• Voltaire is confirmed.  You may resume breathing. (And V, if you’re an MMO fan, we would LOVE to have you MC a few contests for us.  Otherwise, *I* might have to do it again this year.)

• We have added a Second Life panel.

• We have added a Guild Wars panel.

• We are working on a Pirates of the Burning Sea panel.

• We have re-added Champions Online. (No Cryptic, but I think you guys will like this…)

We are co-hosting a very special panel with the Space track this year.  It seems that NASA did some work on an MMO in the recent past, and even got to the point where they brought in Timothy Zahn to help with the game design.  Since we just happen to have Les Johnson from NASA and Mr. Zahn at Dragon*Con this year, we thought it might be a neat idea to discuss the MMO that might have been.

Our Snark Cast is officially on hiatus until my lovely and talented co-host returns from E3 and recovers sufficiently to put up with me once again.

To end things, I thought I would post an old pic that was rediscovered in Ol’ Chumbucket’s archives recently.  Behold, a picture of the infamous “Meridian 59 Guy” panel!

(From left to right:  Alihja, Grim, Crumpster, and “The Meridian 59 Guy”)

First off, let me say that Brian “Psychochild” Green is a super nice guy, and I’m glad that he has kept M59 going strong after 14 years (launched in late 1995, went public in 1996) and we wish him nothing but the best.  However, this was an Everquest panel.  The other three people you see at that table are/were EQ players.  The subject was EQ and the focus was on game design elements of EQ.  If Brian started a sentence with words other than “In my game, Meridian 59…” we are unaware of it.  It was one of the more infamous (funny in retrospect) panels that we had ever run.  Despite all of that, he did have some really good insights into game design that have since become part of the mainstream, more or less.  Remember, back when we did this panel 4 years ago, WoW was the new kid on the block and wasn’t the monster MMO that it is today.  We only had 3 WoW panels that year, as opposed to an entire day devoted to WoW this year.

Maybe later this week, I’ll post a “history in pictures” of the MMO track and you can see just how far we have come in 7 years, bearing in mind that we weren’t an official track at Dragon*Con until last year.

That’s what we have in place so far for the MMO track this year.  More importantly, we’re not done yet.

We’ve got a few more commitments to nail down.  Once we submit the final schedule to the powers that be, we’ll post an unofficial schedule here.  Once the schedule is made official, we’ll have links to iCal and XML files so you can put the entire weekend of events in your phone or PDA.  Why?  Because we’re geeks, and we love our toys too.

Stay tuned, folks.  We’re only a couple more months away.

Yes, we have a staff slot open on the Dragon*Con MMO team. If you want to know what volunteers do at Dragon*Con, you can read this. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the MMO team.

Being in the MMO group is a year-round gig. We start planning next year’s convention about 2 weeks after the end of Dragon*Con each year. What will you be doing?

Do you blog? Can you write well? That’s a start. You’re going to be participating in discussions on forums and blogs all over the Internet.

Obviously, you’ll need to be up-to-date on the latest and greatest MMO’s out there. If you “play WoW sometimes”, that’s not going to cut it… Ideally, you will have played 4 or 5 MMO’s and know enough about others to carry on a conversation without sounding like a total noob. We are especially looking for folks who play Lord of the Rings Online, EVE Online, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, or Guild Wars.

Do you know people in the gaming industry? If I told you to get in touch with a Community Relations rep at Flying Lab, would you have the foggiest idea who to call, or what game I’m referring to?

Oh yeah, you’ll also need to work your 20 hours at the convention. None of the year round stuff counts towards your 20 hours of time at the convention itself. (We had one staff member who worked over 60, that’s why we’re looking for more help.) We’re going to need you to be bright-eyed and bushy tailed, even if you get scheduled for a 10:00 AM panel the night after working a party until 4:00 AM. What’s more, you’re going to be dealing with game industry professionals, so you are going to have to be able to act like a professional yourself.

Here are some of the other skills that would come in handy in our group.

• Photoshoppery
• Designing your own graphics
• Familiarity with Youtube and Flickr (You’ll be searching for videos and pictures a lot)
• Public speaking (yeah, you might have to work a crowd…)
• Willing to bring (and use) your own laptop to Dragon*Con

If you’re just looking for a place to work 20 easy hours in order to get a free badge, we’re sorry, but we can’t use you. We do most of our meetings throughout the year in Ventrilo, so you don’t have to be local to the Atlanta area. If you don’t have all of the things I listed above, but are willing to work like hell to learn how to do those things, that’ll work too. It’s a fun job, but it’s definitely a job. If you’re interested in working with us, drop us a line with your name and contact information and we’ll be in touch. Ideally, we’d like to have the last spot filled by the time the staff meeting rolls around in March.

-Grim