So, I was reading this King Kaufman column in Salon last Monday. He was talking about ESPN’s broadcast on Jackie Robinson Day, and was relating a story that Henry Aaron was telling a story about playing second base against Robinson and — wait a second, Hank Aaron played second base?

That was Kaufman’s reaction, and mine as well, but for totally different reasons. He was just interested in it as a baseball historian, and so looked it up. And sure enough, Aaron played games as a second-bagger for the Braves as late as the mid-1960’s.

Me, all I can think is this: Hank Aaron had fantasy eligibility at 2B! How cool would that have been for my fantasy baseball team!

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Someone always has to harsh the mellow, don’t they? If it’s not grey goo (ding! ding! ding!), it’s do-gooders like the World Development Movement. Yeah, I’d never heard of them either, probably because they haven’t been adopted by Bono or Sting. Their big move is to place a counter in Second Life which ostensibly keeps track of the (estimated) number of children who’ve died from poverty and other preventable causes since the virtal world went live in 2003.

Unfortunately for the message, the counter is in fairly small type at the bottom of a large, underdesigned billboard which reads DON’T FORGET THE REAL WORLD. A valid if admonishing message, as is the counter, but what exactly are they expecting? That Second Lifers will see the billboard from afar, decide for some reason to come in for a (much) closer look, see the counter, then have an attack of conscience and do something about that world with its children croaking like clockwork?

An argument could be made that if it makes just one user, like Aimee The Scary Blowup Doll, get off their Frito-enhanced duff and do something—”something” probably meaning making a
contribution to the WDM—it was worth the effort. I guess, but even if Second Life shut down tomorrow, social conditions in meatspace would not improve. I’m reminded of the arguments against NASA and space exploration: we should take care of our problems on earth before we go into space! Yeah, well, if NASA was dismantled, the money would not go towards feeding the poor or educating children. When Napster was shut down, I kept an eye on the Billboard charts to see if Metallica albums would shoot to the top of the charts. Never quite happened.

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My initial reaction was you have GOT to be shitting me, followed closely by huh. that kinda makes sense. That’s been my chain of response to most everything about the online virtual world thingy Second Life thus far, from the basic concept to its immense popularity to the gazillions of dollars spent on it daily to the notion that for many users it’s just high-bandwidth cybersex to the fact that major brands are establishing a marketing presence there. That it even qualifies as a “there” is troubling, but according to consensus reality, it exists. And where people go, they will be sold to. Certainly advertising in video games is nothing new, dating at least back to the Marlboro ads in Pole Position II. The blatant promotion of cigarettes to ten year-olds (as opposed to the comparatively more subtle Joe Camel approach) has that certain early-eighties charm, doesn’t it?

So after a momentary incredulousness, I realized the lack of shock value that the allegedly beleaguered music industry (whose tolerate/hate relationship with the internet is probably the most well-documented struggle since World War II) is attempting to get a piece of the virtual pie’s very real money, in such forms as the imaginatively named Sony Music Media Island. In Second Life parlance, an island is the same thing as in meatspace: a mass of land surrounded by water. The owner can do pretty much whatever they want with it, allowing for the fulfillment of more than a few fascist fantasies. Rule your vampire clan while sitting at your computer in a bathrobe! We may not have flying cars, but the Future’s still pretty great.

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Say what you will about Microsoft’s Zune launch, it didn’t cause anywhere near the death, destruction, and sheer mayhem that yesterday’s PlayStation 3 launch caused. Reports of shootings, thefts, and generally stupid behavior are flooding in from across America. The details make a George Romero film seem tame by comparison. We have apparently become a nation of PlayStation Zombies.

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We rag on Microsoft a lot around here. Zune, particularly, has come in for a lot of pre-sale criticism from these quarters. So we should praise them when they do something right. And today’s announcement that they have set up a deal with several studios to offer downloads directly to their Xbox Live service in just a couple of weeks smacks a whole hell of a lot of doing things right.

It’s an idea that only those who instinctively dislike everything Microsoft does could hate.

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Never let it be said that Medialoper stood in the way of anyone’s potential riches. Apparently, Mark Burnett’s much-anticipated* multi-media game, Gold Rush has debuted. You can play along by heading for http://goldrush.aol.com/.

I tried to go through the registration process — after a bunch of time-outs and wonky screen resets, I gave up (I do have a screen name and password; AOL recognizes these as valid, the game does not. Yet.). You may have better luck. Note to AOL: You might want to add Gold Rush to your A-Z directory, possibly under, hmm, “G”. Because after going through the registration process, I wanted to get started. I’ve given up.

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It’s no secret that we get really excited about the little things here at Medialoper, especially the bright and shiny things. So when I caught wind of potential presidential candidate Mark Warner (he’s now running the State of Virginia) appearing in Second Life, my first thought was (and I quote), “Huh?”

It was quickly followed by “Hmm, interesting.” Things moved rapidly to “Cool!” before I had a chance to refill my coffee. That’s the Internet for you, always moving at the speed of the mind.

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Wanna know the philsophical underpinnings of some of our posts here at Medialoper? (I’ll pretend you said “yes.”) The following books have helped me work out some of the concepts that infuse nearly everything that I write about what we are calling the “new media.”

Here they are, alphabetical by author:

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Product placement is nothing new, of course: since the earliest days of film, advertisers have always wanted to work their brands into the context of the entertainment people were enjoying. So in today’s world where a significant demographic isn’t watching a film or TV, but pursuing other entertainment options, it’s no surprise that the latest frontier for the product placement is the videogame.

What is surprising, however, is that it has only really taken off in the last year or so. Naturally, the rise of online games means that placements don’t have to be embedded in take-home boxes, only to become immediately anachronistic, but things such as movie advertisments on billboards or marquees can change as new films come out.

It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure, before they start trying to target ads to other information they have gleaned from a particular player’s profile. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before a savvy game maker has an online user choose, for example, their background music from various bands, and then having that music come out of, say, a Prism Durosport.

• Police! Freeze! Do you accept Visa?