Here’s the email announcement — this is at U Cal San Diego, btw. I’ll be there on stage at some point.
Serious Play: MMO gaming, real money, and social worlds A Discussion
Thursday, February 8, 2007, 4-6:30pm
Atkinson Hall, AuditoriumFeatured Speaker:
Julian Dibbell (author of Play Money and My Tiny Life) “Play Money: Gold Farms, Polar Bear Rugs, and the World-Historical Relevance of Game Studies”
Patrick Dugan has the scoop, but the short form is:
…is here, part of OpenSecondLife. Christian Westbrook from the Electric Sheep flock says,
The simulator does not interact with SL’s asset server in any way, supports server-side scripting via Lua, and uses simple flat files to store asset information at this point.
VirtualWorldlets is reporting that the bank that provided the service has been dropped from the larger MasterCard network. Therefore, Entropia can’t use them as an ATM provider anymore. The reason?
MasterCard’s action came after the New York Community Credit Union and the card provider, CardOne Plus, had a series of run-ins with a regulatory body, the Financial Institutions Commission of British Columbia, which, in its fourth and last action, a penalty order, called North York a “rogue financial institution” having “shown complete disregard for the laws of British Columbia.”
According to the article, MindArk is in talks with another bank to get up and running with the ATM cards again.
3pointd.com reports that a Second Life server emu is out there, raising the question of what the world looks like when there’s multiple servers to log into. There’s already been some discussion of what happens to the current Linden business model on the day that there’s lots of hosting choices — sort of like a much more sober version of the issues that arose after the CopyBot scandal.
