Daily Show on the VW congressional hearings
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Apr 082008
VWs go to Congress
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Apr 022008
As has been reported in several places, there was a Congressional hearing on virtual worlds — or more specifically, mostly on Second Life. There’s a good sort of “landing page” to go explore this from source materials on Terra Nova, including links to an MP3 of the hearings.
Virtually Blind has what seems to be an eyewitness account that I enjoyed as well: Congress Holds First Hearing on Virtual Worlds; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale Testifies.
And naturally, it also hit Reuters.
Common to all the reports is commentary on the occasionally off-target opening remarks of the committee members, some of whom referenced MMORPGs rather than VWs, and some of whom were concerned about terrorism (of course). This has led to some sarcasm in some quarters.
It is going to be important to get deep understanding of virtual worlds of all stripes into the various governmental organizations — and for what it’s worth, I think quite a lot of policymakers are quite a ways along on that understanding. So I wouldn’t be making fun of them just yet.
And now, the unbalanced take (the Byron Report)
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Mar 272008
So the UK has “accepted all recommendations” in a commissioned report by Dr. Tanya Byron, best known as a psychologist on various reality shows about troubled kids on British TV (not a knock — she does seem to be quite qualified in the psych arena). The bottom line of the report? Internet sites get a pass and “we need more education,” whereas packaged games get the BBFC ratings put on them in addition to the PEGI ratings already there. The BBFC will now have to review most games made, instead of only the couple hundred they used to.
This is a blow to the games industry — it shuffles their self-regulation efforts (PEGI) off to the back of the box, and puts governmental regulation front and center. The Times Online describes it as “cigarette-style health warnings.”
Great summary of legal issues around VWs
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Mar 262008
Cory Ondrejka has a great slideshow summary of the legal and regulatory issues around virtual worlds that comes from the class he is doing at USC. Take a look:
collapsing geography: apoc week 10 (part 1)
A brief history of botting
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Mar 252008
It’s funny to see how the old debates sometimes just don’t change — they just move from being flamewars on forums to being flamewars couched in more polite language, as in the case of the Blizzard vs WoWGlider lawsuit.
The issue of running bots or enhanced clients is very very old. MUDs originally were played via vanilla Telnet. Vanilla Telnet is extremely annoying, because there’s no separate input bar from your output. Given that writing a vanilla Telnet client is very easy, it was not long before there were dedicated clients that wrapped Telnet with additional functionality. The best known of these were TinyFugue and TinTin, and today it seems like zMud is still retaining dedicated users.
