Cory’s article for InformationWeek on why and/or whether online games can be democratic is really interesting. Note that he’s lumping Second Life into the same bucket, by the way, on the grounds that your wealth in SL can vanish at any time at Linden’s whim.
Read More “Why Online Games Are Dictatorships according to Cory Doctorow”
Via Tom Crawford comes a detailed look at ProtoSphere, a virtual world aimed at companies and educational institutions. A quick peruse of their website shows that they’ve specifically created it to run as an all-in-one solution, with social networking, simulation capabilities, VOIP, ability to integrate course modules, blogs, wikis, and so on. It looks rather robust.
Here’s the press release — but it seems to boil down to ‘make avatars of yourself to play in virtual online versions of popular game shows.’
It’s hard to understand, these days, how prized writing once was. Everywhere we turn there is verbal diarrhea, an endless stream of twittering: there’s blog diaries and fan fiction and political ideologues, there’s spin and truthiness and position papers, there’s stories that perhaps don’t deserve to be told. We live in a world that is abundant in writing, abundant in books, with little sense of how once each carefully formed letter was a bulwark against the collapse of civilization.
According to this article, Atari may be contemplating a user-generated content world. This is an interesting step for a publisher of IP; after all, part of why Sony’s Home is limited to user content mostly in private spaces is basically to prevent IP from being rampantly abused. Be interesting to see what comes of this.
