New World Notes

FASHION CRISIS

Is there no market for the dainty and demure among female avatars?  Longtime fashion maven Torrid Midnight ponders this after launching a new line of spring dresses with the equally acclaimed designer Mistress Midnight.  Their April release was decidedly unlike most popular women's fashions in SL, which lean toward the dramatic (goth, sci-fi babe, etc.) or agressively sexy (very high heels, thongs, etc.)  To herald Mistress' return from a brief SL hiatus, the Midnight sisters had something else in mind.  Their "Spring Flowers" line was girly and modest and the kind of thing you wear when you meet your boyfriend's parents for the first time.

Sales, Torrid notes drily, were not great.  Which launches a quandry in the metaverse fashion industry:

I find myself questioning how I design now, would I do better to just make a bunch of half-boob shirts (tops that only cover half of your chest)? How about five pairs of jeans so low we can tell just how "groomed" you are? The thing is, even though I'm just being funny, those would probably sell extremely well...

Torrid's ruminations on what SL girls want is here.  Mine begin with these questions here: there's an enormous warehouse of Resident-made fashion for people who want to roleplay in-your-face sexuality and sexual-tinged fantasy.  There's a comparative dearth of fashions for folks looking for low-key sensuality.  What's this say about SL culture?   And what does it say about what women want from this world?

Update, 5/9, 5:10pm:  Second Style Fashionista has, of course, a way more thoughtful take on the issue.

ISLAND OF DIPLOMACY

The private island of USC's Annenberg Center opens its doors for a public tour (accompanied by live DJ) today at 1pm SLT, and simulcasts the Public Diplomacy Through Games awards ceremony (featuring Cory Linden) at 3pm SLT.  (Background on that contest from my excellent friend Harmony Harbinger here.)

NEW WORLD 2016

What will Second Life and other 3D online worlds, collectively known as the metaverse, look like in ten years?  Try this on:

"Invisible, unobtrusive PDAs will be the cellphones of 2016, and they will access a datascape where information is presented in a variety of contexts-- metaverse as the operating system of 2016. The walled gardens of fantasy and narrative will become just one annex among many in the metaverse, which will be an equal and parallel partner to the legacy mediums of popular culture-- music, film, TV, celebrity. Real world companies will be incubated, developed, and in large part run in the metaverse. This will engender a high degree of personal entrepreneurship—metaverse as the EBay of 2016.

"The developed world will be subsumed by the metaverse.  Developing nations will collectively share metaverse portals that will enable them to join the global economy. The datascape, providing constantly updated knowledge about every corner of the world and accessible by all, will create total transparency over politics, the health of the globe’s citizens, and the planet itself."

That's the vision statement-- the context after the break.

THE WEEK IN NWN

Rounding up highlights from last week's Notes:

- A genocide information site destroyed-- a stalwart team of superheroes, to the rescue.
- Novel solutions to the high cost of education.
- Myst's designer lost to the mist.  (And the cantankerous interface.)

Remember to send me SL Event announcements for next week, after reading these guidelines.

And just a couple days more to vote in Round One of my NWN Logo Search.

SPEAKING AND STREAMING

Assuming I haven't gotten lost on the way down to Mountain View, in a couple hours, I should be part of the stream simulcast live here in the headquarters of The Electric Sheep Company.  Starting an 9AM (SLT), Philip Linden opens the keynote to SDForum; I pop in at 10AM with CNet's Daniel Terdiman,  UC Berkeley's danah boyd, and assorted friends; ex-Linden Reuben Tapioca and Sheepman SNOOPYbrown Zamboni have the floor at 1pm, and Kula Island owner Joi Ito closes it all out at 4PM.  Lots more metaversal goodness throughout-- here's the schedule.  Watch-- and discuss!

NEW WORLD ADVERTISING

This is pretty marvelously cool and revolutionary:  John Battelle and his crew at Federated Media launched the Beta edition of their advertising platform tonight, and it just made placing ads in NWN about as easy as buying movie tickets online.  You hit the site, you create an account, you browse FM's 50+ affiliated blogs-- easiest way to find mine is select "find a specific site"-- and provided you have the ad created already, you're done.  (If not, there's a button to ping the helpful FM ad execs.)  There's a 35% discount offer running now, too, so why not give it a whirl.

All we need now is for the advertising platform to accept Linden Dollars, but that will have to wait for future versions.  Fortunately, Federated Media does indeed take L$-- you just have to meet Lovisa.

Vast thanks to John, Chas Edwards, and Andre Torrez who got this new new media train rolling, and for that matter, full-throated shout-outs to all the FM musketeers I've been working with:  Bill Brazell, Jennifer Charette, Josephine Quiocho, and Jonathan Schreiber (who's tirelessly and heroically done the most to keep this blog buoyant), and Chas' excellent ad team of Lovisa Taylor and Jonas Halpren, and all the other staffers I haven't met yet.  I'm honored to be the first avatar in this rapidly expanding empire.

And with that, back to our regularly scheduled metaverse.

LOST IN THE MYST

Toss a renowned adventure game designer into the heart SL and he's bound to lose himself to the vertigo of an unplanned narrative told by thousands of people contributing to it separately and at the same time.  Robyn Miller, co-creator the legendary Myst adventure games, recently visited SL, and he was none too impressed by the chaos and lack of civic space:

Not once did I ever encounter a city park or city forest, though I always enjoyed resting on random spots of unsold land (which would quickly be bought – the trees soon mowed down). Nowhere is there a Second Life sponsored monument or memorial. Not even a sponsored Town Hall or city square. There are not housing hills or house clusters or seperate shopping promanades and markets. Instead, everything is thrown together in one endless chaotic clutter.

But of course, there's parks and forests everywhere in SL, and monuments too-- beginning with the plaque in tribute to the Beta testers (SL's first settlers) near Governor Linden's mansion.  Still, the point is well-taken, because it's really an accurate depiction of the typical new user experience.  What Miller misses here, I think, is that his frustration comes from his own expectation of a narrative experience created (masterfully, of course) in his Myst games.  That, and a still-intimidating interface which refuses to shepard new users into the kind of world they're looking for.  I doubt Miller would have the same sense of SL if he'd visited, say, the Lost Gardens of Apollo-- but then, how's he supposed to even find the Gardens when that would mean wading through dozens of nightclub and shopping mall listings?  For that matter, no indication that he even knew about Numbakulla, the SL adventure game created in large part by exiles of Uru Live, the discontinued MMORPG spinoff of the Myst franchise. 

In any case, fascinating, deeply thoughtful reading-- read it all here.

(Via Zero Grace of Clickable Culture.)

DUA VIVO!

Virtual world, meet virtual language:

Do you dream of a land where you can use Esperanto daily to chat, buy and sell, and even work?  Friend, that land already exists!  We have created a virtual Esperantoland.  We've already built an Esperanto museum, a cafe, a Language University, and a tower for apartments, offices, and stores. 

If they make an SL machinima with a young William Shatner avatar, my head will 'splode. 

(From the delicious stream of Pathfinder Linden.)

TATERU TAROT

Tateru Nino has sculpted a tool to determine your fortune in the metaverse-- Tarot Cards featuring Residents standing in for The Hierophant, Justice, Judgement, and more.  Last week she came by my office in Waterhead to give me a first look, and a thoughtful explanation for why she associated these particular Residents with each particular archetype.  Hope she gets a chance to blog these, because it's wonderful how true they ring.  Amazing how some Residents have a character that's so essential, they could represent singular ideas.  (Except maybe for one card, which I'll just ascribe to the blog's name and the decoration on my balcony-- but thanks all the same.)

FROM THE WORLD OF TORLEY...

Shogun Torley:  Once again, the indispensably essential Torley has the first word on SL at its finest-- now with Samurai Island, a private sim devoted to a game of katana combat replete with a scoring/ranking system, breakable objects, and motion trails that follow the wake of your swinging blade.  A few months ago I had a chance to report on an early version of the game's HUD (above) but it looks like the project has progressed way beyond that since then.  Can't wait to play it myself.  Meantime, let Torley transport you to a world of magic and anime-inflected mayhem. 

Tolkien Torley:  If wakazashis don't suit, there's always the LOTR-style rendition of SL, a map created by Dyne Talamasca and uncovered by the neon-hued one.