Somebody comes along and writes something clever and you wish you've written it. That's what Lore Sjöberg has just done with his summary of the 7 Basic Blogpost types over at Wired.

I wanted to summarize them all, but that would be stealing too much of the meat from the thing. Someone should maintain a blog with exactly these categories.

If I had to nitpick: "Animals are cute!" should instead be part of a general "Meme" category instead of shoving those under the holy cult of ego number 7.

What's scary is that I can't read videogame blogs today without thinking it's all just "Something I like, only different!". They're reminding me of the opening scenes of Robert Altman's The Player where movies are pitched as "it's like such-and-such, only a comedy starring Bruce Willis". I was thinking exactly that when I figuratively ran over unfortunate Keen (not so unfortunate, he's doing alright *grin*) with the phrase "armchair designer".

I'm as much a culprit of these formulas creeping in to my own blog.

File the whole thing under "People are dumb!".

This old story never seems to stop. Wired has revived Corrupted Blood once more, with a new spin from even more researchers, this time with a Terrorism angle. My original post was written while the unusual event was in progress, then I followed up again about it last year as it bounced back into the news.

I'm not sure if people ever fully understand this a few years later, but the Corrupted Blood plague that hit WoW servers in 2005 was an unscripted, unplanned accidental event that took on a life of its own. It was only meant to be a short debuff as part of an encounter in the Zul'Gurub instance, but it spread out across to the most populated areas of the game and lasted for days, killing unsuspecting players in its path.

I wonder how much information any new researchers have to go on? Although most players at the time experienced it over the course of a few days, few witnessed the first accidental outbreaks which occurred in the wee hours of the night. Of course, there were many intentional recurrences that followed.

It really was the most interesting thing that has ever happened within WoW. Or any MMO for that matter.