This term I have been teaching for the first time, and there were two things that I wanted to get across. One is the immense power of the behemoths of the internet (including Google and its right arm, YouTube), and the historically contested nature of the internet. It was never quite the place of harmony […]
Linden Lab has long granted licenses to Second Life residents for the taking of snapshots and machinima, reflecting how Second Life was established as a user created space that encouraged creativity and content reuse. In many other games, where they were created by teams of developers, the making of machinima was contested as a breach […]
‘Be yourself in VR’: but you’re never alone in the new Facebook Spaces Facebook clearly would not want you to be anything else, as their real name policy well demonstrates. A singular identity means they can easily track you and collect your data, and sell advertising on the back of it. I remember friends ranting […]
I write a post about gender fairly regularly1 and as there’s some interesting new research around, I thought I’d return to the subject. But first a bit of background. When I first came into Second Life, gender crossing and deception was a hot issue. I remember reading the provocatively titled Is Your Second Life Woman […]
At the end of the last week, an idea came together for another machinima, this time located in Furillen in Second Life. A bleak, open sim, it’s based on a real life place – an island off the northeast coast of Sweden, where a limestone factory was turned into a hotel. Furillen has been recreated […]
In the flush of youth, mortality seems so far away, irrelevant even. Technology is like that too. We dig into programs seeing what they will do for us now, without really thinking what they might be like in a dozen years time. If that future was imaginable, it would probably have already been in the […]
