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Pirate Daniel James’s Three Rings, responsible for the hugely popular multiplayer Puzzle Pirates gamespace, is developing a game-making platform to support Flash and Java games within a larger virtual world, according to a session description from O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference at the end of March. That’s news to me, though I’m not entirely sure it hasn’t been mentioned elsewhere. It sounds like the session features Three Rings co-founder Michael Bayne rolling out the toolkit for attendees to use in making a game during the session: “Three Rings is developing a platform for building multiplayer online games in Flash and Java that operate as part of a larger virtual world where people do things like talk about their cats, decorate their virtual living room, and most importantly, play games. With an aim toward fostering user creativity, we’re opening up all of the tools for creating the world and the games in it. In this workshop we’ll have people collaborating in small groups to think up a game and build it. . . . We’ll provide the toolkit and useful advice.” (more…)

It must be South by Southwest season. How do I know? Because there are Roombas in the air. Second Life resident Mooba Sienkiewicz (aka Greg, the myRoomBud crew’s dad) sends along news that he’s created a virtual Roomba for use in Second Life: “My kids have a business that sells costume covers for the Roomba and they have been pretty successful at it over the last year. So that they don’t have all the fun, I have been hacking and programming the Roomba in RL and recently built a SL Roomba.”

While it doesn’t actually clean anything, you can catch a video of the virtual Roomba in action on the myRoomBud SL page. Now all Mooba needs to do is make it as hackable as the real thing is, and we’re in business. Just remember, as Tyler, Niles, Isabelle and Griffin of The myRoomBud crew warn, “If you don’t dress up your Roomba, it’s just a naked vacuum.” Words to live by. (Although interestingly, dad’s SL Roomba doesn’t have any clothes on. Have a word with this guy, kids.) (more…)

Add Sweden’s to the growing list of governments considering taxing monetary transfers from virtual worlds, if not the in-world earnings themselves. According to an AFP story, Swedish authorities are “planning a clapdown.” Said one Swedish taxman, “Most people play and keep their money on their game account, but if they move it out of the virtual world into the real world, then we’re interested in them.” Any move is at least two to three years away. The U.S. Congress seems to be moving more slowly on looking into the issue, but is headed in the same direction. In a way, this is an encouraging sign, in that with taxation most often comes some compensatory protection of rights. If my activities in a virtual world can be considered, in some way, to be work or investment, they should be due similar protections to other forms of work or investment. Note that the Swedish taxman is not contemplating exactly that, but is looking only at transfers of cash from virtual worlds into the real world. Still, it pushes virtual activities closer to the status of the real. Good thing? [Via SL Insider.]