EverQuest or EverCrack

Wired News has a peice on The Quest to End Game Addiction. It is mostly anecdotal, but mentions two Yahoo groups of EQ widows, one of which apparently has more than 1000 members.
The most touching part is a link to a confession by a 17 year-old Ontario boy on how he suffered from computer game addiction. (See Re: Computer Game Addiction.) Could this be a spoof?
Is game “addiction” a significant problem? Could it be a reflection of a gap between those who play and those who don’t – non-players convinced that there must be something wrong with the player.

The Walrus: Game Theories

In the current The Walrus there is a good (cover) article, “Game Theories“, by Clive Thompson. The article starts withy Edward Castranova’s online papers on online game economies and moves from there cover some of the emerging economic phenomena. The closing question is whether players really have ownership rights to their virtual property and what would happen if a game closed down rendering that property worthless (as may be happening to There.) Would/will people sue for lost income/value or do the game companies own it all, despite the underground economies that have emerged?
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PhiloLogic

PhiloLogic – The ARTFL Project XML/SGML Full-Text System is now available for download. PhiloLogic is an extremely fast large corpus search engine that was developed by Mark Olsen and company at Chicago for the ARTFL collection of French lit from the revolution to the 1900s. The original textbase was one of the first (if not the first) large scale diachronic literary full-text databases. PhiloLogic has proven its worth over the years.
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Spring 2004 Convocation

IMG_5000.JPG.200.jpg Tuesday I went to the 2004 convocation where Daniel Lanois was honoured along with our third cohort of Multimedia students. Convocations are an emotional event for me – after all the marking and lecturing I can give the students a hug and feel joy for them. These rituals are not meaningless, they orient us to what has been achieved and allow us to be our best for a moment – to congratulate students rather than critique their work.
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Armchair Arcade

Armchair Arcade! is an online journal and discussion forum on classic gaming. They are onto their third issue. I like the retro look to the issue “covers”. The articles so far seem mostly written by the site’s authors – they need to widen the pool of authors. What is not clear is how submissions are reviewed which may discourage academics (not that academics, with our strange rituals of promotion, are good writers for such venues.) They model themselves more on a magazine than a journal.
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New Variorum Shakespeare

To Tag or Not to Tag [May. 26, 2004] by Patrick O’Kelly is a story in O’Reilly’s XML.com site about “The New Variorum Shakespeare and XML”. Not only is it interesting that an XML site would publish a long article about Shakespeare and the TEI, but the author has taken the time to provide some of the complex history. Julia Flanders and Judith Altreuter, both of whom have been doing great work at the Women Writers Project and MLA respectively, are quoted.
There often seem to be landmark works that get digitized (over and over) to test new models. Michelangelo’s David is one of those. Every new 3D system scans David to show off the technology with a iconic statue. Likewise Shakespeare is a landmark text to transform and then compare to previous versions. The Variorum is not the only XML edition of Shakespeare, but it may set a standard for how critical editions are done. As Cliff Lynch said at COCH/COSH this weekend, in the next decades we will digitize everything of importance in the canon. We will need examples to compare what we do to, and we will need an army of humanists to do it appropriately.