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So Scott, help me out. I want to give you money. How do I do it?

He gives you plenty of ways to support him.

Buy a shirt, a mug, a hat, a comic book, or even an original character sketch.

4.P0RN

Click on the link... trust me... :)

Let's not forget my personal favorite, PvP!

And Sluggy Freelance (long, complex, and interesting story arcs, which are hillarious to boot), Penny Arcade (extreme funny), Player vs Player (more fun(ny) with gaming), Sinfest (offensive and funny), and Adventurers (hillarious -- but only if you play console RPG's)! There are so many awesome web comics!

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come on, people! check out PVP, my favorite online comic besides penny-arcade.

I can't believe not one person mentioned PvP. Also, Angst Technology and Dork Tower are worth reading on occasion.
And kudos to the people at NetComics (mentioned a little higher up), found this prog a few weeks ago, very nice...

Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO

LOL, that other online comic looks like it was created by a pre-schooler. ;p~

Penny Aracade has changed a lot over the past 6 months, and I'm not sure if it's for the best. But the last three have been a return to old values so we'll see what happens. Plus, the entire controversy around their sudden unplugging might make them return to the old good stuff. `8r) Now, if the stupid ads built into their comic didn't freak out firewall constantly... `8r/

Oh, and cause I can: Wang!

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Gonzo Granzeau

They are not socializing the same, and the undoubted result is the loss of things like Slashdot. There are good and bad effects here, and I think this shows how the internet can be negative - people using the internet imagine they are socializing when in fact they are not. This makes society a less sociable place, which has a number of bad effects:

List of how self-involved gaming will cause lawlessness, issolation, recession, apocolypse, and bad rashes.

There is a great online comics scene out there, and some of the best are all about modern gaming. Comics like Penny Arcade and Player vs. Player (PvP) are consistantly funny and high quality. What's more, they give a shared experience, and often foster a community.

In a bit of nostalgia-meets-the-Internet, Gamers have resurected one of the shining examples of bad localization. The folks who translated ZeroWing did an awful job, and the results are so bad they are funny. The phrases recently became popular again, and you'll hear cries of "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" across the Internet.

These same gamers shut off the connection for a while to fire up the photo editor and create some great parodies. Many are posted to message boards to be appreciated by fellow fans. Some of them made a dubbed version, others made a techno soundtrack (search for "Laziest Men On Mars, "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"), and others made a hilarious flash movie.

All this creativity was spawned by this later version of gamers. More that ever, I think creative people are meeting and interacting online, and the new games are, at worst, better versions of television, and, at best, a tool for creating a common experience, so that strangers can meet each other.

All this is a bit off-topic, but I think you are worried over nothing. I'm hoping they do a good job with the new TradeWars, which I remember as fondly as other Slashdotters (...in my day, 2400 baud modems, 1 hour just to download 1 meg of porn, etc...)

The site does a pretty good job cutting out the middleman. He started to make money off the site first (enough to support it full time) and then went to paper...

Well, if gaming is culture, it is a very immature one at that.

I consider myself to be a "serious" gamer. I don't play the average 49 minutes per day the Katz mentioned, but I do enjoy playing games (not just electronic) on a fairly regular basis.

So far I have been totally turned off by an sort of "social" gaming such as online Quake or any of the MMORPG's.

When this culture evolves beyond the "You #$!@ cheat!" and "Watch me take my level 2000 character and kill all the new guys." stage give me a call. I'll be waiting. Until then I will continue to play computer games either alone, or with some of my real friends.

Case in point; if you want to see a comic strip that's more intelligent and funnier, IMO, than Penny Arcade, check out Player Vs Player

Even my wife agreed that she'd rather vote for ale and whores. Skull rules!

Discussing the general election here at work over the last few days a lot of us seem to conclude one thing. This race would have been a heck of a lot more interesting had it come down to Bradley/McCain rather than Gore/Bush. Two candidates with divergant views and values and positions as compared to the slightly right centrist and slightly left centrist choice we have right now.

*sigh* Sadly, I wish I could have voted for Skull.

Roleplaying, on the other hand, encourages communication, teamplay, and imagination, while demanding a more robust attention span.

Scott Kurtz of PVP Online wrote a good long rant about this one.

Oh, and they also encourage devil worship. Right. I forgot.

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

Hey check this out: http://www.pvponline.com/

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What exactly did you intend to mod him down for? Expressing a valid opinion? I don't remember that one being on the moderation options. What you are admitting is that you were planning on abusing your moderator points to damage someone whose opinion you disagreed with.

What's this about him having to sellout to keep his people paid? I mean, cry me a river. Just look at Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance fame, and he does employ a staff of people to help him run the site and his business. I don't think he's having a problem getting by on banner ads, t-shirts, and book sales. The 30 or so other web cartoonist I read as part of my day don't seem to be having any trouble supporting theirselves economically. When you get as big as Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance, David Simpson of Ozy and Millie, Bill Holbrook of Kevin and Kell, or Scott Kurtz of PVP, book sales and ad banners seem to be more than enough to keep yourself solvent. That doesn't even count the many popular artists who don't have anything beyond banner ads to sponsor themselves, such as Zach Stroum of Etherlife, Gabriel and Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade, and Maritza Campos of College Roomies from Hell! -- all of whom are either college students or fully employed and do their strips as hobbies.

While I still find User Friendly mostly funny and still read it regularly, I lost a lot of respect for Illiad when I came across UF Media. The image he puts for on the site is one of someone whoring themselves out to corporate sponsorship. Illiad doesn't seem content with just selling t-shirts and books directly. He is actively calling to have his characters used as logos to curry favor with his fans for companies like SuSE. He wants the airline commercial spots, the suction cup animals, and co-branded food that syndicated sell-outs like Garfield have engendered.

I think this strip from Penny Arcade illustrates the opinions that many of us have for his ethics and credibility, in spite of or along with our opinions of his work on its own. It hurts his credibility because corporate sponsorship and co-branding are often the vicious monetary cycle that keeps comics going in newspapers long after they stopped being funny or original and sometimes even long after the creator of the strip has died. It's that we object to.

P.S. Slashdot readers should hopefully get a kick out of this strip. Just a friendly reminder for when talking to people who don't read Slashdot.

The comics page would be cool. Actually, what would be cool is if the regular newspaper comics page carried some of the great internet strips out there. Actually, no wait, then the strips would have to be shrunk down into a little four by one strip. Well, I guess things are pretty cool as they are.

Hopefully, a collection of internet comics would not include the abominable User-friendly, and would get good work like PvP or the delicious Sinfest.

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Check it out here.
PVP

That was indeed a glorious quote. Caught my eye as soon as I read it.

As far as the indie gaming scene, I think the closest equivelent we have nowadays is the ability for players to design scenarios (Civ, AoE, etc...) or build levels (Quake, etc...) Very few unique products come out for a variety of reasons, and as you mentioned, the good ones get snatched up quickly.

Some games of late have been horrific, despite repeated delays. As the author of the original piece notes, programmers are rushed to make it by Christmas, or the next Electronics Expo. That in mind, I -really- hope Blizzard continues to impress us, since Diablo 2 was just pushed back again. At least according to our psychic friends at pvponline.