I am a student in Charles Nesson’s CyberOne course at Harvard Law School. Professor Nesson is a strong supporter of poker in all its forms, and is the founder of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, which seeks to broaden poker’s acceptance as a teaching tool. During the course, we fought to gain approval from the MA attorney general for a charity poker tournament, amongst other things.

This semester, we worked on many poker-related issues, as CyberOne is designed for the “born-digital” generation, and is basically an outlet for Nesson’s various interests.

I’ve written a short paper on what we did in the class, and, in keeping with the pro-open content theme of the course, would love people to edit it. I’d especially love it if people could add thoughts as to what next year’s class should work on (poker-related or not).

You can edit directly at:
http://cyberoneproject.pbwiki.com

I’d prefer if you use your own username, but if lazy, you can use:

username: cyberoneeditor
password: cyberone

Thank you so much.

A big draw of MMORPG, or any game (online or not), is the competition. Whether direct, or indirect, competition is what draws us to games. We want to see how we stack up against other people. Player vs. Player (PVP) is a very important part of any online game, whether it’s a first person shooter, a MMORPG, or even just tracking awards via X-Box live. We want to a) get a high score, and b) show off that score to others.

Now, whether or not competition/bragging/smack talk, has any place in an educational setting, can be debated. But if we really want the true draw of games, then we’re going to have to accept the whole package. And competition, sometimes brutal competition, is part of the package.