Ok, it has officially been a month between posts. Little has been done by way of Guild Wars this month as I have been working on my research paper and finishing up this semester. These are nearly complete, so hopefully I’ll be able to unwind a bit and play on GW some more.

A couple of Belzan-related things for you to gnaw on. I am revamping Chronicles a bit. Given my available time versus the scope of my writing, this will never be finished. I’m not sure how I’m going to change it yet, but I won’t change anything that has already been written. I may chunk it down into different “chronicles”. I’ll keep you posted.

Also, I’ve been designing a staff that will represent Belzan (all the bosses have one, why can’t I?) More on that when I get a bit of time to write it up.

I’m hoping my life will be a bit less stressful soon and can get back to doing some fun things. I have been accepted into a doctoral program for clinical psychology (should have my masters in June) so I intend to be pretty busy for the next few years.

I added a link to Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project. This is a series of studies measuring behavior in and out of online communities. In particular, Nick coined the term “Proteus Effect” which accounts for the phenomenon whereby “users in online environments may conform to the expectations and stereotypes of the identity of their avatars… they conform to the behavior that they believe others would expect them to have.” (Yee, 2007)

I’ve found his research fascinating and I will be doing similar research of my own, beginning by assessing real world self-perception and its effect on Avatar creation.

Nick’s project can be found by following the link below.