3pointD.com

So far, this hasn’t been a very self-referential blog. That’s been a conscious choice and a natural decision, since it isn’t my first impulse to just bung the details of my personal life onto Teh IntarWeb. It’s been tempting, at times, but then I ask myself: How 3pointD is this really? And the answer is usually “Not very,” so I don’t see that changing much anytime soon. (Readers breathe collective sigh of relief.)

That said, this is a slightly self-referential post, but it has to do more with the content of the blog than with the content of my hours and days. Basically, I’m putting you all on notice that I plan to expand the scope of 3pointD.com slightly to occasionally take in a bit more of the cultural reportage on MMOs that used to appear on my now nearly defunct blog, Walkerings.

I had been thinking of 3pointD as more of a technology news site, a place where that kind of reporting didn’t really fit in. And I still think of it that way, in large part. But a recent conversation with Dan Hunter of Terra Nova has started me thinking that the two modes of blogging are probably not as mutually exclusive as I’d felt.

I met up with Dan — who, like me, is a World of Warcraft player — at the Supernova conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and he and I and Glenn Thomas (who’s working on the Ideal World documentary) went for a drink at a dive bar south of Market Street. Now, this was a fairly blue-collar place, mind you, not your typical hipster joint. But both Dan and I were delighted to find, scrawled on the bathroom wall, a graffito that read, “Horde > Alliance.” MMOs are everywhere. Reminded me of the subway episode I blogged about a while back. But I digress.

Dan wanted to know why I wasn’t doing much on Walkerings anymore, and I told him I just wasn’t finding the time. It seemed to make more sense to me to concentrate on the technological side of things, since it was faster moving and seemed more suited to a mid- to high-volume blog like 3pointD. Dan’s response, though, was something along the lines of, “Isn’t it all of a piece?”, which is what got me thinking. Maybe it is all of a piece, and I’ve been shoving the cultural stuff aside for no good reason. The cultural and the technological seem to exist in a fairly close feedback loop, after all.

The recent post here about MySpace bullies, for instance, is pretty close to the kind of thing I have in mind. Rather than looking at a metaversal technology itself, it looks at the way people use such things, how they behave in cyberspace, who they are there. There are loads of stories coming out of the metaverse in this vein, both disheartening (like the MySpace story) and inspiring, and it doesn’t make sense to leave them off this blog just because they’re “not about technology.” 3pointD is primarily about connecting people, after all, and I think it will be nice to get more “people posts” onto the blog.

So thanks for indulging me in the publication of my thought processes. Feel free to think back at me in the comments thread. And stay tuned for perhaps slightly more cultural reporting in the coming days — including the next post. You didn’t think I’d leave you hanging, did you?