The Metaverse Journal - Virtual World News

1. Big Think – Learning in Virtual Worlds – not a Child’s Play. “Thanks to high speed Internet and flat rate pricing virtual worlds saw a tremendous boost over the past years. This is unsurprisingly true for online games like World of Warcraft but also for virtual worlds like Second Life and Twinity which are now able to deliver more and more realistic graphics and a better user experience for their audience. All three of them are used in education but today I want to focus on the two more “realistic” approaches of Second Life and Twinity.”

2. WoW Insider (USA) – The Lawbringer: Avatar rights as expectations. “Last week, I introduced the concept that the denizens of a virtual world may have gained, over time, the right to rights within that virtual world. Raph Koster, the lead developer of Ultima Online, explored the idea over 10 years ago when the MMO genre was in its developmental infancy. These rights synced up with a world where there was a distinction between free-to-play MUDs and for-pay subscription worlds in the U.S. and European markets. Today, the MMO has transformed into a new beast from the close-knit communities of MUDs and the relatively forgiving user base of EverQuest and Ultima Online. The people who made WoW are the contemporaries of Raph Koster and children of the MMO genre that EverQuest cemented as important. How then, in over 10 years, has Koster’s declaration of the rights of avatars held up to the incredible growth of the industry and Blizzard’s own impressive growth? The short answer: The code of conduct you follow in World of Warcraft is pretty lenient, all things considered. The long answer: Well, there’s always a long answer”

3. The Guardian (UK) – Fantastic Pets – review. “Microsoft’s Kinect may not yet be able to cope with hugely complex movements and graphics, but the hardware is already proving perfect for a younger audience. Fantastic Pets makes excellent use of the system’s strengths by letting kids explore virtual worlds free from the controllers and wires that constrain imaginations. Fantastic Pets offers a choice of buddies from a selection of animals including cats, dogs, lizards and ponies. Whereupon there is much fun to be had styling, feeding, washing and training your pet, who quickly learns to respond to voice commands.”

4. The Baltimore Sun (USA) – Learning by gaming. “For those of us who are first-generation students of video games, two words can take us back to another life: Oregon Trail. Remember? In school, we’d play Oregon Trail on a sticky PC, naming our intrepid video travelers after classmates so we could laugh at their fates. Through us, our characters made choices: Ford the river, or try the mountain pass. Sometimes they lived, sometimes not. The point is, some kind of learning was going on. Oregon Trail is now nearly 40 years old, but games in the classroom are still considered an unusual teaching choice and are rarely fully integrated. I was lucky enough to grow up with virtual tutors like Spooky, the ghost who taught typing, or Rodney, a raccoon whose endless quest was powered by solving math problems. Students today are even more used to being surrounded by digital environments, immersive worlds and devices that give them instant feedback and access to worlds of information — in their pocket. Why don’t we do more to harness that?”

5. Computerworld (USA) – Intelligence agencies hunting for terrorists in World of Warcraft. “The FBI raided the apartment of two University of Michigan students to investigate “potentially fraudulent sales or purchases of virtual currency that people use to advance in the popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft.” Two students, a sophomore and a junior, share a University Towers apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but claim the feds have the wrong people as neither of them even play WoW. Records show that “laptop computers, hard drives, video game systems, credit cards, a cell phone, paperwork and other computer equipment” were seized. The college sophomore told AnnArbor.com, “They thought we were involved in some kind of fraud. I’m pretty sure they have the wrong people, but they took all my stuff.”

6. Massively (USA) – The Game Archaeologist plays with MUDs: A talk with Richard Bartle. “From talking with Richard Bartle, reading his blog, and looking over several interviews that he’s done, I’ve concluded that the co-creator of the first multi-user dungeon is, in many ways, a card. A smart one, a perceptive one, and an outspoken one, but a card nonetheless. I say this in a good way, of course, because for all of the verbal pussyfooting that often goes on in this industry, it’s refreshing to hear the voice of someone who knows what he thinks and isn’t afraid to say it, even if it goes against the grain. Dr. Bartle’s name often comes up in discussions of both MUDs and MMORPGs. His designs, work and scholarship have influenced MMOs in substantial ways, and it’s possible that if our children end up learning about massively multiplayer RPGs in school some day, Bartle’s name will be mentioned once or twice. While he’s sometimes polarizing, it’s hard to deny the incredible work he’s done, which is why I was excited to get to talk to him about this month’s subject on the Game Archaeologist. So hit that pesky jump and let’s pick the mind of a guy who really earned the right to post “FIRST!!1!”

7. Hypergrid Business (Hong Kong) – Clouds help propel OpenSim growth. “The top 40 public OpenSim grids gained more than a 1,000 new regions since this time last month, propelled partly by low-cost cloud-based regions from a new hosting provider, Kitely. There are now a total of 14,529 regions on these grids alone, an increase of 7.5 percent since this time last month. Total users increased 3.4 percent to 183,360, a gain of 6,059 new registered users. These totals do not include numbers from the SpotOn3D grids, which did not report their results this month, so actual grid region and user totals may be higher. These numbers also do not reflect land and users on the hundreds of private OpenSim grids run by schools, companies, and individuals.”

8. WKMS (USA) – Fort Campbell Soldiers Game to Train. “Thousands of 101st Airborne Division soldiers deploy out of Fort Campbell. Before they ship out, they run drills with some of the military’s most advanced vehicles, weapons, and gear, under situations that simulate real war-time experiences. The base’s latest training site isn’t a field on the Back Forty. It’s a non-descript brick building. As Angela Hatton report, inside soldiers use computer simulations based on video games to train for war. In a plain and windowless classroom, a crew of young soldiers sits a few feet away from each other at laptop computers. They’re all logged-in to Virtual Battle Space 2, or VBS2, the military’s computer training program. In the game, the group navigates a convoy along a dirt road in a patchy desert landscape, digitally rendered to look like the topography of Afghanistan. They communicate via headsets.”

9. New Scientist (USA) – Putting the DIY in DNA. “WHEN her dad was diagnosed with the hereditary disease haemochromatosis, 23-year-old Kay Aull did the natural thing, at least for an MIT graduate in bioengineering. She went online and bought a used thermal cycler for $100. She also ordered several custom-made DNA sequences, designing each to bind to a different mutation of the gene responsible for the disease. Then, using other second-hand equipment she had acquired, she set up a simple lab test in her closet and determined the likelihood that she would inherit the condition. Aull’s wasn’t the sort of achievement that earns grants or tenure. Doctors already have an effective haemochromatosis test, and most of her lab techniques were way behind the times. Aull’s test was remarkable because she did it herself, getting accurate results for a fraction of professional lab costs. As Marcus Wohlsen writes in Biopunk, “Aull’s test does not represent new science but a new way of doing science.”

10. North Country Public Radio (USA) – How To Save The World, One Video Game At A Time. “Every week, people across the globe spend 3 billion hours playing video games, but that isn’t enough for Jane McGonigal. She says video games can help solve some of the world’s biggest problems — and we really should be playing more. “If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity,” she said, “I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week by the end of the next decade.” As the audience broke out into chuckles she told them, “No, I’m serious. I am.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

1. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Virtual pigs and chooks see payday for crooks: NSW Police. “Virtual worlds like FarmVille and World of Warcraft are being used by criminals to launder money, say NSW Police, who have discovered that buying and selling virtual items and currency is a growing new way of cleaning dirty money. NSW Police Detective Superintendent Commander Colin Dyson said the “relatively new” trend provided an “emerging opportunity for criminals”. “Any opportunity that is present on the internet for criminals to use they’ll obviously exploit it [and] take advantage of it” he said in a telephone interview today. “It’s certainly something we’re looking at.”

2. The Times Leader (USA) – Virtual worlds bring about ‘e’conomy, but where is it all headed? Tech Talk NICK DELORENZO. “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you sit at home and play games. So the wisdom goes. Unless, of course, you’re really good at it — and you happen to be playing in the brave new online world. The younger generation can tell you all about World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and the like — the so called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games — or MMORPG for short. People play these games obsessively — spending hours or even an entire day immersed in a virtual world where they fight demons, pilot spaceships, embark on quests, and perform other arcane tasks, all in pursuit of a bevy of achievements, badges, and rewards. These games also feature another aspect: a virtual economy.”

3. Search Engine Watch (USA) – Back to Basics: Linden Lab Releases a Basic Viewer. “There are a number of themes that keep recurring when you discuss Second Life specifically, and more generally, virtual worlds and Internet business itself. One is “How do you capture and retain new users?” This has been an especially large challenge for Linden Lab over the years, and more and more time and resources have been devoted to meeting that challenge. The latest effort on the part of Linden Lab comes in the form of a new viewer, simply called Basic.”

4. USA Today (USA) – 3D Voice comes to ‘DC Universe Online’ on Sony PlayStation 3 and PC. “3D is all the rage now. Nintendo’s 3DS handheld is in stores. Games such as Crysis 2 and the upcoming SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy Seals are playable in 3D on compatible TVs. Now coming to games: 3D voice. Voice technology company Vivox, which already provides 3D voice to virtual worlds such as Second Life and games such as APB and Bloodlines Champions, is bringing the technology to DC Universe Online on the PC and, for the first time, the PlayStation 3.”

5. Education Week (USA) – Games and Simulations Help Children Access Science. “Want to know what it’s like to stalk elk, or a mate, from the vantage point of a wild animal? Educators at the Minnesota Zoo, located in a suburb south of the Twin Cities, created just such an online game a few years ago that has proved immensely popular—and educational. Called WolfQuest, it allows players to learn about wolf ecology by exploring Yellowstone National Park as that creature.”

6. Canada.com (Canada) – Nintendo’s 3DS portable game system as groundbreaking as the Wii console. “Heavens to Murgatroyd – the images are jumping right off the screen! Nintendo Inc. has done it again. Discounted by many as a has-been prior to its groundbreaking Wii gaming console, Nintendo now is ushering in a new era of three-dimensional (3D) video gaming with the release of its 3DS portable gaming console. The most appealing part of the technology? No glasses are required to see the video game characters leap to life. The 3DS, which is similar in size to the company’s popular DS console, uses something called “parallax-barrier” technology – a thin film coating the device’s screen does the work of a pair of polarized 3D glasses. The 3D effect is crisp, clean and superior to almost all of the 3D televisions on the market today.”

7. Bloomberg (USA) – Electronic Arts, Sony Use Crisp Thinking to Fight Cyber Bullies. “Adam Hildreth was a 14-year-old in Leeds, England, when he and six friends started Dubit, a virtual world for other teens, in 1999. The site, which makes money selling advertising aimed at kids socializing in cyberspace, grew quickly to 250,000 users. Dubit struggled to hire enough moderators to keep cyber bullies and other troublemakers in check, at one point needing 50 monitors a day. Human moderation “was never going to scale,” says Hildreth, now 26. Hildreth, who left school at 16 to run Dubit full time, began working on software to detect bad behavior in the game world. The idea became his next company, Crisp Thinking, which he co-founded in 2005. Crisp’s software analyzes users’ language and actions to identify harassment, spamming, or predators who may be “grooming” potential victims. The system can react in real time by automatically warning or banning people who violate a site’s terms of service, or referring them to human moderators.”

8. New Scientist (USA) – How will you cope, living with your avatar? “Hello, future. Gaming systems that drop you into another world, such as Microsoft’s Kinect or Nintendo’s Wii, are just the beginning of what virtual-reality technology has to offer. Get ready for virtual immortality, teleportation, time travel and the ability to be in two places at once. But everything comes at a price. There are those who already worry about how this technology is affecting our brains. And once the digital versions of us become indistinguishable from our real selves, what might this do to our societies? Two of virtual reality’s most prominent researchers have come together to sketch out the landscape of an emerging field I call psychotech – the place where psychology and technology collide to produce something new and exciting. Social and cognitive psychologists Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson detail the current research – primarily their own – and pose some fascinating questions, which have surprising and important answers.”

9. The Daily Mail (UK) – Number of college students having casual sex on the rise…but virginity makes a comeback too. “Rising numbers of college students are having casual sex – but more are remaining virgins too. Some 72 per cent of both sexes said that during their studies they had at least one ‘hookup’, or one-night stand. But at the same time a quarter said that they were saving themselves for the right person, up from 19 per cent in 2002. Experts said that young people were leading such busy lives they either wanted to wait for the right person or just have a throwaway relationship. But in a worrying twist they also suggested that even the chaste could be going online to have hundreds of ‘virtual partners’ – and still claim to be a virgin in real-life.”

10. Escapist Magazine (USA) -Man Let Son Suffocate Because He Was Playing WoW. “A bad situation is even worse than it sounds: A man on trial for the death of his infant son couldn’t tear himself away from WoW to keep the boy from suffocating. A sailor from King’s Bay is currently on trial for his son’s death because he neglected to notice that the infant was suffocating under a pillow. However, the reason for the father’s neglect is being laid at the feet of popular MMO World of Warcraft: the man claims that he was so engrossed with the game that he couldn’t be bothered to remove the pillow.”

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1. TUAW (USA) – Enterprise virtual worlds vendor ProtonMedia promises Mac client. “ProtonMedia says that increasing use of Macs in businesses means it’s now developing a Mac version of its respected virtual worlds software ProtoSphere, a virtual collaboration environment. Although the Windows version of its software is built on Microsoft technology, the company says its architecture means it can fairly easily port it over to the Mac.”

2. The Guardian (UK) – British hacker jailed over £7m virtual gaming chips scam. “A British computer hacker who stole 400bn virtual gaming chips from an international gaming company has been jailed for two years. Ashley Mitchell, 29, broke into the Zynga mainframe, stole the identity of two employees and transferred chips said to be worth more than £7m to himself. Mitchell, of Paignton, Devon, sold the chips through Facebook to other gaming enthusiasts and used the money to fund his online gambling addiction. More than 50 million people a day play Zynga games, including Mafia Wars, in which players run a virtual mob business, and FarmVille, which allows users to create their dream farm. Players have to buy chips for their virtual worlds. A black market in cut-price chips has grown up on the internet.”

3. Massively (USA) – Celebrate EQ’s 12 years with a look back and an interview with John Smedley. “Time grows many layers, and this is especially true in MMORPGs. After all, not only are new quests, stories and chunks of content added to a game as it goes along, but the players themselves add their own memories and experiences to the mix. MMOs truly are virtual worlds, and they change over time and become richer. EverQuest is no exception. After 12 years of adventure, danger, and story-telling, the game shows no signs of stopping. What is planned for the game? How will the last 12 years affect the decisions for the next 12 years? EverQuest has been one of the flagships of the genre, but how does a game of its age maintain any type of market visibility?”

4. Victoria Times Colonist (Canada) – ‘Uther’ worldly class offers a real world benefit -dinner. “Imagine that you could take cooking lessons from a top chef in your own kitchen. And imagine that chef is halfway around the world from where you are. At UtherAcademy’s Kitchen Corner cooking school, it matters not if the chef is in Egypt and his cooking school students are in Nanaimo, Whalley or Tuktoyaktuk. Once inside the three-dimensional virtual classroom the chef and his students -as animated avatars -are in their world, talking freely, asking questions and demonstrating techniques in French cooking, knife skills, pickling and food hygiene. When class begins next week, six students will enter Kitchen Corner with chef Peers Cawley to begin 12 weeks of hands-on cooking instruction.”

5. BBC (UK) – Children ‘give playground games a modern twist’. “Children are using their experience of computer games and reality TV shows to give traditional playground games a modern twist, a study suggests. Researchers found aspects of programmes like the Jeremy Kyle Show and Britain’s Got Talent included in children’s imaginative play. Far from destroying their imagination, new technologies help to enrich it, the team from London and Sheffield says. They observed play at two school playgrounds over two years. The researchers from London’s Institute of Education, University of East London and the University of Sheffield, also drew on archived recordings of children playing made by play researchers in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Should MMOs be more like single-player games? “Most of today’s single-player action games like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed have around 15-25 hours of gameplay. These games share some similarities as the player progresses: the character gains more abilities that affect gameplay (weapons, moves, new mission types, etc), he advanced in a linear story, meets new characters, kills new enemies and often has the chance to explore something extra. Also they all share about the same payment method: you pay around $40 and you have access to all the game for as long as you like. They are also, of course, single-player experiences. In most MMOs today, like in World of Warcraft, you take 20 hours to reach a third or less of the your game progression. And, most of the time, that means little gameplay, hardly any story, a multitude of disposable npcs and tons of variants of the same enemies, all of that often focused on a limited repetition of completing the same kinds of quests with the obvious lack of effect to the game world.”

7. Fast Company (USA) – The 10 Most Innovative Companies in Gaming. “01 / Zynga >>For dominating–and monetizing–the social-gaming industry. The largest social-games developer in the world touts hundreds of millions of monthly active users on FarmVille, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, and more. But what’s truly innovative is its all virtual-goods revenue model: By creating immersive, addicting games, Zynga has roped gamers into paying real money for make-believe “virtual” goods that let them move up in the games or to give their friends gifts. Although small, those numbers add up: Zynga is already profitable, and it’s valued at more than $7 billion.”

8. The Nation (Pakistan) – The Powers of Thought. “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well, said the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes. True enough. Three days ago, an announcement by German scientists revealed how science is moving towards doing just that. Driving a car using the power of thought is the latest advance in linking the brain to a computer. Scientists at the Free University of Berlin have connected commercially available sensors that record brain activity—technically, EEG, or electroencephalogram sensors—to a computer-controlled sedan, which means the car is now controlled by thoughts. It was obviously not a good idea to do the test on a road, so Berlin’s mothballed Tempelhof Airport was chosen to prove the concept.”

9. Big Think (USA) – Walking Across Campus Whilst Sitting on your Couch. “This might at first sight sound like an oxymoron but it could be part of a future campus environment. Last year a couple of tech start-ups presented their first so called “telepresence robots” ready to be commercialized. The one that got the most attention from the tech scene is AnyBots. Michael Arrington, founder of the popular tech blog TechCrunch even changed his Twitter profile picture to an AnyBots QB after he had had the chance to play around with it in the TechCrunch offices last year.”

10. Computerworld (USA) – Display tech to watch this year: Haptics create a buzz. “If multitouch display technology is proliferating, haptic feedback is helping to fuel the trend. Haptics provide tactile feedback to your fingers as you touch a display by vibrating all or part of the display surface. Haptic technology is on a roll; it’s been adopted in more than 20 smartphone models, including the Nokia N8 and Samsung Galaxy S series, because it can help people interact with touch-screen applications more accurately and otherwise enhance the user experience, says Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst with DisplaySearch. DisplaySearch, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based research firm that focuses on the display market, hasn’t yet released growth projections for haptics, but Colegrove notes that tablet PCs are ripe for the technology. One tablet that already includes haptics is Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which has sold 2 million units since its launch in September of last year.”

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1. Singularity Hub (USA) – Your Car is the Arcade: Driving Simulator Uses Real Vehicle in Virtual Worlds.”Daredevils have an insatiable need for speed, but they play with fire when pushing their vehicle or driving abilities too far. Tag Systems offers a unique solution by transporting the motorist and their physical car to a virtual road, a first in driving simulation technology. Sensors collect real-time performance data on an actual automobile, giving you a first-person perspective in 3D world. Basically, you can accelerate, steer, and brake inside your own car as you would on the open road, but the vehicle is driving in place on steel rollers. This one-of-a-kind VR system allows drivers to approach 150 mph on renowned Formula 1 courses, compete in Fast and Furious-style drag races, or even cruise the surface of the moon.”

2. VentureBeat (USA) – DEMO: Next Island opens time travel for its virtual world. “Virtual worlds haven’t fared well as users migrate to social networks. But that hasn’t stopped David Post from launching Next Island. Today at DEMO, the company is formally launching an awareness campaign for its virtual world and enabling the key feature of the world that could be most appealing for users: time travel. Next Island has been in the works for nearly three years. The virtual world opened for its first beta test in December. The world has since grown to nearly 2,000 users and the company is drawing attention to the high quality of its 3D graphics and the sheer creativity of its sci-fi adventure themed world.”

3. The Hollywood Reporter (USA) – Nickelodeon Enters MMO Games Space with ‘Monkey Quest’. “Nickelodeon used GDC 2011 as the coming out party for its first entry into the massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming space. The company unveiled Monkey Quest, a new family-friendly, free-to-play MMO game based on an original property, at a party held at AT&T Park. The game, which encourages players to work together to solve puzzles and partake in challenges, was also available throughout the week at the Unity booth at Moscone Center. Monkey Quest will go live in April. Nickelodeon has a rich lineup of popular gaming sites, IPs, and virtual worlds. Addicting Games and Shockwave are two of the top gaming destinations online. Addicting Games offers more than 4,369 games and provided over 102 million game plays in December 2010. Shockwave serves more than 1,800 games and provided over 47 million game plays in December 2010.”

4. Mashable (USA) – Inside One Man’s Kickstarter Quest to Build True Artificial Life. “Virtual worlds have long been populated by creatures that interact, reproduce, compete, evolve and die. But by and large, they do so because their behavior is programmed by developers. These efforts can produce complex virtual ecosystems, but they’re not quite the digital reflections of what happens in nature. Life in the real world is “programmed” by DNA, but its form and behavior are determined by the random mutation of genetic code, not by the intentions of a developer. Computer scientists have always been intrigued by the prospect of creating “artificial life” — that is, digital genetic code that can sustain itself over generations and adapt to meet the demands of a virtual environment without human interference.”

5. PC World (USA) – The History of Stereoscopic 3D Gaming. “In 1968, Ivan Sutherland of Harvard University created the first stereoscopic computer display (nicknamed the “Sword of Damocles” for the unwieldy size of the apparatus that hung over the user’s head). Sutherland’s experiments with virtual worlds began in 1966 at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, and they culminated in the invention of the first 3D head-mounted display and the first virtual computer environment, a wire-frame simulation of a room (shown here).”

6. Gamasutra (USA) – Bigpoint U.S. Developing Universal Monsters MMO. “Bigpoint Inc., the U.S. based subsidiary of German browser-based games publisher Bigpoint, announced that it is working with Universal Pictures on an MMO based on Universal Monsters. Unlike SEE Virtual Worlds’ upcoming online world also using the Universal Monsters license, this project will be a third-person, multiplayer action RPG in which players fight against famous film monsters from Universal’s catalog like Dracula and The Wolf Man. Bigpoint’s San Francisco studio, which has been working on the project since early February, says it “aspires to capture the integrity of each property and include some of the early film techniques used in bringing the original monster characters to the silver screen.”

7. Detroit Free Press (USA) – Virtual caribou help scientists unearth Lake Huron’s secrets. “On a computer, Bob Reynolds watches caribou run across a wilderness of spruce and lagoons on the edge of Lake Huron. A few of the creatures pause to graze, while the rest move slowly across the tundra. What’s unusual is that the caribou herd is simulated. They are moving at their own whim across a virtual world that mimics an ancient land bridge that existed 10,000 years ago, but now is submerged beneath the waters of Lake Huron.”

8. Silicon India (India) – Indian Gaming Startups Are They Really in the Game? “he Ferrari whooshed across the Lamborghini and there comes the hit point – it’s the Jackpot – Oh yes, it’s the undying NFS, the car racing game. For some the virtual adventure is the perfect idea of gaining nirvana, and even a 10 year old’s combat skills can reign supreme in the game world. Today, gamers constitute 41.2 percent of the total Active Internet users in India, a whopping 89 percent increase from the 2007, as per a report by IAMAI. The growth has been lucrative enough to build up the confidence of the newbies, who have just entered the quasi-penetrated market. Younger people are growing up with the Internet and online games. As they enter the workforce and continue to have greater purchasing power, the market for gaming in India will expand dramatically. “Virtual gaming is definitely big now after 2010. It is about $1 billion market in U.S. and about $8 billion worldwide. It’s huge in Asia Pacific mainly in China, Japan, S. Korea, while India is yet to gain the same speed,” says Sumit Gupta, CEO of BitRhymes.”

9. Wired (USA) – Clive Thompson on How Games Make Work Seem Like Play. “In summer 2009, the UK’s Guardian newspaper had a problem: an enormous pile of receipts. British politicians had been caught filing what would total millions of pounds’ worth of bogus personal expenses. To try to quell the uproar, the government scanned hundreds of thousands of receipts from members of Parliament and dumped the files online—giving reporters the Herculean task of analyzing them. The editors at the Guardian fought back. They turned the task into a game—and invited the public to play. A Guardian programmer named Simon Willison created a clever web app that would present you with a randomly chosen receipt. If it looked dodgy, you could write a quick description of what you’d found, then hit a big Investigate This! button to send the receipt to the paper’s reporters. A leaderboard tracked which contributors had made the most finds. The goal: to get people competing to be top dog, just like on Xbox Live.”

10. Examiner (USA) – Lag strikes Mardi Gras in Second Life. “Going to Mardi Gras in a virtual world instead of New Orleans has some real advantages. No airfare, no hotel bills, no travel time. While it can’t equal being in New Orleans in person, it’s more realistic for most of us. Until lag strikes. If you’ve been in a virtual world any length of time, you know what lag is. It’s like you went to New Orleans and suddenly, instead of a hurricane, the laws of physics went haywire. Gravity increased. Air became thick as molasses, making walking impossible. The speed of light plummeted to barely a crawl. There are huge blotches of the scene around you, walls, floats, costumes, that you simply can’t see. That’s what lag is like, and it struck Mardi Gras in Second Life hard today.”

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1. LiveScience (USA) – Virtual Behavior Labs Discover What Gamers Want. “Imagine the power to know every consumer purchase ever made, big or small, or the gory details of any crime ever committed. That’s the new reality in the worlds of video games. Tens of millions of gamers inhabit virtual worlds where behaviors or actions can be tracked and tallied, creating some astounding statistics. In the first two weeks of release for the cowboy-themed “Red Dead Redemption,” for instance, 13,250,237 virtual U.S. soldiers were killed (or about the same number of actual German and Soviet military deaths combined during World War II). Players also committed a total of 131,904,068 counts of in-game murder and hunted down millions of virtual critters, including 55,813,649 wolves. The rabbit hole goes deeper. Developers of the futuristic sci-fi game Mass Effect 2 found that 80 percent of the game’s players used the face customization system to change their appearances, rather than use the default hero or heroine. Some games even track giggleworthy player behaviors; Mafia II records how long players spend staring at in-game Playboy centerfolds.”

2. TechCrunch (USA) – Moshi Monsters Aims To Become The Facebook for Kids (TCTV). “Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith came to my office today to tell me about Moshi Monsters, his company’s virtual world for kids that is signing up a new member every second. Moshi Monsters was his “last roll of the dice” to save his virtual worlds startup in 2008, and it worked. Moshi Monsters is up to 35 million registered users, with about 7 million of those active every month, says Smith. And it is projected to generate $100 million this year from a combination of subscriptions and gross retail merchandise sales. The site is geared towards kids between 5 to 12 years old. Each kid gets a monster pet and a room that can be decked out with virtual goods. But instead of trying to create “just another bloody virtual world,” Smith wanted it to be more like a safe social network. “Instead of copying Club Penguin,” he says, “we focused more on Facebook and tried to re-imagine that for kids.”

3. Gamasutra (USA) – Image Metrics Acquires Big Stage. “Facial animation tech company Image Metrics has acquired Big Stage, creator of the avatar creation platform Portable You. Big Stage’s tech lets users translate photos of themselves into 3D animated characters for use in virtual worlds, video clips and online communities. Image Metrics says it’ll merge that avatar creation platform into its existing animation tech to create a new product suite to launch in the second half of this year. The company says the merger will help its licensees integrate more realistic avatars into consumer-facing projects.”

4. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Even Better Than the Real Thing. “‘It’s the real world—only better.” This is how Jay Wright, business-development director at technology company Qualcomm Inc., describes the latest buzz technology to grip the digital world. So-called “augmented reality” is the overlaying of digital information onto the real world, and everyone from games designers to retailers to health-care companies to estate agents are gearing up to use it. While the potential for such technology to change the world is vast, the biggest challenge for its backers will be to convert this virtual revolution into rock-solid profits. Fortunately, there are countless ways this can be achieved, but not all are immediately obvious.”

5. ars technica (USA) – Lord British on what games can learn from Ultima Online. “My job allows me to meet many interesting people, and meeting my childhood heroes is definitely a huge bonus. When I found myself speaking with Richard Garriott for 45 minutes, I felt the need to pinch myself. This is the man who created Ultima, crafted one of the earliest virtual worlds in Ultima Online, and then used the money to go to freakin’ space. We’ll have more from the fascinating discussion a little later, but I wanted to share his answer to my most pressing question: is he playing the games he dreamed of while working on the Ultima series?”

6. FierceVOIP (USA) – Vivox sees massive user growth for gaming VoIP. “Today, Vivox, a social networking and gaming VoIP prvider, announced its worldwide user base has surpassed 45 million. In 2010, Vivox saw its user base rise from 18.5 million users to over 45 million users. Companies including Wargaming.net, IMVU, Runewaker Entertainment and Bigpoint.com use Vivox service for high-quality, reliable voice chat services within their games. Vivox enables users of social sites, online games and virtual worlds to communicate in HD quality voice and within Three Dimensional environments. It also allows unique audio advertising and virtual goods capabilities for social and gaming sites.”

7. GigaOM (USA) – Working Together: How My Virtual Team Collaborates. “In an effort to better understand the dynamics of distributed teams, I decided to interview my own virtual team members at the social media marketing agency I co-own, Conversify. I wanted to move beyond my own personal preferences and opinions, both as a virtual worker for the last eight years and as a co-founder of a virtual company.”

8. Huffington Post (USA) – Video Games: An Hour A Day Is Key To Success In Life. “The single biggest misconception about games is that they’re an escapist waste of time. But more than a decade’s worth of scientific research shows that gaming is actually one of the most productive ways we can spend time. No, playing games doesn’t help the GDP – our traditional measure of productivity. But games help us produce something more important than economic bottom line: powerful emotions and social relationships that can change our lives–and potentially help us change the world. Currently there are more than half a billion people worldwide playing online games at least an hour a day — and 183 million in the US alone. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be a gamer — 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report playing videogames regularly. And the average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21. That’s almost exactly as much time as they spend in a classroom during all of middle school and high school if they have perfect attendance. Most astonishingly, 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games — the same as a full time job! ”

9. Develop (UK) – “Hardcore social games can be lucrative”. “Social networks were developed and popularised by young people, and they are still their heaviest users. But, ironically, the booming social network games market is dominated by middle-aged housewives because younger people don’t play there as much there as they do elsewhere. Why has this come about and is there an opportunity for core games targeting traditional gaming’s heartland audience on social networks? The demographic mismatch of Facebook gamers to Facebook users overall has long been one of the great incongruities of the Facebook games market.”

10. Massively (USA) – New RIFT trailer shows off dynamic invasions. “Ho hum, another day, another RIFT reveal. Trion is carpet-bombing the MMORPG battlefield with an all out marketing assault as the March 1st launch date for its fantasy opus draws near. Today brings us a new trailer titled Cry Havoc, and in it we are witnesses to an interesting time-lapse presentation that shows off various in-game battles featuring large contingents of players on screen.”

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1. Internet Evolution (USA) – New Virtual Worlds Still Growing. “It may be tempting to assume that growth in virtual worlds has ground to a halt. After all, There.com has shut down, and Second Life is losing land area and has stopped publishing most usage statistics. Attention has shifted to social networking platforms and mobile devices. But the action hasn’t died off. Instead, it has shifted to proprietary, enterprise-class platforms like Teleplace, ProtoSphere, and VenueGen — and to the open-source platform, OpenSim. Based on reports from educational institutions, non-profit groups, and hosting and consulting firms, I estimate that OpenSim currently has between 500,000 and 1 million users. These users are scattered across hundreds, or thousands, of private virtual worlds running on the OpenSim platform.”

2. New Scientist (USA) – CGI tricks: Slicing virtual dessert is a piece of cake. “As virtual worlds become increasingly interactive, animators have to make sure that objects within them don’t just look good on the surface, but also remain realistic when they are manipulated. This is harder to achieve with some objects than with others. Cut through a virtual sponge, for example, and the texture remains the same all the way through. But take a slice through a kiwi fruit, and the cross section will look different depending on where you cut it, and along which axis. Previous methods of modelling 3D shapes worked for objects with a uniform texture. But according to Kenshi Takayama from the University of Tokyo, it couldn’t handle objects with more complicated texture orientations such as kiwi fruit and tree stumps.”

3. Austin News KXAN (USA) – Virtual world helps in murder case. “Justice moved swiftly in the case of a man who shot his estranged wife in the head in plain sight in an Austin park last October, and now Hernan Mendieta, 35, is sentenced to 60 years in prison, just three months later. It was a virtual world created by a witness that showed Austin police what he saw after he jogged in Brushy Creek Park. Thomas Jung works creating virtual worlds for computer games. He was able to reproduce for police via animation what he saw on the morning of Oct. 26, 2010 . His witness information helped in the murder case.”

4. Mobile Entertainment (UK) – Virtual world Meez goes mobile with Android, iPhone and iPad apps. “Teen-focused virtual world Meez is launching MeezNation, a spin-off making its debut on Android and iOS devices. With more than 15 million users, Meez is one of the popular virtual worlds aimed at teenagers. Now it’s going mobile, with plans to launch a new cross-platform spin-off called MeezNation. It will launch next week with an Android app, with iPhone and iPad versions to follow in March, before ultimately extending onto the Google TV and Xbox Live platforms too.”

5. Fast Company (USA) – Egypt: Social Media as a Life or Death Proposition. “Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, many wearing bandages from from days of street fighting, turned out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday for what they are calling the ‘Day of Departure’, a nationwide cry for the immediate removal and prosecution of Hosni Mubarak who has ruled the country for 30 years. This story is now larger than Egypt and the Arab world, as international news coverage and social media has broadcast the escalating violence around the world, time and again featuring Egyptian citizens dying and risking death in order to have their message heard and for regime change to become a reality. Egypt is widely considered the litmus test for what will happen in the rest of the Arab world, but the importance of social media in its political transformation is larger than that. The use of social media in Egypt is a dramatic demonstration of a clash of cultures — of the old and new, of violence and peace, of the past and future.”

6. New Media Age (UK) – Branded virtual worlds. “With a tin man, talking lion, living scarecrow and winged monkeys, the parallel universe of Oz, invented by author L Frank Baum and made famous by the 1939 Judy Garland film, has been catapulted into the 21st Century. Tapping into a trend for transmedia storytelling, Summertime Entertainment aims to reinvigorate the Oz franchise with not only a new animated film, Dorothy of Oz, but an immersive virtual world game, Adventure in Oz. The project, launched on the Dubit platform, is riding a wave of businesses seeking brand engagement and ROI. Virtual worlds analysis company KZero reports there are now over a billion users of virtual worlds globally, 97% of them under 25. According to Matthew Warneford, chief technical officer at Dubit, virtual worlds are convening with trends in both gaming and socialising online.”

7. Confectionary News (France) – US chocolatier develops virtual factory world. “US confectioner Tcho is developing a virtual factory world which will allow customers and employees to interact online with the company’s chocolate processing facility. The iPhone application developed by Tcho and FXPal that controls the factory’s machines. Real-time sensor data and video is imported from hundreds of sensors on the 30,000-square-foot factory in San Fransisco to create the computer-based environment. “Different users can see different aspects of the data; for instance, we are designing ways for customers to track their own product from point of origin to finished product,” Larry Del Santo, marketing manager for Tcho told ConfectioneryNews.com. “In the future, visitors will be able to choose avatars and interact with each other as well as the factory itself,” said Del Santo. He said the technology will allow the company to create multi-user collaborative spaces for tasks like factory observation, virtual inspections, customer visits, employee training, process monitoring, and inventory tracking. The software is being developed by FXPal, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto, California. Here researchers explore how new technologies like mobile augmented reality, virtual worlds, and social media can be applied in manufacturing.”

8. WVEC (USA) – Congressmen: Modeling and simulation saves money, helps train forces. “When it comes to preparing for combat, nothing can replace hands-on training. Modeling and simulation can get close. Homeland security and military defense are some of the applied research areas at the ODU Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center in Suffolk. The 50 faculty members and research scientists can create virtual worlds for training – like landing an airplane at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. “Modeling and simulation has been shown to be able to save money, use resources more efficiently and you can do things and other activities rather than real life, you save substantial sums of money,” notes Rep. Bobby Scott (D-3rd D).”

9. VentureBeat (USA) – Virtual world Habbo hits more than 200M registered users. “If you’re a teen, chances are you’ve checked into the Habbo Hotel. Sulake, the parent company of the cartoon-style virtual world, said today that more than 200 million people have registered as users for Habbo. That means they’ve created a virtual character called a Habbo. The virtual community is more than 10 years old. It started in Finland and has now grown to more than 150 countries. While traffic to virtual worlds has waned in the age of Facebook and the iPhone, Habbo’s numbers show it has fared well and is growing quickly. It shows that once a community hits critical mass, its growth can accelerate.”

10. Nextgov (USA) – Army taps Second Life for troop and family support. “The Army is bringing a program to improve troops’ physical and emotional well-being into the Second Life virtual world. The service is strengthening its Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, established in 2008, with a “virtual resiliency” campus on an Army island in Second Life, said Maj. Gen. Reuben Jones, commander of the Family, Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command. The campus will offer soldiers and their families exercise tips as well as online, avatar-led classes to improve their physical fitness. The emotional, social, family and spiritual sections will help troops develop coping mechanisms and deal with post-deployment readjustment, Jones said. Should soldiers need more help, the campus will be backed by a network of volunteers recruited through the Army chaplain’s office, said Shaunya Murrill, chief of the outreach and strategic integration division in the command’s family programs directorate.”

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