Lounging by a bright blue pool, Kyndra and Cami, stars of MTV’s hit reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, chat with a bunch of other teenagers. Kyndra’s white bikini shows off an artificially enhanced figure, while Cami’s dark skin glows against an unnaturally bright blue sky. This is Laguna Beach, after a fashion, but it isn’t the TV show. It’s a live appearance, a chance for the show’s bitchiest characters to hang with some of the 2 million viewers who tune in to their breakups and hookups every Wednesday night. As the pool fills up with fans, someone asks why the girls are always so mean to fellow cast member Tessa. Kyndra shrugs: “We just don’t like her personally.” Cami can’t be bothered to answer; she’s busy tongue wrestling with some hipster dude in sunglasses.

Kyndra and Cami are kind of fake—and not just in the catty teenage sense of the word. The two girls by the pool are computerized 3-D replicas of the cast members, who are using mouse and keyboard to navigate their avatars through a multiplayer online environment known as Virtual Laguna Beach. Anyone with a PC and a broadband connection can join them.

You want your MTV? These days, that means going virtual.

Read the complete text at Wired.

An online game is an odd place to have your reputation precede you. But that’s exactly what happened to me not long ago in the massively multiplayer universe of EVE Online. My character there, a spaceship pilot named Walker Spaight, was minding his own business one day when I got a message from another player, who wanted to know if I was “the same Walker Spaight from Second Life,” another 3D online world.

Read the complete text at PC World.

The last 12 months have seen the virtual world of Second Life leap into the media spotlight, with a cover story in Business Week, a feature in Popular Science, and any number of other appearances in magazines, newspapers, radio and television. But does the reality of this virtual reality live up to the hype?

To the skeptics, many of whom have seen 3D platforms like VRML come and go leaving nothing but virtual corpses in their wake, Second Life is little more than the latest passing fad. But for the 400-plus Second Life “residents” who showed up for the second annual Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco, their world is nothing less than a revolution in Internet technologies.

They and the world’s half million other users heard their viewpoint backed up at the convention by Mitch Kapor, who came on the technology scene at a time when it looked like the personal computer itself might never catch on.

Read the complete text at Gamasutra.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m standing in an empty, starlit field in the virtual world of Second Life. In the distance is a low-polygon-count shopping mall. But at my feet, there’s only pixelated grassland – a simple green texture that repeats to the edges of the computer screen.

Just hours ago, a lavish mansion stood here. It was a custom job built for a player known as BallerMoMo King, whose blinged-out avatar carries a diamond-studded cane and is never without his posse of bodyguards and harem of “MoMo hos.” Baller is one of Second Life’s most notorious gangsters, famous for hiring talented residents to script weapons that can bounce an avatar across the gamespace and bombs that produce enough smoke and fire to occasionally crash a server. It seems Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, has had enough. The MoMo mansion – and Baller’s account – has been erased.

Read the complete text at Wired.

Boston, the Harvard Faculty Club, a snowy morning in February. About 30 technologists, encryption experts, academics and corporate execs, plus a handful of journalists, sit facing each other around a long horseshoe arrangement of tables. The assembled luminaries include leading developers from IBM, Microsoft and Mozilla, not to mention former FCC commissioner Reed Hundt; Esther Dyson, the founding chair of ICANN; Marc Rotenburg, president of EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center; and Doc Searls, editor of Linux Journal and an author of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

It’s cold outside, but the faculty club has laid out coffee and pastries for breakfast. It’s a good thing, too, since it’s going to be a long two days here, talking out the issues, approaches and possible solutions to the problem of how we create identities on the internet and, once created, how we keep them safe. Phishing, stalking, secure desktops, one-way hashes, World of Warcraft and the Department of Homeland Security will all come up over the next 48 hours. It’s pretty obvious nothing’s actually going to be solved in this room, but it’s an impressive collection of talent nonetheless. What does it have to do with the future of online games and virtual worlds? Quite possibly, everything.

Read the complete text at The Escapist.

As we all know by now (and the rest of the world is rapidly learning), the imaginary currencies that are earned, spent and traded in massively multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds are anything but virtual, themselves. While no government authority stands behind them to insure their value, a seal of approval isn’t needed for a currency to become “real.” A World of Warcraft gold piece is worth as much as you can get for it on the market – about $0.10 at the moment. The U.S. dollar derives its value in exactly the same way.

Read the complete text at The Escapist.

When I was 12 years old and supposed to be studying for my Bar Mitzvah, I was instead spending lots and lots of my time staring at what was then called a “dumb terminal,” on the screen of which scrolled hundreds of lines of text from the classic of all classic computer games, Adventure. It was 1978 or ‘79 and my father was taking his CompSci masters at the State University of New York at Albany. We had a big, aqua-colored CRT that lived on the dining room table, as I recall, and which, when you switched it on, would do exactly nothing. To liven it up, you had to dial the university’s PDP-11 computer (that is, turn the dial on the house phone), listen for the burr of the computer tone, then jam the handset into the pair of fat black rubber bushings that protruded from the brick-sized modem attached to the terminal.

Discovering that the static that came through our phone could bring the dead, tv-looking thing on our table to life was one of the most fascinating moments of my youth and young manhood. Sadly, that tone is almost gone from our world now, as dial-up disappears in favor of broadband connections (and rightly so). But even better was discovering what kind of life lay in wait on the other end of the line. My brother and I spent hours and hours playing Adventure, throwing axes at dwarves and scrawling dozens of pages of maps in an attempt to collect whatever treasures we could and somehow beat this game–though I don’t think the concept of beating a game even existed yet, as such. We had already discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and we weren’t about to give that up. I think I was already on to the Silmarillion (yes, I was a nerdy boy), and somewhere there still exists the epic fantasy novel that I’d begun to pen (or pencil, rather), complete with Tolkienesque family trees and lots of “begats,” etc. But Adventure held my attention in a different way.

For the uninitiated out there (if there are any still), Adventure was a text-based adventure game in which you navigated the halls and chasms of a place called the Colossal Cave, in which lurked nasty dwarves and dragons, a towering beanstalk (well, towering once you’d figured out how to water it, anyway), frustrating mazes that had to be navigated in order to collect more batteries for your flashlight, and a great many other things. Your interaction with the game consisted entirely of command-line inputs at the level of “throw axe,” “take cage” (so you could carry the bird that would scare away the snake, I think it was), or just plain “N” if you wanted to go north.

The place must have had just the right challenge-reward ratio, because it was absolutely addictive. And while the code behind it was simple, it was not a trivial piece of software. There’s a great passage in Tracy Kidder’s fantastic book The Soul of a New Machine in which he describes how Adventure was used to test early minicomputers. If it could run Adventure without crashing, it was thought, it could run anything. How’s that for system requirements?

As far as I’m concerned, Adventure was the great-great-grandaddy of the virtual worlds and first-person shooters we all wander around in today. Though it was only short chunks of text scrolling up your screen, there was a “you are there” sense to it that many games still fail to capture. It was the state of the art. Take away today’s graphics and Adventure is actually a good bit more complex than many contemporary FPS games, as it took place in a non-linear, open world where what you killed stayed killed, for the most part, and what you carried from the Hall of the Mountain King and then dropped in the large room full of dirty rocks would still be there should you chance to return. It wasn’t multi-player, but it inspired the first multi-player adventure game, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s MUD1.

As games go, it’s hard to overstate the importance of that moment. I’ll be interested to see how it’s treated in the documentary about such text adventures that’s apparently going into production next year. [Grand Text Auto's link to the documentary site was what inspired this post in the first place, though it's something I've been wanting to write for some time.]

But for me the fascination wasn’t just with the game. I don’t know how it happened, since I too should probably have been in class at the time, but I remember spending days with my father on the SUNY Albany campus, days that profoundly satisfied the geek in me (or helped shape and nurture it). My dad at the time was teaching a graduate course in programming, a course he was also taking from another instructor (thus his students were always a week behind those in the class where he was a student), and while he was in class I’d have the great privilege of being sent off with a pocket full of quarters to the game room, which at that time meant all the pinball I could handle–and I could handle a lot. (I don’t recall any video games there at the time.) On other days I’d sit in the rathskellar with my father and his friend Henry, which must be where I got the taste for smoky, smelly pubs and hanging out with people who knew how to make pipes out of nothing but a pear and an aluminum ashtray.

Of course, my dad and his friend couldn’t get high in the bar, so we’d skulk off to the tunnels that ran beneath the quad and after they’d consumed their consumables they’d show the kid a good time by trotting me around the steam pipes pretending to all be orcs or rangers or whatever we came up with. It was a good time. Best of all, though, was learning BASIC (instead of Hebrew) and getting to sit in the mainframe room in front of a teletype, one of those ancient keyboards that stood on its own legs like a little mech-dwarf demigod, fed by an endless scroll of rough brown pub-toilet-quality hand-towel paper, and punch a program into the machine itself on its big cylindrical keys. Hello, World!

That’s why even today when I fire up some World of Warcraft or ponder things like mods, maps or machinima, I still get the taste in my mouth of that time. I think it was my first experience of something “important,” something that was clearly going to change the world, even if I had no thought at the time of how that might happen. Here was something big, bigger than school and sports and whatever synagogue I never showed up at for my rite of passage into manhood, and we were involved. My father was part of this thing that was happening, this thing that was cooler than men walking on the moon because it was right there in front of you and you could do it too.

And I was doing it, and it was more than just pushing buttons. My own little 12-year-old’s text-based programming adventures didn’t come anywhere near what was happening in Adventure, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that what was coming back to me in little green letters or smudged black ink was something I had brought into being, my contribution to the world. For me, listening to the static song of the modem carrier signal or sitting in front of that clunky, clacketing teletype meant that I was charged, for however many minutes I could get, with the responsibility of creating something cool. And there’s no better drug for a pre-teen geek than that, no more solemn burden to shoulder. I never did make it to my Bar Mitzvah. But I’m pretty sure I learned some of the same lessons, thanks to dad and DEC and the big machines that did turn out to spark a revolution after all.

“Did I show you my leather outfit?” Philip Kaplan pops up off the sofa and lopes through his midtown Manhattan loft, returning with a white leather pants-and-vest set. “Touch it,” he urges, pointing to the big red star stitched onto the vest. “It’s python. Made by the guy who does all the stuff for Guns N’ Roses and Marilyn Manson. The pants were like $2,000, and the vest was like $1,000.” He strokes the python. “I designed it,” he says proudly.

Until recently, Philip Kaplan could only dream about buying $3,000 rock-star outfits. When he arrived in New York from Chevy Chase, Maryland, five years ago, he lived at his grandmother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, in his mother’s childhood bedroom, because he couldn’t make rent. “I knew the locations of all the ATMs that gave out $10 bills,” he recalls.

Even at the height of the tech boom, when he had come up with FuckedCompany.com, the dot-bomb Web site he still runs out of his apartment, he couldn’t afford that much “rich-guy stuff,” as he calls it, with a dismissive wave. Then one day last year, when he was 26, he sat down to figure his net worth for a mortgage application. Somewhere along the way, he had hit seven figures. “I called my parents,” he says. “I was like, ‘Guess what?’”

Kaplan will only say that he’s “a 7- or 8-millionaire,” but the exact number isn’t the point. The point is that in the not-so-distant past, Kaplan was just a nice kid from the suburbs who could hardly afford a round of drinks. Now he’s a guy who once spent so large at the Tribeca Grand Hotel bar that the management comped him a room at closing time because they didn’t want the party to end.

When I first meet him, Kaplan has been up for 48 hours straight, staring at lines of code on his computer screen. Because he often works all night and sleeps late into the afternoon, he left the steel shutters on the bedroom windows of his loft on 31st Street. “I don’t want to be a cog in the machine,” he says. “I want to be the machine.”

Scattered around his Aeron chair are a bunch of shoeboxes that have just been delivered by UPS. Kaplan keeps buying shoes on Zappos.com because they have his size – no small thing to a guy with size 14 feet. He still favors jeans and t-shirts at home, but when he wanted to sharpen up his wardrobe recently, he kept the Versace boutique open late so he could buy a couple $2,000 suits. The upgrade is extending to his home : Kaplan has just closed on a new triplex apartment on 15th Street. We hail a cab to go see it. (If Kaplan had a few more errands to do, he might have hired a car and driver for the afternoon. He likes to drive, but like most New Yorkers, he doesn’t own a car. On a recent trip to L.A., he rented a $400-a-day Corvette.)

Down on 15th Street, Kaplan strides into his new place and opens his arms wide, surveying his kingdom. The large, empty ground-floor cube is fitted out with fixtures that were high-tech before he was born. “Isn’t it great?” He’d been looking in the million-dollar range, he says, but his broker showed him this $720,000 triplex because he knew it had something Kaplan would want: an underground bedroom that has no windows at all. Kaplan put 25 percent down. “There’s no reason to pay cash for anything with interest rates at 6 percent,” he says.

The new place also has a washer and dryer, which his current apartment lacks. One afternoon I go with him to the Laundromat to make good on an overdue bill. The last time they picked up his clothes, the sack tipped the scales at 76 pounds. “I just keep buying shirts and socks and let the rest of it get dirty,” Kaplan says cheerfully, writing a check for $170. “When I get to the point where I’m recycling underwear, that’s when I do my laundry.”

Kaplan takes pains to point out that as millionaires go, he is “not super bling-blingy.” But he has nothing against blowing cash in pursuit of a good time, and he’s flown himself to Vegas for the past two years for the Adult Video News Awards, where he rubs elbows (if only that) with the girls, parties with a porn photographer friend, and tries to get close to idols like Gene Simmons and Vince Neil.

If Neil didn’t remember Kaplan from the year before, it’s probably only because Neil has never seen Spel, the heavy metal band in which Kaplan moonlights, playing drums. One cold winter night, Kaplan rents a Ford Expedition to drive the group to a gig deep in the hinterlands of New Jersey. He picks his bandmates up at the $1,200-a-month rehearsal space he rents on Eighth Avenue where the guys also live. On stage, Kaplan beams from behind his drum set like a manic Charlie Watts. His best move is when he spins a stick and pushes his $800 Selima Optique glasses up the bridge of his nose in the same motion.

Spel is pretty good at their Jersey gig, but it’s clear that Kaplan shouldn’t quit his day job. Actually, he hasn’t had a day job in about four years. He quit a company called THINK New Ideas in 1999 to start his own Internet consultancy. Then he set up FuckedCompany in the spring of 2000, gave away the consultancy to his employees later that year, and has been happily working on his “art,” as he thinks of it, ever since. Besides FuckedCompany, Kaplan’s art consists of the handful of sites he’s dreamed up (like his latest, MarketBanker.com), almost all of which are designed, tested, maintained by Kaplan and a single employee. Kaplan usually eats at home so he can work more. If he wants a meal from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver to his neighborhood, he phones in a $14 pick-up order and hires a $25 courier service to get it for him. He would rather work than go on vacation. He likes to work so much that perhaps it’s not surprising that this interferes with his love life.

Kaplan is tall, handsome, nice, funny, and rich, so it seems odd that he wouldn’t have a girlfriend. “A girl might be really attracted to the things I’ve done, and then, once we get in a relationship, she’ll be frustrated that I can’t spend enough time with her,” he explains. “But I didn’t just wake up and have seven companies.” When he’s invited to the premiere of the movie Spun at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, the only girl he can think of to take is someone he chatted with recently on the Internet. “A normal bachelor millionaire would probably be able to lock down a date for that,” Kaplan muses. Even a fake rich guy like Joe Millionaire has better luck. “People perceive me as a man about town, but I’m just the dork who didn’t have any plans for Valentine’s Day,” Kaplan says. “I want a girl to use me for my money.”

One night, I meet Kaplan in Little Italy bar where he likes to hang out with a bunch of other young Internet successes every Monday night. “I have two very distinct groups of people who are my friends,” Kaplan says. “Half my crowd are not particularly rich, half are. It’s not like we sit around and count money. But we’ll go to a bar and get the $400 bottle of vodka and sit at a table and just be stupid.”

Not that Kaplan likes to be stupid with just anyone. He’s been to the Hamptons but has no wish to be part of that scene. Instead, Kaplan thinks he might prefer the seedy cool of Asbury Park on the Jersey shore, where he’s considering investment properties. “It’s half, like, crack den,” he admits, “but parts of it are starting to get nice.”

That’s about the state of things at his new home on on 15th Street, where we tread carefully on the stained shag rug of the upstairs balcony bedroom, soon to be Kaplan’s office, once it’s renovated. “A lot of doors are open,” he says. “The money thing definitely enables me to say maybe I want to have a magazine. I thought about opening a barbecue joint. “Everyone has one million-dollar idea every ten years, but the thing is, you have to do it, and nobody ever does,” he says. Kaplan’s latest? “A topless shoe shine. It takes a long time to shine a shoe, all that wiggling and stuff. It’ll be like Starbucks,” he says, his eyes flickering over an imaginary line of topless shoe-shine girls. “It’ll be everywhere.

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At seven o’clock on a recent morning, Aron Oakley, 23, aerodynamics engineer for the Penske South race team, is watching numbers crawl up his computer screen as he muses over his luck with the ladies. For Oakley, romance may be elusive, but the numbers make perfect sense: The figures he’s reviewing represent the drag and down-force pressures that could propel veteran driver Rusty Wallace to victory in the Daytona 500–NASCAR’s Super Bowl–on February 17. It is Oakley’s job to help turn Wallace’s car into the sleekest, most streamlined racing machine that can still be handled. From this carpeted control room, where the loudest sound is the creak of ergonomic chairs, Oakley glances through a double pane of glass at the source of his high-tech data: North America’s most advanced wind tunnel.

What’s going on here at the Auto Research Center in Mooresville, North Carolina, as the Penske team blows air over a 40 percent scale model of Wallace’s Ford Taurus, may look like a bunch of kids building model cars. But these guys aren’t your usual racetrack grease monkeys. They’re mechanical engineers with university degrees, and they bring a whole new set of high-tech tools that are forcing NASCAR to change gears. “You used to have to work hard; now you’re working a lot smarter,” says Robin Pemberton, Wallace’s crew chief until the end of last season. “They’re the next wave of people that are going to control the sport.”

First, though, they’ll have to gain the old-timers’ confidence. Most racing engineers came up in the sport without the benefit of college, honing their craft trackside every Sunday. “We have to convince the guys that are building the cars that it’s not just a science project,” Oakley says of the scale tunnel, “that you can trust the data that comes out of here.” With the tunnel costing more than $1,000 an hour, they had better be able to trust it. Penske’s model cost close to $1 million dollars to design and build, from laser-scanning a full-size car to assembling the model’s carbon-fiber body and fitting the chassis with components built in a stereo-lithography lab. Over two days, a fourteen-foot fan blows air at 89.2 m.p.h. over the model as the seventeen-ton roadway beneath it turns a belt of simulated asphalt at comparable speed and yaws enough to tell the engineers what the car will do in a turn.

All the wind-tunnel data Oakley gathers, both full-size and scale, as well as past performance figures, data on various car parts, track characteristics, and tire configurations, is filed away on the laptops toted by the team’s trackside race engineers. If Rusty reports that the car is too “loose” coming out of Turn Three, for instance, some of the most advanced software tools in NASCAR racingn can point to various adjustments that improved that condition in past races at the same track.

But NASCAR, rooted in the low-tech worlds of bootlegging moonshine in the Carolina hills and racing 1940s hot rods on the beach at Daytona, has resisted the acceleration. “We try to keep a good grasp on the technology,” says one official, “to where it don’t get too out of hand.” Penske’s laptops may be stuffed with data, but the sanctioning body forbids computers onboard cars during a race. Decisions as to tire changes, suspension adjustments, even refuelling (no fuel gauges, either), must be determined by a pit crew’s sense of timing and a driver’s feel for how a car is handling. Race engineers can make suggestions based on software, but the turns of the wrench are still a matter of eyeballs and elbow grease.

“I have a problem saying, ‘You guys tell me how to fix my car,’ ” Rusty says. “If I want to change something, we can simulate it in the computer, but I’m a seat-of-the-pants-type driver. Once my crew chief has given me the best car he can give me, and the engine guys have given me the best engine they can give me, and the pit crews are giving me the best pit stops–then what’s left is just getting in the car and driving it.”

The sound of a stock car pushing 7,500 rpm down the front stretch is glorious to the ear. It’s louder than a roar, more intimidating than a growl, and as for a purr–well, those noises are for pussies. A stock car fronts all the whine and buzz and guttural rip that pure mechanical muscle can produce, enough to put all other notions of manhood to shame.

At the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame, just down the road from the Auto Research Center and the Penske shop, dozens of vintage cars sit motionless on display. There’s an awesome Dodge Daytona, a blazing orange Plymouth Superbird, and a ‘79 Monte Carlo, driven by racing’s king, Richard Petty, which looks like it’s about to leap right off the garage floor. Over in a corner, two women are swooning over a cardboard cutout of the late champion Dale Earnhardt. This is the sport, remember, that Paul Newman turned to when he realized that just being a movie star no longer cut it with the ladies.

With a sigh, I gun my rented Chevy Prizm up to an edgy 3,500 rpm. Back at the wind tunnel, I ask Oakley whether being on a race team has improved his luck with girls. “Not yet,” he laments. He and another young engineer are comparing notes on vintage Hewlett-Packard programmable calculators, long the race cars of the engineering world. It’s a heartening sight. If these guys are the future of racing, maybe there’s hope for those of us without a stock car in the garage. Maybe a pocket protector would do.

-30-

A couple of years ago, just before Dan Hammans dropped out of high school, his guidance counselor told him that he would never earn more than $15,000 a year, that he would never hold a job for more than six months at a time and that, to put it plainly, he would never amount to anything. ”He pretty much told me I was a loser,” Dan says. He is sitting in his 1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse, which is fire-engine red, cost $23,000 and boasts 210 horsepower off the factory floor — though with Dan’s modifications, that’s up to 260. Dan is on his way home from a job at which he earns roughly $1,600 every two weeks, or about $25,000 more each year than a certain Mr. Sternberg of Gilbert High School in Iowa would have thought possible.

Read the complete text at The New York Times.