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Ludlow Peter

http://individual.utoronto.ca/ludlow/

Peter Ludlow (January 16, 1957), who also writes under the name Urizenus Sklar, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. Before moving to Toronto, Ludlow taught for several years at the University of Michigan, State University of New York at Stony Brook and was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University and Cornell University. His research areas include the conceptual issues in cyberspace, particularly questions about cyber-rights and the emergence of laws and governance structures in and for virtual communities. His popular books include High Noon on the Electronic Frontier and Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias. His professional books include Semantics, Tense and Time: an Essay in the Metaphysics of Natural Language. Ludlow participated as a member of the online community The Well, and also participated in virtual gaming communities such as Second Life and The Sims Online, where he took the character of an online journalist.

MTV.com has described Ludlow as one of the 10 most influential video game players of all time, in part due to his role in showing how video game companies can be challenged as part of the gameplay. In the most famous controversy, reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Ludlow began a virtual newspaper called The Alphaville Herald and reported on events in the Electronic Arts Corporation online game "The Sims Online" -- including some blistering editorials against Electronic Arts Corporation and their failures at managing and policing the gamespace. Ludlow was subsequently kicked out of the game by Electronic Arts.

Ludlow (with the journalist Mark Wallace) has cowritten a book about his career as a virtual world journalist titled, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse. It is slated to appear in September 2007.

Ludlow has been known to participate in what he calls "game instantiation events" -- in effect, these bring computer games to real life in some mildly subversive form. At South By Southwest 2006 in Austin Texas, Make editor, Phillip Torrone, reprogrammed a Roomba robatic vacuum cleaner to be remotely directed, dressed it in a green frog suit, and played "real frogger" on 6th Street in Austin, Texas. Ludlow has described the events as attempts to subvert the comfortable if flawed distinction between the real world and virtual reality, as well as challenges to suburban conceptions of street decorum in the contemporary United States.

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