The September 18, 2006 issue of Newsweek has an article about World of Warcraft: Living a Virtual Life. You can read it online at that link, instead of buying the whole magazine, which is just about my favorite internet benefit: free. I was glad to see that Newsweek talked to Castronova (page 3) because I’d hate to think I’m missing any new information by not buying their magazine, ever.
The official word from the Warcraft forums about The August 2006 Keylogger: “We would like to warn players of a keylogger scam that is getting posted on the forums. This scam puts fake URLs, or hyperlinks, that once clicked will install a trojan to steal your account name and password. It is important that players take caution when being directed to outside websites and update their security on their computers accordingly. […]” Reply #37, by Landragoran of the Draenor realm, summarized the real details (this is what I heard/read also): “just for everyone who doesn’t know, the site currently being used for distribution of this keylogger is tulang1.com (i’m not going to type out the whole link in fear of someone clicking it and blaming me). basically if you see any link with “tulang” in it, do not click the link. so far i have seen the link in a post claiming that DnT had downed the 4 horsemen, SS’s inside, and 2 posts with the title “‘Trial Version’ question”, wherein someone claims they purchased a computer that came with a trial version of WoW and they want to know if installing it will install the full version but only allow them to play for a short amount of time, or only install part of the game. they then provide a link to the “trial version” that they are talking about.” (Furl archive of thread, page 1 — oh well, Furl’s dead now, but whatcanyado.)
Another article in the New York Times about Le World of Warcraft, linked on WoW’s front page also, doesn’t really cover any new ground. Ya, there’s real people that pretend to slay dragons in a popular game. Lots of real people. We’ve already established that, let’s move on. However, this snippet was mildly humorous: “It is rare for guilds in North America and Europe to get together in real life, partly because of geographic distance and partly because of the social stigma often associated with gaming in the West.” It’s not the stigma, baby, there’s just a lot of crazy fucks in the West. Some of them own guns. And have a camera phone. But no friends. You get the idea here.