http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw Just another WordPress weblog Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:03:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Interesting new snapshot report on the use of Virtual Worlds in Higher Education available at: http://virtualworldwatch.net/2009/10/19/choosing-virtual-worlds-for-use-in-teaching-and-learning-in-uk-higher-education/ Second Life and OpenSim appear to be the most widely used systems. http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=177 Proposed revisions to the OAIS reference model have now been released in draft form and are available at http://cwe.ccsds.org/moims/docs/MOIMS-DAI/Draft%20Documents/OAIS-candidate-V2-markup.pdf.  A lot to digest in here, but the more substantive changes seem to include access rights information as a new and separate class of information to be supported in an information ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=146 Ian Bogost has an article up describing work done by some of his students at Georgia Tech to try to modify Stella, an emulator for the Atari 2600 platform, so that it would accurately reproduce the visual appearance of a game being played on a CRT when the game is ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=145 Following on the all intellectual property/all the time Play Machinima Law conference, here's an excellent article by Waheedan Jariwalla (via Peter Brantley) on determining the copyright status of works in the United States.  Kind of frightening in its implications for the amount of work involved in determining exactly when something ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=141 What better way to advertise a conference on machinima and intellectual property law than with machinima?  Kudos to Joshua Diltz for creating this ad for the upcoming Play Machinima Law conference. More details on the conference can be found at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society website http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=135 The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures has a new issue out devoted entirely to games as tranformative works.  One particularly interesting article, "The everyday lives of video game developers: experimentally understanding underlying systems/structures," is based on three years of ethnographic study of game developers in both the U.S. and ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=131 Apparently, the United States government failed to keep detailed records on the manufacture of a critical component of the nuclear warheads on Trident missles.  They are now spending large sums of money trying to figure out how to manufacture it again.  While this is obviously a rather horrifying slip up, ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=129 Short article over at MTV Multiplayer, with a quote from a Sony exec indicating that they are interested in making retro games, including ones for non-Sony platforms available over the PSN network for use on the PSP.  I'm trying to think of a way to do this in a manageable ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=127 Using the Source engine from Half-Life 2, researchers in the CS department at Durham University modeled their own building to use for virtual fire drills, to familiarize people with exit paths and look for problems in the building design.  BBC has the details.  I think it's fairly clear at this ... http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=124 The iPRES 2009 Conference will be hosted by the California Digital Library at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA on Oct. 5-6, 2009.  Preliminary announcement is available here. http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/?p=122