Play’s Republic

(I’m not sure how long we, the students of last semester, will be able to keep on posting to the class blog, but I figured I would make a quick entry while I have access.)
The men’s magazine Maxim has released its “Hot 100 List” for 2007, ranking what they believe to be the 100 most […]

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A new company, Serious Games Interactive, is breaking onto the scene with Global Conflicts: Palestine, a game designed to educate players about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The gamer plays as a journalist reporting on the surrounding events. Various actions increase or decrease your “trust” (in WoW, this is known as “reputation”) with the two […]

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MTV is striking into digital geography with its new plans to build three virtual worlds from the ground up. As we know, many big companies have been drifting into virtual realms like Second Life, but apparently MTV will be the first to truly build its own synthetic worlds. They’ve announced three:
- Virtual Laguna Beach […]

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If you’re interested in learning more about the growing phenomenon of the Chinese gold farmers, there are three good clips posted on YouTube from a documentary-in-progress.
If you have no idea what I’m referring to, low-cost labour (especially in China) is being used to play games like World of Warcraft for 12 hours a day in […]

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The New York Times has an interesting article today about the growing popularity of videogames with senior citizens. I’m not going to summarize the article, just pique your interest with two quotes:
“It turns out that older users not only play video games more often than their younger counterparts but also spend more time playing […]

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…it’s almost here.
That day when play crosses the usual boundaries and enters our daily interactions for a few short hours. It’s a time to be on your guard, but it’s also a time to indulge in the glory of handing out candies that turn your victims’ tongues blue.
It is, of course, April Fool’s Day.
How […]

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Our discussion in class last night made me remember the games of my own childhood. Garrison talked about creating his own games with friends - I think many of us did this. If we didn’t make up entirely new games, we certainly made new rules for existing games. Many of these rules […]

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As Garrison posted below, SL has just released some fascinating statistics. While looking over SL’s data on distribution of user gender, I began to notice a trend, so I created a graph. Take a look. See anything interesting?

(Click here for the full-size graph.)
 
User gender distribution has been describing two inversely […]

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Here are a few links for interesting videos created in Second Life.
The first video is a short clip from one of SL’s earliest build engines. This build was circa August 2001, when it was still called “LindenWorld” instead of “Second Life.” A couple of SL engineers recently ran the build and took this video with […]

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