Archive for November, 2003
International SimCon update
More news on the upcoming International SimCon. Looks like there has been a change of venue – will now be held at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn MI. That is probably a good move. They also announce a call for nominations for the “Simmy Awards.” Voting will take place in January and will conclude at [...]
Full StoryThe State of Play: Post 2
Sorry I’m being so slow about posting summaries of these sessions. Here it is almost a week later and I’m only up to my 2nd post. Nevertheless… Session 2 on Friday was entitled “‘Century 21′: Property, Intellectual Property and Creativity in the Virtual World.” The session included presentations by Dan Hunter, Ted Castronova, and Yochai [...]
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Full StoryBack to the Robot Factory
A couple weeks ago I posted a complaint about the new jobs on TSO. In particular, my utility sim, Doctor Legion took a job in a robot factory and suffered the mind numbing boredom of it for one shift, and was appalled by some of the slogans that are streamed at us while we worked: [...]
Full StoryState of Play post 1
I was only able to attend one day of The State of Play conference but let me just say that it was one of the most interesting conferences that I’ve been to in a long long time. What I would like to do is cover events session by session, beginning in this post with the [...]
Full StoryConsider my thunder stolen,
Linden Labs dropped their bomb today. Second Life has given real-world property rights to content created in game. This is a world gone mad. i haven’t even played Second Life and now I feel that I must visit it jsut to watch the repurcussions ripple through. You can read the Press Release here.
Full StoryInternational SimCon to Take Place in February
According to a press release from the Splash Entertainment Group, an international convention for players of TSO is being planned for this coming February in Detroit, Michigan. Here are the particulars from the press release: “The International SimCon (short for sim convention) will be the first of its kind since TSO’s public release one year [...]
Full Story“Challenge Everything?”: Third-Party Harm and Online Gaming
Lately, I’ve been losing more sleep than usual. I started playing TSO in Alphaville. I had wanted to further explore some legal issues in the course of my graduate studies. My first exposure to Alphaville was light-hearted, fun, and it struck me as a seemingly benign little place. Then something freaked me out. Another player, [...]
Full StoryTSO: High School Redux?
Most MMORPGs have some way of marking achievement (moving up through a guild or acquiring weath, for example), and TSO is no exception; the game is designed so that one can achieve both by acquiring virtual goods and currency and by attaining social status (which is indicated by posted rankings). The problem is that the [...]
Full StoryWoot! Go Alphaville Herald. Now get to work!
In a couple of recent posts on Terra Nova, Ted Castronova at Cal State Fullerton and Dan Hunter at U Penn’s Wharton School have had some nice – indeed, for me, inspirational – comments on the mission of the Alphaville Herald. I ordinarily don’t care much for self-promotion, but this *is* the internet and this [...]
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