I finished reading Halting State, one of this year’s Hugo nominees, this weekend. This novel is AWESOME. If you play MMOs, RPGs, or even LARP, and you’re “into” net culture, this will be one of the best books you’ve ever read. So go get it. NOW. (As always, Amazon.com links on WorldIV are NOT referral links, if that bothers you.)

Good read at Elder Game about forum management. I especially love “the pretend quitter.” Intuitively, I’m going to have to agree that (as a general rule — and there are exceptions) forum posters are too small a cross-section of your game population to accurately reflect player sentiment — but they ARE quite visible.

We recorded the next episode of Tweak and Geek, and as soon as we finish the editing, I’ll post a link here. One thing I wanted to point out is the DreamBuildPlay competition, which is a contest to build an XNA game for the XBox 360. XNA Game Studio is a free C# platform for game-writing that’s cross-platform between PC and 360. If you go sign up for the competition, you can earn yourself a free 12-month trial membership in the XNA Creators’ Club, which doesn’t allow uploading games for review and distribution or downloading of premium content, but DOES enable you to upload games to your own 360.