Archives for July 2009

Speeding

Did you hear about the 83 year old woman who talked herself out of a speeding ticket by telling the young officer that she had to get there before she forgot where she was going?

Makes perfectly good sense to me…..

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

1. CBS News (USA) – The Obama White House’s First Try At Second Life. “Since entering the White House in January, the Obama administration has made use of a myriad of social networking and Internet communications tools, such as blogs, the YouTube video service and Twitter, to interact with the public. Come Saturday, you can add a virtual world appearance to the list. When President Obama, who is visiting Ghana, speaks to a live audience tomorrow morning, his speech will be streamed on Second Life and Metaplace. These computer-simulated worlds offer 3D avatar-driven environments where participants can use voice or text chat to communicate. In this instance, however, there will be no Obama avatar.”

2. GameZone (USA) – Innovating Genres – Bringing Life to the City. ““City Building” – the term itself doesn’t always inspire excitement in the hearts of most gamers. The average gamer is likely to see the genre as one filled with crunchy details, obsessive micro-management and hours of watching a game that’s seemingly run on auto-pilot. Up until recently, you’d likely find few who would argue with that perception, except fans of the genre themselves, however, but in recent years, independent French developer Monte Cristo set out to change all that. Their original outing in the genre — “City Life,” took the standard city builder, and infused it with “life.” No more were citizens simple numbers to monitor, in City Life, they were living, breathing human beings, with specific wants and needs, and your job as a mayor was to do more than just plonk down buildings. City Life was met with critical and consumer praise – spawning several sequels. Now, Monte Cristo’s taken their 80+ person team (split between Paris and Kiev) and aimed it at the genre again, this time, going much bigger – with true social interactions, online gameplay and features to attract a wider audience than the traditional one of city builder player.”

3. People’s Weekly World (USA) – The impact of homophobia in virtual communities. “A few weeks ago there was a group established on Facebook called “I hate gays” which openly advocated killing gay people. When the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) sent a report through Facebook’s built in reporting system and then urged its Facebook and Twitter followers to do the same, the user was suspended, and the group abandoned and commandeered by pro-gay users in the matter of hours. It seems that real people in those virtual communities, as well as the massive companies that run the platforms, don’t like when people form groups that advocate killing people or targeting groups. Now what happens when you take that model and you turn it to online gaming virtual communities? To illustrate my point, take a look at this video previously highlighted on Kotaku and GayGamer to get a sense of the problem just in online gaming communities. ”

4. CNN (USA) – Virtual cash meets the real world. “While China is seriously cracking down on the exchange of virtual currencies for real cash, virtual economies backed by newfound legitimacy elsewhere are quickly gaining ground in the real world. There’s gold in them there screens: Real-money transactions in virtual worlds are finding new legitimacy. On June 24, 2009, the role-playing game 140 Mafia launched on Twitter, following in the footsteps of highly lucrative games Mob Wars and Mafia Wars on Facebook (and now iPhone) to link virtual-currency exchanges to real-money transactions. In March 2009, MindArk — creator of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) Entropia, where one player famously bought an island for US$26,500 in 2004 — saw its wholly owned subsidiary Mind Bank granted a banking license from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority.”

5. CIO (Australia) – AI-powered customer support robots bring human touch to virtual world. ““More Human Than Human” may have been the slogan of the fictional Tyrell Corporation in the sci-fi film classic Blade Runner, but it could equally apply to Australian company MyCyberTwin, a provider of artificial-intelligence powered virtual staff.
MyCyberTwin technology is designed to allow almost anyone to build a virtual, artificial human — called a CyberTwin — which can handle such tasks as personalised customer support, client sales or even entertainment and companionship. CyberTwins can take the form of a clone of yourself, or a representative of your company, and they can live in almost any digital environment, including Web sites, virtual worlds, blogs, social network pages and mobile phones.”

6. New York TImes (USA) – The Next Financial Crisis: Virtual Banks. “By now, the financial woes of Lehman, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and the many other troubled banks is old news. But we may need to start preparing for another round of bank failures … in the virtual world. If indeed it happens, a character named Ricdic will likely be to blame. Ricdic is part of Eve Online, which I have never heard of, but according to this BBC news report “has about 300,000 players all of whom inhabit the same online universe. The game revolves around trade, mining asteroids, and the efforts of different player-controlled corporations to take control of swathes of virtual space.” Ricdic, according to the article, runs a large ebank at the site, and pilfered some virtual funds, traded them to other players for real money, and made a down payment on a house and paid off medical bills.”

7. PBS (USA) – 5 Ideas to Transform Newspaper Sites. “I sometimes wonder whether we are held captive by old school thinking. At our newspapers at Mediafin, we are in the process of integrating web operations with the print publication, a move which I fully endorse. There’s one major risk to this: that we might end up seeing the web as just another way to distribute newspaper articles rather than a radically new opportunity. People who have spent years writing for print newspapers could easily fall victim to the horseless carriage syndrome — the belief that they can continue to apply the same thinking that they applied to an old technology to a new, fundamentally different one. At the turn of the century, many saw the automobile as a new variation on the horse-and-carriage, not realizing that the car was in many ways very different. Just as cars are fundamentally different from horseless carriages, or cinema is fundamentally different from theater, the web is fundamentally different from newspapers.”

8. Times of India (India) – Social Networks and Fashion Trends. “Do friends sport the same style in shoes or see the same movies because of their similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt similar behaviours? Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences. But the virtual world Second Life does. It is a free 3D virtual world where users can socialise, connect and create using voice and text chat. ”

9. Daily Kos (USA) – A Soldier’s Peace, A (Rescheduled) Documentary Premiere in Second Life. “etroots Nation in Second Life and Virtually Speaking had originally scheduled the “in-world” Second Life premiere of peace activist Marshall Thompson’s remarkable film A Soldier’s Peace on June 20, but due to a series of technical roadblocks culminating in a hard drive crash on the system from which we had planned to host the film, we were unable to premiere the film that day. However, we went ahead with our scheduled interview with Marshall, and are we ever glad we did. Marshall, an Iraq War veteran, is a passionate, warm, and kindly advocate for peace with a terrific sense of humor. ”

10. Chicago Now (USA) – Patrick Lichty: Summer of Love 2.0 (Tuesday night performance only). “Making good art with Second Life, Twitter, or Facebook sounds like a dicey proposition, but Patrick Lichty’s Summer of Love 2.0 commandeers all three social networking sites, making good art that uses technology to evaluate the depth and sincerity of the social commitment Web 2.0 fosters both on and offline. Tuesday night’s performance featured a re-performance of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Bed-In, staged in Second Life by Second Front, a virtual performance collective. This event kicked off the weeklong project, which turns the MCA’s McCormick Tribune Orientation Gallery (the 12×12 space) into living installation where Lichty hopes to blur the boundaries between his online community and the MCA’s undulating community of viewers. ”

Virtual sex steps up a notch: JoyRiact

Today whilst completing out weekly news roundup, I stumbled across a press release from a Swiss company promoting the late 2009 release of a suite of net-connected sex toys under the banner JoyRiact. The press release contains the usual healthy dose of hyperbole, but it seems Second Life is key market and JoyRiact claim to have some events planned in-world.

The demo video explains it all pretty well really:

The press release also rightly recognises there are already options available in this area – it’ll be interesting to see if this product captures a significant share of what’s a fairly hard to quantify, but likely significant market.

When a woman lies

One day, when a seamstress was sewing while sitting close to a river, her thimble fell into the river. When she cried out, the Lord appeared and asked, “My dear child, why are you crying?” The seamstress replied that her thimble had fallen into the water and that she needed it to help her husband in making a living for their family. The Lord dipped His hand into the water and pulled up a golden thimble set with sapphires.

“Is this your thimble?” the Lord asked The seamstress replied, “No.”
The Lord again dipped into the river. He held out a golden thimble studded with rubies.

“Is this your thimble?” the Lord asked. Again, the seamstress replied, “No.”

The Lord reached down again and came up with a leather thimble

“Is this your thimble ?” the Lord asked. The seamstress replied, “Yes.” The Lord was pleased with the woman’s honesty and gave her all three thimbles to keep, and the seamstress went home happy.

Some years later, the seamstress was walking with her husband along the riverbank, and her husband fell into the river and disappeared under the water. When she cried out, the Lord again appeared and asked her, “Why are you crying?” “Oh Lord, my husband has fallen into the river!”

The Lord went down into the water and came up with George Clooney.” Is this your husband?” the Lord asked.

“Yes,” cried the seamstress. The Lord was furious. “You lied! That is an untruth!” The seamstress replied, “Oh, forgive me, my Lord. It is a misunderstanding. You see, if I had said ‘no’ to George Clooney, you would have come up with Brad Pitt.

Then if I said ‘no’ to him, you would have come up with my husband. Had I then said ‘yes,’ you would have given me all three. Lord, I’m not in the best of health and would not be able to take care of all three husbands, so THAT’S why I said ‘yes’ to George Clooney.

And so the Lord let her keep him.

The moral of this story is:

Whenever a woman lies, it’s for a good and honorable reason, and in the best interest of others. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.

Signed,

All Us Women

World of Warcraft – ‘Well Read’ Achievement

well-read-achievementAs a long-term World of Warcraft player, I’m still regularly astounded at the complexity and depth of the ‘game’. For the past year, the Achievements system has helped to encapsulate the scope of WoW. At time of writing, there are 931 achievements that range from pulling off 100 victories in a battleground to kissing a range of WoW fauna.

One of these achievements is titled Well Read and requires the reading of 42 books spread around different parts of Azeroth. It’s a time-consuming quest but one that gives you the opportunity to read a lot of WoW lore if that’s what takes your fancy. If not, then it’s just another grind for an achievement 😉

Any Level 70+ character is likely to be able to pick up the quest solo, with the biggest challenge being Scholomance.

I recorded the location of each book as I did it, for your benefit – I tried to do it in the most time-efficient way as far as flight time etc. Of course, the list below applies to Alliance characters, Horde characters may want to check here for an alternate approach.

Onto the list:

Ref Name Where Specifics
1 The Alliance of Lordaeron Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On Table
2 Aftermath of the Second War Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On Table
3 The Guardians of Tirisfal Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On Table
4 Aegwynn and the Dragon Hunt Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On Floor
5 Beyond the Dark Portal Stormwind Keep – Royal Library 2nd Table
6 Civil War in the Plaguelands Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On Floor
7 The Kaldorei & the Well of Eternity Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On Pillar
8 The New Horde Stormwind Keep – Royal Library On 2nd Pillar
9 The Dark Portal and the Fall of Stormwind Stormwind Keep – War Room On Table
10 The Battle of Grim Batol Stormwind Keep – War Room 2nd Table
11 War of the Spider Stormwind Keep – War Room 3rd Table
12 Archimonde’s Return Stormwind – Library – The Canals On Table
  and the Flight to Kalimdor    
13 Mount Hyjal and Illidan’s Gift Stormwind – Library – The Canals On Table
14 Lethargy of the Orcs Elwynn Forest – Eastvale Logging 2nd Floor House
15 Kil’Jaeden and the Shadow Pact Duskwood – Darkshire Inn Upstairs
16 The Founding of Quel’Thalas Duskwood – Darkshire Inn Upstairs
17 The Birth of the Lich King Duskwood – Town Hall On Table (Mayor)
18 The Last Guardian Westfall – Sentinel Hill – Inn On Table
19 The Scourge of Lordaeron Booty Bay – ‘Sea Wolf’ McKinley Bottom Floor
20 The Twin Empires Booty Bay – ‘Sea Wolf’ McKinley Bottom Floor
21 Empires’ Fall Booty Bay – ‘Sea Wolf’ McKinley Bottom Floor
22 Wrath of Soulflayer Booty Bay – ‘Sea Wolf’ McKinley Bottom Floor
23 The Sentinels and the Long Vigil Booty Bay – ‘Sea Wolf’ McKinley Top Floor
24 Sunwell – The Fall of Quel’Thalas Booty Bay – Salty Sailor Tavern 2nd Floor
25 Ironforge – The Awakening of the Dwarves Ironforge – Hall of Explorers Library Table
26 War of the Three Hammers Ironforge – Hall of Explorers Library Table
27 Arathor and the Troll Wars Ironforge – Hall of Explorers Library Table
28 The Old Gods and the Ordering of Azeroth Ironforge – Hall of Explorers Library Table
29 Charge of the Dragonflights Ironforge – Hall of Explorers Library Table
30 The Rise of the Horde Ironforge – Hall of Explorers  
31 The Invasion of Draenor Western Plagulands -Scholomance First room (down)
32 Exile of the High Elves Western Plagulands -Scholomance First room (down)
33 The Seven Kingdoms Western Plagulands -Scholomance The Reliquary
34 Icecrown and Frozen Throne Western Plagulands -Scholomance The Reliquary
35 Sargeras and The Betrayal Western Plagulands -Scholomance The Reliquary
36 Kel’Thuzad and the Forming of the Scourge Western Plagulands -Scholomance The Reliquary
37 The Lich King Triumphant Western Plagulands -Scholomance The Reliquary
38 Rise of the Blood Elves Darnassus – Craftsmen’s Terrace B/W Cooking & First Aid
39 The War of the Ancients Darnassus – Craftsmen’s Terrace B/W Cooking & First Aid
40 The World Tree and the Emerald Dream Darnassus – Craftsmen’s Terrace North most building
41 The Betrayer Ascendant Darnassus – Tradesman’s Terrace Back row, behind Cloth
42 Old Hatreds – The Colonization of Kalimdor Gadgetzan At Flightmaster

Weekend Whimsy

1. Shrink Wrapped – avatars needing psychiatric help

2. Mitch Triellis – Second Life Belfast

3. Waiting for my Tomorrow: A Love Story in Second Life

Another Perfect World

In late June, the UK’s Channel 4 ran a documentary called Another Perfect World. It’s a well structured look at virtual environments with a focus on the tensions in developing a ‘utopia’, with World of Warcraft, Second Life, Metaplace and Lineage scrutinised. A 30-minute preview can be viewed right here:

Ponderisms

I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.

Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.

Never take life seriously Nobody gets out alive anyway.

There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.

Life is sexually transmitted.

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Have you noticed since everyone has a camcorder these days no one talks about seeing UFOs like they used to?

Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again

All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal

How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?

Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, “I think I’ll squeeze these dangly things here, and drink whatever comes out?”

Who was the first person to say, “See that chicken there? I’m gonna eat the next thing that comes outta its butt.

“Why is there a light in the fridge and not in the freezer?

If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?

If quizzes are quizzical, what are tests?

Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog’s face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him on a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle

Do you ever wonder why you gave me your email address ?????

Twinity: intersection of immersion and State

With a new round of funding in the bank, Twinity is on as firm a ground as it’s ever been. The development of virtual replicas of cities has proven a successful formula to date. Singapore is a Twinity stronghold and a virtual Orchard Road is on the way.

twinity-singapore

Two aspects of the Orchard Road announcement caught my interest:

Virtual Singapore was developed in consultation with the Media Development Authority (MDA) and Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

and

Twinity is tying up with AsiaOne – the interactive arm of Singapore Press Holdings – to seek retailers, brands and firms interested in promoting their products or space on the virtual ‘Orchard Road’.

Bear with me while I explain some of the intricacies.

The Media Development Authority (MDA) is a government agency that has two main purposes: “The first is to promote the growth of the media industry. The second is to manage content to protect core values and safeguard consumers’ interests“.

The Infocomm Development Authority is also a government agency with the roles of “infocomm industry champion, the national infocomm master-planner and developer, and the Government CIO“.

AsiaOne is a key business within the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) stable. SPH isn’t government owned, but under SIngapore’s Newspaper and Printing Presses Act, no management shares can be transferred without approval of the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA). This is the ministry that oversees the Media Development Authority.

What this means is that the SIngapore Government has direct involvement in the development of virtual SIngapore in Twinity. Nothing wrong with that at all – Australia’s government has played a role in funding virtual world presences, as have a plethora of other governments. What interests me most is the AsiaOne partnership, which is likely to have an advertising revenue focus. If you’re currently a SIngapore business person, you’re likely to have advertised with SIngapore Press Holdings at some stage as it has nearly 80% of the over-15’s market.

What do you do when SPH’s sales team phone you to negotiate your next advertising package and mention you can now advertise in Twinity? If you don’t know that the government have funded the Twinity presence, the less well informed may see it as a gimmick and decline. This is where it gets really interesting: if take up of advertising in Twinity’s virtual Singapore isn’t as great as expected, what happens next? I won’t be surprised if Singapore becomes the first sovereign entity to have virtual world advertising as a standard option for its business owners. The initial acceptance may be limited but the incredibly close government involvement combined with substantial influence over SPH makes for one fascinating and potentially controversial case study of virtual worlds and business. There’s no criticism of Metaversum intended – they have operated as one would expect of a commercial entity. It’s wider issues of politics, media and governance that invite further discussion.

I fired some questions on the issue through to Metaversum’s Managing Director, Jeremy Snyder:

TMJ: Does Metaversum see the Singapore model of government funding combined with a media partnership to drive advertising as one it’s likely to explore in other markets.

Singapore really offered some unique opportunities for us. Their drive to stimulate and showcase innovative companies in the IDM (Interactive Digital Media) space. The media partnership that we entered here is a strong endorsement of our vision. We do see a lot of value in similar strategic partnerships for other markets.

TMJ: Does it see this model working as well as it may do in Singapore where SPH’s management has a close relationship with the government?

Twinity: The relationship between SPH and the Singapore government was not part of the decision process for entering that partnership. Negotiations for funding in 2008 & subsequent negotiations with SPH were entirely different excercises.

TMJ: Does Metaversum have any concerns that potential success in Singapore may be as a result of the unusually tight control on media in Singapore, which may ensure widespread adoption of virtual world advertising as indirect government policy, making it a case study not easily replicated in other markets?

Twinity: Singapore’s media policies in the Internet space really don’t have any affect on our business. Similarly, we do not plan to apply any different standards for content in Twinity’s virtual Singapore than in other locations in Twinity. We feel our success in Singapore and elsewhere will still come back to the core values of Twinity – the connections to real life, the content available, and the strength of the community.

What do you think: is virtual Singapore likely to provide a unique social experiment?

Book Review: My Avatar, My Self

Waggoner_978-0-7864-4109-9

Firstly, it’s fair to warn you that I’m breaking one of my own reviewing rules here. I generally never write a review of something that I haven’t purchased. That’s a rule that I’m not in the habit of breaking, but it’s worth noting that I’m making an exception here today.

If you want the short version, you should go and buy Waggoner’s book if you have a serious interest in identity, identification, the interaction of people with diegetic and liminal spaces, and/or the core philosophies of human involvement, interactions and identity in virtual spaces and gameplay.

For those of you that are still here, Waggoner has put together a book that doubles as something of a thesis. Littered with references and notes, My Avatar, My Self is a dense and thoughtful read both on the nature of ourselves as well as on the nature of our virtual interactions and extensions.

I say dense, because virtually every paragraph gave me pause for consideration, sparking numerous, lengthy discussions, and causing my editor to wait and wait and wait, and wait some more for me to actually get back to him.

That’s the very definition of thought-provoking, right there. There’s a lot of meat within these covers.

Waggoner discusses the models of modernist identity theorists (who, alas, still aren’t really sure what Identity actually is), as well as contrasting that with the models of post-modern identity theorists (who also still aren’t sure what Identity).

Identity and the nature and definition of it is far from a done-deal, but practical interaction with avatars sheds a whole lot more light on things, and seems to support the post-modern theories rather better.

Debates between modern and postmodern identity theories continue. However, most theorists regardless of their camp seem to agree that communication media impact human identity construction. Even modern identity theorists such as Giddens recognize the importance of these external stimuli: “Mediated experience has long influenced both self-identity and the basic organization of social relations.” This statement is echoed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin almost a decade later: “[People] employ media as vehicles for defining personal identity”

Throughout, Waggoner focuses on single-user role-playing games primarily (Fallout 2/3, Morrowind, Oblivion), but this is no weakness in his approach. In doing so, Waggoner manages to test and demonstrate his points without considerable, intrusive or distracting noise or complications, as he monitors the interactions and reactions of four diverse subjects as they approach various games.

Throughout, Waggoner examines the motivations, identification, and responses of his four subjects, occasionally highlighting responses that a subject is seemingly unaware of, or unwilling to admit.

If you’re not afraid of some deep ideas about identity, expression, avatars, narrative, genres and spaces, nor of the language required to express these compactly, Waggoner’s My Avatar, My Self should find a place on your reading list.

And now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go back and read it again.

(You can purchase this book from TMJ’s online bookstore, Amazon or direct from the publisher).

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