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The Archives
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02.22.08Over-Hyped Blue Mars Still Raises Benchmark for Second LifeIn 2008 it's a virtual world a day, most of them for kids, but some contenders for the Second Life audience and purpose. Now comes Blue Mars, which has observers drooling because of the brilliance of its graphics. Problem? First, the developers say it won't be launched until late 2008, by which time 100 other virtual worlds will have staked their own claims to various bits of real estate, some of which include the "we're the prettiest" terrain, to others like Twinity which are staking out the "we're really real, including our really real commerce" section of the virtual world mainland ...
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12.19.07Games Everywhere – and the ubiquitous metaverseLivegamer's move into a "free economy" of sorts is the topic of an insightful blog posting by Wayne Porter, and I'm hesitant to comment much because I'm such an amateur at this stuff. Porter points out that the trading of virtual goods is brought repectibility by LiveGamer and its significant venture capital backing. The broadening of economic trade outside the magic circle of games is further evidence of not only a migration of people to virtual worlds but wealth and economic production as well. From my amateur's armchair, I've given my take before on the economies of virtual worlds, riffing off the ...
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11.04.07Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, TwinityA few developments seem like natural shifts in the nature of virtual worlds and their economies but leave me perplexed about the future. I'm not an economist and don't really know the first thing about it other than what I've picked up in bits and pieces with my initial framework provided by Edward Castranova who helped me to understand the reason for the biases, misunderstandings, and flaws in virtual world economies. First, the developments. Metaplace allows selling of goods using Web services bridge As posted this past week in reply to my comments on Metaplace, Raph Koster points out that the economy of ...
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