Ludlow is Everywhere

The Alphaville Herald saga continues to crawl upwards in memespace. Peter Ludlow, a Zenger for our time, may apear on this US comedy news program tonight. He's also been on CNN, and has this interesting interview up today with someone who knows much about the early design of Sims and Sims Online. Finally, Professor Ludlow has been writing about virtual worlds for the London Times, a purportedly non-comedy newspaper in England. Full text of that below...

Excerpt from from the London Times (you'll have to go subscribe to get full text):

January 31, 2004

PC World

There goes the neighbourhood
by Peter Ludlow

...
Since The Alphaville Herald began reporting on events in this virtual city, many morals have been drawn from the sad state of affairs. Some commentators have suggested that this is what happens when people are given freedom to be whatever they want to be. I think a different conclusion is in order. The lesson of Alphaville is the way in which communities evolve in response to troublesome elements, and the creative, resourceful and sometimes heavy-handed strategies they use to defeat and freeze out griefers.

The lesson is also that the ability to cope with griefers is limited by the cohesiveness of community, and is never entirely successful. It is a mistake to think of Alphaville as a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is rather a city very much like terrestrial cities, struggling to cope with the behavioural problems of a relatively small number of citizens. Indeed, the more closely Alphaville is studied, the more it looks like a reflection of the world the players thought they had temporarily left behind.

...

Comments

[Nick Douglas]

1.

As long as new players understand these conditions, they could certainly treat this as part of the game. Petty political intrigue may not happen on grand scales in the real world, but everyone enjoys a good power play in the office or the chance to fight those bastards on the school board.

In other words, Alphaville is just another small town with personal politics. If I detach myself from the in-game emotions, I think I'll have fun with it.

[Peter Ludlow]

2.

comment on the Daily Show Interview.

I think they left out some of the better stuff from the interview.
Here's one bit that I thought should have stayed.

Corddry: Do you know who you are dealing with? Do you know what EA could do to you?
Ludlow: What could they do to me?
Corddry: They could fill your mailbox with unsolicited email for viagra, enzyte, invitations to fisting parties. You go there...there's no party...

I'm now wondering if this was the first time that "massively multiplayer online roleplaying game" was uttered on basic cable. It is certainly the first time that the phrase was used in the same story as the phrase "rough granny sex".

[Josh Winslow]

3.

So what is it like to get interviewed by the Daily Show? Do they do take after take to make sure it's funny? Was it hard not to laugh at the questions?

[Peter Ludlow]

4.

The Daily Show does take after take after take after take. What you saw was the product of a 5 hour session on my end. After they interviewed me for 3 hours they put the cameras on Rob and he asked questions which bore very little relation to the ones he actually asked me, and they would do multiple takes of each question-asking, typically revising each time. They would experiment with different ways of phrasing the questions to try and make them funnier. 99% of that ends up on the cutting room floor. And yeah, it was almost impossible not to laugh when Rob Corddry was asking the questions and the camera was on him. I had to struggle. When the camera was on me I fell out of my chair laughing a couple times.

[F. Randall Farmer]

5.

Peter,

What were you thinking, man? :-) :-) :-)

If The Daily Show ever showed up on my doorstep and wanted to interview me, I'd run away and hide in another state until they went away. :-)

You have a much tougher skin/sense of humor than I do, thats for sure.

Thanks for the laughs!
Randy
(Hoping to never see virtual rough granny sex, ever!)

[Peter Ludlow]

6.

Well, it's like this. Once I was at the Big Apple Circus, sitting in the second row, and a clown named Bello asked me to come out to the center of the ring for a humiliate-the-bald-guy routine. My daughter loved it, and now anytime Bello comes through the area (most recently he was featured in the Barnum and Bailey circus) we put on our Bello T-shirts and go see him. When my students insisted I had to do the Daily Show I said: WTF, let's do it again.

For those who missed it, you can find 3 versions posted here (warning, absolutely everything you here me say here is utterly stripped out of its context for comedic effect):

http://blogs.salon.com/0001004/2004/02/15.html#a4609