Courtesy of Mike Rozak comes a pointer to this story about how Cursor hackers target WoW players. As you all know, Windows recently turned up a vulnerability in cursors that prompted security alters. Well, if you’re going to hack random users, what are you trying to get that is of value?

The answer seems to be WoW passwords and accounts, for sale on the gray market.

I think we’ll be seeing more of this as the gray market continues to thrive and the value of virtual currencies keeps going up.

Today came word of word a new study on games and violence or aggression. This one seems to reach some reasonable conclusions, too:

The authors propose that gamers fall into two groups: stable personalities, and those with emotional states that are susceptible to being influenced by game play. Within the latter group, the response to violent games largely depends on the emotional states of the gamers when they begin play. Angry gamers will cool off, calm gamers will get agitated. They also note that only two of the cases of rising anger reached levels that would be considered cause for concern, suggesting that dangerous levels of anger were rarely triggered by gaming.

CNet has an article about something that some of us in the industry have been talking about for a long time: whether or not people running casinos in Second Life are causing Linden to be liable for running an Internet gambling site. In the wake of recent legislation, pretty much the entire domestic Internet gambling industry moved offshore. Edit: a longer version of the original article, by Adam Pasick, can be found here.

Read More “FBI and Gambling in SL”

Destructoid has the liveblog of the recent IGDA San Diego event on next-gen gaming. Interesting to see the responses from the journalists who comprised the panel, as the answers range over everything from graphics to “I’d like to see a love scene in a game.”