I mentioned to one of my tutorials that there has been a few fiction books out recently that look at some of the aspects of gaming that we're talking about in this course. The ones which came mostly to mind are those that address the notion of "gold farming", the generic term for "adena farming" mentioned in one of the secondary readings.
Cory Doctorow has an excellent book called "For The Win", which has a huge advantage of being released under Creative Commons, so is free to download. Link: http://craphound.com/ftw/download/
Neal Stephenson has also written a book with a fascinating concept at its heart - an MMOG designed specifically to encourage the economics of gold farming, to incorporate this emergent behaviour in a way which does not unbalance the underlying infrastructure. The book is called "REAMDE" (readme with the d & the m reversed), and it's pretty large, but worth the read.
I'm not saying that either of these are of any "use" during the course, but they might be interesting if you have an interest in these areas.
Doctorow's "Little Brother" is only loosely about gaming, but I highly recommend it too, as is Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", which looks more at the history of video gaming.
Just FYI :)
That's a great list. There's also "Halting State," from Charles Stross, which is about a police investigation of a bank robbery in a World of Warcraft clone.
ReplyDeleteAs in, people walked into a bank in the game, and robbed it. Which *shouldn't* be possible... and yet.