by Terry Brooks. This was also one of the cities that serves as an excellent case study for the changes that occurred after the introduction of Trammel.

Trammel is one of those concepts that can lead a former Ultima Online player to immediately start frothing at the mouth. It is probably one of the most controversial moves an online gaming company has ever done, short of the New Gaming Experience that was introduced to Star Wars Galaxies by Sony Online Entertainment, which for sake of simplicity, changed an online game so drastically that it is still unclear to this day as to whether it saved or destroyed a game that was seriously suffering in its ability to maintain its player base. Players had been leaving SWG in droves over many changes made in the game by SOE over the years, and this was supposed to fix things, but the controversy over the drastic changes have divided that player community forever, often leading to vehement disagreements between current and former players.

But Trammel was an animal of a completely different nature. Ultima Online was attracting a lot of player killers in the game, and over a particular Christmas holiday season, the number of pkers and thieves, another annoying distraction to players in the game, increased drastically. The UO message boards were filled with angry players who demanded that Electronic Arts (the new owners of Origin who had pushed Garriott from the company after the purchase) do something about it. The result was Trammel.

Trammel was a mirror world of Britannia that was added to every shard. The player would cross through a portal to this new world, and it would be a place where pkers could no longer attack unsuspecting players, and thieves could not steal from anyone as well. Those desiring the player versus player experience could travel through the portal to the old world, now known as Felucca, and everything that happened in the past was still active in Felucca. But Trammel was safe.

So, the majority of the player base moved to Trammel. Felucca became a graveyard, which was fitting because the lands of Britannia were made to appear dark and forbidding, much like a graveyard. Very few players decided to remain in Felucca.

This killed player cities almost overnight because those that existed were now in the “dangerous” land, and some people made it a habit to not even visit Felucca anymore. Then, after a number of months, the developers of the game opened up housing spaces in Trammel in what was a huge land rush that rivaled the land rush that took place in the prairies of the great northwest of the United States. The evening that housing was turned on was an event itself, with almost the entire player base signed on to grab pieces of land that they were looking forward to, finally being able to put down a huge house instead of relying on tiny little houses that had been all that could be placed in what land was left of Felucca in the old days of Ultima Online.

After housing was opened up on Trammel, the first player cities were created there as well. Liberalis was one of the first player run cities to launch on the Napa Valley server. However, after it was created, it quickly died out. Then, with almost every city that came after, the cities lasted a short while and then were abandoned.

What was discovered was that the reason for creating player cities was gone. Without the danger of pkers, without needing a place where people could gather for safety, other than the game’s manufactured cities, there was no reason to put one’s effort into such areas. The guilds that were active during this period slowly dwindled away, players finding themselves playing other games instead of Ultima Online. There seemed to be little challenge left in the game; without a need to band together, the point of Ultima Online was pretty much lost.

Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest helped players of UO realize what was missing in the game, specifically quests and something to do. Ultima Online was one of the few sandbox games, meaning that the players made the environment, not the game designers. Without a need to band together to create societies, which was crucial in the older days of Ultima Online, there was really no reason to continue playing the game.

Ultima Online is still around today, but it is a shadow of its former self, many of its prominent players having gone onto different games, often brining their entire clans with them as well.

For political philosophy, the Ultima Online experience offers a unique opportunity to explore the nature of individuals to band together and create societies and civilizations. Unfortunately, few games since then have offered an environment that produces a similar necessity, so it is unknown if there will be an opportunity to view such a dynamic again. But it is important that social scientists keep their eyes on such possibilities, because like Ultima Online, those opportunities often do not last long, and once discovered can change so quickly that the opportunity may be lost before it was ever realized.

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Review: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

For those of you like me who have grown tired of World of Warcraft (WoW), a new game came along called Warhammer Online. Now, like WoW, this is one of those games where you benefit from knowing a bit of the backstory before actually playing the game. With WoW, I was not a big fan of the real time strategy games, Warcraft, so I went into that game knowing very little of the backstory world. Eventually, I kind of caught up with it as I played the game for the year or years I was playing. But still, there was a lot of the history that made little sense to me, and it just wasn't worth figuring out.

The same thing happens with Warhammer. There's a huge backstory in this game, which you probably understand if you were enamored by the many Warhammer real time strategy games, but I never was, so again, I find myself wondering why I care about this or that particular part of the story. That's a criticism for those who aren't part of the mythology of a game, and unfortunately, they don't seem to care. For that matter, I am looking forward to Star Trek Online and Stargate Online, mainly because I love those particular mythological stories, but I guess that's what makes the fanbois happy with the game I'm discussing now.

First off, installing it kind of sucked. I've not been a real fan of Electronic Arts lately, even though I once worked for them. They seem to be forcing people to have the best equipment to install certain games, and many people have been stuck in the inability to install this game because it does not recognize older dvd rom drives. I had to go out and buy a new dvd rom drive to install this (well, got it for more reasons than that), but many other people have been extremely frustrated and have never gotten past the installation.

Game play: The game is designed to be much like Dark Age of Camelots realm warfare. At the same time, it steals directly from WoW in that it makes your character "flagged" when you do something realm versus realm (rvr) like. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of functions in the game that just remind you of WoW, but that's the problem with most of the games these days. Nothing really seems all that original.

So, this gives you a lot of opportunities to fight other players from the other realm. That can be fun and fast paced, but eventually it becomes an e-penis battle of proving who has the better character than others, with lots of bragging rights for killing lots of people from the other realm. That gets old really fast.

There is a player versus environment (pve) functionality to the game as well where you don't have to fight other players, but the environment is extremely under-developed. If you focused on just the pve environment, the leveling takes forever, and it's really not all that much fun. You go to an area, kill enemy non player characters (npcs) controlled by the computer, and maybe run what we in the gaming industry like to call "fedex" missions, where an npc tells you to deliver a book or some other stupid item to some other npc in the game. There's not a lot of intelligence developed into the pve environment of the game, so if someone comes to this game expecting that type of environment which is massively superior in Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft, you're not going to find it here.

Technical Issues: This is why I decided not to continue to play. The game is massively flawed tech wise. I lost count of how many times I flew to the main capital city, only to have the computer crash to the desktop. There is crafting in the game, but it was like the computer programmer who worked on crafting was a 12 year old English Second Language student because none of the wording makes logical sense. If this was a port from Russia, like a great game called Space Rangers 2, I would understand the bad language translations, but this is a company that speaks English, so I have no idea what their problem is.

Customer Service: Non existent. Simple as that. I joined a guild with friends and I couldn't be promoted in the guild because there was a technical problem with the game. None of the officers could promote me at all. Sent in a customer service report in game and waited, and waited, and waited. Sent one outside of game. And waited, and waited, and waited. They never responded. That kind of customer service leads to people leaving the game. Simple as that. There are also really annoying gold spammers in the game (people who mass send messages to everyone in the game that they are selling gold). The /ignore function in the game doesn't work. The spammers send messages right through the /ignore function, almost as if there was no ignore function. Customer service: doesn't care.

My overall conclusion of the game is that it could have been a really good game if it would have really tried to balance a pvp/pve game, but it didn't really try to do that. It's mainly a pvp game with no real goal in the end, unless the idea of sacking an enemy's city is to be considered "end content". It also appears to have been released WAY too early. There are so many glitches and bugs in this game, and no one seems to care. After awhile, you try to ignore those errors, but it does become massively frustrating, to the point where you start debate whether or not to continue playing.

On a scale of 0 to 10, I give Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: 5. It's not a horrible game, but if I'm paying $15/month, it needs to be a lot better.

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Way overdue for an update

I realize it has been over a month now since I last added an entry, so I figured I'd just kind of recap what's going on.

1. No real job so far on the horizon. I've been trying, and I have not been very successful. I keep ending up as the "second choice" of colleges, but never the first choice. San Francisco State went with one person over me. Casper College went with the other person over me. Pacific University in Oregon went with the other person over me. They often call me to tell me that they wished they could have chosen me, but in the end, they didn't choose me. My prospects are looking really dim these days. I almost got Hillsdale College, and I probably would have got it, but I had problems with my flight, so they ended up having to give it to one of the other people who actually showed up for the official interview in Michigan. I don't really know what to do at this point. I'm not finding any success, and it's almost August now.

2. Working temporarily. I'm working for EF, which is an English teaching school that works through the University of Phoenix. It is one of those jobs that lasts only a month, and by the end of this week, I'll be completely unemployed again. Before that, I was working a temporary month or so job with the county as an election trainer. That, too, ended, so little by little my little gigs are drying up.

3. Overseas might be my only hope. I'm currently looking into working in South Korea, teaching English or debate. We'll see how that turns out.

4. My computer stopped working last week. Apparently, my power supply decided to stop working, or blew itself out. I had to take my computer to a shop to actually get it repaired. To be honest, even though I've been a computer technician before, I misdiagnosed my own computer and didn't realize it was something as simple as a bad power supply. So, I replaced that and added another gig of ram to my computer (bringing it up to 3 gigs of ram). Cost me $200 that I didn't really have, but what can I say?

5. My writing hasn't been going very well lately. I am at one of those stages in my writing where I have a novel formulating in my head, but it's not ready to come out yet. This happens to me a lot with my novels. Unfortunately, it leaves me wanting to write, but not feeling comfortable enough to write yet. I have a working title of this next project that seems to be around the corner, entitled: She Talks to Penguins. Believe it or not, it's actually a very serious project, and something a bit different from what I've tried to tackle in the past. Considering I've tackled adventure, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, epic comedy and romance, this is more of a slice of life kind of novel, which I never actually imagined I would be writing. I guess it is more consistent with some of my recent work, which included my short story "Simple Girl" that took second place from the Stockton Arts Commission this summer; for the record, my romance story, "Buried Memories," took first place from the Stockton Arts Commission the year before. "Simple Girl" was more of a moralistic type of story about a stereotyped girl who everyone seems to ridicule behind her back, but in the end she was really the wisest character in the story.

6. Relationships. None. That's never really changed. I had a conversation with Kat yesterday when we went out for a beer at BJ's, and we talked about that same subject. I guess I don't really know what it is I'm looking for these days. In the past, I was involved with some pretty strange women, dating anything from a crazy girl from Hong Kong who desired to kill everyone in the human race, fondly referring to me in a loving manner as "the last victim"; a professional dominatrix who didn't understand why men found her so intimidating; a seriously toxic semi-supermodel who used to leave the table after we eat to vomit up everything she just chowed down; several best friends with whom I may have or may not have been actually dating at the time (just couldn't figure it out and blatantly asking just gave me vague replies); a couple of 18-20 year olds, who put out airs that they were much more mature for their age until we started dating and then suddenly they were really 18-20 year olds in maturity as well; and well, a couple of others that were great but just weren't either looking for me, or not there when I was finally looking for them.

So, we somewhat concluded, or at least I did, that I'm looking for someone intelligent who can stimulate me intellectually. I don't find myself looking for the same thing other men are looking for. Sure, an attractive woman is great, and I'll spend an eternity looking at a beautiful woman (Shania Twain, I'm looking at you right now...), but there has to be more to it than that. And that's so hard to find because I think too many women are socially stigmatized by what other men are seeking that they're all convinced that most men are interested in them only for sex. And that bad disposition gets reinforced by bad choices they make in trying to find that guy who is "just like you but not you".

There have been a couple of women who have come along but they're just not interested in me, or in a relationship at the moment. Some of them have been perfect for me, and I felt I would be perfect for them. But those relationships have remained strictly friendships because they're seeking someone else, even though I sometimes suspect that they don't know what they're seeking either. What's funny is that no matter where I go, and I do go numerous places in my life, I always end up with at least one or two really close female friends who are never interested in anything beyond friendship. And my jury is still out as to whether or not that is a good or a bad thing.

7. The Shoulder. It still hurts. I can barely move my arm still, and the pain has actually spread to my right shoulder as well, so I have little full mobility, and it hurts when I try to stretch my arms behind my back, like when I try to put a belt on my pants. With that said, the pain has become lessened somewhat, and I do feel that I've been able to get a bit more sleep at night than I use to. I am heading in for a surgery consultation this afternoon, and then in August I'll actually have the surgery itself, where they stretch the shoulder into a position and then supposedly, that "fixes" the problem of "frozen shoulder". I'm hoping so because it's been over a year, and this situation has really sucked a lot.

8. Tabula Rasa. It means "clean slate" but it's also the name of the game I've been playing religiously with the spare time that I have every day. It's an online game, like World of Warcraft, but it's so much not like World of Warcraft. And that's what I was seeking: Something NOT World of Warcraft. The premise is that the Earth has been conquered by an alien race called the Thrax (or the Bane), and we've regrouped on other planets where we're trying to win back our freedom from Bane oppression. It's so much different than other games I've played, and it actually feels like you accomplish something when you play. Plus, the important thing for me, is that it has a very rich story interwoven into the fabric of the game. That's rare. The game was designed by the creator of Ultima (and Ultima Online), Richard Garriott. Great game. I highly recommend it.

9. The Thesis. My second draft was given to Marlin almost two weeks ago. I haven't heard back on it. It's 115 pages approximately, so I can see why it would take some time to read through and correct it. I'm hoping there's not much more to do, because I really want this over and done with. I've been in school way too long. Plus, I need the stupid degree so I can show that I have something in return for the two years I spent here at the University of the Pacific.

That's pretty much it for now. Wish I had more to add, but that's a mouthful alone.

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Lord of the Rings Online

I had stopped playing online computer games, mainly because the people in those games generally just kept pissing me off. I started with Ultima Online, migrated to Everquest, dropped it for Dark Age of Camelot, then joined every MMORPG that existed after that until World of Warcraft came along. This game did everything right, and it felt good playing it. Then, at one point, I realized that the game was so static it was never going to be a different experience playing it from one day to the next. So I discontinued playing and focused on other things.

So, what brought me back to the world of online gaming again so that I am now playing Lord of the Rings Online? Well, first off, I wouldn't argue that the game is better than WoW; it's not worse, but it's not much better when it comes to gaming.

However, there's something else that actually makes the game worth playing. There's actual lore to the story that the developers follow and follow well. For those who loved the books (and then the movies) this is the experience of actually living in that world, but you just don't happen to be one of the main characters, but you get to be important nonetheless.

Anyway, so I'm playing the game these days during my spare time. And I'm enjoying it. It's still an online game, so it's not the greatest platform to enjoy an experience, but the other players are nowhere as bad as they were in previous games. Most of the players actually seem interested in the lore of the story and you don't have these endless conversations in regional chat about Chuck Norris or who really has a girlfriend outside of the game.

Anyway, it's an enjoyable distraction. And I really need a distraction right now. It would be different if I was dating or involved in something significant, but I'm not. So there's this. And sometimes, you just have to be happy with what you've got.

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City of Heroes

Because I'm not dating, and I finally have money again, I decided to start playing another massive multiplayers online roleplaying game (MMORPG) when I had some time to kill. There's not a lot of that kind of time in grad school, but every now and then is kind of fun. I realized I was never going to go back to World of Warcraft because the game is really designed for people who aren't into a tough game, but just want the belief that they are playing a game tougher than it really is. So, I started up a game I had never played before called City of Heroes/City of Villains.

The premise is simple for those who do not play these games. Instead of a hack and slash world with elves and dwarves and that kind of fodder, this involves cities where everyone playing the game is some kind of superhero with all types of different powers. The end product is a lot like any other MMORPG, such as you have healers, magic users and tanks (guys that take a lot of damage for the team so everyone else can actually kill the bad guys), but it has a superhero saves the day atmosphere to it.

Now, those who know my previous exploits may remember that little sarbonn originates online from his character in Ultima Online. This old MMORPG was a very violent game where you could be killed at a moment's notice, and people were actually scared to leave the safety of major cities. So, I created little sarbonn, who ended up being the clueless, happy, go-lucky little guy who wanders around, oblivious to danger happening all around him; I also made him a shepherd, the most useless skill in the entire game, and I was one of about two people in the history of Ultima Online up to that point who managed to develop a Grandmaster Shepherd, which meant that I could click on sheep with my shepherd's crook and they would move the way I wanted them to. I then created a comic strip back then (using scenes directly from the game) to create The Adventures of Little Sarbonn.

In Star Wars Galaxies, well, the universe is pretty much what you'd expect, an MMORPG with the skin of Star Wars. Well, there was one somewhat useless class called the ranger who could create huge camps out in the middle of nowhere, but was pretty much useless for anything else other than producing traps. So, I made the cowardly Linnea who would create camps right outside the city limits and then "compete" for citizens from the cities where she placed her camp, stating that her city was better and more democratic. I used to be visited by people from all over who pledged allegiance to places like Droid Town, Anchorhead West, Across the Street, and, of course, Ranger Town. I should also mention that I also created Cellphone Guy, who was a guy who wandered around in the middle of huge battles between the Empire and Rebel Forces saying: "Can you hear me now?" (long pause) "Good!"

In Dark Age of Camelot, a game that pits three military forces against each other in the frontiers (but safety within the home areas), I created Gretal, the healer, who was great at fighting, but was more famous for my Travels Through Camelot, which was a HUGE database of pictures of Gretal dead in front of many of the great landmarks of the game.

So, I've started doing the same with City of Heroes. My first attempt is Former Girlfriend, a superhero who is powered by the loss of a life shattering relationship where her previous boyfriend bankrupted her before leaving, so she now receives economic power from nonstop credit card offers from predatory lenders. Her battlecry is "Let's just be friends!"

My second character is a little more involved and seems to be pissing people off who take this game too seriously. His name is Floppy, and he's a guy who runs around in a bunny outfit and stops crime. Simple as that. But nothing is better than seeing a team of superheroes go to fight the evil bad villain and then Floppy comes trouncing through with his big feet and very fake outfit, to save the day. It's one of those you kind of have to see to get the true feeling for.

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The Academic fascination with all things Internet

Okay, I know that academics like to think of themselves on the cutting edge, but what I've been noticing over the last year or so is this HUGE fascination with all things Internet by professors and the academic community. Yes, I'm guilty of it as well, as my last paper was on romantic communication involving self-esteem and Myspace.

But there's another layer to this fascination that I'm finding equally fascinating only because I was one of that unlabeled generation that grew up adopting the Internet as it was happening, not pre-Internet or post-Internet. To explain this further, let me take a virtual world that seems to be overwhelmingly talked about in both academia AND the political sphere. I'm talking about Second Life, a massive mulitplayer online role playing game.

People running for office think it is important to have an avatar (a character in the game that looks like them, or whatever they want to represent them) running around in Second Life. Currently, I'm taking a course on mass communication that will involve all of us creating characters in Second Life, interacting with each other, and then writing a paper on our second life persona observations/interactions. Well, as someone who grew up with the infancy of Second Life, there's a little underbelly of a secret that no one seems to want to talk about: Second Life used to be nothing but simulated pornography. People would create avatars and then "hook up". Gambling used to be the highest grossing activity in the game, and I mean real world gambling with real world dollars being played with an exchange rate of Linden dollars (the in game currency). But again, what was fascinating is that there was so much sex going on in the game that most of the businesses set up in this sandbox are sex businesses. And people are selling animations (because they code them and then put them up for sale so you can use them yourself), and those animations are...well...quite sexual and extremely explicit in the variations they use. If bondage is your thing, you can walk down any street in Second Life, and there are bondage dungeons set up all over the place. What you won't find is other players. For some reason, the place exists like a ghost town, no matter what promoters like to say about it. The only time you're really going to see a group of people is when something from the outside of the game has announced that is going to happen inside the game (like a press conference, or some publicity generating activity from an already established real world corporation). So, what academics really have the opportunity to study is momentary expressions of people interacting based on events fueled outside the world, or they can study peep show pornography, if they're lucky enough to catch some embarrassed player in the act.

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