1. The Drum (UK) – Yomego set to enter virtual world with Horrible Histories. “Children’s book publisher Scholastic has commissioned social media company Yomego with the developed of a virtual world for its Horrible Histories series. The Horrible Histories virtual world is planned to go live in June 2011 and will allow fans of the book series the chance to interact with the historical world it has built over the years. A series of ‘rooms’ based on key historical periods, including Rotten Rome, Awesome Egypt and Terrible Tudor London are planned, with children being allowed to create their own avatar when they enter. They will then be able to explore each world and discover the ‘nasty bits’ of history within them and interact with other avatars.”

2. Courthouse News Service (USA) – Players Want Real Money from Virtual World. “Linden Research, creator of the massive multiplayer “Second Life” Internet game, induced thousands of players to invest as much as $100 million in real money in “virtual” properties, then took the properties back without just compensation, four former players say in a federal class action. Plaintiffs Carl Evans, Donald Spencer, Valerie Spencer and Cindy Carter say that throughout the early 2000s the company and its founder, Phillip Rosedale, promoted the concept of property ownership and commerce in Second Life through press releases and media interviews. Linden Research and Rosedale claimed they would protect rights to virtual property and that the virtual real estate could be used to earn money for its owners.”

3. nebusiness (UK) – Firms explore world of virtual conferencing. “Thanks to the lingering volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, many European business leaders have found themselves struggling to attend meetings as planned. This unusual source of disruption has led Gateshead-based business Vector76 to encourage firms to explore the possibility of meeting in the virtual world. The company was set up two years ago to explore the development of the 3D internet, especially virtual worlds such as Second Life. Vector76 set up a virtual NewcastleGateshead last year, and CEO Shaun Allan says the recently-launched conferencing facilities are ideal for deal-makers who have found their operations grounded by the lack of movement in the real world.”

4. The Guardian (UK) – Creating the next dotcom boom could be child’s play. “Anyone expecting one of the figures behind the world’s most popular online game, the sword and sorcery epic World of Warcraft, to serve up another instalment of blood, guts and glory with his latest online venture is going to be in for a shock when his new project goes live next week. There’s no fighting in the world of Boaki, there are no items to trade and players must collaborate as they try and solve the mystery of what happened to the previous inhabitants of their strange new world. But the most striking difference is that the new “game” is aimed specifically at children.”

5. The Age (Australia) – Split Screen: Lost in the sandbox. “Open world” is one of those phrases popular with games marketing people today. Games promise freedom, non-linear stories, with a unique experience for every player, a “sandbox” for everyone to play in and create their own fun. While the creation of convincing virtual worlds that encourage exploration and experimentation is a great goal, and one toward which games have made huge strides in the past decade, it has inherent risks. The big one, I think, is a phenomenon I call “too much world, too little game”. This describes a game which features a big world, but puts too little in it for the player to do, or puts in too many of the same activities with too little variety.”

6. Honolulu Weekly (USA) – Life on Mars. “Jim Sink is the CEO of Avatar Reality, a locally–based gaming company. Its first game is Blue Mars, a 3D virtual world that will remind you of Second Life at first glance but aims to be the next generation of virtual worlds. Before working with Avatar Reality, Sink worked at Microsoft’s Xbox Live division and managed business development at Foundation9, the world’s largest producer of independent video games. Honolulu Weekly sat down with Sink to talk about some of his projects and the state of the high-tech industry in Hawaii. In short: things are not heading in the right direction.”

7. Kotaku (Australia) – Identity And Online Avatars: A Discussion. “Gamers are beautiful, so think of this as a love letter to you. I love how we can circle the wagons when the medium we care for so much is assailed. So, let me tell you directly: my goal is to support your creativity in gaming and other digital media forms. In recent days, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Elisabeth Soep for boingboing.net on the topic of research into identity representation that I have been conducting. This article, “Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell,” also had the distinction of having been reblogged on Kotaku under the sensationalistic headline “Making Avatars That Aren’t White Dudes Is Hard.” I am thrilled to see the dialogue started by my fellow denizens of gamerdom, however the title and article misstated my aims. ”

8. PopMatters (USA) – T.L. Taylor’s Guide to MMO Culture. “One of the most interesting shifts in MMO design compared to single player gaming is moving from an emotion centered design to something oriented around social spaces. Rather than focusing on making a game fair and fun for one person, you have to orient it around thousands. T.L. Taylor’s book Play Between Worlds is a careful study on the effects of design in Everquest over an extended period of time. Detailing her observations as a Gnome Necromancer, the book relies on academic research and interviews to paint a broad picture of how the design of the game interacts with the culture.”

9. iTWire (USA) – Would you pay US$3.5 million for a virtual horse? “Well (as a collective) plenty have, the World of Warcraft Celestial Steed hit the virtual fantasy universe created by Blizzard, and lots of Warcraftians were willing to jump in the saddle. The Celestial Steed mount and Lil’XT Pet (!) went on sale over at Blizzard from the 16th of April (or 15th depending on where you live), and it seems that folks that fossick around in World of Warcraft are pretty sick and tired of their current modes of transport, and want to try the new. At a price of US$25 the queue to download the Celestial Steed alone was 140,000 and seven hours long at launch. This is a nice windfall of US$3.5 million for the Blizzard massive multiplayer juggernaut.”

10. Computerworld (USA) – Linden Lab holds to grand plans for Second Life. “Linden Lab’s plans for Second Life are as visionary as ever — “to enhance and improve the human condition.” But the company is working to marry those dreams to more practical goals for the immediate future. “I’ll settle for a million active users by the end of the year,” said Tom Hale, chief product officer for Linden Lab, which develops and operates Second Life. The service now has about 700,000 active users, who spend more than an hour per month logged in, up from 680,000 active users in February. One million active users is a big goal, but it’s more modest than the dreams of the Second Life boom a few years ago, when Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale talked about Second Life becoming bigger than the Web in 10-15 years. For example, see this 2008 video of Rosedale at TED Talks.”

1. ABC News (USA) – DreamWorks Rolls out “Kung Fu Panda” Virtual World. “After 2-1/2 years of work and an investment of about $10 million, DreamWorks Animation has started rolling out its first online virtual world — a browser-based Web theme park tied to its “Kung Fu Panda” movie franchise. The marketing push for “Kung Fu Panda World,” which comes at a subscription cost of $5.95 per month, but can also be sampled after watching an online ad, kicks off Monday after a soft launch at the end of March.”

2. Wired (USA) – Virtual Worlds, Real Money: Can Social Games Solve Music’s Woes? “Music fans of tomorrow are kids of today, and the way they pay for digital content is through virtual worlds like Farmville and Penguin Town, which turn the acquisition of virtual goods — and digital music is nothing if not a virtual good — into a game. Conduit Labs’ Music Pets app for Facebook may look cute, but it could have tangible ramifications for how music is discovered and sold in the future. The goal of Music Pets is to entertain a virtual pet by training it to like the music you like, then using points to send the pet out to find more music to add to your collection. It sounds silly, but this cartoon-ish virtual world includes every element of the real-world music experience: getting recommendations, deciding whether you like songs, collecting music, and going over to your friends’ “houses” to play songs from your collection, which, as with just about everything else, requires that you expend points.”

3. BBC News (UK) – South Korean children face gaming curfew. “The South Korean government is introducing policies aimed at curbing the amount of time children spend playing online games. The first involves barring online gaming access to young people of school age between 12am (midnight) and 8am. The other policy suggests slowing down people’s internet connections after they have been logged on to certain games for a long period of time. The Culture Ministry is calling on games providers to implement the plans.”

4. National Defense Magazine (USA) – Airmen to Live Out Their Careers In Cyberspace. “Air Force officials anticipate a world in which every recruit receives an avatar upon joining the service. These avatars would follow airmen through their entire careers, earning promotions and educational credits and even moving with them to new offices and bases. This would take place in simulated worlds that mirror the service’s actual facilities. “Everyone who comes into the Air Force will be given an avatar, and that avatar travels with them, grows with them, changes appearance with them,” said Larry Clemons, of the Air Education and Training Command. “It will provide them a history of where they’ve been and a notion of where they’re going.”

5. CNET (USA) – Haptic hug vest makes emoticons so last century. “Sure, it’s great when that hot avatar gives you a hug in Second Life, but wouldn’t it be even better if you could actually feel the embrace? Researchers from Japan are demonstrating a motorized haptic device that lets you experience real-time virtual hugs by physically reproducing the pressure felt on the chest and back when someone gives you a squeeze. Getting a hug that moves beyond the basic emoticon requires donning a kind of harness adorned with soft fabric hands that envelop the wearer in a warm faux embrace. But the HaptiHug is only one of the affective garments included in the I_FeelIM (“I feel therefore I am”) system, which uses software to extract emotional meaning from written text and pass it on to one of a number of haptic devices that react accordingly.”

6. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Avatar Reality Taking Blue Mars To The Clouds. “In 2007 when Avatar Reality first began showing off its virtual world, Blue Mars, much of the talk was high fidelity environments built on CryEngine 2. The early screen shots were certainly something to see compared to most virtual worlds. But that beauty came with high system requirements. Now, however, Avatar Reality has announced that it will be using the AMD Fusion Cloud Server developed by AMD, Super Micro, and OTOY to stream Blue Mars from the cloud to virtually any computer’s Web browser. Specifically, Avatar Reality mentions handhelds, Macs, and legacy hardware–not the gaming PCs that usually run CryEngine 2.”

7. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Avatar II: The Hospital. “The nurses have been told there’s a crisis. But they’re hardly prepared for the chaos that awaits. Hospitals, medical schools and health foundations are staking out space in the online community Second Life, in order to train medical and nursing students in clinical skills and to improve hospital efficency and response to emergencies. Dozens of patients, stricken with a debilitating flu, crowd the emergency room. Some slump mutely in chairs. Others wander, moaning or calling out for blankets. Just as the nurses begin triage, part of the hospital goes dark: a blackout. This chaotic scene isn’t real—it’s part of an online simulation designed to help nurses make quick, sure decisions in emergencies. Dozens of hospitals, medical schools and health foundations have staked out space in the online community Second Life, where participants can build their own virtual clinics and stage just about any training drill they can imagine. Interest is so high, both Stanford University and the University of Michigan last month held workshops on medical training and education in the virtual world.”

8. Reason Magazine (USA) – I Am, I Am, I Am Superman/And I Know What’s Happening. “Peter Ludlow has a pair of guest posts at Henry Jenkins’ site about some battles that broke out in Second Life, a well-known virtual world. The short version: Pranksters and vandals, known in gaming circles as griefers, make trouble for other players; a vigilante group forms to battle the griefers; paranoia sets in, and the vigilantes start to see griefers everywhere. Eventually the conflict spills out into the outside world.”

9. Kotaku (USA) – Blizzard Is Selling World Of Warcraft Mounts Because Players Demanded Them. “While naysayers may think corporate greed is the answer, Blizzard tells Kotaku the real reason World of Warcraft mounts have shown up for sale in the company’s online store is because that’s exactly what the players wanted. The overwhelming response to yesterday’s addition of the Celestial Steed in-game mount for World of Warcraft to the Blizzard store backs up comments we received today from Blizzard PR man Ryan Arbogast. Purchase queues began forming soon after the virtual item went on sale, with players in the forums reporting upwards of 12,000 folks waiting at the virtual cash register at one time for a chance to purchase the translucent flying mount. Wow.com reported yesterday that at one point the number topped 140,000.”

10. GamesRadar (USA) – Hands on with The Old Republic. “Strange to say it, but when you first start playing The Old Republic you forget it’s going to be built like an MMO. Missions, such as the one we played recently, are doled out in such dramatic and wordy ways that you’re temporarily blinded to the fact that the bomb-pursuit you’re on is essentially a World of Warcraft quest in space boots. Secure a ZR-57 bomb that’s deep within a Separatist fortress on the planet of Ord Mantell, having taken down a force field at another point somewhere within said fortress? Well, that’s a little bit of a “fight your way into a zombie castle and bring back some fairy dust” retrieval quest isn’t it?”

1. Computerworld (USA) – Avatars rising in the enterprise. “Avatars aren’t just for the movies or for techies with time on their hands. Organizations are using virtual worlds for training, simulation and prototyping, among other things. The U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) is making the most of what officials call “immersive learning” in secure, virtual work environments replete with avatars, to augment existing training curricula and to facilitate collaborative engineering. “Immersive learning is all about the true power of a virtual world where gravity is optional and scaling is arbitrary, and objects can be made to be transparent,” says Steve Aguiar, virtual worlds project lead at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport, one of the NUWC’s two primary units, in Newport, R.I.”

2. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – IARPA Soliciting Info On Intelligence Training In Virtual Worlds. “Last month the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) posted an RFI looking for quantitative research–and theories and proposals on how to obtain it–on the effectiveness of using virtual worlds for intelligence analyst training. Responses are due April 12 as the agency is aiming to incorporate the information received into a two-day workshop in May. It says the information will help it set an agenda, with some respondents getting an invitation to the workshop itself and an opportunity to set the stage for a multi-year competitive program.”

3. AFP (France) – Augmented reality puts the squeeze into virtual hugs. “Now you really can reach out and touch someone through the Internet, with the help of a wearable robot designed by a husband-and-wife team of scientists based in Japan. Five years in the making, the device aims to inject a little physicality into online chatter, boosting the emotional quotient of virtual exchanges between flesh-and-blood people. Forget emoticons, those annoying little smiley 🙂 or frowning 🙁 faces added to text messages with key strokes. The quickened thump of an angry heart beat, a spine-tingling chill of fear, or that warm-all-over sensation sparked by true love — all can be felt even as your eyes stay glued to a computer screen.”

4. Computerworld (USA) – Intel guru says 3-D Internet will arrive within five years. “A technology guru at Intel Corp. predict that the internet will look significantly different in five to 10 years, when much of it will be three dimensional, or 3D. Sean Koehl, a technology evangelist with Intel Labs, said technology is emerging that will one day change the way we interact with electronic devices and with each other. That could come as soon as five years from now when, he predicted, there will be realistic-looking three-dimensional applications. “I think our lives will be a lot different,” said Koehl. “Look at the trends of the last decade or two. Think about computers becoming widespread, and the Internet and these mobile devices. With the availability of all this computing power, we’re only beginning to exploit it. Now we’re adding more intelligence and more capability. Add that to 3-D worlds and it could be very different than the sort of experiences that we have today.”

5. Kotaku (USA) – How World Of Warcraft Could Change The Workplace. “Stanford University communications professor Byron Reeves talks to The Washington Post about how the collaborative online model of games like World of Warcraft can help change real world workplaces and empower better leaders. Reeves is the co-author of Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. With a title that long and involved, you know he has to be an authority of the subject of plumbing virtual worlds for ways to enhance our workplace interactions, so you should listen to what the man says. As a once-rabid MMO player, I’ve often marveled at the difference between the way large video game guilds work and how your average office operates. I would spend hours online with people from all over the world, with one or two leaders flawlessly orchestrating the actions of 25 to 40 different individuals, none of whom had ever met in person.”

6. Smart Money (USA) – Entrepreneurs Doing Business by Avatar. “After seeing “Avatar,” the movie, I wondered whether the record-breaking intake at the box office might spur more entrepreneurial activity in places populated by, er, “real” avatars—like Second Life, the best-known and largest of the 3-D virtual-world platforms. Could Avatar do for avatars what Titanic did for Leonardo DiCaprio? An avatar is a digital, simulated representation of a person. On sites like Second Life, There and ActiveWorlds, you can engage your avatar alter ego in all sorts of escapist fantasies, like designing and dancing in your own underwater disco. When Second Life and its peers came out in 2003, companies rushed in to build outposts and sell products to the hoards of consumers rushing in to play. Attire companies like American Apparel and Giorgio Armani and tech giants like IBM and Dell set up virtual stores, using the build-it-and-they-will-come approach. Problem is, nobody came. The supposed consumers used the site to attend concerts or become unicorns, not to buy a computer. And what did they want to buy? White hair and goth outfits for their avatars. Which is not to say entrepreneurs should dismiss the immersive reality trip. In the past few years, much has changed, and many companies are doing virtual business—just not the kind they originally envisioned.”

7. CIT Magazine (UK) – Technology forecast: Virtual events becoming reality. “New technologies are adding to planners’ armouries, but which are the best and how will they shape future events, asks Leanne Bell. The conditions are perfect for a boom in virtual meetings – there’s pressure to reduce travel costs, allocate tiny budgets to events and, at the same time, the technology is cheaper and more sophisticated than ever before. Undoubtedly, most events in future will include some virtual or online element. But how far will event planners plunge into the virtual world? Will the networking event of the future comprise avatars swigging virtual beer? MPI (Meeting Professionals International) chief executive Bruce MacMillan agrees technology will be among the most powerful influences on events in the next five to ten years. But rather than going totally virtual, MacMillan says the event of the future will be a hybrid – a live event enhanced by virtual components. “Hybrid events are the reality of the future,” he says.”

8. CNET (USA) – Google trying anew for a 3D Web. “Two related projects from Mozilla and Google, each with the similar goal of bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web, appear to be joining forces after a change in Google tactics. The two projects emerged at nearly the same time in 2009: the O3D browser plug-in from Google and the proposed WebGL standard from Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which standardizes the OpenGL graphics interface on which WebGL is based. O3D is a higher-level technology, whereas WebGL is more concerned with the nuts and bolts of 3D graphics. O3D lets browsers show accelerated 3D graphics such as this island scene. It’s tailored for tasks such as first-person shooters or virtual worlds. In recent months, though, O3D has become dormant. But it’s not fading away, exactly: Google is trying to breathe new life into the project by rebuilding it on a WebGL foundation.”

9. CBS News (USA) – Korean Couple Nurtured Virtual Baby While Real Baby Starved to Death, Say Reports. “They may have excelled as online parents, but prosecutors in South Korea say a young couple from Suwon province failed miserably at the real thing. According to prosecutors, the couple would put their daughter to bed at night and then sneak off to a neighborhood internet cafe for 10-hour gaming sessions in a role-playing game called “Prius Online.” Prosecutors say that in the Second Life-style game, the couple raised a virtual baby, while their real daughter was given just one bottle of milk a day, Korean news report said.”

10. iTWire (Australia) – Blizzard mulls Aussie World of Warcraft servers. “World of Warcraft publisher Blizzard Entertainment this week reportedly said it was discussing the possibility of hosting Australian servers for the popular massively multiplayer online game. The lack of servers hosted in Australia for the game — also a common problem with a number of other online offerings — means that local players must connect to international servers and suffer extended latency compared with players in those countries, which can disadvantage them in-game and cause slower online reaction times. “I would say it’s possible and that it’s something we talk about on a regular basis — and I will also say it’s something I have talked about this week,” World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack said in an interview with AusGamers publishers this week.”

1. The Australian (Australia) – Virtual worlds the real deal. “ASK most academics about virtual worlds and the response will usually be something along the lines that they are frivolous games of no relevance to their work. Get more specific and inquire whether they have a presence in the best known virtual world, Second Life, and they commonly refer to their workloads and bemoan how nice it would be to have a first life. Yet virtual worlds are profoundly affecting opportunities for research and teaching, and need to be taken much more seriously. Virtual worlds are places where digital representations of individuals, or avatars, congregate. They are not real but they are a place where real people interact. As such, they are places where behaviour can be studied and important research can be conducted.”

2. VentureBeat (USA) – Vivaty shuts down site for user-generated virtual scenes. “Virtual world company Vivaty announced on its site today that it will shut down its user-generated “virtual scenes” site on April 16, another victim of the malaise around virtual worlds. Jay Weber, chief technical officer and co-founder, announced on the company’s blog that the site will close because its business of letting users create their own 3D virtual spaces just hasn’t taken off. “I apologize to our loyal users that this must be so,” Weber wrote. “Vivaty.com is a rather expensive site to run, much more than a regular web site, and Vivaty the company has been running out of money for some time. Our business model was to earn money through Vivabux sales, but that has never come close to covering our costs. We tried for months to find a bigger partner that would support the site, but that didn’t work out.”

3. Philadelphia Inquirer (USA) – Girls abandon dolls for Web-based toys. “Paige Gabriele loved her dolls – once. At age 8, however, the Swarthmore girl has largely abandoned them. Even Barbie gets slim face time, and the single American Girl doll, a gift from her grandmother, sits pretty on her bureau – untouched. Playing with dolls “gets boring after a while,” said Paige as she passed by the well-stocked aisles full of Barbie, Moxie Girlz, Liv, and other fashion dolls at the Target in Springfield Mall. She was more interested in a basketball, and gushed about social Web sites such as moshimonsters.com, where she nurtures pet monsters. It used to be that dolls held girls’ interest at least through elementary school. But these days, girls are dropping such playthings at ever younger ages, largely replacing the childhood mainstay with technology-driven activities, even as the toy industry battles to attract the coveted market with new products.”

4. The American Spectator (USA) – Virtually Innocent. “Several months ago, at the request of Congress, the Federal Trade Commission released a report explaining the risks children face when they play in virtual worlds. Virtual worlds, a quickly expanding market of online playgrounds, combine glitzy three-dimensional environments with social networking. Basically, users can lazily sit behind their computers, but still interact, communicate, and play with each other in these worlds via their avatars, cartoonized representations of themselves. Some of the games they can play, parents may be surprised to learn, push the boundaries of Larry Flynt’s wildest dreams. Virtual worlds took off in 2007, with sites like the Disney-owned Club Penguin and the adult-oriented Second Life leading the charge. According to KZero Worldswide, one of several virtual worlds consultancies that have emerged in recent years, in 2009, an estimated 150 worlds were either live or in development, bringing in about $1.3 billion in revenue. In the next two years, an estimated 900 virtual worlds will hit the market, generating $9 billion in revenue. ”

5. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Secret Builders Scores $2.3M. “oday Renaissance 2.0 Media, parent company of the educational virtual world Secret Builders, announced that it had raised $2.3 million in new funding. Despite the world’s educational theme, it still monetizes by selling virtual currency to its users, mostly kids aged 8 to 12. Parents can also buy subscriptions for their kids, which give them a monthly in-game allowance of virtual currency. Secret Builders serves 1 million registered users, with around 350,000 monthly active users. “We’ve weathered a tough time in the market,” said Secret Builders CEO Umair Khan, in statements made to Venture Beat. “Spending money to get users was a good way to go out of business. Now the investors are looking for traction and your long-term success in attracting users.”

6. Discovery News (USA) – Avatars May Inspire Us To Exercise. “If seeing is believing, could watching a digitized version of yourself running on a treadmill drive you to get in shape? Watching a self-resembling avatar in action turns out to be an effective motivational technique to start exercising, according to a Stanford University research project. Participants who watched digital versions of themselves run on a treadmill ended up exercising nearly an hour longer than those who watched their avatars hang out or viewed avatars of other people exercising. “We’re definitely surprised that the manipulation worked,” said Stanford doctoral student Jesse Fox, who oversaw the studies. “I was very fascinated.”

7. University of Ulster Online (UK) – New Computer Games For Stroke Sufferers Tested. “Researchers at the University of Ulster have been carrying out trials of specially designed computer games to help rehabilitate stroke sufferers. Ulster’s School of Computing and Information Engineering in Coleraine has collaborated on the project with fellow researchers at the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at the Jordanstown campus. The Games for Rehabilitation project, which has been funded by the Department of Employment and Learning over three years, focuses on rehabilitation of the upper limbs and involves the player using their hands and arms to touch targets which move around the screen. Their movements are tracked by a webcam and the game responds to their interaction, giving them positive feedback on their performance and engagement with the system. The design of the games and interface means people don’t need to have played computer or video games in order to engage effectively with the system.”

8. Gamasutra (USA) – DFC: Virtual Goods Adoption Grows, ‘MMO Lite’ To Reach $3 Billion By 2015. “88 percent of gamers surveyed have bought virtual content, says a study from DFC Intelligence, in partnership with monetization platform company Live Gamer. Research firm DFC and Live Gamer studied some 5,000 gamers in North America and Europe during the first two months of 2010, and included seven years of Live Gamer’s historical data from around the world. According to the survey, “digital content” also includes music, movies and games, and isn’t limited to virtual goods bought through microtransactions, as players can do in popular Western social games like FarmVille on Facebook or Sony Online Entertainment’s family-friendly Free Realms MMO.”

9. Kotaku (USA) – Free Realms Reaches 10 Million Users, Gives Out Free Cash. “Free Realms continues to be an unrelenting engine of family-friendly fun and frivolity, reaching the 10 million player mark just short of its first birthday, with Sony Online Entertainment doubling Station Cash purchases this weekend in celebration. We’ve established by now that people love mini-games and free things, and that’s pretty much the formula to Free Realms’ success – it’s a free massively-multiplayer online game packed with mini-games. It’s also packed with stuff to buy with Station Cash, which is a Sony Online Entertainment form of currency people buy with real cash. To celebrate the big 10 million, SOE will be doubling any Station Cash card values redeemed between 4PM today Pacific and 11PM Sunday.”

10. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Educators save money switching to OpenSim. “Educators in primary schools, colleges, and other institutions looking for lower costs, better controls, and no age restrictions are considering switching from Second Life to its open source alternative, the OpenSim virtual world server platform. The OpenSim server software can be used to power an entire public grid, or a small, private behind-the-firewall installation, and can be run on an institution’s own server or hosted with third-party providers. In general, educators say, they find that OpenSim offers significant cost savings over Second Life. However, there might be some hidden costs.”

1. CNET (USA) – Start-up hopes to bridge real, virtual worlds. “Micazook, a start-up trying to bring some real-world flavor to virtual worlds on the Net, plans to publicly launch an online realm it calls Project X for now. “A beta will be out in the next few weeks,” Michael Fotoohi, managing director and one of the prime programmers behind the project, said at the Image Sensors Europe conference here. By then, he said, Project X should have a real name instead of its present placeholder. Project X attempts to overlay the free-wheeling style of Second Life over a model of the real world. The company has obtained high-resolution imagery for many parts of the world, combined it with data for where roads are located, and used it as a foundation for the virtual world. Think of it as Google Maps Street View populated by avatars.”

2. VentureBeat (USA) – Secret Builders raises $2.3M to expand educational virtual world for kids. “Secret Builders is announcing today that it has raised $2.3 million in funding for its online virtual world with educational games for children. In doing so, it has shown that it’s one of the survivors of what was once a very hot sector now littered with dead companies. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company debuted its Secret Builders web site in December, 2008. It has slowly built up to 1 million registered users, and it now has 350,000 to 400,000 unique monthly visitors from 190 countries. ”

3. Wired (UK) – Does World of Warcraft reflect real life concerns? “We can learn about the future of our world by studying World of Warcraft, a sociologist has suggested in a new book being published this month. William Sims Bainbridge argues in The Warcraft Civilization: Social science in a virtual world that the game isn’t just “escapist fantasy” but offers an insight into ” how people are going to be respectful of each other in a world in which there aren’t enough resources” – something we are already facing in reality. Speaking to Samantha Murphy of New Scientist, Bainbridge said that sociologists could glean as much from virtual worlds about human concerns and attitudes as they can from the real world. The challenge is then how to interpret the information.”

4. CNET (USA) – Don’t laugh, Venuegen’s virtual meetings can work. “My co-workers will attest to the fact that when I started reading the materials about Venuegen’s virtual-meeting-room service, I audibly groaned. I’ve had enough of companies trying to make meetings work in Second Life-ish virtual worlds. It’s too cute an idea for too serious a need. Or so I’ve always thought. A demo of the service, which is being unveiled at the Demo conference Monday, opened my eyes a bit. Built on a gaming platform but decidedly not a game or “virtual world,” like Second Life or There, Venuegen is a world of 3D rooms inhabited by human-appearing avatars with photo-mapped faces (like yours and your co-workers’), and a set of controls aimed squarely at replicating both the real-world experience of sitting in a meeting room and the unique online experience of sharing onscreen presentations and having private back-channel conversations while watching a public presentation.”

5. PhysOrg (USA) – Real criminals use virtual worlds to launder money. “Senior Law lecturer Dr Clare Chambers has just started an 18-month project to investigate whether the legal structure of these virtual worlds – where players use real money to buy virtual goods such as land, businesses or consumer items, which can then be sold on or exchanged – enables money laundering offences to be committed. Clare said, “On an average day, about £750,000 changes hands in the most popular virtual world platforms. The most recent research into virtual fraud was carried out in 2007 and this concluded that money laundering was on the increase in virtual realities. More up-to-date research is required in this area order to understand and combat it.”

6. Discovery News (USA) – Could Gamers Save Our World? “I’m not talking about the virtual worlds found in World of Warcraft or Second Life. I’m talking about Earth, our motherland, la tierra. And I’m wondering if those people who spend 16 billion hours a year tapping keyboards or jiggling joysticks can save the world. It’s not my idea. In this TED Talk video, Jane McGonigal, director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., suggests that if we could harness the power of video games, where players collaborate and are given the incentive to become heroes, we could solve real-world problems.”

7. Oxford Press (USA) – Miami research team awarded grant for virtual environment. “At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be an area of scientific research. With basketball hoops being cranked to the ceiling, it looks like any other big gymnasium. This place, however, is not just another gym. It’s the HIVE. The Huge Immersive Virtual Environment is located in the basement gymnasium of Miami University’s Phillips Hall. The HIVE is an immersive virtual environment in which a person wears a helmet and their movements are tracked by infrared censors. The structure is the largest of its kind, with similar structures at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and Tübingen, Germany, according to Miami psychology professor David Waller.”

8. TechCrunch (USA) – Avatar Reality Raises $4.2M For 3D Virtual World, Hires Industry Vet Trent Ward. “Avatar Reality, developer of the massively multiplayer online virtual world platform Blue Mars, has raised an additional $4.2 million from Kolohala Ventures and co-founder and games industry veteran (and somewhat of a legend) Henk Rogers. That brings the total invested in the company to more than $13 million, according to the press release. In addition, Avatar Reality has announced that it has recruited Trent Ward to join as the new VP of Design. Ward has been in the industry for quite a while, having worked as creative director for companies like Foundation9, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts.”

9. Gamasutra (USA) – Opinion: Fear and Loathing in Farmville. “GDC 2010 is now in the books, and it will be a hard one to forget because the whole conference seemed to be obsessed with one thing, which I summed up in this tweet. Or, as designer David Sirlin puts it here: “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.” Off the top of my head, here are the highlights and lowlights of this fixation: -The long-running Casual Games and Virtual Worlds Summits have vanished entirely from the conference, presumably eaten up by the new Social Games Summit.”

10. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Law firm holds meetings, training in Second Life. “New Orleans law firm Jones Walker has been conducting meetings and training programs in Second Life, the company announced this month. “We created office space where we could conduct meetings, make presentations, provide training, and explore the applications of Second Life to the law firm environment,” said chief marketing officer Carol Todd Thomas in a statement.”

1. Times of India (India) – Amputees could feel artificial limb if put in the virtual world. “Anthony Steed, a computer scientist at UCL, studied how the rubber hand illusion Movie Camera works in virtual worlds. In the standard illusion, a false hand is placed on a table in front of a volunteer whose real hand is out of view, and both are stroked at the same time. After a while people feel a sensation in the rubber hand, even when it is the only one being touched. And now, it has been discovered that people relate to virtual appendages so strongly that much of the set-up work normally needed to pull off the illusion is unnecessary in virtual environments.”

2. The Drum (UK) – Are Virtual Worlds like Second Life still viable marketing tools? “When The Drum received a press release a couple of weeks ago from digital company Corporation Pop describing an online graduation ceremony it had planned with fuel company BP through virtual world Second Life, groans were clearly heard. “Second Life? I thought that was dead,” said one member of the team, thus inspiring this piece. With Avatar becoming the most commercially successful movie in history, it seems odd that the platform which would have inspired much of the film seems to have had its day with the online user. Then again, the Lawnmower man was no advert for virtual reality which did okay for a while.”

3. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – TeamPalz Launching Sports-Themed World. “This Saturday TeamPalz.com will be heading for a public launch. The new kids virtual world aims at bringing together online socializing with kids’ love for real world sports. There are plenty of sports-themed worlds out there (e.g., ActionAllstars, the NFL’s own world, ToppsTown, UpperDeckU, etc.) that have partnerships or licensing agreements with leagues or teams. While TeamPalz is currently avoiding costly licenses and partnerships, it’s hoping to capitalize on an untapped audience. “TeamPalz is very gender neutral,” explained Co-Founder Kevin Bernadt. “During our research of other sports-themed virtual worlds, almost all of them seemed very male-centric. Girls’ sports are a huge under-marketed force out there, and we’re including sports such as softball, dance, cheer, and make sure our basketball and soccer experiences are friendly for both girls and boys. Volleyball will be one of the first sports we add down the line.”

4. The Guardian (UK) – Living the dream through computer games. “The inspiration for this week’s Observer Conversation is a fascinating piece by the American writer Tom Bissell which will be in this Sunday’s paper. In it Tom describe his life disintegrating as he becomes hooked on the computer game series Grand Theft Auto and then also on cocaine. Here’s a guy who would regularly spend 30 hours straight running over pedestrians and shooting drug dealers, policemen and prostitutes, all the while bleeding from the nose. In the paper’s latest editorial conference meeting, where we shape the weekend’s edition, we also discussed a new game called Smokescreen, which has been a big hit at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. It’s a game about life online, on a new social network called White Smoke, containing elements of horror and which frankly I’ve yet to fully understand. Perhaps its like a cranked up version of Cluedo: “Your friend Miffy murdered Bob in the Save 6Music site with a Farmville rotovator”.

5. Newsweek (USA) – Money for Nothing. “If you’ve spent time on Facebook, you might be mystified by all the people tending to their virtual farms and virtual pets. I know I am. Not only does this seem a strange way to spend time, but here’s the even weirder part: a lot of these people are spending real money to buy virtual products, like pretend guns and fertilizer, to gain advantage in these Web-based games. But to Kristian Segerstrale this is very serious business, and not only because he runs Playfish, a maker of online games and a top seller of virtual goods. Segerstrale, an economist by training, says the world of virtual goods opens up a new way to study economics. “You can learn a lot about human behavior, and how people interoperate in an economic environment,” he says. “There are a lot of valuable lessons.”

6. Directions Magazine (USA) – Masternaut Three X Integrates Real and Virtual Worlds with Augmented Reality for Field Service Management. “Masternaut Three X launched an advanced camera phone application that enables digital images to be displayed together with associated business data. This augmented reality (AR) solution is targeted at organizations in need of vehicle tracking and mobile resource management technology for more efficient field service operations. Editor in Chief Joe Francica interviewed Masternaut’s Johann Levy, the research and development manager, about the AR application.”

7. Financial Times (UK) – Corporate learning: Out of body experiences are ‘in’. “Teams operating in a virtual world face the challenge of constructing a bridge across a stretch of water to an island, using a set of blocks. One team spots that some of the blocks are weightless. They quickly string these together, march their avatars across the bridge, and declare victory. The other teams of business school students cry foul, but the winners deserve their triumph because they avoided making assumptions, says Steve Mahaley, director of learning technology at Duke Corporate Education in North Carolina. One way to shed new light on old problems is to take people completely out of their element, he says. “Virtual worlds let us test people’s understanding of the nature of the problem and help highlight their assumptions, such as whether all the blocks are subject to gravity, and if the other teams are rivals or potential collaborators.”

8. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Teleplace focuses on app sharing. “When business users get together for a virtual meeting, they’re not interested in showing off the latest dance moves or hairstyles – they want to share PowerPoint presentations, work together on spreadsheets, and collaborate on documents. At least, that’s the experience of virtual world vendor Teleplace, which counts over 100 corporations as customers – some of them big names, including Chevron, BP, Lockheed, Intel, and Fidelity. In addition, the company has a strong presence in the government and military sectors, counting the US Army, Navy, and Air Force as customers. Teleplace revenues grew 200 percent over the past year, the company reported last month. Teleplace Inc. used to be Qwaq Inc., and changed its name last September, timed to coincide with the release of the 3.0 version of its platform.”

9. Boston Globe (USA) – Tag for the gamer generation. “IT WAS awkward this semester when a zombie and a zombie-epidemic survivor both showed up in my undergraduate creative writing workshop. I’d heard tales of Humans vs. Zombies battles raging on campuses across the country. What was surprising, though, was that this bizarre game struck me as an antidote for the ailments of a generation. Humans vs. Zombies is a massive game of tag. One player starts as the zombie, what we used to call “being it.’’ All others are human. Both wear official bandanas on their arms. Zombies tie a second bandana around their heads. When a zombie tags a human, the human becomes a zombie.”

10. Kotaku (Australia) – Video Games Can Save The Planet, But Only If We Play More. “Only video games can save the world, says Jane McGonigal, but only if we dedicate more time to playing them, some 21 billion hours of game time per week needed to survive the next century. McGonigal, director of game research and development at Institute for the Future and one of the people behind the do-good game Urgent Evoke. presented her theory that playing video games can save the world’s problems – hunger, poverty, climate change, obesity, global conflict – at this year’s TED conference. (That stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design by the way.) Her argument? We’re “better at games than we are in real life”, and are more inclined to do good in video games.”

1. Casualgaming (USA) – GDC: Virtual worlds need better player contact, says Habbo Hotel designer. “Speaking at today’s Game Developers Conference’s Social and Online Games Summit, the lead designer of Habbo hotel has suggested that virtual worlds are loosing out on an opportunity to welcome more users because of an ingrained blinkered focus on real time interaction. In his session, titled What Virtual Worlds Can Learn From Social Games, Sulake’s Sulka Haro shed light on the fact that many virtual worlds only engage their customers in real time when the player is in the world. “Virtual worlds are historically too obsessed with real time,” stated Haro, adding: “The problem with that focus is that if a virtual world is synchronous, it is temporal. In other words, if the player isn’t there the world doesn’t exist.”

2. The Independent (UK) – Digital disguises: Who do they think they are? “It was a boring corporate job that piqued the interest of the photographer and video artist, Robbie Cooper. “I met a company boss who was divorced and had bad access to his children,” Cooper recalls. “So they met every evening in Everquest, an online 3D virtual world”. Cooper asked the man what he and his children did as they carried massive swords around a land populated by fire-breathing dragons. “They talked about homework, their mother and school,” Cooper says. “I was fascinated by the idea of this really banal but emotionally important conversation going on in this vivid fantasy world.”

3. The Big Money (USA) – Forget Invisible Hands. What About Virtual Hands? “Back in 2008, it seemed like only one thing was certain about the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program: It was a gamble. A really big one. The economy’s problems were unprecedented and the potential remedy untested, which meant that economists could do little more than speculate about how hundreds of billions in bailout money would affect the country’s overall fiscal health. In a New York Times article from February 2009, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was quoted as saying of TARP, “We will have to try things we’ve never tried before.” But, some economists are beginning to ask, what if such broad economic policies could be tested first? Not on living, breathing, tax-paying citizens, mind you, but on goblins, wizards, and intergalactic space pirates.”

4. Washington Post (USA) – Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash. “Dana Moore sells rain. He sells a lot of it, for about a buck per reusable storm. “I don’t know why people love buying rainstorms,” he said, watching his product drizzle last week, “but they do seem to like them a lot.” The attraction isn’t rain, per se, but Moore’s rain, which can deluge swaths of land on command. The rain falls not in Bowie, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, but in the virtual world of Second Life, the Web portal where he also markets snow, clocks, University of Maryland basketball T-shirts, Duke basketball T-shirts (grudgingly), two-story Tudor-style homes, pinup posters from the 1930s and the sounds of barking dogs.”

5. The Province (Canada) – Finding backbone in virtual world. “When faced with creating an avatar, you can bet your mouse that no one is dreaming up their virtual doppelganger. Snoop around the online fantasy front and you’ll find lots of King Leonidas and Zena: Warrior Princess types — not so many Ed Grimleys. It’s a misrepresentation along those lines that is at the heart of the new play Spine, here in Vancouver as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Spine opens with a 40-year-old disabled man (James Sanders) losing his job and his relationship. He retreats to a place he feels the most empowered — the rehab facility he spent time in after suffering a spinal-cord injury. It’s there he meets a much younger and newly injured patient who turns him onto the virtual role-playing world.”

6. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Sometrics Launches GameCoins Platform; IMVU Joins Up. “Today Sometrics announced the launch of GameCoins.com, a virtual goods marketplace and social platform designed to help virtual worlds and online games both grow their reach and monetize. GameCoins.com will feature user blogs and friend lists that allow users to recommend games and virtual worlds to each other. Users will be able to obtain virtual goods and currency for favorite games through GameCoins.com using the Sometrics Offer Solution, an ad offer network. “This is the first time we’re going to consumers directly with our virtual currency products,” said Sometrics CEO Ian Swanson, in a press statement. “Until now, our solutions for earning that game’s virtual currency have lived within the individual games themselves. But with GameCoins we can broaden the reach for all the publishers and games that partner with us. It serves as a hub for consumers, to enable them to share their enthusiasm for a game with others and, while there, discover new games for themselves.”

7. New Scientist (USA) – Amputees could get a helping hand in the virtual world. “WHAT is the best way to for someone to get used to their artificial limb? Put them in a virtual environment. So says Anthony Steed, a computer scientist at University College London, who has been studying how the rubber hand illusion works in virtual worlds. In the standard illusion, a false hand is placed on a table in front of a volunteer whose real hand is out of view, and both are stroked at the same time. After a while people feel a sensation in the rubber hand, even when it is the only one being touched. Steed has now discovered that people relate to virtual appendages so strongly that much of the set-up work normally needed to pull off the illusion is unnecessary in virtual environments. For example, people automatically experience ownership of their virtual limbs, without needing simultaneous stroking in the real world, claims Steed.”

8. Washington Post (USA) – Teleporting to reality: Reporting in Second Life. “Earlier this week, I wrote about the booming economy in Second Life, the online portal where people spend lots of money to outfit their avatars with fancy shoes, nice eyes, long hair, short hair, tight jeans, business suits, bathing suits, and anything else you could buy in Tysons Corner. Although the stuff in Second Life is digital — just pixels on a screen — the materials people buy, and the land they rent to build their houses, seem every bit as real as the place where you are reading this blog. For a reporter, interviewing people in Second Life offers opportunities that sometimes seem harder to come by these days — namely, interviewing subjects in their homes.”

9. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Warcraft row: An industry game-changer in China. “NetEase is a veteran of Chinese online gaming, with seven years of industry experience. So it was stunned when a seemingly straight development path suddenly descended into a dark maze after the company sought government permission to operate China’s version of “World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade,” an online role-playing game enjoyed by millions of Chinese. NetEase eventually succeeded. But along the way, the company lost a lot of money and had to play games with a pair of competing bureaucracies that each sought an upper hand in regulating the online gaming business.”

10. TechRadar (UK) – Blizzard: World of Warcraft unlikely to appear on console. “Blizzard has said that its massively popular MMO World Of Warcraft will likely never arrive on home console. World of Warcraft is currently available on the PC and on the Mac and, according to the game’s lead producer J. Allen Brack there are a lot of reasons why it won’t appear on Xbox 360 or PS3 anytime soon.”

1. The Australian (Australia) – Is putting real-life law into an avatar’s hands viable? “The difficult business of enforcing law and order in virtual worlds — and resolving the messy consequences when problems spill into real life — needs to be debated before knee-jerk political responses. Over the past fortnight Facebook memorial sites for murdered Queensland children Trinity Bates and Elliott Fletcher have been swamped by pornographic and obscene messages.”

2. CNET (USA) – Real-world woes shuttering virtual world There. “The pioneering virtual world There.com will shut down on March 9, a victim of the recession and the pinch on brand spending that had kept it going long past earlier troubles. The news was announced by CEO Mike Wilson on Tuesday.
The service, which launched in the fall of 2003, was a fully 3D social environment with a sophisticated economy, wonderful vehicles like hoverboard and hoverboats and, eventually, a wide variety of community-created content.”

3. Everything PR (Germany) – Real Baby Dies as Parents Raise Virtual Daughter. “When does virtual game play go to far? The parents of a starved baby may have found out, when their three-month old infant died of malnutrition. The South Korean couple left their baby to starve to death at home, while playing an internet game. The disturbing irony of it all? The web-based game they were playing involved the rearing of a virtual child.”

4. Radio National Future Tense (Australia) – Money – Part Two. “In part two of this series we look at the changing nature of currency. Is traditional state-issued tender now losing its monopoly? And how widespread is the use of alternative currencies – be they digital or virtual, or both?”

5. ZDNet (USA) – Earn 100 points – read: The reverse virutal reality world of the future. “Kevin Kelly, writing on his Technium blog points out a fascinating talk by Jesse Schell, a games designer. In “Design outside the box” Mr Schell starts by explaining out how much money is made by very simple games, such as Farmville and Club Penguin. But its the latter part of his talk that is even more interesting, when he predicts how games will be embedded into our reality through the use of cheap wireless sensors.”

6. Montreal Gazette (Canada) – ‘Avatars’ inspire us to be better people: study. “F ascination with the blockbuster 3-D film Avatar has fans tuning into real-world research indicating that virtual selves can inspire people to lead better lives. Since the release of the film, interest has surged in a Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab study showing that avatars, animated versions of people, act as powerful role models. “It is getting so hot right now,” study author Jesse Fox told AFP on Thursday. “James Camerons’s Avatar movie is out so our website hits have just spiked.”

7. IT PRO (UK) – The chief executive of Second Life thinks virtual worlds will be the future of work. “Second Life is often assumed to be a place to go and kill a lot of time, where your alien-looking avatar wanders the landscape looking for virtual sex. The virtual world is much, much more than that, argues chief executive Mark Kingdon, who believes that people thought the internet was “weird” when it first started, too. At the CeBIT conference in Hanover this week, Kingdon told IT PRO that more business functions would move to worlds like Second Life, for meetings, simulations and more – especially after the launch of more user-friendly systems, like the beta of its new viewer, which allows document sharing.”

8. People Management Magazine (UK) – BP executives graduate on Second Life. “Thirty BP executives are to undergo a graduation ceremony on computer game and virtual network Second Life, after completing a programme at Manchester Business School (MBS). The Managing Projects programme will culminate in the executives using avatars to receive their awards on the business school’s “island” inside the virtual world on Thursday this week. Since those who completed the course are based as far afield as Canada, Angola, Indonesia and Russia, the online event is the best way of allowing them to celebrate their achievement together.”

9. Michigan Radio (USA) – “Inch-vesting” In Detroit: A Virtual Realty. “Jerry Paffendorf is not your typical real estate developer. But then, the people lining up to buy into his project are not your typical investors. He calls them “inchvestors.” Paffendorf’s project is called Loveland. And it’s a hybrid: part virtual and part physical. “What we want to do is we want to build this wild social network of people that’s literally built out of the dirt and the ground,” Paffendorf says.”

10. mad.co.uk (UK) – Social Gaming. “Social gaming is growing fast and brands are eyeing it with increasing interest. But how can they integrate themselves into gameplaying in a way that looks natural to users? With Zynga’s FarmVille now exceeding 76m monthly active users on Facebook and Playfish’s Pet Society exceeding 1m, growth in social gaming has well and truly taken off, a boom further illustrated by gaming giant Electronic Arts’ (EA) recent acquisition of Playfish in a deal potentially worth $400m (£268m). Zynga CEO Mark Pincus predicts that by 2012 there’ll be 500m people involved in social games, which means the opportunities for brands to get involved and reach this rapidly growing audience are also increasing.”

1. CNET (USA) – Where virtual worlds once ruled, FarmVille dominates. “Almost every week for the last few years, it seems, I’ve gotten a press release or a pitch touting some company’s great new Facebook games network or kids’ virtual world.
And why not? Companies like Zynga and Playfish are making money hand over fist with their collections of massively popular social games, and 2D Flash games aimed at children like Club Penguin, Webkinz, Habbo Hotel, and others have garnered vast amounts of virtual world investment dollars in recent years.
But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?”

2. Computerworld (USA) – Second Life seeks mainstream adoption. “Linden Lab, which develops and operates Second Life introduced a new beta version of its desktop viewer software on Tuesday, the first big upgrade in many years. Will the new software help bring about a renaissance of the once-trendy service? You remember Second Life. It’s a virtual world, a three-dimensional environment like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto. But it’s not a game, it’s a simulation of a world. You can build virtual buildings and vehicles, create virtual clothes, play live music, role-play as a vampire or cowboy, and buy and sell virtual goods for real-world money. It’s the closest thing we have now to Star Trek’s holodeck.”

3. CLickZ (USA) – WildTangent Targets Social Media Games and Virtual Worlds. “Game-based advertising company WildTangent announced the launch of BrandBoost, a platform that enables brand marketers to tap into the audience for virtual worlds, social media games, and massively multiplayer online games. The Redmond, WA-based company said BrandBoost is already being deployed on several properties, including OutSpark.com, OMGPOP.com and Sony Online Entertainment’s FreeRealms, which already has attracted 8 million registered users since its formal launch last year.”

4. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Virtual worlds pose compliance risks. “The very aspects of virtual world that make them appealing to some enterprise users, such as the collaboration tools, also make them risky from a compliance perspective. These risks include the communication risks of the wrong information getting to the wrong people, inappropriate workplace behavior, and lack of archiving tools.”

5. Los Angeles Times (USA) – Disney hopes kids will take online World of Cars out for a spin. “Walt Disney Co. believes that World of Cars, its new subscription-based online community aimed at boys and based on the Pixar movie “Cars,” won’t get lost in the traffic of virtual worlds. Things are already a bit congested. Some 200 virtual worlds target children under 12. Each competes for a slice of the 10 hours and 45 minutes a day the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that kids spend viewing media, simultaneously vying for screen time against a growing number of portable media players and smart phones that offer their own diversions.”

6. Escapist Magazine (USA) – Are Advertisers Running Away From Home? “The failure of PlayStation Home to capture gamers’ attention may be having repercussions as advertisers jump ship to the more media-friendly Xbox Live. When PlayStation Home made its open beta debut at the tail end of 2008, gamers responded with a collective shrug of disinterest. The world had barely any of the content originally promised, felt empty and lifeless, and offered little incentive to log in more than once. Home’s failure to connect with users may be the reason for Sony’s absence from this year’s Engage Expo, believe brand analysts at Brand Week, when the hardware giant had been promoting the service as the next big thing at the Expo just a year before.”

7. Stanford Report (USA) – Can avatars change the way we think and act? “If you saw a digital image of yourself running on a virtual treadmill, would you feel like going to the gym? Probably so, according to a Stanford study showing that personalized avatars can motivate people to exercise and eat right. Moreover, you are more likely to imitate the behavior of an avatar in real life if it looks like you, said Jesse Fox, a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department and a researcher at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. In her study, she used digital photographs of participants to create personalized avatar bodies, a service some game companies offer today.”

8. FierceContentManagement (USA) – What if content management were 3D? “I recently saw the Michael Douglas/Demi Moore 1994 movie called “Disclosure.” In the movie (which explores sexual harassment in the workplace), Michael Douglas was working for a computer company that created a 3D virtual reality database. The user would put on special glasses and he was literally inside the database with the data. He could walk inside a library of content, interact with it and touch it.”

9. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – No R-rating for games does not compute. “It’s confession time. I have picked up a prostitute in a stolen vehicle and sped the wrong way down a busy highway to escape police. I have accompanied a terrorist group in an airport shooting spree. I have garrotted guards, slaughtered soldiers, decapitated dudes and shotgunned sheilas. But never have I felt the remotest desire to do any of this for real. They were computer games. Yes, I’m a ”gamer”. At 37, I’m a little older than average for a gamer, but not by much. Gen X was the first gaming generation. I can’t remember there not being computer games. I first discovered there wasn’t a Father Christmas when I found a (very primitive) computer game under my parents’ bed, and got it as a present a few days later.”

10. USA Today (USA) – Author: Librarian, cybrarian appreciation is ‘Overdue’. “Bryan Hissong is 31, happily married, and the father of a 2-year-old named Olivia. He seems quite content with his life.
But Marilyn Johnson, who is not his wife, loves him and has said so very publicly. It doesn’t matter that she has never met him. Hissong is a librarian. He doesn’t look like the clichéd librarian of old. He favors plaid shirts and is sporting a beard on his babyface — but that doesn’t matter to Johnson, either. She’s well aware that librarians wear many disguises these days. Often they’re pierced, tattooed, punk with bright blue hair. She loves them all.”

1. PC World (USA) – Lego Creating Multiplayer Online Game. “Toy construction set company Lego Group plans to launch an MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) in the second half of this year, to be called Lego Universe, said Mark Hansen, director of business development and LEGO lead for the project. Lego users have long been known for their creative use of the company’s products, so the company is hoping its users will take their creativity online, using virtual Lego bricks to create entire virtual worlds. “There are such endless possibilities for what you can do in this game,” Hansen said. Hansen revealed some of the details of the game, which was four years in the making, at the 2010 Engage youth entertainment technology conference, being held this week in New York.”

2. Venture Beat (USA) – Online firms and toy companies clash over kids virtual worlds. “For many years toy and video game companies have been battling each other for the mindshare of kids. Toy companies have strong products targeted at children from pre-school up to about second grade, when they turn 7 or 8. Then, at about age 8, video games start to replace traditional toys. The typical business model enables video game companies to license their products to toy companies to generate additional revenue. At the same time toy companies have been offering more interactive toys to reach the slightly older child. Media companies like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney have effectively found a way to provide programming for both the younger and older kids and license their properties to toy and video game companies who in turn use their networks to market back to kids. After Disney bought Club Penguin for $350 million plus earn-outs in 2007, a wave of kids virtual worlds copycats materialized.”

3. CTV (Canada) – The world’s most expensive island – online. ” What is the most you’re willing to pay for a virtual item in a videogame or virtual world? Five, ten dollars? How about $26,500? That’s the amount David Storey, a 27-year-old graduate student living in Sydney, Australia, paid for a virtual island, the “Most valuable object that is virtual,” according to Guinness World Records. It’s easy to write off Storey, who goes by the name “Deathifier,” as a geek gone wild, but he now owns a million-dollar empire. Storey runs Amethera Treasure Island, which he purchased in the virtual world Entropia, as a rare game preserve and taxes hunters on his land. Storey says the taxes bring in more than $100,000 in real money per year.”

4. San Jose Business Journal (USA) – Xulu Entertainment provides real opportunity in virtual worlds. “Xulu Entertainment Inc. is developing a high-definition software platform for virtual worlds and gaming. It includes tools and libraries that professional developers as well as users can apply to create extreme realism and physical interactivity. Xulu’s simulation-driven software is built on an open framework and is designed to exploit the processing power of recent PCs. It is extendible to mobile devices and multiple operating systems. Xulu plans to launch an online entertainment destination to show early adventurers and developers what types of activities it will support. This will include sports, gaming and social activities. The first commercial release is planned for the end of this year.”

5. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Richard Garriott’s Portalarium Aiming At A More Mainstream Second Life? “Today Richard Garriott, former part-time astronaut and founder of Origin, announced his latest company: Portalarium. Portalarium, according to the site, was founded in September 2009 to develop and publish ” online social games, virtual worlds and related services and products.” There’s not much to the company publicly yet, but its initial release is a Torque2D-based plugin for Windows PCs (Mac support is coming in Q2 2010) allowing developers to work within social networks, but outside of traditional Flash-based environments. The Portal Player is currently in beta testing with Portalarium’s first title, Sweet @$! Poker, on Facebook. Virtual worlds are on the way.”

6. VizWorld (USA) – Scientific Research in Virtual Worlds. “When I began this series of investigative reports on Second Life, one thing I was really looking forward to was to see just how much “science” was going on in Second Life. I wanted to know is the majority of what happens inworld Social or Academic? The reality wound up being more complex than I originally thought, being heavily influenced by the perspective of who I was speaking to. Some people said science was everywhere, while some people said it was a nonexistant community. After several weeks of digging around I’ve come to some conclusions, and I share them here.”

7. The Independent (UK) – Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons? “Nothing so complicates a child’s relationship with his parent as the death of a sibling, and when we first see Shaun Mars and his father Ethan alone together, it’s plain that they are struggling to navigate the hostile unfamiliar territory in which they find themselves. Deprived of his co-conspirator and protector, the previously effervescent Shaun is monosyllabic and sullen; Ethan, meanwhile, is barely able to function. As the camera follows the pair into the cheerless house that Ethan has moved to since his marriage ended, there seems little reason for hope. But once they are home, it is soon clear that the bond between them has survived this terrible assault – that, in fact, it is the only thing keeping Ethan from falling apart entirely. He makes his son a snack. He asks him how his day was. He helps him with his homework. He feeds him a healthy dinner. And, eventually, the faintest echo of their former happiness becomes audible. When Ethan tucks Shaun in at the end of the evening, the future doesn’t seem so grim.”

8. Federal Computer Week (USA) – Feds look for their avatars in 3-D. “Many agencies have staked out so-called islands on the virtual world Second Life, but now the government wants software to build and host a virtual world of its own for collaboration, training, simulation and analysis. The Agriculture Department plans to award multiple contracts under a program to develop a fully immersive, persistent 3-D experience in a virtual world populated by avatars that can be customized to resemble real-life users, according to documents published on the Federal Business Opportunities Web Site.”

9. Mediaweek (USA) – Study: Women Social ‘Gamers’ on the Rise. “The increasing number of women who play games on social networks do so with a regularity normally associated with hardcore gaming. But according to a recent study conducted by the lead generation firm Q Interactive, most women don’t associate themselves with a gaming lifestyle like the PlayStation and Xbox lovers do—and don’t care for the label “gamer.” According to executives at Q Interactive (which owns CoolSavings.com), the study was conducted in January among 770 women who were likely to be familiar with online gaming and virtual worlds. It found that while 36 percent of respondents said that they play games on sites like Facebook and MySpace, 54 percent of those who do so admit to playing social games every day. Not surprising to any Facebook user: The most popular social games were identified as Mafia Wars and Farmville.”

10. TechCrunch (USA) – Moonshoot Raises $6.6 Million To Teach English Through Online Gaming. “Moonshoot, a startup with that aims to teach English to children globally through an online gaming experience, has raised a total of $6.6 million in funding led by Alsop Louie Partners and TL Ventures.The startup is also announcing that Tom Kalinske; former CEO & Chairman of Leapfrog, President of Knowledge Universe, CEO of Sega of America, and CEO of Mattel; is joining Moonshoot as Executive Chairman.”