More evidence that video games can control your braaaiiinss. In a good way.

Basically, a comaprison study between two groups. One group played a game which made them click on smiley faces among frowns, and the other didn’t have the smiley faces in their game.

At the end of the study, the folks who clicked on smiley faces had lower cortisol levels. Less stress.

The result was actually the creation of a new company, Mindhabits, to commercialize this. Very cool. 🙂

So, if the f13 people played more games with fluffy bunnies, would they be less cynical and bitter?*

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*Not that I want to change them. I like them this way. 🙂

This is cool news — Activeworlds has a Facebook app now.

They’re best known for AlphaWorld, of course, but ActiveWorlds hasn’t been inactive since then. They switched over to a browser plugin model for their client a very long time ago. I’ve often commented that Second Life is clearly a descendant of AlphaWorld, even if SL doesn’t actually draw direct inspiration from it. For example, in ActiveWorlds you build by cloning objects — not exactly prims, but similar. One cute difference is that you claim land in ActiveWorlds by laying objects on it. As in, completely covering it up. 🙂

There’s a sizable library of stuff made for ActiveWorlds already… and you can run your own servers. But it’s certainly orders of magnitude more complex than what a Facebook user typically encounters. It’ll be interesting to see what the adoption is like given that the most popular “virtual space” app on Facebook is this.

(I also note that “open standards” is the latest buzzword — it gets mentioned in this press release, and it’s not exactly relevant).

Metaversed has a good article on Twinity, which appears to be a social virtual world with very firm ties to real world geography. It uses an “urban” metaphor, so you don’t freely build structures, and instead you rent apartments and the like. There’s clear potential here for the sort of geotagging/mirror world stuff I alluded to recently.

“Booty & the Geek”: The New York Post covers new SL lawsuits.

Simon denied any wrongdoing.

“They can say whatever they want to say,” he said. “It’s a video game.”

He also said the plaintiffs found their “evidence” by taking pictures inside his Second Life home. He contended that if he could be sued in real life for what goes on in Second Life, then U.S. search and seizure laws should also apply in the virtual world.

Ah, it’s interesting how quickly we can slip down the rabbit hole. 🙂