Tag: gaming

Interesting, Linden Labs have made some changes to the registration process…….I didn’t notice this before, have any of my readers that are SL residents notice this clause before?

2.4 Account registrations are limited per unique person. Transfers of accounts are generally not permitted. Linden Lab may require you to submit an indication of unique identity in the account registration process; e.g. credit card or other payment information, or SMS message code…..etc…

Look what my college Kjell came across and was kind enough to send me….

“RIT Joins Library of Congress Partnership to Preserve Online Games and Virtual Worlds Rochester Institute of Technology (09/19/07) Researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology will participate in an initiative to develop standards for preserving virtual worlds and online games. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project, which the Library of Congress will administer under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP), will focus on basic standards for metadata and content representation, and also use archiving case studies of video games, electronic literature, and the Second Life virtual world to study preservation issues. “This is incredibly important work because the worlds we are playing with today will be gone in a flash, with no recordable way of recreating them for future generations,” says Andrew Phelps, director of game design and development and RIT’s principal investigator on the project. “Virtual worlds are affecting millions of people in their daily lives and while we can record and store some of the social commentary that happens about them from the outside, it seems almost silly that we in fact can’t store the original work beyond a scant number of years.” RIT’s Christopher Egert, assistant professor of IT, and Elizabeth Lawley, director of the Laboratory for Social Computing in the Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure, will also be involved in the project. They will join researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and Linden Lab on the project, which has received a $590,000 grant from the Library of Congress.”

For my Swedish readers, you may be interested to checkout this community ‘Biblioteksavatarna‘ in Second Life. There are some really good videos here to that introduce the potential of training/learning and provision of services within such a virtual environment. These videos are in English.

Read this article from Time magazine it is quite interesting and fun…an excerpt follows :o)

Reality is catching up with Second Life….The ballyhoo surrounding this online community has led multinational brands from Reebok to Toyota to establish beachheads on Second Life to interact with consumers and be a part of the next wave in social networking. In April market-research firm Gartner predicted that by the end of 2011, 80% of active Internet users will have some sort of presence in a virtual world, with Second Life currently one of the most populous…..

and looks like terrorists have come to SL too…..
Companies are drawn to these techno-savvy trendsetters who spent 22 million hours on the site last month. But some devotees are so upset by increasing commercialization that a group called the Second Life Liberation Army last year gunned down virtual shoppers at American Apparel…..

It was so wonderful to find the following article that I have tried to summarise below. Enjoy and then think about it….

Torley Wong who is a project manager at Linden Labs in San Francisco, which created Second Life, is not the only person with an autism spectrum disorder who prefers online communication to meeting people in the flesh. In the past few years, people with all forms of ASD — from Asperger’s to the more severe forms, known as “low-functioning” or “classic” autism — have taken to the Web, joining virtual worlds, writing blogs and posting videos on Web sites such as YouTube.

Torley uses interactions inside the virtual world to learn more about how to socialize off-line. He buys “gestures” — animations of avatars making faces — and plays them back to himself. “I can observe gestures, and watch them repeatedly, to learn body language,” he says. “It seems very odd off-line to tell someone to keep smiling for me, I want to pick up on that.”

Not all autistic Web users are interested in learning to behave in a more conventional way. Laurent Mottron, an autism researcher and doctor at the University of Montreal in Canada, has noticed quite the opposite. “People with autism are using the Web in a totally different way,” he says. “They have a social drive, but the exchange does not go through non-verbal stuff or emotional sharing, what they are interested in is sharing information.” This is why communication through the Web is particularly appealing, he says. “It bypasses all the non-verbal stuff, which they are not interested in.”

One example is Michelle Dawson, an autistic woman who recently joined Mottron as a research collaborator. As well as her own blog, she has also set up online forums where contributors, many of whom have autism, exchange research papers and discuss autism-related issues. “They talk very seriously. They exchange information which is also verified by sources, evidence-based issues,” says Mottron. That is the strength of the Web, he says. “It can be used by crazy teenagers to chat, or by autistics to exchange very serious information.”

Many blogs and Web sites created by people with autism promote the idea of “neural diversity”, the notion that the condition is not a disease that must be cured, but simply a different brain “wiring”.

There has been much talk of what goes on in Second Life (SL), such as gambling -which incidentally is now banned according to this mornings Swedish newspaper, dancing, shopping, chatting, biking, flying, virtual sex. Anything is possible in SL. However what is not talked so much about is the concept of SL gives equality for all residents regardless of race, creed, gender, age, size or disability. Hence we have the potential of equality there. For example nobody need know you are unable to walk in the physical world because in the virtual world you can, everyone can!

If we take away the name ‘Second Life’ which automatically conquers up imagines in our minds influenced by what we have been reading in the press, and just ponder on the ‘concept’ alone. The possibilities are interesting and exciting. Take a look at an article out May this year.

I think these sort of games should be censored as unsuitable for children. Can we ban these type of games outright?

Yes I think so based upon my experience in SL. I would say that some gamers that get involved in these type of ‘role-playing’ games can start to lose some distinction between what is, or what is not real…. scary to say the least! What do you think?

I just came across Ralf Bendrath’s blog he has some interesting thoughts on identity and privacy. Latest being in SL and the use of a third-party for verification. I’ve posted a comment.