Monthly Archives: February 2009

Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex

By Garrison | Published: February 21, 2009
How much “fun” will NASA’s much-touted Unreal 3-based MMO be when it is released next year? If the cap­tions to still images released on devel­oper Project Whitecard’s web­site are any indi­ca­tion, not much. Here’s how they describe the Regolith Grinder (aka “The Taurus”): “Con­tructed from an advanced smelt­ing process and lunar fac­tory, it is a general-purpose [...]
Posted in MMORPG, Rhetoric | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Tetris and Torture

By Garrison | Published: February 19, 2009
Raph Koster revis­its his book on A The­ory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Cal­abouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply dis­turb­ing Flash-based Tetris vari­ant that replaces col­ored blocks with human beings in dif­fer­ent states of dis­tress.  Speak­ing of it on his web­site, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Per­sua­sive Games (wherein he rejects as [...]
Posted in Aesthetics, Politics, Rhetoric, ethics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Lost and the Damned at The NYTimes

By Garrison | Published: February 18, 2009
The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA’s new down­load­able expan­sion, the evoca­tively named biker sce­nario The Lost and the Damned. Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accom­pa­nied by vio­lence. But most titles are set far away from what [...]
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Against the Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism

By Garrison | Published: February 17, 2009
At the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence (AAAS) in Chicago, a behav­ioral sci­ences pro­fes­sor from North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity has called into ques­tion the ide­al­ism of much of our rhetoric on the poten­tial diver­sity of human net­works in MMORPGs. “Social Dri­vers for Orga­niz­ing Net­works in Com­mu­ni­ties” appeared as part of a panel called “Ana­lyz­ing Vir­tual Worlds: [...]
Posted in MMORPG, Reports | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Good, the Bad, and the Silly

By Garrison | Published: February 15, 2009
Try­ing to dis­cover a lit­tle bit more about ethics and the nature of malev­o­lence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde char­ac­ter: Bad­flower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In War­craft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly. WoW’s two fac­tions are the Alliance and the Horde: [...]
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