The Games and Gaming Special Interest Group (SIG) had a great started yesterday with 26 students hearing about Roger Stack's adventures in Second Life and Bernie's experience with WoW and The Lord of the Rings - The Battle for Middle Earth.

Roger talked about the 4.1 million users in Second Life (SL) and how hundreds of thousands of $$$ of real money change hands each day. A few people make their real life living in SL! He bought a property in Eldora some months ago - it's above the snowline - and he has built a gallery for some of his wife's art. That's his avatar on the left with the gallery behind him...

He's exploring the educational potential of SL - some believe that in the near future as bandwidth rapidly increases online interations will more often take place with avatars in 3D environments rather than just the text of chat or email. Many universities have already established annexes in SL.

More and more designers are using immersive worlds like these to try out their ideas... walking around, in and even through them. Recently the Half-Life game engine has been used to create a walk-through of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

Over the last year UNICEF has been hosting Global Kids in Second Life - teenagers from around the planet looking at local and global issues - see video clips.

After Second Life Bernie did an excellent presentation talking about WoW and Battle for Middle Earth - while showing off his new laptop

Here is his Middle Earth character Thrugg. Bernie took us on a bit of a tour demonstrating some of the features that makes this game one of his favourites at the moment.