Creative faculty emphasize digital and analog media production and digital gaming and interactive storytelling. While we especially seek people in law and policy, management, media psychology, interactive storytelling, game design, 3D modeling, and international communications, our overall objective is to attract the best applicants in the field, regardless of interests, who either enhance current strengths or extend our reach.

Let me stress that I am on the recruiting committee for these positions, and also the Director of Graduate Studies for the department. And we are posting this at Terra Nova. Get the picture? :) We are really interested in people with research and production agendas in MMORPGs, simulations, and virtual worlds. If you're just starting out (finishing grad school by August 2006 or just been out a couple of years), going for (or with) an appropriate degree (PhD, JD, MFA), and have a track record of work in the media subject areas listed above (media and society, law, policy, etc., or production), I'd encourage you to apply. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger.

Sorry? There's a winning player in MMOGs? Maybe I haven't been playing these games enough but I've never met a winning player, or even a winning guild. I know a few WoW lvl 60 night elves, but I don't think of them as winners. I know a lot of people who have more plat than me, but I don't think of them as winners so much as dupers. And I've never come across these so-called "second tier" groups who conspire to take down the top player. I know some guilds who could use some adult supervision, and I don't ever want to be hanging around a PvP server when Tim Burke is online; but stopping someone from "winning" in order "to keep the game alive"? WTF?

More than that, I think that this misreading means that researchers miss an opportunity to use MMOGs as political testbeds. The approach mentioned assumes a small number of players, which means that the sorts of politcal questions asked follow the Great Game theory of international political interaction: ie, a small number of powerful players (US, Russia, China, India, UN Security Council members, etc) with a string of less-powerful players milling round the edges (Old European countries, UN Western and Other Group, etc).

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.

Maybe the issue is the "larger" community. It's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that level. But I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going on. I don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to be. But then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet.