10 by 10 room

“When I talk with teens about MySpace bulletins versus comments, they consistently tell me that they value comments more than bulletins. Why? Because “it takes effort” to write a comment. Bulletins are seen as too easy and it’s not surprising that teens have employed this medium to beg their friends to spend time and write a comment on their page.

— Danah Boyd, “Valuing Inefficiencies and Unreliability”

“Female Draenei and Tauren, however, are just a little bit shorter than their male counterparts, and can usually fit through the same doors that males cannot, while mounted. This may sound like a trivial problem, but to some people it is a really big deal — so much so that some people have vigorously petitioned the WoW developers to allow them to switch genders on their Draenei and Tauren characters.

— Lessons learned from playing female characters in MMORPGs

“Be they sororities or IRC channels, there’s a point where they get big enough that nobody knows everybody anymore. The community becomes overwhelmed with noise from various small cliques and floods of obnoxious people and the signal-to-noise ratio eventually drops to near-zero — no signal, just noise. This has happened to every channel I’ve been on that started small and slowly got big.

— ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat

“I think the most important lesson I (re-) learned in the entire 4e process is that playing D&D or any other RPG is an intensely personal activity. There’s a reason why we game with our friends, usually at the home of a friend, over food and drink. This is intensely personal stuff, where we say and do things that we wouldn’t let loose in public. [...]

— Mike Mearls on his D&D