Virtual Worlds 101: Panel at National Institute on Cyberlaw
I created this 10-minute introduction to Virtual Worlds (think Second Life, but also online games like World of Warcraft and social networks with ‘rooms’ like Cyworld) for the panel on “Legal Developments in Virtual Reality” at the American Bar Association’s Second Annual National Institute on CyberLaw. I shared the limelight with gaming lawyer Sean Kane, IBM’s legal strategist for virtual worlds Steve Mortinger, and Mark Rasch, with Andy Grosso moderating.
In my remarks, I advise folks to keep an eye out for these Virtual World trends: open source to create your own worlds, public grids, virtual workspaces, serious gaming, casual gaming, and the return of virtual reality technologies (now that we have more interesting places to visit, maybe it’s time to start digging those gloves and goggles out of the closet).
The legal types seem to be most interested in virtual property rights and regulating money transactions, but we had time to talk about fun stuff like the virtual ’strike’ against IBM in Second Life. A continuing point of controversy: the terms of service for most virtual worlds give users little recourse if a company decides to suspend or delete their account. But what if I built and furnished my whole mansion online?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Gaming, IT & Society, Virtual worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 
Have your say
Fields in bold are required. Email addresses are never published or distributed.
Some HTML code is allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>URIs must be fully qualified (eg: http://www.domainname.com) and all tags must be properly closed.
Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted.
Please keep comments relevant. Off-topic, offensive or inappropriate comments may be edited or removed.