Man charged with beating fellow MMORG player to death
THERE’S BEEN ANOTHER case of MMORPG-related drama in the news again, this time over in sunny Moscow.
MMORPG Lineage 2 regular Alexander Ponamorenko has been arrested and charged with beating to death fellow player 22 year old Alexander Blyoskin after Blyoskin tried to interfere with a real [...]
Tracy Spaight, Who Killed Miss Norway, in Balkin & Noveck pp189-197
A tale of faked identity and staged ‘death’
What does this mean about the identity of the fictional/real “karen”
Reality of the idenity matters because people develop real bonds, and if they are being duped then that spoils the experience.
Or, was it Tracy Spaight who spoiled [...]
Multiverse
Multiverse makes a free MMO-creation platform, essentially allowing anyone with an intermediate knowledge of computing to create their own MMOG or virtual world.
I’ve been noticing that religion is becoming more prevalent in Second Life. Cyber-churches are popping up everywhere and Christians have even purchased their own island called “Truth”.
Not to be outdone by the more traditional denominations, the First Second Life Church of Elvis has been going strong since October 2006.
Located [...]
Via Terranova, this Slashdot story about eBay’s announcement that it is banning trading in game items, although apparently the policy does not apply to Second Life, a point also noted on Slashdot with a suggestion that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s stake in Linden may have something to do with the distinction between SL and other [...]
I said I would write down some thoughts about insurance and virtual worlds. I think there is a fundamental set of questions relating to the characteristics of risk and property interests in virtual worlds: would we expect there to be a market for insurance?
In the RW people insure valuable assets against certain types of risk [...]
Relevant to this week’s topics is an article by Constance Steinkuehler and Dmitri Williams, Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places” which concludes that:
MMOs are new (albeit virtual) “third places” for informal sociability that are particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital.
It is worth noting, however, that [...]
Slashdot says, Restrictions On Social Sites Proposed In Georgia:
A state senator in Georgia, Cecil Staton, has introduced a bill that would require parents’ permission before kids could sign up at a social networking site such as MySpace and Facebook, and mandate that the sites let parents see all material their kids generate there. Quoting:
“[Senate [...]
Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life
Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said on Friday.
“We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden,” Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Wästberg told AFP.
Actually, [...]
