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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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