Recent writings: Wordpress themes considered harmful, confessions, and my sexy gamer guy-pals

Bunch of posts elsewhere:

Web Insecurity: Free Wordpress themes considered harmful

It's illegal in many places to compromise someone's site to force them to serve up spammy links. But it's not illegal to put them in a Wordpress theme and then offer it for free...

Web Insecurity: To whom are you confessing?

The Catholic church has given its blessing to a new iPhone app that helps you prepare for confession. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada isn't so sure they'd approve it, though, pointing out the the developer collects a lot of information and doesn't provide a policy about how it will be used.

Geek Feminism: “How could they not have known?!”

A post about how our male compatriots are often floored by the sort of sexism women deal with daily. Also about FatUglyorSlutty.com, troll visualizations, and ...

*grin* In that post, I wrote "my male gamer buddies don’t have people freaking out or getting, er, excited when they speak on voice chat" and it took some effort to resist adding "but some of them should. Yum." Seriously, some of my gaming buddies have incredibly sexy voices and on the entirely too rare occasion when one of them sings on teamspeak... mmm...

I know, TMI, but I've wanted to brag about my hot gamer guys all day. ;)

Jonathan Blow on why social games are evil

If you haven't read this interview with Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid), you really should.

Some choice quotes:

A game like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike or whatever is way more social. Because you actually meet new people in clans or guilds. You go do activities together and help each other out, right?

[With certain social games] it’s about the game exploiting your friends list that you already made, so it’s not really about meeting people. And it’s not really about doing things with them because you’re never playing at the same time. It’s about using your friends as resources to progress in the game, which is the opposite of actual sociality or friendship.

I've always said the really addictive part of games, for me, was the people. Now I'm just disturbed by that interpretation of the use of people in fb games...

Designers know what they are doing. They know when they show up in the office – “My goal is to degrade the player’s quality of life”. They probably won’t think about that exact phrase. But [will think], “My goal is to get people to think about my game and to put more money into my game and get other friends to play my game to the exclusion of all other games and all other things that they might do with their free time.” That is the job description of those designers. And that’s evil. It’s not about giving people anything. It’s about taking from people.

Now go read the interview: Jonathan Blow interview: Do you believe social games are evil? “Yes. Absolutely.”