Jessica Mulligan Bites the Hand at Skotos

BERKELEY, CA, May 25, 2001 — For four years Jessica Mulligan has written "Biting the Hand", one of the most insightful and controversial columns available about online gaming. After a long run at Happy Puppy, the column has now been picked up for publication by Skotos Tech.

Jessica Mulligan originally created the column to help shed light on the online gaming industry. When she began, she says, "The hype and disinformation surrounding online games was as thick as pea soup. An industry insider needed to break through the hype and tell it like it really was, no holds barred." Biting the Hand has.

Jessica has never wavered from her staunch position. She says, "I want Biting the Hand to take the industry as a whole to task for its bone-headed mistakes and its BS." Among other topics, Biting the Hand has talked about how online games aren't ready for the mass market; about how current subscription rates are too low; and about how big companies keep making the same mistakes with online games over and over. But, Biting the Hand offers more than that. It's also the home to critical information on how online games are designed, built, and managed afterward. "Whether that has had any good effect on the industry," Jessica says, "is for the players to decide."

No matter what the effect, Biting the Hand has proven popular in its incarnations to date. It has attracted thousands of regular viewers and is required reading at a number of game publishers. "I've received literally thousands of emails," Jessica says, "Not only from game players and game developers, but also from 'average joes' and luminaries in other fields."

The heart of Biting the Hand's success is Jessica's unique knowledge of the online industry. She's worked on over fifty online games including the original NeverWinter Nights on AOL, Warcraft II Online for Engage, and Ultima Online. Currently she is employed by MM3D, Inc., a developer of massively-multiplayer games whose most recent project has been an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

"We're very happy to be Biting the Hand's new home," says Shannon Appelcline, Director of Operations at Skotos Tech. "We're working on becoming a community not just for players of online games, but for their designers too. Jessica's column is the perfect fit." Biting the Hand will join a set of regular columns at Skotos Tech which all discuss online game design, including "Building Stories, Telling Games", "MetaStatic", and "Trials, Tribulations & Trivialities".

Biting the Hand is published biweekly and can be found at http://www.skotos.net/articles/bth.html.