Play’s Republic

Yesterday’s The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy article about WoW gold farmers in China:
“The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” by Julian Dibbell

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For those of you who got hooked on World of Warcraft while fulfilling the requirement for this course:
The New York Times ran a series of articles written by Seth Schiesel on conquering The Burning Crusade expansion pack. You can access the series at Conquering the Burning Crusade. (The author was the first to hit level [...]

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I stumbled across Nabaztag, the WiFi bunny while writing tonight (don’t ask), and found a Second Life complement for bunny owners: SecondNabaz.

The Second Life version I made detects if avatars are around. If so, it makes my real Nabaztag wiggle its ears and tell me their names. Also, if people talk to the virtual bunny, [...]

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The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that a virtual auction will be held in Second Life to benefit “victims’ families and people on campus who are struggling to cope with last month’s deadly shooting rampage.” Bids are to be submitted in Linden (L$) amounts.
You can browse photos of the items available at the auction website.

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Here’s Edward Tufte’s site, per our conversation in class: The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press.
I also have a copy of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (first edition, apparently) if anyone wants to borrow it—just let me know. You can also view a preview of the essay on the shuttle Columbia accident: PowerPoint Does [...]

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I was talking to Alyssa today about a WoW guild called We Know and how they plan raids in Second Life, and figured this would be a good time to write about one of the sessions I attended at SXSWi in March.

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First, a story from Second Life: A friend of mine was showing me around his meticulously rendered plot of land when he stopped the tour and excused himself to remove a blackjack table that some person had discarded on his land. He seemed greatly annoyed by this discovery—the random object was incompatible with the simulation [...]

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