There’s been some derision at Joystiq and even a slight tone of “duh” from Nerfbat over the recently resleased results from a study showing that MMO games “promote sociability and new worldviews.”
For example, Joystiq’s Kyle Orland says,
You can always count on scientists to confirm through painstaking study what most people can figure out using common sense.
This is an entirely wrongheaded view.
(Link is work-safe).
My Worldcon schedule:
Friday August 25th, 10am: “World of Warcrack” panel, ACC 212-A
Yep, I am moderating a panel about WoW. The other folks on the panel include Mike Stemmle, co-designer of classic LucasArts games like Sam & Max and Escape from Monkey Island; William B. Fawcett, author of The Fleet series of books; Justin Lloyd of Otaku no Zoku, and Scott Campbell, who is apparently a game developer but I can’t quite figure out which Scott Campbell it is. 🙂
The panel description reads,
Massively Multiplayer Online Games have long been popular but none have ever been as popular as World of Warcraft. (At its height, “Everquest” had fewer than one million subscribers; WoW has about six million.) Why are these sorts of games popular and what is it about WoW that makes it king?
Saturday August 26th, 3pm: Autographing session, ACC ATGR6.
The Autographing area is in the exhibits area between art show and dealers room. I’m opposite the likes of Harlan Ellison, and who knows if they will even carry my book at any of the dealers at Worldcon. But if they do, or even if they don’t, bring one, and I’ll draw a penguin in it. I’ll be happy to sign game boxes too, I suppose. I imagine there will be no line, because nobody there will have the slightest clue who I am. 🙂
I will probably get up there on Thursday evening and wander around in a daze at my first-ever Worldcon, and drive back down sometime on Saturday evening.
And it ain’t pretty. It didn’t connect with this reviewer, who commented,
I think I am just more into having a simpler and more direct experience when I am on social networking sites like MySpace. Don’t get me wrong, I love customizing my page. However, I would never go as far as to create a pretend or mini version of myself or home. Though it may not be for me, Cyworld is worth a look.
A couple of responses to the Harper’s Forum have popped up on the blogosphere, one at The Aspidistra and another at ideant. This latter one prompts a reply, as it comments,
the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:
KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)
Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation.
