The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. The Guardian (UK) – Ten years of virtual worlds: Habbo hits a decade. “Virtual worlds might have been an entertaining diversion for big media a couple of years back, but for a massive swathe of web users these are a powerful and important part of their online lives. Far from being a flash in the pan, sites like Habbo Hotel can claim both longevity and profitability – both often elusive qualities for social web institutions.”

2. The Telegraph (UK) – Club Penguin: parents and the power of the penguins. “Club Penguin is an internet phenomenon like no other – this virtual world, inhabited by millions of four to 14-year-olds, is the most popular children’s website in Britain. But when Canadian Lane Merrifield founded the site in 2005, it wasn’t an attempt to cash in on pester power: “I really did start this for my kids,” he says. “There was nothing online that was fun and safe, and that took advantage of the fact that children really want a social experience.” Just two years later, Disney bought the site, with its games, chat-rooms and virtual pets, for $350 million (£230 million).”

3. VentureBeat (USA) – Playdom buys Metaplace, which forsook virtual worlds for social games. “Fast-growing social game company Playdom has acquired Metaplace, which failed in its attempt to create a site for user-generated virtual worlds. The price of the deal wasn’t disclosed. The move is the latest in a spree of acquisitions by Playdom, which is racing to catch up with social game rivals such as Zynga in one of the hottest markets in games. Last month, Playdom said it raised $33 million to fuel its rapid acquisition pace. The outcome could be a good one for Metaplace, which did a two-step and shifted strategy earlier this year. Metaplace shut down its meta world, which consisted of 30,000 user-created virtual worlds, at the end of December. At the time, founder Raph Koster said the San Diego company was pursuing an exciting opportunity but declined to comment further on it.”

4. Technorati (USA) – Virtual Worlds Continue To Make Real-World Gains. “Opensim, the open source server platform used for hosting virtual worlds has reported growth of over 13% last month. Opensim has two modes. Standalone and grid. Standalone essentially hosts the entire virtual experience on one server which limits the number of users, whereas the grid option spreads the number of simulations across a number of different machines.”

5. Kotaku (USA) – Blizzard’s Naming Policy Is Smaller MMO Publisher’s Marketing Opportunity. “Who benefits from Blizzard’s controversial decision to use players’ real names in forum posts? War Rock publisher GamersFirst hopes it will, issuing an official press release to let gamers know it’s all still anonymous there. Blizzard’s decision to modify its forums in the near future so that players’ real names are displayed instead of their character names has caused quite a stir. While others debate the pros and cons of using your real name on the internet, others smell opportunity. Public relations folks always smell opportunity. GamersFirst is a publisher of quick and dirty online games, many of which you might never have heard of on Kotaku if not for today’s press release. You might have heard of War Rock, but Knight Online World? Sword 2? Our World? Never heard of them, until now.”

6. USA Today (USA) – NASA releases free-to-play online game. “NASA’s latest endeavor to educate people on space exploration has taken them to the world of video games. The space agency has released a new PC video game available through Valve Software’s Steam service called Moonbase Alpha. The game, which features single-player and multiplayer components, places players inside an astronaut suit, as they must rebuild a lunar base crippled by a meteor strike. To complete the objectives leading to the revival of the base, players will use a variety of tools include mobile robotic repair units and a lunar rover.”

7. Image and Data Manager (Australia) – Surveying the collaboration battleground. “In June 2009, we set out to assess the state of play in the collaborative software market in Australia. We wanted to get behind the hype of the “collaboration” buzz-word to discover how organisations are selecting and implementing these tools, and whether they are benefiting from them. We used an online survey to collect our data, and received 42 responses. In the following article, we will present some of our high-level findings. We began by asking our respondents to define the term “collaboration” in the first place. To give you some idea of the responses, we have put the text through Wordle, an online tool that creates ‘word clouds’ from text based on the frequency of words within that text.”

8. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – 3Dchat Launches Today. “New social virtual world 3Dchat officially “beta launches” today. The world is billing itself as an adults-only virtual scene that will feature an identity verification process for users who want to log in using their real name. The virtual world plans to use this process to verify user ages, as well, so it can screen out any users that are under 18. User gender will also be verifiable through the process.”

9. MTV.com (USA) – ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’ Closed Beta Kicks Off, Invites Sent. “Even though Blizzard went back on its controversial decision to require real names in the official “WoW” forums, fans might still be sore. What better way to inflict revenge than to join another MMO? The time may soon be ripe, as “Star Wars: The Old Republic” has just entered a closed-beta phase in which outsiders will be able to test out BioWare’s biggest and most epic timesuck yet.”

10. The Drum (Australia) – This is Web 2.0, and it’s changing our world. “I’m looking at a series of pictures by the photographer Robbie Cooper and they’re making me think about computers, the cyber world and our changing relationship with reality. They’re from a book called Alter Ego – a project in which Cooper travelled the world taking pictures of people alongside their ‘avatars’ – the images they construct for themselves in cyberspace games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. Some of them are funny, like the skinny kid who appears as a superhero or the obese boy whose avatar is a Viking-like warrior – and some of them make you wonder what’s the point, such as the woman whose avatar looks exactly like her – but one pair of images really stays with me. It’s the little boy in an oxygen mask, with stick-like, atrophied arms and hands resting on foam support cushions, next to the image of a menacing figure in full space armour. It tells a story without words, and it’s a story of liberation – a child whose life has been expanded by the ability to travel to new (even if imaginary) places and experience a world outside his room.”