Archive for 'Business'

One Song’s Poker Table

Infamous land baron, strip club/escort service operator, and virtual arsonist One Song (aka Mr. Fairplay) has finished his long awaited poker table — and the result is one of the most complexly scripted single objects in Second Life. We have seen it in operation at The Edge, and at the Red River Valley Saloon. Following [...]

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Interview with Phil Murdock of Empire Vendors

Snow and Phil In this interview Miravoir Psaltry talks to Phil Murdock, who with Snow Hare heads up the Empire Vendors Group. They turned sex toys and sex animations into an empire! Their story follows.

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In the Belly of the Beast

CMU Researcher Randy Pausch Academic Randy Pausch has provided a rare look into the workings of EA Corporation in a recent paper entitled “An Academic’s Field Guide to Electronic Arts“. The paper is based on Pausch’s residency at EA and is intended as a sympathetic portrait — designed specificially to help academic institutions to build [...]

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more stuff you can do with terms of service (TOS) agreements

i dunno how many of you guys have bothered to follow the TOS thrashes that show up here now and then. for those of you who do not follow them — the points debated can concern the use of TOS as holy writ v the use of TOS docs as really fine personal information reapers.

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Exploring Online Conflict Resolution

In an historic meeting at the State of Play, a group of game developers, lawyers, and conflict mediators met to discuss strategies for conflict resolution online. The headline idea emerging from the meeting was the thought that rather than impose uniform conflict resolution strategies in a top down manner, it might be more useful for [...]

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Free Speech for Avatars! And?like?Now!

Ludlow blasts Stratics. In a Session at The State of Play entitled Avatar Rights, Virtual Liberty, and Free Expression in Virtual Worlds, Peter Ludlow blasted the organized censorship policies of Stratics, while Fred Schauer of Harvard University suggested that the possibilities for free expression in virtual worlds should be used to explore alternative models of [...]

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100 million? 880 million? More?

Ok, the market in Simoleans, Linden Dollars, Hammers of Kick Ass, and whatnot are big — we knew that — but just how big. Just a couple days ago The New Scientist ran an article quoting Ted Castronova as putting the world wide sales of game currency etc. at 100 million (and also quoting some [...]

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Stratics bans anti-Kerry .sig

Ohhhh Stratics, you’ve done it again! Just when you think the Stratics Thought Police have run out of speech to ban, a stratics user now claims that the following .sig was banned by the Mods:I mean, I’ll be voting for Kerry too, but it would never occur to me to ban a siggy like that. [...]

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Hamlet the Fashion Maven

Hamlet Linden has been busy on New World Notes reporting on the New World Notes Fashion Expo, so if this is something of interest to you I highly recommend u check it out. Included are some extended discussions with our friend Mistress Midnight and a brief chat with Cherry Bomb Hare, who gets an honorable [...]

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Item Farming is Big Big Business. Is it Good for the Game too?

We know about the dealers in rare pets and cannons on tso, and we know that some dealers make a pretty penny at it, but what of games with lots of players like Lineage (with over a million subscribers)? Well, a recent article in Newsweek International, puts the revenue generated by sales of game objects [...]

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