What legal and ethical restrictions are there on developers who might wish to impose in this way on that minority of their players who misbehave? Yet it goes beyond that; technology we can get right, after a few iterations, and in the end it wouldn’t be a great hardship on players.

As someone who has been on the commercial side of these games for almost twenty years, I can tell you that having such a scanner on the players' PCs would be a huge help to finding and banning accounts that use cheat programs. It isn't the end-all and be-all, but as part of a defense-in-depth strategy that includes PC scanning, data-mining alarms and some other techniques I won’t talk about here, it would be enormously helpful.

There has been some controversy in Blizzard’s official World of Warcraft forums lately over the concept of privacy. After some players started asking some pointed questions in a now-locked message thread, an official Blizzard post from community rep Caydiem confirmed that the company scans players’ computers for hacking programs.

University’s Department of Telecommunications seeks two new tenure-track Assistant Professors. Applicants should hold the Ph.D., M.F.A, L.L.M. or other appropriate terminal degree and present a promising program of either (1) scholarly research using social scientific, legal, or historical methods related to electronic media / communications or (2) creative activity in interactive new media. Promising candidates must also be able to teach effectively in one or more of the department’s undergraduate areas of concentration: Media and Society, Design and Production or Industry and Management. Graduate teaching is also possible. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points.

Richard Bartle: yes, well, boys will be boys (even the girls) The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.

6 x 8 1/2 inches; 128 perforated pages, 2-color illustrations;

Paperback

Quite simply - players will be who they are in real life. You can pretend to be somebody that you're not for a while, maybe a few hours, maybe even a few days, but eventually your true personality will shine through... I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us.

Quite simply - players will be who they are in real life. You can pretend to be somebody that you're not for a while, maybe a few hours, maybe even a few days, but eventually your true personality will shine through... I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us.

Quite simply - players will be who they are in real life. You can pretend to be somebody that you're not for a while, maybe a few hours, maybe even a few days, but eventually your true personality will shine through... I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us.

Quite simply - players will be who they are in real life. You can pretend to be somebody that you're not for a while, maybe a few hours, maybe even a few days, but eventually your true personality will shine through... I suspect that the difference here comes down to one's view of embodiment, the avatar-as-self, and the distinction between game worlds and social worlds. They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at us.