Linden Labs New CEO Slowly Rezzing

"To me, the CEO role at Linden Lab combines perfectly my passions for art and design, business and technology. Until Second Life, we experienced the digital world passively in two dimensions. By enabling users to create a rich and immersive virtual world, Second Life is transforming the way we connect, collaborate, learn and transact online.

Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom Closing, Fans Hysterical

Once upon a time, Disney had this virtual world called (creatively enough) Virtual Magic Kingdom:

As with Habbo Hotel, Virtual Magic Kingdom was developed by Finnish studio Sulake and shared many similarities with the social networking site. Players with registered accounts are able to decorate their personal rooms, earn and spend in-game credits, and participate in a variety of online events and activities with their customized avatars, all in a "safe, non-threatening environment."

Disney Closes Gates To Virtual Magic Kingdom [Worlds In Motion]

NASA Wants Second Life On The Moon

...we got employees from all around NASA - the 10 geographies around the country - showing up at these Tuesday afternoon meetings. We formed a community of NASA and non-NASA, started coworking in Second Life. Cultural change started to take place at the agency...

Second Life and ESL Instruction

A while back, we mentioned a journal article on using MMOs to aid second language acquisition. Now Forbes has a piece discussing the same issue, only with Second Life. The author spoke with several teachers about their approaches to using SL to educate:

Another popular way to teach English in "Second Life," says Boahn, involves role-playing and quests. "I once dressed up as a pirate, had a ship and everything. I was kind of rough on the students," he admits. "I put some of them in cages, and had them confront language in a shock-and-awe kind of way. They seemed to like it, and they learned all sorts of new words, like 'loot' and 'booty.'"

Boahn's approach may appear nontraditional, but he feels a new medium calls for a new way of teaching language. Even using the game's English interface gives students a chance to practice what they've learned. "We like to encourage teachers to see 'Second Life' itself as a classroom," he says.

How To Spark Remote Learning [Forbes via Worlds In Motion]

Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

SXSW hosted what sounds like a very interesting panel on the issue of personal property rights in virtual worlds: this is becoming an ever more important issue, with lawsuits a-flyin' and people getting arrested for virtual property theft. So, how is this issue going to get nailed down? And when? And by whom? The panel consisted of GoPets CEO Erik Bethke, Live Gamer co-founder Andrew Schneider and attorney Greg Boyd, with Charles River Ventures' Susan Wu moderating.

Wu began by discussing the recent Bragg v. Linden Labs court case — in brief, a legal battle between a Second Life user and the world's parent company over land that Bragg apparently improperly acquired, resulting in a ban from the world by Linden. That case, Wu says, was a landmark in that it demonstrated that virtual property rights have tangible value in the court system ....

"What are the prevailing customs that should apply?" Wu asked. "Is it the country where the company is based? Is it the country where the customer lives? We don't even know what the basic virtual property rights are that we should be concerned with."

These sorts of issues will get nailed down eventually (maybe?), it's a serious balancing act in a lot of ways. And once you mix in the reasonably global nature of many MMOs? Well ....

Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds [Worlds In Motion]

Should Virtual Item Loss Be Classed As Real Life Theft?

Government After Terrorists in MMORPGs

And you thought gold farmers were irritating. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a report on data-mining that includes information on a new initiative called the Reynard project. The point of the foxy initiative?

Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.

They do describe it as a 'seedling' effort that 'may increase its scope to a full project' if early results are promising. I have nightmarish visions of TSA meets virtual worlds, which won't be pretty. You can find the full PDF version of the unclassified data mining report at Wired.

U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft [Wired]

Metaverse U Roundup

Stanford's Metaverse U conference has been going on this past weekend, and Joey Seiler has been blogging from the event, which has a lot of academic theory, predictions about where virtual worlds are headed, as well as how people are trying to implement some of the theoretical aspects into actual practice. One of the most interesting panels looked to be on avatars, some experiments with virtual reality, and preservation of virtual worlds:

The second day of MetaverseU had much more of the University in it. While the first day certainly had an academic bent, it also featured discussions of technology developments, products, and practices. TL Taylor led the second day with a discussion of online embodiment, ranging across game and social worlds. Jeremy Bailenson took a more quantitative approach, quickly running through 9 experiments and studies, looking at identity, avatars, and persuasion. (Amazing and fast!) Kari Kraus then took the stage to look at how people are approaching the preservation of virtual worlds.

The whole set of entries relating to Metaverse U is great and worth a look through, if you're into that sort of thing.

Liveblogging MetaverseU: TL Taylor, Jeremy Bailenson, Kari Kraus [Virtual Worlds News]

Passively Multiplayer Online 'Games'

Worlds in Motion has a quick write—up of something that may become a new trend: passively multiplayer ... web browsing? From the GameLayer's website comes a description of a Firefox add on that turns web browsing into something else:

PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game. Players play without playing; clicking around the internet turns into experience points and currency. A battle between Order and Chaos rages online, between people tagging and people spamming; this game gives people the weapons they need to wage that war in real-time in their browsers.

This unconventional massively multiplayer online game merges your web life with an alternate, hidden reality. The mundane takes on a layer of fantastic achievement. Player behavior generates characters and alliances, triggers interactions in the environment, and earns the player points to spend online beefing up their inventory. Suddenly the internet is not a series of untouchable exhibits, but a hackable, rewarding environment.

It's currently in beta, but this is a new take on the classic MMO and seems perfect for the lazy among us.

Multiplayer Web Surfing? [Worlds In Motion]

The Case Against Media Convergence In Games

10 Reasons Free To Play Growth May Be Slow

Air Force Unveils Plans For Air Force 2.0

Never accuse the USAF of being too far behind the times - they've just unveiled a long term plan to create 'Air Force 2.0,' including social networking (MyBase!), virtual training, and more ways to appeal to those tech savvy kids than you can shake a stick at. The Air Education and Training Command paper details the plan (but no real mention of cost), wrapping up with a look at three of the ways they hope Air Force 2.0 will function:

Attached at the end of the white paper is a series of three vignettes, detailing narrative form how MyBase will operate for each sector: recruiting to and inspiring the public after a recent terrorist attack with games as well as social settings; training new cadets in a virtual Squadron Officer School (vSOS) with avatars of famous historical thinkers, guest lectures at the University of Texas, and full-blown simulation of what it's like to watch an air mission from the ground in an Army M1A2 Abram; and, finally, using avatars as interaction methods for research about security issues and further training.

Ooooook. Well, they've projected plans running through 2030, so we'll see how long it takes for the USAF 2.0 to become reality.

Air Force Unveils Potential Plans for MyBase Virtual World [Virtual Worlds News]

Real Money Transaction Lawsuit Gets Interesting - Very Interesting

Stanford Announces Metaverse U Conference

Stanford's New Contribution To Virtual Worlds: Dryad

Ars Technica has an interesting hands on with a creation tool that the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group released last month. It's called Dryad, and is the first example of what the Stanford team hopes will be an easy way to create (realistic) user-generated content in virtual worlds:

It may not be completely obvious why research like this is so important, so we'll spell it out at the risk of over-simplifying matters. If virtual words are to proliferate, one major bottleneck to that proliferation will be visual design. Let's face it: few of us can draw something as simple as a tree well in two dimensions, let alone three. However, if a system could be devised that would allow everyday people to participate in the crowd-sourced construction of virtual worlds, then that particular bottleneck could be done away with.

While it's limited right now to trees, the team clearly hopes it won't be too long until even the least artistic among us can design buildings and objects for virtual worlds. It's an interesting read (including thoughts from Prof. Vladlen Koltun, who headed up the project) on how some academics are trying to do research that will applicable in the not-too-distant future.

Researchers hope to enable crowdsourcing of virtual worlds [Ars Technica via Worlds In Motion]

Characters of the Year: Does 'You' Suck?

Virtual Worlds Aiding 'Exodus' From Reality?

Are Virtual Worlds Liberating?