Year: 2007

A helpful interview has been posted at Virtual Worlds News. It sounds like basically Metacrasher is trying to create glue between worlds — intermediary formats and tools that can export data to differing worlds.

This is only needed because of all these silly proprietary formats, of course. 😛

I don’t know if you have all seen Askville, Amazon.com’s post-questions-and-get-answers site, but it’s very very clearly inspired by games (XP, levels, etc!). Enough so that one blogger already wondered aloud if they were inspired by my ETech talk (I personally doubt it, but if it’s so, I’d love to get royalties 😉 Amazon gift certificates would do…).

Well, Virtual Worlds News is reporting that this system, which is based on winning virtual currency, is designed to hook into something called Questville which will launch this year. And that Questville will be a virtual world of some sort. Details are thin on the ground though.

Metacrasher.com is the site for a new company that seems to be trying to create bridging software so that tools and the like will work across multiple different virtual world platforms. The website seems a bit broken in places, and there isn’t much info, but I was highly amused to see that they apparently support Areae’s texture-mapping format. 🙂

Jokes aside, the idea is interesting — essentially, creating a directory of places in worlds, and presumably wrapping software so that you can “see into” various different worlds. They have tests going with Ogoglio apparently.

Maker Of Virtual Sex Toys Takes Online Dispute To Federal Court — happening in Second Life, of course. And over sex toys, of course. Porn is always on the bleeding edge of technology…

This is a good example of exactly what Linden wanted to happen — redirecting disputes like this away from customer service and to the real-world dispute resolution process.

At issue is actually a trademark dispute, apparently; Stroker Serpentine, the person suing, makes around $40,000 a year selling “Sex Gen” beds that permit sexual positions between avatars, and he accuses the other party of copying it and selling the copy for a profit.

I blogged about the original pass of this study. Now there’s an update. It’s focused on gamers specifically, and it looks like it was a pretty deep study — over 11,000 folks surveyed.

• Avid PC Gamers: 33%. 13.6 hours a week mostly on computers, and buy 1.4 titles a quarter.
• Secondary Gamers: 22%. 6.8 hours a week, again mostly on computers, and buy 0.8 titles a quarter. Only a third of this group owns a PS2.
• Avid Console Gamers: 20%. 10.7 hours a week, and they own 1.6 consoles and 0.8 portable platforms. 1.9 titles a quarter.
• Mass Market Gamers: 15%. 8.9 hours a week, mostly on PS2 and PC. They own 1.8 consoles — more than avid console gamers, probably because they don’t sell their old consoles for store credit. 😛
• Casual Kid Gamers: no % given, I deduce 8%. Kids 6-12, owning 1 console and 0.5 portables (which doesn’t match the kids I know, all of whom have Gameboys of some stripe). Just 3.6 hours a week of playtime, probably because of pesky parents. 0.8 games per quarter.
• Heavy Gamers: 2%. 39.3 hours a week, mostly on 360 and Wii. Own 2.8 consoles and 1.9 portables. And they buy 13.1 games a quarter, or around 4.5 a month.

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