Ferguson protests and gamers?

I’ve been reading way too much Ferguson news lately. It’s a stressful story about a city and population essentially under siege, journalists accosted and harassed by police, and the slow semi-transparent wheels of justice…

Even though I heard about the news of Darren Brown’s death the day it happened (and the night of the first protest) it’s taken a while for the news to finally reach the national stage.

With Twitter leading the way with most of the on-the-spot news of what’s been happening, I’ve long wondered how gamers and the MMO gaming community has reacted so far.

Looking at Google and the Internet at large, and a dearth of articles on the subject (from said community) I’d have to say I agree with Helvetica at Vox Ex Machina in that the impact is little seen.

How has the Ferguson news affected the MMO gaming community? (Not much) | Helvetica | Vox Ex Machina

I’ll be keeping an eye out for news to tip the people I know who write about this sort of thing, but I’m not holding my breath. If anyone notices any gaming groups making an effort to spread awareness -– through in game rallies, their own blogs, Twitter, etc. -- let me know and I’ll pass it along.

MMO Anthropology Interviews Nelson Williams Editor-in-Chief of Vox Ex Machina

Friend-of-the-blog MMO Anthropology interviewed Nelson Williams, editor-in-chief of Vox Ex Machina recently and here's the resulting footage. I hope that you forgive the fact that apparently the normal transition zoom is missing from the beginning--but otherwise it seemed to come out rather well.

Link, via YouTube via MMO Anthropology.

A Talisman Online Review

My friend, and writer on Vox Ex Machina, Nelson Williams has reviewed the free-to-play MMORPG Talisman Online. It's 3D antics muse a bit with Chinese mythology and as you'll see, provide a different sort of approach from MMOs that play in the Western mythos sandbox.

Link, via YouTube and GameOgre

Wordpress and Twitter Tools 2.0

Well, it’s that time again. I am getting used to using Wordpress and all the wonderful things that come with it – for example: Twitter Tools.

Twitter, like any other social media concept, provides a method for promotion like nothing else. It also creates a huge time sync, watching people, waiting for responses, re-tweeting, and actually tweeting content that I want my followers to know. But, with the advent of this Wordpress plugin, we can see less difficulty for tweeting—a great deal less.

As it will automatically tweet blog posts for me.

I’ve already tested it out with Vox Ex Machina (@voxexmachmedia) and I have also installed it on the Pets 911 blog (@pets911com). These are setups that already get a lot of visitors to the blog (Vox especially gets almost 2k visitors a day now—granted, that’s mostly because of nude and sexy mods for things like Fallout 3.) Pets 911 not so many, but we do have 57 followers now, and that’s only two days after setting up our Twitter account.

Now if only we had a working Facebook account.

The last thing that I did was also set up Twitter for Black Hat Magick via my normal account; it will be tweeting posts as they go live with the Twitter Tools 2.0 (by the way, it’s an excellent upgrade, adding lots of excellent changes. I wholeheartedly suggest it even over the previous version and over TweetSuite.) This way I can pre-load a set of chapters, and then just have it update for my various readers—and my Facebook account—even while I’m away being sucked into book signings.

Be sure to check me out, and take a gander at all of my upcoming work.

I’m going to be out of touch for a while after Friday, but there’ll still be updates…

Follow me on twitter!

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A post in which I realize that yesterday, I spoke too soon.

Vox ex Machina just got linked out of Slashdot—fortunately, the sky has not fallen (yet) because the article we were linked out of happens to be collapsed.

Apparently the post walked right into a firestorm of discussion about the direction Funcom has been going with Age of Conan. Concerns about the company remaining in business are bristling with a community that survived a horrible beta release process of the MMO.

For those interested the article in question is on Vox ex Machina entitled, Age of Conan: How an MMORPG Dies.

For one, I found one particular post on Slashdot to reflect my own thoughts on this matter:

Honestly, I'm far more concerned with the fate of The Longest Journey, one of their other franchises.

The original was one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games of all time. The sequel was okay, but left too many unanswered questions. The original left the door open, of course, but it also told a complete story with a real ending.

From the Elrond, Duke of URL.

The Longest Journey is one of my favorite Adventure franchises ever. The releases are very slow, but the story is stunningly compelling, beautiful, and heartbreaking—the last one actually drove me to tears over something I already knew was coming. I hope that even if Funcom suffers from their poorly accepted MMO that they won't then collapse under their own weight.

The worldwide economic recession aside.

On the server front, looks like the berserk traffic that tore down my server yesterday is going to continue pretty much for a while. I am right now working out moving the site to a different, more stable server.

Diverting Attention, Wizard 101

Yes, I know. I’m postponing my in-depth message about WFG again because I’ve found myself late, late in the day, amidst a thunderstorm, and I’ve got nothing better to do than to talk about something else.

That something else happens to be a long-winded review of Wizard 101 that I am co-writing over at Vox Ex Machina.

Go check out the series, and play the game. If you want to find me, I’ll be on as Iridian Stormshard.