vulpish_one

There's still time. But even if this doesn't pan out at all, maybe remember how you feel and try to take that feeling into another community down the line.

We can all stand to be a little more awesome to each other, I think.

Funny, maybe. Human nature, definitely.

In mice? Quite high. We believe it to be well above the ED50, which would make for an impressive therapeutic index. Unfortunately, all attempts to fabricate a placebo for experimental trials have thus far been fruitless, so we are unable to quantify the data or provide suitable human test results.

Now that you mention it...yes, they're all paying attention to what they--and only they--are doing. Eyes forward, no Facebook or Twitter or whatever else the kids do these days. No one on a mobile phone. In today's American postsecondary education system, that's a gosh-darn miracle in and of itself.

Now, I'm going to go get a new onion for my belt.

Heck, Valve's emphasis on finding talent within their own communities goes hand-in-hand with CoH's vast quantity of user-generated content tools. Even a good costume tells a story!

Tell anyone who will listen that you've found a community that needs a lifeline badly!

Yeah, I was. The English language totes needs a sarcasm mark.

Edit: First post before redname!

Is that what happened to me...??

That...would be awesome. If even one or two of them enjoyed the "assignment" enough to want to join the community, we'd love to have them. After all, isn't the Save Paragon City! movement exactly the sort of cyberculture your research focused on?

I'd categorize it as "arguably true, but irrelevant to our efforts." Then, being focused on the task at hand and having applied that label, I'd skip over the point and go on to the next one.

Down the line, I might ask myself what I can do to prevent lapses in subscriptions to try to prevent something like this from happening again, should it come to that. But we don't have time to play "shoulda, woulda, coulda" right now.

I could list what's going on in my life right now, but I don't like to sound showy--it starts with "second and third degrees," though. And while the African warlords deserve coverage, as do pressing social and political issues, I maintain my assertion that this fact does not invalidate the coverage of lesser events, especially in an online medium where there is practically infinite storage and users can contribute quality work. Maslow's Hierarchy assures us that, the higher we climb in life, the more varied and nuanced our interests will become. Having news coverage to reflect this fact in a relatively cushy, post-Industrial society isn't a bad thing. Having well-rounded interests--the arts, football, and politics, for instance--isn't a bad thing.

Would you be willing to post in this thread on the Titan Network forums? We're trying to get together a long list of poignant, thought-provoking, or otherwise interesting testimonials from users.

In fact, if any of your students would like to share--or if you have the authority to share on their behalf--so much the better! Your input could really help us promote the "game-as-art" angle.

Normally, I do ignore comments online that seem to be engineered to draw out emotional responses. I chose to reply here, in part, to try to seed other readers of our message board with counterarguments for the points Angry_Citizen raises. There will be those that say "this isn't a story of merit." To a degree--especially when compared with real-world atrocities--they will be right. I would counter that it may not be a story of global merit, but it is definitely a story of interest to the larger world because it sheds light on a great many emerging facets of both modern cyberculture and grassroots activism.

For what it's worth, I don't feel any emotional response at all to the points brought up in this thread; what I've stated here is my simple, reasoned, dispassionate opinion that I've tried to support as best I can.

If we're sticking with AAA titles, my favorites of the latest generation have been, in no particular order, the Assassin's Creed series, the inFAMOUS series, and the Mass Effect series. Of course, none of those are perfect--they have varying amounts of low-grade filler and their own narrative problems. But they're reimagining old gaming formulae amd pushing the medium forward in their own ways.

There are risktakers out there, but you have to go below AAA to find truly daring ideas. I still can't believe anyone ever got Spec Ops: The Line greenlit. It's probably, what, AA? I know paying for Nolan North can't be cheap anymore.

Let's not hold CNN up as purveyors of exclusively big-picture, Earth-shaking topics. They report on a great many things that aren't global issues. In fact, they have a whole section of their website devoted exclusively to such things...and these aren't even user-submitted iReports! CNN, for better or worse, is presumably trying to reflect the people in its audience. Those people have diverse interests. The iReport we're discussing wouldn't belong on CNN's World News page, as others have pointed out.

I submitted previously that the CoH fandom's reaction to NCsoft's decision is a something of a microcosm of contemporary American society. I stand by that assertion: we have, in miniature, a story where a group of people used modern information technology to self-organize and begin espousing a coherent, if somewhat narrow, message. That alone makes it an intriguing story from a journalistic perspective, which is part of why I submitted the story of our struggle as a tip to the thoughtful radio program This American Life.

Two things all my heroic characters have in common? They don't fight because they know they'll win. They fight because they think the fight itself is worth fighting, and they know that how you fight is at least as important as the fact that you're fighting in the first place.

It's what makes heroes heroic. Think about it: Mike hasn't eaten today. Mike has $10 from working his legal, productive job. Mike buys a pizza. Mike's motive was relatable (hunger) and his means of satisfying the motive were honorable (honest, legal transactions). Mike's struggle to acquire pizza isn't seen as heroic in part because it took no real courage.

Tell me that Mike has a crippling fear of strangers and the pizza place doesn't deliver. Now even going to the pizzaria to pick up his order becomes a heroic endeavor, littered with anxiety and peril. Heroes don't have to save the world. Heroes just need relatable motivations that they seek to meet through morally upright means, despite great adversity.

We are heroes. This is what we do.

But I'll bite. I've got about five minutes.

If a tool ostensibly designed for a serious use is later repurposed by other users for more "frivolous" uses, that intrinsically invalidates neither the tool nor the secondary purpose. I agree: this isn't using social media in any of those relevant major real-world uprisings that message board rules prevent me from enumerating directly.

It's using iReport--a tool which regularly sees far, far less news-worthy topics--to address an online community's reaction to the potential destruction of said community. Parallels can be drawn to the potential destruction of real-world communities; as these parallels can at least be drawn--however tenuously--this can be a story of legitimate journalistic merit that highlights the emergence of purely virtual societies in post-Industrial America.

Annnd...that's my five minutes. Good work, Paindancer! Keep spreading the word, everyone! This article needs hits, too!