[MUD-Dev] Bay Area Press re: UO, the good the bad and the Ugly.

[Jessica Mulligan]

>F. Randall Farmer [randy at communities.com] wrote:

>They expose the underbelly of our industry. :-) They aren't AP newswire
>YET,but one or two more big virus stories might make editors think that
exposing
>any "negative" net-related story will sell more papers. :-P

This isn't the first time the press has jumped all over persistent worlds
and won't be the last time.  Ten years ago, when I was at GEnie, one of our
own sysops became an avid player of one of our RPGs, then denounced it as
cult-like, prone to driving people to commit criminal activities (i.e. be a
thief character) and to worship demons.  The same religious groups that
bothered TSR in the late 80s jumped all over us for a while, then it died
down.

We're at an interesting point in the MMPOG history cycle: we're generally
too small in the world's perception for politicians and special interests to
gain major "press" points from whacking us, but with corporate parents that
are too large to carelessly poke with the "issue" stick.  Assuming no
duplicate accounts, all for-pay MMPOGs and MUDs combined certainly have less
than 800,000 subscribers, and maybe as few as 600,000.  Toss in that these
are fantasies and games, and it's hard to drum up political support for
regulation.  If this portion of the industry does get attacked, I would
expect we'd need a cause celebre to kick it off, such as the Columbine/FPS
connection made by the press.

Randy does bring up an interesting point about RL social consciousness,
however.  Should we take responsibility for those 1 or 2% of gamers who
become addicted to our worlds to the point of having it adversely affect
their daily lives?  If so, what do we do about it?  And if we do take
responsibility for it, what can of legal worms are we opening up (especially
in the US, where suing others is the national pastime)?

>Raph Koster [rkoster at austin.rr.com] wrote:

>Did this just come out? Because I haven't been "lead designer of UO" for
>oh, almost a year. -Raph

At the bottom of the articles is the legend "From the June 1-7, 2000 issue
of Metro, Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper."  However, it does sound like
the interviews were done months ago and worked into a story later on.  Jason
Bell hasn't been UO Live's senior producer for 4 or 5 months (and left OSI a
week or so ago).  Also, the press, even the wired press, rarely get  things
such as titles and responsibilities right.

-Jessica




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