Andrew Phelps has dug up an absolutely astonishing story: "[...] the thing that blew me away was a fairly recent development on the Stormhammer Server of Sony's Everquest Legends. The names here are removed to protect the innocent, and most of the threads I read on this have now been deleted which is why I [almost] think its ok to talk about. It seems that one of the "guilds" on the Stormhammer server has recently had a moment of crises with it's guild leadership. The group of RL (real life) friends that formed the guild apparently had a very different purpose than those intended by Verant and Sony Online Entertainment. After months of leading the guild on several high-end raids and gaining all kinds of in-game items and loot, this group of friends took those items from the guild vault and sold them on Ebay, and then vanished from the server. Online identity and trust issues abound. But before you dismiss this as 'oh, well, who really cares about some gold pieces and magic swords that are really just numbers in a database', take a good look at what's happening in online communities of this size. One economic study by California State University at Northridge Professor Edward Castronova placed Norrath (the virtual world of Everquest) as the 77th richest world economy, based on the value of the items in the world adjusted to their value in then-current Ebay auctions. This was reported in WIRED and several other sources. So the folks that perpetrated this virtual heist won out with what could have amounted to thousands of dollars in US currency. Now, this is devious, I suppose, but I personally know people who make money starting new characters, powerlevelling them up to god-like status, and then selling them off and starting again. Any cheat program or automated levelling system is just an advantage to reduce the time between character creation and profit on investment. So what makes this different? In a word, trust. What's interesting as a social phenomenon is the idea that people are willing to sell "virtual relationships" and/or reputation for real world currency. [...]" In my opinion it's even more interesting, that there are people who are willing to BUY "virtual relationships" and/or reputation! Now where has the difference between "real and virtual" gone? :o via Got Game?

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We are proud to announce the latest issue of Reconstruction (vol.3, no.2), a journal and online community dedicated to interdisciplinary thought. Included in this issue are:

In line with our efforts to foster intellectual community, Reconstruction also hosts a message board dedicated to interaction between authors and readers, and between readers themselves, hoping to affect a more communal approach to, and understanding of, academic journals and intellectual thought and action. Please take the time to participate in this experiment in community.

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Ever thought about the eurocentric picture a world map has ? The german Arno Peters did and developed a map of the world, allowing all countries to have equal representation. Unfortunately Peters deceased on 2nd of December last year, but his thoughts remain alive at: projectone.cla.umn.edu

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" Archaeologists have found the oldest image yet of an Andean religious icon. The 4,000-year-old carving of the Staff god - a fanged creature with splayed feet, holding a snake and a staff - is on a bowl made from a seed pod.", reports Nature. You can read the story in german at Spiegel Online.

Its a great found, I agree. There are some deities in andean culture, which you can trace thousands of years back through all the different cultures and times. Most popular was the feline, which is alive still today in many religions of south american indians (of course, its appearance is not need to be caused by cultural exchange). Before this newest finding, the earliest appearance of the staff god, not mentioned in the articles, was the Chavin Culture. A impressive stone, Raimondi Stone, clearly shows the staff god. Chavin, and the mentioned Tiwanaku Culture have been very different. Between them have been a lot of other cultures worshipping the staff god, among them Paracas and Ica. So, it`s interesting, that now they have found proof of a culture before Chavin, also worshipping the staff god. Another deity from Chavin was the so called "Smiling God", which is shown on a huge stone called El Lanzon. But this god probably was only from local importance.

For further reading on the Chavin Culture I recommend this paper from one of the most achknowledged scientist reasearching chavin culture, John Rowe.

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Just read an old interview from the year 97, in which Pattie Maes one of the leading artificial life researchers talked about the impact of personal software agents on the way we view our world: Interviewer: "It occurs to me that in contrast to processes like browsing in a library or on the Web, which expose you to new ideas, systems like Firefly give users data that's very narrow in scope. Will people's horizons be narrowed if they rely on personal agents?" Maes: "This is a very valid concern, but one which can be dealt with through good user interface design. If an agent only gives you what you like or what you ask for, then your view of the world will become more and more narrow. It's important to integrate the agent interface into a direct manipulation interface, or to integrate agent recommendations within an existing system where the user can also browse...."

But existing popular search engines like google dont interact with me. You can tell google a thousand times that the result of the query is quite interesting but you although would like to hear some other point of view . Google will ignore you and so step by step all people get google's opinion.So don't get me wrong, Ithink the web is a great invention but isnt it also narrowing our view? P.S.: the interview with Pattie Maes is available here.

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Lars Risan, an anthropologist from the University of Oslo spend 8 month at an artificial life lab in Sussex, England and wrote an interesting anthropological study about the "small tribe of Artificial Life researchers"....

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This article from BBC reports about a study which is disprooving the stereotype of a pimple-faced teenager locked in his bedroom. With 540 questionaires, it seems to be a huge study and it would be interesting to hear more about it if its finished. Via Slashdot

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Torill Mortensen is an assistant professor at Volda College. She is writing a weblog about Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs), media studies and reader-response theory, role-play games and online communication, called "thinking with my fingers". And she just submitted a Ph. D. thesis on Computer Games in the beginning of March 2003, to the Faculty of the Arts, University of Bergen. The title is Pleasures of the Player: Flow and Control in Online Games.

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Lisbeth Klastrup is Assistant Professor at the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication (DIAC) at the IT University of Copenhagen. She just reached in her Ph.D. thesis: Towards a poetics of virtual worlds: multi-user textuality and the emergence of story. Abstract will be online soon. And she's writing a research diary with a lot of interesting information on persistent online worlds, games and interactive stories (selfdescription).

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The study was originally presented in the Science Magazine (only for subscribers - students from Munich University can access it from our library pc's)

As cannibalism is always worth a headline (the engraving above, used in early newspapers is 500 years old), also NYTimes (free subscription necessary) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (11.4.03, Panorama) are reporting. National Geographic even titles "Cannibalism Normal For Early Humans?". Which is a bit overdrawn, I think, as the whole assumption already seems to be mainly speculation.

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Where's the connection between the ancient culture of the Mayas, the web-language XML and stylesheets? For an answer let's first time-warp back to 1989. Tim Berners Lee 'invented' the WWW and shortly afterwards the markup-language HTML surfaced -- created for the inter-human communication. For this means HTML was an ingeniously simple language by which thoughts easily could be transformed into pictures and given a shape. But soon HTML showed to be insufficient for being handled by machines. Machines don't understand the semantics of pictures, and HTML unifies shape and semantics of a website into one document. Therefore XML was developed which follows the paradigm of structurized documents. Content, structure and shape are separated. XML has the content and an XLS-stylesheet covers the shape of a modern web-document. But alas, this thought of splitting-up a piece of information into content and shape isn't new at all. The Mayas already were knowladgeable of this strategy/technology. On March 21st and September 23rd the shadows cast by the sun reveal a winding serpent at the pyramid of Kukulacan at Chichen Itza -- proof of the aforementioned strategy. The information to be carried, the serpent, represents the XML-document. The sun and the pyramid's architecture constitute a kind of stylesheet, which gives structure and shape to the serpent. Now -- are the Mayas the founding-fathers of the paradigm of structurized documents?

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