Today, I attended Metanomics session with David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute. Wortley spoke a bit about the Serious Games Institute(SGI). I was busy with a bunch of other things at the same time and didn’t give it as much attention as I would have liked. The one thing that jumped out at me was their use of SGI’s use of Forterra. They like Forterra because of its integration with other tools. Hopefully, Linden Lab and/or OpenSim will come up with tools to facilitate creating better objects in the Second Life/OpenSim space.

David Wortley talks about Serious Games, originally uploaded by Aldon.

This was followed by the discussion about Rights and Responsibilities in Virtual Worlds with Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, Robin Harper, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from Linden Lab, and Jack Balkin, professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.

Rights and Responsibilities in Virtual Worlds, originally uploaded by Aldon.

The time was too short and the discussion was too broad to be very interesting. If anything, all that it did was reinforce my opinion about the Lindens being out of touch with the community they created. Robin Linden seemed especially concerned with the privacy. She used it as an excuse for why Linden Lab was not making their jurisprudence more transparent. She also expressed concern about people gathering information about who is visiting their site in SL, and didn’t address the question about how it compared to web sites where even more information could be gathered.

Then, out of the blue on a completely different list, I received an email about Lufthansa’s effort to get people to think about all the European cities they fly to. It is a great little game where you can see how well you know your European geography and improve a little on it.

Here are my initial results:

It seems like a great illustration of a brand using a game to give something back to people interested in the brand.