PUBLIC MARKS from bcpbcp with tags mmog & gaming

This week we're talking to Scott Jennings, a man better known as Lum the Mad. He's just released his book Massively Multiplayer Gaming for Dummies, and we talk to him about the world-wide phenomenon that is online gaming.

In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps--as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces.