virtual worlds

‘Ghost Whisperer’ Tackles Video Games Tonight, Expect Hilarity

10:00AM Michael McWhertor | 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. More »

IBM and the Palace Museum Launch the ‘Virtual Forbidden City’

5:00AM Maggie Greene | 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: More »

Future Trends for Virtual Worlds

3:30AM Maggie Greene | 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: More »

Study Finds Racial Bias Common In Virtual Worlds

6:20AM Stuart Houghton | 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/) More »

Virtual Worlds for Fun and Research

3:30AM Maggie Greene | We mentioned Arden, the university-design MMO, a few times; a working paper has just been released that looks at economic behaviour in MMOs using the game. The interesting thing here isn’t so much the fact that people replicate real-world behaviours online (in this case, they purchased less of an item when it was more expensive), but that it’s yet another piece of a growing literature explaining the utility of virtual worlds in actual research: More »