MMOFPS, or why Penny Arcade rocks
One thing I do with the time for which Red Hat pays me so many millions of (some of) your precious dollars is to lounge around in my underwear reading a bunch of web comics. (This comes under the heading of 'community research'). One of my favourites is Penny Arcade, and this is one of the big reasons why. Yup, that's a link to a news post. It's not even got much to do with the comic it was posted alongside. On most comic sites - Nuklear Power is a great example - most of the news posts are eminently skippable and generally fairly dull. On Penny Arcade, they're most of the meat. The PA comics are very, very funny, but the news posts form probably the most perceptive long-term body of criticism of the video game industry ever written (in addition to being very, very funny). I don't play games anywhere near as much as I used to, but I still hang around the borders of that world, dipping a toe in occasionally (I got the 242nd star in Super Mario Galaxy 2 last week). PA has a knack of looking at issues of game design from a perspective you never thought of before, but which seems blindingly obvious as soon as they do it, and that article's a top-notch sample of the above.
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