Via a post on Terra Nova (Link) comes word of Nick Yee‘s relatively recent talk at Stanford titled “The Blurring Boundaries of Play: Labor, Genocide, and Addiction” (Link to audio and video). It’s an excellent lecture and well worth the time to watch it. His point that many people play MMO’s because they like the structured environment might explain why so many people are turned off by an open-ended virtual world like Second Life. I may not understand the mindset, but it sounds like an opportunity to me.

Earlier this year I believe I mentioned a CG competition over on the CG Architect site. I also believe I said I’d keep tabs on it. I didn’t. Instead I’ve just now surfed through and have been looking at some of the final entries (Link to rankings page) including an animation that caught my attention (Link) – not because it’s the winner, but because one of the cg characters in the piece reminded me of Half-Life 2 and I got to thinking that some sections of it could very well have been done in a game engine. You might recall the Fallingwater animation/game level I’d mentioned previously (reLink), so of course I found this interesting. Anyway, you can check out that animation and a few others on the Japan Nature Dome webpage (Link). Out of curiousity I’m looking for more plans and elevations and it at least shows a cross-section of the dome and site plan. No luck on the rest so far.

By the way, entrants had to submit three images for approval to qualify for entry. Those submissions are in a longish thread which makes for a nice reference source (Link) with some interesting ideas on display.

{Image Copyright © 2006 Sean De Boer}

Plenty of media stuff on Second Life is still being spat out and I haven’t read much that’s of real interest. If anything, it’s now the people writing about Second Life that catches my attention. In the meantime, however, I did read one relatively minor comment that is worth mentioning here. From C|Net’s inworld interview of Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale (Link):

One thing that will help is when attacks on “Second Life” are properly treated and prosecuted as cybercrimes, and we are working a lot on that.

Did he say “when”?

For those of you who recall, I was one of the few who took some early assurances that griefers and gridbusters were being pursued by authorities for their attacks with a very large grain of salt (reLink 1, reLink 2) after some initial assurances seemed to be mostly hot air. It appears that my suspicians of Linden Lab’s impotence in dealing with the issue are being verified. To be fair, it’s not their fault. But they should, imo, be more straightforward about the difficulties they’re apparently encountering. Personally, I suspect the problem won’t be resolved any time soon and no one should expect it to be.

Wired online is carrying an article, “Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth” (Link), that’s worth reading if you’re an industrial designer. Here are some quotes that I thought were of interest:

They found that digital cameras and camcorders were pretty well designed and sold well, but music players were a different matter.

“The products stank,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod product marketing, told Newsweek.

Digital music players were either big and clunky or small and useless. Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 MB, which stored only a few dozen songs — not much better than a cheap portable CD player.

But a couple of the players were based on a new 2.5-inch hard drive from Fujitsu. The most popular was the Nomad Jukebox from Singapore-based Creative. About the size of a portable CD player but twice as heavy, the Nomad Jukebox showed the promise of storing thousands of songs on a (smallish) device. But it had some horrible flaws: It used Universal Serial Bus to transfer songs from the computer, which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful) and it often sucked batteries dry in just 45 minutes.
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I’ve been finding ever-increasing amounts of spam in my email inboxes and have to wonder at which point the cost of using this technique will outweigh the benefit. But in the meantime, another kind of spam which I’ve been expecting to become seriously disruptive for some time, appears to be gaining an increasingly firm virtual foothold. While spam inside the Second Life virtual world isn’t new, the levels of it haven’t been so bad that it’s gotten the kind of attention it now appears to be getting (or maybe it just seems like it’s getting more attention since the information is posted on a blog instead of on a forum). Anyway, from the Linden Lab official blog (Link): Continue reading →