Hey, gang. I had to wait to post this until everything was signed and sealed. The circle of life has turned again for me. I still do some work for GamerDNA (most visibly, a Friday column posted to the company blog) and I still do a bit of consulting on community issues, but I am now back into the dirty, dirty world of… MEDIA. I joined the staff of Massive Gamer – it’s a relatively new magazine just out of the harbor. I’m terribly excited. I’ll be working for Dana Massey (he who built MMORPG.com into a mighty empire, and dragged Warcry back into prominance) on the website when it launches, and I’m one of the associate editors on the actual magazine. The team is terrific, but to a degree the magazine is still finding its groove. Check us out and watch it grow!
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From Kotaku: My First MMO
Favorite quote: “I was fascinated to discover the hysteria over PWI’s decision to offer a PvP and a PvE server. Not being sold on this whole ‘MMO’ thing in the first place, the PvE server seemed like the best choice for me — other people clearly enjoy the whole PvP experience, and they had a server for that, too. Surely that couldn’t be cause for consternation, could it? Of course it could, this is the internet we’re talking about.”
Read the rest for her comments on the microtransaction stuff, and more. Having a veteran gamer and writer stumble into an MMO is always interesting!
Any time you change a post, a FAQ, an announcement, or a story for ANY REASON besides a very minor typo, you must put “EDITED mm/dd/yy HH:MM.”
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I love automatic trackbacks. I’m always interested in seeing what people are saying… or not saying. One example of the latter, my little reference-laden post about certain parties and their piss poor timing? That little post is one of the most heavily hit features on this entire blog. And yet? Almost no one is discussing it. They’re just passing the link to their friends, in emails or IMs or other means not trackable, saying “READ THIS.” And yet I’ve got almost no email on it, or any crankiness in the comments. I don’t preapprove my comments, and have deleted three comments in the history of this blog, so it’s not like I’m editing out the hate or anything. I have theories about the reasons for this strange aberration, but no evidence.
But as usual, I digress. I followed one of the trackbacks (in the Quid Pro Quo thread) to a blog called Geek Critique, where a fellow named Rob disagreed with some of my text. I nodded a bit while I was reading, seeing where he was coming from. One of his points, though, made me realize that I hadn’t fully explained my reasoning, and so I started to post a reply. The longer I typed, the more I realized that my response was covering a topic that is actually rather central to the way I conceive of true community work.
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UPDATED, 9:50 PM EDT 9/10/08
No, no, not that, that’s yesterday’s tempest in a teapot. No, I’ve got something new pissing me off.
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One of the things that makes reading this blog full of hot air and profanity worth your bookmark (I think) is that I’ve done time on both sides of the fence. After my last post, where I complained about what a reporter owes the reader, it occurred to me that any reader could have written such a screed. So, today’s will be something any CM could write. What does a reporter owe a studio after drinking the free booze and hauling away t-shirts in the free tote bag?
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I just updated my Twitter feed with a snarky comment about MMO reviews. Then I realized I had more to say than the Twitter window allows.
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