[ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers

[Aleksei Riikonen]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> wrote:
> The foundation of the Order of Cosmic Engineers was announced at The
> Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life
> on June 5, 2008. There will be a launch event in World of Warcraft
> TODAY June 14, 2008, at noon EST, hosted by Bainbridge's WoW Science
> Guild. The Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers,
> collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members, and other
> parts of the website, will be online tomorrow June 15, 2008.
>
> See Bainbridge's convergentsystems wiki for information on the Order's
> launch at the Silvermoon Meeting, Saturday, June 14 noon server time.
> Please see the Earthen Ring US page for information on how to set up
> your WoW character to attend the event. In summary: you must choose
> the the North American server, Earthen Ring US, and your character
> must belong to the Horde. Europeans see here.
>
> See http://cosmeng.org/
>
> We hope to see transhumanist WoWers today!

I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try
out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW.

EVE Online certainly has by far the most demanding learning curve
among MMORPGs (I have never seen this disputed), and in a wholly
positive way; it's not fucked up design or anything like that that
makes it more challenging, just the depth and complexity of it all. No
other current MMORPG has an equally complex virtual economy (could
other MMORPG worlds non-hilariously employ a PhD economist putting out
quarterly reports?), or an equally rich political landscape of
competing player alliances, as the possibilities for PVP and the
infrastructural elements for empire building in EVE are from a
different plane of complexity than in typical MMORPGs.

If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as
computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent
person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into
it.

Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find
ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are
called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy):
http://www.eve-viv.net/

-- 
Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei