Virtual Worlds [view: normal]

Continues here.

My deepest thanks to everyone at Linden Lab who made my journey to this point possible. And just as much gratitude to the Residents and readers who've made (and make) it a trip worth taking.

So it suits to suspend my tenure as Hamlet Linden while standing on the cliffs of Shipley, because this is where, more or less, it all began some 30 months ago. I interviewed Catherine Omega in May of 2003, in her mansion along the Shipley shore below, and though I'd been writing New World Notes for a couple weeks by then, it's...

Now it can be told: once New World Notes is no longer sponsored or affiliated with Linden Lab starting March 1st, it will partner with John Battelle's Federated Media Publishing, a vast and mighty new blog network anchored by Boing Boing. It's a new enterprise from the co-founder of Wired and the Industry Standard, and I'm deeply honored to be the little brother in FM's growing roster, reporting...

Fast on the heels of Cory Linden's recent thoughts on using OpenGL to copy SL objects, Mr. Zamboni sends word of an imminent in-world demo of that very technology-- from OpenGL, to an application called OGLE, to a 3D printer, to a once-virtual object you can hold in your hands.

Details on tomorrow's event-- and a startling visual demo-- here....

A unique solution to the high cost of higher education...

For awhile there, he could put himself through college by floating the tuition with his credit card, and with his job selling refrigerators and such at a department store chain. But when one thing led to another (as they're often apt to do), Lordfly Digeridoo found hims...

All the drama, patter, and giggles of SL, now portable for your morning commute: Johnny Ming's Secondcast, podcasting hour-long shows on a myriad of Second Life subjects. The first episode is a Skype-powered rountable between Ming, the SL Herald's Walker Spaight, famed architect Lordfly Digeridoo, fashion empress Aimee Weber, and Snapzilla founder Cristiano Midnight, winging it on assorted topic...

There's been SL comic strips, SL magazines, and SL advertisements that use graphic novel stylings, but unless I didn't get the memo (and that's always possible), there hasn't yet been much in the way of actual graphic novels using Second Life as an illustration platform.

Enter Sidra Stern's "Reavinator", a witt...

In the first part of "Unimpeachable Offense", I mentioned the Gorean subculture of Second Life in passing, and only because one of the Residents I chose at random to interview happened to be a "slave" within the group. I haven't written about them in detail (yet), but as luck would have it, "humdog" has written a vivid confessional of her time among SL's Goreans for the Second Life Herald:

... ...

The nice thing about running a blog for so long is you'll suddenly see an old entry re-discovered to enjoy another surge of readership, then surge again from the first re-discovery, and so on-- sort of like Chris Anderson's "long tail" model applied to blogging. That phenomena happened to me last week, when a Wired.com article on SL included a link to a 10 month old NWN entr...

Walker Spaight just put up his interview with me for the Second Life Herald here, a conversation on my recent decision to take NWN indy, while also touching on issues of journalistic independence and financial backing, bloggers and virtual words, and more. Thanks to Bedpan Unknown, Huns Valen, and an identified Japanese dancing box robot for the mid-interview entertainment....

Being the final word (hopefully) on a curious (if butt-ugly) experiment that tested the boundaries of community values-- and the values of a community.

Just a few weeks ago, it seemed to be the most important thing in the world, but if I don't post something about it now, it'll probably be forgotten forever. So here goes:

...

Like so many other online worlds and computer games, SL's 3D graphics are rendered via OpenGL. A great toolkit from a developer's perspective, but in recent times, also a growing concern to the companies-- and in Second Life's case, many of the subscribers-- with livelihoods that depend on controlling the IP rights over their graphic creations. What happens to the concept of ownership in Second ...

... this one from the editor of The Second Life Herald, writing for The Escapist: The romance of Diamond Hope and Unmitigated Gall (!).

Scrolling back to find stories of romance for February 14th, here's a few personal favorites from last year: the courtship of Snow Hare and Phil Murdock, and the partnership of Jade Lily and Torley Torgeson, transcending gender and now even Linden Lab policy. Scrolling back two years, another favorite of mine is the Atlantic-spanning duet of Eddie Escher and Fallingwater Cell...

I'm a fan of the SL blog from Ordinal Malaprop, not because I know anything about scripting in Linden Script Language (her main specialty), but because she writes it in the voice of her Second Life persona-- sort of a Victorian-era mathematrix, say Ada Lovelace as depicted in The Difference Engine, who's somehow stumbled forward in time into an online world. Miss Malaprop's blog, appropriately en...

On Monday I am defending my dissertation via video conference to New Zealand, a semi-public review of a five year effort. I even got written up in a tome on Internet ethics, after being interviewed on my made up on the fly research methods. Awesome. But I am a little cross about something. The examiners have an opportunity to send me questions that arose for them while reading my dissertation. ...

(this is posted on behalf of Ashley Funkhouser - greglas)

Dear Terra Nova readers,

I am an undergraduate researcher at Trinity University who is part of the Worldplay Research Initiative. Our collaborative research project explores transnational communication in virtual worlds. This project is connected to a course taught by former Terra Nova contributor Aaron Delwiche.

We are seeking input from ...

I have been discussing violins with my neighbor, violinist Alex Kerr (who is both classy and world-class).

Once made, a violin matures over the course of hundreds of years. It comes to produce sounds of unparalleled high quality: voice, sweetness, juice, subtlety. When played by an expert, the best violins produce experiences that approach a kind of transcendence for the player. For an eloquent...

On many occasions, I've had to stress to people that Facebook really is not a virtual world. Even Farmville is just barely in the virtual world category for me. Still, the latest uproar over new interface changes reminds me a lot of the uproar over, well, just about every VW patch. It seems to me we're dealing with similar, though not identical, concerns about social contracts and investment-ba...

Sort of apropos of Ted's post, take a look at this short essay in The Guardian: "To come out as a gamer is still to risk looking a social n00b: Even with sympathetic friends, we still speak low when we speak games."

This certainly is not true everywhere, and certainly is not true among communities of gamers. We don't tend to speak low on this blog about games, and there are plenty of gaming blogs ...

Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read have written the best book to date on games and work. Business people still seem hung up on the virtualization of the office when in fact WoW increases group productivity not because it is virtual but because it is a game. Reeves and Read try to right the ship. They describe practical ways for using game design to make work better: Not just for the bosses, but for...

In Ren's thread on virtual world history, Mike made the following comment:

But let's put it in perspective. In three months the number one social game on Facebook has gone from zero to over 50 million players. Not registrations, but actual unique monthly players (about 20 million daily uniques).

So, yesterday, USA Today noted the same. Zynga's Farmville is at 56M:

Gaming is the most po...

By way of background: about a year ago, W&L held a symposium entitled Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online. Lots of TerraNovans were there. The panelists gave some really great papers, which we turned into an issue of the Washington & Lee Law Review (that issue goes to press this month). And that's a good thing, because the papers were ready when Congress asked the FTC...

In the beginning there was mud.

We all came from mud.

Well before MUD 1 there was Spacewar!, the Brown Box and Turing - who was begat by Lovelace and Babbage, oh and Leibniz. Ye get the picture.

But let’s start with mud.

While events may be linear, history is not – fair enough, and I don’t know the first version of the history of virtual worlds. I was not really there.

But I caught the s...

The French government has proposed a new law regarding gambling. The idea is that sports have "betting rights" that they can sell. Unless they sell or otherwise release those rights, you can't bet on that sport.

Does this have potential implications for virtual worlds?

Very few sports are built around the concept of gambling. Horse racing is perhaps the most noteworthy, as it exists primarily to of...