Lots of events have been happening in Metaplace lately, but this one, you might guess, is near and dear to my heart: a poetry open mic. It is happening in WritersForumWorld in about half an hour (1pm Pacific time).

The WritersForum guys have been working to try to get a virtual workshop going as well.

We’re gearing up soon for even more events, so it’s worth following along with the events calendar. In the meantime, stop by for this one!

State of Play VI is coming up June 19th and 20th, and I will be keynoting there and doing lots of Metaplace demoing.

I’m looking forward to this one — I haven’t made it to a State of Play conference since the first one, and it was incredibly stimulating. A great group of folks is gathering there this year, and the topics are nice and meaty: kids’ worlds, whether virtual worlds have reached a plateau, recent policy developments, and even government worries about terrorism. There’s also a Graduate Student Symposium where students will present their research.

Here’s the press release:

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The Guardian is reporting that David Eddings has died.

I stopped reading Eddings long ago, but for me mention of him or The Belgariad (books 1-3, books 4 & 5) will always conjure up sundrenched days in Barbados, where I lived when I first read him. We haunted Cave Shepherd (a duty-free department store) on Broad Street searching for imported American paperbacks, because most bookstores in Barbados carried just “beach reading” at the time, and that meant almost nothing a budding geek would read.

They were sunny books, in the end, part of that wave of light fantasy in the late 70s and 80s when there was a lot less gore and a lot more humor in your swordplay (well, except for the Thomas Covenant books, which I read at the same time). I remember a frisson of awe when I thought that The Prophecy that guided the action in the novel (unusually, a speaking character in the books) was actually the author himself talking straight to his protagonist. I also recall my disappointment when it became clear that the book wasn’t nearly as gutsy as that. By the time we got to The Malloreon (books 1-3, books 4 & 5), my writerly mind had started mapping the action chapter by chapter, noting that there was actually the same set of characters and even broadly the same set of actions occurring in the same order — talk about a formula!

But it doesn’t matter — like so many other books, they were perfect for an age, and an ageless time in this case — 15 years old and bicycling around, hacking away at some game programming, a light introduction to metafiction and a paperback in my back pocket.

I’m on the MediaSnackers Rezed Podcast#33 today, for maybe five minutes worth of talk about Metaplace, particularly uses for education. The bulk of the podcast though, is about the fascinating project Quest Atlantis out of the Indiana University School of Education.

For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company). In making these decisions, students engage in projective consequentiality: they have to consider what their use of particular tools tells them about the context that they are working with. After making a recommendation, students travel 20 years forward in game time, and see the results of their recommendations (experiential consequentiality). At that point students are asked to reflect on the implications of their disciplinary recommendations on the context, thus serving to re-couple content with context.

Virtual Worlds News has a report that tomorrow may see some developments in the Worlds.com patent case; apparently Article One Partners, the folks who were crowdsourcing finding prior art, will be posting something…

…announcing the outcome of a Patent Validity Study it conducted on the Worlds.com complaint.

“With verification of outside counsel, Article One Partners has identified prior art that can show the Worlds.com patent to be invalid,” the organization said in a statement. The group said it would post the prior art on its web site, although at press time the art had yet to be posted.

Still confused about this use of the word persistence; coming here with the dictionary meaning and trying to understand a seeming contradictory concept.

— David, in a comment in the earlier post

The technical sense of the term arises from “persisting something to the runtime database.” The base states are usually in a template database of some sort, along with all the other static data. The template database is read-only as the game is running, and only developers get access to it. The runtime database is where everything that players do goes. (See here and here for more).

The base data in the static template database doesn’t count as “persistent” or “persisted” because it’s actually baked into the world’s rules in some fashion, as a starter state. Delete everything in the runtime database, and that map will still be there, usually. You will have playerwiped WoW, but the world of WoW will still be there: every loot drop, every monster, every quest, every house.

The virtual world definition of the term means “to save changes on top of the base dataset.” So a base character starts with no real gear and newb stats, and a designer sets that up in the template database as the definition of a newbie character. But we save their advancement. That’s persisting a character to the runtime database. The stats and gear might go up OR down, but they are different from the base.
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Click here to attend!

GigaOM has an article titled Will O3D Get Google Back Into Virtual Worlds?. Apparently, at the MetaverseU conference (which I usually attend but couldn’t this time), the tech lead for O3D said that his team’s next goal is to fully integrate it into Chrome. By the end of the year.

After his presentation, a group of developers surrounded Kokkevis, peppering him with tech-heavy questions. He told me there weren’t any companies creating MMOs in O3D yet, but he raised the possibility that Google might port Sketchup and Google Earth into O3D, “once we become part of the browser.” (Both have been implemented for MMO-related projects.)

I wrote about O3D back in April; its integration into Chrome is certainly interesting, but Chrome itself has quite a lot of adoption barriers yet. But it’s still highly intriguing tech to keep an eye on. If Sketchup and Google Earth migrate to it, that’s a pair of apps to drive adoption, for sure.

Meanwhile, the same article says Unity has reached 10m installs…

Massively asks, “Are MMOs truly as persistent as they claim?”, prompted by a blog post over at Player vs Developer. The Massively piece actually takes off in quite a different direction than the original blog post, because the post is about how much game developer changes to balance and systems affect the perceived value of a given character. But the question that Massively asks is more direct: are MMOs really that persistent?

And the answer is unequivocally no.

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The Koinup “Rocking the Metaverse” live music tour is hitting Metaplace tomorrow, Tuesday June 2nd, at 1pm Pacific time, after having been to Orange Island in Second Life, and ReactionGrid (an OpenSim world). After Metaplace comes Twinity. There’s a great line-up, too:

• DJ Doubledown Tandino
• Slim Warrior
• Grace McDunnough
• Dizzy Banjo

The guys here made an awesome custom music venue for it complete with all sorts of cool stuff for musicians and promoters, including stuff like lighting controls, a VIP area with bouncers, a cool audience feedback system that uses crowd metrics to drive applause audio, and event metrics so that performers can see how many attended and for how long.

There will be teleporters available from Metaplace Central, or you can jump straight to the world. You can RSVP on Facebook if you like. More details are here.

I’m looking forward to this — we’ve had several live music events already in Metaplace, and they are always a blast. This will be the largest to date, and Koinup has done a great job organizing the event.