« PREVIOUS ENTRY
Altoids: The curiously weird role-playing game
NEXT ENTRY »
Oolong, the “head performance” bunny
For a decade now, cybercheating has been an ethically weird question in online behavior. What precisely, constitutes, cheating? Hot chat with someone outside your marriage? Webcamming yourself for other people? Googlestalking ex-spouses?
Now there’s a new dimension to think about: Avatar relationships. Inside online multiplayer games, plenty of people have virtual hookups. I’ve talked to women who have virtual husbands inside Everquest, who they’ve “married” in well-attended online virtual marriages, and with whom they share their virtual property. Yet these women are also married in real life; sometimes their husbands know they’ve got online partners, and don’t care.
Psychologists have long noticed that the combination of distance and pseudoanonymity on the Internet tends to unlock people’s ids — hence all the flame wars, the UPPER CASE SHOUTING, and the rampant flirting in chat rooms. I think the addition of 3D avatars in games adds a new dimension to this behavior, because people can get pretty psychoactively charged by their new bodies. When I went into the online world There for the first time, I was kind of stunned at how hot all the avatars were; they were like some freakishly potent remix of anime and J. Crew sensibilities. So it didn’t surprise me to discover that online cheating in virtual worlds has begun to boom, and that many real-life partners aren’t too thrilled about it.
In fact, over at his brilliant New World Notes blog, James Wagner Au — the first journalist to be “embedded” in a virtual world, Second Life — recently reported on a new phenomenon: Virtual-world detectives who you can pay to put a tail on your partner and find out if he or she is cheating. One of the detectives is a woman; she’s pictured above. Another is Bruno Buckenberger, who describes his job thusly:
To prove their case, Bruno prefers that his agents take an incriminating screenshot with the target— or just as good, have the agent teleport the client right to their location, to catch their unfaithful partner in a compromising position.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
New technique renders objects at sea “invisible” to waves of water
Poll: Young people who use landlines are more conservative than those who use mobile phones
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
North Dakota the most outgoing state, according to study of “the geography of personality”
» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
» see all of my photos on Flickr
ECHO
Erik Weissengruber
Vespaboy
Terri Senft
Tom Igoe
El Rey Del Art
Morgan Noel
Maura Johnston
Cori Eckert
Heather Gold
Andrew Hearst
Chris Allbritton
Bret Dawson
Michele Tepper
Sharyn November
Gail Jaitin
Barnaby Marshall
Frankly, I'd Rather Not
The Shifted Librarian
Ryan Bigge
Nick Denton
Howard Sherman's Nuggets
Serial Deviant
Ellen McDermott
Jeff Liu
Marc Kelsey
Chris Shieh
Iron Monkey
Diversions
Rob Toole
Donut Rock City
Ross Judson
Idle Words
J-Walk Blog
The Antic Muse
Tribblescape
Little Things
Jeff Heer
Abstract Dynamics
Snark Market
Plastic Bag
Sensory Impact
Incoming Signals
MemeFirst
MemoryCard
Majikthise
Ludonauts
Boing Boing
Slashdot
Atrios
Smart Mobs
Plastic
Ludology.org
The Feature
Gizmodo
game girl
Mindjack
Techdirt Wireless News
Corante Gaming blog
Corante Social Software blog
ECHO
SciTech Daily
Arts and Letters Daily
Textually.org
BlogPulse
Robots.net
Alan Reiter's Wireless Data Weblog
Brad DeLong
Viral Marketing Blog
Gameblogs
Slashdot Games
