Combat games are nothing new, but now the Department of Defense is testing the concepts of battlefield games and virtual worlds to help soldiers explore the causes and symptoms of combat trauma. The newly released virtual world game “T2 Virtual PTSD Experience“, is designed to enable soldiers and their loved ones to find out more about post-traumatic stress in an anonymous Second Life setting.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Second Life was rocked yesterday by an announcement that “Emerald”, an open source software client that can access Linden Lab’s 3D virtual world, had been de-listed from the company’s directory of approved, third-party viewers. This news came days after revelations that Emerald’s mysterious lead developer had used the software in a denial-of-service attack provoked unrest for many of the world’s one million active users. Because by the time Linden de-listed it, Emerald had already become incredibly popular with SLers; by some reliable reports, it accounts for nearly half Second Life’s total user hours. And this being Second Life, the scandal also involves a confluence of anonymous avatars with bizarre names, open source, and, of course, bouncing breasts:
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ResLive is a new 3D web-based virtual world which aims to become the ultimate destination for live music performances in an MMO space. (Though still in early Beta, you can join now with a special Social Times code at the end of this post.) As a number of musicians and DJs have learned, 3D worlds like Second Life are a great place to perform live from the comfort of their computer, even earning a decent side income with tips. But as they and their fans have also learned, it’s extremely difficult to get more than a couple dozen people in the same performance space without lag ruining the show. By contrast, ResLive’s project manager believes his world’s architecture can support 100-150 avatars in the same venue, and with the company’s sharding system (which creates multiple copies of the same virtual space), up to 5,000 attendees can concurrently enjoy the same show. That’s a bold claim, but considering who’s developing ResLive, I’m inclined to believe it:
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What happened to Second Life since it was hyped as the Internet’s next generation a few years ago? Today tech personality and Gnomedex host Chris Pirillo offered a remarkably misguided analysis: “Nothing really ‘happened’ to it other than being overrun by people addicted to porn and gambling,” he asserts. Literally everything about that sentence is wrong, including the word “and”. Since Pirillo’s repeating a commonly held myth, it’s worth explaining why it’s so misguided here:
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Tomorrow, Second Life creator Philip Rosedale will give Linden Lab’s corporate strategy presentation to the company’s customers, at the most perilous time in the virtual world’s history. A darling of the Internet industry only three scant years ago, Linden’s profitability has been eroded by company efforts to turn SL into a real world business platform and improve the complicated user interface — both of which yielded negligible results, and worse, a massive layoff of Linden staff (including the top executive and CEO who led that drive.) Newly returned to Linden Lab as “interim CEO”, Rosedale says he’s pushing a “back to basics” crusade that will fix the nagging technical problems that beset Second Life. Which is a good start. But as someone who’s been writing about Second Life for seven years (first as a Linden contractor, and then as an author and blogger), saving Second Life in today’s Internet will require quickly growing its userbase. Here’s how: Read more
Friends Hangout is a new web-based virtual world in open Beta that’s been gaining a lot of attention from fans of the genre. As a special offer to Social Times readers, you can click this link to get 2000 extra virtual tokens to spend, when you create a free account. Developed by a small Tampa startup, it comes with FaceBook and Bebo integration, and enables players to create and share a one million square meter virtual world space with up to 10 of your friends (30 if you become a paying customer.) Unlike most other web-based virtual worlds, such as Habbo or Zynga’s YoVille, Friends Hangout boasts realistic 3D graphics running in the Unity 3D Web Player plugin, one of the best, perhaps last hopes to revive consumer interest in 3D virtual worlds.
Why “last”?
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Greetings, Social Timers — I’m joining the team here to occasionally cover virtual worlds, a space that often gets overlooked amid the social game hype, but is still doing quite well, thank you very much. Prior to Nick and Neil bringing me on, I was a writer and designer at ohai, the massively social gaming start-up of my friend Susan Wu (who spoke at the last Social Gaming Summit), where I mainly wrote the storyline, dialog, and mission flow for City of Eternals, the groundbreaking (in my very biased opinion) social network MMO that Neil loved.
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Could there be real legal rights attached to the ownership of real estate on the internet? Should there be? The case of Carl Evans v. Linden Labs is tackling that issue, where plaintiffs are the owners of virtual real property. In the class action lawsuit, users of the virtual world Second Life are claiming that the site lured them in with the promise of actual ownership of property, and then changed the rules on them such that the real estate is now a service that the company can control and cancel.
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