Games, especially video games and online games, are incredibly fascinating. They can be beautiful, intriguing, social, but in order to become a success, they need to be engaging. There is a kind of gold rush to games by marketing specialists, human resources experts, experimental economists, psychologists, neurologists, educators, and they… Continue reading
I saw this fascinating video about Minecraft (via Kotaku). Wikipedia explains: Minecraft is a sandbox game which allows players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. It is currently in development by Markus “Notch” Persson on the Java platform. The gameplay is inspired by Dwarf Fortress,… Continue reading
Where does our inspiration come from? It seems that for Philip Rosedale the inspiration for a virtual world came from Burning Man, an annual event in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The idea is to build a city for about a week, collaborating and exchanging gifts. It… Continue reading
Talking about OpenSim, John “Pathfinder†Lester, an expert and strategist in educational online communities and virtual worlds, launches an open club for anyone interested in group explorations of virtual worlds on the Hypergrid and sharing their experiences with others. Pathfinder officially starts the Hypergrid Adventurers Club: We’ll be meeting regularly… Continue reading
This seems great: Title: World of Teachcraft: The Learning Quest Date: November 2 – December 16, 2010 Location: Rockcliffe University http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/215/73/23 Campus portion 5 pm SLT Tuesday and Thursday (On Rockcliffe in Second Life) Reporting over 12 million paying subscribers, World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular massively multi-player online… Continue reading
Talking about the future: I’ve been reading insightful posts by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing and Annalee Newitz on i09 about the Technological Singularity, described by Wikipedia as (…)a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so extremely rapid, due in most accounts to the technological creation of superhuman intelligences, that… Continue reading
I’m trying to use Google Living Stories for a project about the Metaverse in Turmoil. The project is important to me because Living Stories could help bloggers and journalists to combine breaking news and context in a very user-friendly way – that is at least what Google promises. Google made… Continue reading
I am thinking back to the students I met at a journalism seminar. What does one basically want to tell graduate students that goes beyond techniques and some insights in where journalism and media might be going? Something more about values and attitudes? I found this famous Stanford University video… Continue reading
Just found this new screencast by Howard Rheingold about finding, refining, organizing and curating information. It’s really about the basics of the social media ecosystem, while augmented reality and immersive environments can be considered the high-end part of it. New for me (I’ll have to add it in my Prezi-presentation)… Continue reading
This seems a very nice project: artists organize an exhibition in the New York  MoMA, and a few days before the opening the museum is “not involved yet.” How is this possible? The answer seems simple but there is quite an intellectual puzzle behind it: augmented reality. Here is the… Continue reading