living in a virtual world gives us the status of citizen there, and our rights have to be recognized and enforced.

- Virtual Citizens Association [1]

Introduction

These pages cover metaverses, 3D worlds and trends, and immersive gaming worlds, as well as Play Ethic developments. See Pat Kane's summary of the Impact of Play on Business Organization

To put the trend toward P2P-based virtual worlds into the context of gaming developments, please read this introduction by Gwendal Simon.

Check out the typology of Virtual Worlds; Clay Shirky argues that Multi-players Games and Non-gaming Metaverses are Fundamentally Different

We support the goals of the Organization for Transformative Works

Resources

Key Articles

1. Games as P2P Utopia: Alexander Galloway on the World of Warcraft and Utopia
2. Game Modding and Education: excerpts of a thesis on using entertainment for eduction, that goes beyond the failed edutainment model.
3. The Power of Play: essay by Pat Kane for Soundings magazine. In conversation with Ephemara in Dialoguing Play
4. What is Play?. Toward a Universal Definition. By Gwen Gordon.
5. Integral Play. Developmental levels in play. By Gwen Gordon.

Also:

Short intro but with lots of links to critical and independent gaming culture.

Key Blogs

The Play Ethic blog of Pat Kane. Watch or listen to Pat Kane on the Play Ethic

Key Books

1. Bernie DeKoven explains Coliberation strategies in his book The Well-Played Game
2. Pat Kane. The Play Ethic
3. Pat Kane reviews the books Synthetic Worlds and Second Lives
4. McKenzie Wark, whose Hacker Manifesto is a classic for our times, has published a new draft book open for discussion, on Gamer Theory
5. Ed Halter's book, From Sun Tzu to Xbox "a definitive history of the longstanding relationship between games and military culture, from wargaming's roots in ancient civilizations, to the Cold War development of computing for battle, to a recent crop of Pentagon-funded shoot-'em-ups, big-budget commercial titles and homemade hacks".
6. Barbara Ehrenreich. Dancing in the Streets. A history of collective joy

Key Experts

1. Pat Kane
2. McKenzie Wark
3. Gwen Gordon

Key Tags

Delicious Tag: P2P Gaming ; Play Ethic

Various Links

1. Wikipedia has a list of open source games
2. Liberated Games has a list of free, legal games for download

Known Distributed Systems

• NPSNET (Naval Postgraduate Scholl of Moterey)
• Spline (Mistsubishi Elecronic Research Laboratory)
• Massive (University of Nottingham)
• Continuum (France Telecom R&D)
• Score (INRIA)
• Open Source Metaverse Project
• Croquet Project
• Virtual Object System
• VREng: Interactive and Distributed 3D Application over the Internet using Unicast or Multicast

Studies on Gamers

• The Psychology of MMORPGs
• The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments

Some Open Source 3D Tools

• Ogre, open source real time 3D rendering engine
• OpenSceneGraph, open source high peformance 3D graphics toolkit
• Blender, open source software for 3D modeling and rendering
• Xfrog, a procedural 3d organic modeling and animation software program
• X3D, Open Standards XML-enabled 3D file format
• Panda 3D, a free animation system in Python, created by Disney and the Carnegie Mellon University

P2P Gaming Concepts