In 2005, one of the major remaining candidates for the US Presidency proposed anti-game legislation whose wording indicated many of the biases and inaccuracies that have re-emerged in the Cooper Lawrence incident. Today, that candidate's web site says nothing about video games. And how benefit facto
Pwnage, zerging, phat lewts - online gaming has birthed a rich lexicon. But none, perhaps, deserves our attention as much as the notion of the griefer. Broadly speaking, a griefer is an online version of the spoilsport - someone who takes pleasure in shattering the world of play itself. To really ac
A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from "rooms" in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website. (And click here for a similar hacking/virtual property story from Japan.) Pirates is arguably an EVE "restart": many of its underlying mechanic
Proponents of online research counter with figures that the audience for today's "massively multiplayer" games mirror the general public far more closely than most other video games. And in hopes of quelling the skeptics, several studies are attempting to see if reality shines through in t
DKP systems create "player obligation to the guild through a rationalized system intended to measure commitment" and that they therefore constitute a core practical component of how guilds as institutions establish legitimate rule. You could feel surprised that our FF11 Gil price is the ch
Club Penguin, where members pay $5.95 a month to dress and groom penguin characters and play games with them, attracts seven times more traffic than Second Life. In one sign of the times, Electric Sheep, a software developer that helps companies market their brands in virtual worlds like Second Life
"When virtual environments first started, they were viewed as libertarian dreams with no interference," says Behnam Dayanim, a lawyer who specializes in Internet law at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP in Washington. "As companies that sponsor these environments become more a
Below are some recent mainstream media stories on virtual worlds for those who might have missed them. Thoughts, comments, and links to other things welcome, as always. Before that, though, if you should happen to be in Santa Clara County on Friday (the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, spec
What might be some ways to effectively establish more multi-university and multi-institutional research, both with regard to studying virtual worlds as well as using virtual worlds to facilitate research collaborations? Many of us have been talking about a "supercollider model" for virtual
Sometimes these groups don't play so well with social scientists (who are almost always data-driven these days, while legal/political researchers are more qualitative). We are sure that you can really get the EverQuest 2 Platinum on your order. As we are really having available stock of EVE On