Play’s Republic

A follow-up to Brian’s post just earlier, it seems like WoW is an aberration in its ability to appeal to both Eastern and Western user bases. I found this article that talks about the difference. Seems like the two gaming communities are very disparate, but something about these results seems dubious to me. Am I [...]

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So, as I went through my (occasionally multiple-times) daily perusing of icanhascheezburger a little bit ago, I found a nicely done article analyzing some of the sociology of these cat-macro images. It traced all sorts of aspects, including why they are called ‘macros’ (they originated on message boards as an image which served as a [...]

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This is just a quick entry to give you all a link that I found interesting to my final project and thought I would share. Check out the links to the photogalleries at the bottom (the first link is just to the book’s Amazon page, but the next two take you to the photos themselves, [...]

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i came across this call for papers – it is due May 30th.  Here is the description from the site – I think it would be great if someone could pull this off from class :).  The description is pretty vague and it is a trip to London afterall.     The theme of the conference is [...]

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Super Mario Frustration (Not safe for work, due to heavy, constantly, unceasing profanity.) I highly enjoyed this. Mostly because its the ultimate example of what happens to me pretty much every time I’ve tried to play a video game that wasn’t tetris. (Disclosure: I think the games I was attempting to play were typically Mario [...]

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This is a brief post to discuss a couple of quirky features that have really stuck out at me when using the Wii interface. 1. If you are playing a game, say Wii Sports, between every third or so game, the console will take a minute to remind you about the other options that are [...]

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A brief video on Second Life was recently featured on blog for the NPR show “The Bryant Park Project”.  This video discussed the importance of social boundaries, even in the virtual world.  NPR producer Win Rosenfeld spent some time immersed in the Second Life culture researching the notion of personal space in the virtual environment.  [...]

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A Fox News piece yesterday pointed to a recent Pew Internet & American Life survey to make the claim that “nearly 50 percent of Americans have little use for internet and cell phones”. The Pew survey, completed in 2006, interviewed just over 4,000 Americans to discuss their views on technology (primarily internet technologies and cell [...]

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So while at the Media in Transition conference last weekend, the Heraclitean/Platonic dichotomy Garrison set out at the beginning of class kept jumping out at me. Someone in the very first plenary session, Tom Pettitt, described something which fits perfectly, and which Garrison has somewhat alluded to in a recent post. One of the panelists [...]

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