Our very own Wagner James Au sent us a line to point out a story he's just put up about former Virginia Governor Mark Warner's in-game campaigning on Second Life.

The founder of the Forward Together PAC and Nextel, took to the virtual town hall to talk technology, homeland security , Roe v Wade and just why he agreed to make an appearance in Second Life.

From the in-game live interview:

HA: Thank you. Governor, during an Iowa appearance on Tuesday, you said, "My sense is we've got to make clear that we're getting out of Iraq." Do you think it's possible to convey such a message, sir, without Tehran-sympathetic bad actors like Sadr and his Mahdi army seeing our withdrawal as an inspiring victory— with catastrophic consequences for a country already on civil war's brink? Or to make the question more general, where are we in Iraq, and where can we go from here? MW: The real question is, is our ongoing presence in Iraq making us safer? Of course, getting out of Iraq without a plan is as bad as going in without a plan. Our goals must be to ensure that as we redeploy from Iraq, we ensure that it doesn't become an even greater haven [for] Al Qaeda, or Iranian expansionism. And this has been made more difficult by some of the Administration's policies.

Au says that Wagner will be making another appearance in the game this fall to field audience questions. .Brian Crecente

THE SECOND LIFE OF GOVERNOR MARK WARNER
[New World Notes]

By: Wagner James Au

Second Life's embedded journalist reports from SL's annual real world convention

The first time I met Nethermind Bliss, she was a woman with fire engine red hair, WWI flying ace goggles, and Wolverine wrist claws. The next time I met her was last weekend at the Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco, so this time, the meeting was in-person, and she was more or less the same, just flesh-based. (Though she still had the goggles and claws.) And even though I could have asked her real name, I still called her Nethermind Bliss. Which seemed to be the standard way of addressing people at SLCC. When meeting in person, SL residents— even staff members with Linden Lab (the world's owner)— call each other by their avatar names. That's whether they look like a version of their alter egos, or come without the fur, devil horns, alien skin, robot gear, and other enhancements you've come to identify them by in-world. What's amazing is how natural this feels, and how familiar you can quickly get with hundreds of people you've only known through 3D graphics.

It was two and a half days of fascinating SL-to-RL encounters (much of it alcohol-fueled), Silicon Valley utopianism, and perhaps causing the most audience glee, a demonstration of what appears to be the first MMO-based sex toy. These highlights and more after the break.

When Baccara Met Nick
Clockwise from left, here's Nick Rhodes, DJ Nexeus Fatale, architect/fashion designer Asri Falcone, your reporter, and Baccara Rhodes. This is the first time Nick and Baccara have met in person; in real life, Nick is a photographer from Paris, and Baccara is a retired wedding and bar mitzvah planner from New Jersey. In Second Life, Nick is known for his glamour screenshots of women avatars, while Baccara is famed for, well, being Baccara— the high-born lady in a Versace evening gown whose SL weddings and spectacular events have put her, in my estimation, among Second Life's power elite. For awhile there, Nick and Baccara shared an adoring relationship in-world, and hosted intellectual salons in Nick's art gallery. Until, that is, Nick's wandering ways became too much for Baccara ("I'm not gonna sit around here like Rapunzel!", as she recalls thinking) and she piled up their keepsakes and mementos and turned them into a giant bonfire. He took her punishment in good spirits— which is a relief, because Nick flew from France for SLCC, and to meet her. So that's where they sat together for the first time, idly chatting like old friends reunited (which they are), the handsome Parisian and the Jersey spitfire. "He's a very sweet man," Baccara told me indulgently.

Down to Business

In the premiere SLCC last year, the world had a spare 60,000 or so registered users; now it's approaching some 250,000 active users, and has become a darling of next generation Internet commerce. So the Convention is no longer just a fan con, but a business expo, too, with several metaverse development companies that create experiences and branded items in Second Life for major corporations, educators, and government contractors— including products from Addidas and Toyota both of which were announced at SLCC 06.

Sexual Rezzing

SLCC probably has the unique distinction of being the only mainstream MMO convention sponsored in part by a sex shop. Then again, Strokerz Toyz is a homegrown success story, a hardcore Macy's of animations, working organs, and play equipment for the discerning avatar. During the "Sex and Relationships in Second Life" panel, CEO Stroker Serpentine (bald shaven, dark glasses, Southern drawl) regaled the audience about becoming a successful simulated sex entrepreneur, which involves getting technical support questions via Instant Messages like, "How do I attach my penis?" and, "My vagina won't shut up!"

Stroker was followed by mad scientist inventor qDot Bunnyhug, who proceeded to demonstrate a mini-revolution in peripheral hacks for the horny. Inspired by Jane Pinckard, who famously used the Trance Vibrator from the PS2 music game Rez as a, well, actual vibrator, Bunnyhug showed how he'd managed to wire a Trance Vibrator to a laptop running Second Life, then scripted it to respond when an avatar touched a giant green vibrator in Second Life. Between fits of giggles and a suspenseful pause, Bunnyhug's avatar touched the virtual vibrator—and lo, the physical Trance Vibrator on the other computer whirred to life. (And verily, a whole wealth MMO-to-real world interaction was revealed.) For good measure, qDot held the Trance Vibrator up to the mic, so the whole crazily cheering audience could hear the buzzing— and when he was through, fired up a cigarette. Keep an eye on qDot's site, where he plans to run a video of the event, and provide schematics for creating a SL-to-vibrator interface of your own. ("All completely open source," he added proudly. "There should be no DRM to your fucking!")

There were so many other highlights, including a visionary speech by Lotus founder/initial Linden Lab investor Mitch Kapor, and Linden VP Cory Ondrejka's demonstration of Second Life back in 2001, when it was still known as Linden World, and your avatar interacted with the environment mostly by blowing it up. Not to mention the convergence of so many musicians who've made a name for themselves by using SL's audio streaming capability to perform live, for the first time performing both live and in person. (My personal favorite being, of course, Frogg Marlowe.)

The first SLCC brought in a hundred-plus real life residents; this year, nearly 500 attended. (I began reporting from the world when the entire population was barely that number.) I'm continually impressed how diverse the group is, artists, entrepreneurs, educators, developers, gamers, from all kinds of real life backgrounds. At current growth rates, SLCC '07 will be several thousand strong. What happens then is anyone's guess.

Wagner James Au continues to cover the inner life of SL at New World Notes and online games at GigaOM.

Master MMO designer and Ultima Online graduate, Raph Koster points out the emergent artificial life simulation created by a Second Life user in the non-game.

While the thing itself is very interesting (our very own Wagner James Au has a terrrific write-up over on his site), what I find even more fascinating is Koster's reaction to it.

He calls this sort of self-sufficient world, where bee's beget plants and clouds beget rain, the future of dynamic world enviroments.

Natural resources and natural shifts in them offer plausible reasons for AIs to behave differently over time. Add in users affecting abundance or scarcity, and you get systems with changing dynamics. If it doesn't spin out of control, that is. But you can curb that with balancing mechanisms.

Going to a simulation level also allows players to interact with the world and actually affect it.

In other words, developers may begin to program ecosphere's as opposed to static graphics and AI-embedded characters. Better still, Koster says based on what he's done and seen, this way would be way cheaper. Brian Crecente

Way Cool [Raph Koster]

By Wagner James Au

"The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness..." - Sun Tzu, Art of War

"OK listen the fuck up. You are going to DPS very, very slowly. Now... and by slowly I mean FUCKING slow. If you get aggro, it means you're going to lose 50 DKP because you didn't know what the fuck to do. And watch the FUCKING tail." - Dives, Guild Leader of Wipe Club

Dives is this year's Leeroy Jenkins. If you understand that sentence, you can skip past the next four. The most prominent form of player-created content to emerge from World of Warcraft is actually external to the game—the voice chat that guild players use, especially during high-level "raids" against WoW's toughest monsters, which require dozens of players of different classes working together in tight coordination. The perfect counterpoint to the game's fantasy action, Warcraft voice chat is the stream of collective geek consciousness that makes all the onscreen heroics possible. Last year, the reining king of that subculture within a subculture was Leeroy Jenkins, the cheerful ass who gets his entire guild killed during a raid. The video of that strategic bumfuckery was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, making the battle cry "Leeeeeroy!" more instantly recognizable by millions of WoW players than any bit of dialog Blizzard itself came up with for the game.

This year, the new emperor of WoW voice chat hails from the land of Dracula and Nicolae Ceau escu, the dictator whose submachine gun execution against a stone wall finally overturned the country's Stalinist regime. (Perhaps the most difficult wipe of a Cold War instance.) And though no video capture accompanies the recording, you won't ever forget the voice of Dives, founder and leader of Wipe Club as he leads (or misleads) his guild in a raid against the dragon Onyxia, which, as things go very wrong, devolves into an earphone-shattering rant. It's like playing WoW with the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket if Lee Ermey was a Romanian techno fan. (Audio helpfully Flash-animated by "Deluthor" here, audio-only backup here supplemental Dives freak-outs here and here. Explanations for Dives' obscure references to "DPS", "DKP", and "DoTs" here, here, and here, respectively.)

Hearing Dives at the Onyxia raid, you wonder how a game could possibly be so important that this man would risk a coronary, to play it. You wonder if he logged off his computer and bludgeoned his guild members to death with his keyboard, afterward. If Internet guru Joi Ito is right that in the future, large organizations will be run like WoW guilds, you wonder if this is what corporations will sound like, when they go Enron.

Most of all, you wonder about the man behind the scream and the immortal cry, "Throw more DoTs more DoTs more DoTs!"

Among Dives' favorite characters is a Tauren Warrior whose equipment of choice includes a Broodlord's defender and Elementium reinforced bulwark. Their home the EU Boulderfist server, Dives' Wipe Club has about 80 members, most of them from the UK, Sweden, and Finland, with a smattering from Israel and Poland. And though many assume the recordings were secretly made by a disgruntled guild member, Dives says they were actually created and distributed with his full approval by the guild's former shaman class leader.

Now living in Espoo, Finland, Dives is 22, and served for a time in the Finnish military. (Dives' family left Romania after Ceausescu's fall, and lived throughout Scandinavia before settling there.) Currently a self-employed computer technician and salesman, he's also been the boss of two companies with ten-fifteen employees.

And though it may seem strange, in Romania, he was an altar boy in the Orthodox Church. "Dives" is actually drawn from that background, since it's Latin for "rich."

"I choose 'Dives' because I am rich," he explains. "Not in wealth but in spirit and mind. It's a multi-dimensional name."

A couple weeks ago, I sat down with Dives in an MSN Messenger chatroom for a conversation about his guild, his background, and his philosophy of leadership.

au@kotaku.com:
Is this a good time for a short interview?

Dives:
Just woke up and I'm in a slight hangover, so I guess so... I got pissed off at work so I downed half a liter or so of vodka.

On why he started Wipe Club

Dives:
I wanted a guild in which people enjoyed themselves. And while the recordings are not the best advertisement of that, people do enjoy themselves.

au@kotaku.com:
When you started did you guess they'd make you famous?

Dives:
No way in hell, they were mainly for amusement inside the guild.

au@kotaku.com:
When people hear them, most say, "I bet everyone quit his guild the next day."

Dives:
Nah, the problem with people is they base their opinions on something they hear in a recording. Those recordings were made with the idea of showing people what you do not want to get into [during a raid].

au@kotaku.com:
So you weren't worried people would think you were an asshole and not want to join your guild?

Dives:
Well if they think that, then too bad. But forming opinions on something that is edited from some raids is not smart.

au@kotaku.com:
But that's the only thing people have to form their opinion from, right?

Dives:
But then again, if we made tapes about the normal stuff that goes on in our Teamspeak nobody would care.

au@kotaku.com:
You sound genuinely angry at your clan when things go bad. Were you?

Dives:
Yes I was, because the performance was a disgrace, especially Onyxia... We took Onyxia down on the fifth try when we should have done it on the first.

On why he now needs a guild "Publicity Officer"

Dives:
We have five types of officers— Event Officer or Raid leader, Rank/Conflict officer, DKP officer bank/Loot officer, Publicity/Communications Officer... I can have up to 100 people per day contacting me, it gets stressing. Besides, we are a high profile guild and now it seems not only on the server we play but worldwide.

au@kotaku.com:
Like running a real company.

Dives:
Yeah, I have run two.

au@kotaku.com:
Have you ever yelled at your employees like you did at Onyxia?

Dives:
A few times. Not quite as bad, though... Unlike in a game, people can't quit or stuff like that. I always like to say that I'm hard, but I'm fair. So usually they did their job better.

On what provokes Dives to rant at work

Dives:
Mainly people lazying off. You give a person a two hour deadline to do something relatively simple and he messes it up, etc. I usually start it slow, and if it does not get through to him, I change the tactic.

On what he said, when one employee missed a deadline

I think it was something like, "I gave you two hours to do the order, it been three fucking hours and the order is still not done and the only fucking explanation is that you have been 'busy' with what?? Answering your fucking email?? You have 15 minutes to get that fucking order done or you get your money from welfare starting tomorrow. Now GET THE FUCK TO WORK!"

Something along those lines. I hate it when people don't do as I friggen tell them.

au@kotaku.com:
So if being a boss is so stressful in real life, why would you want to put yourself through similar stress in WoW?

Dives:
I'm taking it much easier nowadays, and frankly, running a successful guild is a lot harder than running a company. You have to be a lot more political with people in a game than in real life... in a game people CAN just leave the guild, while in real life if you quit your job you starve to death.

au@kotaku.com:
So how come people don't leave the guild after you yell at them?

Dives:
They don't leave because they know I'm right.

au@kotaku.com:
But do you apologize after?

Dives:
I apologize if I was wrong. Like to Crushim in the Onyxia tape. Well, I did not apologize, since he did fuck it up. But I did not give him -50 DKP since he explained it to me.

au@kotaku.com:
Have you ever apologized for a decision?

Dives:
Yeah. Don't remember what, though.

The point is when we raid it's like the army. Your leader is never wrong, even if he is wrong, he is still not wrong. And if he says do something you do it.

Dives on his most controversial command decision at Onyxia

au@kotaku.com:
I don't understand during that time in Onyxia where you asked Mogris and Lee and a bunch of others to run to the center, then when they do, tell them not to be close together. WTF?

Dives:
The point is since the Horde does not have Fear Ward, it is slightly more technical to get aggro in phase three. [Wipe Club was Horde-affiliated at the time - WJA] So if Onyxia was attacking that person I told him to run to the center. So if she flame breathed she did not wipe that side. The "whatever you do, do not stay close together" was to make sure people are spread out so that in case someone gets breathed [on] he does not wipe half the raid.

au@kotaku.com:
So it was a correct decision on your part.

Dives:
Yes.

On his English usage and the possible origins of his unclassifiable accent.

Dives:
I have spoken three languages since the age of seven, and I speak four at the moment. Romanian, English, Finnish. My Swedish is not too great but I do get along with it... also studied two years of French.

au@kotaku.com:
Where did you learn to swear in English? You swear like an American. When Europeans and Asians swear in English, they usually do it wrong, so it sounds strange, like they say, "Shit you, fucker of your mother", stuff like that... So how'd you learn to swear in English so well?

Dives:
Well, I have used it almost daily for the last ten years or more. Also, I have some friends in the US... Must be all the movies.

Thing is I'm an educated person but I use the education sparingly.

On whether the violence of his background influences the way he plays WoW

I had a violent childhood but no, I'm not violent. Last time I was in a fight was probably some two years ago... I did live in a country that went through a revolution, and I moved into a racist country. (Much has changed since then [in Finland], the people are more open.)

au@kotaku.com:
Do you remember the fall of Ceausescu? You must have been 8 or 9, right?

Dives:
Younger, but yes, I do... I saw a guy running with one eye hanging on his cheek.

au@kotaku.com:
Holy shit. What happened to him?

Dives:
No idea. But he was running.

I remember the fight for the radio building. Probably still one of the most touching things I remember still. "We are being attacked, come help us! We are helping you! So help us!" Ceausescu's troops were trying to retake the building and gunfire was being heard in the background.

au@kotaku.com:
When you play WoW do you think of stuff from your childhood, like listening on the radio while Ceausescu's soldiers came for the freedom fighters? That's sort of like listening to a Teamspeak channel.

Dives:
Hell no. You asked me about my childhood and I told you. Don't usually spend my days pondering stuff like that...

People go all psychoanalyst on you nowadays. It's like [if] I just had a crap: "How did that make you feel?" Hmm, well gee, quite nice.

On the future of Wipe Club... and the future of Dives

Dives:
Well basically the only reason I'm still playing is because I enjoy the company. So I'm gonna socialize with the people and make some guild movies, get some more raid progress.

au@kotaku.com:
What do you want to do in the future besides WoW?

Dives:
Hmm, wish I knew. I have done so many things that I'm not too inspired. I could write a book about that. Been high class, low class, rich, poor. Had more women than necessary... I have visited most countries in Europe, including having intercourse with girls from most countries in Europe. It was a project of mine at one point.

I'd probably like to find a nice girl, get married, and have a few kids.

au@kotaku.com:
I thought about interviewing you with Skype but I thought you'd start yelling at me.

Dives:
lol no.

au@kotaku.com:
"WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT YOU FUCKING CUNT! THAT'S A 50 DKP MINUS!"

Dives:
Yeah, I get that a lot.

By the way, please mention that I DO NOT come on anyone's Teamspeak/Ventrillo server. I get too many people asking me that people want me to come to their servers and yell something at them. I did go once and give some people some attitude, which was fun. But I get huge amounts of requests.

au@kotaku.com:
You could charge people money.

Dives:
Well, I'll make some T-shirts. "Dives yelled at me and all I got is this T-shirt", and stuff like that.

au@kotaku.com:
Thanks again, Dives. You're an interesting dude.

Dives:
That is what people tend to say. Never boring and never blending into the crowd.

In between occsional WoW dispatches, Wagner James Au still covers the emerging user-created world of Second Life at New World Notes. Send Warcraft news tips to "Hamletau" on the Eitrigg server, or e-mail him— au at kotaku dot com.

By Wagner James Au

If you're from the Axis of Evil, you're not supposed to be in the legions of the Horde— even if your country got bombed out of the Axis more than three years ago. Kalimdor's a no-fly zone, as are the Eastern Kingdoms. This is because World of Warcraft's Terms of Use bars players living in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, "or any other country to which the U.S. has embargoed goods." (Citizens from Junior Axis members Syria and Cuba are similarly shit out of luck.) And though the US dropped its Iraqi embargo right after President Bush's remarkably ill-timed "Mission Accomplished" announcement in 2003, Blizzard's rules still say gamers in Baghdad shouldn't be caught leveling in Azeroth.

Which is a roundabout way to introduce "Hamletau", my 8th level Warrior currently noobing it up somewhere South of Goldshire. And though he's got a short sword and a crappy shield, Hamletau's real profession is reporter. After three years as "embedded journalist" in the kinda-sorta MMO of Second Life, where my avatar is known as "Hamlet Au" , my editors at Kotaku challenged me to try out the same kind of reporting in the biggest MMO of them all. It's one thing to report within a user-created world where players can literally make the news up, but could I create a news desk in an old school, hierarchical, level-oriented MMO? Who has time to talk about virtual anti-Bush protests or avatar racism, when there's dungeons to raid?

And though I've argued that every MMO should hire a team of embedded journalists , I was a bit anxious to try it myself. There's news going on in WoW all the time, whether it's a plague resembling a terrorist bio-warfare strike , or a temporary ban on guilds defined by sexual orientation or an attack (staged or real) on the memorial service for a guild member who apparently died in real life. But how can any one person report from a place with 6 million-plus members scattered on 1000+ servers?

Fortunately, the first WoW story angle popped up even before I'd finished the registration process. On paper, at least, despite all the troubles Iraq has been through, and is still going through— not to mention the Coalition soldiers covered in dust and IED shrapnel flakes just looking for a damn hour of R&R at their base's Internet caf — World of Warcraft is still supposed to be off limits to the entire country.

But how strongly enforced were these regulations? As it happens, I know an Iraqi gamer in Baghdad, so I asked him.

"[Y]es," Zeyad e-mailed me back, "I have played [WoW] in the past. It's not very popular here as, say, Red Alert or Empire Earth, for example, but the game has its fans." Zeyad is the secular Sunni author of the enormously popular Healing Iraq blog, and when he's not reporting first-hand on firefights in Adhamiya or lynchings in Husseiniya, he's often gaming. (Notice the Paypal link on his site; assisted by 1337 blogger Jeff Jarvis, Zeyad is trying to raise enough money to get out of Iraq to study journalism in New York. Help a fellow gamer out, for god's sake, the dude's trapped in a Counterstrike match that never ends.)

"I have noticed plenty of games and software with the ban on Iraq warning," Zeyad's e-mail continued, "but you know that we get most of our games, software, and DVDs though piracy anyway." This was also the case during Saddam's regime, Zeyad told me, when bootlegs games were freely available in Baghdad's Bab Al-Sharj markets—after the secret police had first play-tested them to make sure they didn't contain anti-Saddam material, that is.

Zeyad isn't impressed with Blizzard's ban on Iraqis. "As long as we have piracy here," he told me, "I wouldn't care less if they still have a ban on Iraq. No one here really buys originals when they can get the game or DVD at a one dollar price." Which, when you think about it, is probably one of the best markers for real progress in Iraq. Forget about voting or troop withdrawal, we'll know the country is actually a stable member of the world economy when Blizzard's corporate parent Universal-Vivendi sends a team of lawyers into the Bab Al-Sharj to make sure the electronic stores don't have any contraband Warcraft on their shelves.

I checked with Blizzard to see if the ban against World of Warcraft in Iraq was still being enforced.

"After with consulting with the legal team that wrote up the Terms of Use," Blizzard PR assistant George Wang e-mailed back, "they informed me that Iraq and Iran had previously been on a government list of embargoed goods when the ToU was first drafted. Because of this, we did not condone shipping World of Warcraft to Iraq..." Wang told me the Terms of Use will soon be updated to reflect the updated embargo list, though more than a month after contacting him, it still has Iraq listed on the Axis of No Play.

Then again, there's little reason to think the ban was enforced much at all. Veteran WoW players tell me they often raid with folks who say they are Coalition troops in Iraq who've cleverly hacked around military firewalls to log in. And while it's doubtful that anyone but Kim Jung-Il and his geek cronies could log into World of Warcraft from North Korea, there's still an embargo on Iran. I checked with some contacts an Orkut, the semi-defunct quasi-Myspace that's still popular with Iranians, to see if they could WoW from Tehran.

An Iranian IT consultant eventually e-mailed me from somewhere inside the theocratic regime:

"hi dear ... yes , i and my friends play WOW in iran... this game is buying in shopping in iran."

So despite round-the-clock "morality" enforcers on the street and an Iranian President who keeps threatening to launch nuclear conflagration, WoW finds a way in, and continues its spread around the globe.

There's actually a serious side to all this. Despite the early promise of an Internet that could truly connect the entire world, vast firewalls block the Web traffic to and from countries like Iran and China. Web traffic, that is, because up to now, authoritarian regimes have not blocked the chat in MMOs— this despite the nearly two million Chinese alone who play World of Warcraft. But sheer numbers make it inevitable that some of them will soon test the limits of political expression in WoW. Picture a Chinese guild conducting Falun Gong meditations in Booty Bay, or a memorial to Tiananmen Square's dead held in Stormwind, and you get an idea of the possibilities of free expression, even when you look like an orc.

So I asked Blizzard's George Wang about the inevitable: "If governments in Iran or China asked Blizzard to help them regulate 'subversive' chat in World of Warcraft," I e-mailed him, "how would the company respond?"

Unfortunately, I didn't get any reply to the two times I sent that question. And so the dagger hangs over the head of WoW's Chinese and Iranian players, who must wonder if (or rather, when) Vivendi-Universal will go the way of Yahoo! and Google, and bring the hammer down.

It looks like there's a need for virtual reporters in World of Warcraft, after all.

In between WoW bouts, Wagner James Au still covers the emerging world of Second Life. Send Warcraft news tips to "Hamletau" on the Eitrigg server, or e-mail him— au at kotaku dot com.

By: Wagner James Au

In this column's March debut, we laid out the basics that gave life to Preview Ho, explaining how hyped-up previews are the enemy of good games, since publishers use them to secure shelf space from the major retailers, no matter how crappy the ultimate title. (And read this great Escapist story to understand how dependent the industry is on chains like Walmart.)

Later in the month, we found out it was even worse than that, with major gaming sites selling premium editorial space to publishers. When called on it, one editor adorably defended the practice by saying it was "pretty common both in print and online".

I was curious what the game industry's leading advocate thought about the practice, so I contacted the press office of the Entertainment Software Association but despite repeated requests, received no answer. Though they're sponsored by publishers, you'd think the ESA would be disturbed by a "pretty common" practice that's totally at odds with its goal of presenting the industry as a respectable medium with fair, ethical standards for promoting their product. (What, they'll take a controversial move like banning booth bimbos from E3, but they can't say anything about this?)

But hey, maybe the ESA doesn't check their e-mail much.

Anyway, let's roll out the two top candidates for April's biggest Ho, and explore how they work, like most of the gaming press, to serve the publishers' interests (who are also their advertisers) at the expense of you, the gamer. (And yes, we started with way more than two; believe me, Preview Ho could be a daily column.)

The first Ho contender was spotted by Kotaku editor Brian Crecente on the blog of a site called, appropriately enough, RedAssedBaboon. (If a Preview Ho were a baboon, he'd have a...) Props to Red Assed's "Rappateng" for joining us, whether he knows it or not, in a bloggers' call to arms against the gaming press. His post focused on "Splinter Cell Essentials" for the PSP, a game that was, on review, almost universally slagged, even by Gamespy, which gave it a withering 2/5 review. But Gamespy's preview by Will Tuttle called it "One of the best games on PSP".

And that's the line Ubisoft used in the advertising for the game.

Pause and consider that. Gamers like you stop at the PSP retail shelf, presented with a few dozen games to choose from. You pick up "Splinter Cell Essentials", maybe because you like the Clancy franchise— and hey, since Gamespy says it's among the PSP's best games right on the goddamn box, you blow your $40 on that one.

I contacted Gamespy editor John "Warrior" Keefer for an explanation. Staggeringly, Keefer says he authorized Ubisoft to use the "best games" line in their advertising copy for "Essentials".

"It is the publisher's job to try to make their game look as good as possible in their marketing of the game," Keefer e-mailed me. "My job is to make sure they don't use our quotes out of context. All quotes have to be approved through me." For the preview, Tuttle actually played just three levels made available at the time by Ubisoft, which is also a Gamespy advertiser— and that was enough, both of them insist, to nominate "Splinter Cell Essentials" into the Best Game pantheon of an entire platform.

"Bottom line is that it was unfortunate that the game was radically different from what Will originally saw," Keefer explained, "which makes our quote stand out even more. He said he stands by the original quote because at the time he made it, the graphics and lighting were phenomenal and it did a very good job of fleshing out the universe. Unfortunately, the rest of the game did not pan out with the demo."

The qualifier "at the time" is particularly delicious— sort of like a Nevada working girl who says you're her favorite client ever, because at the time, she's trying to pry a $40 tip from your fingers. Still, we have to credit Keefer for at least attempting an explanation.

The other nominee in this month's Ho search is PC Gamer, as helmed by editor-in-chief Greg Vederman. As it happens, Vederman brought himself to our attention by publishing a widely-praised editorial announcing that his magazine would no longer accept ads from "virtual gold farming" companies which sell gold coins from World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs.

In the US at least, this is still a small cottage industry, so it's hard to believe a teeny company like IGE could afford to spend much in advertising, certainly not compared to multinational corporations like Microsoft, Sony, Vivendi, and EA that already swamp the front pages of magazines like PC Gamer.

But still, it's at least some kind of stand, isn't it, with Vederman the lone hero of the gaming press drawing a line in the sand?

Maybe in his own imagination. Because here's the thing: the pages of PC Gamer may not run ads from virtual gold companies, but the magazine's entire preview section is an advertisement.

Have a look at May's issue:

Preview for "Medal of Honor Airborne" from Electronic Arts, by Chuck Osborn: "[This game] has already done something I previously thought was impossible— it's gotten me excited about yet another WWII shooter... I'll be there, ripcord at the ready."

Preview for "World in Conflict" from Massive Entertainment, by Logan Decker: "ITS UPCOMING RTS PHENOM... ABSOLUTELY BLOWS OUR MIND." [sic... and sick]

But the clincher is the cover story, an extensive preview of BF2142, also from Electronic Arts (via DICE studios). Now Battlefield 2 is a great game for its genre (though hardly 2005's all-time best), but judging from advance gameplay footage, BF2142 is basically just a mech warrior-themed add-on, with little new added to BF2's basic design. You'd have a hard time convincing preview writer Dan Stapleton of that, however, since when shown a library of futuristic weapons and vehicles in action he is capable of achieving orgasm:

"Come the end of the year," he promises, "DICE will be giving you an all new reason to practice your skills... [in a game] that fundamentally changes the nature of warfare. Could BF2142 be our Game of the Year in the making? It wouldn't surprise anyone here and... we're not so bad predicting the future."

I guess it wouldn't surprise me, either, since in May's Letter From the Editor, Vederman speaks obscurely about how he "inked this month's Battlefield 2142 cover contract" with Electronic Arts, and that he personally "brokered the deal". In my experience, a "deal" that is "brokered" usually involves an exchange of money or services, so it's unclear what Vederman means here, unless it was just that; his phrasing certainly leaves that impression. In any case, something was expected by Electronic Arts when they let PC Gamer have exclusive advance coverage of their unfinished game. (What that was, exactly, will have to remain secret between EA and Vederman,. Greg Vederman didn't reply to my e-mail asking for his commentary for this article.)

Here is what Vederman said in his acclaimed editorial denouncing gold farming companies: "For the record, PC Gamer's official stance on these types of companies is that they are despicable... [because] they all-too-often ruin legitimate players' fun." Call me crazy, but it will also ruin players' fun when they pre-order copies of BF2142, Medal of Honor Airborne, and World in Conflict, based in part on the hype PC Gamer gave them, then discover all-too-often that they've wasted their time and money on ass product. (For by simple iteration of Sturgeon's Law, they'll be lucky if even one in three of these games truly lives up to the magazine's hype.) This is not even mentioning how press previews like PC Gamer's are used by publishers to promote and market their product, or as we saw with Gamespy and Ubisoft, actually made part of their advertising campaigns.

It's why Vederman's refusal to accept gold farmer ads is so disingenuous, considering all the thoughtless, unqualified boosterism of incomplete, undistinguished titles PC Gamer does on behalf of its potential advertisers. It's sort of like the madame of a Paris whorehouse waddling into her lobby filled with clientele and pointing a chubby finger, not at the banker or the Parliamentarian or the bishop already paying their bills, but at the peg-legged dwarf with 20 Francs waiting his turn in the back of the room, and thundering "ZIS IS A RESPECTABLE ESTABLISHMENT! WE DON'T TAKE ZE MIDGET AMPUTEES IN ZIS PLACE— GET OUT!"

Which is also why, after a close race, Vederman helps PC Gamer take April's Preview Ho crown.

For in the end, there's no bigger Ho than a Ho on its high horse.

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com, including previews that are used in advertising copy. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcome—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

Update: Although we try to give companies opportunity to respond before a column is run, PC Gamer's Dan Morris had this to say, "Wagner James Au made a ridiculously cursory attempt to contact PC Gamer for comment on this article, sending one email to a general reader mailbox. Our spam filter killed it, probably due to his misspellings in the subject line. He failed to follow up, despite the fact that editors' email addresses are prominently published in the magazine, or, for that matter, that I have repeatedly invited him to contact me by phone for comment on stories such as this.

If he had made a serious attempt to get comment from us, we'd have told him that PC Gamer accepted nothing from EA for our Battlefield 2042 cover story. I continue to be dismayed that Au is allowed to skirt the most basic ethical consideration of his trade — a good-faith effort to get comment from his subjects.

Sincerely, Daniel Morris, Associate Publisher, PC Gamer" We have offered Mr. Morris a comments invite which he may or may not use to respond to any questions from readers in the comments.

By Wagner James Au

Numbers ten through six are featured in Part I.

5 - Anshe Chung
Creative Influence: 5
Commercial Impact:10
Connection Network: 3

No SL power list is complete without mentioning Ms. Chung, owner of an entire continent and thousands of dollars worth of oceanfront property across the world. In SL-related media, "$150,000" is the dollar figure you'll see the most— it's the amount Linden Lab estimates Anshe makes per year from her in-world real estate business, started from seed money she earned by teaching Residents the tricks of online lovemaking. For all this influence, however, Ms. Chung's power in business seems to negatively impact her Connection Network. (Do things like buy a tight-knit artists' community and convert it into a pleasure resort for the French, and that's bound to happen.)

For the longest time, members of SL society engaged in wild speculation of Anshe Chung's real life identity. Was this person with a dragon lady avatar really a Chinese migr living in Germany, a former member of the Red Communist Party who now beat American capitalists at their own game? Many thought it was too contrived to be true, so more than a few went slack-jawed, when Anshe Chung herself showed up at last November's Second Life Community Convention in New York City—revealing a slight young Chinese woman fresh from Germany, in a cheongsam silk dress and a dragon tattoo on her back.

4 - Kermitt Quirk
Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 9
Connection Network: 6

Scan SL's Event list at any given moment, and one word always stands out: Tringo. A combination of Tetris and Bingo with a gambling hook, the game, created in late 2004, has since consumed the community of SL, played 24/7/7 in casinos, nightclubs, and game rooms. Its success was based not just on its ease of play and gambling aspect, but a clever franchise system Kermitt created that gave buyers an incentive to host Tringo games. (They'd buy a copy from him for the Linden Dollar equivalent of around $60, then make their purchase back (and more) by holding Tringo matches where they collected a cut from the betting.) Selling 70 copies by mid last year, Kermitt's success leaped to whole new levels when the rights for the game were sold for a Gameboy Advance port. This was possible because Linden Lab allows Residents to retain the IP rights over their creations. Nearly a year later, however, Kermitt Quirk remains the only major success story to this policy—and as such, remains the sole role model for the Second Life dream.

3 - Nephilaine Protagonist
Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 9
Connection Network: 7

Like Aimee Weber, Nephilaine's proven the power to create not just a viable business in avatar fashion, but a unique persona that's just as important to her success. Her avatar a delicate belle flavored with goth and industrial stylings, Nephilaine was one of the first clothing emporiums to dominate SL. Often too busy designing to socialize, her Connection Network seems based more on her loyal customer base and just as key, on the numerous, now-successful fashion designers she taught and encouraged on the way up.

In real life, Nephilaine happens to resemble her avatar, a pretty Southern brunette, and as the star of an upcoming documentary film on Second Life, the chances look good for her becoming an influential luminary in both worlds.

2 - Baccara Rhodes
Creative Influence: 7
Commercial Impact: 5
Connection Network:9

Often seen sashaying through the world in a Versace evening gown, Baccara's avatar is decidedly a woman of a certain age, and by sheer force of personality, she transformed herself into the grande dame of SL. Her language is elegant and often high-flown, and she tolerates no vulgar speech. She once decided on a whim to move into the combat-enabled warzone, scolding the gamers there for their rude behavior, and outraged, they launched a series of terrorist attacks culminating in the kidnapping of a monkey in an art gallery rigged with proximity mines. But the terrorists never threatened Baccara directly because, one of them sheepishly admitted to me, she had too many powerful friends for them to risk that. Since then, she's organized numerous elaborate weddings and projects involving dozens of creators, including a 48 acre to the world of Peter Pan. It's projects like this that helped make her the central connector between diverse and often insular groups of builders and scripters with the socializers and casual gamers they rarely interact with otherwise. A mature woman retired on the East Coast, her influence is so great, when MTV arrived in Second Life to shoot a fashion video, the producer—who's half her age— came to Baccara Rhodes, to put it together.

1 - Torley Linden
Creative Influence: 8
Commercial Impact:1
Connection Network:10

In Second Life, a "Linden" last name denotes a staffer with Linden Lab. In this rare case, however, we are speaking of a person who made the world fall in love with her a year before joining the company's payroll, when she was "Torley Torgeson". I say "she", though Torley's avatar has been, at various times, a young man, a large bird, an alien from another dimension, and various other incarnations, though all of them involve watermelons and neon hues of pink and green—reflecting a real life Asperger's condition (a mild autism) and an artist's eye. It's as a woman that Torley, in real life a straight guy, fell in love with Jade Lily, also a heterosexual dude who plays a woman in SL. Torley's blog remains the best place to go for Second Life at its strangest and most dreamlike, where everything's possible—even Torley. Reading her exhaustively enthused journal entries will give you a sense for why she knows and is adored by everyone. Her Asperger's seems to be a key to her charisma: offline it's difficult for her to perceive or communicate emotions; in-world, where most communication is through chat and IM text, she's mesmerizing with empathy and charm. This power has not diminished even after becoming a Linden employee, but enhanced it twice over. Though just a mere "Liaison" (a low-level community and technical support staffer), in the world, Torley arguably has more social influence than even Cory Ondrejka, the head of development, or Philip Rosedale, the CEO himself, both of whom occasionally appear in-world for town hall-style meetings. But while Linden Lab management has the power to pull the world's plug, it's Torley who holds the lever to move it.

Wagner James Au covers the new power elite and other topics at New World Notes and searches for Preview Hos on Kotaku.

By Wagner James Au

In Second Life, you are what you make. With no levels to treadmill on and no clans to command, unlike most MMOs, influence and reputation goes to those with the will to build—objects and scripts, yes, and successful businesses, too, but just as important, unique personas who engage and enthrall. What follows is an opinionated and sure-to-be disputed compilation of the most influential players (called "Residents") in a world now 180,000 strong.

Were this list to exceed a top ten, it would include, say, veterans like Catherine Omega, Cubey Terra, Marilyn Murphy, Eggy Lippmann and the Midnights, Cristiano, Chip, Torrid, and Mistress, newcomers like Tateru Nino and Ordinal Malaprop, and several hundred more. (And I'm sure I'll be catching flames from all their friends in the next few weeks.) With so many subcultures and waves of immigrants, it's a monumental task to track the networks of influence, one you could devote your whole academic career to—which is, in fact, what UK Guardian games blogger Aleks Krotoski is doing right now.

I'm ranking each person by three categories on a scale of 1 to 10: Creative Influence, Commercial Impact, and Connection Network. To hold real power— influence, leadership, reputation—it's not enough to be a great creator, or flush with Linden Dollars (the official in-world currency.) You need also to connect with a wide range of Residents on a personal level. Some awesome creators toil away quietly on cool but obscure projects, while some successful businesspeople couldn't influence a dozen folks outside their client base to do anything, even if they paid them. (Though they sometimes try anyway.) In the power hierarchy, connections are all important.

10 - Jenna Fairplay

Creative Influence: 5
Commercial Impact:8
Connection Network: 9

Within months of joining SL in late 2004, Jenna launched The Edge, a nightclub-cum-casino-cum-sex club, and since then it's consistently been one of the most popular spots in the world, the hangout of choice for thousands every week, especially noobies. This could be because of the fairly strange secret behind Ms. Fairplay's success: She runs The Edge, she once told me, based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs , where the noob's urge to feel safe and accepted in a strange MMO comes first, sex, fun, and friends second. And only after having gotten all that is the noob ready for the features Second Life is actually known for: Building, scripting, and owning land. But for Jenna, booty comes first, and her continued success suggests she's not wrong.

9 - Prokofy Neva

Creative Influence: 3
Commercial Impact: 7
Connection Network: 9

Actually, everything you're reading in this article is a damn lie. There's no natural aristocracy of connectors who earned their position in the SL—in reality, it's an elite known as the "Feted Inner Core", a shadowy, informal conspiracy between Second Life's top content creators and Linden Lab, who want to create a techno-utopia where the average user is marginalized . That's the likely response this piece would provoke from Prokofy Neva, a successful virtual landlord who's also SL's self-styled dissident and iconoclast. After months of acrimony promoting this theory, he was ejected from the official Forums, but by then, the "FIC" concept had infected the world, as seen in parodies, slogans, and everyday speech. For this reason, I've dubbed him the Noam Chomsky of Second Life— an activist dismissed as an irrelevant extremist by the mainstream, but whose thought still manages to define the terms of the debate. ("Smash the FIC" is the "No blood for oil" of SL.) Like Chomsky, Mr. Neva has a talent for taking a kernel of truth— three years after release, the Second Life user interface is still undeniably confusing and complex in a way that benefits the technically proficient at the expense of the beginner— and weaving around it an all-encompassing theory glued together by suspicion and bile.

Least it seems so to me— but then, I'm a member of the FIC myself.

8 - Francis Chung

Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 7
Connection Network: 6

Ms. Chung made a gun and a hug and changed the world. Created back in mid-2004, the Seburo (a tribute to a fictional pistol from the works of anime artist Masmune Shirow) was and still is among the most fully-formed weapons in SL, with muzzle flashes and spent casings that trail wisps of gunsmoke when they exit the chamber. The hug was just as complex, enabling avatars to embrace each other. A simple enough task, you'd think, until you consider that each avatar has to be perfectly positioned even before two custom animations can be launched. For such a social world, inventing a hug was profoundly powerful, eventually unleashing an entire industry of custom animations that brought Residents together, from kisses to the most acrobatic sex imaginable. The pistol she sold for 1500 Linden Dollars, about $6, and despite the price, a substantial number of Residents have bought it, proving there was a commercial market for gamers in SL. (The hug she sold in far larger numbers.)

Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast, a talented electronica musician named Torley was browsing the Web in search of an online world. A bad case of hyperacusis had just ruined his composing career, and he wanted a place to express himself. Up Googled the guns and hugs of Francis Chung, and a door opened. But that's another story.

7 - Aimee Weber

Creative Influence: 10
Commercial Impact: 7
Connection Network: 8

I have to full-disclosure Ms. Weber, now that she's become a regular contributor to my own blog, but she's earned her place on this list many times over as a fashion designer who not only became successful from her massive sales and distinct style, but for the brand and identity she created around it, anchored by her persona, an outrageously brash, flirty, vaguely tipsy ballerina with blue butterfly wings. (Read virtual world expert Betsy Book's fascinating study on the emergence of virtual brands, in which Aimee stars.) To frame this personality (and a prime consumer location), she built the island of Midnight City, a virtual New York with textures and lighting to rival the best of GTA, and is now dabbling in SL-made machinima with ass-kicking results.

6 - Cory Doctorow

Creative Influence: 1
Commercial Impact: 1
Connection Network:10

The Boing Boing blogger and novelist doesn't visit Second Life often, but when he does, his impact is deep and ongoing. (Another full disclosure: Cory's a meatspace bud of mine.) As an avatar, Doctorow resembles himself in real life, and has appeared in-world twice to promote his novels. From these visits (and his mention of them on Boing Boing) have come other luminaries of the Internet age, from Lawrence Lessig to Joi Ito, spreading the influence even further among futurists, the technorati, and not trivially, venture capitalists. While writers like Verner Vinge and Neal Stephenson came before him with their speculative novels about the metaverse, Doctorow is the first author to influence the direction, growth, and culture of an actual online world. As an avatar, no less.

The countdown to number one continues soon...

Wagner James Au covers the new power elite and other topics at New World Notes and searches for Preview Hos on Kotaku.

When I launched Kotaku's Preview Ho column a couple weeks ago, I did so on the assumption that the gaming press hyped up their previews primarily to stay in good stead with the publishers, whose access and ad revenue they depend on. But in the case of the top two gaming sites, at least, I quickly learned that the story is more complicated—and disturbing— than even that.

Shortly after the first Preview Ho, I was contacted by a former media buyer for various game publishers. This person was irked by the game media's pretense that previews were pure editorial. But unlike their readers— or for that matter, me— my source had hard proof they were much more than that.

"I was the media buyer who made the purchase," the source told me, "signed the insertion order, and then followed up to make sure that what we had been promised was in fact delivered."

What was delivered, my source went on, was editorial placement on the two largest game websites for a sizeable fee.

This source sent me some invoices for a game studio client. (For good measure, I faxed copies to my Gawker editors.) Several were from Gamespot, and while most of the items referred to legitimate ads, a couple mentioned something called "Front Door rotation"— or what Gamespot staffers refer to as a "gumball". Gumballs are those thumbnail screenshots you see on the front page of Gamespot, when you visit the site— clicking on these takes you to an article about the game.

In the Gamespot invoice I looked at, a gumball for two weeks cost the media buyer's client over $7000.

"You can purchase messaging plus units that increase the likelihood of an article about your game showing up on their front page," the source said. In other words, if you want your game to get more editorial prominence, you pay extra.

Then the source showed me an invoice for the same game, this one from
IGN/Gamespy. What Gamespot calls a gumball, Gamespy calls, less charmingly, a "Gamespy Spotlight". But the content and the principle is basically the same: the Spotlights are those thumbnail screenshot links that you see on the site's front page. "What you're looking at on the front page is not what the editors decided is the best game," the media buyer informed me.

Reached for comment, both the editors of Gamespot and Gamespy, unsurprisingly, have a much different way of looking at their policies.

"I can confirm that GameSpot does offer publishers programs that promote their content on our site using a variety of means," Gamespot Executive Editor Greg Kasavin acknowledged. "The promotion causes gumballs linking to specific content to appear more often than other gumballs (which are auto-generated for all new content and displayed randomly and dynamically upon page load)." But for the "vast majority of cases", he goes on, the gumball doesn't feature Gamespot editorial, but an official asset like the game's trailer or a playable demo. "Our editors have the authority and responsibility to decide which content gets top billing," Kasavin added.

I asked Kasavin about this "vast majority" of gumballs— what was an exception, where a paid gumball linked straight to Gamespot editorial?

As it happened, he said, such a gumball is currently in play, for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for the Xbox 360. "I wouldn't want you to jump to the incorrect conclusion that the extra push being given to the review must mean that the game's publisher somehow influenced the review in the first place," Kasavin added hastily. "My guess is this promotional deal was negotiated after we decided to give the game a positive review, but since I'm not privy to the details of these types of deals, I don't know for sure." He insisted that Gamespot maintains a strict separation between editorial and ad sales.

IGN/Gamespy had a similar explanation for the selling of their editorial space.

First noting that the practice is "pretty common both in print and online", Peer Schneider, IGN's VP of Content Publishing, described their Spotlights as "'sponsored' slotting, sometimes called 'digital reprint.' This is a practice where advertisers want to make sure coverage of their titles is seen. For example, some magazines sell their cover image (or part of it) to the highest bidder." Schneider insisted IGN and GameSpy don't sell their "top story" placement to anyone. "We have, however, designated spots that can be 'sponsored.' What this means is that a publisher interested in exposing more users to a title (including games, movies, etc.) can book a one-day sponsorship in what we call 'spotlights.'" Like Kasavin, Schneider enunciated a principle of strict separation between editorial and ad sales.

"In the time I have been here (six years now)," Gamespy editorial director John "Warrior" Keefer added, "there has never been any deliberate intent to deceive our readers. If anything, we try to err in the other direction. I am a strong proponent of editorial integrity. My staff knows that the quickest way to get on my bad side is to mess with GameSpy's name or reputation. We have made a few mistakes (Donkey Konga, anyone?), but those we have never shied away from or tried to sweep under the carpet (I spent three days after Donkey Konga answering questions and posting on boards)."

Hos, or honest brokers? We leave that to the readers of Gamespot and Gamespy to decide. To us, however, their answers raise more questions than they answer. Can any indy game studio really compete for attention against publishers who can afford to stack the deck? With so much money at stake, how separate can editorial and ad sales truly be? And what would happen if it were discovered that, say, the websites of Premiere and Entertainment Weekly charged the studios extra to put their trailers (no matter how mediocre) in a prominent place on their page?

We leave readers with those questions to ponder, as well. For now, consider this a glimpse inside the sausage factory, where games often reach the public awareness not because of their quality, but because of the billing that goes with them.

And the search for Hos continues.

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcom—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

I tried it out, but it just seemed like The Sims Online in 3D, all these blinged-out club rats just standing around chatting. Like, WTF?

That s pretty much the reaction I get from most gamers on Second Life, the user-created online world in which I ve been an embedded journalist for the last 3 years. I can t blame them. Though it s been featured at E3 and sometimes gets blurbed by the gaming press as an MMORPG, SL is really a world that s architected to be all things to all people. Start a free account, and you re liable to wind up in the Welcome Area with a few exiles from TSO and There looking for a new place to socialize and, yes, cyber on poseballs but just as easily, academics checking out the schizophrenic hallucination simulator, or government contractors with US Homeland Security, or even the odd Japanese sex worker who wants to virtually recreate Hiroshima after the nuke hit. Absent specific goals or mobs to kick the crap out of, you re liable to fly around aimlessly before deciding that it s just a weird cross between a 3D development platform and a chat program, AutoCAD meets the Sims.

Which it sort of is, but then, also not. It s definitely not for every gamer, but for those willing to recalibrate their expectations of what an online world is supposed to be or just want a break from leveling in WoW here s some of the SL tips I usually give to gamers still stuck at WTF.

Avoid the Popular Places

This might sound counter-intuitive, but like Yogi Berra used to say, "No one goes to that restaurant anymore, it's too crowded!" Popular Places (a category under SL's Find command) is a raw data listing of sites based on nothing more than foot traffic. And much like a gleefully deranged amalgam of Vegas, Miami, and Amsterdam, what brings customers is the promise of gambling, dancing, and naked fun. None of this is a bad thing, of course, but it does mean Popular Places tend to be the haven of casual and social gamers, and scarce with folks with Kotaku in their bookmark.

Plus if your Mom is into SL, she's probably hanging out in one of these Popular Places right now, and you don't really want to see what she's wearing or what kind of animated moves she's busting in there. Seriously.

Find the Sandboxes

If you insist on thinking of Second Life as a game, then think of it as a game the same way playing with Lego is. This comes out most clearly in the Sandboxes , regions in Second Life that have been reserved for temporary free-form, no-cost building. Generally the area is wiped of all objects created within it every 24 hours. For my money, these are consistently the coolest areas in SL, a kind of massively multiplayer building blocks land. Unsurprisingly, this is where a lot of gamers hang out, whether it s to make giant dreadnought starships, or build tributes to Counterstrike or Mario, or play a round of Bearhammer .

To reach the sandboxes: Click Map , then in the Find Region slot, type in Sandbox or Combat (where p v. p battles are permitted along with building), then Teleport.

Befriend a Furry Today!

Once the bane of gamer-dominated sites like Something Awful, the furry subculture has found its place in SL. Come across a game or an amazing game-like area, and there's maybe a 50-50 chance it s the proud work of someone with a large bushy tail. Furries took Taco, for example, and converted the entire island into a cel-shaded cartoon land of wonder; furries not only created the Lusk community, but are building a whole software development kit for making puzzles. Unsurprisingly, many are also members of the game industry. Tiger Cotton, creator of many popular SL games, works on those titles as a break from his day job: working on Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Visiting Taco or Lusk. Click Map , then in the Find Region , type Taco or Lusk , then Teleport. Contact Arito Cotton for Lusk s SDK.

Get with a Group

With such a large community of Residents (over 160,000 now) and a high concurrency (nearly 6000 online at peak), one of the best ways for gamers to find their way is join a Group of like-minded folks to share resources, tips, and communicate live in group IM messages. There s hundreds of groups for every conceivable interest, a lot of which are game related. SL has become a kind of 3D forum for gamers who want to meet up outside their favorite titles. The famed girl gamer PMS clan recently started a chapter in SL, while the popular Penny Arcade site has a group nearly a hundred strong. Gamers looking to try their hand at SL development should check out the Game Developer Association, while WoW fans can join World of Warcraft Players.

Speaking of which, one of those famous WoW players out there, Internet guru Joi Ito, is planning to buy and island in SL, and devote to activities associated with his WoW clan and other activities. Go here to get involved.

To join a group. Click Find, the Groups, then enter the title of the group in the search slot. The groups listed above are all open to the public.

The games are in there

That Second Life isn't a game doesn't mean the world isn't rife with games— there are dozens, of every variety and genre, so much so that there's a wiki devoted to them. Even better, the 2006 Game Development Contest launched on the 20th, and it's a showcase of eight games, including a mini-MMORPG, an RTS, and an in-world Magic-style card game. (Full disclosure: when still a staffer, I helped Linden Lab put this contest together.) At its best, SL is a platform for games, and gamers looking for a world where they bring just as much to a game as is expected of them.

Wagner James Au still covers Second Life at New World Notes.

We're not afraid to post dissenting opinions, so be warned that Chick doesn't find Au's point to be particularly salient or elegant. On the other hand, he has some interesting thoughts on the nature of writing previews and getting sucked into the still-hypothetical world of the game designer. How does he know? He once proclaimed Trespasser the second coming of Christ. Here's what Chick has to say about that:

I remember being enamoured of a game called Trespasser many years ago.

Until it came out.

But until then, boy, was I enthusiastic listening to Seamus Blackley and Brady Bell tell me all about what it was going to be like. I could probably cull some excerpts from those previews and we could all enjoy a good laugh. I might even be eligible for some sort of special recognition from Wagner James Au's Preview Ho Awards.

He goes on to offer some advice to gaming journalists on how to write good previews. Definitely worth reading as a sometimes opposing but sometimes complimenting perspective on Au's editorial.

Pure Au [Quarter to Three]

The games writer for Salon and the embedded journalist in Second Life rallies Kotaku readers in a war to save games from their worse enemy—the gaming press. This is an expanded version of a talk delivered March 11 at South by Southwest s ScreenBurn Fest in Austin, Texas.

Why do games, for the most part, unrelentingly suck such ass? If you happened to hear veteran designer Greg Costikyan s acclaimed rant last GDC 2005, you d think the trouble was due to the rising cost of development, and outdated distribution models. He is right as far as it goes— but right in a way that doesn t leave much hope for change.

After covering the game industry for some five years, I think I ve found the primary source of the trouble. Not the only source, but the weakest link in the greater chain of suck and more key, the one that can be hammered at by blogs like Kotaku.

I found it at an E3 cocktail party in Beverly Hills, shortly after I d begun introducing myself not as a journalist but as a writer with the virtual world Second Life—not a game per se, but close enough, evidently, for folks on the business end of the industry to lower their shields. The topic was the gaming press, and on that subject, the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.

Press previews are very important to our sales, he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Retailers don t know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those.

And just like that, the gaping mouth of suckage was staring me in the face. Or rather, it had always been there, but I just hadn t noticed until then.

For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it.

And the circle jerk is complete. All started by the gaming press, in their preview section.

Consider these excerpts selected at random from game magazine previews from last year:

Batman Begins and The Incredible Hulk No longer are you limited to just reading about your favorite superheroes for once, you truly are the superhero.

Rainbow Six: Lockdown we re quite certain that the new online career mode will justify a purchase.

Call of Duty II We don t need any more convincing [on the studio s qualifications to make this game.] The hard part now will be waiting until this fall, when Call of Duty II hits shelves.

These aren t impartial descriptions, let alone critical evaluations. These are words that directly drive sales. None of these previews had a single critical word to say either, except perhaps to point out easily fixable technical issues and missing content.

Ask yourself if you ve ever read anything like the following in a preview:

While technically impressive, there s really no design feature here which hasn t been done before in previous games.

The story looks like one more series of boring cutscenes you ll be skipping past, since they re pretty much derived from a dozen movies you ve already seen.

If one more slightly different looking set of futuristic weapons is so goddamn important to you that you re willing to part with $50, why, this is the game for you!

None of this is meant as a slam at all individuals in the gaming press, many of whom are personal friends who have my respect and sympathy. Generally they are just as pained by the compromises they feel they must make by running non-critical game previews. (I m not claiming purity for myself, either; in retrospect, for example, I regret over-praising a technology demo of Molyneux s Black and White without ever asking uncomfortable questions such as, Where s the, um, game? ) I don t even think the press does it in exchange for all the free trips, gifts, and other benefits that publishers ply them with. They do it for fear of losing early access to games and their developers, and endangering their advertising revenue.

But they are gamers, too, and they must feel just as keenly the indignity of hyping crap. Like any dedicated gamer, they can tell when a game is fundamentally bad or undistinguished, even in Beta; they know that a game with unoriginal gameplay will still be unoriginal, after all the bugs are rooted out and the unfinished levels completed.

Talking with them, I can sometimes seem to see a mortified look in their eyes, a kind of Stop me before I hype again! plea. We saw an example of this personal tumult in recent months, when Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Dan Hsu unleashed a rant about fellow editors who sold coverage for ad space—a groundbreaking story that most of the gaming press cravenly failed to follow up on. It s gotten so bad, members of the game industry are themselves begging for the press to reform witness God of War s David Jaffe much-discussed critique of the gaming media. (Both Hsu and Jaffe s editorials, it s worth noting, didn t show up in game magazines, but in their personal blogs.)

If editors were to break this unspoken agreement they ve made with publishers to write groveling previews, they d be heroes to gamers everywhere. They d also be out of a job. Which is why it s up to gamers to save them from themselves and in the process, to help save games.

This is where blogs like this come in.

Starting in April, Kotaku will launch a regular feature called Preview Ho of the Month , and the object is to name and shame.

Preview Ho will be a compilation of the most egregious, blatant promotion for unreleased games from across the gaming press. We will challenge the editors of these magazines and websites to justify their hype on behalf of their advertisers products. We will ask them why they gave so much glowing press to games that were so unfinished as to be design documents with conceptual art, or gave any attention whatsoever to yet another movie spin-off with no perceivable originality at all. In doing so, we will go after previews as they exist now for what they are: the mortal enemy of good games.

This is a task that will require the help of every reader of Kotaku who also reads game magazines. Go hunting for these handjobs, clip them out, and e-mail (au@kotaku) the text to us. Help us find the biggest Hos and win public praise—and the satisfaction of knowing you helped create a future of better games.

Think what a gaming press which no longer acted as the publishers fluffers would look like, where journalists felt free to state their actual impressions of a game in preview Beta. There would be some pissiness in the beginning, yes; some publishers would threaten to yank their advertising, after particularly harsh previews. All for the better: this would push magazines to court more non-gaming advertisers, and thereby, expand their audience demographic. The less dependent on game ads for revenue, the more editorial freedom they ll have, in future issues. No longer able to rely on the gaming press booster-ism, publishers would be forced to take more creative risks. They d also put more effort into creating playable demos early on in the development process, to generate a fan base the old-fashioned way, by earning it.

Meanwhile, the gaming press would actually become a genuine force for good and innovation in games; honestly harsh previews would kill or suspend projects in early development, or force studios to rethink crucial elements of the design. In the same way, honest positive previews would build up buzz for the titles that deserved them. We would see more games like Katamari Damacy, which began its life in the US on a single demo machine on the E3 floor, while the publisher devoted its promotional resources to less worthwhile games only to see gamers (largely gamers who blog) drag it into the spotlight.

Bloggers have transformed the mainstream media (think Dan Rather and those fake memos), US politics (think Trent Lott s hasty retirement after praising a segregationist), and Hollywood (think Ain't It Cool News, an ur-blog that forced the film industry to improve their geek genre films.) It is time for blogs to do the same thing for the game industry, breaking the closed circuit of suck once and for all.

Sometimes game journalist/sometimes game developer Wagner James Au writes the New World Notes blog, the journal of the online world Second Life.