Bloodspell: The rise of machinimaViewing and panel 22 November 20075.15 – 8.30pmLondon Metropolitan University Graduate Centre 166-220 Holloway RoadLondon, N7 8DB Bloodspell is the world’s first feature-length machinima, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Bloodspell “is a story of a world where men and women Read more…
Virtual Worlds with commercial toy tie-ins may be bad for kids. This seems to be the message by Lord Puttnam in his opening address to the Virtual Worlds Forum in London (which unfortunately I’m not attending). He seems troubled by the ethical implications of virtual worlds designed specifically for small Read more…
The dust is starting to settle in the widely publicised case of Bragg v. Linden Research, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. However, one must assume that plaintiff Marc Bragg has done rather well out of the deal, as his alter ego Marc Woebegone has been Read more…
A couple of separate pieces exemplify some of the problems and opportunities for virtual worlds. Firstly, Reuters reports that several companies are re-thinking their virtual world strategy. Companies spent millions to jump into the Second Life bandwagon only to find that nobody visits the vast corporate environments (“if you build Read more…
(via EFF Deep Links) Microsoft has released a Game Content Usage Rules, which will make it easier for machinima enthusiasts to assert their copyright from content generated in games like Halo (1-3), Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, and Project Gotham Racing. The inspired grant of licence reads: “Here’s the Read more…
I have been meaning to to write about this column by Marina Hyde in The Guardian, but I wanted to keep some distance from it. While I welcome all sorts of articles that criticise technologies, I have been distraught by certain tone emerging in the supposedly more progressive sectors of Read more…
On Day 3 I attended the Identity workshop organised by James Grimmelmann from New York Law School and Caitlin Hall from Yale Information Society. This was a surprisingly good and fruitful session, not surprising because of the organisers, but because workshop format can be quite uneven. The small number of Read more…
Last night we were treated to a sumptuous and delicious dinner at Singapore Zoo, and then taken on a night safari. Tigers, lions, hippos, giraffes… but no gnus. Oh yes, there were no velociraptors sighted on the tour. As a Costa Rican, I’m always conscious about the inherent dangers built Read more…
The highlight session of the conference for me was Regulating Virtual Worlds, which I was very much looking forward to. I’m sure this was intentionally built into the choice of speakers, but each of the panelists took a very clear regulatory approach to the new technology. Charles Lim Aeng Chang Read more…
I’m in Singapore for State of Play V, which concludes a self-indulgent week of buffing-up my research into games and virtual worlds in preparation for next month’s Gikii 2. I’ve just come from a dinner where we were shown a documentary on businesses in Second Life, following the rise of Read more…