Wired, Too, Bearish on Second Life
Last fall, Wired published a huge "travel guide" on Second Life. "[...] This exotic realm can seem bewildering and strange to first-time visitors," the magazine wrote then.
On this blog we bring together the latest insights in the cross-over of business and gaming - from gamevertising to businessgames.
To find out more about Futurelab: Click here
Authors
Blogs we read
- Avant Game
- Serious Games Source
- Game Research
- Advertising Lab
- Raph’s Website
- Henry Jenkins
- the-inbetween.com
- Joystick101
- GameSetWatch
- Kotaku
- Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog
- Business Communicators of Second Life
- Destructoid
- Adverblog
- We the Sheeple
- The Daedalus Project
- GamePolitics.com
- Future-Making Serious Games
- Serious Games Portal
- Darren Herman
- Water Cooler Games
- Clickable Culture
- reBang
- Terra Nova
- SLOG
- 3pointD
- ARGNet
- iViNNie
July 25, 2007
Links For The Day
I temporarily lost access to my rss reader (read: I'm an idiot) so I had to find news the old way, like our ancestors did a few hundred years ago: I read a bunch of blogs and whatnot.
July 23, 2007
It Is Hard To Think Of Anything More Surreal Than A Chinese Goldfarmer
by: Lynette Webb
There was a really interesting article in the New York Times recently that looked at the gold-farming phenomenon. For those who don’t know, ‘gold farming’ is the term given to people who play online games like world of warcraft in a manner so as to earn the maximum ‘gold’ which is then sold on to other players who don’t have the time/skills to earn it themselves.
Continue reading "It Is Hard To Think Of Anything More Surreal Than A Chinese Goldfarmer" »
July 13, 2007
The Niche of Mass
Joel Greenberg has a blog entry (Link) worth reading regarding Suzanne Vega’s upcoming concert inside Second Life. Some of what he’s getting at has come up here before (reLink). And of course scarcity is something I’m often thinking about, given my particular interests.
July 12, 2007
Links
Hi and welcome to another installment of "articles you may have missed and you may or may not care about".
First off, The Angry Gamer, an introductory analysis of..well.. trash talking. While not necessarily revealing anything you didn't already know, the author did do his homework and took the subject quite seriously.
July 9, 2007
Gibson To Ghost Second Life
Via Media Bistro comes word (Link) that cyberpunk author William Gibson intends to rez inside Second Life as part of a marketing effort to promote his latest book, Spook Country. From the Media Bistro post:
Art Institute Goes Virtual
Via The Online Universities website comes word (Link) that The Art Institute Online has established a presence inside Second Life. No surprise here. But also no surprise is that so many other art schools have failed to establish a presence. This is especially odd considering the recruiting possibilities in a virtual space where there is so much emphasis on content creation.
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?
CNN International: The future of virtual worlds
by: Dominic Basulto
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)
Continue reading "CNN International: The future of virtual worlds" »
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.
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading "Serious Games @ BBC: First TV Show Broadcasting in SL" »
May 24, 2007
Smart Vending
I suppose there are a few people who wonder why I find vending machines interesting and blog about them. I’ll try to keep this short and to the point:
1) Vending machines can fabricate an item on demand. Example: the Pouchlink system (reLink)
Starwood Shutters SL ALoft Effort {*Update*}
The first time I blogged about Starwood’s CEO, Steven J. Heyer, it wasn’t because of their use of virtual world Second Life, it was because of a video interview where Heyer talked extensively about consumer Experience. I titled that entry using a key quote from the interview, “We Deliver Memories” (reLink).
Continue reading "Starwood Shutters SL ALoft Effort {*Update*}" »
May 23, 2007
Harvard's School Of Government On "Serious Games"
Via: Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government /Government Innovators Network- Companies put "Serious Games" to work
Sam LaGrone, Staff Writer - The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
If 20-something pilots can use simulators to train for catastrophes, so should a 20-something restaurant or retail manager.
Continue reading "Harvard's School Of Government On "Serious Games"" »
May 20, 2007
Another great addition
We're very happy to announce another great new contributor: Eliane Alhadeff. She runs the Future-Making Serious Games Blog, as well as the soon to be launched Serious Games Portal. Once we read her very thorough and deeply researched articles, we knew we had to have her :) We have added the best of her recent posts to this blog, and more to follow from the library soon.
P.S. Be sure to check out her profile too.
May 19, 2007
Quick Note
Starcraft 2. Hell yeah.
May 18, 2007
Met’s Digital Simulcasts Proving Virtual Experience Profitable/Marketable
I’ve previously mentioned in comments that I’d been explaining both the immersive benefits of virtual worlds and the potential uses for digitally-enabled movie theaters to my senior citizen mother. I’ve also recently mentioned that she’d been attending digital simulcasts broadcast to a local theater from the New York Metropolitan and was raving about how immersive the experience was for both her and other attendees. Well, it seems that the simulcasts are a hit. The New York Times is reporting (Link) that the effort was a brilliant success. From the article:
Continue reading "Met’s Digital Simulcasts Proving Virtual Experience Profitable/Marketable" »
May 14, 2007
Playboy Soon in Second Life
Playboy Island in Second Life is opening soon. Look for Playboy in group search, join, and you too can be a playmate (that's the title group members get automatically). I bumped today into someone who said the island was actually open, but when I tried, the teleport failed. Don't you love the island's shape, though? It's one of the few businesses for whom Second Life is a natural fit, given how many of the residents spend most of their time.
Original post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/05/playboy-soon-in-second-life.html
May 11, 2007
News, Links, Stories
Much to my chagrin, I again find myself in the mindset where anything beyond a small listing of links just won't tick right.
So here we go again. First off, you might've noticed that people started blogging about the latest panic wave that hit Second Life. It took a large portion of my will to refrain from making any comments of any nature, but here's a good observation from csven, picked up from the comments on this post:
May 8, 2007
New Study On Gaming Habits
Via Gamasutra, an NPD report titled "Online Gaming 2007: The Virtual Landscape".
Some data:
- 42% of the gamers are women;
- 54% of online console gamers use the Xbox; PS 2 comes next with a 45%;
- Only 19% of the subjects indicated MMOs as their preffered genre;
- On average, more time is spent playing online on consoles than on PCs/Macs.
May 4, 2007
In Other News
Having been somewhat busy lately, I couldn't find the time for more than briefly scanning my feeds list. Like a good news monkey however, I do have to share those links that caught the eye.
April 24, 2007
MMO Miscellanea
Some MMO-related articles caught my eye because they stray out of the old, beaten path (Where is <game> headed? or What is the next WoW killer? or A new era dawns as patch 5.43.21b is announced).
First off, a Clickable Culture article reinforcing the point that, no matter what you design your game for, there'll be people who'll find new, weird and sometimes interesting uses for it.
Staying in Azeroth, a piece about 'coming of age'. And as horrible as that may sound, the author makes a pretty good point. Yes, it's a game but it's still played by real people, even if they're behind really cartoonish characters.
Finally, a very detailed article by Nick Yee on MMO superstitions. I found it to be a delicious read, although, if you never played a MMO in your life, the post might read more like a psychiatry ward visit.
Mining Gamers' Behavior
Business Week writes about how "predictive analytics allow publishers to analyze and build a profile for each player—allowing for highly targeted marketing."
April 22, 2007
Book review: Advergaming and In-Game Advertising
A little while ago Ilya mentioned a new book about in-game advertising that has hit the market, 'Advergaming and In-Game Advertising" by Gerald Marolf. In the meantime I have received it, and want to give you a little review.
Let me say upfront, that I appreciate this is in actual fact a master-thesis that has been repackaged as a book - in other words, some academic rules have to be followed, which do not always co-incide with readability.
Continue reading "Book review: Advergaming and In-Game Advertising" »
April 18, 2007
Endemol Takes Its Shows To 3D
Apparently inspired by the successes of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach and its own Big Brother show set in Second Life, Endemol is teaming up with EA to build Virtual Me (virtualme.com redirects to EA press room), a virtual world that will allow "avatars to compete in online versions of Deal or No Deal, Fame Academy and Big Brother." Coming soon.
Study: In-Game Ad Spend $295M This Year
More datapoints from the eMarketer study: "eMarketer projects that $295 million of the 2007 total will be spent on in-game advertising and that spending on advergaming (the creation of games for the purpose of promoting a brand) will reach $207 million. By 2011, the balance between the two will have shifted significantly. US spending on advergaming will climb to $344 million in 2011, but US spending on in-game advertising will climb faster, reaching a total of $625 million that year."
-- press release
Original post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/04/study-in-game-ad-spend-295m-this-year.html
April 16, 2007
Of Browsing and Passive MMOs
When I read about passively multiplayer online games, I immediatly thought about Progress Quest, basically a mock RPG where character creation is pretty much the last interactive part. After that, the game sits quietly in the background and plays itself, basically grinding up a character while you go about your business.
PMOG however is a concept crafted to define the next level. It's a "game" where what you browse defines your character. Quite amusing, really.
April 15, 2007
Violent disagreement about report - or...?
Over at GamePolitics the writers compiled a list of the reactions to the FTC report that came out earlier this week on retail and marketing practices to children. Obviously the gaming industry was holding it's breath, and was relieved when the report was generally positive about the self-regulation efforts shown, while pointing out some areas for improvement. In other words, a varied and balanced result.
Now read what various media outlets headlined - and tell us if they read the same report...:
Continue reading "Violent disagreement about report - or...?" »
April 11, 2007
Space invaders! Oh - no, it's a DoS attack...
NetQos has released a video showcasing their research on visualisation techniques in network management, Netcosm. Using graphics reminiscent of space invaders and other ancient console games it provides real time insight into datatraffic, attacks on the network, and whatever else is going on. It's a great example on how visuals and concepts from the gaming world can be used for 'real' world benefits.
Continue to see the cool video...
Continue reading "Space invaders! Oh - no, it's a DoS attack..." »
April 10, 2007
Serious Games Are Getting Down To Business
Via: eMarketer.com
The practice of using video games as an advertising vehicle is as old as the games industry itself. Early Sega racing games for the Atari 2600 console featured Marlboro display ads on the raceway, and high-profile early-'90s titles such as Zool and the FIFA International series contained ads for Chupa Chups and Adidas, respectively.
Continue reading "Serious Games Are Getting Down To Business" »
April 9, 2007
Serious Games Booming In West Midlands
Via: The Birmingham Post
As the Serious Games Institute is officially launched at Coventry University, business reporter Joanna Geary examines the growth of the computer games market, one of the region's fastest-growing industries.
It is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. By tapping into how we might play the computer games of the future is exactly what will ensure the continued success of one of the region’s fastest-growing industries.