American Anthropologist event in Second Life, Sept 1st 2009

Posted by Helvetica | August 25, 2009

While Second Life isn’t exactly a video game, it does touch very closely on the digital world paradigm of gamers and influences our rights and abilities in this medium. So when we hear tell that a prominent anthropologist who studies these things is getting interviewed in a readily accessible virtual world, we like to bring it to everyone’s attention.

Can’t get there in real life? Second Life is only an Internet connexion away.

The UK Second Life community and the UK Department of Anthropology invite all to attend — in real life or in Second Life — an interview by AJ Kelton with Tom Boellstorff (SL: Tom Bukowski), Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association and author of Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008). Mark your calendar

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Second Life and Digital Rights in Virtual Worlds

Posted by Nelson Williams | August 15, 2009

Second Life is something of a cross between the Wild West and the New Frontier, with a solid dose of pornomachina to spice things up. A number of other online playgrounds have opened their doors, offering similar services as Second Life. But with a digital land rush comes the question; who owns all this stuff, and how do they enforce that ownership?

As creative types who make our money through digital labour, we here at Vox are keenly interested in this debate as it plays out among clients, artists, writers, con men, spammers, companies, thieves, freelancers, and scammers.

You can find one battle over at Internet Evolution, where they showcase the plight of one Gospel Voom. Voom created a virtual town for a client in Second Life, then awoke one day to discover his work gone and sold to another person… Without his consent, or any …

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Necessary Complexity in Virtual Gaming and Games Within Games

Posted by Nelson Williams | January 4, 2009

The good folks over at Massively.com are running a great article about necessary complexity in games, using the failure of Google’s Lively MMO as an example. Short order, games that are too complex might offer players a wealth of options and free cookies, but no one’s going to run that kind of rat maze when they could be playing World of Warcraft. A game that’s too simple, like Lively, risks boring players out of their skulls with a lack of options and sending them back to playing World of Warcraft. Or, to use the jargon of the day, boring games suck. You can read the article here.

Now, I’ve been a part of the pen-and-paper gaming world for aeons long past remembering, and our shrouded guild of fiends and ghouls has been wrestling with the same problem. Why is the most popular role-playing game in …

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