The Edge Online Columns Hat

In October 2000, the developer-centric magazine Edge brought out an web-based version of itself with original material. They chose as their editor Steve Hildrew, a former MUD2 player. As he had no budget to pay anyone to write columns, his thoughts turned to people he knew who were egotistical enough to be willing to work for nothing. Naturally, I was one of the first he approached...

The launch of the magazine was delayed by several months, which dated the first article a little (but not excessively so). Subsequent articles were written when Steve emailed me and said, "how about another column, then?" and are more in keeping with the date they appeared.

The columns are edited for length, and therefore don't always match what I wrote. The cutting tends to be less than in offline magazines, though, which is a relief. Also, they don't have names - they're just Column: Richard Bartle.
Mortar Board Column 1
October, 2000.
I wrote this column using material I was preparing for the Online Games 2000 conference. I didn't get a lot of feedback from it, but then it doesn't say a lot that's controversial.
Mortar Board Column 2
February, 2001.
For the second article, Steve asked me to be more provocative. I therefore reworked a talk I had planning to give at the Computer Games Developers' Conference that they had rejected (no reason given). I wasn't expecting many people would read it, but hey, it was for a friend so it didn't really matter.
Was I ever wrong...
I spent 2-4 hours a day for the 3 weeks following its publication fielding emails and forum postings about it! The biggest discussion raged on Lum The Mad's site. I took a snapshot of it before it disappeared, and present it here in its entirety; it clarifies a lot of the issues in the article. The version of the article I reproduce here is the one I actually wrote, by the way; to see it as published, check the Edge Online Archives.
An interesting counterblast later appeared in Jessica Mulligan's influential Biting The Hand column. It makes some very good points, although I think that likening player killing to rape was somewhat ill-advised.
Mortar Board Column 3
September, 2001.
I wrote this article in June, 2001 and contacted Edge Online to tell them that it was ready. No reply. OK, so maybe their email server was broken. I tried again next day, and again a couple of weeks later. Then I went on holiday and retried when I got back: still no reply. I phoned.
It seems that there wasn't anyone actually responsible for the online edition of Edge any more. Someone was nevertheless deligated to put my piece onto the site, so I sent him a copy. Two weeks later, it still hadn't appeared... I finally cracked and put the text here instead. It's the usual provocative stuff you'd expect intended for a magazine calling itself Edge.


Copyright © Richard A. Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk)
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