General News – Page 74

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

January 21, 2008 by Editor Leave a Comment

1. Reuters – Cell phones and virtual worlds morphing shopper ways. “Virtual worlds, mobile coupons and bar-code readers on cell phones are the next technology wave that U.S. chain stores must ride if they hope to stay competitive in the fast-changing world of global retail”.

2. The Bulletin Online – Public health lessons from virtual game worlds. “It’s challenging to model disease spread during epidemics. Simple mathematical models such as the “general epidemic” model make assumptions about constant population size, homogeneous mixing, and constant recovery rates, but can only go so far in predicting an outbreak’s severity”.

3. Tech News World – Virtual World Workforce, Part 1: Promising the World. “It’s a dream scenario: A candidate aspiring to a pivotal job in the culinary arts field enters the virtual world Second Life, having never been an online gamer before. He attends an online job fair held by recruiting company TMP Worldwide and is interviewed by major food and operations services company Sodexho. As a result, he lands a job as an executive chef with the firm”.

4. BBC News – NASA investigates virtual space. “The US space agency is exploring the possibility of developing a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. The virtual world would be aimed at students and would ‘simulate real NASA engineering and science missions’ “.

5. San Jose Mercury News – New passage to Gaia. “In a sign that social networks and virtual worlds are beginning to meld, Gaia Online, the popular virtual playground for teens, will announce Tuesday a connection to its site from inside social network Facebook”.

6. ABC News (USA) – Asperger’s Therapy Hits Second Life. “Texas researchers believe that people suffering from Asperger’s syndrome — a cognitive disorder often referred to as high-functioning autism — may have found a new therapy in an unlikely place: the online virtual world Second Life”.

7. New World Notes – Second Life Grows Beyond Its Map. “Click the image on the left: this is the world of Second Life’s grid as it exists now– 26.5 million acres*, with three major land masses to the Southeast, surrounded by a veritable galaxy of disparate islands.”

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With: the watch

Does Second Life need a Republic?

January 19, 2008 by Editor 2 Comments

The Metaverse Republic is a new site that states its purpose clearly:

“The Metaverse Republic, currently work in progress, will be a legal system for Second Life, with real powers of enforcement originating in user-created tools, and a democratic parliament.

There are many disputes and potential disputes in Second Life that could benefit from formal resolution: disputes about broken agreements, land use, alleged griefing, extortion, etc. The Metaverse Republic aims to provide an effective and fair system for resolving such disputes.”

That’s one hell of a brief and it’s not an initiative likely to receive widespread support for two reason. First, there’ll be automatic scepticism toward one model of goverment put forward by one group. Secondly, apathy rules – a resounding majority of people in the real world find politics a boring, meaningless pastime with no direct relevance to their daily lives. This is unlikely to be any different in the virtual world context – our own reader survey conducted last year showed just that, a real lack of interest in the politics stories we run.

That said, such an experiment doesn’t deserve outright condemnation – at the very least it should be considered a useful experiment.

The Virtually Blind blog has an interesting discussion underway on the whole concept. What do you think – does Second Life need a government?

Filed Under: General News, Politics, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: government, legal

Weekend Whimsy

January 18, 2008 by Editor Leave a Comment

1. The Middlesea Fleet Recruitment Video

2. uss kinkster

3. WoW Commercial Parody Glenn Quagmire

Filed Under: General News, User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: whimsy

Metaplace is hotting up

January 17, 2008 by Editor Leave a Comment

Back in September 2007 we mentioned that Metaplace was a new kid on the virtual world block. That kid is growing up pretty quickly and in an interview this week, Metaplace founder (and virtual world guru) Raph Koster states that widespread access to Metaplace should be available by April. The likelihood is it’ll be free for users to build small virtual worlds, with costs kicking in as your world grows.

Metaplace is a service aimed at people designing their own worlds and potentially making money by charging others for the services they offer, with the ability to cash out virtual currency accumulated. The ‘create your own world’ approach reminded me of VastPark, and there are similarities. There’s a brief conversation on the two here.

I love the idea of being able to create my own world but the actual task seems daunting. The ease of use of the toolset will be crucial – it’s hard enough building basic structures in Second Life let alone trying to construct a whole world. On assumption we could all successfully build a world, what type would you build? I’d love to hear your suggestions / thoughts.

Thanks to Virtual Worlds News for the heads-up

Filed Under: Alternatives, General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: metaplace, vastpark

World of Warcraft recipes – really!

January 16, 2008 by Editor Leave a Comment

If you play World of Warcraft and have always wanted to make the dishes you eat in the game, then this site may be for you. If you don’t play WoW then have a look anyway for amusement value. Goblin Deviled Clams anyone?

The full recipe book costs $19.97US but you can sign up for an email newsletter that’ll feature some of the recipes.

Thanks to Massively for the heads-up.

Filed Under: General News, Humour / Satire, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: humour, world of warcraft

Want to be famous? Linden Lab want YOU

January 15, 2008 by Editor Leave a Comment

All the details here. Essentially, they’re after Second Life residents who are willing to speak with the media on their life in-world.

Jump on in!

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: linden lab, media

Forrester to business: ignore virtual worlds at your peril

January 12, 2008 by Editor 2 Comments

Well known technology and market research company Forrester have released a paper titled ‘Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds’.

If you’ve got a spare $249.00 (US) you can read the full report, but otherwise you’ll have to be happy with the executive summary supplied. Although far from a new claim, the key one in the summary is that “within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today”.

It’s a message most businesses either can’t or won’t digest. A lot of businesses are unable to see beyond immediate return on investment and combine that with the cutting edge nature of virtual worlds and you have the slow adoption occurring now. The corporations who are taking the plunge have rightly realised it’s a research and development exercise. Of course, the true virtual business innovators are the thousands of small businesses running every day in worlds like Second Life. The larger real-world entities could learn quite a bit from the home-based virtual world entrepreneurs.

Filed Under: Business, General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: business, forrester

Linden Lab release customer service metrics

January 11, 2008 by Editor Leave a Comment

Linden Lab has a long standing mantra of being as transparent as possible although over the past year this has been tested in the customer service area, with a number of changes undertaken with little consultation or notice. A small step back in the other direction has occurred with the announcement that customer service metrics will be released each month.

The metrics themselves are rudimentary but at least provide some ideas on service trends. It’d be nice to see statistics around abandon rates (how many people gave up waiting in queue on the phone) and number of support tickets were resolved rather than number of tickets submitted.

Credit for another step in transparency but it’s far from full transparency at this stage.

Filed Under: General News, Metrics, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: linden lab, Metrics

Political satire at a whole new level

January 9, 2008 by Editor 2 Comments

With ten months still to go until the US Presidential election, Second Life is definitely hotting up as a platform for campaigning. As you’d expect, where there’s political activity there are satirists waiting in the wings to lighten the load for those of use bombarded by the whole election process. Christophe Hugo is one such person.

When I arrived at his faux WhiteHouse he was sitting there in his Hilary Clinton avatar. I approached Christophe and he immediately enveloped me in a cage, demanding I wouldn’t be let go until I voted for Hilary. Here’s the same fate befalling another visitor:

He was too busy for an extensive interview but I did manage to ask whether Christophe’s efforts were coming from a particular political ideology. His response: “I am a French Marxist (of the Groucho Marx movement)”.

That sums it up really -if you enjoy political humour with a dash of slapstick then this is an area you may want to visit. There’s even a Barack Obama / Hilary Clinton boxing ring where it’s obvious who lost out:

And finally, there’s the Whitehouse itself – it’s not the best replica I’ve seen but it fits the overall presence well:

Thanks to New World Notes for the heads-up.

Check it out in-world

Filed Under: General News, Politics, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: clinton, humour, obama, politics

Second Life groans under weight of record use

January 7, 2008 by Editor 6 Comments

Second Life has continued to experience regular difficulties which haven’t been helped by record numbers of Second Life users logged in concurrently.

2008 has been touted as the year of increasing stability for Second Life. We’re only two weeks in, but things are getting worse, not better. Here’s to improving performance in coming weeks.

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: lindenlab, usability