Virtual Cultures is a new MMO blog by Ron Meiners & Celia Pearce that looks quite promising. (Celia has been doing the games thing most recently from the academic side for quite a while now — and Ron is one of the most experienced community guys in the biz).

Among other things, they seem to be the best source for coverage of the Indie MMO Conference that just happened — among other things posted, there’s a description of Dr Bartle’s keynote, which Celia terms “massively inspirational.”

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.’

Read More “EA makes avatars”