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Land Zoning Introduced to Second Life. Linden Labs is introducing land zoning to the mainland in Second Life. What is the proper balance between public interest and ownership rights? (Jack Linden, Second Life Blog, Aug 5, 2008) Read

Scientists get a 2nd life. To track down neuroscientist Corey Hart, you could stop by his laboratory, located on the second floor of Drexel University’s medical building in Philadelphia. Or, you could visit the lab of Luciftias Neurocam, located in the virtual world of Second Life. Hart is among a growing number of scientists and educators now using the online world of Second Life to pursue real-life science. (Terra Questi, Science News, May 24, 2008) Read

"The freaking wild wild west." While many long time Second Life residents bemoan the influx of freeloaders, griefers, and large corporations like Toyota and Addidas flooding the world with their products, and the Second Life Liberation Army sets off atomic bombs in front of corporate stores, some residents explore creating their own virtual worlds using Multiverse. (Alana Semuels, LA Times, Feb 22, 2007) Read

Dan Miller, senior economist and WoW Night Elf Priest, on virtual world taxation. “The first thing to make clear is that, contrary to what you may have read, the Joint Economic Committee is not seeking to impose a new tax on virtual economies,” Miller said. “If you look at our body of published work, you’ll find a very clear track record of supporting lower taxes and free markets. We are planning to do a study on virtual worlds, and (we) hope to have something published in the first part of next year.” (Reuters, Dec 4, 2006) Read

Cyberspace, the Wild New Yonder. The US Air Force mission statement has been amended to include cyberspace as an operational area, along with air and space. The new command will be part of the 8th Air Force based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, a unit made famous during the combined armored offensive in Europe during World War II. (Wired News, Nov 2, 2006) Read

IBM eyes move into Second Life ‘v-business’. IBM has embraced Second Life to an extent unmatched by any other major company — it has more than 230 employees spending time in-world, and it owns some half-dozen islands. Some are open to the public, but most are private, with restricted access for the public. The company is also eyeing revenue opportunities that could have it vying with Second Life design firms to bring real-world businesses into the virtual realm. “E-business was a strategy for us, why not v-business?” (Reuters, Oct 24, 2006) Read

Tools for developers to create their own virtual worlds Multiverse hopes to be the Netscape of virtual worlds, providing tools for developers to create virtual worlds, and for users to navigate them... are virtual worlds the Next Big Thing or the Next Big Nothing, and can Multiverse escape Netcape's fate? (Mitch Wagner, Information Week, Jan 22, 2007) Read

Sundance Film Festival holds first time ever screening in 'Second Life'. Never before had Sundance Film Festival audience members been part fox, used names like "NeoConD" and "Apparatchik," or had the power to teleport away. Marking a first for both Sundance and cyberspace, these viewers were avatars watching a feature-length festival film Monday from a screening room in the virtual world of Second Life. (Michelle Meyers, CNET News, Jan 24, 2007) Read

Charity raises funds with homeless avatar. A Spanish charity group has raised enough money through its Second Life awareness campaign, which featured a homeless avatar, to provide a month of healthcare and education for a real-life child. (Reuters, Dec 20, 2006) Read

Study on Second Life and the pursuit of happiness. A study by a Dutch think tank found that that people with a strong sense of well-being and many friends in the real world follow similar patterns in Second Life, but that “There is, however, a small group which feels less comfortable in the real world but has discovered fantastic social possibilities in Second Life.” The study also found that dedicated Second Life residents who spent more than 30 hours a week in-world were more likely to “belong to the creative or IT professions,” and that many of those who spend considerable time in Second Life are women. They are frequently better educated than the men, often at university level.” (Adam Reuters, Reuters, Dec 12, 2006) Read

Google To Create Its Own Virtual World? Google Earth has become a very popular application among users wanting to explore various parts of the globe via satellite imagery. Rumors are now circulating that Google is looking to take its technology a step further and implement facets of Google Earth in a project aimed a creating a virtual environment, much like that of Second Life. (Joe Lewis, Web Pro News, Jan 26, 2007) Read

Virtually dead in Iraq. "This is a way to communicate a sense of loss and frustration with the fact that soldiers are dying over there and life just seems to be going on like normal over here," says University of Nevada, Reno's Art Department chairman Joseph DeLappe, who has has turned the US Army's $10,000,000 online video game America's Army into a war protest and a memorial to dead soldiers. (Rebecca Clarren, Salon.com, 9/16/06) Read

Experimental AI Powers Robot Army. Robots currently being developed by the U.S. Air Force will have to find their way into underground bunkers, map unknown facilities in three dimensions and identify what's in them while avoiding detection - all without any human control. This is well beyond the capability of any existing system, but the Air Force Research Laboratory is putting its hopes on new software that lets robots learn, walk, see and interact far more intelligently than ever before. Perhaps the most impressive - and spookiest - aspect of the project is the swarming behavior of the robots. In computer simulations, they acted together to tackle obstacles and grouped together into defensive formations where needed. They also worked out how to deal with defenders, and spontaneously devised the most efficient strategy for mapping their environment. (David Hambling, Wired News, 9/14/06) Read

Avatars Need Personal Space Too. Psychologists have long known that unwritten rules govern our social interactions. Now researchers have observed similar behaviour in Second Life, and other researchers have used Second Life as an experimental platform in studies of learning techniques and simulations of the hallucinations experienced by schizophrenics. Also, economists are conducting experiments not possible in the real world, such as tweaking an exchange rate and observing the effect. (Jim Giles, nature.com, 9/11/06) Read

Synthetic Worlds Initiative. The Synthetic Worlds Initiative is a research center at Indiana University whose aim is to promote innovative thinking on synthetic worlds. Synthetic worlds are immersive digital spaces that can host many online users on a persistent basis. The most popular applications of this technology today are massive video games. The goal is to learn about this technology and deploy it for research and education. The Initiative holds a bi-annual series of conferences, the Ludium, and is building Arden: The World of William Shakespeare, a massive synthetic world. (Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University, 2006) Read

Google moves into virtual worlds. Real estate companies have started showing off virtual versions of their buildings (for sale in the real world) on Google Earth. SketchUp allows them to build entire models of their apartments, right down to the microwave oven. Google Earth general manager John Hanke has said that Google Earth was partly inspired by Snow Crash's metaverse. The result could be that we'll soon populate a virtual version of planet Earth instead of the made-from-scratch metaverses like online games or Second Life. The main element Google Earth is missing today is avatars, but at least one observer believes those to be added soon. (Chris Taylor, CNNMoney.com, 5/12/06) Read

Possible US Presidential candidate visits Second Life. Mark Warner, former Virginia Governor and founder of Nextel, is considered a possible candidate for the US Presidency in 2008. He recently made an appearance in Second Life. (Wagner James Au, Second Life's New World Notes, 8/31/06) Read

When a virtual world bank fails because of fraud, is it actionable real-world fraud? Eve-Online players could deposit in-game currency with the Eve Intergalactic Bank, which would pay interest of a few percent a month and would loan the funds to promising investment projects but James Grimmelmann writes that "... it was all a scam. Or rather, if it wasn't one at first, it became one as its principal proprietor ... at some point decided to take the money and run. This being EVE, there wasnt much anyone could do about it once he made that call. He now has enough wealth to be utterly and absolutely pimped out at all times." What are the virtual and real world legal implications? (James Grimmelmann, LawMeme (Yale Law School), 8/26/06) Read

Sweden to open virtual embassy in Second Life Sweden plans to open an embassy and information center in the virtual world Second Life. “It will have answers to questions on all aspects of Sweden,” Olle Wastberg, general director of the Swedish Institute, an organization which promotes the country’s image abroad, said on Tuesday. (Reuters, Jan 30, 2007) Read

Reuters opens first virtual news bureau. You can read its virtual world news reports at secondlife.reuters.com. “I’ve been playing in Second Life since it was a relatively small community,” said Thomas H. Glocer, Reuters’ chief executive. “This is a very serious, old brand that stands for things and has principles, but that doesn’t take itself so seriously that it wouldn’t play in a gaming space.” (New York Times, 10/16/06) Read

US Congress launches probe into virtual economies. The increasing size and public profile of virtual economies, the largest of which have millions of users and gross domestic products that rival those of small countries, have made them increasingly difficult for lawmakers and regulators to ignore. For example, in Second Life up to US$500,000 in user-to-user transactions take place every day, and the economy is growing by 10 to 15 percent a month. “Ownership, property rights, all that stuff needs to be decided. There’s just too much money floating around,” game designer Sam Lewis, who trained as an economist and has worked on games such as Star Wars Galaxies, said in a telephone interview. “The tax laws don’t know how to behave because these are virtual items: ones and zeros on a database we’re allowing you to play in,” he said. (Reuters, 10/15/06) Read

"Game On" exhibit at the Science Museum in London, England. Visitors will be able to play games dating as far back as the 1960s as well as the latest consoles. It will also feature classic artwork, such as drawings by Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the character Mario from Super Mario Bros. Among the games visitors can play will be Space War, the world's first computer game, from 1962. The exhibit is open October 21, 2006 - February 25, 2007. (BBC online, 9/18/06) Read

Invitational Gaming Championship on TV. The Championship Gaming Series was formed in May 2006. It's goal is to revolutionize video game competition by treating the games in the same manner as traditional sports and the players as professional athletes. The Championship Gaming Series will launch as a league starting 2007, and is being preceded in 2006 with 3 television events, including the Championship Gaming Invitational, which was telecast in September 2006. (championshipgamingseries.com 2006) Read

BBC Seeks Gamers For Upcoming Documentary. The BBC is in production on an hour-long television documentary on massively multiplayer online games, and they’re looking for subjects to interview. If your avatar is “more like you than you are” — or even if you’re a more typical sort — get in touch with them and maybe you too can appear on British television. (Mark Wallace, 3pointD.com, 9/1/06) Read

What the future holds for MMOs Speakers at GCDC 2006 roundtable in Leipzig offer some interesting perspectives on the future of massively multiplayer online games. Professional "gold farmers", who are paid to collect rare items and currency in-game so that they can be sold to other players for real money, are considered a thorn in their side by MMO developers - should they be banned? (Justin Calvert, GameSpot.com, 8/22/06) Read

Ghost in the shell It's well-known that the way that people choose to appear online is distinct from physical appearance, and this is often perceived as some kind of falsehood. But honestly, for someone you've never met, which is their “real” face? And do you learn more from a photograph or an avatar? (Terry Hancock, Terry Hancock's Blog, 8/21/06) Read

Every soldier is a sensor - The latest video game for training U.S. soldiers emphasizes social skills over combat In Iraq and other conflict zones with unfamiliar cultures, U.S. soldiers can find it hard to identify threats and targets amid the hubbub of everyday life. Yet their interactions with locals yield far more information than intelligence officers could collect on their own -- hence the emerging military doctrine that "every soldier is a sensor." Now the U.S. Army has translated that doctrine into a video game to help soldiers learn to recognize signs of danger or opportunity in the field. (David Kushner, technologyreview.com, 8/17/06) Read

Someone stole my magic sword Microsoft warns that criminals are targeting the lucrative world of online games. The security firm F-secure has already dealt with hundreds of malicious programs that seek to steal details of players' accounts, which can be worth thousands of dollars. The police are really good at understanding "someone stole my credit card and ran up a lot of money". It's a lot harder to get them to buy into "someone stole my magic sword". (BBC News, 8/15/06) Read

House rejects Net neutrality rules: The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it. (Declan McCullagh , CNET News.com, 6/8/06) Read

'Second Life' dreams of Electric Sheep - Phillip K. Dick would be proud The Electric Sheep company has been booking six-figure deals from members of the Fortune 500 who want to engage their customers/communities in a virtual world, but it's not all corporate customers. Electric Sheep tends to charge around $15,000 for a complete customization of a sim that includes terraforming the land, constructing buildings and scripting interactivity into objects throughout the space.(Daniel Terdiman, CNET News.com, 4/6/06) Read

US troops taught Iraqi gestures: The US military has funded a computer game to teach its troops how to use and decipher Iraqi body language. (Paul Rincon, BBC News, 2/19/06) Read

Religion in MMOGs: Despite MMOG's often containing characters with religious trappings - holy warriors, priestly characters, demons - religion until now has not played a significant role. What is the proper role of a religion in an MMOG? (Wagner James Au, Second Life's New World Notes, 2/13/06) Read

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity Dr. Gary Flake's concept of "Internet Singularity" is "the idea that a deeper and tighter coupling between the online and offline worlds will accelerate science, business, society, and self-actualization." However, Lawrence Lessig talks of a "permission culture," which is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past." Could this act as a brake on the "Internet Singularity"? (Charles W. Bailey, Jr., DigitalKoans, 1/28/06) Read

Future of the Net - Compromise in Tunisia: After 20 months of the US battling the rest of the world over control of the internet, a tentative agreement was worked out in Tunis. One major sticking point was a single word: whether as the United States wanted, a new way to manage the Internet's underlying technology might be created "if" justified, or as Iran and Saudi Arabia wanted, "when" justified. A compromise was reached by using wording the British proposed: "where" justified. (Kenneth Neil Cukier, TechnologyReview.com, 11.22.05) Read

Sir, the Gamers Are Revolting! - As one of the founders of the Serb student-resistance group Otpor ("resistance"), Ivan Marovic helped remove former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power. This year, Marovic and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict will add another training tool to their arsenal: a computer game called A Force More Powerful. "The idea was to use the game to transfer knowledge about nonviolent action," said Marovic. "The game can help more than movies and books because activists can simulate different situations and try different strategies before they try them in real life." (Chris Kohler, Wired News, 10/28/05) Read

Architecture's virtual shake-up: From reconstructing ancient buildings to creating new property developments, these days virtual reality is finding a natural home in the world of architecture. (Tayfun King, BBC News, 10/28/05) Read

World-wide plague strikes virtual world: There were reports of "hundreds" of bodies littering the streets of the World of Warcraft after a deadly digital disease inadvertantly spread from the corrupted blood of a dying god to weaker players by means of infected inworld pets. (Mark Ward, BBC News, 9/22/05) Read

Yet Another Digitization of All Human Knowledge: Yahoo's Open Content Alliance will create a free online repository of a wide range of printed material, using XML and PDF to make the content easily crawlable by search engines. One big difference between this and Google's similar effort is that Yahoo will seek permission to include works covered by copyright, while Google requires publishers of copyrighted works to opt out. (Wade Roush, TechnologyReview.com, 10/20/05) Read

Web 2.0 Has Arrived: A half million Wikipedians, 18.9 million bloggers, community photo-sharing (exemplified by Flickr), collective editing (Wikipedia), and social bookmarking (Delicious) are disrupting traditional ideas about how software is built and how information is generated, shared, and distributed on the Internet. This was the focus of the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. (Wade Roush, TechnologyReview.com, 10/5/05) Read

Laying Down The Law - The Notary Public of Thyris: A virtual Notary Public hangs out his shingle in Second Life (Wagner James Au, Second Life's New World Notes, 10/4/05) Read

Rebuilding Big Easy: Linden Lab has loaned out two linked regions of Second Life for events to benefit hurricane Katrina victims. Anyone who joins the in-world group "SL Katrina Relief" will be able to help decide what events to sponsor there. (Wagner James Au, Second Life's New World Notes, 9/30/05) Read

U.S. Insists on Keeping Control of Web: Should the United States or the United Nations control the main Internet routers? A stalemate over who should serve as the principal traffic cops for Internet routing and addressing could derail November's U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, which aims to ensure a fair sharing of the Internet for the benefit of the whole world. (Washington Post, 9/29/05) Read

RIP: Gaming Open Market? Gaming Open Market stopped all trading of L$ effective 10pm eastern time Sunday October 2nd. The site will remain open long enough to allow everyone to withdraw their cash and L$ balances (Terra Nova, 9/28/05) Read

Wells Fargo Buys 'Second Life' Island: Wells Fargo's Stagecoach Island aims to teach young adults how to handle their finances. (Clickable Culture, 9/14/05) Read

Building the Dream: Creating and Profiting in Virtual Worlds. A high-level discussion of the present benefits and future promise of digital worlds from some of the most highly respected innovators in the field. It was a tutorial at Stanford Unversity on Friday, September 16 2005 by Cory Ondrejka of Second Life. Read

Cyber-memorials raise cash for Katrina’s victims: Gamers have raised at least $3000 for the victims of Hurricane Katrina using virtual memorials, parties and clothing sales created inside a 3D online world. (NewScientist.com news service, 9/5/05) Read

Storm help flows from 3D worlds: The momentum within online gaming communities to organise help and donations for the Hurricane Katrina relief effort is gathering pace. (BBC News, 9/7/05) Read

The Reality of Virtual Commerce. The market for goods and services produced in online games has reached almost a billion dollars a year, according to Steve Salyer, president of IGE.com, the largest broker of virtual goods. By some estimates, the market could be twice that size ... in economic terms, there's actually no difference between real currencies such as the dollar, the pound, and the yuan, and virtual coin such as the platinum piece and the Linden dollar. (The Escapist, 8/2005) Read

Evolving Nemo: Off the coast of Hypatia and Themiskyra, a year-long experiment in artificial Darwinism continues (Wagner James Au, Second Life's New World Notes, 6/6/05) Read

The Game Is Virtual. The Profit Is Real. For many people, what are known as massively multiplayer online games have become significant sources of income. (Mark Wallace, New York Times Online, 5/28/05) Read

Croquet: What if we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today ... collaborate with one another in an online dimension to create or simulate anything we wanted to ... had the robustness of a 3D immersive technology, the diversity of the Internet, and the degree of social interaction we have in the real world ... how far could we go? (Croquet Project) Read

The Uncanny Valley: Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating? (Dave Bryant) Read

State of Play Timecapsule: Views of leading thinkers on the future of virtual worlds, law and society (New York Law School, 10/04) Read

The Undead Zone: Why realistic graphics make humans look creepy. (Slate, 6/9/04) Read

Who Owns My Light Saber? (Terra Nova weblog) Read

Virtual real estate boom draws real dollars (USA Today, 6/3/04) Read

Is There going nowhere? (Gamespot.com, 5/25/04) Read

The End of There...Or the Beginning? (There-alist, 5/21/04) Read

Game Theories (The Walrus, 5/04) Read

Interview with Kira Snyder, Senior Designer, There.com (Per Jacobsen, 5/04) Read

US Army reveals its There-based simulation (Gamespot News, 4/22/04) Read

Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and creator of the Metaverse, now writes longhand with a fountain pen and finds computers in the 18th century (Salon.com, 4/21/04). Read

My Avatar, My Self (MIT Enterprise Technology Review, 4/04) Read

US military creates second Earth: The US Army is building a second version of Earth on computer to help it prepare for conflicts around the world. (BBC News, 2/23/04). Read

Army Massively Multiplayer Project Interview (HomeLANFed, 2/18/04). Read

Justice Has Its Price In Sim World (Boston Globe online, 1/14/04) Read

What happens when a virtual newspaper covering virtual events runs afoul of a real corporation? (Salon.com, 12/12/03) Read

The Army’s Massive Multiplayer Environment will move simulation training into a wider domain of realism and soldier participation. (Military Training Technology, 12/01/03). Read

Laying Down the Virtual Law (Wired News, 11/13/03). Read

The State of Play: On the Second Life Tax Revolt (LawMeme, 9/21/03). Read

Reviews of Second Life, There, The Sims Online, and ToonTown (PC Magazine, 10/28/03). Read

World Games and Golden Boots ... what are the play-ethics of a computer game? (Play Journal, 7/4/03). Read

An Oxford University professor asks whether we might already be living in the Matrix, or something like it (Times Higher Education Supplement, 5/16/03). Read

Get a Life: Why are so many fans of fantasy games more socially involved in the virtual world than in the real one? (New York Daily News, 2/24/03) Read

The Singularity - A Talk with Ray Kurzweil The destiny of evolution is to progress ever faster, and grow human intelligence exponentially. The merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution. To think human beings are fine the way they are is a misplaced fond remembrance of what human beings used to be. The next stage will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results of our technology. (John Brockman, Edge, 3/25/01) Read

This page last modified Thursday Feb 26, 2009 at 5:15pm EST