As part of my growing interest in games (from a research point of view of course), I have decided to make the Edinburgh Interactive Festival my one and only August Fringe event this year. This conference is mostly directed towards games industry insiders, but it is quite an amazing insight Read more
(via Colin Miller) As part of my growing interest in virtual economies, here is an eye-opening look at the gold of Chinese gold farmers from Julian Dibbell, including some video footage of their virtual sweat shops (you can sort of smell that the term could be quite literal as well). Read more
(via Terra Nova) I missed this one during my travels, but I find it such a great story. A Florida law firm has initiated a class-action suit against Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a gold farming company based in Hong Kong and Delaware. According to the plaintiff, one Mr Antonio Hernández, Read more
This seems to be an urban legend or prank, but I found some of the potential legal implications quite interesting. Supposedly, a female gamer from New York placed an advert on Craigslist stating that she would have sex in exchange for 5000 gold in Wolrd of Warcraft so that she Read more
The Beeb runs a story on a new report by research consultants Screen Digest on the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) market. The big headline in the report is that the MMOG market has now passed the $1 billion USD revenue mark from subscriptions worldwide. While big revenue is to Read more
One of the most traumatic events for the fledgling field of IT Law was the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, when the artificially inflated electronic commerce market suffered a re-adjustment and a crash to weed out all of the pretenders and irrelevant market dwellers, producing some of the Read more
I’ve received one piece of blog comment spam, and as a matter of policy I deleted it. However, I have removed the links and I have felt compelled to keep it for posterity: “Welcome to our website for you World of Warcraft Gold,Wow Gold,Cheap World of Warcraft Gold,cheap wow gold,buy Read more
(Valuable item from Ultima Online) (via Colin Miller) This is an old item, but I’ve just read it. According to Slashdot, eBay has caved-in to increasing pressure from the games industry and has de-listed all in-game items from its database. However, I’ve made a search and you still can find Read more
Second Life is back in the news. This time, reporters are describing virtual protests and guerrilla warfare against Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, which has opened virtual headquarters in Porcupine, an otherwise quiet region of the Second Life universe. Apparently protesters, not happy with placards, are using all sorts of Read more
I’ve finally got around reading the nitty-gritty of the much publicised move by Linden Labs to release an open source version of Second Life. In case you have been living in a cave without a broadband connection, Second Life is a virtual world, more like a giant chat room than Read more