This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
The BBC is reporting about a German police investigation into “virtual child pornography” in Second Life; in Germany, virtual depictions of underage sex acts are illegal. Linden Lab is, of course, co-operating.
Edit: There’s also this report on similar concerns in the Netherlands, and this one about virtual rape concerns in Belgium.
There’s something that almost seems self-defeating about it. 🙂 Basically, a guy is trying to set up a showcase area, a “World’s Fair” thing, for virtual worlds, in Second Life. A booth for WoW, a booth for EVE, and so on. Read about it on his blog.
Some of the biases and assumptions present in the project are certainly visible:
For each virtual world, a legal counseling service will be offered to open a business, to advertise, to start a commercial or cultural project.
I have trouble seeing those sorts of projects in WoW. 🙂
On the other hand, the YouTube based festival of virtual world travel videos seems like a nice touch.
The debate always rages, and it always seems silly to me. I often say that technologies accrete, which means that usually, new technology doesn’t replace old technology. In this case, the kinds of live text chat that we consider to be the “old way” are in fact the new way, having arisen during the 70s, long after the rise of party line telephony. An adaptation to limited bandwidth, text chat has stuck around because it has different affordances than voice chat does, and even now that bandwidth has increased, it still offers and forever will offer some things that voice cannot.
Via Clickable Culture, I am pointed to this article on trademark infringement being rampant in Second Life.
Which we all knew, of course. But more interesting is the fact that this blog even exists: it’s called Virtually Blind, and it’s all about legal issues and virtual worlds. Yummy.
