After the latest crisis, Sachant, her migraine and J. explore familiar territory in instant-message, leaving new scorch marks in their wake. (Note: “Van” is her husband.)
Continue reading Sachant and J. Save Gaming Again: Booth Babes…

I decided to give all my family members comic books for Christmas this year. I tried to make the focus as broad as possible — I didn’t give anyone any Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis just because I didn’t want to scare hell out of them on the holiday, but I did take some Ellis recommendations via Artbomb, notably the collected salamander dream and Sundiata.

Those two were for my nieces. The adults got various trade paperbacks ranging from indie pen and inks (Jason Lutes‘ Jar of Fools and The Fall) to post-modern realism (Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter) to slapstick (Eric Powell’s The Goon to a couple superhero collections (Kurt Busiek’s Astro City and Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Single Green Female.)

To my brother Andy, who was living in Brooklyn in September 2001 when the World Trade Center fell, I gave The First Hundred Days, collecting the first volume of Ex Machina by Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris. It’s an ongoing comic about a superhero that can talk to machines and manages to save one of the Twin Towers from falling in the New York of his universe, and then becomes mayor.

Andy, without any knowledge of what I was going to give him, got me In The Shadow Of No Towers by art spiegelman. His first “adult” comic collection since Maus, this was a collection of cartoons, many of which he wasn’t able to get published in American media in the fallout of 9/11, collected in a coffee-table book. It’s like a giant children’s book. All the pages are thick cardstock. It’ll take me a while to get through this thing.

Never mind why I took until now to relate this story.

Please, if I die under any circumstances and any of you Internet people find out about it, please refrain from doing anything so lame as this crap on my behalf.

If me begging isn’t enough for you, maybe the reminder that I might not actually be dead would be enough warning. Actually, I might be dead right now. Send money, I need a proper burial. My neighbors downstairs are complaining of the stench.

As a sort-of-related note, I reacted to a Warren Ellis post featuring a William Gibson quote about JT LeRoy, an author that, as has been suggested, isn’t real.

Awesome. Obviously, this refers to IGE. And it is glorious. Now if only Computer Games would stop selling the back page to them.

So Midway bought an Australian game development company last August for about $7 million Australian. Last month, they shut them down and laid off the 70 people that worked there. Apparently the San Diego office also got shuttered, the result of a $29.1 million shortfall.

I’m not sure why this is particularly interesting to me right now, but it strikes me as important. Even if it is old.

Fan-made maps.

Once upon a time, I went to college. In this college, I took an Ethics class. In this class, one of the texts was David Hume’s collected Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals. In the latter text, Hume postulated that there existed “social virtues” that “must … be allowed to have a natural beauty and amiableness, which, at first, antecedent to all precept or education, recommends them to the esteem of uninstructed mankind, and engages their affections” — in other words, human beings accept them as good and pleasing without needing to learn as such.

I didn’t pay very close attention in that class, but I was an Ultima fan. A large part of what makes Ultima special is its carefully defined Virtue system. One of those Virtues, Justice, is one of Hume’s Social Virtues. But that’s not what I was thinking about. Rather, two years after graduating, I’d renewed my fascination Origin Systems, which had just released a new application of the Ultima story, Ultima Online.

The Virtues of Ultima, I was thinking, were made for a single-player game — they were monastic, such that for the most part, they didn’t describe the interactions between players of Ultima Online. They weren’t social, in other words. Players could consider themselves and each other individually Honest, for example, but what really mattered was that they Trusted each other. (Or didn’t.)

So, way back when, I turned the Virtue system on its ear and came up with three new Principles and eight new Virtues that I thought could be applied to UO. That was 1999. Never mind what I meant for it that long ago. But if you play Lazarus and make it all the way to Castle Blackthorn, pausing foolishly to check the library shelves, you might find the following book.
Continue reading Bedtime story: The Social Virtues…

Our fans, and credit due. (Picture of the congratulations certificate for the first player to be confirmed finishing the game.)

At least one fan is devoting an entire blog to documenting her experiences in game.

Doug the Eagle is working on a Lazarus-based anti-walkthrough, so he says.

You can go “all the way” with a certain amorous pirate in Buccaneer’s Den.

Unlike Professor Bartle, I know to laugh at the quote he points out, because it is both topical, funny and (unfortunately) appropriate. At least you can send your kid to rehab for cocaine.

Wish I understood what “555″ meant. That one was new to me.