This is an excellent series of clips with the WoW characters dancing right next to their creator’s inspiration! I really enjoyed it! It’s by animpinabox!
My sister enters the world of blogging
My darling sis has started blogging! She’s always been the hardcore gamer of our family and offers some interesting stories from her WoWing. A few weeks in and she’s already in Cerise writing about the frustrations of being a non-stereotypical gamer customer.
She’s also an avid reader and offers her thoughts on the recent books she’s read.
Welcome to the world, Strumpet (honestly…I have no idea where this nic comes from).
South Korea claims tax on Virtual Goods
Worlds In Motion (which I’ll get back to later) reports that Korea’s National Tax Service (NTS) “has begun adding the new tax automatically to all virtual transactions involving real money as of July 1st, says the report, translated as follows:
Sellers who do between 6 and 12 million won ($6,500 – $13,000)/half year in
business will have VAT auto applied by transaction’s middle-man.Sellers who do more than 12 million won/half year in business will need a
business will need a business license and will pay the tax by themselves”
Social Networks in Virtual Worlds
Here’s a video of one of Aleks Krotoski‘s presentation entitled “Social Networks in Virtual Worlds” – it was a refreshing find. Aleks doesn’t focus too much on the ‘OMG!’ factor and is very straight to the point about her research. She’s also willing to share her methods of research which I found extremely interesting and helpful. This should be useful to some people out there! ;) The more I think about my own thesis the more I wish I had spent more time on methodology techniques, so methodology has started to interest me. I feel like my thesis discusses more what we’re talking about and why and chapter 2 should be something like “Ok, now we know ‘what’ now let’s concentrate on how to really research the ‘what’!”.
It’s a great find – but I’m writing this already late for an appointment so I haven’t done enough digging from where and why this presentation was held. All I know is that it’s from an event called “Massively Multi-Learner” at The University of Paisley.
CNN Future Summit on YouTube
It’s edited to the parts with glorious Nick Yee. I definitely recommend watching the whole thing although CNN’s video player annoyed me some. The program is ok – nothing really new – but a great resource (specially for someone like me who’s applying for work in a place filled with negative skepticism of virtual worlds)!
Trond Aas (Funcom) has an adorable response to Jimmy Wales‘ vision that Wikipedia will remain text based (part 6), where he shares his vision that instead of reading a speech given by Cicero in Rome you’ll be able to immerse yourself in the Roman era and listen to the speech given on the streets of Rome – by looking it up on wikipedia first. I think that’s just charming!
Virtual World Politics News
Where to start?
How about the “u gotta be kidding me!” news:
The US Congress has announced that it will be issuing a potential taxation of virtual goods report in August. I’m a bit perplexed about this. Firstly – how are they going to define what is virtual? And second of all, I don’t think we’re anywhere near ready to discuss this issue ‘officially’. I’m a bit worried that they’re going to ruin the creative gaming freedom that these virtual worlds offer by bringing up such invasive things as taxes. And when there’s just a handful of gamers this could apply to – is it really worth it? I’m all for that academics, gamers and designers discuss it, because it is important that we think about these things and have ready proposals and not in the least definitions before such matters do become official – but not the US Congress! Maybe I’m just skeptical because I’m European. I’m just not as thrilled as everyone else seems to be. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the ‘real’ value of virtual goods – I really do! And I abhore all the journalists writing headlines about virtual goods being fake – yet worth real money. I just think that the ‘realness’ of such things has to come about another way than through a governmental force like the US Congress. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, they do say ‘potential’.
Second Life
So I’ve been cruising through Second Life this evening – starting to get my grips – but my lag is just awful! I still haven’t actually invested in any Linden dollars, but I suppose it’s just around the corner.
I’ve just stopped by the Social Simulation Research Lab and found bunches of interesting reads! I’ll have to print out some stuff so I can enjoy the summer as well – I want a sun friendly laptop sooo bad! Life would just be near perfect then!
But for now I’m happy to have found SLED Picayune that has taken the trouble to gather several tutorial videos. Time for me to stop being a tourist and really start getting involved with this world that I have such high hopes for – so tutorials are a blessing!
I was really impressed with DnB Nor’s island (Slurl). A few weird things – but that’s half the fun! The Second Life Newspaper – Finance, has a good description of their tour.
Video Subgenre
Machinima mashups
I’m sure that I can describe this as a distinctive genre within machinima – when using one game to parody (?) another game. Lovely the way that the gaming sound just makes it complete – would it ever work with a rock song? This is the mixing of gameplay mechanics (although is it gameplay mechanics if we’re just passively watching it?)to describe a story, in my opinion, so deserves it’s own genre type within machinima.
But then I get confused when watching this superb film (embedding disabled for some mysterious reason).
Ah – what’s the point of organising everything into definition boxes really?
This whole copyright licensing of media thing
Like the rest of the world, I became enchanted by ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent when I saw Paul Potts‘ remarkable performance on YouTube – oh the tears! This of course led to hunger for more and I randomly went through some of the related YouTube videos. At one point I thought ‘hang on – I’m sure they’ve got a website with better quality clips and a much better organisational overview’. And they do -yay! But no – I get this picture up. “This content is not for viewing outside of the UK due to rights reasons”. Urgh! My thoughts go to the delightful Ben Hammersley‘s words:
The audience is actually quite happy to pay for these things. Witness the sales of DVD box-sets, or the success of the downloadable episodes of hit shows in the iTunes Music Store. Again, though, the television industry shoots itself in the foot. Would I pay for downloadable episodes of the Daily Show? Yes. Will anyone take my money from me? No. Why? Because I’m in the wrong country. Well, I tried. I’ll be thinking about how little their broken business model is my problem as I boot up my torrent software, download the show, and watch the whole thing, including the adverts and any in-show sponsorship.It’s a curious business indeed that turns away customers. It’s exceptionally puzzling when an industry ignores offers of cash. The reason for this seemingly counter-intuitive approach to business – where those with the supply actively avoid those with the demand – is that selling programming is not the business channels are in.
Remember What The Dormouse Said 
