Last month, I was filmed for a documentary film on the down side of video games and the rapid integration of technology into modern culture. The movie is titled Your Computer is Killing You: The Side-Effects of a Techy Lifestyle, a labor of love by filmmakers Brian Bentow and Solomon Rothman. I was asked to contribute my thoughts on video game addiction.

For this week’s (month’s?) Robot Punch!, I’ll share my experience from the other side of the screen to give some insight on its progression.

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As Second Life continues to broaden its domain, industries not normally associated with the virtual world are taking interest. Although Second Life may be old news to you and me, it’s become new territory for many emerging service-oriented companies and industry giants alike, such as Crescendo Design or Cisco Systems.

Cigna Healthcare, a Philadelphia based health-service provider, is the most recent company to take the virtual leap by announcing its development of an island-based community geared towards a technologically savvy audience.

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In SocioTown, the latest MMO from Outside the Box, developers are putting an entirely new spin on defining your own game. In fact, they’re letting you define exactly who can and cannot occupy your game space–and quickly. With the choice to toss out, punch out, or bat out any offending players, you don’t need a second thought or even a reason for being rude. If WoW implemented some similar immediate-batting abilities say, for funeral crashers, maybe the world of MMOs would be a happier, or rather more mournful, place.

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After studying MMOs, spooks decided they needed to have two things: the first being the egregious ability to state whatever they have on their minds and, second, they would commission Doc Brown to build a virtual time machine that did not require a DeLorean going 88 mph, accruing 1.21 Gigawatts. This was only mentioned after the allegation that terrorists (whose hate is for your freedom) may be lurking in virtual worlds akin to Second Life. The contention had also been made that young people playing all kinds of MMOs (including WoW) were unfit to join the intelligence community for a number of reasons: they spread misinformation about their identities, many share files, check their e-mail compulsively and have a predisposition for gaming addiction.

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Weeks after the closing of EA-land, formerly known as The Sims Online (TSO), the head of the Sims Division at EA is hinting at a multiplayer future for this popular life-simulating strategy game. Isn’t she, like Merlin, getting the timeline backwards?

Surely the bestselling computer game of all time would have experienced a smoother transition from single- to multiplayer, especially a game with a social needs bar; friendless Sims end up moping around on the couch and experiencing Social Bunny hallucinations. Yet TSO was poorly received.

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June has already been a month of spectacular breakthroughs in science, spanning from the creation of honest-to-god replicators to prototypes of holodecks. Well, we just hit another major breakthrough. On June 2nd, it was reported that for the first time, scientists enabled a paralyzed man to walk. For years, science fiction has delved into the idea of humans being capable of interfacing with machines using little more than their brainwaves. Logged into the virtual world of Second Life– a sim to end all sims that sports everything from shopping malls to a ‘living’ online ecosystem– a 41 year old man with a degenerative muscle disease was rigged up to do just that. Fitted with headgear that employed the use of three electrodes ‘listening in’ for brainwaves related to hand and leg motions, the man merely used his imagination and his avatar on-screen began to walk.
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Recently, I came across a Sportbike and Formula1 racing trend in Second Life. The experience for me was something less than exciting… and perhaps a little depraved. I had no idea that SL had cars, let alone racing circuits.

The first SL race track that I competed on was entirely in Italian, so I kinda blew it off as merely an activity only Italians do due to their apparent predisposition to fast cars.

But after a bit of link-hopping I found that this trend is more widespread than I originally assumed. There’s even a midget racing circuit.

Naturally, a race wouldn’t be complete without SL’s news and TV organizations providing video coverage of tournament SLASCAR races.

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Despite the Virtual World genre’s recent success, there is evidence to suspect that the VW “boom” may soon go bust. In a recent article about the future of VWs, Bruce Damer, a VW enthusiast and co-founder of the Virtual Worlds Timeline project, expounded upon a few of the reasons why gamers might reasonably expect to see the VW genre go into recession sometime soon. And no, it’s not because the real world is becoming more appealing.
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