Year: 2007

Reuters/Second Life » UK panel urges real-life treatment for virtual cash

He recommended treating virtual currencies like the Linden dollar as “real money”, including a requirement for virtual world operators like Linden Lab to report suspicious financial transactions, just as for real-world banks and financial institutions.

Well, some of us have been warning of this for a long time. The article concludes with a quote about how once the virtual worlds are set up in Belize or the like, it will all get much messier…

Interesting article on the Guardian about a patent filing from Google based around watching how you play, what you chat about, how you tend to communicate, etc, then building psych profiles of you in order to better target ads. In addition, there’s mention of targeting ads based on game save state — crash a car in a racing game, then have a car pitch made to you with stuff like “this one has better handling!”

I suppose it’s inevitable — given that ads companies already aggressively mine psychographic data from us, extending that into gamespace seems like a natural next step. And of course, virtual worlds in particular are essentially panopticons. And yet, the implications are troubling.

Once Upon A Time, there were many sites dedicated to sharing photos, and videos, and for listening to music. But there was a war on, so the military blocked access to those sites because the traffic was huge, and soldiers kept leaking info they weren’t supposed to, and so on.

But soldiers, being trained to be smart and clever about working around limitations, found that for every Photobucket, there was a Flickr, and for every Pandora there was a private podcast, and so on.

So soon the military started blocking more sites, and asking the sites to help block. Some sites were patriotic and did so. Other sites were patriotic and decided not to do so. Other sites were in other countries altogether. Read More “A brief SF tale”

Back at GDC I sat down for my now-traditional ramble-all-over-the-place interview with f13. And now they have posted the first part of the transcript. There’s some stuff about Areae, some stuff about old days at SOE and at EA/Origin, and a lot of stuff about Andean Bird and game design stuff.

F13: So what have you been occupying your time with in the past six months that you’re willing to tell us about, then?

Raph: Actually, it’s been a lot of fun. The company was actually founded back in July last year, and part of that time was spent fundraising. We were fully-funded as of AGC last year, so since then, actually, it’s been team-building. We’re up to about a half-dozen people already, and we don’t expect to grow that big. One of the virtues of the way we’re doing it is that it doesn’t require an army, which is actually REALLY refreshing!