Machinima Western Movie

Through role-playing, Second Life users created the Arizona town of Sigil set in the period 1860-1890. Sigil was the first, and most-developed Second Life Western role-playing simulation. Make note that it was a simulation of the West, not the Arizona town itself; Sigil was a fictitious town created from the imaginations of users [...]

Your ‘Second Life’ on the net

Protecting your online identity isn’t limited to our real lives, but our “Second Lives” as well. Linden Lab recently announced that they’re going to charge users to customize their SL first and last names - the “virtual equivalent of vanity plates” according to the AP. Does it matter if my avatar shares my [...]

Your ‘first life’ on the net

Evolution is a data-mining tool that searches archived information including cached websites, DNS records, phone records and IP email addresses. This information has been on the net for a long time, however the goal of Evolution is to map this information together and visualize a person’s online activity. The web version is in [...]

Introducing Sigil

Over the past year I’ve been studying the Oregon Trail computer game and looking at the manifestation of cultural ideas and history within computer simulations - notably the inaccuracies in representing gender roles and race within the game. A natural outgrowth of this research has brought me to Second Life where there are “Wild [...]

updates all around

As many of my visitors have noted over the past several months, there hasn’t been much activity on my personal website for some time - here’s a recap:
In January I moved to Washington, DC to pursue a fellowship at Georgetown University working on the Crossroads Project. Much of my time has been spent developing [...]