Open to the public for the first time, the G4C conference will focus on partnerships, existing games and emerging business models. Speakers include the General Manager of MTV’s college TV station (Stephen Friedman), a Senior Program Officer from the MacArthur Foundation (Connie Yowell), the CEO of the gameLab studio (Eric Zimmerman) and a representative from the United Nations’ World Food Programme (Zach Abraham). On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.

Better late than never, right? News from Ben Stokes: The second annual Games for Social Change Conference is going on today and tomorrow at at CUNY in the Heights in New York City. Here's a bit of info pulled from their press release: N. Scott Momaday in his "The Names: a Memoir" recalls a lyrical, magical property of the names in his childhood as a Native American growing up in a pueblo in New Mexico. Oddly, when viewed by this light, "daughter of Fredrick Brown and Paula Gottin" may be awkward, but at least a quality of something worth noting is conveyed. On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere. It is how most of us conceptualize a simulation.

Do they reflect too much freedom and too few anchors in a common experience, or are they liberating? Is there no information worth conveying in a virtual name aside from (often) a minor and obscure peccadillo or pun in the real life of the owner, or is that the point of freedom? Perhaps, then, we worry because there is a legitimate concern that VWs, once they become truly taken-for-granted by the (non-poor) public at large, will be sites for all the ugly aspects of society that we find all-too familiar.I Want to Know Your Name On the one hand this may seem like technical arcanum, but note that we all often pretend this point in our discussions and comments on Terra Nova and elsewhere.

The brow just keeps getting higher around here. Terra Nova's newest author, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee anthropologist Thomas Malaby, brings an agile and sophisticated understanding of modernity and its contradictions to bear on the contemporary meaning of play. From the social stakes of gambling in modern Greece (the topic of his first book, Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City) to the ethical life of code in Second Life (the focus of his current, NSF-funded ethnographic research), the questions Thomas pursues -- and the answers he chases down -- light up the intersection of culture, technology, games, and chance like so many signal flares.

Though I do see an interesting line in expert witness work here. Recent conversations among many of us have been sparked by Cory's remark that "WoW is the new golf," riffing as it does on the apparent way that WoW has become a common diversion, meeting place, and source of friendly competitiveness for academics and developers. Extending this idea leads directly to a perhaps troubling outcome: the appearance of something like country clubs in our VW future (although not in WoW necessarily). So why might this be worrisome?

What if it happened 6 months later, are they going to roll the code back, do patches become legal documents? You can also see the effects here if you wish to read some other threads. Expect to see more and more of these types of requests for "another coin type" in the near future. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.

On the other hand, new eyes mean new looks. More recent players, scholars and developers sometimes tend to see an old problem in a new way, frame it in some new fashion, or bring new methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the table. Some old issues have become completely new in their implications simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been in Gemstone or Meridian 59, even if the phenomenon is not wholly novel. A programming language and a programming paradigm can shape how we engineer a world. As with our natural languages perhaps there is a cognitive dimension, but without having to even reach that far it is safe to say that engineering practices establish approaches to problem-solving that bias solutions. These practices are hard to ignore in especially high-stakes, risk-adverse software development environments.

But the designer arrogance goes deeper than that, I'd say. This kind of elitist characterization [of users as lacking in skill] itself rests on a rather narrow conception of what "content" is. What do you want to know? Buy SWG Credits from us. A flying mount costs nearly 1k Warhammer Gold.

But the designer arrogance goes deeper than that, I'd say. This kind of elitist characterization [of users as lacking in skill] itself rests on a rather narrow conception of what "content" is. What do you want to know? Buy SWG Credits from us. A flying mount costs nearly 1k Warhammer Gold.

But the designer arrogance goes deeper than that, I'd say. This kind of elitist characterization [of users as lacking in skill] itself rests on a rather narrow conception of what "content" is. What do you want to know? Buy SWG Credits from us. A flying mount costs nearly 1k Warhammer Gold.