Skycandy

Last autumn, I had my Ultima Online account turned on for old times’ sake. I bought myself a ride to the most populated server and decided to plop down a house. After a few days of looking, I’d found myself a location, but I still had a book of leftover runes to what are known as IDOC houses. In UO,…

Minecraft’s plucky creator has just hit the big million — that’s a million purchases, not bucks. I’ve made money as a modder in my day, and I can with no small amount of envy say that he’s on top of the modding world right now, and good for him. I love to see modders pull off these wild indie games…

I’m uncertain how to feel about the response to my recent Soapbox column on Massively. It was meant as a mix of ideas — a refutation of parts of a past article and comments, a demand to game developers to stop passing off free-for-all PvP as anything but a cop-out of a game system, and a suggestion that tweaks to…

I mentioned back in November that I’d gotten a day of play with the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO due out next year from BioWare. The embargo finally lifted last week, and my hands-on article was gobbled up by fanboys everywhere. Overall, the response was ego-bloatingly positive, but I did get one comment that gave me pause. On…

Ask any Star Wars fan about Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and you’re likely to hear some variation on a list of its weaknesses relative to the Original Trilogy: Episode I is formless and lacks a protagonist Wunderkind Anakin and Jar Jar Binks complete the kiddie-fication that began with the Ewoks Padme acts as though she’s been injected…

Back in October, Paul and I drove through Casper, Wyoming on our way home from the Midwest. A billboard caught my eye: “Support the three percent lodging tax. It’s the tax you don’t pay,” it read. I sat there, stunned, realizing how emblematic of human stupidity that billboard was. Do people believe these things? They must, or politicians wouldn’t try…

Blog posts that talk about why you’ve not posted (and that assume anyone even cares) kinda suck, so instead I’m just going to show off where I have been posting. In November, not only did I lend my voice to another Massively Speaking podcast, but I got back-to-back day-long hands-on sessions with two games: Rift and Star Wars: The Old…

For far too many years, the world of City of Heroes has been plagued by a rule called the cottage rule. A player once asked for a particular superpower to be rethought, and a developer — Castle, actually — responded by saying that changing that power into something else would be unfair to the players. After all, players had chosen…

My takeaway from Mad Men Season 4 came in the form of a revelation about the gender norms of today, not of the bygone days in which the series is set: A lot of men really still are pigs. I don’t like the realization. My generation grew up pretending sexism didn’t exist, and for many of us, that made it…

My boss invited me to guest-host on this week’s Massively Speaking podcast, on which you can hear the decidedly midwestern accents of Shawn Schuster, Rubi Bayer and me as we discuss EVE Online’s upcoming expansions, the Minecraft craze, sparkly vampires or lack thereof in World of Darkness, hack-and-slash freemium game Vindictus, MMO crafting pitfalls, the state of the MMO industry,…