Croquet 2 Play

Matthew Schmidt has provided a nice intro to launching a Croquet world programmatically. If you found it helpful you may want to view(or review) these pages from the Croquet Consortium site while waiting for his next installment:

• Getting Started: Starting Croquet
• Programming: Simple World

If you’re itching for more right now, you might try to understand what the quick and dirty path has in common with the route taken by Simple World. To do that you need to find out where and how the SimpleWorld class is used. Read more

EduTechie lists 7 Ways Croquet is Better Than Second Life.  I also recently ran across this interesting Greenbush Edusim Slidecast. There are numerous Croquet videos at the main Greenbush site along with links to their Second Life island.

The song Paradigm on George Clinton’s recent CD How Late Do U Have 2 B B 4 U R Absent? closes with the statement “The virtual is real”.

As hard as this may be to believe, there is real money changing hands among the players in these games, Bowen reports. An estimated $1 billion worldwide is spent by users buying and selling virtual goods, such as furniture for virtual houses and clothing for their avatars. But it’s paid for with real-world credit cards — at Second Life alone, $6 million a month.Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality?, Living Online — With Dream House, Job, Friends — May Be Preferable For Some - CBS News

It shouldn’t be so surprising that people are making money in virtual economies. People buy things that are outside the human sense of touch all the time. People pay for MRIs and satellite radio signals and Wall Street is a virtual world where people trade in “financial instruments“. All of these have the same real existence as goods in virtual worlds - bits on a disk. Physics agrees with this. A bit on a disk is as physical as your fingers, it’s made up of the same atoms bound together with the same laws of subatomic physics. As the song says - “let the shakin begin”.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Wow: 3D operating system, Open Croquet
We’re getting a demo of Croquet from Julian Lombardi and David Smith of Open Croquet, which is a 3D world. Something like Second Life, but runs P2P.

We have just seen a new world.

Real diplomacy from the virtual world | CNET News.com
Eric Brown and Asi Burak think a strategy game, of all things, could help forge a new level of understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their game, known as “Peacemaker,” is all about tearing down decades-old walls of mistrust between the two peoples, all the while turning one of the best-understood video game dynamics on its head. In the game, players assume leadership responsibilities on both sides of the conflict as they face real-life issues, such as diplomatic negotiations and military attacks, that divide the camps.

“The public often sees press on all the negative aspects of games. This is a fight, in a way, for better games.”
–Jean Miller, project manager, Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds competition

“It’s a strategy game that’s typical in form,” said Eric Brown, a graduate student in interactive educational design at Carnegie-Mellon University, “except we inverted the model, so it’s not a war game. The point is to make peace with the other side.”

What Croquet’s model brings to this conversation is the possibility that individuals and small groups can choose to establish and pursue world changing agendas independently of large entities - be they governments or corporations. Instead of a handful of huge IPO’s emerging from this wave Imagine instead hundreds of OpenIPOs and thousands of very prosperous privately held entities that choose to evolve more self-sustaining and wholistic community ecosystems.