A recent U Washington Law School panel discussion with Neal Stephenson regarding his video-game crime-thriller REAMDE.

Here's a MMO-Champion thread in which Ramsesakama sets out to recreate the World of Warcraft realm of Kalimdor in the maker-friendly game/environment Minecraft, in faithful 1:1 scale. Using procedural tools and a lot of skull-sweat, the task is undertaken, with awfully fabulous results.

I'm trying to create a replica of Kalimdor in Minecraft, and I want it to be the correct scale. I'd like to create the terrain first, so I need to compute the relative distances (in Minecraft blocks) between the different locations in Kalimdor.

If a Minecraft character is approximately two blocks tall, and if we assume the male Orc model is equal in size, then how many blocks is "one yard" in WoW?

Thread: WoW to Minecraft coordinate space conversion

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I'm heading to Germany next week for a series of school visits and public appearances to promote the German edition of my novel For the Win. I'm doing public stops in Hamburg (Nov 7, 10AM, Hamburger Kinderbuchhaus im Altonaer Museum), Berlin (8PM, Sankt Oberholz), and Munich (7PM, Lovelybooks, livestream available). Full details at the RandomHouse.de site. Read the rest

Two players of the Eve Online MMORPG pulled off a Ponzi scheme that netted them over 1 billion ISK (Eve Online's currency, a sum that can be exchanged for about USD50,000). They ran the Ponzi scheme like any other, soliciting customers for "investments" that paid out better-than-market returns, but those returns were generated out of the "investments" of new suckers. The con was both legal and within Eve's rules, and it's not the first or even the second massive (lawful) in-game fraud to hit Eve. The scammers have published a long postmortem on their effort, including some accounting information and ruminations on the hard work it took to hoover up their billions in virtual skiffy funny-money.

Why did we do it? We had a lot of reasons actually, but above all there is one thing that's NOT the reason. Most probably we will disappoint a lot of people, even make more than a few a little angry for a while. That, in itself, has never, ever been our purpose. We consider that to be a collateral matter. However, enough about what wasn't the reason for doing it.

The main reason why we did it is; because we could! But, of course, we don't do everything we can. One should imagine that we have a lot of people with an account on Phaserinc.com. That account will be secured with probably the same password as their EVE online accounts. We could have easily run all these accounts through our EVE client and stolen a lot of assets as well as ISK.

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