If we do, where do we send our students to read through the literature? So far, I've treated Terra Nova as a sort of repository of ideas. But this will not easily sustain us as more scholars join the field. So... I wonder. Is it time we publish a journal of our own? Or at least a yearly review of some form? I worry that knowledge gets lost as generations move on to other topics/activities and newcomers will see nothing but a whole lot of webtalk without much scholarly, peer-reviewed writing on the issues.

Recently, I have been faced with the task of "Reviewing the Research on Virtual Worlds" (yes, with capitalization) as part of my dissertation requirements (ch. 1 of dissertation for me, due in 13 days and counting) but also to be published in a "Handbook of New Literacies," edited by well-known literacy scholars such as Michelle Knobel and Conlin Lankshear. So, for the past few weeks, I've been burying myself in old and new writings on the very spaces we all hold so dear – MMOGs, MUDs, virtual worlds of all forms.

Read about gold farming wage slaves in action, courtesy of James Lee of 1UP.com. We've been waiting for this for awhile. Thanks Brian Whitener of gameguidesonline for the tip. As Thomas Friedman argues, the world is flat. Is the virtual world flat as well? What do we make of China? And what do we make of Chinese gamers, now and in the future? Personally, I can't claim to have been put out by this reversal - the enterprise had a gimmicky feel to it from the git go. But it does suggest an interesting tension that I suspect we will see a great deal more of in the future: conflicts arising from different styles and forms of gaming joined for various reasons (whether novelty, entertainment, or commerce) will be exacerbated by their different impacts across different mediums.

This piece of eye-candy came across the transom recently. If you enjoy cute Chinese girls, WoW, Coca-Cola and orcs, it's just the thing for you. Blizzard is localizing WoW for the Chinese audience. And it's a big audience.

The estimable Cory D alerts us to the fact that my favorite almost-MMOG, Kingdom of Loathing, is now merchandising the hell out of itself. That allowed us to calculate the average leveling time and the accumulated play-time for every given level.

Here is a story I've been sitting on for a while, hoping for some insight in the shower as to what the lasting meaning behind this really is. I don't have it, maybe you do, but I do have a hunch and it starts with baseball... On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation. We talk to the illusion of a world with many concurrent activities and a speak least metaphorically, to the agencies that can live in such places (e.g. of Non-Player-Characters and Player-Characters interacting with shared world state). In the fact of today, however, such parallelism is a fiction - most games are implemented within a single simulation thread (they just iterate through all the objects quickly but in sequence... "butcher before baker before the cat jumps over the moon..."), but this is likely to change, perhaps very soon.

However, this is misleading when examined in isolation. To return to Willard's original muse, and to Robert MacMillan's hint: the virtual threads of interconnectedness are multi-layered, from cell phones to chatrooms, leading to a foggy but resiliant virtualized space. We now live in such a place, and are moving through it to somewhere else.

We saw some of this with London, as was reported, a modest chat room went a long way at building confidence within the regulators in how well the London financial system was coping. The global information culture is fundamentally shifting from a broadcast environment to a topology where broadcast amplifies, and is amplified by, many-to-many networks that are increasingly enabled by information technologies – including web services, publicly accessible databases, social software (weblogs, wikis, buddy lists, online games, file-sharing networks), mobile devices (camera phones, text messaging, global positioning systems), and the tools and technologies that blur the line between online and real-world spaces (web cams, wi-fi, distributed sensors, Internet cafes, MeetUp and other smart-mob phenomena)... The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.

You can Buy SWG Credits, a professional, loyal and reliable Final Fantasy XI Gil exchange corporation work group. We are fairly confident that, in fact, Bob Moore is the brains behind the operation (Bob, if you're reading this, give me a call). But since we were uncertain about who was responsible for all the good work, we decided to grab as many of them as we could. Especially those who, like Eric, are big fans of Jane Austen, have spent years living in Southeast Asia, and who hold the conviction that every American 13 year old should be packed off to live with a Third World family for a year. Eric is particularly interested in quantititative methodologies of research in MMOGs.

You can Buy SWG Credits, a professional, loyal and reliable Final Fantasy XI Gil exchange corporation work group. We are fairly confident that, in fact, Bob Moore is the brains behind the operation (Bob, if you're reading this, give me a call). But since we were uncertain about who was responsible for all the good work, we decided to grab as many of them as we could. Especially those who, like Eric, are big fans of Jane Austen, have spent years living in Southeast Asia, and who hold the conviction that every American 13 year old should be packed off to live with a Third World family for a year. Eric is particularly interested in quantititative methodologies of research in MMOGs.