From my column, today:

Star Trek Online is far easier to learn than Eve, however. And I like that it encourages avatar-to-avatar interactions off the battlefield, much like World of Warcraft (www.worldofwarcraft.com), which STO more closely resembles, with its use of inventories and its style of play.

(I can see STO becoming a fun place to hold scholarly meetings, as is WoW.)

via Star Trek offering is mission ready – The Boston Globe.

Not looking too good: A PS3 Home avatar takes a moment to herself. CC/Annabeth Robinson

A Washington Post columnist notes the seemingly hard times that have befallen inworld-types, in a bit about Sony’s “Home”:

Google, for example, is pulling the plug on Lively, a virtual environment it launched earlier this year. And news service Reuters is shuttering a virtual bureau it had opened in the once-buzzworthy Second Life. In a farewell note posted last month, reporter Eric Krangel confessed that he found using the service “about as fun as watching paint dry.”

via Mike Musgrove – PS3′s Virtual Home Is Inhospitable – washingtonpost.com.

But things are about to take a turn for the better in virtual worlds.

My 2009-2012 prediction (it’ll happen somewhere in there): Every internet user will acquire (or be assigned) an avatar of his own.

Rambam found “the accused” catting around in the guise of a dominatrix.

Rambam often says that “privacy is dead.”

Rambam, a/k/a Steve Rombom, has a colorful history, too.

He also has at least one peculiar enemy, who says he is revealing Rambam’s own secrets.

Reuters/Second Life » Avatars beware: Private investigators scouring Second Life
Rambam’s client told him this story: Twenty years ago as a child, he had been molested by one of his grade school teachers, a trauma he never fully recovered from. “The client believes/d that pedophiles don’t ‘retire’ — I absolutely agree — and he wanted to prevent the target from molesting anyone else,” Rambam said in an email. “We were retained to investigate, gather evidence, and if evidence was found then convince the target to retire from teaching.”

So Rambam started looking into his target — now an assistant principal — and discovered the man was a Second Life user. Pallorium investigators logged into Second Life and tracked down the man’s avatar, only to discover his Second Life identity was a leather-clad dominatrix.

from Mark:

High-profile virtual worlders are trying to correct what they see as misrepresentations by Parallelnormal of their recent meetings and events.

One of them, Second Lifer “Dale Innis,” writes a comment blasting my comparison of real and virtual versions of New England, and my description of a conference about the convergence of reality with virtual reality.

“(You) drastically misread your sources about the WoW conference and the Extropia sims, and you seem to do the same thing in many places where Second Life is involved,” Innis writes.

Innis in real life (RL) is IBM researcher David M. Chess.

IBM has built inworld stores for big box retailers.

Chess is working to develop autonomic technologies, which are self-aware and can fix themselves.

Chess, speaking for himself, and not IBM, denies that Extropia and the World of Warcraft conference “are in fact about transhumanism.”

Yet the WoW conference was organized by a transhumanist, and one who views the world’s major religions as an obstacle to the advancement of his own beliefs.

And extropians, by their own definition, are transhumanists, real or imagined.

(A meeting of the minds, at “Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft.” Image: from the Convergentsystems wiki)

by Mark Baard

Virtual worlders, led by a so-called “convergenist” from the National Science Foundation, met this week to discuss one of their plans for humankind: capturing individual personalities onto computers, and transmitting them into other worlds.

Rather than meeting in the real world, attendees at the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference brought their swords and leopards, and their idealized bodies (big muscles, big boobs) to a space in World of Warcraft, an online massively multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG.

The NSF sociologist who organized the WoW scientific meeting, William Sims Bainbridge [sic], has taken the form of a “level 65 (out of 70) blood elf priest” in the game, which claims more than nine million players.

Part of Bainbridge’s job, as director of the NSF’s Human-Centered Computing Cluster, is to direct young researchers into areas of “future research,” including “immersive and multi-sensory technologies, and direct brain-computer interfaces.”

For the WoW meeting, Bainbridge described how human consciousnesses might be uploaded to virtual worlds (at least in Battlestar Galactica, they call it “downloading”).

He also described how virtual humans might be made governable:

(Virtual world) participants are much less likely to be guided by religious belief, and more likely to prefer the suspension of disbelief associated with science fiction and fantasy. So, we can expect that virtual worlds will prototype many social innovations that might then diffuse to offline governance, while often preaching sedition.

Bainbridge spent some of his younger days in a Scientology splinter group, and is considered by some academics to be a religious expert.

But Bainbridge is also a religious hero, to the transhumanists, who hope to accelerate the convergence of real and virtual reality, as well as genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (Ray Kurzweil’s GNR).

In addition to recruiting its partnerships with the NSF, NASA and other governmental agencies, the extropians court Hollywood stars such as William Shatner, and academics at Yale and Oxford.

Some transhumanists call themselves extropians, others, convergenists. Some also use a different convergence acronym, NBIC, which represents nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.

Like Scientologists, transhumanists appear to brook little dissent, and seem eager to silence their critics. When Bainbridge meets with Second Lifers in a few weeks, for example, he will be hosted by a group of transhumanists “too busy building the future we want to spare time on unconstructive criticism.”

That unconstructive criticism, say the transhumanists, is any that comes from those who do not “share our goals and values.”