The MMORPG Second Life has been living up to its namesake for many, with various groups even hosting concerts there; and now one of the worlds more prodigious PR firms, Text 100, is setting up a virtual office within the game world.

Second life allows users to create their own objects and world, being a very free-form game in which real currency can change hands for everything from real estate to BDSM kit. Now Text 100 have moved a business arm into the world in order to "work with clients on how Second Life may benefit their businesses by facilitating virtual press conferences or new ways of demonstrating products to employees or customers." The firm is also hoping to conduct staff training in the complex which features a welcome centre, an amphitheatre, and information centre.

"We view virtual worlds as the next stage in the evolution of peer-to-peer media like blogs, wikis, social networks and other online forums," said Georg Kolb, EVP, and leader of the peer media practice at Text 100. "Having a presence in Second Life will enable us to explore, innovate, educate and collaborate on a next generation communications platform."

Can't say I wouldn't mind a job at said virtual office...

Florida, which boasts a tremendously large senior citizen population, has a
number of adult arcades and rec rooms. For years, these businesses would pass
themselves off as nothing more than a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant for retirees --
indeed, they exploited an exemption to state gambling laws called the Chuck E.
Cheese exemption, which allows coin-operated games that require a level of skill.

In case you missed it, this issue gained national attention this week when an
adult aracade owner named Gale Fontaine, who was on trial in Florida for running
an illegal casino, was acquitted of the charges by a jury of her peers. Fontaine,
who owns the Tropicana Rec Room in Pompano Beach, Fla., is also president of the
Florida Arcade Association. Again, the FAA is not what you think it is. The
industry advocacy group has nothing to do with actual video games.

The state attorney's office in Broward County, Fla., brought the charges against
Fontaine as part of a statewide crackdown by Florida on the adult arcade
industry, which has grown rapidly in recent years. Why? Well, because they do
have slot machines, which are gambling machines, right?

Wrong. According to Fontaine's defense attorney and the FAA, the rec rooms don't
qualify because the slot machines "require an application of skill." A level of
skill? Come again? Anyone who has ever played any type of slot machine know
definitely that the only skill involved is the ability to press a button or pull
a lever. There's a reason that slot machines are called "one-armed bandits."

Yet somehow, the jury allowed Fontaine and the FAA to exploit a ridiculous
loophole big enough to drive a truck -- or a bus-load of senior citizens --
through it. Now other adult arcades like the Tropicana Rec Room will masquerade
under the guise of being a Chuck E. Cheese or other video game arcades.

A crowd of supports cheered the verdict and the now-free Fontaine. Protesters
who felt the state was unjustly persecuting elderly Floridians were shouting
"Right to play! Right to play!" -- even though, as common sense would dictate,
no such right exists. This is hardly fair, though it's understandable why a jury
and even some politicans would cave to the desires of the state's senior citizen
population and its formidable lobby. But it's upsetting for me, because while
the elederly in Florida get to circumvent the law and GAMBLE, which is illegal
in the state and also clearly addictive, real video gaming continually comes
under fire from experts and legislators who want to outlaw or excessively
regulate it.

There's an old saying: what's good for the goose should be good for the
granny.

So apparently, says EAs big chief operating officer for worldwide studios David Gardner, the gaming industry is failing women. "We have all been talking about this for a long, long time," he says. Well, he's right about the talk part.

He's worried that the industry isn't reaching out to girls and women, lamenting that The Sims is just about the only thing they're interested in, and hypothesising that it's relationships and interaction, chat rooms, that the girls want. Well, EA tried that with The Sims Online, a game which has become something of an underage whore house if I recall correctly.

The Sims is, of course, the top game for female players - over half of all Sims players are female - but do we really understand why they're playing it? Has anyone checked recently to see if the girls are enjoying The Sims so as they can play Mommy and Daddy; or if they play it because they enjoy putting little sims into swimming pools, removing the ladders and seeing how long it takes for them to die?

Nobody seems to understand female gamers, and all we're continuing to do is talk about it. I think that that's all we can do, until the current generation of female gamers come of age and become developers. Men making games specifically for women doesn't work, most of the time.

Ohh great, now even the impartial Beeb is getting on the "Ohh Holy Christ, Will Somebody Please Think Of The Children?!" bandwagon with regards to video game ratings; tussling with the question "Are there some games just too violent?"

Erm, "maybe, but who the hell are you to tell me what's too violent", would be my answer to that. "The game has an 18 certificate and should not be played by younger gamers. But should it even be played at all?" el Beeb asks of Reservoir Dogs, the really violent video game take on the really violent Quentin Tarantino movie of the same name.

Umm, hello, the "18" rating? Must I wave my arms about incessantly here? First of all, for my yank friends, allow me to explain. In the UK the "18" rating is not the same as its equivalent in the US of A. In the US an 18's rating condemns a game to porno shops. In the UK it's more seen as the upper limit - anything over 18's is for over 18's, and games like Grand Theft Auto get this rating, and everything is kosher, with mainstream retail outlets stocking the titles.

Now, the question being asked is "Should we ban games like Reservoir Dogs because they are too violent?" Which part of the Nanny State will be deciding what we can and cannot view and play, so? Living in liberal societies I daresay that we can view pretty much whatever the hell we want within the bounds of reason, thankyouverymuch, and if you begin to censor Reservoir Dogs today then tomorrow you'll be critiquing the perceived non-politically correct elements of Lemmings.

An 18's rating is an 18's rating: Anyone over 18 is an adult, capable of making adult decisions (and paying for them appropriately.) The big problem, of course, is idiotic parents who blissfully admit things such as "I've never really looked at ratings for games." Probably the same parents who would, in a knee-jerk, go all guns blazing for banning Reservoir Dogs.

I understand that many parents don't have a grasp of video gaming. But if you can't read a big red label with a number between "12" and "18" on it then perhaps we ought to consider banning you from parenting.

The Emmy's got into a bit of hot water over a spoof in which Conan O'Brien is involved in a plane crash. The spoof comes a little uncomfortably close to the Comair Flight 5191 crash which left 49 people dead in Kentucky. "In no way would we ever want to make light of this terrible tragedy," the network said in a statement. I trust they wouldn't.

However, what if the Kentucky crash hadn't happened? Then it would be alright to do this spoof? No problemo, so long as nobody has had a rough encounter with gravity recently? Would the network have apologised if the spoof had been aired a little closer to the Pulkovo Airlines crash which left 170 people dead only five days earlier?

If we're going to pony up and apologise for doing a spoof then we either shouldn't have done it in the first place, or else we should take a look at what we apologise for. To use another industries example, if a game is found among the possessions of a murderer then the developers either shouldn't have made the game, or else they shouldn't have to apologise for it. Take your pick, but making something that won't be acceptable to the general public on one very unlucky day of the year either means you shouldn't make that thing any day of the year; or else you shouldn't have to make apologies for it at all.

Microsoft XNA (no, that's not an acronym, it's a load of crap) is the toolset which Microsoft is pushing for development of Windows and Xbox 360 games, providing game developers with a common standard to allow them to not have to worry about the "nuts and bolts boilerplate coding."

As well as giving this platform to developers, Microsoft has recently flung open the doors to homebrew developers on the PC and - critically - the Xbox 360. This will allow the bedroom coder crowd to develop on XNA.

But will they? I don't think so. The mod community which has been around since the days of Quake, and which exploded after the release of Half-Life in 1998, is much better at taking a complex developed game (we'll call it a platform) and reshaping it, rather than designing something from the ground up.

Generally speaking the amateur game developers who have designed their products from the ground up have suffered greatly in terms of what they finally manage to produce. Having to worry about everything from the game engine up costs mainstream developers a lot of time and money, and for amateur developers it can be a prolonged nightmare.

This is even so for mainstream developers - most developers simply buy a third party engine to run their games, essentially making them more professional mod squads. The Doom and Unreal engines are the current big wigs, and before that you couldn't fire up a World War II shooter that wasn't made in the Quake III engine.

Microsoft is throwing open its platform to allow for development, but in reality I think that it will be developers who will be messing around with XNA, not modders. Mod squads are at their most successful taking a game like Half-Life 2 and twisting it around to their ends.

The word "convergence" has become a bit of a dirty one in the tech world, thanks to rather crap attempts to take every device known to man and stuff it into a handheld device that doesn't have very much battery life. In the New Media world however, the word might find new and productive meaning.

MySpace and Snocap (alright, so not Napster, it's just made by a bunch of the same guys) are jumping into bed together to provide music ("and maybe more..." Ohh God, that sounds like a midnight sex chat ad on the telly) to the fawning young masses.

The idea is that "if we want to crack the youngsters, we have to do it on their ground and on their terms", meaning that youngens will be far more likely to buy your stuff if it's sold to them on MySpace or Bebo than traditional outlets.

This entry should really be titled "I feel like I'm getting old", but I'm not self centred enough to take up a whole headline to tell you that. The guts of a paragraph will do. The reason? Because I'm so disconnected from this Bebo generation, and for the first time I feel like an old man in the technology world. Kids (I mean about 12 and up) are using sites like MySpace and Bebo to the extent that, like mobile phones, everyone has a profile and is to be found on one of these two social networking sites.

They're using them as cheap text messaging services and putting videos and pictures up on the web thanks to the simple interfaces offered by sites like YouTube. There's a whole debate about how dangerous this may be to said youngens, but that's another days discussion. For now, let's just accept that it's happening.

So I feel old because I'm watching as 12, 14, 16 year olds who would have derided anyone openly capable of switching on a computer, let alone being able to touch type, just a few short years ago; now just about as tech savvy as anyone really needs to be to get by in the modern day and age, if not more so besides. It has kinda crept up on me - we in the tech sector have been observing it from a distance, but it's different to sit down next to a 14 year old hammering away with a Bebo page and six MSN windows onscreen.

Back to New Media Convergence, if you please. Now that everyone in the hard- to-reach young demography is on social networking sites, New Media Convergence can happen. We already see it with, for example, Bebo integrating YouTube to such a simple extent that it's a matter of pushing a few buttons to get a stock video on your page; and just a few more after that to get your own cam/phone/whoknowswhatelse vids online.

Google paid top brass to get to be the search engine for MySpace a short while ago. And now we're entering into direct sales - forget about just being able to advertise to the demographic, how about being able to directly sell to them like even iTunes can't?

The new big growth sector is New Media Convergence, and so long as the social networking sites hold their water as mobile phones have done we'll be seeing them becoming a more day-to-day thing. Mix up mobile phones, social networking sites, search engines, stores, even municipal WiFi and you can see the shape of teenage lives forming around the internet, whether we like it or not.

Congratulations are in order, we've made technology so mainstream that ditsy blonde teenagers are using it in their fumbling attempts to have sex with one another.

The award winning documentary "9/11" by French filmmakers Gedeon and Jules Naudet and retired New York firefighter James Hanlon, all of whom were with a New York fire crew on September 11^th 2001 (and one of the cameramen actually in Tower 1 when Tower 2 collapsed), has been prevented from airing on a number of CBS affiliates due to swearing in the film.

This perhaps marks a rather low watershed - the film was due to be aired at 8pm across the country, but after a campaign from Christian family pressure group the American Family Association it was decided by many affiliates not to show the film. I might take issue with this, if you please.

Airing profanity for profanities sake before the 10pm watershed in the US is not acceptable. In the case of this documentary however, I daresay it is warranted, even if kids are watching - indeed, I daresay that children too young to now remember September 11^th 2001 are the best audience for this film. The swearing in it is not gratuitous. It is human nature, and the swearing is "mostly by fire fighters" - That is, the chaps who ran into the burning buildings whilst everyone else was running out.

To censor or simply not air this documentary in a popular time slot because the men on the ground didn't have the good taste to say things like "Ohh my word, we appear to have been accosted by some rogue trouble makers" instead of "Holy fucking bananas some bastard just flew another goddamn plane into the goddamn tower" is stupid Political Correctness nonsense. Even moreso perhaps coming from an organisation like the AFA, whose other issues of the day include telling us how Ford's 11.6% drop in sales probably has something to do with homosexuals.

I think that we can make exceptions to strict watershed rules in the case of documentaries. Indeed, in the UK you will sometimes news items and documentaries with profane language shown in the middle of the day. Why? Because these things need to be seen. "9/11" is not a film about swearing fire fighters. It's a film about a day that needs to be remembered. Concentrate on the latter, not the former.

Hundreds of comments later, Joystiq decided to wipe the egg of its face and
terminate Summa's employment as one its most prolific bloggers. Joystiq editor
Christopher Grant quickly wrote a thoughtful href="http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/08/an-apology-and-a-note-on-
hype/">apology to readers, which essentially put the blame on Joystiq for
succumbing to the rules of Internet hype instead of real news.

Grant states: "The worst part is, we understand that it was our hard-earned
credibility that contributed to this excitement cocktail. There are gaming
websites that trade in hype, and we've always prided ourselves on avoiding it.
If we tell you that something is "major" and "worth waiting for," naturally you
would expect it to be."

Well, it didn't take long for Summa to land somewhere else -- a new gaming blog
called Destructoid -- and fire back at
Joystiq. In a post on Destructoid, Summa declared that he was
"very happy to be free from Joystiq's shackles" and that "Joystiq takes
themselves WAY too seriously." Summa doesn't apologize and instead paints
himself at Joystiq's scapegoat. Here's more from Summa's post:

"I in no way meant to hype anything. There was no ulterior motive to bring
increased traffic. The entire affair was blown way out of proportion. Joystiq
fired me because of fan reaction and their fear of losing whatever credibility
they think they have. Also, we were both headed in different directions. They
wanted content that was long, boring, and obscure. I want to write about fun
stuff like rumors, culture, and everything that is humorous out there."

And rumors it will be, apparently. One of Summa's recent posts on Destructoid is
a self-described rumor about Wii online beta testing, which Summa got off a
forum from a guy who he writes is "just talking out of his ass." Ironically,
Summa started off the post with "I don't normally like to take rumors from
message boards, but considering how plausible it sounds, what the hell." (the
post also featured the above image of "Rumor Has It...", and I can't tell if
that was meant as a disclaimer to readers or a tounge-in-cheek gag)

I think I have an idea of what's going on here. Clearly, Summa wasn't adhering
to the same journalistic standards as his employer. Joystiq is trying to ensure
quality the same way a newspaper or magazine would, whereas Summa feels the site
is just shoot-from-the-hip blogging where the rules of journalism don't apply.
Summa isn't a reporter -- he's a blogger. But even a blogger, who's delivering
information to the masses, has a duty to be truthful and accurate. So is Joystiq
to blame for hiring someone they knew was a blogger but who they wanted to act
like a journalist? Are they to blame for allowing Summa to hype a press release
as a "scoop" and then firing him when readers reacted badly to the news? Or is
the unapologetic Summa to blame for callously discarding his responsibility to
readers and laughing off Joystiq's credibility? Should Summa be blamed for
acting unprofessionally, even if he's not a "professional"?

Maybe it's all of the above. I'll need a few more days to think about this
one.

Well, there's just one problem, apparently. JP's Domain alleges that in fact a
significant number of front page stories are submitted and Dugg by the same,
small group of prolific Digg members. The blogger even identifies severa Digg
members that are apparently flooding the site with content. But is this true
manipulation? Are these Digg members simply casual acquaitances and avid Digg
fans or are they agents of an insidious plot to turn Digg into their own
exlcusive club? I'm not sure, but JP's Domain believes the issue loophole needs
to be close. The blogger writes:

"What it comes down to is there very literally is a group that controls Digg. If
you are within this group and you submit a story, you are more or less
guaranteed 10-15 (or more) automatic diggs from this group. What happens to the
people who don't have such a luxury and only get the default single vote like
everyone else? This only encourages a cycle where those who are getting votes
will continue to get more and more, as they feed each off each other and pat
each other on the back."

JP's Domain blames Digg's "Friends" feature, which allows Digg members to link
up with other Digg readers. This of course creates a system where a limited
group of people can get together on the site and combine their efforts to exert
greater control on the Digg electoral process.

In essence, they're a lobby group or a PAC (political action committee).

Interestingly enough, JP's Domain submitted the post to Digg, and it quickly
became a popular entry with 865 diggs at last count (including my own digg).
JP's Domain also posted a follow-up blog entry found href="http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/what_happened_to_digg">here.

As a result of the posts, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose href="http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/digg-friends.html">pledged to
reform the site with a key algorithim update that is designed to select a more
diverse range of Digg submissions.

But one member of the Digg "in-crowd" was none too please with JP's Domain and
Rose's promises to reform the system, according to my old CMP pals at href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192600648"
>InformationWeek. According to the article, Digg member " href="http://www.digg.com/users/p9s50W5k4GUD2c6">p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 ," who had
sumbitted the most stories of any Digg user, denied that he or she was rigging
the voting process and decided to leave Digg altogether.

"As a direct result of your blog this evening, I will no longer no supporting
(sic) Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever
wants to reign," p9 was quoted in the InformationWeek article. "Now YOU can
spend all the time, all the effort and get stabbed in the back by fellow Diggers
-- aptly named -- and then tossed to the side by a Digg team that values toilet
paper with more worth than the core users that feed this site it's content every
day."

I swear, Web geeks are SO sensitive.

Now if you'll excuse, I'm going to get on Digg and check to see if any of the
"in-crowd" ever dugg any of my TwitchGuru stories.

For months now geeks have been closely following the v(ideo)log of a YouTube'r named "LonelyGirl15", a teenage girl named Bree who had strictly religious parents (yadda yadda) and was interested in "geek stuff", for wont of a better phrase.

Well, it turns out that the LonelyGirl saga was a fake, and that it was created by some enterprising film makers using nothing more than their intelligence, acting ability and a web cam. They led many scores of obsessed geeks on for four months, until finally a massive web witch hunt tracked down the producers and unveiled the mask of LonelyGirl.

Many geeks are decrying this great "scam" against them. I don't see why everyone has to get so touchy - well, I do actually. On the internet we all seem to be trying to form meaningful connections with others, even if it's just a passive thing where you watch that other persons vlog on YouTube, or comment in their blog, become one of their friends on MySpace or get chatting on MSN. LonelyGirl was one such passive relationship, where geeks listened to her woes and associated with her interests, probably amazed that a good looking girl could also be classed as a geek.

So some people feel personally betrayed that this was all a show. Well, tough luck I say. If you come onto the internet looking for meaningful lifelong relationships then you're entering into dangerous waters; even more so if the "relationship" you have is with a person looking into a webcam to record a vlog entry. Go out and meet some real people, for crying out loud. Internet relationships can work, but you have to have that distance between yourself and the chat box representing the person on the other side, or else you are quite likely as not to get burned.

I see the LonelyGirl show instead as a brilliant example of what can be done by film makers in the age of New Media Convergence; a scriptwriter and an actor, maybe even with a prop or two, can run an entire show - be it a fictional one like LonelyGirl purporting as real life, or a current affairs show, or whatever else you want - off of a site like YouTube, other blogs will talk about it and link to it, then big publications will weigh in. Even the "hunt" for who the real LonelyGirl was is a bit of fun - a distraction, something to do in your spare time, as most of this stuff is.

There's a lot of crap on the internet, but increasingly too there's a lot of quality stuff out there, the entry bar to creating of which has come down very low in recent months, and I don't see the LonelyGirl incident as a personal betrayal - it's a successful experiment.

Is Sony running out of material? It certainly seems like it. A keen observer at the blog Gaming Edge picked up on a striking similarity at the recent Tokyo Game Show. Ken Kutaragi, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment and the father of the PlayStation, delivered a highly anticipated keynote address at TGS. While most of the buzz was about Kutarag announcing an unexpected price cut in Japan for the 20GB version of the new PlayStation 3, Gaming Edge's Rod Oracheski had a bit of deja vu and discovered that some of Kutaragi's speech was recycled -- word for word, apparently -- from a speech he gave in 2000 prior to the PlayStation 2 launch. Here are some excerpts of the speech:

"We need an open system. Like an internet. People can have a first hand experience: the network world of the game has to be open to everyone."
"Sony has Sony's agenda. But (I) want a very open platform, equal for every person."
"For instance: for movies. You looked at the [..] you can jack in and watch the new world. We are very lucky to live in this era. We try to open the door for the future."
"You can communicate to a new cybercity. This will be the ideal home server. Did you see the movie 'The Matrix'? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into 'The Matrix'!"

First off, let me just say that Oracheski has got one hell of a memory. You have to have a sharp eye (or ear) and a whole lotta video game industry knowledge to make that connection. Kudos to Gaming Edge!

Second, "The Matrix" was, like, 10 years ago.

Third, if this doesn't indicate that Sony is coasting on the remarkable success of PS2, then nothing will.