Tickets will go on sale later this year for Sony Online Entertainment’s annual fan gathering, held this year at Bally’s Las Vegas from August 5 through August 8. If you’ve never been to one of the SOE extravaganzas, be prepared for cosplay of varying degrees of skill, special announcements and sneak peeks at upcoming SOE titles, tournaments, trivia, some subtle LARPing, and a huge influx of children, considering this year those plucky Free Realms fans might be making the trip.

Keep track of all the Fan Faire related news by visiting www.soefanfaire.com, your home for all things fannish and fairey on the internet.

Plaintiff Alexander Stern sued Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment America and Sony Online Entertainment in federal court for the Central District of California, alleging that “his visual processing impairments prevent him from fully enjoying the video games manufactured by Sony, some of which are played on gaming systems with internet connections through which players in different locations can communicate and play with or against one another.”

The court, in granting Sony’s motion to dismiss on Feb. 8, refused to go so far as to say any game Sony currently makes constitutes a public accommodation. A public accommodation doesn’t need to be publicly owned -very loosely speaking it can be a grocery store, hotel or office building whose use is generally available to the public. In a broad sense, we were talking about applying that standard to a virtual environment.

So as you can imagine, allowing the suit to proceed on this finding would have wide ramifications for games publishers. Instead, the court found Sony “is not a place of public accommodation,” and therefore is not in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Disabled Gamer’s Suit Against Sony Tossed [Game Politics]

MMO players are as charitable as they are in-game exclusive crazy, as SOE proved over the weekend. From January 15th to the 18th, players of EverQuest, EverQuest II,and Free Realms were invited to purchase special items from the games’ in-game Marketplaces, with the company donating $US10 for every item sold to the American Red Cross’ aid efforts in Haiti. Players could choose from the Haiti Relief Plush Bear in EQ, the Protectors of the Faydark Crate in EQII, or Zando, the spiked T-Rex in family-friendly Free Realms. Items were sold for 500 Station Cash apiece, which equals around $US5 in real money.

“In just three days we were able to reach our goal of $US25,000 and it’s all because of the generosity of our players,” said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment. “They really stepped up for a good cause and we’re proud to lend support to the estimated three million Haitians affected by the recent earthquakes.”

This is Sony Online Entertainment’s second charity project of 2010, with its month-long Child’s Play charity drive generating $US26,900. T Haiti drive generating nearly that in only three days, it says something about both the dire situation in the island nation, and SOE fans’ love of in-game swag. We’ll go ahead and assume it was mainly the former.

EverQuest Underfoot, available today at EverQuest.com for $US39.99, substantially adds to Norrathian real estate by going deeper underground than ever before. Players can expect to encounter plenty of new creatures as they venture forth, hunting for tradeskill recipes so they can make the powerful new items afforded by the addition of Master Tradeskilling.

Other new additions include an expanded target window, which lets players assign group members to specific roles for ease of targeting, and an achievement system, much like the one already implemented in World of Warcraft.

“Celebrating a decade of EverQuest throughout this year has reinvigorated our community and development team alike, and that passion is clearly on display with the latest expansion,” said Thom Terrazas, Producer, Sony Online Entertainment. “Underfoot presents a world unlike anything you’ve experienced in Norrath, providing a deep and fun experience for all our players.”

I’ve not played EverQuest for years, but there are times I miss my bard something terrible. Then I remember this, and the melancholy fades.

The nature of Alexander Stern’s visual impairment isn’t clear from the report, whether that is total blindness or partial blindness, or some other form of sight disability. But his suit, filed in federal court in California, claims that Sony has ignored repeated requests to modify its games – the suit seems to focus on SOE’s MMOs – and that the realms Sony maintains here are essentially public accommodations as defined by the ADA.

Stern repeatedly asked Sony for the addition of visual cues to point out destinations for gamers with “disability impaired visual processing.” The suit mentions World of Warcraft and another game that, through the allowance of third-party modifications or other features, make their games more accessible to the visually impaired.

There’s also a claim that by not making accommodations for the visually impaired, Sony essentially deprives Stern and others of fair participation in selling off in-game items over SOE’s official auction site.

Sony told GameSpot it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

Whatever the merits of the suit, and I’m sure our team of lawyers will robustly discuss them in the comments below, the action is intriguing to me in that it seems to depend on finding a virtual environment is a public accommodation. I can’t even begin to argue coherently that it is or isn’t or should or should not be. A judge could find that an MMO is a public accommodation and Stern could still lose, but such a ruling could have larger ramifications that outlive this case, for more than just Sony.

Visually Impaired Gamer Sues Sony Online [GameSpot, thanks Roberto E.]

First of all, thank you all for the kind words and well-wishes directed towards Emily and I. As I said in the article, I’ve made reference to my time in EverQuest on Kotaku in the past, but being with Emily after eight years and realizing just how big an impact the game had on my life was the impetus for the story.

In talking to my friends, family, and former employers over the course of writing the article I gained a much deeper understanding of how I affected the people around me, doing something I felt didn’t matter to anyone but me. It’s been a very sobering experience.

Many of you have written to say that you relate to my experience, and in a way it’s good to know that I’m not the only one. Of course I knew I was not the only one, but to hear from people who I feel I have a connection to through Kotaku brings it to a whole new level.

Some of you wrote asking for advice on how to overcome your own personal game addiction. I’d say that by even asking for advice, you’ve already taken your first step. I know the whole “admitting you have a problem” line seems old and tired, but it still rings true. During the period I describe, I never once felt that I was doing something wrong. It was my body, my time, and my money, or lack thereof, which I realise now was an extremely selfish way to look at things.

By just asking the question you’re on your way. All I can suggest is that you get friends and family actively involved in getting you away from the computer, the console, or your handheld. Go out of town. Stay at someone else’s house.

Mind you, I am not a doctor, or any kind of qualified therapist. Your best bet is to get on Google and do a search. Unless you are addicted to Google. In that case, just ask random people in the street.

Many of you were curious if I still played MMO games, and I do. I’ve just developed a different sort of personal philosophy towards them in the past few years. I’ve forced myself to see them as a diversion. I’ve convinced myself that the next level isn’t going to go away if I don’t play for a week. I used to worry about friends surpassing me; now I tell myself we’re all going to end up at the level cap eventually.

I guess what I really wanted to do in this post was to let you all know that I received your emails, and I’ve read them as well. If I don’t respond personally, it’s just because I am incredibly busy playing video games for work. If it helps at all, I’d rather be reading a book.

Oh, and Emily says thank you as well. She was completely tickled by the overwhelming response, which instilled in her a new level of respect for my little writing thing. We’ve decided that if we ever break up, my next and all subsequent girlfriends will have to assume the name Emily, so the story can continue, shades of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

During the course of my tenure at Kotaku I’ve referenced my days in EverQuest on many occasions, but I’ve never elaborated on what went down back then. Recent events in my life have brought that period to the fore, and I’ve decided to share my experience with our readers.

In November of 2000, my life was going well. I had a lovely girlfriend, a serviceable vehicle, and a job that paid more than enough for me to survive while catering to my increasingly expensive video game habit. Within four months, it would all be gone.

At the time I was sharing an apartment with a friend of mine named Dustin. Dustin was a great guy, but he spent his entire downtime sitting in front of his computer, playing a video game called EverQuest. I had encountered the game before, having participated in the beta for Sony Online Entertainment’s massively popular multiplayer game, but once the game went live I lost interest. I just couldn’t see myself paying a monthly fee just to play a computer game. Oh, how things have changed.

Having nothing much else to do at the time, I’d sit and watch Dustin play. He’d explain what his Monk character was doing in the game. I was a spectator as he progressed, learning to feign death, earning new weapons, and taking on greater challenges as he got closer and closer to the level cap.

So when I wasn’t spending time with my girlfriend, Emily, I would watch Dustin play. Or I would tool around on various text-based MUSHes and MOOs online, role-playing with people all over the world. I’d been into science fiction, fantasy, and comic books since I was very young, so slipping into an imaginary world came easy to me. Perhaps a little too easy.

Towards the end of 2000, Emily and I broke up. The reasoning behind this is far too stupid to delve into… let’s just say we were both young and a bit foolish.

I became depressed, and Dustin had just the thing to cheer me up.

The Scars of Velious expansion for EverQuest came out in December of 2000. My roommate, perhaps tired of my moping over my lost love, picked up a copy of the game for me as a Christmas present. I installed it, created a half-elven Bard, and soon our apartment had two guys in the living room at all hours of the day, faces bathed in the glow of monitors.

Within a week, the game that hadn’t affected me at all nearly two years previously had become an important part of my life. Soon, it would become my life.

If I wasn’t asleep or at work, I was playing EverQuest. The former was becoming a rarity. I would go into work, and I would still hear the sounds of EverQuest orcs in my head. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was speeding through the Greater Faydark zone, killing pixies and turning in quest items.

In January of 2001, a man with a tow truck came to my place of employment and took my car away. I had fallen behind on payments without realising it, and Nissan had decided they wanted my Sentra back. My first thought as I watched the tow truck drive away was how many hours walking to and from work would take from my EverQuest time.

I worked at a company called FranchiseOpportunities.com, maintaining and creating websites, but increasingly my time there was spent either communicating with my EverQuest friends or browsing websites for tips on the best equipment and techniques for grinding experience points and gold. It was impossible for my co-workers not to notice. In February of 2001, Joseph Lunsford, the owner of the company, called me into his office.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” Lunsford told me this month when I went to see him and talk to him about the person I used to be. “You were was amazingly bright. I was convinced there wasn’t anything you couldn’t do. You showed so much promise, but your interest in work just fell off. Projects started taking longer to get done, and it was obvious your head wasn’t in it. You left me no choice.”

I was in tears back then. I felt unbelievably pathetic. I had no car. I had no job. Joe had handed me my last paycheck and about $US120 he had in his wallet, and sent me on my way. I took a taxi home, broke the news to my roommates (we had moved into a three-bedroom to split the bills three ways), went into my bedroom, started up EverQuest, and forgot about everything.

According to Dr. Hilarie Cash, the executive director of the reSTART internet and gaming addition recovery program and co-author of the book “Video Games & Your Kids: How Parents Stay in Control,” retreating inside a video game to avoid real world problems is a common cause of “video game addiction.”

“I would definitely call it video game addiction, which is a subset of internet addiction. Many of the things [you] described to me are typical of a video game addict, particularly the way that real life shrinks away for the addict, living more and more in the virtual world.”

And that’s exactly what I was doing. I had been a confident and outgoing young man who enjoyed hanging out with my friends, spending hours chatting about absolutely nothing while smoking cigarettes and drinking countless cups of Waffle House Coffee. Now my social dealings involved helping online friends camp a rare monster spawn, or discussing class balance on my guild’s chat channel.

Going outside was only necessary when I ran out of smokes or beverages. I lived off $.30 pot pies from Wal-Mart and cheap bags of rice. I was taking care of my most essential needs, but only barely. Often times I would fall asleep in my chair in front of my computer with EverQuest running, waking up hours later to start the cycle all over again.

Even now my memories of the period are a blur of Oasis runs, power leveling, and experience grinding. My mother remembers those days much more vividly.

“Mike was unavailable for most of that period,” she recalled recently. “There was no way to contact him, except to do a ‘drive by’ preferably with a bag of groceries in the back seat. I remember trying to talk to him. Such a fine mind and wild sense of humour; all covered up and hidden deep inside again. He listened half-heartedly and was easy to anger. He was going down fast, even to the point of telling how it really was and not just what you wanted to hear.”

Hearing her talk about it now, I can barely believe it had gotten so bad, but I tend to hold on to positive memories more than the negative ones. Like the day Emily came back.

It was three months after I was fired that Emily decided to give us another chance. I wasn’t the same man she had been with before. I was relatively skinny, and my hair had grown ridiculously long. As we lay curled up in bed one evening she commented on how my belly had disappeared, which tickled me to no end. It seems perverse to me now. It wasn’t as if I had been dieting or exercising; I was taking pride in my own malnourishment.

My existence slowly started gaining some semblance of a real life again. Emily went out one afternoon and brought me a stack of job applications, which motivated me to go out, get my hair cut, and go to my first job interview at a Fast Signs down the street. Looking slightly more human and feeling more alive than I had in months, I got the job on the spot. It was amazing how fast things had turned around. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last.

In an odd twist, my EverQuest friends were now worried about me.

I hadn’t been around, and they missed my sense of humour and my enthusiasm. My ability to twist four Bard songs at a time didn’t hurt either. These people needed me. I was important to them, and I couldn’t let them down. Looking back, I can’t believe I missed the irony there.

So I started playing EverQuest again. At first it was only on the nights that Emily couldn’t make it over, but soon I was back to my regular play schedule – every waking hour. I was regularly late to work, and called in sick at least once every two weeks so I could stay home and play.

Then came that fateful night.

The woman I had once told was the love of my life was sitting undressed in my bed not a foot away from my computer desk, begging me to join her, and I kept putting it off. I was so close to level 40 I could taste it. I was in the Dreadlands, kiting large enemies back and forth, killing them slowly with my Bard songs. I still remember the urgency I felt, along with the annoyance that this woman was trying to keep me from reaching my goal. Couldn’t she understand how important this was to me?

She had certainly tried.

“Back then I just figured I was dating a gamer, and that’s how it was going to be,” she said to me recently. “I hadn’t dated many guys at that point, and my older brother was the same way. He worked, came home, and played video games.”

Eight years later it became obvious that my lack of attention toward her weighed far more heavily than either of us had suspected.

One morning in late September of 2001, I called my job and quit. Whatever justification I had for this at the time doesn’t matter. The reason I quit was because I was tired of making excuses for being late, and I just wanted to play EverQuest.

Emily and I had grown further apart. During my time at Fast Signs I purchased an old car from my sister, only to discover I couldn’t get insurance for it due to my driver’s licence being suspended over a previous ticket, ironically issued for driving without insurance. Rather than actively working to fix the problem, I slipped deeper into depression. I would let Emily take the car, driving it with a “TAG APPLIED FOR” plate on the back, but wouldn’t go anywhere with her for fear of being pulled over and sent to jail. Instead, I would stay home and play EverQuest.

The last time I would see her — until 2009 —was two days after her birthday in early October. I had let her take the car to her party, but refused to go with her. She reacted by keeping my car for two days without contacting me. I responded by telling her to return the car and the keys and get out of my life. She did just that.

And I kept playing.

December rolled around again, one year after I had taken my first steps into EverQuest’s world of Norrath, and I had completely changed. I went from being a strong independent person to a gaunt, unshaven, unshowered recluse, completely withdrawn from the outside world.

My roommate, once one of my greatest friends, was threatening to throw me out of the apartment if I didn’t find a job. But I had absolutely no motivation. The only time I left my dwelling was to scavenge for food at my parents’ house, or to grab a quick shower, as our apartment’s hot water had been turned off.

I remember feeling like a ghost, drifting through the waking world unnoticed. Luckily for me, my mother was looking out for me as best she could.

“He didn’t look like Mike anymore,” she remembers now. “He was scary and pitiful. I was afraid he was suicidal or dying of some mysterious disease. It broke my heart and I knew that coming home and taking the pressure off would be the best medicine for him.”

And so on January 1st, 2002, at the age of 28, I moved back in with my parents. It wasn’t an instant cure for my addiction – as soon as I convinced them to let me order DSL I was back online again – but something had changed. I started spending more time hanging out with my parents and less time sitting in my computer chair staring at little computer people doing little computer things. I had responsibilities. I had a support system. I had a stable platform to launch myself from instead of the quicksand I felt I had been standing in before.

Within two months I had found myself a job at a local gas station. Later that year I started speaking with Joe Lunsford again, proving myself through contract work until he decided to hire me on again in 2003. So I once again had a job, a girlfriend, and eventually my own apartment, sans roommates. That’s where I was in 2006, when Brian Crecente contacted me and asked me if I wanted to write for Kotaku. That’s where I am now.

It would be easy for me to pin my problems on EverQuest, and society in general would accept it without question. I could say I fell prey to an addictive video game that nearly ruined my life, but I would know that wasn’t the case.

I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place. It was my responsibility to control how much I played, and the SOE spokesperson I contacted regarding my story agrees.

“EverQuest is a game,” the Sony Online rep told me. “The majority of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers play the game in moderation enjoying the gameplay as well as the community interaction the game provides. As with any form of entertainment, it is the responsibility of each individual player to monitor his or her own playing habits and prioritize his or her time as necessary. It is not our place to monitor or limit how individuals spend their free time.”

Dr. Hilarie Cash agrees as well, though she suspects that game developers are actively engaged in trying to make their games more addictive.

“Some blame can be laid at the feet of developers, making a conscious effort to make their games more addictive. It’s analogous to the tobacco industry, trying to make tobacco more addictive. It works to their benefit. That having been said, it’s up to the individual to take responsibility for how they play.”

During our conversation, Dr. Cash also likened gaming to gambling. Some people can walk into a casino, lose $US5, and call it quits. You have to know your own limits, and be conscious enough of them to know when you are in danger of going too far.

My own solution to my potential for MMO addiction is rather simple. I’ve managed to turn a habit that once interrupted my work into something I actively have to do for work. It’s no longer escapism if I am doing my job. Perhaps I am fooling myself, but if I am going to be that gullible I might as well take advantage.

As for Emily, she’s sitting behind me as I type this, playing Peggle. I’d ask her to come to bed, but I know how important getting to that next level can be.

To me, MMO writing seems tough. There’s just so much text to take into account like menu text, quest text and dialogue trees (to say nothing of scripting actual cinema scenes and race- or class-specific flavour text). Keeping the tone and pace of a game consistent across all of that and actually crafting a basis for a story or an instance sounds especially daunting. So no wonder both Seamster and Danuser had tons of examples of writing gone wrong in MMOs.

Here’s a good bit:

Writers should “get over themselves”, [Danuser] stated plainly. Instead of trying to saddle any single player with an epic destiny, the gameworld itself should provide a backdrop for collaborative heroism. Framing the narrative to promote teamwork, and creating narrative events that challenge the playerbase as a whole, allows for the epic tales writers crave.

Check it out, if you’ve got the time or possibly the aspiration to become an MMO writer.

GDC Austin: Writing for MMOs: You’re Doing it Wrong [Gamasutra]

More than just an art book, this large, hard-bound special edition tome is filled from cover-to-cover with the history of the EverQuest franchise, from the original release to the coming of EverQuest 2. You’ll find developer interviews, box art, concept art, and developer commentary that will have a lapsed player itching to get back into the fray.

Or at least it had this lapsed player itching. SOE delivered a copy of the book to me late last week, and I’ve had a hard time putting it down. It’s been years since I traveled Norrath, but half a decade of my life is contained in those pages, and the reminiscing is fine.

You can purchase the book for $US34.99 directly from SOE by clicking the link I cleverly hid in this sentence.

Pure West’s Second Skin looks the lives of gamers and virtual world residents as they live out their lives playing World of Warcraft, Everquest, and of course, Second Life. It touches on the topics of addiction, online romance, and the community feeling and sense of camaraderie that can be fostered by a group of people essentially only connected to each other through the internet.

Since first reading about the project back in 2006, I’ve pretty much lived through most of this documentary, having put my Everquest addiction behind me well before that. Back then I thought it would be interesting to watch in order to see how those people live. Now I’m going to pick it up to see if I spot anyone I know.

Along with the DVD release on August 25th, Second Skin will also see a limited theatrical run, so check your local papers, just in case. Check out a sneak peek at the first five minutes of Second Skin below.