The rumor has been going around, but now Slashdot seems to have official confirmation.

All this will do, of course, is push more to independent resellers.

I don’t really have time to comment on these much, except to point them out:

• Critical Hits asks, What Is A Good game Anyway?, referencing my game grammar material.
• Yehuda asserts that Wiinning as a Goal is Incompatible with Art; and I disagree, but the reasons why are long and complicated.

I expect we’ll see more and more of this sort fo thing over time: uses of game technology to help visualize complex data sets. After all, games are models of complex systems. So it stands to reason that some of the techniques that have been developed for conveying complex information will work well in other domains.

Enter VisitorVille, which can only be described as converting your real time web stats into a Sims-like display, with each visitor shown as a little person arriving by bus (search engine) or on their own, and entering buildings (pages) that develop and light up depending on traffic. You can even pull up a passport (unique visitor history) for each little guy you see on the screen. It’s available in 2d or 3d versions, even.

Alas, for a site my size, it looks like it would cost maybe $90 a month. I have a firm rule that the website has to pay for itself (if only in Amazon gift certificates) and I’m not willing to spend that much on stats. Which is a pity, given how interesting the tool looks.

Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life, says VERN. Except that it’s actually more like a tourism booth set up by a separate group, and not the Swedish government.

That said, reportedly, there’s lots of talk about Second Life at Davos in the last week.

The headline is all over the Net today: whether Second life is a Ponzi scheme. It’s a sensationalistic headline and tagline for an argument that isn’t actually about SL itself but about how some folks may be using SL. As Mark Wallace says over at 3pointD, “a more scientific inquiry would find that what SL’s economy resembles is that of a small developing nation.”

Read More “Second Life under an economic microscope”