Letters to the Editor

Join or Die

The game world is an escapist frontier, and it has no room for 19th century-like Old Money, just like the Wild West had not a place for those not willing to strap on their boots and work for a living.

I don't know how common this feeling is, but it's very strong for me whenever I play an MMOG. It's a feeling that the one place where skill and craftsmanship should have mattered most - a true manifestation of Adam Smith's vision - was changed completely by the introduction of RMT.

-Dubi Kanengisser

To the Editor: I really love this magazine. The articles are insightful and the quality of the writing is refreshing in a world where game marketing passes for game literature most of the time. Well done!

With regard to the web version of the magazine, I really dislike the way the navigation bar at the bottom right gets in the way of the text. I use Firefox as my main web browser, and I increase the font size so I don't have to squint at my high resolution display. Your web page doesn't make it easy, and I end up having to change screen resolutions to read the page comfortably without constantly increasing and decreasing the font size and squinting just to read the paragraph or two that get obscured. Could you at the very least move the nav bar to the top so that increasing the font size won't pose such a problem? It would at least solve that issue for readers, and I won't feel that printing out the PDF is my only recourse.

With regard to the articles, can we please refrain from referring to paying and potential customers as "consumers?" With all the recent talk about abolishing the old publishing model, we sure stick to the same thought processes easily enough. When you call a person a consumer, you are basically relegating that person to an unthinking creature suitable for commercial exploitation. Is that who we really want as our gaming public? I would think we would prefer smart, savvy customers who appreciate a good game and won't salivate over the latest blinking light show.

Also, is there a reason why the editorial calendar is available only in an Excel document? Why not just convert it to an HTML or PDF document? It would be way more web friendly in either format compared to Office documents.

-Gianfranco