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"Recently, the guild All Good Things on Kargath lost one of their longtime players. Feelan, one of their guild's holy priests, passed away from cancer in early December -- shortly after he was finally able to meet his online friends. Now the guildmates are wondering what they can do to remember their friend in-game. Kesryth suggests that Blizzard add Feelan's character to one of the floating islands in Nagrand, where he can stand and watch the sunset in his favorite zone."

"This is short film directed by Gavin Kelly ( http://www.piranhabar.ie ) we worked on a while ago called "Avatar Days". What makes this one special is the fact that it was filmed, vfx'ed and comped all in just 4 days. It was made as part of the "4 day Film" catagory in the Darklight Film Festival. It follows 4 MMORPG players taking about their online persona's. As they tell their stories we see them go about their everyday lives against the mundane backdrop of city life...but as their Avatars."

A conversation with Cory Doctorow plunges into the matter at hand so quickly that it's almost impossible not to imagine yourself falling through an internet-era rabbit hole of pop culture and technology. Doctorow is all about synthesizing ideas and spitting them out in as accessible a fashion as possible, and the ground he manages to cover in a single stride can be mind-boggling; he's a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, father, gamer ... A former WoW player and husband of gaming standout Alice Taylor (also previously profiled here in 15 Minutes of Fame), he's widely known as the co-editor of Boing Boing and author of the bestselling young adult novel Little Brother.

"SCVNGR, which makes a mobile game with real-world challenges, has a playdeck. It is a deck of cards listing nearly 50 different game mechanics that can be mixed and matched to create the foundation for different types of games. I've republished the accompanying document below, which should be interesting to anybody trying to inject a gaming dimension into their products."

"Here's the PDF (4MB) of my dissertation:, submitted to the graduate school on September 2, 2010: Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice" Mark was "… a PhD student in Ed Tech at the University of Washington looking at digital games as a way to promote active participation in social contexts as well as my own personal narrative with games."

"Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft(R), its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), now exceeds 12 million players worldwide. This milestone was reached in the wake of the mainland Chinese launch of World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King(R), and also as global anticipation continues to mount for the December 7 release of the game's third expansion, Cataclysm(TM). "

"PARIS, France - October 7, 2010 - Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), now exceeds 12 million players worldwide. This milestone was reached in the wake of the mainland Chinese launch of World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King®, and also as global anticipation continues to mount for the December 7 release of the game's third expansion, Cataclysm™. "

"The patch impressed and excited me in a way I hadn't felt for a long time in Warcraft. For it seemed to mark the culmination of a sometimes hesitant process of refinement which--via 21 major patches, to date--has since the game launched seen it gradually homing in on a particularly potent notion of fun and player involvement. This shift has meant a move away from wasteful complexity, and towards creating as many decisions as possible that players find meaningful. In blunter terms, it's about pulling psychological levers more effectively--and pulling these for more different types of people. … Throughout the game, more is explained, and more is automated: the designers' own thinking is more clearly visible. A virtual world that six years ago felt esoteric, obtuse or just bloody-minded in places (running ten minutes in the form of a ghost in order to locate your corpse comes to mind) has become almost cosy. It no longer wants you walking for miles to locate a tiny object that can't be seen on a map, or slaying a hundred spiders to get one drop of poison. It wants you progressing, interacting, questing: knowing where the next objectives lie, and the ones after that."

"In this data set, we'll fill in that framework with some quantitative data to get a better sense of what changes from stage to stage. The player life-cycle proposed has 5 stages:" Stages are: starting, ramping up, mastery, burn out, and casual/recovery.

"Sociologist and director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation, William Sims Bainbridge spent 2300 hours entrenched in popular MMO World of Warcraft, looking for look for insights about Western civilization. What did he find there?"

"Needless to say I was intrigued by the indie movie Second Skin and the people that were portrayed in the film. A benefit of the wonder of the internet is the ability to actually locate people that you would never know how to get a hold of. It works wonderfully to reunite old family members, rekindle old relationships and even get in touch with old school members. bustardIt also works great for journalists, luckily I ran into Dan Bustard on Facebook. When I approached him asking if it was who I thought it was he was very apprehensive, he first asked me if he owed me money. After awhile he opened up and he agreed to an interview. And here it is"

"After the Lead Content Designer of World of Warcraft (WoW), Tigole, deemed a new set of rewards ''welfare'' epics, the WoW player community responded in a multitude of fascinating ways. Using rhetorical analysis, gaming studies literature, and a critical analysis of welfare discourse, four rhetorical strategies can be seen in the discourse produced by the playing community. From directly confronting Tigole's statements to lamenting a loss of avatar capital and analyzing the role the changes have on the multiplayer aspects of the game, the rhetoric of ''welfare'' epics offers unique insights into the importance of balance and scarcity in the normative structures of WoW, how players accept and perpetuate the belief that rewards in online games should be ''earned,'' and how WoW's system of rewards has been fundamentally altered since the game's launch."

"Regular readers know that I don't play many massively multiplayer online games, but it turns out you don't need to be a fan of the genre to get something out of Mr. Andrews' book. In addition to providing advice on how to forge a guild's identity, offering guidance in recruiting reliable people who are a good match for your guild, and giving tips on how to equitably distribute loot gained from raids, he also delivers insight into the people who invest significant chunks of their lives playing online games and the communities they create for themselves. "

"According to John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC, massive multiplayer online games demonstrate ways in which groups can manage information and maximize learning. At a recent lecture as part of Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, Brown said that World of Warcraft guilds can serve as models for entrepreneurs in understanding how to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. "

"MMOGCHART.COM is dedicated to my research in tracking the growth of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). The menu on the left is updated each version with new figures, charts, graphs, and my analysis. My work is wholly independent and free; if you find it useful please consider making a donation via PayPal. If you have any questions, desire an interview, wish to provide numbers, or would like to hire me to consult on a MMOG project, please feel free to contact me."

"In their continued quest to plumb the mysterious depths of human interactions, some sociologists have stopped watching people-and started watching their avatars. And the US government is paying them to do it. While playing World of Warcraft and traipsing through Second Life might not sound like traditional academic disciplines, they are increasingly important for research into virtual communities. This burgeoning subdiscipline even has its own publication, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. What gets studied? Gold farming, "goon culture," griefing, entrepreneurial activity, intimacy, even "The Visual Language of Virtual BDSM Photographs in Second Life," which appeared in the most recent issue of the journal. "

"Blizzard EVP of product development Frank Pearce has told VG247 that World of Warcraft will return to growth this year, moving beyond the 11.5 million subs it's been stuck at since 2008. Speaking with Adam Hartley in an interview in London yesterday, Pearce told us that the launch of Cataclysm later this year, as well as the release of Wrath of the Lich King in China, will bring increased numbers to the MMO. When asked if it had hit its peak as far as the number of players went, Pearce said: "No, I don't think that at all."

"Instead of logging onto Blackboard to complete homework this spring, students in one class will enter the "World of Warcraft" and "Second Life" to study the culture of online virtual environments. "Discourses, Community, and Power in Virtual Worlds," or ENG 654, is open to students of all majors and interests. The course intends to adapt to an increasingly technological environment. "We want them to get the experience of playing together with different characters that have to take on different roles to really get an experiential sense of how complex game play is in that environment," said English professor Elisabeth Hayes, who will teach the class with law professor John McKnight. The class will meet in a physical classroom for half of its sessions and the rest will be held virtually in "World of Warcraft" and "Second Life.""

"We would like to invite those with inspirational personal stories to share them for consideration in our new series. We want to hear about the positive impact World of Warcraft has had on you and your life."