Chore Wars :: Earning Experience Points for Housework is another application of game logic to serious work, brought to you by the guy who made Urban Dead.

Chores are supposed to be serious. I can’t seem to get my kids to take them seriously, even by attaching monetary valuation to them.

Interestingly, the kids did have a good run about two weeks ago. The reason? They had found they wre missing a Pokemon game for the Gamecube from a few years ago. So they had to have it. And we refused to buy it, and told them they had to spend their own money. Goal established. Next, the game framework: they already earned dollars for their allownace by doing chores, but Kristen set it up so that whichever kid did more chores won the week and the higher dollar amount. The competition was on, and they did something like ten times the usual number of chores that week, and bought the game. Now they’ve reverted to their usual slothful behavior. 😉

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I almost linked this beautiful Second Life video the other day, but didn’t. Now New World Notes has an extended article describing how it was made.

Some interesting things to think about with this:

1. This was done in a multiplayer world. There’s nothing multiplayer about it. The power here comes from the ease of construction, not the setting. This could have been made in Maya or 3DStudio Max. But I bet the presence of an avatar adds a lot to the vibe.
2. The movie is, to my mind, art. In other words, it’s art in the form of machinima, made with a VW as a tool. But I am less sure that the in-world installation would be or was as powerful — the lack of music, of narrative, and so on, probably made it far less compelling.

According to a blogger over at Scientific American,  the 3m is in the span of 60 days.

 Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep–who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie–told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they’re adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.

“Could Barbie Girls Become The Largest Virtual World?” has some good discussion over at TechCrunch, including some controversy over the stats. Among the other comments that caught my eye:

• It has to be fun for me to be there: “I think Niche games like this will end up being more popular that games like second life. I have no interest in second life, but if there was something that was a little more specific that was interesting to me I might be motivated to try it.”
• Probably less than you think: “out of the 3M users, lol – how many of those accounts are pedophiles?”
• Yeah, good idea: “These virtual worlds should allow users to travel to other virtual worlds through special “gates”.”