Due to the Age of Conan Gold game being in rumored development since 2003, an online virtual community had steadily clustered around various fan websites regarding Age of Conan Gold game: Hyborian Adventures. By February 2005, this informal community was still going strong despite no true public announcement concerning the rumored game.

Amy Harmon [registration required probably] picks up the story first broken by the Alphaville Herald. [Edit: The article revealed that TSO's subscriber base has fallen to 80,000, so it is gone from the 100K group list at left.] Or are they doing something else? Hidden in this question of course is why it matters at all what we call this activity. I can't say I've worked this through completely yet but I can't help but think that the more the "magic circle"-like definitions of play get pushed at (and in turn "labor"), the closer we will get to understanding what it means when our play is not fun, when it is repetitive, when it seems to look like work, when it doesn't run smoothly but is filled with contentions over rules, strategies, and cheating... and yet we keep going back, finding pleasure in it somehow. What does it mean to the definition of play when the boundaries between gamespace and "regular life" are less clear, when investments in each blur into each other.

So the pursuit of virtual realism must ultimately end in failure or only partial success. Statues will only come to life in Greek Myths and science fiction. And even in the virtual world genre, there are alternatives to the reality fetish -- Ludicorp's The Game Neverending is the one that comes most readily to mind. For the most part, though, we're still in an era where verisimilitude is a common goal. If one sees virtual world design as an art form, this is somewhat interesting. In fine art, this moment essentially passed after the time of Durer's rabbit (though it resurfaced, to some extent, with the Pre-Raphaelites, the photorealists, and contemporary realism). I wonder how long virtual worlds designers will pursue verisimilitude? At what point (if ever) will Picassos and Rothkos of virtual world design predominate? It might be a murdering rapist Well, it might be, in which case you'll find out just how awful it is to be considered as a, erm, a rapist, in which case you wouldn't want to do that in the real world.

If you apply fire to water, will you get steam? What is interesting here is not the fact that this "object problem" exists (it's actually a lot of fun for us that don't have to grapple with it), but the fact that that it exists as a "problem" per se. It reveals how one of the goals of a contemporary virtual world designer is to struggle to replicate reality in a convincing way, presumably down to the nitty-gritty modeling of the adhesion and viscosity of honey on furred surfaces. Reuben Klamer certainly didn't stay up at nights wondering how to make the blue pegs and the pink pegs more accurate representations in the Game of Life. But part of the appeal of virtual worlds is that they are so immersive and realistic -- the general obedience to the expectations and rules of reality means that breaking them (e.g. by flying or casting great balls of fire) is all the more fun.

Yet another news story about Korea's lost youth. Games are becoming the bugbear of Korean society." 'One 25-year-old unemployed man confessed he had once sat up three straight nights to win game items in order to sell them back to other players for real money,' Hwang Jang-min, a researcher at Yonsei University, said in a research report. The man said he made almost $1,400 by selling them." The average Korean earns $2,000 a month [edit: Java; scroll down to the link on monthly earnings]. "Committed players devote between 17 and 26 hours a week to online games." Half the time Americans spends watching TV. "In extreme cases, game addicts have collapsed and died after playing for hours, consuming nothing but soda and instant noodles." Thousands and thousands of noodle-bloated gamers, keeling over at their desks. Medic! "