According to the (possibly apocryphal) tale, Lydians survived a famine by alternating days of playing dice games with days of feasting, to preserve resources. This allowed them to live for 18 years through a resource shortage, before playing one final game of chance to decide the civilization’s terms of exodus.

Herotodus’s chronicle could not be a more relevant historical anecdote today. There are literally millions of teenagers and 20-somethings who are either un or underemployed, who use gaming as a money-saving means of entertainment, not to mention an effective mental respite from their increasingly intolerable real lives.

While online communities such as World of Warcraft or Second Life were originally conceived of as modes entertainment, they also serve the role of facilitating survival. When food is sparse and work is elusive, there are fewer more efficient (and enjoyable) ways of spending a day than gaming while remotely connecting to a network of peers often in similar situations. And all of this is available for a meager monthly subscription fee that offers unlimited access to these worlds.

While McGongall’s lecture attempts to sell an optimistic vision of this trend, somehow hoping for a future in which we harness gamers’ collective intelligence to solve world problems, the near future seems a more likely forum for using gaming as economic hibernation.

Of course this theme isn’t new to the cyberpunk genre. While The Matrix contains the most obvious reference to gamers in hibernation, James Cameron’s Strange Days also included virtual reality as a sanctuary from a distopian future. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash told tales of impoverished pizza delivery boys living in glorified storage pods with little more than a ‘metaverse’ jack on the wall for entertainment.

This is becoming present day reality at a very alarming rate. While it’s very noble for the rosy McGongall to seek out a way for humanity to utilize these lives cast away to the Internets, perhaps we should begin to wonder how we’ve allowed our society to deteriorate to the point that a mass hibernation is a rational reaction to it.

Originally posted on Technorati.

For those of you that don’t know, I spend the majority of my days VJ’ing for Frequency, an internet video show akin to radio’s Pandora.

While most of my work consists of combing the internet for various gems, I also occasionally get to create custom playlists to show off the site’s toolset for assembling video collections. Here are two recent ones I’ve compiled:

This one sort of defies description. It was assembled out of the most manic, random, and dangerously catchy of videos I’ve come across:

Videos that cause Psychoses

This other one is an uber-geeky collection of World of Warcraft themed clips…

The WoW Show.

Peruse, view, and let me know what you think. Bonus points to any custom collections of your own that you’d like to share.

For the student or devotee of the game, baseball provides almost infinite legendary American tales. It has its heroes(the Babe, the Rajah, the Iron Man, or the Say Hey Kid), its goats (the Black Sox, Charlie Hustle, Big Mac, and the Billy Goat) and its share of historians and cultural custodians, whose job it is to chronicle present day feats that they might one day become the next generation’s legends.

Another name for these “cultural custodians” is Baseball Nerds. Baseball Nerds have existed as long as the players, and some haven even risen to prominence amongst the athletic demigods of the game. One writer and baseball historian rightfully dons the mantle as King of the Baseball Nerds, and until the 30 for 30 series, he had been languishing in semi-obscurity. This man is Daniel Okrent, the father of “Rotisserie” baseball, better known to laymen as Fantasy Baseball.

Download YouTube Video

Invented in 1979, it was the first completely engaging, ongoing game for fans of the national pastime. It provided the baseball fanatic a means to completely immerse themselves into the dark hobbyist’s womb of baseball statistics, trades, contracts, and futures markets. The proficient rotisserie baseball player has to be versed on the most obscure of baseball statistics for the most marginal of major league ballplayers.

The only hobbyist parallel that seems fitting is World of Warcraft (nouveau Dungeons & Dragons), with the caveat that baseball actually exists in the world. Imagine the level of obsession you associate with players of games like WoW, and then imagine that their games correspond to real life events.

It’s a world where the deeds of Orcs, Humans, and Elves were recounted in the Crusading section of your local newspaper. A world in which Shamans and Necromancers were called to testify in front of Congress for using unregistered runes on the battlefield. This is the level of interest and immersion possible in fantasy sports.

This meta-level game outside of a game has happily consumed the lives of an estimated 18 to 30 million people. It is an industry that takes in approximately $2 billion a year, and Mr. Okrent sees none of this money. So, let’s all cuddle up in front of the flickering video embed and watch the creation tale of the most obsessive activity known to sports fans. Perhaps, then, the internet at large will finally give the King of Baseball Nerds his due.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Link via BoingBoing

Terrific and heart-rending article written by a GTA4 addict who consciously decided to abandon his life of productivity to gain a greater understanding of both cocaine and Pixeltropolis, San Andreas.

For more on video game addiction, listen to this classic Mep debate on WoWs similarity to crack.

Procrastination is devoting every last waking hour to Dragon Age: Origins, because at least it’s not a life-stealing MMORPG that goes on without end. At least it is a singly contained story that can theoretically be beaten without taking out a mortgage on your ever-loving soul. And so, when we theoretically procrastinate by spending the better part of every waking hour marauding around as an Elven Champion, in some sickly nostalgic attempt to resurrect Skystrider Antilles, we drive off the Procrastination Boogeyman by immersing ourselves so deeply into the game that we realize we have been hunting through the catacombs of a werewolf nest for five hours vainly searching for some creature called Witherbark who, as elven legend has it, can remove the curse that has afflicted the Dalish elves whose help you require to vanquish the vast undead army known as the Blight, all while seeking your revenge upon the Vassal Lord of Ferelan who left your Grey Warden Master to die a bloody death at the hands of said Blight. Yeah.

And when, hypothetically speaking, you look outside your window, and daylight is streaming in, when you were pretty sure you started playing this campaign just after work ended, and you’re not sure if you’ve eaten in six hours and yet you wonder how many more Levels Up before you can unlock the Champion Prestige Class that will REALLY begin to allow you to simulate the MMORPG days of yore and wonder why your party’s shape-shifting forest witch refuses to properly appreciate your generosity after you give her a found onyx statuettes as a gift and notice that you’ve used the highly detailed character creation features to craft an Elven Warrior that looks exactly like yourself in digi-form and find your in-game-self getting annoyed that he can’t get the local merchant to give him a sweetheart deal on a brand new, Tier 3, steel greatsword, and you might just have to make due with crappy Grey Iron, and you hear morning birds chirping outside and workaday world alarm clocks going off and you haven’t even reached the bottom level of the werewolf catacombs yet, so clearly you can’t stop the campaign for something as trivial as the dawn of a new day in the outside world and you think your rear end might be inextricably stuck to your leather desk chair as you think about getting up for a second to grab some light sustenance except for the fact that your party’s inventory is dangerously close to full which means that there is actually a limit to the gigantic horde pile of shit you will be able to drag out of the catacombs to sell for cash and you lament the fact that the catacomb geists don’t have their own merchant handy and you realize that 45 more minutes passed as you’ve been making these decisions and you’re only on your second day of playing Dragon Age: Origins and wonder how much effort it would take to rig up an IV solution next to your computer to ensure that you’re properly hydrated before you black out and crave things that you would never have in your barren kitchen, like Ready Made Western Omelets and Rendered Nutrient Paste Tubes (as invented by John Malkovich’s character, Dr Jeff Peters, in the little known sci-fi romance Making Mr. Right) and you wonder where, in the global scheme of things, you rank as far as the first phalanx of players playing through Dragon Age: Origins who ordered it the day of its release (and didn’t get to play through it in some early, previewy, game tester environment) and maybe you’re on the front lines of getting deep into the story and you think someone told you that today is Veteran’s Day which means your school is closed and you don’t have to take any breaks for teaching…

Yeah, that’s also a type of procrastination.

As you just saw, the movie tells the story of a primitive but proud indigenous alien culture defending itself against a human-run technological assault This theme is, of course, nothing new…

The main difference, though, is that Avatar builds in a concept familiar to internet gamers (especially purveyors of MMORPGs). The idea that you can plug into an ‘Avatar,’ who you control, and perform your actions through is a direct reference to video games and an overt attempt at wrangling in the hugely influential gamer demographic.

As if this wasn’t enough to convince studios to fund the project (remember, this screenplay has been floating around in some form since 1994), Cameron seemingly threw in an attempt to co-opt an entire corner of the RPG market. Let’s take a closer look at the native race in Avatar — The “Na’vi.”

Hmm, that’s odd. The Na’vi seem to be a CGI carbon copy of the Draenei race from World of Warcraft, the most popular online role playing game in history. Their inclusion seems an especially clever way of drawing in the 15,000,000 strong WoW contingent without acquiring any copyrights, trademarks, or even making any mention to the source material.

Even the name, “Na’vi,” seems reminiscent of gamer parlance. Nav (or Navigational) Points are often used in games to direct the user to a particular place on the map. In my experience, these came into vogue in the MechWarrior series, which also seems to have a strong presence in the storyline of Avatar (note the remote battle mechs that take on the Na’vi army).

Hmm, co-opting past blockbuster themes, secretly embedding familiar pop culture characters and worlds, and copying other successful works. I suppose that is one way of getting your lame duck screenplay produced. Perhaps, on a meta-level, the movie Avatar is really the avatar of the awkwardly titled World of MechWarrior Craft of the Jedi.

Did it occur to anyone else that the parents of these performers are young enough to have experienced most of these games firsthand? The age of video game genealogy is upon us.

Today, the entire film can be found on Hulu. So ready your supply of Doctor Pepper and Mountain Dew, jump into a nearby Teamspeak channel, and enjoy:

This may speak to my convention noobness, but I’ve never seen anything approaching a giant crowd-throng like the one we saw this weekend. It was a giant, pulsing, unending string of people. I was convinced that it would be an ideal target for a biological weapons attack, except for the fact that most of these people don’t generally seek human contact.

Ready your empty crack vials. Digital pusher Blizzard Entertainment has just announced that Sam Raimi will direct the official World of Warcraft movie.

Set to go into production after Spiderman 4 (tentatively titled: Web-Slinging for Cash), the movie is sure to attract the attention of the over 10 million devotees to one of the most effective time wasters ever created by modern humans (with apologies to Dark Age of Camelot.)

If the past is any indicator, the movie will take approximately 400-man hours to view, while audiences snack on metric tons of Cheetos and Mountain Dew. The only hope is that some wily gamer will discover a crack that allows you to program a bot to watch the movie for you, while you continue to progress with your level 80 Night Elf Hunter.

We apparently have much to learn from the Germans in the realm of video-game themed photoshopped movie posters. More mashupy goodness for you after the clickthrough…

Robert Heinlein meets flying turtles.

When human vacuum cleaners are brainwashed into eating their own…

Paul Rudd regains his manhood by befriending a local boy-cyborg.

And finally, everyman action-hero pastiche Duke Nukem restores the Old South to glory in…

This one, by Black20, however, achieves instant classic status.

That’s not to say I can’t nitpick a little. I mean, aren’t these Boba Fett-gadget types getting a little bit overpowered (a la Iron Man on steroids)? The one in the trailer seems like she could take out the entire Jedi brigade by herself.

And does every Sith Lord have to have the full-body cybernetic breathing suit? Is there no other way to use the Dark Side without suffering full-body disfigurement? Meh.

You can watch the trailer here.

(Removed the embed because it was annoying as all get out.)

Full-sized view.

Electric feature from Wired Magazine delving into the different types of lightning strikes. Particularly intriguing is the legendary ‘ball’ lightning, which sounds like something that Raiden would conjure up.

Unfortunately, there’s no mention of pine-cone lightning…

The well known Xinhua Province Television Network is reporting that the Chinese government is cracking down on online gamers.

Government tactics include random internet disruptions for citizens under 30, rationing the national supply of Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, and distributing free samples of heroin.

Other news outlets are reporting that a mammoth Chinese government project is underway to create an MMORPG-wide-government-sponsored gank group. The gank group, run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be designed to “grief” addicted gamers to the point of forcing them to either quit gaming or throw their computers out the window.

Not to be outdone, the Americans are working on their own elite team of griefers:

Once upon a time, I participated in an MMORPG called Dark Age of Camelot.

My character was a precocious half-elf champion with the unlikely name of Skystrider Antilles. He, and other Mep House avatars vigilantly defended the lands of Hibernia.

But that is a tale for another time. Today I want to share an old piece of short fiction that stemmed from DAOC lore and my frustrations with ISP provider, SBC Yahoo!

A tall, yet ambiguous figure walks through the automatic doors in the ornately decorated office lobby of Yahoo SBC. As he passes through a lowered archway, alarm bells sound.

The security guard on duty stands up, hand flying to his holster.

“Sir! You have tripped the metal detector! Please turn around and face the wall!”

The figure walks out of the shadow of the archway, unphased by the guard’s command.

The guard is stunned by the visage before him. A tall, very gaunt man with pointy ears and large blue eyes, dressed in a full suit of medeival scalemail armor stares back.

As the guard reaches for his pistol, the tall ‘man’ shouts something at him in a foreign tongue. The guard’s knees buckle immediately, and he slumps to the ground, severely weakened.

Skystrider, the ancient elf, approaches the security desk curiously. He looks at the panel full of lights and switches, totally dumbfounded by what he sees.

One strange symbol (not resembling Celtic) catches Sky’s eye: SBC Yahoo! Inc.

Without knowing why, hate beings to swell in the ancient champion. He somehow knows that this strange place is responsible for his extended hibernation. He cannot remember why, but he knows that he can never return home while this building and its inhabitants are allowed to live.

A nearby door flies open, revealing a half-dozen heavily armed security guards. They begin to yell at the tall figure.

“Get down on the ground, right now!”
“Move!”

Sky turns his head to see his assailants. Faintly reminded of his old-time foes, Briton Scouts, he takes the familiar defensive position behind his silver-gleaming arcanite shield.

The guards, somewhat confused by the anachronistic appearance of the elf, surround him in a small semi-cirle.

“Stop there,” speaks the elf.

The guards ignore the warning, and move in closer. Skystrider, realizing their intent, slings his shield over his armored shoulder.
In a well-practiced maneuver, he draws a gigantic elven greatsword from his back-sheathe. The blade, glowing with blue-electricity, temporarily stuns the oncoming security guards.

“Drop your weaponn! Now!”

Skystrider yells an unintelligible command back at the guard, at which point an invisible force knocks him six feet backwards against a potted plant — rendering him unconscious.

The other five open fire.

Sky lunges with his giant sword, but is soon beaten back by the barrage of bullets. They easily pierce his scalemail and inflict a dozen large wounds in the elf’s torso.

Sky, dumbfounded by this form of assault, falls to his knees, and collapses on his back.

One brave guard approaches the fallen figure cautiously. Seeing that the elf is still alive, he takes out a pair of handcuffs. As he kneels next to the bloodied figure, he sees the lips of the elf begin to move. He moves his head closer to listen…

Sky whispers two words.

“Ignore… Pain…”

Instantaneously, the elf’s wounds close, as a malevolent grin spreads over his elven features.

The elf bolts upright and unleashes a piercing yell…

A white ball of energy expands outward from the arms of Sky and envelops the security officers. Those nearest the champion are instantly vaporized. Others, still engulfed in flames, stagger away from the elf as he rights himself.

Then, Sky shouts something resembling English, that the survivors in the lobby can hear all too well…

“YOU WILL PAY!”

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