Geek Gestalt

The Institute for the Future is launching a series of what it calls 'massively multiplayer forecasting games' designed to help researchers come up with solutions to long-term global problems. The first game, Superstruct, will launch October 6.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line.

Over at Venture Beat this morning, Dean Takahashi has a piece about what appears to be a fairly well developed in-game advertising program that has been under stealth development at Google.

"Sources close to the matter said the company has developed an in-game advertising technology that allows it to insert video ads into games," Takahashi wrote. "In demos of the technology, a game character can introduce a video ad, saying something like, 'And now, a word from our sponsor,' before showing a short video at the end of a sequence in a game."

He also wrote that Google is pretty far along in the development of this initiative and could launch it soon, if it wanted to.

Of course, when and if Google does launch the program, it will hardly stand alone in the in-game ad market. Rather, that market already has one 800-pound gorilla, Massive, which is owned by Microsoft. In addition, IGA Worldwide, Double Fusion, and others, like Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell's NeoEdge, are working on inserting advertisements into just about every kind of game.

On the other hand, none of those outfits, even Massive, have Google's ability to dramatically alter the playing field when it comes to new venues for ads.

Some, including Takahashi, question why Google hasn't gotten into the game earlier, particularly because "the seeds of AdSense for Games were planted in early 2007."

Either way, the field seems to have room for Google and the other players. One reason--which I have lamented before and will continue to each time this topic comes up--is that studies have shown that video game players actually like in-game ads because it makes their experience more realistic. As in, because there are ads everywhere we go in real life, finding them in games means our playing experiences have more veritas.

To which I sigh.

Google and the established in-game ad providers, however, see green at the end of that reality check. The Yankee Group has predicted that the in-game ad market could be worth nearly $1 billion by 2011. And while that is the kind of money that Google finds under the cushions of its couches, it's still nothing to sneeze at.

There's a major kerfuffle going on at Second Life publisher Linden Lab.

According to the virtual world blog Massively, Linden Lab CTO and employee No. 4 Cory Ondrejka has been asked by CEO Philip Rosedale to leave the company.

And Linden Lab itself has confirmed that Ondrejka is leaving, though it hasn't publicly explained whether he was fired or left on his own.

Either way, this is very big news in the Second Life world because Ondrejka has been there from the beginning, wrote the Linden Scripting Language and has been the engineering lead all along.

But according to an e-mail posted Tuesday by Massively that appears to be from Rosedale to Linden Lab employees, he fired Ondrejka over irreconcilable differences.

Here is the text of that purported internal e-mail written by Rosedale, which, it should be noted, was provided to Massively by someone presenting themselves as a Linden Lab employee:

"Cory is going to leave LL. He has been with us for 7 years, and was the fourth person to join. So this is a big deal. Cory has been a huge part of the company, having designed big parts of SL, hired many people, contributed greatly to the culture, and given a powerful voice to SL and LL. Among other things, he had the original design idea for the love machine, single handedly wrote the scripting language, and got us all doing A&Os back in 2001. Losing him will be hard for the company. I will miss him a lot. What's worse is that ultimately his leaving is my decision.

"Cory and I have differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable. These are tensions that were more manageable when we were smaller, and there have been times that they have helped us do great work together. But now, as we change and grow as a company, I feel that we need a different set of strengths in engineering leadership. I strongly believe that this is the right decision, although not without pain, for both LL and Cory. Of course, I'm not going to go into the details of these differences. This is one of those times when, in having me as your leader, you will also have to trust me in my decision."

If this situation is for real, it would be pretty big news. As any regular user of Second Life knows, the virtual world has many technical problems that have gone unfixed for years. Who exactly has overseen attempts to address those problems is not entirely clear to me, though Ondrejka, as CTO, certainly had some oversight.

On the other hand, as CEO, Rosedale obviously also has oversight over such issues.

All we can say for now is that Linden Lab seems to be in a bit of a state of chaos, and that's certain to last as the dust settles.

Stay tuned for more on this.

Update, 8:17 p.m. PST: In an e-mail response to a query from CNET News.com, Linden Lab provided a statement. Further, a Linden Lab representative said someone would be in touch on Wednesday.

The statement, issued on behalf of Rosedale, read: "I can confirm that Cory Ondrejka, CTO, will be leaving Linden Lab at the end of this year, in order to pursue new professional challenges outside the company. I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Cory for his tremendous contribution to the company and to Second Life, in terms of its original vision and ongoing progress.

"As it grows, the needs of our company are changing, and the role of CTO, or technical lead, has also evolved. Therefore, Cory and I are in agreement that our paths, at this point in time at least, lie in different directions. During Cory's tenure the engineering team has grown tremendously, and given the breadth and depth of our technical expertise, we do not foresee any impact on our development plans.

"Together, we've produced great things in the development of Second Life, and I know Cory will go on to achieve excellence in his chosen field.?