Posts Tagged ‘ World-of-Warcraft ’

AOL to Launch World of Warcraft Social Net?

Michael Arrington is reporting that the AOL Games Group may be getting ready to launch a social network for World of Warcraft players, since the company owns wow.com. Could AOL’s reach make wow.com a category-killer? Sean Fanning’s Rupture, another WoW socnet, hasn’t particularly taken off, as I understand it. New entrants to virtual world social [ READ MORE ]

Seriosity Teams With IBM to Study Work 2.0

Meet the new boss Good news, all you obssessively grinding World of Warcraft addicts: “Success as a business leader may depend on skills as a gamer,” according to Jim Spohrer, Director of Services Research at the IBM Research Center in Almaden, California. IBM has just done a study with Seriosity (one of the cooler companies [ READ MORE ]

Entropia News: MasterCard Deal, RL Bank, More

A small raft of news emerged from the virtual world of Entropia Universe this week, including tie-ups with MasterCard and a real-life bank, and a new awards show being put on by virtual entrepreneurs Anshe Chung and Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs. First up, MasterCard. Entropia has been trying to implement a real-life card for some time. [ READ MORE ]

Next-Gen: Web Integration in Virtual Worlds

The presentation I gave in Berlin on Thursday was ostensibly on “virtual worlds, media and identity,” but as I’ve been going over it I’m finding it’s extending itself into a small picture of what the next generation of virtual worlds might look like and how we might get there. A lot of it was stuff [ READ MORE ]

SXSW Xcript: Joi Ito and Justin Hall

Venture capitalist and World of Warcraft addict Joi Ito and lifelogger Justin Hall sat down for a conversation together in Room 9C on Monday afternoon at South by Southwest. Ben Cerveny joined them midway. Title of the talk: Online Games: Beyond Play and Fantasy. Ito: I know everyone says this, but we’re going to try [ READ MORE ]

Is the Metaversal Category-Killer Dead?

Raph Koster flags an Escapist article in which Allen Varney covers “boutique MMOGs” and the fact that they can not only be profitable but can garner significant niche audiences in a similar manner to very narrowly focused Web sites. This kind of thing is along the lines of some of my thinking about virtual worlds. [ READ MORE ]

Whither Virtual World Research?

As previously noted, I spent much of Friday and Saturday at the joint State of Play / Terra Nova symposium at the New York Law School. I’m always happy to spend a couple of days talking virtual worlds with a lot of smart people, and the symposium was no disappointment in that regard. Great panels [ READ MORE ]

U.S. Congress to Investigate Virtual Economies

One of the first stories from the new Reuters bureau in the virtual world of Second Life flags the fact that the U.S. Congress is in the preliminary stages of looking into virtual economies such as Second Life’s and World of Warcraft‘s, and the public policy issues surrounding them. The story quotes Dan Miller, senior [ READ MORE ]

South Park Plays World of Warcraft

SLBoutique‘s FlipperPA Peregrine flags a Slashdot post about the fact that World of Warcraft will be featured in tonight’s season premiere of South Park, of all things. Check out the video clip. As Flip points out, this is probably the first mainstream appearance of machinima. Here’s Blizzard’s press release about the episode, which sees Cartman, [ READ MORE ]

Planning WoW Raids in Second Life

World of Warcraft guild We Know has garnered some repute for being run by venture capitalist Joi Ito, who says he listens to the guild’s TeamSpeak channel even while cooking dinner or driving his car. We Know’s latest innovation is to use the virtual world of Second Life to plan their end-game raids on World [ READ MORE ]

Speaking of Virtual Worlds at AGC

I’m blogging this from the Austin Convention Center in Texas, where the Austin Game Conference is in full swing. The highlight for me so far has been (not surprisingly) the panel I spoke on yesterday with Corey Bridges of Multiverse; Raph Koster, formerly of Sony Online Entertainment and now of his own stealth virtual-world startup, [ READ MORE ]

As SL Grows, Is World of Warcraft Shrinking?

The “population” of the virtual world of Second Life passed the 600,000 mark sometime early this morning — at least in terms of the number of avatars that have ever been created. But many of these are people who have looked in once and never returned, and many more are “alts,” i.e., alternate avatars created [ READ MORE ]

Play With Julian Dibbell’s Money in Second Life

Well, read about it, anyway. Dibbell, a journalist, Terra Nova contributor and author of the new book Play Money, Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, comes to the virtual world of Second Life today — not once, but twice — to promote his new publication (which is sitting [ READ MORE ]

Synthetic Worlds Take Shape at Indiana U.

Ted Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and perhaps the person who’s done most to advance the study of MMOs as an academic discipline, has launched a new Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University. The Synthetic Worlds Initiative is a research center at Indiana University whose aim is to [ READ MORE ]

Follow the Metaverse Roadmap to EyeBeam

The Acceleration Studies Foundation is wrapping up its work on a first version of the Metaverse Roadmap, a document designed to look ahead at the next 10 years of the metaverse, and to be updated along the way. (I participated in the meetings that gathered thoughts for the Roadmap back in May.) To celebrate, the [ READ MORE ]

Horde > Alliance: Self-Evident, But Worth Noting

So far, this hasn’t been a very self-referential blog. That’s been a conscious choice and a natural decision, since it isn’t my first impulse to just bung the details of my personal life onto Teh IntarWeb. It’s been tempting, at times, but then I ask myself: How 3pointD is this really? And the answer is [ READ MORE ]

An Hour (Almost) With Joi Ito

You have to admire a guy who blithely posts a 50-minute videoblog interview. But when the interview subject is venture capitalist and hardcore World of Warcraft player Joi Ito, it’s not so far-fetched to think people might watch it. (Which I plan to do, once it finishes downloading.) In any case, here’s the link, from [ READ MORE ]

New Voice Changing Software

Voice can be a contentious issue in virtual worlds. Many MMOs rely on it. It probably wouldn’t be possible to participate in the “end-game” in World of Warcraft and EVE Online without benefit of a VoIP app like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. Using voice in Second Life is becoming more common, especially for making presentations. But [ READ MORE ]

The Metaverse Sessions: Joi Ito

Over at the Metaverse Sessions site, John Swords has posted a keynote speech by venture capitalist Joi Ito in which the avid World of Warcraft player talks about “monochronic” and “polychronic” time, and gives the audience a look into the crowded world of his computer’s desktop. (I liveblogged the presentation at the time.) It’s a [ READ MORE ]

3pointD Goes Supernova

We’ll be on the road next week (or, more accurately, in the air), headed to the Supernova conference in San Francisco, where I’ll be moderating a workshop on the social, business and work-oriented lessons we can learn from massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. We’ll have two hours to fill, hopefully with plenty of [ READ MORE ]

WoW-Inspired Insurance Commercial

Amazingly, this Undead Mage has just hucked a fireball at that guy’s house! What’s amazing about it is not the fireball itself, but that he’s done it in a commercial for Farmer’s Insurance. If there’s any doubt that this is a commercial based on World of Warcraft or a similar swords-and-spells game, it’s dispelled by [ READ MORE ]

SL Hits Quarter-Million Members

I don’t usually post about Second Life membership numbers, but reaching the quarter-million mark (which I spotted on SL resident Tateru Nino‘s blog) seems significant to me. Tateru follows up with a post attempting to look a bit more closely at the numbers. Neither she nor I have great insights into the matter, but the [ READ MORE ]

Second Life of Warcraft wiki Now Open

Got any ideas for how to mashup Second Life and World of Warcraft? Post them over at the Second Life of Warcraft wiki page, where Jerry Paffendorf of 3pointD sponsor the Electric Sheep Company is putting together an event we blogged back in April, now planned for this summer, that will stream WoW into SL [ READ MORE ]

Positional Audio System for 3D Online Spaces

The Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre in Australia is bringing positional voice and audio to online games and 3D virtual spaces. Its Immersive Communications Environment will represent environmental audio and users’ voices positionally: the gamers and gunshots that are closer to you will sound louder, while those that are further away will sound fainter [ READ MORE ]

UK Bankers Weigh WoW Gold

Dave Birch at the Digital Money Forum recently invited Richard Bartle and Aleks Krotoski to speak to the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. There was a lot of talk of virtual property and secondary markets and other such sensible things. . . . I also enjoyed the whole spectacle of people discussing World [ READ MORE ]

Metaverse Forecasts

An update from the Metaverse Roadmap: We spent a fun session this afternoon envisioning some of the things that might come to pass in the metaverse in two- to ten-years time. Some tentative conclusions, for your perusal: More and more virtual worlds will start coming online as venture capital money discovers the space. As this [ READ MORE ]

Joi Ito’s Polychronic Metaverse

Joi Ito gave a fun talk at SDForum about being a massively multiplayer online game player, rather than a venture capitalist, and how the player’s experience could lead the development of virtual worlds. “The whole concept of cyberspace is holding us back a little bit,” Ito said. It’s not the case that cyberspace starts when [ READ MORE ]

Gen 3pointD

20-something hipster boy to 20-something hipster girl getting off the subway in Manhattan’s East Village last night: “Yeah, we had to cancel the raid because our Druid didn’t show up.&#[ READ MORE ]

A Saturation Points for Virtual Worlds?

This article from CNet’s Daniel Terdiman describes the ongoing server problems that have been plaguing World of Warcraft lately. With 6 million subscribers, the company must be running something close to 1,000 servers, each one supporting several thousand accounts. Unfortunately, they seem to be crashing a lot lately. Could it be that Blizzard has topped [ READ MORE ]

eBay-Style Reputations for World of Warcraft?

One of my World of Warcraft guildies (not that I have time to visit Azeroth lately; I don’t know how Joi Ito does it) passes along this link, in which a LiveJournal user called MonkeyModulator describes a World of Warcraft plug-in he’s writing: an eBay-style reputation system for use by players within the world. Somebody [ READ MORE ]

Questioning the Census: New VW Usage Figures

Sir Bruce Sterling Woodock has new population figures up on his excellent MMOGChart site, which tracks the population of massively multiplayer online games as well as a few virtual worlds like Second Life. Sir Bruce’s new data only covers up to about January of this year, but it’s worth slappping an eye on his charts, [ READ MORE ]

Visit BlackWing Lair with alwaysBETA

Clickable Culture reports that Zach Brock of alwaysBETA will be liveblogging during a raid in World of Warcraft‘s BlackWing Lair, one of the toughest instances in the game. The raid is set to start Saturday, April 15, at 7pm Eastern. I kinda wish this was a podcast, but it should be a nice look into [ READ MORE ]