My beady eye was caught by an interesting post on zdnet with a title about SL
Google’s secret project turns out to be Second Life
“The concept behind the service is neat. You can create a virtual chatroom that goes way beyond the traditional, and post it on any website. Your visitors can then actually interact with each other rather than just type
Garett Rogers goes on to say
“Unlike Second Life, I suspect the currency will be real dollars, not something that’s made up.”
Of course if Garett came in-world to SL he would quickly find out that Lindens are worth real money.
(P.S. The programme, Google Lively, like the Vivaty on Facebook isn’t for everyone, Lively needs Vista before you can use it and Vivaty only runs in IE - a silly choice if ever I’ve seen one)
Popular Artist, Eshi Otawara, is having a terrible time in RL.
Eshi married a US citizen who died in 2006 and she now faces being deported because her husband died before she got her green card.
More on Eshi’s Blog
Her American husband died suddenly, when they’d been married less than two years, while her application for residency was in progress. According to U.S. immigration law, the application is automatically rejected once the American spouse dies.
This is commonly referred to as ‘widow penalty’. Basically- it means the USCIS revokes granted petition for relative or spouse if one of the sposes dies unexpectedly. This law is horribly unjust, because had our spouses lived, this would not have been the case- we would have gotten processed fully.
At the same time -people who decide to separate from spouses or even divorce after mere 3 months of marriage do get approved under the law.
Best of luck to you Eshi
A Stanford University study shows that people carry over the benefits of their Second Life avatars into their real lives.
For example, people with avatars skinnier than their real selves go out and lose weight. The researchers call this the “Proteus effect.”
You can extrapolate from this to see how complex, granular role-playing games can have positive effects on team dynamics, helping organizations with lots of remote workers or, worse, different parts of the organization located in different parts of the country, heal divisions and even build stronger bridges.
Here’s the study on avatars as behavioural models
