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Welcome!

October 20, 2008 by Leave a Comment

For years, I complained about the ceaseless barrage of jokes sent to me via email by friends and family. I’d get particularly frustrated if I received the same joke email multiple times over a short period of time. I’d be near screaming point if I got the same again joke 6 months later.

Then I realised that the fact it comes via email is nothing more than a different delivery method. Twenty years ago you’d hear the same joke over and over but would you punch the lights out of the person who relayed it for the seventh time. Ok – sometimes you probably did want to get violent but you know what I mean: at the end of it all, a joke is something that’s meant to make you happy. I’m the first to admit I’ve got some good laughs from email jokes.

Aside from that, I’ve always wondered who generates the jokes in the first place. For the particularly good ones, I want to keep them sometimes. I know there are hundreds of thousands of email inboxes worldwide with ‘Jokes’ folders. This site is the next step on from that: a growing repository of jokes if for some reason you want to relive some humour. I’d particularly love to hear from the creators of the jokes – if you honestly believe you started the joke you see, comment on that post and give some history.

If you’re wondering what order jokes are appearing – they’ll appear as I receive them myself. There’s no accounting for taste so even the jokes that just make you groan will be featured. That said, overtly racist jokes or ones that go beyond the pale aren’t likely to be posted.

So please enjoy, have a laugh or two, and I look forward to building a community of fun!

Filed Under: Email Joke Graveyard, Site news

Weekend Whimsy

October 18, 2008 by Leave a Comment

1. Obama in Second Life

2. Torben Asp at Skatepark of Tampa

3. SecondLife: Moondance

Filed Under: User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters

October 17, 2008 by 2 Comments

It’s been a great couple of weeks for interesting new Australian presences in Second Life. Last weekend, ‘Foul Whisperings, Strange Matters‘ launched. It’s a fascinating take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth character, a “timely use of pop culture as an adaptive bridge between classic texts and new media technology”.

The first five minutes of my wanderings around the build were reminiscent of the last Australia Council funded build I wandered around, Babelswarm. In this case, the New Media Consortium provided part of the funding as well. The similarity isn’t in relation to content, it’s the quality of the content. As Macduff says in the play: “The life o’ the building!”.

Three Australian collaborators were involved with the project: multimedia artist Kate Richards, theatre and film director Kerreen Ely Harper and Angela Thomas, a writer and educationalist.

For me, the power of the experience is that there’s plenty of room left for self-interpretation of the intent. Having studied Macbeth a (cough) few years ago, the strength of the themes from that work are strong. English teachers take note: this is an obvious boon for the student analysing Macbeth – the immersiveness and open interpretation provides one mighty playground for discussion of the play itself.

Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:
More needs she the divine than the physician.
God, God forgive us all! Look after her;
Remove from her the means of all annoyance,
And still keep eyes upon her. So, good night:
My mind she has mated, and amazed my sight.
I think, but dare not speak.

I think it’s fair to say that for most student, Shakespeare can be one of the more forbidding hurdles to overcome, and initiatives like this can only help lower those hurdles. Kudos to the creators, the NMC and to the Australia Council, who have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to virtual worlds as artistic platform.

Check it out in-world

Filed Under: Art, Australian News, Education, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , , ,

Australian Accountants enter Second Life

October 15, 2008 by 2 Comments

Lee Hopkins (SL: Lee Laperriere), an online communications strategist and Lindy McKeown (SL: Decka Mah), an educational consultant, presented at the Chartered Practising Accountants Congress. Both are well known Australian Second Life residents.

It was the first event in Second Life the accountants peak body has run, and by all accounts it was a success (geddit?).

Lee has the full story on his blog – kudos to CPA Australia for taking the plunge with the Second Life session. When true ROI is demonstrated with virtual worlds, the bean counters themselves will be leading the charge if CPA Australia have anything to do with it.

Filed Under: Australian News, Business, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

AFTRS: directing the future

October 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Gary Hayes has amazing talent. As with so many people who are masterful in their field, he can make the difficult look effortless. However, this time it’s not an attractive and engaging machinima or build that has me excited, but Gary’s words about the new diploma courses being run at AFTRS.

Forget the glitz and glam, ignore the special effects of the promo videos if you are able. Look, feel and presentation are required elements of film, animation, games and virtual worlds. Nonetheless, the promo video for these courses overshadows something that I feel is of far greater importance: these one year graduate diplomas in Games Design (Directing) and Virtual Worlds (Directing) have great technical depth.  Each has been rigorously designed, will be delivered with the intensity and creativity of amazing mentors, and behind each stands a wealth of knowledge concerning both presentation and mechanics.

The new courses will build upon the work performed within the Animation (Directing) course and the LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production) initiative.

What does ‘directing’ refer to?

The directing portion of the course titles refers to the fact that participants will be taught, in addition to the technical and business aspects, creative leadership skills, and the skills of innovation and entrepreneurship. Students will be expected to pioneer new ideas and thoughts, to create games and worlds never seen before, and they will be mentored in these endeavors. Originality, and the ability to push the envelope, are key. Students must be seen to be creating the future, not just contributing their small part to a company or the community. The focus of the courses is innovation: brand-new genres and interactive, film-like spaces – things which rarely even pass go in the risk-adverse computer games industry.

Games Design (Directing)

In the context of this course, a ‘game’ is defined as “authored or artificially constructed play”. Game formats and genres of a multitude of types will be considered in the course, from casual to serious/simulations, from console to online multi-player, from children to adult, and so on through hundreds of sub-categories. New gaming tools, such as emotional AIs, natural generative dialogue and realistic motion will be covered also. Significantly, game theory will be covered in-depth, and will be given as much importance as the creation of dramatic depth and visual intensity. Students will be expected to study and understand such things as gameplay and usability before they are let loose with visual and audio tools.

“We love games that have play and story at their core and not just great graphics or deep sound.” – Gary Hayes.

Here is an indicative list of the types of topics that will be covered:

Games Story, Character Design, Games in Motion, Storytelling Essentials, Game Level Design, Mechanics of Play, Cross-Media Incubator, Designing Story Worlds, Acting for Animators, Directing Voice Performers, Genre Workshop, Innovation and Form, The Business of Games.

Virtual Worlds (Directing)

Students will be learning to construct virtual worlds. Social worlds and MMORPGS will be covered, as will film pre-visualisation tools and CG-animated story worlds. Film/virtual world cross-overs will be covered in depth.

“We will also have lecturers from across the Australian and international metaverse industry involved in Virtual Worlds who understand financing, finding your market and target users and of course insights into the technical deployment of large scale community driven worlds. So from the outset students will understand how decisions made at napkin, sketching or proof of concept stages can have enormous impact further down the production chain. Each course will have several small incubator projects but the final major project spread over 13+ weeks, will include extra help in project managing rapid and complex productions.” – Gary Hayes.

Here is an indicative list of the types of topics that will be covered:

Designing Story Worlds, Virtual Camera, Social Virtual Worlds, Storytelling Essentials, Virtual Life, Cross-Media Incubator, The Avatar and Interface, World Design, Acting for Animators, Genre Workshop, Directing Voice Performers, Innovation and Form, Episodic Storytelling

“Eventually games are going to be designed in the same virtual space as the film will be.” – Peter Giles.

An especially exciting part of the two courses is the space in which they overlap. Components of each of the Games Design and Virtual Worlds courses will also focus on film production, the involvement of games and virtual worlds in film production, and the cross-pollination between games, virtual worlds and films.

“What makes these courses unique will be the cross-over with the film craft and directing parts of the school.” – Gary Hayes.

A range of professional associates will be employed during the period of the courses, including Matt Costello (Doom, Pirates of the Caribbean), John Buchanan (ex EA Games Research and Development) and Deborah Todd (author of Games: from BlueSky to GreenLight).

The one caveat I would like to issue about these courses concerns their length – just 32 weeks each. Courses run by the AFTRS are well known for their intense nature, and these will not differ in that manner. If you do join the student body, don’t plan on having any sick days – legitimate or otherwise.

See here for the video promo for the Games Design (Directing) and Virtual Worlds (Directing) diploma courses.

See here for a GameFilmWorld crossover video which Hayes produced to highlight the cross-over between the three.

Filed Under: Australian News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Superstruct: six weeks to save the world

October 14, 2008 by 1 Comment

Superstruct homepage

Play the game. Invent the future.

This is the tag line for the MMO forecasting game Superstruct, an alternative reality game set in the future, developed by a team at The Institute for the Future (IFTF). It’s a SF game, where SF has the original meaning of speculative fiction – crises are speculated upon by the game’s designers, and the objective is to speculate upon solutions to those crises in a collaborative manner.

The game launched on October 6 and will run for only 6 weeks. The IFTF, based in Palo Alto, California, is “an independent nonprofit research group.” Assisting organisations to prepare for the future is a major aspect of the work they do. The game draws on their knowledge and foresight to place crises in front of players, and to judge when players have made substantive leaps forward towards the game’s goals.

Superstruct is billed as “the thinking person’s MMO” – strictly, this means that people who get enjoyment out of thinking will enjoy and appreciate the game (there are no orcs to kill here). Nonetheless, it’s important not to be too off put by this description, because no one player is expected to present complete solutions alone, and because as we now know there’s more to intelligence than scoring high on IQ tests. Within the context of the game, people who are able to collaborate well, to get along well with other people, and to bring teams together, will also fare well.

Su`per`struct´ v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation.

Humans have been superstructing for centuries. You could look at it as “standing on the shoulders of giants.” We build upon what our ancestors have done before us. In times of crisis and trouble, humans pull together and launch off from the failures and successes of our predecessors – hopefully this tendency, coupled with the power of our current technologies, will help us survive the super-threats facing us in the near future of Superstruct.

Super-threats

The super-threats are a comprehensive listing of specific crises the world is likely to face in game in the years following 2019.

  • Quarantine covers the global response to declining health and pandemic disease, including the current Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS) crisis.
  • Ravenous focuses on the imminent collapse of the global food system, as well as debates over industrial vs. ecological agricultural models, and basic issues of access, energy, and carbon.
  • Power Struggle tracks the results of energy resource peaks and the shifts in international power as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions.
  • Outlaw Planet embodies the volatile mix of new forms of surveillance, transparency, civil rights, and access to information as people work out new rules for human security.
  • Generation Exile follows the massive “diaspora of diasporas” underway globally, as the number of refugees and migrants skyrockets in the face of climate change, economic disruption, and war.

Keeping score

As the game is played out, three things are being tracked: how many people are playing the game, how many “survivability points” have been earned by players, and how many years are left before humans face extinction. The score is a combination of these three items – the higher the score, the longer the human race has left to live on this planet.

“Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.”

Filed Under: Alternatives, General News, Virtual Worlds

The Watch – virtual worlds in the news

October 13, 2008 by Leave a Comment

1. TMCnet (USA) – Diabetes UK: Second Life launch for diabetes campaign. “Diabetes UK has this week launched its Silent Assassin campaign’ within the virtual 3-D world of Second Life. The charity launched both its headquarters and the campaign in the virtual world that boasts 15 million residents’ to coincide with its biggest ever UK-wide campaign – created to raise awareness of the seriousness of diabetes.”

2. CCTV (China) – Beyond space and time: 3-D Forbidden City. “A three dimensional Forbidden City is now open in a virtual world. People can get a glimpse of the imperial palace and experience the lives of ancient emperors without having to be there. And the interactive platform allows online tourists to take on an ancient identity.”

3. Herald Sun (Australia) – Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s Playstation launching rival ‘virtual worlds. “Microsoft and Sony are taking their battle for gaming supremacy into cyberspace, launching competing virtual worlds.
Microsoft announced its New Xbox Experience at this weekend’s Tokyo Games Show.”

4. DMNews (USA) – Machinima is a futuristic, viral option for marketers. “Although still in its infancy, machin ima — animated films created by using a number of different game or virtual world engines — is rapidly emerging as a surpris ingly effective new tool for marketers. Currently, most machinima is produced through the online virtual world Second Life. However, it is expanding to include other online games and virtual worlds.”

5. Stars and Stripes (USA) – Game developers tap into social network. “As the Internet continues to increase in complexity and social networking grows in popularity, game developers are working to utilize the full potential of these technologies. “Social technology has fundamentally altered the means by which we communicate,” Jim Crowley, president and CEO of Turbine, said during a presentation Friday at the Tokyo Game Show.”

6. VentureBeat (USA) – Twofish raises $4.5M to create economies for virtual worlds. “Twofish has raised $4.5 million in a second round of funding for its business of creating the economic infrastructure behind virtual worlds. The deal is another indication that the virtual goods economy is heating up, even as the real world economy spirals downward.”

7. Gaywired (USA) – A Virtual Lesbian Life: Revisiting Second Life. “Although I dabbled in the massive online world of Second Life back when it was first becoming really popular 3 or 4 years ago, I didn’t have time to really explore and didn’t end up playing for long. It was not until Showtime made a big splash in SL by creating a virtual L Word island in the game a couple of years back that I ventured back in for another go. My passion for the immense virtual world comes and gos, but there is no denying that Second Life is an addition that’s hard to kick.”

8. bMighty (USA) – Welcome To Fantasy Island. “With fewer dollars to spend in the real world, consumers have been hanging out in virtual worlds — where their money goes farther, according to operators of such sites. Take Habbo, a self-described hangout for teens that charges a small fee for access to specific site features. Visitors are spending twice the amount of time on Habbo than in days past, the site’s EVP told Forbes.com. U.S. users, who account for 25% of Habbo’s 10 million customer base, spend around $18 per month buying virtual items. You do the math.”

9. Pittsburgh Post Gazette (USA) – The Next Page: The triumph of the gamer. “If he were alive today, Shakespeare might very well have rephrased his famous observation stating “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” by describing this worldly existence of ours as more closely resembling a videogame than a theatrical production.”

10. BBC News (UK) – Virtual worlds carve out new path. “If you are walking with orcs in the World of Warcraft or setting up a business on planet Calypso, the real world is probably very far from your mind. But for attendees at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London this week, the question of how to bridge the gap with the real world is a very pertinent one. As well as gaining an audience beyond the core teenage male gamer, virtual worlds with real world connections offer a whole new way to make money.”

Filed Under: General News, Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds in the media Tagged With:

Competition winners: ‘The Unofficial Second Life Building Guide’

October 12, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Over the past fortnight we’ve run a competition, with five copies of The Unofficial Second Life Building Guide.

Twenty-one people entered, with some excellent suggestions of new builds in Second Life. Using a random number generator, I’m pleased to announce that the five winners are:

Cary
Alberik Rotaru
KerryJ
Kim Flintoff
Rayn Juran

Thanks to Killer Guides for the prize of five copies of the guide. Winners – we’ll be in touch via email very soon with your prize.

We have another competition coming up in the next month, so there’s plenty more opportunities to win!

Filed Under: General News, TMJ Site News, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Our new Second Life HQ

October 12, 2008 by 5 Comments

We’re really proud to announce the opening of our new in-world presence in Second Life. It’s been quite a number of months in the making. Our aim with the new presence was to have a multi-purpose facility that could be used for in-world information sharing.

Our old presence had its limitations although we had a number of groups utilise it for events. With the new build, we hope to increase that focus – if you’re from a non-profit group, education or health support group and need a venue for a meeting, research project or other event, contact us. We’re also happy to hire the venue to for-profit entities, though that’s not the focus.

The whole layout is pretty spartan at present – well be adding further aspects as time goes on but keeping it simpler makes it easier to customise things when an event is underway.

A big thanks to Encore Design Group for their work on the build – they were consultative and very understanding of the extended development timeframes. A disclosure here: EDG Designs are intermittent advertisers on The Metaverse Journal.

So it’s over to you – comments, questions and debate welcome. And here’s to more Australian community events.

Check it out in-world

Filed Under: Australian News, TMJ Site News, Virtual Worlds

Weekend Whimsy

October 10, 2008 by Leave a Comment

1. SKATEBOARDING FOR REAL IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT

(This is related to the new virtual worlds course offerings at the Australian Film Television and Radio School)

2. Kaneva World Welsh Society Even Bigger

3. surfable waves for second life

Filed Under: User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

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