Warfare in virtual worlds

Last week, I was speaking on a panel at a departmental conference about new media and war.
It was great to meet Tim Stevens, one of my co-panellists, who gave a fascinating talk on violence and warfare in ‘virtual’ worlds like Second Life.
I put virtual in inverted commas because one of the points Tim made throughout his presentation was the way the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ are merging.
He showed us how some Second Lifers used an in-world uprising to protest against Linden Lab, the owners of Second Life, and how the virtual spills over into the real world – the most obvious example being the ability to trade Linden Dollars, Second Life’s currency, against the US Dollar.
If you want to find out more about what Tim thinks about terrorism, insurgency and information environments then you can find him on the Complex Terrain Laboratory website or on his personal blog, Ubiwar.