Weekend Machinima: "Impressions" of Second Life, the Video to Show Gamer Friends Who've Dismissed SL

I love this Second Life machinima directed by Willow Caldera (Sarah Burnside IRL), who recently became this blog's live music reviewer. Behold:

It's a travelogue-style montage through several Second Life locations, a popular SL machinima sub-genre, distinguished by two elements most other videos leave out:

• Recurring characters featured within most shots, an excellent way to anchor the images with an implicit storyline, and also add a social context to the locations. (Way too many montages are empty of avatars.)
• Shots of the dynamic content creation process in action, strongly suggesting everything else was also created by other other users. (Which is, after all, Second Life's core market distinguisher.)

A third optional element might be: Flying chick with Icarus wings armed with twin Uzis. That's the one which makes me think this is an ideal video to send your gamer friends who've dismissed SL after a sub-par first time experience, or seeing sub-quality screenshots and machinima from the pre-WindLight years. Not only do you want to show them the world's current 3D visual quality, you also want to show them gameplay they can't easily get from standard MMOs. (And so far, MMOs are severely lacking in the cyberpunk/flying chicks with Uzis metric.)

Anyway, here's direct SLurl teleport links to some of the locations in Willow's video:

• The retro cafe is in Artilleri (SLurl teleport link)
• The destroyed city is Abyss (SLurl teleport link)
• The cyberpunk metropolis is Insilico (SLurl teleport link)
• The autumnal forest glade is Tempura (SLurl teleport link)
• The submerged island with grand piano is Chouchou (SLurl teleport link)

Comments

[Alicia Chenaux]

An absolutely wonderful piece of work. :)

[rikomatic]

It's a really accomplished piece of work, visually quite stunning.

That said, I'm not sure this is going to be very convincing to gamers without some actual game play footage. Spinning angels with uzis are cool, but she's not interacting in any way with other players, bots or the environment.

[Delinda Dyrssen]

Nice work!

[Simondo Nebestanka]

Pure Awesome.

[aems case]

I love the Sound'r crew and what they can do with machinima, Willow does wonderful direction and all the hard work that the talented editor Mewsic Bing does is incredible. To pull anything out of that raw footage and make it work always amazes me. To make it work within a storyline, kudos to both of you.

[Hamlet Au]

"I'm not sure this is going to be very convincing to gamers without some actual game play footage."

That's for the follow-up video, this one's mainly to convince them SL doesn't look like ass. And has shit in it they might like.

[Sasy Scarborough]

It makes me proud to be a resident, with people as talented as that team, Willow is definitely always inspiring...fantastic machinema.

xoxSasyxox

[Truthseeker Young]

I agree with Rik: Gamers want gameplay footage, and frankly, SL can only deliver it to partial satisfaction at best.

I suspect that the gamers who will appreciate SL on its own merits are largely *already here*, and they'll occasionally succeed in bringing 1 or 2 possibly-interested friends inworld with them, but that's about the best that SL's gonna do in that market-segment.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Speaking as a gamer and SL Resident, I don't game in SL. Gaming in SL is like cooking pizza in a crock pot... it can be done, it's an achievement if you can pull it off, but the final result is a sticky mess and you're much better off using the appropriate appliance for the task.

If LL can get latency and script response delays down to where they're barely perceptable on a low-end machine, even with a fully-occupied sim, a robust networked combat HUD system and dozens of NPC/mob script instances running at the same time, then we can talk about what else is needed to make SL a viable development platform. But I won't be holding my breath. Why should I, when I've already got City of Heroes and Champions Online to cater to my 'Angels with Firearms' needs?

[Hamlet Au]

"Gaming in SL is like cooking pizza in a crock pot"

Hah, that's a great metaphor. Then again, people still do it. Bloodlines has had 60K players, that's larger than some professionally made MMOs. As I pointed out at the time, that's larger than Matrix Online's subscriber base. I agree with you that games depending on high frame rate aren't suitable for SL, at least for quite awhile, but MMOs aren't as low ping intensive.

[Metacam Oh]

The Matrix Online was a huge disappointment and I think went out of business and shut down.

What SL needs is a new kind of Sim, one in which the contents are downloaded before you enter and real time building is not allowed (modding the sim would need a restart or something) where you are able to have the contents of the sim client side and better physics and gaming is enabled... I guess somewhat similar to what Blue Mars mini games seem to be.

Games in SL barely approach TEXT MUDs in complexity and fun. Just my opinion though.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I will say this much; when the MMO industry more or less abandoned the RPG part of MMORPG, a good chunk of it landed in SL. The roleplaying communities here are astounding.

Metacam's right; you really need to preload zones/levels/resources to client for a decent FP3D experience, and I don't see SL rushing in that direction.

What I do see is roleplay thriving even with the most rudimentary game systems (and no disrespect to the leeches, but Bloodlines is pretty rudimentary in gaming terms) -- or no game systems at all. If and when LL can deliver the tools to create a smooth gaming experience for those communities, we're going to see games that are more nuanced and richly textured than the commercial product out there, because you've got the heritage and lore of the existing community to build upon.

[M Linden]

Terrific machinima! Thanks for sharing Hamlet.