Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better 
Resistance: Burning Skies: The Kotaku Review 
Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending The Humvee drives down a crowded street in a foreign land. A child waves. Merchants display their wares. Suddenly soldiers raise their rifles as a suicide bomber runs into the street, detonating his lethal package. This is virtual PTSD therapy.
Second Skin, a documentary about virtual worlds and their inhabitants that we’ve been keeping tabs on since it started casting in 2006, is finally coming to DVD this August.
Muslim social networking site Muxlim.com is planning a Islam-themed virtual world.
Tonight’s episode of Ghost Whisperer, the Jennifer Love Hewitt vehicle about the personal problems of the undead, delves into dangerous territory: the warped TV version of video games. Episode three of the show’s fourth season is titled “Ghost in the Machine,” because there’s a ghost in a machine.
Hewitt, as protagonist Melinda, must enter the world of Virtual Life and send the specter haunting the online game toward the light and away from her hilarious outfit. Based on the preview spot for the episode, after the jump, we expect good times at someone else’s expense.
In a move that seems designed to provide Chinese historians with even more ways to torture their poor students (I know at least one thing I’m forcing my sections to do next quarter), IBM and the Palace Museum have teamed up to offer a virtual, immersive, and interactive version of the Forbidden Palace of Beijing. In contrast to the more typical 3D ‘tours’ that abound, the “Forbidden City: Beyond Space & Time” is sort of Second Life meets the Qing dynasty and eunuchs (minus advertising, a virtual economy, and sex). It’s running like a snail on my computer, but is certainly a very neat idea — and in the future, we’ll perhaps being seeing more creative uses of virtual worlds for ‘cultural’ purposes? Full release after the jump:
The Virtual Worlds Expo took place last week in Los Angeles, and there’s been bits and pieces of news from the event floating around — the wrap ups of roundtables and panels are the most interesting. Over at Free To Play, they have put together five big trends in virtual worlds, ranging from ‘the war on geekiness’ (oh, ouch) to one I’m most interested in, the movement from virtual world to real world instead of the other way around:
Anyone thinking that virtual worlds are edging towards some kind of utopia, please revise your hopes downwards.
A study into the social psychology of virtual environments, by Northwestern University, indicates that people respond to the same social cues about race in virtual worlds as they do in real life.
In an experiment carried out in There.com users were approached by a researcher wearing either a light-skinned or dark-skinned avatar and asked a series of questions..
The study found that when asked a fairly demanding question, followed by a less demanding request (a so-called ‘Door in the face technique‘, dark skinned avatars received a significantly lower rate of positive responses.
Same old, same old.
Researchers find racial bias in virtual worlds [ITNews.com.au]
(image source: http://soulsphincter.blogspot.com/)
