Nice paper from Tyler Pace and the Bardzells

There's a good new paper from the ACM CHI Conference on romance in WoW. It explains how people meet others easily through whispers, and then use the features of the game -- and some pretty innocent ones, by the way, like flowers and food -- to get to know one another. Rather a sweet paper; it's not all hardcore out there on the Internet.

The paper is called "The Rogue in the Lovely Black Dress: Intimacy in World of Warcraft." WoW nerds, I know rogues don't wear dresses (even females), but the rogue in the paper had bought the Lovely Black Dress and wore it for romantic purposes.

Something wonderful from Liz Losh

I recommend Liz Losh's excellent Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press 2009).

I especially liked chapter 3 on military video games, but each chapter is a fascinating, densely worked example of the U.S. government's involvement with digital technologies.

Liz is a superb writer; she knows how to "make media." You may find yourself admiring and enjoying her prose so much you have to remember the seriousness of her themes.