1. The Hindu (India) – Brave new worlds beckon. “Everyone has indulged in a little escapism sometime in their lives. The need for an outlet from the relentless glare of reality is felt by many and the possibility of an alternate lifestyle hidden from public view can be a powerful attraction. This a lternate role-play starts at childhood with girls playing make-believe games with dolls and boys dreaming up war games with their action heroes. As age advances, the need for fantasy it seems, does not always diminish, it sometimes gets hidden under the wraps. In the past, people’s fantasy world went as far as books or movies could take them. Today the Internet can transport you to worlds beyond your wildest imagination.”

2. TechCrunch (USA) – PlaySpan Strikes Deal With Nickelodeon To Power Microtransactions. “We just wrote about PlaySpan’s recent study showing positive growth in the exchange and e-commerce of virtual goods exchange. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. Today, PlaySpan is announcing a fairly significant deal with Nickelodeon to power payment services for virtual goods and microtransactions for the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Virtual Worlds Group.”

3. PhyOrg.com (UK) – Researchers bring noise to virtual worlds. “When you kick over a garbage can, it doesn’t make a pure, musical tone. That’s why the sound is so hard to synthesize. But now Cornell computer scientists have developed a practical method to generate the crashing and rumbling sounds of objects made up of thin “harmonic shells,” including the sounds of cymbals, falling garbage cans and lids, and plastic water-cooler bottles and recycling bins. The work by graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An and Doug James, associate professor of computer science, will be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Yokohama, Japan, in December.”

4. CNET (USA) – Virtual-goods resellers on the rise. “Gamers are not just making purchases to enhance their gaming experience but also selling virtual assets to other players, according to new research from video game market research firm VGMarket.
Sales of virtual goods are expected to reach $1 billion this year and already generate near $4 billion annually in China. But there are some challenges, primarily the fact that once you convert your real money to virtual cash you can’t readily get the dough back out.”

5. The Guardian (UK) – Google Earth beware: the Brits are coming. “I intended to give the 3D internet a miss for a while after writing last week. But that was before Mike Fotoohi, a freelance software engineer from London, emailed me. When he told me that he and a few friends, working for five years in their spare time, had built a 3D version not just of capital cities, as others have, but of the entire planet that was better than Google Earth, my first reaction was to get off the phone pronto.”

6. Reuters (USA) – Shapiro Negotiations Institute Opens New Training Centers Inside the Sistine Chapel, at the North Pole, at Camden Yards, and on Mt. Everest. “Shapiro Negotiations Institute (SNI) today launched a new online, 3-D approach to corporate training and education that delivers dramatic results and has the potential to change perceptions and expectations of such programs worldwide. Virtual Training Partners moves the experience of learning from conference rooms to the online, virtual world of Second Life, where participants and instructors interact as avatars in dynamic, ever-changing environments. The result? A program that costs dramatically less to provide, avoids lengthy time out of the office, and delivers effective new skills for participants that can be implemented immediately. ”

7. The Straits Times (Singapore) – Street cred in a virtual world. “I AM a midnight voyeur. But it’s not what you are thinking. Not the type that stares out of the window in the middle of the night, through high-powered goggles, searching for live porn action. My time is spent flipping through the profiles of my friends on Xbox LIVE – the online part of the Xbox 360 game console, which among other things, lets me connect to my friends and challenge them to virtual death matches. And this I usually do at the stroke of 12, which is when I get my free time in my daily busy working schedule. What I am looking for? Xbox Achievement points.”

8. VentureBeat (USA) – China’s growing addiction: online farming games. “A new agrarian revolution has occured in China, but only in the virtual worlds of social games. Social farm games now dominate all major Chinese social networking sites — RenRen (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001, 51.com, and QQ’s QZone. The May launch and 2H 2009 adoption of QQ Farm — a version of China’s already popular Happy Farm game built to run on Tencent’s estimated 228 million active-user QZone platform — may very well have transformed China into the leading country of online farmers. According to Five Minutes, Shanghai-based game developer of the first and largest social farm game, Happy Farm has now surpassed 23 million daily active users (DAU) across QZone, RenRen, and 51.com.The DAU count is the total number of users who log in during a 24-hour period.”

9. The Guardian (UK) – The rise of urban gaming. “Although we’d all like to think that we can completely separate our virtual and real-world experiences, it’s never quite as simple as that. Who hasn’t, at one point or another, emerged from a ten-hour Counter Strike session only to scour the street for camping spots? And conversely, surely you’ve had moments where you spot a cool building or rundown industrial area and think, ‘that would make a hell of game level’. I think, through the omnipresence of game culture and conventions, and the growing popularity of virtual worlds in general, our sense of reality is becoming more plastic; our interactions with the world around us more playful. I don’t think parkour could have evolved in a pre-videogame world – it’s games that have taught us to see scenic objects as potentially interactive components. ”

10. Christian Today (USA) – Brick-and-mortar pastor defends virtual churches. “The Christian church is engaging far less than one per cent of the 70 million people who are active in the virtual world. This means the virtual world is by far the largest unreached people group on planet Earth, says one pastor. Douglas Estes, a pastor from San Jose, California, has no vested interest in virtual or internet churches – a relatively new phenomenon – but given the large “unreached” population on the internet, he says he has a desire to see healthy churches proliferate “regardless of context”. Although he leads a brick and mortar church – Berryessa Valley Church – Estes defends virtual churches against critics in his new book, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World, maintaining that they are real churches with real people.”

1. Business in Vancouver (Canada) – Virtual worlds now delivering genuine business opportunities. “As video games, social networks and virtual worlds increasingly star as stand-ins for reality, development shops are exploring new ways to monetize fantasy by creating virtual marketplaces replete with digitized goods and services. Fuelled by micro-transactions in which users buy virtual goods and services for as little as pennies, virtual marketplaces are not only driving user engagement for technology companies, but also adding new revenue streams. During a recent panel discussion at the Mobile Monday Vancouver event, where local Internet entrepreneurs gather monthly, roughly 90 attendees heard how B.C. companies are monetizing virtual goods.”

2. Gamasutra (USA) – The Effects of Imaginary Value in Real Virtual Worlds. “Like, I feel, a large portion of my generation, most of my learning has been through books or the internet. I think that’s helped, or maybe forced, me to parse through things logically. And an unexpected outcome of pushing myself to write more is that I find out what I really think about something when I’m forced to type out the facts and read them back to myself. So with that preface, I’ve been trying to figure out why I like Warhammer Online. In a previous post I think I gave the impression that it was a nostalgia fix, and it is to some extent. But sheer nostalgia shouldn’t hold my interest like this, so there must be something more concrete here that’s affecting me. It’s confusing because I think I’m done with the MMO. WoW was my first, and I hopped on that bandwagon right away out of Warcraft fandom. I deposited years into that beast, and I don’t entirely regret it. But after WoW I was worn out — never again would I trudge through a world so huge that I was made as powerless as I am in the real world. Because in reality I’m in the lower tax echelon, work all day and don’t own a badass axe.”

3. New York TImes (USA) – No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You. “IT may be raining pink slips, and some people may be hard-pressed to make the rent, much less splash out on a pagoda-shoulder jacket from Balmain, but Vixie Rayna is hardly feeling the pinch. Not a month goes by in which she isn’t spending as much as $50,000 on housing, furniture or her special weakness: multistrap platform sandals, tricked out in feathers and beads. Recession or no, Ms. Rayna isn’t reining in her fantasies, or her expenditures — at least not in the virtual world. In a simulated universe like There.com, IMVU.com or Second Life.com, the granddaddy of avatar-driven social networking sites, Ms. Rayna, an avatar on Second Life, and her free-spending cohort can quaff Champagne, teleport to private islands and splurge on luxury brands that are the cyber equivalent of Prada waders or a Rolex watch.”

4. The Guardian (UK) – The real-world boom in online cities. “The internet has been evolving into three dimensions for years without most people noticing. The change has been confined to niche activities, even though some – such as World of Warcraft or Second Life – are big niches. Now there is a worldwide move to bring the 3D web to a mass market, led by the building of “virtual” cities where avatars can walk, shop, club or whatever with links to “real life” activities. From Tokyo to Helsinki and from Paris to Philadelphia, cities are being constructed at a pace that recalls 19th-century railway mania; except, mercifully, it is a lot cheaper and won’t have serious economic effects if there is a crash. ”

5. New York Times (USA) – A Virtual Clinic to Treat the Stresses of War. “Many veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with serious problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder, but only one-third get medical help. One researcher has built a healing center for veterans in a virtual world, where she hopes they will be more comfortable seeking care. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is a senior researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. She formerly did animation for Disney. She calls her current project, which she presented at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Coming Home.”

6. INSEAD Knowledge – Capitalism thrives in virtual world: Second Life gives commerce a second chance. “In the beginning, the online virtual world was a place for action video games such as Grand Theft Auto, or hanging out and chatting. Today, it’s a very different place. Commerce and capitalism have entered the picture. “A big change happened when the virtual worlds decided to give ownership to assets (there), which gave rise to an interesting and thriving economy,” says Miklos Sarvary, the new Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD and creator of the school’s campus in a virtual world called Second Life.”

7. VentureBeat (USA) – With 3 million fans, Fantage formally launches virtual world for kids. “While many kids virtual worlds have come and gone, Fantage has quietly built an audience of 3 million registered users. Today, it is formally launching its web site. The company has managed to do what lots of other kids sites have failed to do: get an audience by offering fun games and social activities in a safe, parent-friendly setting. And they did so just by observing kids, building what they like, and starting over when things didn’t work, said Peter Bae, vice president of marketing, in an interview.”

8. InformationWeek (USA) – Is There A Business In The Virtual World? “Much has been made of the premature obituaries for Second Life, but while the virtual world manufactured by Linden Labs has prevailed long beyond its presumed expiration date, the business model seems too arcane and forbidding to inspire many imitators. His unprecedented ability to manipulate individual atoms signaled a quantum leap forward in in nanoscience experimentation and heralded in the age of nanotechnology. After all, a business that depends on writing dauntingly complex code running on giant server farms to lure users to a bandwidth-hogging digitized playscape where they can flirt or do business — all in the hopes that they will purchase so-called “in-world” Linden Dollars using actual American dollars for the privilege of purchasing pink see-through blouses and imaginary islands — is a little bit daunting to say the least.”

9. Financial Times (UK) – Social games to change the world? “Social games are oft criticised for being little more than drivel. It’s a fair charge. After all, there’s not much intellectual value in games like Sorority Life and Mob Wars. Nonetheless, they have become among the most popular activities for users of social networks. Zynga, the largest maker of social games, says it has 50m daily active users of its various games, most of those on Facebook. In turn, Zynga is raking in cash through the sale of virtual goods.”

10. Huffington Post (USA) – Augmented Reality: Here to Stay. “There’s a new phrase around town — “Augmented Reality.” For a period of time, Virtual Reality (VR) was the hot new thing. Folks could create avatars, pretend to be other people, and buy and sell ‘virtual’ goods. You know, fake stuff. But alas, for most of us, there was just too much to get done in our daily lives to allow us to vanish into the ‘virtual worlds’ of Second Life or such. But now the combination of the web and technologists seem to have found a way to bring the ‘virtual’ world of the web into the real world of our daily lives. And shockingly – it’s pretty darn helpful.”

1. The Guardian (UK) – Are online currencies striking gold? “Money. The stuff that makes the world go round. Every day we earn it, spend it, exchange it and lose it. But you won’t find any Linden dollars, Eve ISK or Facebook credits down the back of the couch. Virtual currencies like these are used for transactions in online worlds and social networking sites. While real-world currencies are on the slide, many virtual ones are going from strength to strength. In the second quarter of the year the equivalent of $144m (£91m) was traded on the LindeX, the official currency exchange of Second Life, where residents buy and sell Linden dollars for their US counterpart – a 20% increase on the previous quarter, while the US economy shrank by 1%. Trading activity increased by 6% in the last quarter of 2008.”

2. Financial Times (UK) – Trading in online virtual goods set to top $1bn. “Revenues from the sale of virtual goods will top $1bn this year in the US, according to analysts, a 100 per cent leap over last year that signals the arrival of a new online industry in the largest internet market in the western world. The findings, to be released in a report today, show that sales are expected to double again next year, with particularly fast growth noticeable in the social games category. Analysts and entrepreneurs have been following developments in virtual goods and social games closely. But the report will give the most complete picture to date of virtual goods sales trends in the US.”

3. VentureBeat (USA) – Electronic Arts exec says social gaming bubble resembles mobile games hype. “The social gaming bubble is getting bigger and it resembles all of the hype that used to envelop the mobile phone games and virtual world markets a few years ago. So says John Schappert, the newly appointed chief operating officer at Electronic Arts. When EA agreed to buy Jamdat Mobile for $680 million in December, 2005, that was a peak moment for the mobile games bubble. Venture capitalists funded lots of mobile game startups in the hopes of getting a similar outcome, only to see the peak shift to virtual worlds as Second Life.”

4. Signal Magazine (USA) – Virtual Design Challenge Opens To All. “A new competition is opening up the process of developing and improving virtual training environments by streamlining the rules and requirements for participation. The U.S. military spends billions of dollars developing and improving virtual environments to train its personnel, but this process can seem complex and difficult for individuals and firms without government contracting experience.”

5. Reuters – China Q2 online game revenues hit $906 mln -research firm. “Revenue from China’s online game market grew 39.5 percent in the second quarter from the previous year to 6.18 billion yuan ($906 million), according to data from research firm Analysys International on Tuesday. Tencent Holdings (0700.HK), which runs China’s largest online messaging platform and operates popular free-to-play games domestically, emerged as the market leader with 20.2 percent of the market and 1.24 billion yuan in revenues.”

6. Computerworld (USA) – Linden Lab CEO on Second Life’s growth, future. “While the recession has been brutal on most technology companies, one venture that has done relatively well is Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life. When we first interviewed CEO Mark Kingdon in January, he said the company was profitable and growing. Last month, Linden Lab released figures showing increased usage of the virtual world, and a near doubling of the size of the in-world economy. The Standard recently caught up with Kingdon via email to see how the company’s enterprise push is faring.”

7. MTV.com (USA) – Project Natal May Provide Dance Controls, But ‘FaceAPI’ Could Let You Talk Or Make Out. “From what Microsoft has shown off so far, Project Natal looks like it will track various body movements for controls dealing with first-person shooters, sports games and maybe even lightsaber fights. PhD candidate Torben Sko, is concentrating on face movements in his work right now, though, and he says he’s found a way to track mouths, eyes and head movements nothing nothing more than a camera. “Using a program called ‘FaceAPI,’ it’s possible to track a person’s facial features using nothing more than a standard Web camera,” he explains in a video posted to TorbenSko.com. “In turn, we can use this information to drive the expression of a virtual character.”

8. Air and Business Travel News (UK) – Comparing real and virtual meetings. “In a bid to compare the virtual and real life, the UK and Ireland Institute of Travel and Meetings (ITM) and Eventia held two events, one a real meeting at the NEC in Birmingham, the other in the virtual reality computer programme Second Life. The same content was included in both events, held on September 22 and 23, after which the delegates were asked to complete a survey about their experience. The two meetings organisations wanted to use the events to test out the business viability of Second Life technology. After comparing the feedback, ITM and Eventia recently released the results of the experiment to be mixed.”

9. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Teen net addicts at risk of mental health problems. “Obsessive use of the internet could create a mental-health epidemic, with up to 10 per cent of adolescents at risk, a Sydney academic warns. World studies have documented dangerous levels of “internet addiction” – computer use that interferes with daily lives – says Lawrence Lam, a behavioural epidemiologist at the University of Sydney and the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.”

10. World Politics Review (USA) – Social Media, Virtual Worlds and Public Diplomacy. “On Sept. 1, 2009, the new U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Michael E. Ranneberger, a career foreign service officer with deep experience on the African continent, started a Twitter feed. The seven or so tweets he posted between then and Sept. 29 were lauded as another example of “Twitter Diplomacy.” Shashank Bengali, blogging for McClatchy, declared that the ambassador came out “swinging” with highly charged comments about Kenyan presidential appointees and in support of Kenya’s need for reform.”