Oh…today is just one of those days where there’s just too much to blog about!!! So I need to just cut’n’paste some stuff and maybe, if I’m lucky, it will be quiet at work tomorrow so I can piff up with some comments of my own!!

The Dazzling Mr. Timothy Burke has a brilliant post on Terra Nova!! It’s about the MMOG Roma Victor and how they’ve implemented a punishment system for griefers entailing crusifixion! Brilliant! And, as usual, his comments are just soooooo spot on!!!

“What I like is that it’s a very good example of how I think developer sovereignty might more meaningful manifest within the terms of a given MMOG’s fictional framework. With a game like World of Warcraft, what the GMs do to players for various infractions is entirely outside the framework of the otherwise very well-developed setting of the game. The policing of players (which Blizzard does fairly actively in relation to some other live management teams) always breaks the magic circle. Moreover, because it does so, Blizzard is always under pressure to systematize and make explicit the precise formulations under which its sovereign interest in the gameworld will become active, because that’s what we expect in the real world from institutional actors, that they will precisely delineate violations that will trigger intervention.”

Yes! Yes! Yes!!