Academic Research mmorpg style

Will Wheaton's table top web show on Geek and Sundry has sparked interest in a lot of modern table top rpgs.

There's a lot going on this weekend. It's International table top gaming day, so all across this great land at hobby shops across the country people are currently engaged in their favorite board or rpg game. This blog is primarily about mmorpgs not table top gaming, but I bring it up because as descendants of RPGs, mmorpgs owe a great deal to their table-top heritage.

Today I have the misfortune of missing out, so instead of playing D&D, or fun games like Zombicide, Bloodsuckers, Clash of Cultures, and countless others, I am trying to work on my research paper for my theory class in graduate studies.

I have spent a great deal of time scouring the forums and trying to contact guild leaders to take part in my study, but thus far, the response has been less than spectacular. I figured, why not reach out through my blog? So if you are reading this post and you are a guild officer in a current mmorpg like Rift or World of Warcrat, or if you are the leader of a guild, it does not matter what game, please get in touch with me. You can respond to this blog post, or contact me via email at journalismdude@gmail.com

I appreciate any and all help, as there is a deadline involved and I am getting kind of antsy. If you happen to be one of the lucky ones who is either playing your favorite table top RPG today at your local hobby shop, or even at WonderCon in Anaheim, then oh how I envy you! Peace out!

MMORPG Kickstarter projects I would have funded

wow I am back blogging on my original blog after nearly a year of being AWOL!

Well, it has been a while but I think the reason I decided to get back into blogging about mmorpgs here at my original blog is mainly because I already have a built in audience on blogger and I want to take advantage. So for my return post I decided to follow up on a blogging project that I have been kicking around in my head for a while, now that I am on spring break from grad school, I decided it might be a good time to work on it. It dawned on me while hanging out with my gaming group this spring that a lot of interesting projects are going the crowdfunding route these days. One phrase I heard a lot was, "I kickstarted so and so, or I really like this game project and I am kickstarting x or y." It got me thinking, What exactly makes for a successful indie project and  conversely, what factors help to make a failed project? I will be exploring this topic in a series of posts with an emphasis on mmorpgs and mmo-related projects.

I ask myself, if these indie projects were available now would I play these games? why or why not? and are they innovative, or more of the same old same old? I started with a successfully funded comic book based on a mmorpg called "Meatspace" A sci-fi comic book by NY based comic book author Josh Gorfain.

As described by Gorfain, this is a cyberpunk story that is one part mega-multiplayer online roleplaying game, one part revenge thriller and one part story about a man re-entering society from his own self-exile partly from his own doing and also from someone bringing him back. Sounds like something I would dig reading and wish I had written myself, and it has been developed into an Amazon Kindle book. Check out the promotional video in the kickstarter campaign which was funded in the fall of 2011. This was supposed to be a 5 part series so is Gorfain working on the second edition? Seems like a long time in between editions, but that is the thing about these indie projects, some take a while to see fruition. More on this later!

I should probably note that this particular project was funded after a first attempt which failed, and the writing and editing team had to modify the specific to make a successful run of it.