mtl3p

I found this a week or so ago. The deafening silence makes me want to share it.
(I don’t think this guy is completely right, but I think his expectations are illuminating).

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“Non Profit Work within Second Life

The metaverse will present vast opportunities for non-profit groups if they are able to adopt the technology and adapt their methodology to harness the power. Using Second Life as a platform, nationwide non-profit groups can begin to expand their relationship reach into new digital communities that exist in the ether. As shown through our Second Life Relay For Life the digital community is as vibrant and responsive as and small town or big city, and it should be treated as such.

There are tremendous opportunities to perform outreach, and advocacy through the digital worlds. Organizations can set up information outreach centers maintained by staff or volunteers who can provide information to residents. Development of fundraisers is already a proven issue. Yet there are still ways to build relationships and maintain them. The sale of digital music has become a major portion of that media’s sales, but is not the sole distribution channel. Similarly, I see that over the next 5 years that action through digital worlds will make up a notable portion of our fundraising, education, and advocacy activities.

More powerful yet is the resident’s ability to create micro events for personal causes. Using their meme, residents can collect their friends and tap their in-world social networks for causes very close to them. I feel that as the virtual world grows more material world causes will appear and we will see the growth of micro events. Geographically local events will draw donors from all around the world. . . . . .

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Also - this is pretty interesting. It’s the “why” behind the licensing of an opensource mmorpg. They’ve made the code open and the content closed. But for a very interesting reason:
http://www.planeshift.it/pslicense.html

Brief Explanation of the licenses

Read this paragraph if you want to have a quick overview of the licensing used by PlaneShift.

For players:

The first goal of our team is to make a free game for players. This means you will not have to pay for the game, nor pay a monthly cost. You can install our software on many PC as you like, play it as much as you want.

You cannot distribute the client, sell it or gain any profit from it.

You can use our client only to connect to Official Servers.

For developers:

Code is under GPL license, this means you can get all our source code, study it and reuse it as soon as you keep it open and give back to us your changes.

All artwork, musics, dialogues, stories, names, 3d models, etc… are under a proprietary license. This means you cannot reuse those in any way. If you plan to create another game based on our source code, remember you will have to redo all art,music,models,stories,etc…
You cannot host another server where PlaneShift Clients connects to, because our license on assets forbits it.

A detailed explanation of the licenses follows.

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while I’m at it - what the hell . . .
a world of warcraft world

“playing” mmorpgs for a living:

“Let’s take this a little bit further. You earn gold in World of Warcraft, gold with which you can buy these in-game objects. If this game gold is truly valuable to my life, if it lets me get more value out of the pasttime I already pay real-world money for, what’s to stop me from paying real money for game money? Nothing. Go to Ebay and do a search for World of Warcraft Gold and let your jaw drop open.

Here we have game currency being traded for real currency, and at a better exchange rate than the Iraqi Dinar.

If we go further still, we can imagine a person winning rare weapons and selling them on auction sites or directly to other players they meet. We can imagine somebody working full-time to gather in-game gold by slaying gold-shitting squirrels (or whatever you do to get gold in the game) and then exchanging it for real dollars to pay the real rent with. Sure, it may be decades before you see this kind of-

Oh, wait. There are people doing that right now. ”

I wish I knew some real technical geeks who have read julian dibbel and neale stephenson. I know there are lots of them out there - but apparently none of my friends.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.