New World Notes

SL Turk: Developer Pays Second Life Residents $46 in Linden Dollars for $9000 Worth of Translation Services

Here's an interesting real world application for Second Life: Leveraging the extremely international character of SL's user community, a real world software developer named Max Klein recently hired some Residents to translate 200 documents, which would probably cost upwards of $9000, had he hired a real world translation service. However, the virtual economy has its own logic:

Second life is filled with people who want Linden Dollars. They come from all over the world, and for them it’s just a game. They will willingly spend 30 minutes to translate the article for you for 20 cents, which is 50 Linden Dollars. For that, they can get accessories, funiture, clothes etc. within the game.

Instead of $9000, his total cost came to less than $50. In effect, he used the Second Life economy like Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdsourcing service. I'm surprised more people haven't done this. (Crowdflower, a crowdsourcing startup, has done a similar project with a social gaming company.) There's probablya huge opportunity to create a Second Life Turk, a management service connecting SL workers to real world work projects. Read the rest here, including an interesting conversation thread on the ethics and feasibility of the project.

Hat tip: Kimberly Rufer-Bach.

New Second Life Documentary, The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave, Tracks the Search for Virtual Transcendence

The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave is a new documentary on Second Life from the French filmmaking team Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita, and to judge by the trailer and my in-person chats with them, it's about the search for transcendence in SL, people yearning for something deeper than the life they have in the material world (even if that search sometimes takes directions that are dark and strange to most.) As the title suggests, the movie centers on profiles of three Second Life users: a minister who creates a virtual church, a furry, and someone in an avatar-driven S/M relationship. Watch:

Much of the movie was shot in 2007, which is when I met Alain and Kaori, and did some on-camera interviews with them -- before and after they made a trip to Burning Man, which you'll see in the trailer. (I'm briefly in the movie, depicted on my cellphone, likely talking about flying penises.) They also shot me interviewing Philip Rosedale, and while that footage didn't make the final cut, Alain and Kaori tell me that that 40 minute segment should be in the DVD, which comes out next year. They're lovely, charming folks and extremely talented, humane filmmakers, so I can't wait to see the whole thing.

If you can be in Southern California next month, you can see the movie and meet Alain and Kaori at the Anaheim Film Festival. If you're in France, the movie is playing in theaters now -- here's a list of the screening locations/dates.

Another clip from The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave after the break:

My New Alienware Notebook Rocks My Metaverse (So Far)!

So I just got an Alienware M11x notebook after much deliberation, and while Dell took a comically long time to get it to my door, my initial reaction so far is: Awesomesauce indeed. I've been using it for several days, and just as I hoped, it can run both Second Life and Blue Mars at optimal levels -- this on a machine that cost under $1000, after an upgrade to 4 gigs of RAM. Getting used to the notebook's reduced size, which is three-four inches smaller than my last laptop, took some practice. (And some squinting -- I had to increase the font size on Facebook.) For New World Notes readers, however, the verdict on 3D worlds is good: I can run Blue Mars pretty well with all the settings turned up full (but performance is better at the midrange), and still more impressive, run Second Life with dynamic shadows enabled.

Be-fricking-hold:

This is Second Life running in Imprudence, by the way; I'm not sure how shadows perform in SL Viewer 2. And these aren't just dynamic shadows that show up but then slow the world down to a crawl -- my frame rate only dropped a little bit. I'm far from a hardware expert, so do your own additional research, caveat emptor n' stuff, but if you are looking for a new machine that can handle 3D worlds, give this one a look. Also: Black matte finish! Red glowing keyboard! Chassis like a Stealth bomber! These are the things that make my geek propeller spin.

Blue Mars' Lead Designer Trent Ward on Making the World Work for Game Developers

The Blue Mars blog has a long interview with designer Trent Ward, veteran of Electronic Arts and Ubisoft and design head of world creator Avatar Reality. (Not by me, but Avatar's Jasmine Spearing.) When I (FULL DISCLOSURE) announced that I'd joined Avatar Reality as a consultant recently, one of the main reasons I cited was its emphasis on game industry vets with a proven track record on creating fun experiences. I know many New World Notes readers are skeptical about Blue Mars, and Trent acknowledges what it's lacking now, and where he wants it to go as a game development platform. And yes: Dude's avatar is an angel with bunny slippers, a good omen by my lights.

Open Forum: Should Chestnut Rau Cover Events On All Imprudence-Accessible Worlds (And If So, Which)?

Imprudence, the third party Second Life viewer, has become by popular vote the official viewer of New World Notes. I just installed it on my new laptop (more on that later), and immediately saw a cool Imprudence feature: The ability to easily select and log into OpenSimulator-based grids, such as InWorldz and Reaction Grid (see above). This means it would be feasible for Chestnut Rau to include events on multiple worlds accessible via Imprudence on her indispensable calendar. I talked with Chestnut about this opportunity, and she's potentially willing. But it's going to take extra legwork on her part, so I want to know if readers are interested: Do you want to read about events on all Imprudence worlds, or just Second Life? And a question for folks in those worlds: Are there enough weekly events for Chestnut to cover, and are you willing to send her details a week in advance?

New World Gaming: MineCraft, the Insanely Popular Indie Sandbox World Game, Echoes Philip Rosedale's Original Vision of Second Life

MineCraft, an indie game from Markus Persson, recently became a runaway cult hit, even though it's still in Alpha. It remarkably and eerily echoes Philip Rosedale's original vision of Second Life, a decade ago: A sandbox world with flora and fauna, which you can explore and remake, converting natural resources into tools and items. For my book, here's what Philip told me about his initial idea of Second Life, which he wanted to be a simulation of the natural world:

"[Y]ou would wander around it as an avatar, and you'd come across animals -- maybe they'd try to eat you or something -- that no one had ever seen."

In MineCraft, there's sheep and cows and other identifiable animals, which you can convert into meat after punching them enough times (oh yes), and scary monsters that hit back. Especially the zombies, which come out at night. Because you see, you're not just crafting the world for the fun of it, you want to build a fort to keep yourself safe from the fricking zombies.

Second Life/real life rockstar Keiko Takamura recently became a MineCraft fan: "MineCraft was a reluctant experiment on my part," she tells me, "because I was watching my husband play it, and I saw that he was building his own little stone fortress. I knew that if I got into this game, I wouldn't stop until I made a zombie-proof fortress, too. And prettier than his."

And you can make it pretty indeed. Via Rock Paper Shotgun, here's a level of MineCraft that some clever dude transformed to resemble Rapture, from BioShock:

Last Week's New World Notes Posts You Don't Want to Miss

Metaverse-to-Real World

• Breakthrough Performance? Virtual Pop Star Skye Galaxy (Sean Ryan IRL) Wows Ze Frank and Thousands During Star-Filled Online Fundraiser 
• MoCap Basketball: Pantomime Jump Shots in the Real World, Make Baskets in the Virtual World!

Second Life

• TED Star & Media Maven Johanna Blakley on Second Life Fashion: "Offers Tremendous Insight Into Fashion Zeitgeist" 
• Ophelia's Gaze on the Second Life of Mad Men: Dressing Down Joan Harris Guest Post: 3 Lessons Linden Lab Can Learn From LOTRO 
• Second Life Machinima Gets 2 Million Viewers at the Shanghai World Expo

OpenSim

• John Hurliman on Intel's OpenSim Breakthrough: Yes We Can Get 100s of Avatars in One Region, Yes It'll Be Part of OpenSim's Public Codebase

Blue Mars

• Meeting the Fool on the Hill

Other World Notes

• Emerald Viewer Leaves Second Life for Welcoming Arms of "Virtual World Web" Platform Utherverse

NWN Weekend Open Forum

Got anything you want to say about Second Life, OpenSim, BlueMars, next generation gaming, user-generated content, this blog, movies about any of the above? Say so here!

Blue Mars Meet Up Today at 6pm PST: Meet Iris, Me, and Blue Mars Bigwigs in the Welcome Area

Update, 8:30pm: Thanks to all who came (and many did.) Here's a glimpse from near the dance floor, Iris in hot pink, and me in steampunk-esque duds. (Yes, my avatar is very much a work in progress.) Not sure who the buff angelic devil bartender is, but he never filled our order.

Today at 6pm PST, Iris Ophelia and I will join a bunch of the Avatar Reality team for a dance-powered meet-and-greet social in the Welcome Area. Come hang out, give Mars-flavored dancing a try, chat with the team. Go here to download the free Blue Mars client, and see you in about 90 minutes!

Mr. Shoji's Amazing Mixed Reality Profile

Second Life wanderer Shoji Kimura offers one of the more amazing mixed reality profile photos I've seen. Not just because his avatar and real life self look so alike (which is relatively easy to do), but because they both have the same wide-eyed curious expression -- a subtlety that's more harder to achieve.