But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companiesMaybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet

"Yes, we know that Tom Cruise, whom we watching in "The Last Samurai" is that same guy from "Mission Impossible." But if, at the critical moment in the 19th century, Japanese film he were to whip out a plastic-explosive, pull off a latex mask and say, "Show me the money, $#%!" we would run screaming from the movie

"There's plenty interesting to say about where online gaming convergence is goingCross-over of "stuff" from game-to-game ain't it.

If you're thinking "What the heck is a newsreader and why would I want one?" -- it's a way to keep track of your blogs on one page without a bunch of surfing and clickingI'm using Feedreader, which is a *free* and open-sourced (GPL'd) optionHowever, gated communities and heavily restricted virtual worlds grow tedious after a time: they're monocultures, ticky-tacky boxes all in a rowIt's why I came back out from the gated communities into the world of blogsIt's why I'm feeling just as cranky as Richard is about MMOGs

Nothing online can ever be made impervious to griefing or trolling or whatever forms of disruptive play and action we can imagineWhen outrageous forms of griefing are made impossible by the rules, then modest forms of griefing come to seem outrageousPlayers in City of Heroes recently got the ability to toggle a no-teleport setting so that griefers could not involuntarily drop them into pitched battles-a minor nuisance by the standards of old-style Ultima Online murder and robbery, but one which had come to seem like a violation because so much of the rest of the gameplay is instanced and controlled