(via TerraNova) Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, are involved in copyright litigation against MDY, the makers of a cheat program called Glider. This program allows users to run the game on autopilot by becoming a bot that allows the user to kill monsters and farm their loot without Read more
… I found this. Associate Professor Evil Kills All Gold Farmers I loved the line: “I’m sick of gold farmers infesting our servers and inflating our prices. You get in the way of our ability to complete quests by killing NPCs and camping spawns! You make it harder to farm Read more
Reading about the Tower of London GPS game has got me thinking about the future of role-playing gaming, gadgets, and some potentially interesting legal issues (this is a technology law blog after all, despite my efforts to forget that fact from time to time). The growth of ubiquitous smart phones Read more
The second day was extremely interesting, particularly from my perspective. The first two sessions were very PS3 heavy, with a session on motion-capture in Heavenly Sword. I was very impressed with this game, enough to actually consider buying a PS3 just to play it. Virtual Societies Session:This was the best Read more
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