talking games

Tuesday, August 31, 2004, at 12:31PM

By Eric Richardson

I'm sitting in my MMORPG class right now. I don't really talk a lot about video games. Who does, really, outside of the people who make them? I mean you say, "Yeah, it's cool." and that's about the end of it.

I mentioned before that we're supposed to be playing Star Wars Galaxies, but that I don't have a machine that could play it. Well, turns out Annenberg really doesn't either at the moment. This is thanks to a number of things, large among them the fact that all Annenberg machines are remotely managed by ISD. ISD rolls out software to all machines at once, and local access is locked down pretty much completely. So even if ISD kicked the game out to machines, when run the game wouldn't even have the appropriate rights to install the patches it likes to download every week. I also doubt these machines have capable video cards, but that issue's farther down the road.

Our professor brought a machine from his office into the classroom today to show the character creation, only to find his network card getting disabled. ISD says his machine has a virus, even though the approved ISD virus protection software is indeed running. It's good to see that professors struggle with the same institutional issues you hear about students having all the time.