Archive for May, 2004

Alpha Refugees Start with Clean Slate in Second Life

In TSO they were caught up in scam houses and drama, but sometimes the incorrigibly bad are really just painfully hungry for some form of intellectual stimulation and creative outlet. Hopefully, the ability to create custom content in Second Life will provide that for them. In this photo some former Alpha residents pause for a [...]

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News From DG: Rival Gang War Continues…

By Dana Grove LLC continues to be the most powerful gang in Dan’s Grove. While the Triad Mafia is slowly growing, it is having difficulties keeping up with the numbers in LLC. Once again the leader of Triad, Bob Busch (aka Daniel Alfredson) money house Mad Cash, was hit with another trashing, this time by [...]

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Yale Law Prof Ponders Uri’s Plight

This draft law review article — entitled “VIRTUAL LIBERTY: FREEDOM TO DESIGN AND FREEDOM TO PLAY IN VIRTUAL WORLDS” is a must read. Written by Jack Balkin, who is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and Director, The Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The article covers a lot of [...]

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Why do Griefers Grief?

There is a really interesting discussion of this topic over on Terra Nova. Can’t say I agree with most of it, but there was a really nice taxonomy of motivations for griefing by Chek Yang Foo, which follows.

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Leaving the Party

In the Clay Shirky article post below is the following passage, which I found interesting, and worth pondering out of context. “You’re at a party and you get bored — it’s not doing it for youanymore. The people you wanted to talk to have already left, you’vebeen there a long time, you’d rather be home [...]

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Clay Shirky on Mutable Rules for Games

Clay Shirky rocks, what more can I say. Oh, maybe this: following is a copy of an essay he’s been giving since the State of Play conf., on the plausibility and desirability of games that give players themselves the ability to change the rules as the game evolves. There are technical issues, of course, but [...]

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May Census: Activity in Alpha Down 15% Since February

Back in February, we published some stats from CherryBomb, who counted up the number of hours logged in the top 100 properties in each category. While it is difficult to extract conclusions from these surveys, they do provide some interesting discussion points. (For example, residence is up 8%, but romance and welcome are both down [...]

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SL CEO Holds another town meeting

Seems like just last week we reported that the CEO of second life had held a town meeting. Well, here is another, and your intrepid reporter Uri, on vacation in SL, caught the whole thing. It was pretty impressive — especially given what we’ve seen from tso. Phil Linden (Phil Rosendale’s avatar) took questions for [...]

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Papparazi Catch Simlebrities in SL

by Pat the Rat Alphaville Simlebrities can run but they cannot hide. Here our SL papparazi catch four Alphaville citisims on the lamb in the land of merry-go-rounds and really big trees. Can you identify them? Winner gets a date with the hottie in the lower left of the pic. Hint: guy in blue shirt [...]

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There there Thereians: There is History?

Looks like There is going to be the next boring MMORPG put out if its misery. According to this article in GameSpot, there could be an announcement about the consumer game going down within the next 90 days. Fpr now, Thereians should expect no further updates (hey, sounds like TSO!). Of course the real force [...]

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