Dr. Jimmie Ivory in Communications here on campus has been working extremely hard to initiate a gamer/virtual worlds colloquium series on campus. His hard work has paid off as the first speak in the series will be Dr. Dmitri Williams from the Annenberg School at USC. More on his talk follows:

2009 VT G.A.M.E.R. Lab Virtual Guest Scholar
(via videoconference)

Dr. Dmitri Williams
Annenberg School for Communication,
University of Southern California

“The mapping principle and other oddities:
Recent findings from the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium”

Thursday, 26 February 2009
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.    
123A Burruss Hall

• Open to all Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students.
• Scholar’s presentation will be followed by Q&A and discussion.

Dmitri Williams is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Southern California. His research
interests lie in the social impacts of newcommunication technologies and
online communities, with a special interest in games and virtual worlds.

More on the series and upcoming talks can be found on the series flyer.

We’ve managed to wrestle together playtesting teams for the spring 2009 semester…the titles being destroyed are these:

• Civilization IV
• Spore
• Second Life

The Second Life team may be at a slight disadvantage seeing that Spore and Civilization IV are slighlty more compact…nevertheless, I don’t think it’s fair to say that they’ve been given too big a handicap ;^)…