I'm not quite sure who Lyndon LaRouche Jr. is, even after reading his "About me" page, nor reading about him on Wikipedia.

However, he's had a froth at the mouth about some MMORPG that's just been released (Halo 3), and in the same diatribe attacked WoW,
Entropia, Counterstrike and the like. Apparently they undermine the social fabric of America. Second Life gets a special mention, as a hedonistic and for "the adoption of an arbitrary set of anti-scientific, anti-principled rules, like that of Second Life[.]" Even wikipedia comes in for a swipe or two.

Of course the fact that there are people that use Second Life for education, and there are some excellent science education sites within Second Life doesn't matter. There's no development of the argument that makes it clear how we're all hedonistic and how SL is anti-scientific and anti-principles, but if you enjoy reading rants, you might just enjoy his article. If you don't you might want to be braced in case your boss does when you try to sell him on SL.

(Thanks to Jonah for the original tip)

If you are even tangentially interested in games, you most likely already know that the World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade has hit store shelves everywhere. Also, there is a good chance you are already the proud owner of the game as well. If that is true, believe me you are not alone. The Burning Crusade is now claimed to be the fastest selling game of all time (even if it is technically an expansion pack).

With a grand total 2.4 million copies sold in 24 hours, The Burning Crusade is not only selling an oddly symmetrical 100,000 copies an hour, it is also close to surpassing the 2.8 million residents of Second Life. Controversy around the resident numbers aside, for a person who first logged in when Second Life had 30,000 residents, the growth of Second Life is staggering. For The Burning Crusade to pass us so quickly, I think can only be good for Second Life. Want to know more?

Widow PC is the first gaming computer company to release a World of Warcraft Box. The WoW Box is the first computer to officially jump the shark and bill itself as perfect for playing an MMOG. What makes this computer so good for that one of a kind online gaming experience? First of all it has a Killer NIC, the Online Gaming Network Accelerator card. This card bypasses the Windows networking stack and frees up CPU cycles. It also will run downloads and firewalls on the card so your PC doesn't have to. Otherwise it is a fairly standard computer running at around $1495.00 out the door.

So this begs the question, where is the Second Life box? Besides this system coming up short in the RAM department, with only 512MB, are there any other features we need to have a complete Second Life experience? I personally enjoy dual monitors when I am in world. That's one monitor per life, if you will. But, I don't think they are required. What feature would you look for in a Second Life Box.

This blog post is flawed in many ways, but I thought it was interesting enough to mention here. This isn't the first, nor will it be the last such piece to compare the two, but what a fallacy to say that men will prefer WoW over SL simply because there are adventuring and combat elements! Without even breaking a sweat, I can name at least 5 people on both sides of the gender fence who play WoW, and 5 more who play SL. And at least 5 of each who do both!

Speaking of that, I've almost used up my first month of free playtime in WoW, and I don't think I'll be going back. It's fun, but there comes a point at which the need to grind outweighs the fun of exploration/quest completion. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think this; do we have any reformed WoW addicts in our audience, and at what point did you realize it stopped being fun?

And at what point will someone try to combine the two?

While Metroblogging Azeroth is usually the domain of our sister site WoW Insider, I was really excited when i saw this on 3PointD today. The WoW guild We Know uses Second Life as a planning tool for raids. They have made Second Life based maps of the World of Warcraft maps and use markers to annotate their plans.

By using a virtual world to plan play in a MMOG We Know is stepping over a bound for distributed working environments that really can not be done with online tools. While WIKIs and Forums allow people to communicate through text, the embodiment a virtual world provides is much closer to the types of interaction we have in the real world. I see Second Life as a natural way to overcome this boundaries and seeing this type of use helps me solidify that view in my head. The one thing I would like to see is the ability to launch WoW from within Second Life with some natural form of transferring between worlds.

Two nights ago I had the pleasure of witnessing the inaugural meeting of the Kuurian Expedition in the MMOG World of Warcraft (WoW). The Kuurian Expedition is a guild, or a group in SL speak, that is primarily comprised of researchers and high level decision makers who are interested in virtual worlds. They are being organized in the game for the purpose of learning what all this new fangled MMOG stuff is all about. It is ran by the Synthetic World Initiative, which is a virtual world research and outreach group at the University of Indiana headed up by famed virtual world economist Edward Castronova.

While I attended the meeting, I didn't actually control the player. I watched on a projection screen with a group of people who fit the bill of researcher or high level decision maker. It was actually a lot of fun explaining to them what "lol" and "1337" mean, while trying not to sound like a complete dork (As it turns out, it didn't work). So, we started the meeting at Iron Forge and got a run down of how guilds work and what the purpose of this guild would be. There was a large emphasis on respecting others and embracing role playing ideals while in WoW. Then there was a mission. It was a lot of fun watching as a group of players, all under level 10 (mostly level 1 and 2) traversed the world attempting to fight orcs and crocs, but mostly falling short. Luckily there was a level 41 character around to resurrect everyone as they died.

OK, so what does this have to do with Second Life? The Kuurian Expedition is Second Life bound as well. If you want to join you can search for the group Kuurian in world and get connected with one of the officers. If you are interested in Synthetic Worlds (ie. you read this blog) and new to Second Life, this will be a great opportunity to get in world, learn the basics, and make some friends at the same time.

We know that there are men in Second Life who play as women avatars, and women who play as men. I have never had the urge to be anything other than my own gender; it is what I'm comfortable with, and I doubt my acting ability is strong enough to carry out true female roleplaying. Yet it does happen, though I'd venture to guess that the practice takes on a greater depth and meaning in SL than in, say, World of Warcraft, where it's been written that players choose opposite gendered avatars simply to admire them visually.

In Second Life, with its goal-less play, the vicissitudes of the need for interaction virtually demand a deeper involvement in one's avatar. It's not merely a stand-in for oneself; it's the idealized extension of one's being. How, then, does one play the opposite gender? Is it mere whimsy at first, then a gradual revealing of a hidden nature, heretofore unsuspected? Does one find that, the longer one plays against true, the more comfortable one becomes? Can Second Life be a functional test-run for gender-reassignment ideation?