Julian Dibbell has a marvelous post about how game realities are symptoms — sort of concentrated, more-obvious outcroppings — of a general shift in economic and cultural reality itself. The game’s the thing …
Online Games, Virtual Economies … Distinction between Play and Production
And I’m arguing, finally, that that relationship is one of convergence; […]

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I only just heard about the Google Image Labeler via the IAI mailing list.
Here’s a description:
You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to […]

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My obsession with what I call the “game layer” aside, it’s interesting that the mainstream press are now reporting on how using “game mechanics” in business software can create more engaging & useful ways of working with data, collaborating, and getting work done.
Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game - New York […]

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This is delightful. A sort of logo for hacker culture. Not hackers as in criminals (hacker culture calls those people ‘crackers’ among other things) but hackers as in lateral-thinking technology heads.
The graphic … is called a glider. It’s a pattern from a mathematical simulation called the Game of Life. In this simulation, very simple […]

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Excellent article on JM’s ideas about how game situations can unlock incredible problem-solving potential in groups of people, and can be applied to anything from medicine to politics.
San Francisco - News - Future Games - sfweekly.com
McGonigal designs games for a living, and she believes they point the way toward civilization’s next step forward. Her […]

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I recently did a presentation at the very excellent DigitalNow conference, in Orlando. It’s a conference for leaders of professional associations, who have a vested interest in virtual community building and keeping their constituents engaged, even in the splintered information-saturated “Web 2.0″ world.
I combined a couple of previous years’ IASummit presentations and added a […]

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SnoopyBrown Zamboni at Electric Sheep Company has started a geek-roots initiative to bridge the somewhat divergent virtual world experiences at World of Warcraft and Second Life.
Second Life of Warcraft Wiki Is Up
Check it out, lend your thoughts, and if you’re excited please get involved! This can be as big as we all make it. […]

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This sounds right up my alley … I’m fascinated with how various things in ‘real’ life behave with game-like logic and rules.
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Half-Real is an attempt at creating a basic theory of video games: In the book I discuss what video games are and how they relate […]

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I ran across a post by Nat Torkington on the excellent O’Reilly Radar blog echoing (more articulately) some of what I was trying to say in the podcast I posted about earlier today.
O’Reilly Radar > Second Life and the Future of Prototyping
The biggest appeal of Second Life from a creator’s point of view has […]

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I played a small role in starting the IA Institute five years (and 30 lbs) ago, but I can’t take credit for the success it’s had since. Lots of dedicated people have worked very hard on it during that time.
Recently I became a little more involved, when Stacy Surla gently prodded me into helping […]

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The Wright Stuff - Popular Science
This is an excellent interview with Will Wright, creator of SimCity, The Sims, Spore, and other games.
It touches on a lot of key ideas about game design; the nature of education, play and socializing, the richness of game design, how to engage users of different types, and so forth. […]

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In a study much like the famous Milgram experiments (where people administered shocks to others behind a partition, in accordance to an authoritative direction), they’re finding that people have high empathic response to avatars (like those in Second Life) even when they know they aren’t real.
Research findings:
Our results show that in spite of the fact […]

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