Tech -- Culture -- Humour
K-Zero are a company that follow metrics in virtual worlds and last week they released their updated chart showing the number of registrations by platform over time.
Note that gaming worlds like World of Warcraft (with more than ten million active users) aren’t even part of the 300+ million, which just further illustrates the growing depth of the virtual world population. Of course, an even more interesting measurement would be how many of those people remain active.
I have to admit, I hadn’t understood the weapons in Second Life thing. For me, there were so many gaming worlds around where you can engage in combat that I just didn’t see the point of Second Life weapons.
I spent some time tonight being guided around the showroom floor for the Second Life Combat Expo by its creator, Australian Apollo Case. It then started to dawn on me why weapons are such a big deal in Second Life. There’s the obvious testosterone-laden image side of it, but it’s also another creative outlet. The level of design and scripting with some of the weapons is as complex as anything you’ll find in Second Life. As Apollo Case said during the guided tour, “weapons are a very competitive business, so the people in it need to be very good at what they do”. From my time browsing I don’t doubt there’s some real talent here.
The Expo has two workshops and five product demonstration sessions with at least three products per demo. I was interested in whether any real life weapons manufacturers had explored opportunities in Second Life. Case’s repsonse: “not directly, but I have suspicions a lot are playing around the edges and need their hand held coming into SL”. Then he couldn’t resist saying “and we can do that”.
The expo kicks off Sunday morning east coast Australian time (5pm SL time May 17th).
(Disclosure: Apollo Case is an intermittent advertiser on The Metaverse Journal)
The Association of Virtual Worlds has released a free publication for download called ‘The Blue Book: A Consumer Guide to Virtual Worlds’.
You can get it here and it comes in at 41 pages. The bulk of that is a listing of the more than 250 virtual worlds launched or in development. Lists like these already exist, but the relatively new Association is committed to keeping it updated and its format is useful – although a full online version would be a great future addition.
The publication’s release isn’t all about altruism – there’s plenty of links to the Association and virtual news website iViNNiE – the same site that touts itself as the ‘Number One Virtual Worlds News Network’. I think there’d be a site or twenty with greater traffic and equal output and commitment to quality that may disagree with that claim. That said, the guide is a commendable addition to virtual world information out there.
Clever Zebra are holding their vBusiness Expo later this week.
35 speakers are confirmed from organisations such as Gartner, Forrester Research and IBM, with the key focus being “what is the practical purpose of virtual worlds?”.
Registration is free and there’s still places available. We’ll bring you key debates and issues as they occur.
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