1st Penguin

I went looking for interesting stuff on the internet today (no, not porn!) and ran across this: TerraNova's post 1st penguin. Apparently the International Game Designers Association (IGDA) has given this award, for the very first time, to Professor Richard Allan Bartle Ph.D for being first among Penguins. He has “the courage and bravery of a developer who is the first to test the proverbial waters, in the face of uncertainty of success or failure. Receiving a "penguin" serves as an inspiration and lesson to the community.” See terranova's post for the full details. This is what makes it interesting: 20 years ago he and Roy Trubshaw developed the first virtual world MUDs (1978), making them the progenitors of all the multi-user games we (or some of you, anyway) know and love/hate :-)

And from the same site, this is just plain old SAD!!

And I'll leave you with this post on how gender, age, and personality effect avatar/character creation, also from TerraNova. Very interesting, although I had to read it a few times to get past the $10.00 words. Or maybe my brain is just slow tonight! They seem to be referring mainly to characters in online games, but I think the idea overlaps into face-to-face role-playing type games as well.