Virtual Worlds

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to the mega-popular online game, sold 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours last week, setting what its publisher said is an all-time record for PC games.

According to Blizzard Entertainment, Wrath of the Lich King, broke the one-day PC game sales record of 2.4 million copies, which was set 22 months earlier by The Burning Crusade, the first WoW expansion.

The new expansion was launched simultaneously in North America, Europe, Chile, Argentina, and Russia.

And at $40 a copy, the game would have brought in $… Read more

Once thought to be its answer to virtual worlds like Second Life, Google's Lively launched this summer to much fanfare.

Lively was Web-based and allowed anyone to set up virtual spaces, such as rooms, that could be embedded onto blogs or Facebook pages.

But the project never picked up much steam.

Now, Google has decided to shut the project down.

"Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year," Google said on its … Read more

If you knew the human race was facing imminent extinction, what would you do?

For the folks at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, creating a fictional scenario in which five "superthreats" have coalesced in 2019 to augur the end of the human race by 2042 became the basis for a new alternate-reality game (ARG) in which players the world over have been weighing in with ideas for staving off disaster.

The game the IFTF created, known as Superstruct, launched October 6, and is the first of what could be many so-called … Read more

q&a Mark Kingdon became Linden Lab CEO in May, when founder Philip Rosedale stepped aside to take a more active role in developing Second Life.

The hype surrounding virtual worlds a year ago appears to have died down in recent months, but when Silicon.com caught up with him, Kingdon was keen to point out that there's still life in Second Life.

Q: What's happened to the hype? Kingdon: It would be a huge mistake to assume hype and success are interchangeable. Hype is born from anticipation, intrigue, and excitement, and as such, it naturally settles … Read more

While Macs have long been the preferred computer of the creative class, gamers have generally looked at the machines and said, essentially, thanks but no thanks.

That tech truism could be on the verge of disappearing forever in the wake of Apple's announcement Tuesday that the newest high-end MacBook Pro model will have the graphics processing firepower--thanks to the inclusion of the Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT chip--to finally give hard-core video game players what they want.

"It's more of a gaming machine than the old MacBook Pro," said Mike Schramm, a blogger who writes for both … Read more

After fighting off an unsolicited buyout offer and reviewing its options with other potential suitors over the past five months, Take-Two Interactive Software announced on Thursday it has decided to remain an independent company.

Take-Two, publisher of the popular video game franchise Grand Theft Auto and other titles, said it has completed its strategic review and determined that it would like to continue operating as an independent entity, following a couple of strong quarterly results.

"Take-Two's recent performance demonstrates our potential to create value for the long term. We have delivered solid financial results and expanded our portfolio … Read more

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. … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--How do you fine tune a game that has been long in the making and is just a couple of months from going public?

That was the central question behind a focus group I sat in on Tuesday, as the developers behind the wildly popular casual virtual world Gaia Online invited seven devoted players to put zOMG, their new massively multiplayer online game, through its paces.

During the session, which lasted about two hours, the seven players--five women and two men ranging in age from 19 to 25--were asked to pound away at zOMG in a bid … Read more

It seems you're never too young for virtual worlds and social networking, at least that's what Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp thinks.

In a room filled with cupcakes and cotton candy, the company launched its new Web site for "tweens" on Tuesday on ABC's Good Morning America set in Times Square. The site, which is targeted specifically at the age group of 6- to 12-year-old girls, allows users to dress up avatars, decorate virtual bedrooms, and shop in virtual malls.

It's called ZwinkyCuties.com, and is a spin-off of IAC's teen Web site for … Read more