1. VentureBeat (USA) – Watch out, Disney, Fantage doubles its growth for kids virtual world. “Virtual worlds for kids have been volatile during the recession. Some have come and gone. Some have declined. So it’s worth noting that Fantage, a virtual world for kids who like playing games and staging fashion shows, has doubled its audience in the past year. The Fort Lee, N.J.-based company now has 3.3 million unique visitors a month, compared to 1.5 million nearly a year ago. To date, it has had 7.7 million registered users, compared to 3 million a year ago. That’s pretty good growth at a time when the competition for the attention of kids is growing.”

2. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Will games take over our lives? “In the film Mary Poppins, a scene in the nursery has the children distraught at the drudgery of tidying up. Naturally their nanny uses the moment to impart a life lesson. “In every job that must be done there is an element of fun,” she tells them. “You find the fun, and snap-the job’s a game.” It’s a trick most every parent has used: pureed vegetables arrive at an infant’s mouth via a spoon airplane, long car trips include “the quiet game,” and yard work Olympics determine who can gather the most weeds. In coming years, the idea of using games to increase good behaviour and happiness is going to explode into adult life, as insights and technology associated with videogames make their way into the larger culture.”

3. Wall Street Journal (USA) – On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking. “A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults. The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults. The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.”

4. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Smith & Tinker Reinvent Nanovor. “Developer Smith & Tinker is launching a revamped version of its Nanovor offering from last year. The new version, called Nanovor Evolution, will be a full-featured browser-based virtual world. The toy arm of the franchise will be discontinued in favor of a Nanovor app for iOS that leverages the collection of Nanovor virtual insect robots that a player accumulates while dueling other players in the virtual world. Players’ Nanovor collections will be stored in the cloud. Where the original version of Nanovor emphasized the collecting and battling aspects of the franchise, Nanovor Evolution introduces customizable avatars, hub lobbies where users can interact in a virtual environment, and action mini-games that users can play to earn a new time-based virtual currency called Jolt Points. In Nanovor Evolution, users will be able to purchase new Nanovors and avatar customization pieces using both cash-based Nanocash and Jolt Points.”

5. Inside Facebook (USA) – Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2010 – 2011. “With an up-to-$750 million acquisition of Playdom by Disney, an up-to-$400 million acquisition of Playfish by Electronic Arts, the acquisition of Tapulous by Disney, and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture investments, virtual goods are impacting businesses across the media landscape. Virtual goods, and the companies that create them, may be bringing the largest disruption entertainment, communication, and e-commerce infrastructure businesses have seen in years.”

6. CBC News (Canada) – Battle to preserve online anonymity rages in video game community. “Micah Whipple may not be a familiar name to the online masses, but in the World of Warcraft sphere, there’s no greater symbol of the need for privacy. The young man became a scapegoat for gamer outrage earlier this year when the owner of the massive multiplayer game announced it would require users to post their real names in official forums. The stated reason for the dramatic change: to oust “trolls” who were disrupting the chatrooms. A community manager who interacts with players, Whipple decided to show support for the new company policy and wrote a short post under his forum moniker, Bashiok, that revealed his true name. “Micah Whipple, at your service,” it said.”

7. The Guardian (UK) – PlayStation Move. “When Sony’s Move motion-sensing input system was unveiled, it attracted a certain amount of derision – it was accused of being a pale rip-off of the Wii remote, and of being clunky in comparison with Microsoft’s high-tech Kinect. Which just goes to show how first impressions can be misleading. It’s true that technologically speaking, Move is about as sexy as Norah Batty’s wrinkly stockings, but astoundingly, it makes much more sense as a purchase than Kinect. The main reason is that it actually works, whereas Microsoft’s attempts to keep Kinect’s price down means that it suffers terribly from terminal lag between your gestures and its response.”

8. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Microsoft Bullish on Kinect. “Microsoft Corp. is targeting global sales of more than three million units of its new Kinect motion-sensor gaming accessory for its Xbox 360 console in the first two months after the Nov. 4 launch in the U.S., providing a much needed holiday sales boost to the slumping overall market for videogames. In an interview ahead of this week’s Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft’s top videogame executive, Don Mattrick, said he expects Kinect will propel the company to have its “biggest holidays ever.” Mr. Mattrick said he expects Kinect, a camera and sensor technology which allows users to play videogames on the Xbox 360 through gestures and verbal commands, to eclipse the industry’s three million unit threshold by the end of the year.”

9. The Age (Australia) – Such a Tragic Waste of Life. “I have always been a little suspicious of social networking. When Facebook was introduced, I at first enjoyed the novelty of keeping up with friends and looking at happy snaps. Then Facebook got nicknames like Stalkbook and Creepbook. For lazy communicators, it’s a sinister kind of genius. Then Twitter came along. Letting others know your thoughts in 140 characters or fewer is perfect for short attention spans. I embraced it. Now I sometimes think I should write even less. With these two sites well and truly entrenched, I’d like to remind you of another world that had everyone talking back in 2005 called Second Life. In this virtual world, users could create a new persona for themselves and interact with others doing the same. For Brian in accounts who, on his night off, loved the idea of being half-Twilight-wolf, half-Arnold-Schwarzenegger in chaps, Second Life was a revelation. To me, it all felt (and I don’t want to offend anyone who still regularly plonks their ugg boots in there), well, a little unnecessary.”

(Note: click here for a great rebuttal of Warhurst’s article)

10. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Eviction game hits a nerve in China. “It may lack the sophistication and addictive power of Farmville or World of Warcraft. But an online game in which a family fights off a demolition crew with slippers and bullets has hooked Chinese internet users. The Big Battle: Nail House Versus Demolition Team has triumphed not through playability, but by tapping into anger about forced relocations. ”Nail houses” are the last homes left standing in areas slated for clearance, so called because they stick out when all around them have been demolished. Owners resist because they do not want to move or think that compensation is unfairly low, but wrecking crews often retaliate with tactics from cutting off power and water to violence.”

1. Department of Defense (USA) – Government Invites Public to Solve Challenges. “The federal government has a lot of problems to solve, and a new website it launched this week will give average citizens a forum to discuss and potentially solve those problems while vying for rewards for the best solutions. Bev Godwin, director of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement; Brandon Kessler, founder and CEO of ChallengePost; and Tami Griffith, science and technology manager for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Simulation and Training Technology Center, discussed the new site — Challenge.gov — during a “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable yesterday. Godwin oversees the site for the government. Kessler’s company designs and builds “challenge” sites for different clients. Challenge.gov is an extension of President Barack Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation, which opens government solutions to the general public.”

2. The Independent (UK) – Comment: The Virtual World Conference is the shape of things to come. “On 15 September, the Open University, in collaboration with the Serious Games Institute, will host a 24-hour conference. Opening in Hong Kong, the focus will shift to Europe as the eastern evening meets the UK morning, handing over at our sundown for a final eight hours on the US western coast. Despite crossing many time zones during the day, conference chairs and delegates will meet at a single location, and never have to leave the comfort of their own armchairs.”

3. Christian Science Monitor (USA) – A virtual world that breaks real barriers. “Thus far in the relatively short existence of online worlds and virtual communities, less than flattering stories typically float to the surface. The Internet is rife with tales of bad behavior: antisocial “trolls” posting inflammatory messages; players addicted to fantasy role-playing games; and marriages ruined by spouses staying up half the night to flirt in virtual spaces, even proposing marriage to people they’ve never met in the flesh. Given the power of negative thinking, it’s worth repeating: Not all that happens within the digital realms of monsters, quests, and virtual dollars is evil. Much of the zombie-shooting amounts to people having fun or finding an escape. But some online communities embrace a more lofty mission. They’re forging new relationships across the chasms of nationality, religion, and language – long the unrealized dream of some who hoped the Internet could bring us closer.”

4. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Go with the flow. “I am a sucker for physics simulations, especially in games. The last half a decade or so has brought us advances such as Havok, PhysX, and Euphoria, all of them technologies that help to make our virtual worlds a little more believable. The only thing I love more than physics in general is liquid simulation, and right now is a good time to be a fan of virtual fluid dynamics. Three games are on the horizon that play with realistic liquid simulation in very different ways. Probably the first we will get the chance to play will be Hydrophobia, a 3D survival adventure that takes place aboard a slowly sinking ocean liner. The game’s developer, Dark Energy, has spent three years just programming an engine that can model realistic water movement.”

5. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Sulake Reports Best Half-Year Results To Date. “Virtual worlds publisher Sulake announced its best half-year performance in the company’s history, earning approximately $37.9 million in revenue. This is a 20% increase year-over-year. Sulake credits the jump in revenue to reducing costs, improving operations, and a continued focus on development of its Habbo Hotel virtual world. Sulake expects its revenue growth to continue in the future.”

6. NewScientist (USA) – Avatars learn gestures to match your tone of voice. “Avatars in virtual worlds provide a richer way than email or chat to communicate online, but despite better graphics and sound quality, they still can’t rival in-person meetings. Now new software may help virtual characters appear more lifelike by imbuing them with realistic body language. Rather than assign physical gestures based on the literal meaning of a person’s spoken words, the program focuses on prosody, the combination of vocal rhythm, intonation and stress. To assemble a library of gestures associated with prosody features, Sergey Levine and Vladlen Koltun at Stanford University, California, used a motion-capture studio to digitise the movements that an actor made as he spoke.”

7. Computerworld (USA) – Second Life should be more iPhone-like, says CEO Philip Rosedale. “One of Second Life’s biggest problems, says CEO Philip Rosedale, is that it’s not enough like an iPhone. From the moment you open the box on an iPhone, it’s fun to use, and in playing, you learn how to use it. The whole process is pleasurable. Second Life is nothing like that, learning to use it is a long process, and painful for many people. I talked with Rosedale three weeks ago, when he’d been back as CEO of Linden Lab for two months. Rosedale is founder and chairman of Linden Lab, the company that created and operates Second Life. He stepped down as CEO two years ago, and returns to find the company battered and troubled.”

8. The Toronto Star (Canada) – Techno-porn: how the sex industry drives mainstream technology. “Patchen Barss might well have called his first book Hard Drive. After all, the central thesis of The Erotic Engine is that pornography has almost always powered human communication, all the way from dirty cave paintings to Google. The cover shows a couple of computer mice in a compromising position, an illustration reflective of the wit the 40-year-old Toronto author has brought to his research. Today, the international pornography industry is estimated to be a $25-billion business, and, technologically, it’s driving all sorts of things that nobody would ever connect with one-handed typing.”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – LOLapps thrives as under-the-radar Facebook social game maker. “You probably haven’t heard of LOLapps, the maker of social games on Facebook. But the company has quietly become one of the leaders of the pack among hot social game companies that are still independent. The San Francisco company has more than 100 million users. But almost nobody has kept track of that. On AppData, which measures Facebook traffic, LOLapps is listed as having about 10 million monthly active users, which doesn’t even put it the top-10 developer list. But if you consider the 100 million number, only Zynga and CrowdStar are in the same ballpark. The undercounting happens for a simple reason. The company’s two top apps, Gift Creator and Quiz Creator, have many more users than are shown in the official stats. That’s because users create their own quizzes and gifts with those apps, and are then counted as the developers of apps; LOLapps doesn’t get credited or recognized when its users create apps that spread virally on Facebook. In that sense, LOLapps is a lot like CrowdStar, another leading Facebook social game company whose quiz games don’t get counted much.”

10. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Sex world recruits Emerald team. “The adult-themed Utherverse virtual world platform is in discussions with former developers of the controversial Emerald Viewer for Second Life, the company announced. Prior to recent scandals involving an alleged distributed denial of service attack, privacy violations, and a Second Life ban this Wednesday, the Emerald viewer was primarily known for a nicer user interface than Second Life’s own official viewers — and for its “breast physics.” But bouncing boobies wasn’t the only factor that caught Utherverse’s attention.”

1. Rochester Post-Bulletin (USA) – Mayo Clinic expands in the virtual world. “Mayo Clinic has opened a new, virtual bookstore in the imaginary world called Second Life, one of many online realms that increasingly are taking on real-life importance. Mayo first opened a Second Life Gonda Building in December 2009. But now you can walk into the Mayo bookstore by signing onto secondlife.com and naming an avatar — an online caricature of yourself. It’s sort of like an avatar from the popular movie of the same name. With an avatar, you become part of the the virtual world. “Virtual Worlds hold great opportunities to grow Mayo Clinic offerings and reach out and interact with patients and non-patients in new ways, regardless of geography and in real time,” says a poster placed on an easel outside the Second Life Gonda Building.”

2. Gamasutra (USA) – US Buyer Completes Purchase Of Realtime Worlds’ MyWorld. “An anonymous US buyer has completed the purchase of Project MyWorld, the 3D virtual world platform in development by recently collapsed studio, Realtime Worlds, according to a report by Develop. However, it is still not understood whether the buyer has purchased just the MyWorld IP and game build, or will be taking on the remaining staff on the project in order to form a new spin-off studio. The news comes a fortnight after it was announced that Realtime had hired back 23 developers who had previously been laid off days before the company went into administration.”

3. Memeburn (USA) – Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories. “Ernest Wilson, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: “What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden?” This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we at the Annenberg school are calling “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilises gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories.”

4. io9 (USA) – Scenes from a 3-D, augmented reality metropolis. “Keiichi Matsuda creates incredible short films that depict an augmented reality city where synthetic information clouds are grafted onto brick’n’mortar material spaces. Here are two of his futureshock videos. Matsuda created this first 3D video, “Augmented (hyper)Reality: Augmented City,” for his final year at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.”

5. Canada.com (Canada) – Children wield outsized economic clout. “At age nine, the sandy-haired boy from Markham, Ont., is already a savvy shopper of electronics. When his mother told him the Nintendo DSi game he wanted was too expensive, he pursued a new strategy. He told family and friends to forgo birthday and Christmas presents and buy him gift cards to put toward the new device. Now he saves for the accompanying games – most recently Super Mario Galaxy 2. Next on his wish list: the iPod Touch. “My aunt has one and lets me play with it when she visits,” he says. Jackie Macdonald-Bartkiw, Andrew’s mom, figures that by Christmastime, he will be lobbying for more gift cards to buy his own touch technology. “I’m amazed at his patience . . . and persistence.”

6. Reuters (Canada) – Gameworld: Tween players impacting online game development. “A booming market of tweens is changing the landscape of online games.
This audience of boys and girls aged 8 to 11 has game publishers launching new games like Disney Online’s “World of Cars Online” and Sony Online Entertainment’s “Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures.” As these tweens grow older, they are also fueling the success of established online games like Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft” and Zynga’s “Farmville.” In 2007, when children’s marketing research firm KidSay asked boys what virtual worlds or online games they had visited in the past two weeks, 35 percent of boys aged 8 to 11 replied “none.”

7. Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) – Online support for significant others of military personnel overseas. “he first thing Tatiana Simpson did after her boyfriend proposed to her in a phone call from Iraq was to log on to Facebook. “Right after it happened, I posted. I had to tell them,” Simpson, 17, of Sewell, said of her social-networking friends. Simpson says the Facebook page Army Girlfriends: For All the Girls Waiting Back Home is her favorite among the forums she uses to connect with others who are dating members of the military. Simpson, who doesn’t know anyone locally who is dating a service member, relies on the site for advice. “The girls on Facebook are so easy to talk to, because you’re going through the same thing they’re going through,” she said. Like others, she has found support on Facebook from those who share her situation – the strain of having a boyfriend in the military, and often in a war zone. First-time deployments can unleash emotions and questions that are addressed in more than 1,000 Facebook forums. The military provides support groups, which helps, but most are limited to spouses and families of service members.”

8. CNN (USA) – Who says video games aren’t art? “According to Merriam-Webster, the word “art” can be defined as “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination, especially in the production of aesthetic objects.” The Oxford Dictionary says art is “the expression or application of creative skill and imagination, typically in visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” So why do so many critics — most notably Roger Ebert earlier this year — still assert that video games, the best of which rank among today’s most visually arresting and touching experiences, don’t fit these definitions? (To be fair, Ebert later amended his comments, saying, “I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.”

9. The Next Web (Dubai) – Beladcom to build a Virtual Planet in Entropia Universe for Arabs. “Jordanian game development firm Beladcom signed a deal with Swedish software company MindArk to create an online virtual world with content specifically tailored toward Arab audiences. Beladcom will be building a virtual planet within MindArk’s Entropia Universe, which is a highly advanced 3D online virtual universe, to create a virtual gaming environment with high quality entertainment, social networking, and work simulation and learning tools.”

10. VentureBeat (USA) – LOLapps thrives as under-the-radar Facebook social game maker. “You probably haven’t heard of LOLapps, the maker of social games on Facebook. But the company has quietly become one of the leaders of the pack among hot social game companies that are still independent. The San Francisco company has more than 100 million users. But almost nobody has kept track of that. On AppData, which measures Facebook traffic, LOLapps is listed as having about 10 million monthly active users, which doesn’t even put it the top-10 developer list. But if you consider the 100 million number, only Zynga and CrowdStar are in the same ballpark. The undercounting happens for a simple reason. The company’s two top apps, Gift Creator and Quiz Creator, have many more users than are shown in the official stats. That’s because users create their own quizzes and gifts with those apps, and are then counted as the developers of apps; LOLapps doesn’t get credited or recognized when its users create apps that spread virally on Facebook. In that sense, LOLapps is a lot like CrowdStar, another leading Facebook social game company whose quiz games don’t get counted much.”

1. VentureBeat (USA) – Intel and Nokia launch joint research on mobile 3D virtual worlds. “Smartphones have barely entered the 3D age, but Nokia and Intel are already racing ahead to do research on enabling 3D virtual worlds on mobile computing platforms. The two companies are announcing today a research center (pictured below) at the University of Oulu in Oulu, Finland, that will work on the technology required to make the mobile 3D virtual world possible.”

2. CNET (USA) – Virtual farm games absorb real money, real lives. “Last century’s cash crops included tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane. Now we have magic cauliflower and super berries, too–and even though they can’t be sold at market, some people still toil from dawn to dusk cultivating them. People spend not just real time but also real money growing these crops in virtual farming games that combine the allure of both games and social networking in what is usually a cute and deceptively simple package. They can be addictive: many users come back at least once a day to micromanage their farms and deal with other users’ requests. On average, the users of these types of games are spending anywhere from a few minutes a game to the greater part of an hour. Indeed, one individual who CNET spoke with said that it’s all she does between waking up and going to bed–and that’s every every day of the week.”

3. Huffington Post (USA) – Getting Physical in a Virtual World. “We’ve been talking about the ability to bring physical objects into the virtual (internet) world for quite a while now. Discussions have ranged from simply tagging physical objects and allowing humans to then attach metadata (something similar to what StickyBits does), to allowing objects the ability to be automatically tracked and to subconsciously attach and transmit metadata based on usage, location etc. There has been some speculation around Facebook’s dive (possibly called ‘Presence’) into this largely untamed world especially with reports of tests done during its F8 conference. As a marketer and a part-time anthropologist, I want to bring a cultural perspective into understanding what it might take for this marriage between the physical and virtual worlds to become a reality in our everyday lives.”

4. MediaPost (USA) – Virtual Goods Worth More than Real News: Curmudgeon. “I usually try to avoid making any statement involving the words “society,” “values,” or “priorities” — nouns which are all so vague as to be almost meaningless. I also usually don’t see any point in judging what other people do with their time or money, as long as they accord me the same indifference. But a recent realization has prompted me to (oh no, here it comes) question society’s values and priorities. Basically, it dawned on me that Americans will soon be spending more money on imaginary objects than the news. In fact, they already do. According to various estimates and forecasts, Americans spent $500 million on virtual goods in 2008, rising to $1 billion in 2009 and $1.6 billion this year. Fueled by the rise of social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars (and virtual worlds like Second Life, where sales continue to grow) U.S. spending on virtual goods may jump to $5 billion by 2014.”

5. American Medical News (USA) – Med students open to learning via new media. “Having been raised in an age of ubiquitous technology, medical students are game to using new media and virtual reality as part of their education, according to a new survey. However, students’ varied opinions about what games they would like to use, and the unresolved question of whether they would be effective, are barriers to overcome before medical schools add video games to the curriculum. Ninety percent of the 217 participants in the study — medical students at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the University of Michigan Medical School — said they would be inclined to use new media technologies if they helped to develop skills in patient interactions. Meanwhile, 98% said they think education should make better use of new media, according to the study, published online June 24 in BioMed Central.”

6. San Francisco Business Times (USA) – Fate Fickle In Second Life Too. “arely three years ago, the virtual world Second Life was all the rage, with exploding traffic numbers, eager investors, tons of news coverage and lots of interest from big corporations looking for ways to make money in the immersive online social world.
Today, the roughly 250-person San Francisco company that operates Second Life, Linden Lab, is getting a different kind of attention following a 30 percent layoff – some 90 people out of 300 – in June, the resignation of former CEO Mark Kingdon a few weeks later, and a current report from private shares trading company SharesPost showing that Linden Lab’s value plunged by 21.4 percent – or $100 million – in just the last five months. What went wrong, and how dire is the situation?”

7. The Guardian (UK) – It’s dodgems on the streets with everyone gazing at mobile devices. “I don’t walk down the street any more: these days I swerve, bob and veer my way past most of the other people occupying it. Why don’t they look where they’re going? Or is it just me? A current TV ad imagines how funny it would be if car-driving behaviour were adopted by pedestrians. Sorry, bright adperson, but your fantasy is no fantasy: I already experience pavement rage, because traversing it has become a species of dodgems. The street has become an extension of the living-room, used for so much more than walking – lighting up, for example. Smokers, ejected from public buildings, labour under the delusion that outdoors is a giant extractor hood, discharging smells directly into the heavens. They niftily forget that minor natural element known as wind, which can blow with such precision that, without swift evasive action, we passersby can feel like those notorious beagles compelled to puff smoke not of our own producing.”

8. Financial Post (Canada) – Tweens & Technology: The tiny power shoppers. “Meet Andrew. At age nine, the sandy-haired boy from Markham, Ont., is already a savvy shopper of electronics. When his mother told him the Nintendo DSi game he wanted was too expensive, he pursued a new strategy. He told family and friends to forgo birthday and Christmas presents and buy him gift cards to put toward the new device. Now he saves for the accompanying games — most recently Super Mario Galaxy 2. Next on his wish list: the iPod Touch. “My aunt has one and let’s me play with it when she visits,” he says. Jackie Macdonald-Bartkiw, Andrew’s mom, figures that by Christmastime, he will be lobbying for more gift cards to buy his own touch technology. “I’m amazed at his patience … and persistence.”

9. Big Think (USA) – Can Hollywood Redesign Humanity. “Most people do not come to Hollywood for deep conversation, but as we explained with respect to “serious games,” the entertainment universe is producing an impressive array of products that can educate youth to think more constructively about real-world problems through experimenting with solutions in online environments. There is also a new breed of film-makers who are advancing the cause of techno-optimism in ways that contradict the dystopian visions of robots taking over the earth. When we convened a salon of film-makers, online game designers, branding executives, and media personalities to discuss this construction of ever more immersive realities, they provided not only deep conversation, but also a sophisticated and controversial view of how Hollywood has moved beyond vanity and celebrity worship towards “world-building” that can inspire progressive behavioral change.”

10. Computerworld (USA) – Rocker raises money for first album in Second Life. “Keiko Takamura, a San Francisco indie rocker, raised some of the money to record her album and built a following by playing concerts in Second Life. She uses a broad array of other social media to find listeners and sell her music. Keiko and other indie musicians are worth watching by businesspeople as well as music fans. The music business model has been turned upside down by the Internet, and indie musicians are leaders at using the net to build new ways of finding customers. Their techniques are often applicable to traditional business.”

1. The Guardian (UK) – Virtual worlds: is this where real life is heading? “Recently a man bought a space station for $330,000, while last month Small Planet Foods, a subsidiary of General Foods, introduced a new brand of organic blueberries. What have these two products got in common? Neither actually exist. Well, not except as pixels in the virtual worlds where they are traded. Only the money is real. The space station was sold in the virtual world Entropia Universe, which has its own economy and currency. The buyer, who converted his $300,000 into 3.3m PED (Project Entropia dollars), is convinced that virtual shops on his virtual space station will produce virtual profits that can be converted back into real dollars. The blueberries represent a “brand extension” of a product that exists in the real world as US company General Foods aims to establish a presence in FarmVille, a game which exists as an application on Facebook and which at its peak has had nearly 80 million players. It is a classic example of a new genre.”

2. The Royal Gazette (Bermuda) – 3D concept adapted for the wider arena . “The use of 3D worlds on the Internet has been evolving from the gaming sector to a more expansive leveraging of the technique. Last week I wrote about how Citzalia, a site I am working on as editor, uses virtual 3D as an innovative means of navigating through information and for social networking. Companies, non-profits, government and other entities should also consider using the concept of creating 3D virtual worlds as a means of attracting and engaging visitors. Above all, they should keep in mind the idea of allowing users to have fun.”

3. IEEE Spectrum (USA) – Reducing World of Warcraft’s Power Consumption. “Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft consume a lot of their players’ time. They also consume a lot of energy, as more than a thousand servers can be required to create one game’s virtual worlds. Last year, Yeng-Ting Lee, a 26-year-old online game fanatic, began to wonder if there was an easy way to reduce their energy consumption. Lee, who is a research assistant at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, says he has found a way to cut MMORPG power consumption in half. Last month he revealed the solution at the IEEE Cloud 2010 conference.”

4. Inforum (USA) – Video game industry tailoring more offerings to female players. “or years, video games have been marketed toward male players with ads that showcase unreal action sequences or alluring female figures guiding players through virtual worlds. But as the video game industry expands its consumer base, some female gamers are feeling a little less ignored by an industry that has realized not only men play their games. In fact, women make up 42 percent of the 215 million Americans who play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association.”

5. RTH Life (Switzerland) – Virtual reality you can touch. “Researchers at the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich have developed a method with which they can produce virtual copies of real objects. The copies can be touched and even sent via the Internet. By incorporating the sense of touch, the user can delve deeper into virtual reality. Sending a friend a virtual birthday present, or quickly beaming a new product over to a customer in America to try out – it sounds like science fiction, but this is what researchers at the Computer Vision Lab want to make possible, with the aid of new technology. Their first step was to successfully transmit a virtual object to a spatially remote person, who could not only see the object, but also feel it and move it.”

6. Red Deer Advocate (Canada) – A virtual world to see, hear — and smell. “Virtual reality may seem all the more real in the future, with not only people’s sense of sight and hearing engaged, but also their sense of smell. A high school student from Elnora is part of the cutting edge research, having just worked on a project at the University of Alberta known as Smell-O-Vision. Ashley Brown, a Grade 12 student at Delburne Centralized School and the cyber school North-Star Christian Academy, was one of 60 high school students accepted into the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology (WISEST) summer research program at the U of A.”

7.Computerworld (USA) – The (better) future of tech support. “Right now, getting help when something unusual goes wrong is a frustrating experience for customers. They’ve come to stereotype the experience as waiting endlessly on hold, deciphering strangely cheerful foreign accents, humoring technicians who are incapable of understanding — let alone answering — their questions, and taking time off to wait for a tech who doesn’t show. Tech support pros are just as frustrated, experiencing the same issues from their vendors’ tech support and dealing with users who start the interaction expecting nothing, despite their own cluelessness. But even with these drags on their morale, many sally forward and poke around cryptic forums, hunting for answers among the rants to find an answer for their frustrated users and reaching out to fellow support pros through social networks and the like.”

8. Chicago Tribune (USA) – Despite some blips, most see technology as boon for family life. “At first, Andrea Pryor admitted, she was a little nervous about installing a computer in her Chicago home. What exactly was this thing? What would it do to her family. Years later, she has her answer: It brought them closer. “It has kept us connected, with family scattered across the U.S.,” said Pryor, 57, a retired teacher. “I’m getting to watch my nephews, nieces and grandchildren grow up.”

9. The Guardian (UK) – How the internet is altering your mind. “Like nearly all the Guardian’s content, what you are about to read was – and this will hardly be a revelation – written using a computer connected to the internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to read. Modern communications technology is now so familiar as to seem utterly banal, but set against my clear memories of a time before it arrived, there is still something magical about, say, optimistically sending an email to a scientist in southern California, and then talking to him within an hour.”

10. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Linden Lab’s Value Down 21%, Teen Second Life To Close. “The value of Second Life publisher Linden Lab has plunged by 21.4% in the past five months on the private market, according to SharesPost. This drop in price has effectively sent the company’s value down by $100 million, with SharesPost now estimating Linden Lab’s value at only $271 million. The decline follows Linden’s announcement that it would cut 30% of its staff in June, shortly followed by the replacement of CEO Mark Kingdon with founder Philip Rosedale. Earlier today, the company also announced that it would shut down its Teen Second Life grid on December 31, 2010. Linden Lab was founded in 1999, while Second Life launched in 2003. Teen Second Life launched in 2005 as a solution for younger users who wanted to enjoy the virtual world but weren’t old enough to explore Second Life’s sometimes-adult grid freely. To compensate for Teen Second Life’s closure, Linden Lab will drop the minimum user age in Second Life to 16 on or before December 31, 2010. Accounts for 16 and 17-year-old Teen Second Life users will be transferred to Second Life’s Main Grid.”

1. Computing (UK) – Can virtual worlds make a real impact? “The explosion of social media has been one of the striking trends in internet use over recent years. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are used by private business and government bodies as a way of reaching out to their audience, especially the sometimes hard-to-engage younger demographic. But there is a new trend, one with a greater potential for interactivity than conventional web sites, and one that offers a fusion between networking and, well, fun. The new kid on the block is 3D multiplayer gaming. Massively multiplayer online gaming (MMOG) has been around for decades. One of the earliest examples was 1974’s Mazewar, which involved moving around a wireframe maze and shooting other players. Technology and user expectation have moved on since then, and today’s best-known multiplayer online game is arguably Blizzard’s flagship product World of Warcraft, with more than 11 million subscribers globally. Last year, the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Communication released a tender asking “for the development and launch of an innovative web site which uses creative methods to generate interest and raise awareness about the role of the European Parliament”.

2. Gamasutra (USA) – Report: Google Buying Jambool/Social Gold. “In a move likely related to its rumored games-friendly social network, Google has reportedly purchased Jambool and its virtual currency payments product Social Gold for as much as $75 million. Jambool is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2006 by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein. Last October, it launched Social Gold as an online payments and virtual currency platform that players could integrate into their free-to-play MMOs, virtual worlds, casual online games, and social games/applications. Though neither Google or Jambool have commented on the acquisition, TechCrunch cites multiple sources that suggest a purchase price of around $55 million for Jambool, with another $15 million to $20 million promised if the company reaches certain goals.”

3. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Crisp NetModerator To Use Scotland Yard Pedophile Data. “Crisp Thinking is going to use Scotland Yard pedophile data to enhance the performance of its Crisp NetModerator software. NetModerator will use real conversations between convicted pedophiles and undercover officers to help identify and shield children from predatory behavior in virtual worlds and child-oriented MMOs. Crisp Thinking says it is the first company in the space to use real Metropolitan Police data to test and enhance its product’s performance.”

4. Minneapolis Star Tribune (USA) – Mayo Clinic lands its own fantasy island. “Dr. Paul Friedman insists he wasn’t distracted by the woman in the second row wearing a pair of wings and a rainbow bodysuit. And he didn’t even seem to notice when a visitor teleported into the audience, scanned the crowd and vanished into thin air. Friedman, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist, has given medical lectures worldwide. But last week he entered a new dimension, when he gave a presentation on the online fantasy world known as Second Life. To most people, virtual reality and avatars are the stuff of games. But the Mayo Clinic is one of a growing number of real medical centers that have established outposts in this fictional universe to explore new ways to teach and practice medicine.”

5. Gamasutra (USA) – Virtual Goods Monetization Firm SupersonicAds Raises $2 Million. “London-based start-up SupersonicAds, which runs a virtual goods monetization platform, has raised $2 million in a new round of funding led by former Skype chief executive Michael van Swaaij. Founded in 2007, the company is headed by Gil Shoham and has 32 employees. SupersonicAds’ monetization tool allows developers and publishers to reward players with free virtual currency for online titles, social games, and virtual worlds after they participate in targeted offers, watch commercials, or engage with brands in other ways. The firm, which also has offices in the U.S. and Israel, provides coverage in more than 100 countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and it plans to offer the platform in 20 languages. It currently works with more than 450 advertisers and counts a number of publishers as its clients, such as Live Gamer, PlaySpan, NHN Usa, Bigpoint, Playdom/Disney, IMVU, and more.”

6. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – The business of virtual sex. “Would be sim-commerce millionaires gathered at the Hypergrid Entrepreneurs Group meeting Thursday night on the Trombly Grid to discuss recent innovations in OpenSim hosting, currency systems, and selling real homes and real furniture in virtual environments. Towards the end of the meeting, the conversation somehow turned to virtual sex (okay, I turned it) and why there didn’t seem to be any grids in OpenSim dedicated to this pursuit. For example, I hypothesized, someone could rent, say 16 regions for around $10 a region from one of the providers at the meeting, create a central business area with clubs, shops, and other commercial destinations — and give away all the surrounding land for free to virtual escorts. The area would need a currency, with the G$ an obvious choice. (OMC from Virwox might also work, but only if its owners were okay with using the currency for adult purposes.)”

7. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Second Life Relationships More Satisfying Than Real Ones. “Participants in the 3D virtual world Second Life are more satisfied with the romantic relationships they form in the virtual world than the ones in their real life, according to two studies conducted by Loyola Marymount University researchers. Even more remarkably, Second Life users who participated in the study reported that their level of sexual satisfaction with virtual world relationships was roughly equal to what they experienced in their real world relationships. Users surveyed as part of the studies rated their virtual world relationships better in the five categories of marital satisfaction than their real-world relationships. Half of respondents felt they could communicate better with their Second Life partner than their real-life partner. One-third of respondents said they felt a “stronger connection” to their Second Life partner.”

8. Smart Company (Australia) – Is IT a high enough priority in the upcoming election? “Australia has abandoned all but the most high tech of manufacturing, meaning that manufacturing is now a minor component of our GDP. We’ve also seen agriculture take a back seat in the economy. Due to this, our services industries are emerging as major players in the future of our nation’s GDP figures. And this means that IT and telecommunications are a very important part of the business infrastructure of the future. America has just suffered a serious downturn in employment and the financial reports are showing that the nation has learned to be more productive and more efficient as a result. Australia has not yet had this brute force applied, and is still complacent about productivity tools and building scalability and efficiency.”

9. Open Media Boston (USA) – Second Life Community Convention Brings the Metaverse to Boston. “his weekend, over 300 people from all over the nation and world will be descending on the Park Plaza Hotel “to network, build friendships and to discuss Second Life in a common forum” according to the leaders of AvaCon, Inc. – the non-profit behind the Second Life Community Convention 2010. This year’s SLCC is the sixth since 2005 and like its predecessors is entirely organized by active residents of the Second Life virtual world. The event is open to the public, and day passes are available for those who’d like to dip their toe in the digital waters of a sometimes exotic online universe.”

10. Wall Street Journal (USA) – China Approves ‘Warcraft’ Add-on. “Chinese Web portal operator Netease.com Inc. said Monday it received regulatory approval to offer the latest expansion pack for the popular “World of Warcraft” online game in China and plans to start letting players download the software next week. Regulatory uncertainty delayed the China release of the expansion pack, which launched in the U.S. in late 2008. The new version of the game could boost the company’s revenue by attracting more people to try the game and luring players into spending more time online. Netease, which operates the game under a license from Activision Blizzard Inc., said in a statement posted on the “World of Warcraft” website in China that it received approval to offer the “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King” expansion pack from China’s culture ministry on Monday and from the country’s publishing regulator last month.”

1. New York Times (USA) – The Best Virtual Worlds Have a Touch of Reality. “What do the American frontier in 1911, a distant sector of the galaxy in 2504 and the gritty, industrial outskirts of modern Philadelphia have in common? They are the settings of the best interactive entertainment products so far of 2010: Red Dead Redemption, from Rockstar Games (for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3); StarCraft II, from Blizzard Entertainment (for PCs and Macs); and Heavy Rain, from Quantic Dream (for the PS3). As Labor Day and the traditional fall and holiday buying seasons approach, these titles have set the bar in what has already been one of the most bountiful years ever for great games. When I think about what makes each of these games so captivating and the circumstances and organizations that produced them, I see a few common threads beyond the obvious technical polish.”

2. Santa Rosa Press Democrat (USA) – Facebook game’s closure a cautionary tale. “When game publishers turn out the lights on virtual worlds, everything in them ceases to exist. But anyone who spends money on virtual goods, be they Xbox Live Arcade titles, credits in Facebook games or accoutrements for online avatars, should view the recent closure of Facebook game “Street Racing” as a cautionary tale. On Monday, social gaming juggernaut Zynga shut down “Street Racing,” one of its less popular titles. According to social games blog Games.com, the Facebook application had about 400,000 active players. To those of us more familiar with console or traditional PC games, that sounds like a heck of a lot of people, but it pales in comparison next to the nearly 60 million who played Zynga’s “FarmVille” on Facebook last month.”

3. Charisma News Online (USA) – The Wave of the Future. “Victoria Walker isn’t a hard-core video gamer, but she knows a thing or two about avatars and virtual worlds. For her doctoral dissertation, the mother of two created a counselor training facility where mental health students could hone their diagnostic skills on a licensed counselor and higher-level graduate student pretending to be patients with self-inflicted injuries and eating disorders. In the virtual world known as Second Life, where online users inhabit digital representations of themselves called avatars, Walker created a facility that users can walk into, ride an elevator up to the counseling rooms on the second floor and look inside. “They could look through one-way mirrors and see a counseling session in progress,” says Walker, 39, now director of continuing education and instructional and Web technologies at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va. “Students were able to come in and interview [the patients], practice skills they had only been able to read about in their textbooks and see in videos, and practice with friends.”

4. Los Angeles Times (USA) – Video games are serious business for Blizzard CEO Michael Morhaime. “The gig: Chief executive and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment Inc., maker of mega video game franchises including World of Warcraft, one of the most popular online video games in history with more than 11 million monthly subscribers. Morhaime and two fellow UCLA students started Blizzard in Irvine in 1991. The company just released an intergalactic war game called StarCraft II, which took five years to complete. Morhaime, 42, captains the long voyages from the games’ inception to their release. In his nearly 20 years at Blizzard, the Northridge native has gone from a full-time code monkey to the big gorilla at a company whose Warcraft game alone brings in close to $1 billion for its parent company, Activision Blizzard.”

5. On Point Radio (USA) – Cheating in Social Games? – MIT’s Mia Consalvo on “Virtual” Ethics. “When I first wrote about cheating in videogames, I found that players cheated for four main reasons: they got stuck, they wanted to play God, they wanted to be a jerk, and they wanted to fast forward through content they thought was too tedious, too boring, too difficult, too whatever, for their personal tastes and abilities. (You can read in more detail about those reasons here). At that time there were a few casual games around (like Bejeweled) but no one had heard much about social games, or Facebook games, and certainly no one was tending virtual crops, or trading their real money for virtual horseshoes. What we did have were massively multiplayer online games such as Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft, where players were encouraged to engage in a long process of leveling up their characters, to become more powerful and to earn game currency. And although it was deemed against most games’ Terms of Service (and thus illegal), there were (and still are) companies that would sell you in-game currency (or in-game items) for a convenient charge to your credit card. Eliminate the tedium—get to the good stuff. Fast forward through content you consider boring, whether the game company likes it or not.”

6. Gamespy (Australia) – Digital Town, Inn Labeled WoW’s Red Light District, Blizzard Attempting Clean-up. “In what amounts to a virtual police blotter report, World of WarCraft customer service reps say, after receiving numerous complaints, they’re going to break up the digital orgy going on over at the Lion’s Pride Inn. Wow.com tracked down a forum listing from a concerned parent who said he canceled his son’s account after discovering the 15-year-old boy was getting his erotic role-play on at the Lion’s Pride Inn in the town of Goldshire on the U.S.-based Moon Guard server — a place that’s become a hot-spot for level 1 alt characters and WoW tourists looking to experience erotic role-playing. Call it the WoW Red Light District. “As a paying customer for 6 years now, I just wanted to voice my extreme displeasure regarding this disgusting server. IMO, it should be shut down,” the parent posted on the WoW forum. “T for Teen is one thing. What goes on in Goldshire on Moon Guard is appalling and beyond offensive.”

7. IT Pro (UK) – Businesses told to prepare for chaotic 10 years. “Companies will need to get ready for some chaotic times through to 2020, as much will lie out of their control, an analyst firm has warned. In the coming 10 years, there will be less cohesiveness between staff, as links become weaker and the working environment becomes increasingly virtual, Gartner has suggested. One of the firm’s predictions is there will be more work “swarms,” where employees will come together in a “flurry of collective activity” to add value to the group’s aim. These swarms, which will increase in number as a response to the need for ad hoc action needs, will form quickly to achieve a goal before disbanding, the firm explained.”

8. New York Times (USA) – The Award for Virtual Reality Goes to …“The coming “Teen Choice 2010” awards show on Fox Broadcasting will have an online complement in the form of a virtual beach party. (If only Gidget were around to get some virtual sand between her toes.) Fox is joining forces with Planet Cazmo, which creates virtual concerts, and the Mottola Company, led by the music impresario Tommy Mottola, for the promotion. It is tied to the annual presentation of the Teen Choice honors, scheduled to be broadcast by Fox on Monday from 8 to 10 p.m. (ET).”

9. Ars Technica (USA) – An edu-game that entertains? Inside The Curfew’s dystopia. “Labeling something as an “educational game” is usually the kiss of death. The recently released The Curfew is instead described as an “adventure webgame with a political thriller theme.” Commissioned by Channel 4, designed by LittleLoud, and written by Kieron Gillen, the game plays out like a point-and-click adventure crossed with a Sega CD FMV game. It’s not the most appealing description, but thanks to some excellent writing and a fully realized dystopic future, it’s an experience that’s well worth your time. The year is 2027. Once the sun goes down, all of Britain is placed under an involuntary curfew. After a second Great Depression and a near nuclear explosion in the heart of London, the country chose to elect the Shepherd Party. Now the country is run like a police state. The freedom and civil liberties that many of us take for granted are nowhere to be found. Citizens are divided into classes, and depending who you are, your movement is restricted.”

10. SIGNAL Magazine (USA) – Government Prepares For Work Force Changes. “The U.S. federal information technology work force is sandwiched between two major trends it must address to continue successful operations—the retirement eligibility of the Baby Boomer generation and the emergence of Web 2.0. The former threatens to empty hundreds of thousands of positions across the government, while the latter is shifting how the work force thinks about and uses technology. Solutions for both these issues converge in the Net Generation (sometimes referred to as Generation Y or the Millennial Generation), the demographic of youth currently preparing to enter institutions of higher learning and the job market. However, this population group is not a panacea for the government’s problems, because the ideas held by these young adults will challenge the status quo.”

1. LiveScience (USA) – Motion Sickness in Virtual Worlds. “If the idea of spinning carnival rides, reading in a car, or sitting through a 3-D movie makes you sick to your stomach, then Frederick Bonato is your new best friend. Bonato, an experimental psychologist at Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., studies all forms of motion sickness including cybersickness – a phenomenon that occurs in virtual reality environments such as those displayed by 3-D movies. Bonato knows first-hand the pain you suffer and is dedicated to solving this problem so you can travel, read, and enjoy Avatar more comfortably.”

2. Armed With Science (USA) – Three Ways Virtual Reality Can Improve Military Training. “Efficiency of flight simulators has improved since they first appeared in the 1930s. My first flight as a commercial airline pilot was with a full passenger load because the fidelity of the flight simulator made the training so realistic that it didn’t require aircraft flight hours. We now have a similar capability available for a far broader training and education spectrum. We can now use virtual environments to train more efficiently or in environments that are too dangerous to recreate. The key to this training is a realistic immersion. You need to feel like you are present in the environment. The virtual environment provides the immersion and the scalability is drastically improved. An example of the scalability is a base exercise which is generally limited to a portion of the base. The reason for the limit is due to some portion of the mission needing to continue. However, if a weapon of mass destruction were to be used in a large city it would likely effect large portions of multiple bases (like Joint Base San Antonio). We can use a virtual environment to train such a cataclysmic event. AETC is testing large-scale exercise scenarios in a virtual environment by building the Joint Base San Antonio command post.”

3. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Realtime Worlds Announces Project: MyWorld. “Developer Realtime Worlds is entering the virtual worlds business with its latest project, a 3D world with social features called Project: MyWorld. This world uses map information from GIS services to create 3D renders of entire countries. Users can then edit the procedurally generated data using special in-game tools. The suggested use is to make buildings more closely mimic real world counterparts and Realtime Worlds is actually going to attempt to enforce a sense of realism.”

4. Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) – Second Life avatars give disabled at Inglis House new experiences. “In the blockbuster movie Avatar, lead character Jake Sully, a paralyzed military veteran, wakes up in a virtual body to find that he can stand and run and dig his toes into the earth, which he does with animated abandon. “This is great,” Sully says as he disconnects himself from medical equipment and stumbles out of a laboratory. It is great – and not just for Jake. The ability to create a cyber version of yourself has been embraced by people with disabilities stemming from arthritis, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, mental illness, and other debilitating conditions. They log on to virtual worlds, Second Life chief among them, to do things they cannot, or are afraid to, do in real life. Can’t go places without a wheelchair? In Second Life, you not only can walk, you can fly. Is your speech slurred? In Second Life, text chats can let out your inner Shakespeare.”

5. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – ReactionGrid discontinues $25 region hosting. “ReactionGrid no longer offers $25 regions, offering only entire servers starting at $150 a month, with a $500 setup fee. Each server can handle four regions, and there is a discount for educators — to $75 a region with a $220 setup fee. “The price for a $75 four-sim dedicated server actually works out to less than $25 per sim should users decide to go that route,” ReactionGrid CEO Kyle Gomboy told Hypergrid Business. According to Gomboy, the company has decided to focus on dedicated server deployments and the Jibe platform, which is accessible via the Web. Those looking to rent individual regions can go through a reseller, Gomboy said, but declined to provide any names. “If you hang out on the ReactionGrid community you will find many educators and others there who have the lower priced single sim options,” he said. “[But] I do not know the specifics of what each partner offers so from our perspective we’d rather not say you can get any particular level of hosting from a partner.”

6. The Jakarta Globe (Indonesia) – Gamers at Risk of Virtual Addiction. “Back in 2002, then-seventh-grader Surya Santoso was spending six to seven hours at a time playing “Nexia,” his favorite online game. The game, the first massive multiplayer online role playing game to hit Indonesia, was enormously popular when it debuted that year. “During those years, it was almost like my life revolved around the virtual world of my avatar, the mage Nonamushi,” he recalls. “I was obsessed with increasing my character’s power to heal and to attack, to the point where I often forgot to eat and sleep. I wanted to stop, but my mind always persuaded me: ‘Just one more level, just one more step.’ ” Now a university student, Surya has vowed never to touch another online game because he knows how casual curiosity can lead to a destructive cycle of addiction. ”

7. Thanh Nienh Daily (Vietnam) – Game over! . “Vietnamese authorities are poised to issue a stringent crackdown on the online gaming industry. Authorities claim that the move is aimed at protecting the nation’s youth from perceived social ills. Critics of the measures have decried them as unfeasible and unwise. On July 16, the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, the municipal administration, submitted a proposal to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung asking that he tighten the screws on online gaming. In the request, the city government noted that the number of licensed online games has increased from only two in 2006 to more than 65 today. The city hall claimed that 43 of the currently licensed games are violent in nature. The city government proposed a halt on the importation of new online games and an end to their advertisement “in any form.” It further proposed that all new games be screened for violent, gambling or pornographic content. All existing licenses should be re-evaluated; those that fail to meet the new content standards should be revoked, the city officials recommended.”

8. PhysOrg (USA) – Living in the Past and Looking Toward the Future. “Advanced computer models are changing the field by projecting the interactions between people and the landscape. They track agricultural activity, soil erosion, game animal populations, and more. Models enable archaeologists to explore life in past societies, helping them connect field observations to a sequence of events that explains them. The results may even help predict the future. Traditional archaeology limits the types of data that can be collected, said Michael Barton, a geoarchaeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “At best we get snapshots, usually with very tiny windows on what’s going on in the past.” Barton said that, conventionally, archaeologists compile these snapshots, which represent different times and locations, into narratives in an attempt to explain the large-scale changes within groups of people and the landscapes they inhabit.”

9. Veterans Today (USA) – Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan and how it is helping some Troops and Vets with PTSD. “Back in May 2010, we ran an article Virtual Reality Combat Simulations as a Treatment for PTSD that resulted in heated debate [60 comments] about both the negative and positive aspects of the Pentagon, and Department of Veteran’s Affairs experimentation with Virtual Reality War Simulations as a treatment for PTSD. Among those contributing to that discussion in a dignified manner was Professor Skip Rizzo, Ph.D. Associate Director – Institute for Creative Technologies and Research Professor – Psychiatry and Gerontology University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. In sum readers can conclude that Skip is the Father (or Founder) of Virtual Reality (VR) as a treatment to help heal active duty troops and Vets of PTSD. For the record, Dr. Rizzo and other proponents of VR, to treat PTSD, claim only that it is a TREATMENT not a cure for PTSD, and is to be used in conjunction with other treatments and therapies.”

10. Ars Technica (USA) – A decade to separate us: Ars reviews StarCraft 2. “Gamers have expectations for StarCraft 2 that will be impossible to meet. Players have waited a decade for a sequel to what is widely considered to be one of the best real-time strategy games of all time, and one of the world’s most-played PC games, period. Blizzard certainly isn’t afraid to make bold choices: LAN gaming is out, the title is being split into three releases, and the game is launching alongside a reboot of the popular Battle.net service that stretches across all of Blizzard’s properties.”

1. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Women Beat Men in Virtual Shopping Habits. “The shopping habits of women compared to men in virtual worlds may reflect those stereotypically seen in the real world. I’m not being sexist here: Ask 100 women if they like to shop or not and I bet you’d get a lot of positive responses. At the least, I don’t think it’s crazy to say that women like to generally shop more than men. According to a new survey, the same might be true in the worlds of virtual online games.”

2. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Want eternal life? It could be possible in the Internet of Things. “Would you feel hurt if your refrigerator stopped returning your emails? Would you be annoyed to have your dinner interrupted by a pot plant demanding a drink? Are you friends with your toilet on Facebook? Do you like the idea of a virtual avatar that contains your personality and memories — the essence of you — that could communicate with your descendants?”

3. Fort Leavenworth Lamp (USA) – ‘America’s Army’ game leads to NASA’s ‘Moonbase Alpha’. “Eight years after the Army Game Studio launched its initial first-person shooter video game, “America’s Army Recon,” NASA joined in with the release of its prototype game, “Moonbase Alpha,” July 6. The new NASA game was developed with the assistance of the Army Game Studio, so “Moonbase Alpha” and “America’s Army” share some DNA. But the two games have different goals. While the “America’s Army” game has morphed into more than 38 versions, each offering true-to-life Soldier experiences from training through combat missions, “Moonbase Alpha” allows gamers to step into the role of an astronaut at a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement. The mission scenario of “Moonbase Alpha” requires virtual astronauts to restore critical systems and oxygen flow after a meteor strike cripples a solar array and oxygen-generating equipment on the moon. Resources available to players during the game include an interactive command center, a lunar rover, mobile robotic repair units and fully-stocked equipment. “Moonbase Alpha” is free, rated “E” for play by everyone, and can be played by a single player or with multiple players online.”

4. Cult of Mac (USA) – Pocket Metaverse iPad App Improves Life In Second Life [Review]. “Unfortunately, Second Life definitely ain’t what she used to be. There have been more than a few headline-grabbing scandals in recent years, user numbers have fallen off a bit and the newest official Linden Labs viewer software hasn’t exactly gotten rave reviews. However, there is still a very large and very loyal SL contingent that is eager to access their digitized world wherever and whenever they can. Those people have been begging and pleading for a reliable Second Life viewer for the iPhone since day one. Those same people really began clamoring for something more mobile when the iPad came on the scene.”

5. Dr Dobbs (USA) – 3D Gesture-Based Interaction System Unveiled. “Touch screens such as those found on the iPhone or iPad have become a standard form of technology allowing interaction with smart phones, computers, and other devices. Now scientists at Fraunhofer FIT in Germany have developed a next-generation noncontact gesture and finger recognition system. The novel system detects hand and finger positions in real-time and translates these into appropriate interaction commands. Furthermore, the system does not require special gloves or markers and is capable of supporting multiple users.”

6. The Telegraph (UK) – Council scraps £36,000 virtual town hall in Second Life. “Tameside Council, in Greater Manchester, ‘rented’ an island in the virtual world of Second Life and built a computerised town hall, hoping it would encourage users to access local authority services. But the project has been abandoned after council chiefs admitted they could not justify the cost. Now the authority has been attacked by critics for wasting taxpayers’ money at a time when the squeeze was on public finances. John Bell, leader of the council’s Conservative oppostion, said: “They want to get in the real world, not a virtual one. “It’s absolutely barmy. They must be out of their heads. How may pavements would you be able to mend for £36,000? How many roads could you maintain?”

7. BBC News (UK) – Guide creates virtual world on Second Life after stroke. “A tour guide recovering from a stroke has created a computer-generated version of the Highlands in virtual world Second Life. Tony Hamsworth began work on the project during his year-long recuperation. Second Life users design an avatar, a computer-generated representation of themselves, to live in the online world. There are believed to be as many as 16 million users from all over the world. The virtual Highlands stretches from Inverness down Loch Ness to Fort Augustus and Loch Oich.”

8. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Gold Farmers Mimic Behavior of Drug Dealers. “The networks that sell virtual items illegally in MMORPGs behave similarly to the networks that sell actual illegal goods in the real world. Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad and Brian Keegan of Northwestern University hypothesized that the illicit activities of virtual worlds would mimic those of the real world. By studying both gold farmers and drug dealers, they found that the techniques used to keep both in business were very similar. The pair says they compared data from an EverQuest 2 gold farming network with “a drug trafficking ring obtained from a Canadian law enforcement taskforce called Project Caviar.” The data released is a bit complicated, but they found that the gold farming network “exhibits a clear pattern of dissortative mixing that resembles the dissortative pattern observed in the offline Caviar drug trafficking network,” which they say is “key evidence that behaviors in online, virtual worlds also map onto behaviors found in the offline, real world.”

9. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Digits Live Show: Virtual Goods Show High Risk of Fraud. “As sales of virtual goods on sites like Facebook, Second Life, and World of Warcraft become increasingly popular, cyber thievery is also on the rise. Online consumers spent than $2 billion on virtual goods such as songs downloaded from iTunes and gifts and currency on Facebook and gaming sites in 2009, and more than 1% of these transactions involved stolen credit cards, fake goods, and other fraudulent actions. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen and Jessica Vascellaro discuss the growing market for digital wares and the steps that social-networking and gaming sites are taking to prevent fraud in their virtual marketplaces.”

10. Boston Globe (USA) – Stuck in your online routines? Give this a shot. “Attention Second Lifers: Are you afraid, even in your fantasy worlds, of new experiences. Your avatar might be a candidate, then, for a psychotropic drug designed to treat Wanderlust Deficit Disorder — in other words, Internet addiction. The drug, Virta-Flaneurazine (virtaflaneurazine.wordpress.com) is actually a bit of downloadable code that causes Second Life avatars to rapidly and uncontrollably teleport from one Second Life location to the next and to walk and fly in circles. The idea is to get people thinking about how much time they spend stuck in the same old places, in-world and out.”

1. BBC (UK) – View from the end of the world. “Taking a journey to the end of the world might not be for everyone, but in the virtual spaces of gaming and online environments, it’s not as dangerous as it might seem. Robert Overweg in the Netherlands has been capturing virtual spaces since 2007 and his latest project has produced some of the most eerie and unexpected pictures from the worlds of first-person shooter video-games. He first found the edges of a world while playing a game called Left for Dead. “I saw normal road, walls and bushes but then the road just ended – it was foggy. So I decided to capture this and go into other games and explore their aesthetics of the ends of their worlds,” Mr Overweg said.”

2. The Guardian (UK) – Internet addiction driving South Koreans into realms of fantasy. “s dusk descends on the Sinchon neighbourhood of Seoul, a wave of Saturday shoppers melts away, on cue, into restaurants and bars. But in a windowless room several floors above the throng, Ji Yu-tae is steeling himself for a very different night’s entertainment. His only companions are a bottle of vitamin drink, cigarettes and a monitor displaying a scene from Aion, one of South Korea’s most popular online games. When the hunger pangs become irresistible, he will click a box in the corner of his PC screen and order instant noodles. By Monday morning, after two days of almost non-stop gaming, Ji will make his way to work, pale and sleep-deprived, but content that he has progressed in the virtual world that has been his second home for the past two years. Seated next to him among rows of screens at this PC bang, an internet cafe in the South Korean capital, are scores of fellow obsessives whose attachment to online gaming is fast becoming a problem in the world’s most advanced internet society.”

3. Ars Technica (USA) – Gamers crave anonymity, so Blizzard scuttles Real ID plans. “Blizzard did not make many friends with its recent decision to force users to post with their real names in its official forums. The response was immediate and deafening, with pages and pages of users complaining bitterly about the new rule. One Blizzard employee posted his own name to prove the system’s safety only to have his personal information, including address and phone number, posted on the forum. The company listened to the feedback, and is now reversing course. “We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums,” Mike Morhaime, the CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, wrote. “As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

4. Huffington Post (USA) – Overview: Asia’s Social Media Scene. “Asia’s diverse cultures, languages and levels of economic development have always made it an exciting place to work. Now, however, Asia’s wide range of digital ecosystems have created wildly divergent virtual worlds that few people understand. These virtual worlds are, however, having a very real impact on Asias economics, politics and culture. I run Ogilvy’s team of social media specialists in Asia and created this video for an internal meeting to show some recent developments across the region. Countries in Asia with a similar level of development can have extremely different ways of approaching the Internet. In Korea, broadband connections are available virtually everywhere, while Japan’s Internet population is highly reliant on mobile.”

5. Times Higher Education (UK) – Sceptics start to see the other side of Second Life. “Hostility between academics who advocate teaching through virtual worlds and those who scorn the idea is being blamed for holding back the evolution of higher education. The warning comes despite evidence that universities are slowly embracing virtual environments such as Second Life for teaching, according to a report from the Virtual World Watch consultancy. The report, Zen and the Art of Avatar Maintenance, says that like the two characters in Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, academics hold polarised views of learning online. “Some people take to it with great enthusiasm; others recoil in dismay, horror or anger,” writes the study’s author, John Kirriemuir.”

6. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Reality Gets a Makeover. “French electronics company Parrot SA plans next month to release a toy helicopter with a twist. The AR Drone has a pair of cameras to relay video to iPhones or iPads, which function as the remote control. The device also recognizes certain objects, such as other AR Drones, and can add graphics to the video feed, creating a videogame played out in the real world. The $299 toy is the latest example of an effort to commercialize augmented reality, a technique in which extra information or graphics are added to ordinary surroundings. From virtual mirrors that superimpose a shade of lipstick on a potential buyer’s face, to restaurant reviews that pop up when a person points a camera phone at a restaurant, proponents say the technology has a range of possible uses beyond videogames that mix the real and virtual worlds.”

7. Bendigo Advertiser (Australia) – Professor nurses a real passion for regional health. “Professor Isabelle Ellis is looking forward to the challenges of her new role as professor of rural and regional nursing at the La Trobe Rural Health School. Professor Ellis was appointed by the La Trobe University board and will also head the school of nursing and midwifery. Professor Ellis was the mastermind behind a virtual online hospital course called v-Hospital, which enables nursing students studying externally to access real-life nursing in rural and remote areas. Her program was heralded a world first after it was launched at the Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory in 2007. After leaving the NT, she took up a role at the University of Western Australia, where she continued to develop her passion for helping disadvantaged communities in rural and remote areas.”

8.Marketing Vox (USA) – Cascadian Farm Becomes First Branded Crop in FarmVille. “Organic brand Cascadian Farm is becoming the first branded organic crop to be offered in Zynga’s popular online game FarmVille. Beginning July 19 through July 26, Cascadian Farm will give FarmVille players such benefits as coupon offers, organic farming and green living tips and – per the game’s philosophy – the opportunity to enhance their farm. The campaign was developed with the support of Sterling-Rice Group. The brand has recreated the real Cascadian Farm – located in the Upper Skagit Valley of Washington’s North Cascade Mountains – virtually, with the online fruits and vegetables planted in similar fashion. There’s also an avatar farmer called “Farmer Joe Cascadian,” who’ll serve as the “virtual” tender to the brand’s own FarmVille farm.”

9. Gamasutra (USA) – Virtual Fairground Launches Engine for 3D Flash-based MMO Games and Virtual Worlds. “Virtual world and MMO games specialist Virtual Fairground announced today the launch of its browser-based virtual world and MMO game development platform, The Ride. The Ride enables reliable and rapid development of advanced and scalable 3D Flash-based virtual worlds and MMO games at a fraction of the cost usually associated with these types of products and services. Virtual Fairground has spend over 2 years developing this proprietary technology and design platform after raising US 4 million in venture capital in 2008.”

10. Government Technology (USA) – Edmonton, Alberta, Replicating City in Second Life. “Second Life may be a scary, uncharted world for most local governments, but not for Edmonton, Alberta.
In the capital of Canadian province Alberta, CIO Chris Moore is on a mission to recreate his city in the virtual world, where avatars roam and interact like they would in real life. Launched in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, Second Life is an immersive online environment and a 3-D modeling tool based around simple geometric shapes that allows users to build virtual objects. At the beginning of the year, Second Life had 18 million accounts registered. Moore is one of them. When it comes to business, he likes to plug in.”