Academics are flocking to use virtual worlds and multiplayer games as ways to research everything from economics to epidemiology, and to turn these environments into educational tools. But one such highly anticipated effort — a multiplayer game about Shakespeare meant to teach people about the world of the bard while serving [...]

There is a lot of interest in Second Life and the educational potential of this and similar immersive game-like worlds. Club Penguin — a site supposedly for 13+ (but likely 9-14) — has recently been sold to Disney for $350 million. These have fascinated me since reading Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) , Neal Stephenson’s [...]