links for 2009-06-15

"On a recent rainy evening in Brooklyn, I was at a friend’s house playing (a bit sheepishly, given my incipient middle age) Call of Duty: World at War. Scrolling through the game’s menus, I noticed a screen for Xbox Live, which allows you to play against remote users via broadband. The number of Call of Duty players online at that moment? More than 66,000.

Walking home, I ruminated on the number. Sixty-six thousand is the population of a small city — Muncie, Ind., for one. Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?"