About

Hi! I’m Bryant Durrell; I’m a techie who’s been fortunate enough to spend quite a few years managing operations groups in the online gaming industry. Places I’ve worked at include Vivox, who provide really good integrated voice chat solutions; before that I had the distinct pleasure of running the Technical Operations group at Turbine, Inc., makers of Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Not to mention Asheron’s Call, which is still pretty awesome in a dated graphics kind of a way. When people ask me what I’m proud of in my career, I talk about the LOTRO launch, because it was really, really smooth.

Before I hopped into gaming, I ran various aspects of operations at AltaVista. Before that I worked at the usual random conglomeration of Silicon Valley companies. Sun was a neat place to work. So was Netcom, actually, although man it was disorganized.

I am also a gamer. I played a lot of World of Warcraft for a long time, because it runs on my Mac and it’s a really good game. I am currently spending an inordinate amount of time on my old-school pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons game, because that’s where my roots are and it chews up less time than raiding. I blog about pen and paper gaming here, with a bunch of my friends.

I live with three cats and my girlfriend. Two out of the three cats adore me.

This is my blog about operating MMORPGs. My rationale is here. I do not speak for anyone but myself, and opinions found here are solely mine and do not represent those of my employer.