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June 29, 2007

Coca-Cola 2.0
I just got off the phone with Coca-Cola’s David Vanderpoel. You might recall his earlier comment regarding the Coca-Cola VirtualThirst campaign in Second Life that came as a result of my critique of the competition rules.

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June 28, 2007

Coca-Cola Releases Trademark To Second Life Merchants?
Now here’s an interesting development. According to Second Life resident Vint Falken in a post today (Link - may be dead), the SL Exchange website claims that Coca-Cola is releasing their trademark for use by merchants inside Second Life.

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June 27, 2007

Kongregate: A "Serious" Games Social Network

Via: GigaOM - Inside the YouTube of Games
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Written by Blake Snow

About Kongregate

Founded in 2006 and currently in a state of heavy development, Kongregate seeks to create the leading online hub for players and game developers to meet up, play games, and operate together as a community.

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Standards of Avatar Portability
Anyone who’s been keeping up with comments here and over on The Meshverse Journal will appreciate this bit of additional information posted on the blog of Amazon’s Jeff Barr (Link):

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June 26, 2007

Eliane, in her own words

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you undoubtedly noticed our newest contributor, Eliane Alhadeff. She writes about serious games, she does it well and nothing gets by her. She's also one of the nicest people I ever met in this blog business, always eager to help, never without a kind word and very, very patient.

But who is Eliane Alhadeff?

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CNN International: The future of virtual worlds

by: Dominic Basulto

Second_life_characters As part of its innovation-themed Future Summit series, CNN International is running a special segment on the future of virtual worlds starting tomorrow: "CNN Future Summit: Virtual Worlds will premier on June 13th on CNN International. Originating from Singapore and Palo Alto, California, the program features creative visionaries and entrepreneurs leading us into a new age of creativity and imagination." (Hat tip: 3PointD.com)

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June 25, 2007

No, I don't have a problem

via Game Politics:

"The American Medical Association has backed away from a move to declare video game addiction an official diagnostic disorder. As reported by Reuters, the AMA concluded that psychiatrists need to devote additional study to the issue. Addiction experts also voiced opposition to the proposal."

So there! Har har, told you, all that.

On a related note, I'm waiting for the newspapers to follow up with another horror story, as their "reporters descend into the electronic delirium that governs your children's life.". Or some other equally painful catch phrase.

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June 24, 2007

Serious Games: A Sizeable Market - Update
In my previous post Serious Games, Serious Money: A Sizeable Market, dated March 12, 2007, I've tried to extrapolate a few "back of the envelope" figures for the actual size of the Serious Games market, departing from PricewaterhouseCoopers' media outlook report 2006 for the video game sector worldwide.

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June 23, 2007

Virtual Goods Summit 2007 Roundup
Virtual World News has done an excellent job posting a record of the Virtual Goods Summit I mentioned earlier (reLink), and there’s plenty of documentation elsewhere. I’ve not read everything yet but wanted to at least make those people who stop in here - especially Industrial Designers - aware of the interesting and relevant topics being discussed.

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June 21, 2007

Serious Games Developing Leadership
The recent Business Week article IBM's Management Games has been reproduced at large by several blogs and sites over the Web , therefore I have no intention to replicate it here.

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Serious Games For Global Problem-Solving

Via: Microsoft - Microsoft, Games for Change Team Up to Encourage Global Problem-Solving Through Digital Gaming

Microsoft Corp. and Games for Change (G4C) announced early this week a joint commitment to explore new ways to bring together the world of digital gaming with the world of social change at the fourth annual Games for Change Festival at Parsons The New School for Design.

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June 20, 2007

Game Developers chase Serious Games Business Models
Via: Mass High tech News

The ideas for Serious Games technology -- from military simulation to personal health care -- are coming quickly for entrepreneurs, but establishing a business model is a different story.

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June 19, 2007

Formula One Leveraging On Serious Games and Neuroscience

Via: The Guardian - Flawless Hamilton makes it look so easy

Lewis Hamilton may not be the youngest driver to win a formula one race, but his victory in yesterday's Canadian grand prix will take its place among the most remarkable achievements in the history of the sport. As the first driver whose approach to the job comes close to matching the sophistication of his machine, he has single-handedly raised the stakes for his own generation and those to come.

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June 18, 2007

Tech Review’s Excellent “Second Earth”

Rather than bother reading Forbes or BusinessWeek and getting poorly-researched stories, check out the excellent “Second Earth” (Link) article penned by Technology Review contributing editor Wade Roush. It’s not perfect (e.g. Multiverse doesn’t sell its software, it provides everything for free and makes money when world builders make money), but it’s close. The Multiverse slip, which isn’t all that major, was the only thing I caught, and considering this article is 11 pages long, there was plenty of opportunity to get it wrong… but Roush doesn’t.

Excellent piece of journalism by someone who obviously took the time to get it right, as far as I’m concerned. So take the time to read it.

via Ogle Earth

Original post: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1312 

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Forbes Gets It Wrong, Too
In a blog entry today (Link), Jaffe Juice relayed frustration with the author of a Forbes article covering Second Life. The piece, “Sex, Pranks and Reality”, written by Allison Fass, is posted on the blog for our review, so let’s see if Forbes is any better at writing about Second Life than BusinessWeek (reLink).

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June 17, 2007

Boundaries Disappear In Virtual World
There’s a good - if long - article by Julian Dibbell, “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” (Link - registration may be required), on The New York Times website today. It goes to some length describing a situation I’ve mentioned on this blog, and is related to something I posted on another one. Good Sunday reading.

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June 16, 2007

Linden Lab On Next Gen Architecture
I’ve only been scanning the excellent liveblogging entries over on Virtual World News, but the closing entry contained something of particular interest. From that final entry covering the MIT Media Lab/IBM conference (Link), Linden Lab VP Joe Miller made the following comment:

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June 12, 2007

Linden Lab Delivering Attention Metrics
Normally I don’t post about Linden Lab publishing their “Key Metrics”. Not only because it generates plenty of coverage and discussion elsewhere, but because I’ve long found some of the metrics lacking… and by “long” I mean well before an under-informed Clay Shirky jumped in and made them sound worse than they were (for reference - reLink). However, Linden Lab is enhancing the data they already provide in what I believe is an important way. From the official Linden Lab blog (Link):

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June 11, 2007

Layers of Peer-to-Peer Worlds
The first time I experienced a virtual simulation was in 1985. The military systems on which I was being trained were usually nothing more than big interactive screens inside a mocked-up space; not nearly as fun as firefighting training in blazing boiler rooms full of smoke, or ship flooding trainers where you had to team together to escape through a hatch leading to a flooded room above you (tough to do). Those primitive systems were still interesting to me though, mostly because of my passion for filmmaking, with which I saw obvious similarities. It wasn’t until a few years later when I read Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” that I saw the potential which sparked my return to college for a second degree.

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June 10, 2007

Economist Interviews Spaceman Shuttleworth Who Talks “Croquet”
Yesterday evening I stumbled upon mention over on The Weekly Squeek blog (Link) of an Economist article interviewing millionaire space tourist and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Here’s an excerpt from that interview (Link):

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XBox Island a Future Gateway?
Via Tateru Nino on the Second Life Insider comes word (Link) that a “Microsoft XBox” island has broken the virtual surface in Second Life. As Tateru says, Microsoft’s presence isn’t news, but their intentions will certainly fuel speculation, especially with Sony’s Playstation 3 “Home” (reLink) in beta and full release on the horizon.

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June 7, 2007

Opportunity Fading: Why The New Second Life Offers Less for Business
Those following virtual worlds have probably heard about recent “changes” to Linden Lab’s position in regards to how they - or supposedly their residents - will police Second Life to make it “safe, together” (Link). While I’ve been involved in the debates, there is a separate opinion I’ve formed regarding what’s occurred that I consider worth mentioning here: the less like the Internet Second Life becomes, the less reason there is for a company to stake a claim inside it.

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June 5, 2007

Innovation that's bold, brash and in your face

by: Dominic Basulto

Brash_entertainment I almost knocked my coffee over when I read this: "Brash Entertainment, a start-up game developer that plans to focus on games based on licensed film, TV and music properties, announced on Monday that it has raised $400 million in its first round of financing, led by ABRY Partners." 

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June 4, 2007

Adsense Edges Towards Virtual Worlds
Via Mashable (Link) comes word of the entirely expected: Google is bringing AdSense - and then some - to Google Maps. The way they’re doing this, however, is interesting. It’s more than just text they’re offering. Mapplets, as they’re called, will likely carry much more since this feature allows developers to build their own applications within Google Maps.

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HiPiHi Report Adds Salt to SL Wounds
Via the Metaversed blog comes word of a post over on media agency Centric’s blog listing “The Top 10 Things About HiPiHi (Link)“. I won’t list them all, but will instead cull the top three I think matter most and list them in order of importance:

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June 3, 2007

Serious Games @ BBC: First TV Show Broadcasting in SL

Via: Digital-Lifestyles

Last Friday saw the first BBC TV programme broadcast in Second Life.

The Money Programme is the BBC's flagship business affairs programme. It has been reporting on the business and financial world for the past 37 years and has won many awards for its coverage.

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June 1, 2007

Linden Lab Follows Six Apart Down Censorship Path
Over the past few days the Live Journal community was in an uproar over Six Apart’s move to delete what they considered objectionable material. I first read about it on Boing Boing (Link), then on Mashable (Link), and then on numerous sites. C|Net carried the news (Link) and one look at the comments should provide some sense of just how upset LJ users were; I rarely see that many comments on any C|Net story.

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