任是无情也动人

Because China is one big MMO farming community, amirite?

WOW Welcomes You

EDIT:

Also, more panda pics

Idealizing Fantasy Bodies is an interesting article on the most popular/successful western style MMO and how it reflects western aethetics and gamer psychology.

I would love to see a similar study done for eastern games/aesthetics, and then compare the differences.

Or, to be more precise, a western viewpoint to an Asian type MMO. It would be interesting to read the original Chinese and see how much of the tone matches up, I think.

I actually found some of the comments more interesting (and less biased :p)... Eg. "An MMO such as ZT Online is no different than countless other MMO's like World of Warcraft or EVE Online. They all seek to exploit superficial aspects of Human Nature."

Interesting article on virtual transactions based online gaming - actually, interview transcription. It's dated July 07, so fairly recent in terms of the technology.

Speakers are:
John Blakely of Sony, who as far as I can tell, owns the only ingame selling/buying service that didn't go defunk for a popular MMO (see Station Exchange for EQ2, though I hear they're closing that in favor of a third party deal...)
Mark Jacobs (VP EA, Studio GM EA Mythic) - no idea who he is
Raph Koster (President Areae) - no idea who he is
Erik Bethke (CEO GoPets)
Matt Firor (moderator)

I have to admit though I that I find it hard to follow who's saying what and has what opinion. But I do get the impression there's several conflicting opinions in there. @_@

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