Terra Nova - Academics playground

Bruce DamerTerra Novans, you might be interested in this interview on Daniel Terdiman's Geek Gestalt blog on how James Cameron's film may presage the future of virtual worlds (how we will interact with them beyond our current "keystone kops" era)... http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10443265-52.html?tag=mncol;title

Edward CastronovaMajor James D. "Pidge" Fielder, USAF, points us to this report by CNET's Dave Rosenberg indicating that the virtual goods market, once confined to the insides of MMORPGs, continues to expand into all kinds of social software systems. Thanks Pidge!

Edward CastronovaWhile wandering around the Catholic blogosphere I encountered Basilian Father Chris Valka discussing video games. Fr. Valka's concern is that games erode one of the cardinal virtues, Fortitude. As you know from your Catechism (see Para. 1808), Fortitude "strengthens the...

Unggi Yoon* This post is a correspondence to Ted's recent post 'SCOSK Legalized RMT' Supreme Court of South Korea just interpreted game industry promotion act that I introduced in my old posting on Terra Nova: "Selective bombing of RMT in Korea"...

Edward CastronovaThanks to Ren Reynolds for passing this around the backchannel: The Supreme Court of South Korea overturned fines imposed by lower courts on RMTers in Lineage. Does this mean that you can't have a ToS clause forbidding RMT? We can't...

greglasI still have not found time to see Avatar, but since I keep a running search query on avatars in the news, I have seen quite a bit of commentary about the film , including spoilers. One thing I have...

Lisa GalarneauWhat's in the pipeline? What are the major trends in MMOs and virtual worlds? When's the Star Trek MMO coming out? Who will be TN's next contributing author? What conferences will rock? This is your chance to give TN all...

Lisa GalarneauWas digging through my old socialstudygames.com archives, and found this post from 2005. I am still waiting: After spending a bit of time playing World of Warcraft together, colleague Gordon Calleja and I had a discussion by phone about how we felt about it. We were impressed with the technological achievement and visual style, certainly, but we were perplexed as to why we weren't getting that spark, that feeling of really falling in love with a game (often characterised by fiending to get back in immediately after logging off, just like wanting to call your lover the minute they've walked out the door).