Ahem*.
You can do lots of things with Google. One of those things that I’ve been using for a while now is Google Alerts. It’s a service that sends you an email when google comes across a certain search phrase. I’ve had it send me stuff on a variety of search phrases over the years, but there are only two things that it sends me links for now: “Lincoln Lutheran” and “Sie Ming”. The former is pretty obvious. The latter is the middle name of Tony Sie Ming Yuen with whom some of us went to High School. Tony moved back to Hong Kong our Junior(?) year and has since fallen off the face of the earth. But, while he was still on it, I borrowed his middle name to use on those video games into which one has to enter a name. Now it’s over twenty years later and I still haven’t returned Tony’s name.
While I was working for Oetting’s Detasseling (a job that really only kept people busy for about 3 months of the year), I played the game Ultima Online. I wastedspent a huge amount of time on this game. This was one of the first “main stream” games that you played online with other people, so it was much more interesting than a normal computer game. One of the subgames that went along with it was suggesting ways to improve the game (and that type of game). There were enough people interested in making and reading these suggestions that people spent some time putting them together.
About a week ago google sent me an email that said it found “Sie Ming” in the index of the book Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle. This is the guy who wrote the first “virtual world” game. Well, I had to buy the book. It came today. I’m proud to report that I have a footnote (well, “Sie Ming” really, but lets not be picky). And, not to brag, it’s actually two footnotes, two entries in the index and a paragraph. Really, calling it a paragraph is not doing it justice. It’s more or less most of a page.
But wait, it gets better, the book is a required text for Telecommunications T366: Multiplayer Game Design at Indiana University which, incidentally, is not where the author of the text teaches. I have now been footnoted in a scholarly text. My life is complete. Oh, you can read the articles that he mentions here and here (and the paragraph here)
*I was worried that someone might think I was terribly serious about this and Lauren said, “No one can think you’re being snooty if you start off with ‘Ahem’.”