So SWG is taking a small step towards player government. This is nice to see, though I note that even though players can nominate, they can’t vote on the Senators. Instead, Senators are picked by the community team.

One of the powers of a Senator is to vote on legislation. There’s nothing in there about what exactly Senate legislation is or what it can accomplish, though. 🙂 But they do get some forum mod powers, the ability to sticky posts, and stuff like that. It isn’t a hollow title, basically, though it’s also not true power.

Long ago, I floated the idea of actually let.ting players vote in Correspondents. Kinda neat to see the meme still around (though who knows to what degree this was inspired by that…)

• Richard has a great rant on computer games education at the university level in the UK.
• Toontown is moving to an ad-supported model, sez Mediaweek. Over at Clickable Culture, Tony asks, “They can’t handle chat, but we can throw ads at them?”
• Some stats from another article on the same topic: Wow, Nicktropolis is taking off fast. 1.4m monthly uniques, beating Toontown’s 1.1m.
• The Economist suggests that perhaps Multiverse may be the Netscape of virtual worlds.
• That pesky E3 thing is going on, but it’s some other E3 that somehow isn’t attracting any of my attention. How odd.

Worlds In Motion has an interview with Trion’s Lars Buttler about their recently acquired $30m in funding. Based on the interview here, I’d say they are trying to make the existing big publisher model apply to the Web world — a “virtual console” perhaps?

“…the platform also allows you to tap into the same experience from any connected device. We’re taking the game experience out of the client and putting it into a sophisticated infrastructure.”

Read More “An eye on Trion”

Log in here to try out an Ajax client that talks to Second Life and gives you access to the basics of chat and teleportation. It’s the work of a student named Katharine Berry, and a great demonstration of why MUDs and MMORPGs (and virtual worlds!) are the same thing.

(via Metaversed).