'#Pretend and sociodramatic play: We are the imaginative animal, able to think of things that are not immediately present, and so we have fantasy play, or pretend play, which builds our capacity for imagination. In this type of play children establish certain propositions about the nature of their pretend world and then play out those propositions logically. In doing so they are exercising the same capacities that allow us, as adults, to think about things that are not immediately present, which is what we all do when we plan for the future and what scientists do when they develop theories to explain or predict events in the real world. We are an intensely social species, requiring cooperation with others in order to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable. Children in sociodramatic play are also practicing the art of negotiation. As they decide who will play what roles, who will get to use which props, and just what scenes they will enact and how, the players must all come to agreement. Indeed, a basic rule of all social play is that everyone must agree. Anyone left unhappy by a decision will quit, and if everyone quits there will be no game. Since the motive to play is strong, the motive to keep the other players happy is strong. That is true of all social play, but it is especially apparent in the negotiations that are observed in sociodramatic play. Keeping our companions happy, so they stay with us and continue to support us through life, is surely one of the most valuable of human survival skills, and children continuously practice that skill in social play.'

'Could we have had the iPhone without Star Trek? Can we create the next innovation without thinking about other possible worlds? What are we making out of our imaginations that will shape what’s next? As an emerging area of thought and practice, Design Fiction provides us with a way of “thinking about doing what we see and imagine.” By making models or prototypes of the future, we expose, test and probe further into it, exploring scenarios as use cases, as they are assumptions about the future made reality. Scott Smith of Changeist will take us on a journey to see where Design Fiction has come from, its impact on a generation unwittingly raised on it, and how designers, creatives, strategists, and other future-minded professions among us are applying it to actively provoke possible futures that we prefer.'

'"Chatroulette is eliminating all approach anxiety, there's no adverse signaling. You're just thrust into a conversation with people. Right now it's one to one, but you can imagine a one-to-many approach there, too. People who don't get nexted [skipped over to a next conversation] could be helped to draw a bigger audience. If you don't get nexted, you're more likely to be a cute girl, less likely to be a penis. You're more likely to be interesting. It could evolve toward live performance."'

'I'm pretty sure that Foursquare + Fantasy = Larping [Live-action RP]. So far, most of the real world games (boktai, treasure world, etc.) have been more trouble than they have been worth. Geocaching is different, though, I think because there is a real cache when you get there, not a virtual one. Why go through real space to get to a virtual treasure?'

'Play imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. These fully immersive games are nested inside each other like Russian dolls — each new game emerging from another and connecting backwards with increasing complexity. Synthetic experience competes with real experience as dream, fantasy, and memory begin to collapse into each other. A host of questions emerge: Who are the players? Who are the game designers? What is the purpose of these games? What is the point of winning? Where is it all leading? And if someone wants to stop playing, where in the hell is the escape button?'

'And as I grow up, I find something never change, the game, the people, and the world, they are still there, however evolves into another immature form, now my world is sorounded by adult toys like big houses, BMW car, fancy jobs, and now my childhood player partners all grow up to be adult game players, we play games like "start up companies". Each one of us, somewhere in his heart, is dominated with the dream to make a living world, a universe. For that dream we train ourselves with discipline, seek for good quality, and the underlying rules.'

The broader principle being: change the 'conditions' (create "games") to change the incentives (re-enable 'happiness'). -- 'McGonigal: "Games support happiness ... by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish... Studies have shown that playing a short game — having something concrete that you can accomplish — actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work. ...because when you’re trying to do real-world work it’s frustrating; we don’t see the results of our actions right away. So games give us that sense of blissful productivity... Neurochemically we’re kind of fired up ... to take on challenges... Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking. They trigger the brain to a state in which it’s possible to do good work. It’s possible to aspire to tough goals."' -- Neo Taylorism? A Brave New 'Chunking' World? Who Games The Game Makers?

'First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn't described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward - a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this "empty shell," the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear.'

'MagiQuest, a real-life World of Warcraft... Invented by Creative Kingdoms, a company that designs theme-park attractions, the game is built around infrared sensors embedded in the wands. "It's like having a joystick that controls a 20,000-square-foot facility." After paying $14.99 for a wand and a $10-per-hour activation fee, players begin a scavenger hunt for Tolkienesque paintings, sculptures, and installations scattered throughout the hotel. Video kiosks of wizards and maidens dispense clues and track your progress by picking up your unique IR signature. Guides in Elizabethan garb roam the grounds dispensing advice. Victories and discoveries trigger up to 150 visual and audio effects, and frantic kids drag weary parents to and fro until they catch them all. The online version lets players accrue rewards and "powers" that carry over to the physical locations. ... ...since its 2005 launch, the franchise has expanded to 15 US cities and two locales in Japan.' -- UK, please.

'Gaming provides a different avenue for establishing new “relationships” with their real world friends. Our focus group participants expressed a great desire for role-playing games set in historic periods. In China, the Three Kingdoms period is an enduring favorite as evidenced by recent video games, television shows and blockbuster films, such as John Woo’s Red Cliff, that depict the glory of Chinese military history: "I want more strategy games based on China’s long military history. I want to wage war and form alliances with friends to build a new empire."' -- Hmm... on so many levels.

'Here are seven VR technologies that work, and that may yet point the way to truly successful virtual reality. #Multiplayer Online Gaming. One result of virtual-reality research is the existence of entirely separate virtual worlds, inhabited entirely by the avatars of real world users. These worlds are sometimes referred to as massively multiplayer online games, and the World of Warcraft is the largest virtual gaming world in use now, with 11.5 million subscribers. Another example is Second Life. The world of Second Life can't really be classified as a game, since the goal seems really just to be to wander around and interact with people, much like the real world. There is even a Second Life Shakespeare Company that performs Shakespeare's works within Second Life. #Project Natal. ...a system that requires no keyboard and no controller, where a user's voice and motions serve as their method for interacting with the system.'

"It's 2018 - six years after a virus was released at the 2012 Olympics. Zombies dominate the earth and humankind has been mauled, torn and eaten to extinction. The problem is there's not a lot to do now that there are no humans left to rip apart... cue the first post-apocalyptic music festival curated by the undead. Film4 and Warp Films bring you I Spit On Your Rave, a mockumentary by director Chris Boyle about the first post-apocalypse zombie music festival, and we want YOUR living corpse to take part."

#26. Videogames Adventure Services of New York City: Arranges bespoke kidnappings and other customized real-life (despite the name) adventures for thrill seekers. -- Consumer Recreation Services?

Increasing emotional bandwidth.

They just twittered a re-enactment of the movie Aliens. Fuckin' A!

'Since "adult services" have previously managed to use other communications systems -- postal services, telephones, shop windows, email, the web, advertisements in tabloid newspapers -- this shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but brothel stories are probably good for raising your circulation (fnar fnar).' -- Yup. Sell the sizzle not the steak. See 'Big Sister' businessmodel: http://bit.ly/2c3cm

"Carri Bugbee, the PR woman behind some of the much talked about twitter marketing of 'Mad Men', is to build a Twitter-based ad agency for media and entertainment companies. Bugbee said that there are a number of lessons producers and marketers can learn from the 'Mad Men' fan fiction, including that producers should strive to reserve the Twitter accounts for all the characters in whatever show or film they are making. She also advised producers to overcome their need to control all aspects of their work and to use their fans to their advantage." -- Wasn't it just that ad people wanted to roleplay being ad people to prove what good ad people they were? Still, a good idea if they can attract true fans who can authentically flesh out the characters. Endless opportunities for brand/product/service/environment/person placement - and not just placement...

'#What: Is obsessive Tweeting hindering enjoyment of real life activities? Then you need me, Twitterboy, professional blogger, social networking guru, and Tweeter for hire. Leave your Twitter responsibilities to me, and you'll be free to go out and experience the world, while I maintain a cool and credible online persona for you. I'll put you in awesome locations/situations, have you saying geniunely interesting and thought-provoking things, and have everyone who's anyone wanting to follow you! #How: Tailor Twitterboy to your own personal Twitter needs by telling me about desired Tweet topics and frequency.'

"Is the real self always the naturally occurring one? If a patient on the antidepressant medication Prozac tells his therapist he feels more like himself with the drug than without it, what does this do to our standard notions of a real a self? Where does the medication end and the person begin?"

"We construct our objects and our objects construct use." -- "Online experiences of playing multiple aspects of self are resonant with theories that imagine the self as a multiple and fragmented, or as a society of selves."-- "Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those with thich people can become actively involved. They tend to be theories that can be 'played' with. So one way to examine the social appropriability of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to-think-with, objects that can help theory move beyond intellectual circles. For Freud's work, dreams and slips of the tongue carried ideas... today computational experiences carry ideas."

'What is real? What is virtual? What is living? What is nonliving? Of the many selves I am, who is he real me?' -- 'Computing would offer [Turkle] endless moments of sweet epiphany when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for terms of Lacan's manifesto: computing is constructed as a set of languages; language (the relationship of terms to each other) is the structure that forms computing; the boundaries between data and execution are blurred; and so forth. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism–decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)–is rendered clear at last.'

'... we "project ourselves into our own drama, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star... computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual."' -- '... once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, bot on and off the screen?'

'"This is more real than my real life." says a character who turns out to be a man playing a woman who pretending to be a man. In this game the rules of social interaction are built not received. Traditional role playing prompts reflection on personal and interpersonal issues, but in games that take place in ongoing virtual societies such as MUDs, the focus is on larger social and cultural themes as well. The networked computer serves as an "evocative object" for thinking about community. Additionally, people playing in the MUDs struggle towards a new, still tentative discourse about the nature of a social world that is populated both by people and by programs. In this, life in the MUD may serve as a harbinger of what is to come in the social spaces that we still contrast with the virtual by calling the "real."'

"We relate to [computational objects] as psychological machines, not only because so many of these new objects might be said to have primitive psychologies, but because they cause us to reflect upon our own." -- 'In some ways, Case's description of his inner world of actors who address him are capable of taking over negotiations is reminiscent of the language of people with MPD. But the contrast is significant: Case's inner actors are not split off from each other or his sense of "himself." He experiences himself very much as a collective self, not feeling that he must goad or repress this or that aspect of himself into conformity. He is at ease, cycling through from Katherine Hepburn to Jimmy Stewart. To use [Philip] Bromberg's language, online life has helped Case learn how to "stand in spaces between selves" and still feel one, to see the multiplicity and still feel a unity.'

"... the fact that Caddell can be both an industry insider and a fan simply demonstrates the degree to which those lines are blurring from all sides in our contemporary convergence culture; the fact that his fantasies have something to do with his real world identity should also not be a shock to anyone who understands the psycho-sociology of fandom." -- ;^)

"Stories that include their audiences in the creation process become more complex, go off on tangents and create new relationships between the broadcaster and the audience. Giving the audience space to create their own stories within the broadcast story is a great way to create mass media. Instead of creating one story with broad enough appeal for a mass audience to find it palatable, it’s now possible to create a piece of mass media without much of a storyline at all, but instead, the tools the audience needs to create millions of their own, that they in turn can change and narrowcast to their peers. The audience knows what they need from narrowcast entertainment better than the broadcaster does, and they know the target audience for that entertainment (their friends and families) better than the broadcaster ever will. When mass entertainment properties encourage and add value to the networks that grow around them, they make it easier for the network to reciprocate."

"I’d say games are closer to plays. The director is the game designers, the game itself is the script, the player is an actor. Actors have a lot of wiggle room they interpret the lines and perform them, in ways that the director or scriptwriter may never have thought about or intended. But on the other hand, the actor can’t go outside of the script. Just like a game may have all sorts of alternate paths and endings, but the player can’t go outside them. I think the point really is that players have no problem being actors, even in roles that may be very different from themselves. I think many players want to expand their range a bit more than designers give them credit."

'At a conference recently, I heard someone say that she had several avatars in several virtual worlds, including World of Warcraft and Second Life. I was surprised, though, that she uniformly referred to her avatars in the third person. She said things like: "It isn't a good fighter -- it was exploring and it got killed by wolves." This surprised me. Though it is perfect logical to see your avatar as a separate thing, I still would have expected her to say "*I* was exploring and *I* got killed by wolves." Does the usage of the third person here sound strange to you too? When you talk about things that happen to your avatars in virtual worlds, do you refer to your avatars as "it" or "I"?'

'"The goal of healthy personality development is not to become a One, not to become a unitary core, it's to have a flexible ability to negotiate the many - cycle through multiple identities. A lot was done in my mother's generation to keep experiences at home and at work, motherhood and social life - to keep it easy for you to seem to be one person. Around women you couldn't use certain language, for example. And for men too: you were boss at work, you were boss at home. When you came home, you weren't supposed to be sensitive and nurturing with your child. People's life experiences encouraged them to think of themselves as a One." Men's lives, especially, have been socially constructed along unitary lines, which, she speculates, may be why so many of them are having a hard time just now. But women today... cycle through these different roles, and we're trained to keep them a little bit separate, but not so separate that you can't negotiate them.'

"[I discovered] someone online called Dr. Sherry, who advertised herself as a cyberpsychologist who was doing interviews and studying people in this virtual environment. And I hadn't created Dr. Sherry. This was a character created by other people. And the question was, what is my relationship with this character created by other people who had in a sense used my name as a trademark? Or a mnemonic, a kind of cultural mnemonic for being a cybershrink, in brief? I think that each of us is a persona. Each of us has spent a lifetime creating a persona. And how do we really feel about its potential appropriation in virtual space by other people? There was no intent to hurt me. And as a matter of fact it turned out the intent was to flatter me, by taking my name in a kind of virtual appropriation, as though I were a trademark for Cybershrink. I think those kinds of questions about your identity and how much you can protect it are going to become very salient."

Q: So social skills acquired online are applicable in RL? -- A: Yes, because in virtual communities people are interacting with other people. That's why I don't get upset that people, even children, are spending a lot of time online. They may be working through important personal issues in the safety of life on the screen. they may come out the other side having had some experience they're able to use to make their lives more fulfilling. It is also possible they are not. I think of this as the "Cyrano effect." Rostand's character created a text-based virtual reality, the world of his letters, to express himself to the woman he loved. But he never really came to believe that he was the man who she was in love with. Sometimes people have trouble bringing their experience of the virtual into other aspects of their lives."

"People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use. Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation."

"Superstruct is like a big, fun brainstorming session." -- Video.

"You live in a perfect world. You live in the free world. Every new day brings you new challenges. Every new job brings new opportunities. You’re the master of your destiny, your own boss. The future is bright. You just have to keep your soul. And your salary options. MSG™ is a slightly satirical game of negotiation and conscience, for three to six adults."

"[MSG] Players play the roles of company Reps who all work for the soul-crushing Company in service of the Brand. The point is really to make a mockery of soulless corporations and their often ruthless strategies, not to mention the soulless drones who do their bidding. At the same time, it mocks our own willingness to worship these brands and submit to the will of these companies, all while creating ludicrous scenarios that are maddeningly interconnected with the stories created in the previous round. Maybe this excerpt from the rule book explains it best: Brainstorm for a couple of minutes until you come up with a name for the Brand [that all the players work for]. If some of you hate it — or, better, all of you hate it — that’s brilliant, because it means you’ll understand a little of what it is to work for an organization that makes you cringe every time you look in the mirror and see the Brand logo they tattooed on your forehead." -- Haha

Stuff's just beginning to trickle in reflecting on our Halloween reenactment of The War of the Worlds on Twitter. Here are some links to what we've found so far. Each participant averaged 2.6 tweets total. The most active participants posted 60 to 100 tweets. There were around 600 people following the invasion progress. That's about 1500 tweets for all participants over the course of the event. I think it's safe to assume that about 10,000 people were touched by these apocalyptic tidings."

"#1: a noteworthy astronomer speculates on the possibility of an alien invasion. This would be a good time to talk about the Drake equation in your blog, especially if astronomy is your hobby. Send an email to wotw@cixar.com with your blog so we can proliferate it on the @wotw2 Twitter account. -- #2: The alien invasion occurs. Follow @wotw2 to keep in sync with the progress of the invasion. This Twitter feed will automatically update, in general terms, the unfolding of the alien invasion like clockwork throughout the world. Coordinate with Tweeters in your area to tell local stories. -- #3: After the threat dies down, people begin to blog and speculate about what happened, and every topic near and dear to them. -- #4: The curtain rises. Blog, link, and tweet about the experience."

"In the recent War of the Worlds example, some estimated 600 participants got together and generated around 1500 tweets about what they envisioned to be happening around them as various events within the original narrative unfolded, so that as the tripods touched down, people were encouraged to generate local narratives and fill in gaps in the story... a "real time" unfolding of a story-act, creates not only a story world, but one which is ambiguous in its boundaries, where characters can enter and leave at will, in any direction... the original story is merely the facilitating mechanism in the storytelling effort... the stories that explode out of the framing device have gaps, overlaps, contradiction, temporal inconsistencies, and all forms of delay, change, surprise. We are not only talking about a multilinear hypertext narrative, but rather an entire narrative ecology that potentially explodes the structure of how we, as a collective, tell stories."

Comment: Barbara Fister: "... an amorphous, self-organizing group that works to sustain a story - that reminds me of what it felt like as a kid to play "let's pretend" with a group, all working off the same premise. I haven't had that experience as an adult, and I remember exactly when we all looked at each other and realized we were too old to do anymore. We had become self-conscious and it ruined the improvisational ability to make stuff up on the fly together. I'd love to have that experience again!" -- :((

"The rumblings you've been hearing in the criminal underground since July indeed are true: At long last, we are seeking new applicants to the League. Aspirants to new heights of Evil should submit an application video that meets the terms below..."

"Play the game. Invent the future."

Weight Watchers is an RPG. Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first."

"... women who experiment with playing men routinely comment on how little help they are offered... [they] may go on to reflect on how "help" has shaped them: has its availability made them more likely to see themselves as people who needed it?"

Christopher Caldwell: “I also begin to understand for the first time what an addiction is... It’s a desperate need to simplify. An addiction is a gravitation towards anything that plausibly mimics life while being less complicated than life.”

"The Wids(tm) are here to support each other, and to discuss the trials and tribulations of living in Real Life while our loved one is immersed in EverQuest. EQ players recovering from compulsive game play are welcome to the forum."

"...the enrichment of life itself through its fusion with fiction, a true Dreaming, an almost-sacred possibility of communion with imagination... conflict without tragedy, narrative motion without the boredom of everyday life, defeat without suffering...

"Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008 approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories" -- World's a stage

"Like a story, transformation design allows people to step into new experiences... At every touch point the company offers an opportunity for a person to access the story and become a role player in it."

"The real problem is professional writers aren't ready to share authorship, or even carve out areas where players can add something meaningful - and permanent. But in the next generation of transmedia properties, it's hard to believe they'll stay there."

"Virtual worlds are a rare medium of social interaction that can enable you to transcend your real-world social statuses. But if your real-world persona is connected to your 3D avatar via a profile, you will be much less able to transcend it."

Second Life and Everquest Research: "Core roleplayers: 4% of the population; 15% more with occasional roleplayers. And they tend to have more psychological problems and physical disabilities. (Don’t kill the messenger on this one, folks!)"

"A majority of 44.2% of the research participants opted for ‘Keep me just about the same as I am’, whilst the opposite, ‘I would dramatically alter my physical appearance’ represented 14.7%."

"Because of advertising and microtransactions-supported business models, companies will earn their money from products that users love enough to buy, or are engaged with enough to spend more time playing."

"From the time a young man wakes up in the morning to the time he goes to bed, he has but one thing on his mind: getting girls."

"How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society."

'If you want to watch Nick having sex with a prostitute, he's happy to let you. The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet. At Big Sister, about a dozen guests perform on camera each night, and the Web site gets 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day. "Our goal is to attract as many people as possible to catch the first reality sex TV,'' says marketing manager Carl Borowitz, who goes by the name Carlos. "This is National Geographic for adults. Everyone's curious to watch their neighbor.'' Nick says he's on his fourth visit to Big Sister. "It's a different concept,'' Nick says later, as he leaves his details so the brothel can mail him complimentary DVDs of his performance. "It's what the people want, to see normal people."'

Comment (Leland): "In Second Life, we initially play the archetypal role of the innocent until we grow up into a new role." Nice little gaming of everyday life discussion.

"Dress up your Sims in the latest H&M® clothing collections for men and women with The Sims 2 H&M® Fashion Stuff*!"

"An arrogant insouciance might, for example, seem more fitting to an age of imperialism than this wilting, debilitating malady; and enlightenment, another well-known theme of the era, might have been better served by a mood of questing impatience."

RPG built in TiddlyWiki using TagglyWiki TiddlerTags (!)

"We have a game right now at Sony Online Entertainment called The Agency. We're stretching the MMO genre with this game and breaking out of the "men in tights" world and introducing the "men in tuxedos with silencers world."

"Here's a simple question for you, which I suspect does not have a simple answer: why is Fantasy the predominant genre of game-like virtual worlds?" Must remember to go back and check comments.

"Marketing opportunities “Product placement on crack” … opportunities to showcase products within the story… opportunities to require people to interact with products in order to progress story..." But bloody hard to organise it all!

"And while people who frequent social networks tend to depict themselves truthfully, people setting up avatars in virtual worlds are probably creating fantasy figures so their actions may be less useful to advertisers." Then make a fantasy Coke!

'... the boy reportedly "taunted' the moose away from his sister, and then feigned death, causing the moose to lose aggro and leave. - "Just like you learn in level 30 in World of Warcraft," the boy is reportedly quoted as saying. He'll be a Hunter, then!'

"SELECT MY FACTION: Horde or Alliance." Is this what you lot mean by 'Branded Utility'?

"Because games are experiential they might be good at teaching things that you learn through experience, and that are difficult to teach through books." Good man! (We tried a similar thing at Age0+ using historical roleplay and MMS messages.)

"We are watching the birth of a new category of entertainment, one native to the wired age, built to let the audience participate as well as observe. Stories you can browse, take with you, push on and feel react. They invite exploration and community."

"An SL-based Battlestar Galactica roleplaying group with over two hundred members, its own sim even a news service, "A Service of the News Bureau of the Government of the Twelve Colonies", relating the latest in the internal game's narrative."

Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner: "I want you to be celebrated for helping to construct the canon. You will eventually become a character in narrative world and, depending on the level of participation you will move closer to the centre of the action."

"Of the 596 respondents, one in five felt their online identities were closer to their "true self" than their real-world identity."

"...people who design virtual worlds are actually doing public policy... innovations will bleed over into real-world policy-making... governments will try to please citizens raised in virtual world policy environments... big political change is coming"

"All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players."

Here it is! 'Game/World' created within SL to support 'I am Legend' movie release. Where else can you rapidly prototype a game/world and evolve characters/players as a story unravels? Brilliant.

"Our findings show that Chinese youth experience this new emotional space-the 'emobytes'-more intensely than young Americans" - [Respondents] "Online interactions have broadened my sense of identity" - "Online interactions have made me more self-aware"

Wow! "... the basic concept is if you could take a theme park, a physical space, and everyone could be data-mined, then you could have a live-action MMO.”

"having an avatar alter ego is simply going to be a fact of life... As a result, avatar support services will become more visible, from in-world makeovers; parents grinding for their kids; power-leveling / gold farming / gray-market virtual trading."

"Facebook is a game. A very social one... the goals are to win friends and influence people."

"Children identify with branded characters in 4 ways. #Reflective: character is like them. #Emulatory: aspire to be the character. #Nurturing: want to take care of the character. #Disidentification: identify with darker elements - finding meaning"