Raph Koster, Supreme Dictator of the Star Wars Galaxies online game, has posted detailed stats about the SWG monetary supply and flow. Ted Castronova, the leading MMO economist in the (very small) field, says "So rather than say that something is wrong from an economic policy point of view – I don't know that, hell, an army of Stanford Nobel laureates can't know that, not yet – all I can say is that something in these numbers makes me uncomfortable." — Read the rest

Here are my notes from Stewart Butterfield's ETCON talk, "The Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software."

* Raph Koster: The future of gaming isn't flashy graphics and blowing up elves,
it's average people connecting with each other.

* We built a social software oriented game and run an alpha that we eventually
had to shut down — it was so significant to peoples' lives that when we shut it
down, people all over the world logged in at the same time to cry together

* In the Game Neverending prototype, we made a social index — you could count
people as friends, acquaintances and enemies.

Raph Koster, an sf writer and game developer who works on Sony's MMORPGs, has posted a long, brilliant rumination on civil liberties in gamespace.

Therefore this document holds the following truths to be self-evident: That avatars are the manifestation of actual people in an online medium, and that their utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions should be considered to be as valid as the utterances, actions, thoughts, and emotions of people in any other forum, venue, location, or space.