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 vehicle with a plow option.”

Maybe things are more exciting over near the Moonbase?

“The centre of operations for Moonbase Alpha, this inflatable, reinforced structure is the core. Look at the scale of the extensible walkway system!”

Nothing says “I can’t wait to play this” like “extensible walkway system.”

“Social Drivers for Organizing Networks in Communities” appeared as part of a panel called “Analyzing Virtual Worlds: Next Step in the Evolution of Social Science Research.”

The findings are interesting. According to VWNews:

A group of researchers recently took a look at social habits inside the MMOG Everquest II. Their findings show that players tend to associate with others from their nearby geographical community. Obviously, gameplay heavy MMOGs like Everquest attract a different user than more open-ended or social worlds like Second Life or Habbo, but habits like that could present a challenge to creating international, large-scale communities in virtual worlds.

“People end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know,” social scientist and engineer Noshir Contracto said in a statement. “It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks. You can talk to anyone anywhere, and yet individuals 10 kilometers away from each other are five times more likely to be partners than those who are 100 kilometers away from each other.”

Via Virtual Worlds News, “Research Shows Worldwide MMOGs Not Very Cosmopolitan”

WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your standard Human / Elf / Dwarf power trio pitted against the Orcs, the Trolls, and the Walking Dead. But whereas Tolkien and others in the literary tradition clearly see this as a contest between good and evil (and even Good and Evil), WoW equivocates. Good, yes: Alliance characters (human, anyway) make frequent reference to light and righteousness. But Evil, not so much: Horde characters include the Undead and spells make frequent use of demons and imps. But these are not malevolent. Sometimes they are “bad,” and frequently merely “different.”

Indeed, the idea of the Horde as some overwhelming, ubiquitous evil is frequently skewered. On one recent outing, for example, a horrifying giant ogre asked me to help him fetch “gloom weeds” for an zombie apothecary who had built him with leftovers from the graveyard. After a considerable effort, I brought the gloom weed to the frightening skeletal pharmacist, who complained, loudly, that he wanted “doom weed, not gloom weed.”

There is no evil here. The Horde is just like the Alliance, except the Horde’s narratives are infused with irony and humor.

Subscriptions and virtual-world populations are a frequent topic of discussion in game studies, but the facts are notoriously hard to come by, since population density — often perceived as an index of popularity — is a selling point, and therefore subject to spin. Blizzard is generally regarded as one of the most forthcoming and transparent of the online gaming services, as their definition of “subscriber” refers clearly to members who pay a monthly fee:

World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This differs substantially from online services like Second Life or MMORPG competitors like Atlantica (which calls itself “#1 ranked”): While SL and Atlantica boast many million “subscribers,” their definition of a subscriber includes those who sign up for free (and may never even have subsequently returned to the site). Blizzard’s pricey subscription may be the source of much complaint, but that cost guarantees the relative equivalence of subscriber base and shard population.

I’d like to research this further, but for the moment, the math on WoW is sufficiently interesting. If, as of Dec 28, 2008, there are 11.5 million subscribers, and approximately 236 known shards (“realms” or game instances, probably equivalent to physical servers), then there is a mean of roughly 48,700 subscribers per server. One difficulty with this number: I’ve no way of knowing how many avatars each subscriber maintains: I have 3 characters on Thrall, 2 on Crushridge, and 2 on The Underbog; based on anecdotal evidence, I doubt that my arrangement is atypical. Consequently, that 48.7k subscribers/shard mean fails to reflect the reality of individuals who play across several servers.