New World Notes

Second Life Co-Creator Cory Ondrejka Co-Creates Game Dev Platform for HTML5 -- Can It Help Save Second Life?

Yesterday when Linden Lab was reporting downcast performance numbers for Second Life, there was a presentation that's probably far more important to the future of SL. Second Life co-creator Cory Ondrejka, who is now a developer with Facebook, showed off the project he and his development partner Bruce Rogers created after joining the social networking giant: JSGameBench, a very very early stage, free Apache-licensed platform for creating games in HTML5, which will soon be the standard code for web browsers. Watch his high level geek talk here, with an impressive graphic demo happening about 10 minutes in:

Watch live streaming video from facebookeducation at livestream.com

Read more about JSGameBench here. As Cory mentions in his presentation, we're in extremely early days of game development in HTML5, but the demo suggests impressive results even now. Of course Facebook's incentive in this are games that will run within the social network. But for those with any investment in the power and potential of Second Life, it's also a development worth watching:

Zero Punctuation on Minecraft: The Delight in Creation Comes From Earning Resources to Create With First

After much anticipation, famed game reviewer Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has appraised Minecraft, and if you're already familiar with the Zero Punctuation video column, you know it's totally not safe for work viewing. So here we go, and be sure to watch toward the end, where he makes a very good point about user-generated content that's generally applicable beyond Minecraft:

Did you catch it in between all the bracing, British-flavored vulgarity?

Part of the appeal of building is the effort required to gather materials. That 80 foot [NSFW NSFW NFSW] wouldn't be so satisfyingly turgid if it weren't for the entire continent you had to turn upside down to find all the ore.

This reminds me of an idea I had when I was at Linden Lab, way back in 2003: What if, I casually mentioned to Philip and Cory, instead of just rezzing prims out of thin air, you actually had to harvest them? You'd get metal prims from mountains, wood prims trees, and so on. Then you'd end up with an economic system that was truly wedded to the world, not floating arbitrarily above it, and emergent societies based around the precious resources they happen to own, and so on. Ah well, it could have worked. Now Minecraft has 1 million paying customers. The upcoming new Lego MMO also has a mechanic of earning the blocks you build with.

In any case, if you like Zero Punctuation, do read my interview with him from a couple years back.

The Virtual World is Flat: In 2010, Second Life User Activity is Flat to Negative (But for E-Commerce)

Linden Lab just published some key metrics of Second Life user activity and in-world economic performance in the final quarter of 2010, and the results are largely negative. In Q4 2010, monthly unique log-ins were floundering at 795K, somewhat up from the previous quarter, but below the peak of 806K in Q2 2010.

What's worse, total user hours in-world have dropped in 2010, which strongly suggests that even established Second Life users are spending somewhat less time in-world as well. (In late 2009, just 133K Second Life users were responsible for nearly 90% of SL's total user hours.) The other most meaningful user metrics were also flat or trending South: total land mass (which users contribute to when they buy private islands, or in this case, don't), and average monthly economic participants (485K in Q4 2010, down from a peak of 496K in Q1 2010.) Still worse, it's difficult to see these trends strongly reversing, barring a fairly radical change in how Second Life is run and deployed: a version for the iPad and Kinect would be a good start, a version of SL that runs on the cloud and on the web would be even better, as would deep integration with Facebook. The question is if Linden Lab's new CEO, Rod Humble, can introduce any or all of such changes before this decline becomes irreversible.

In all this, I should say, there is one hopeful sign:

Here Are Your Very Favorite Second Life Music Performers for 2010 -- Who Are We Missing?

Here are the top seven favorite Second Life music performers for 2010, as chosen by New World Notes readers from several open forums and surveys last year, talented artists who span rock, electronic, blues, pop, and folk. These seven will be finalists in our next and last vote to select NWN Readers' very favorite all around performer in Second Life for 2010:

• The Black Stripes
• Chouchou
• Cosmic Haystack
• Juel Resistance
• Komuso Tokugawa
• Skye Galaxy
• Von Johin

If you think there's an SL performer who should be in this finalist round, please nominate them in comments below. If many readers show a clear and obvious preference, we'll add up to three more in the voting finals. Here's some nomination criterion after the break:

Ophelia's Gaze: 3 Big Mistakes MMOs Make That Alienate Female Gamers

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

Women are an expanding segment of MMO users (and the majority of online gamers, too), but many developers still aren't acknowledging the importance and needs of this market. Researchers studying MMO demographics attribute the concentration of female gamers in this genre partly to the flexibility of characters they can play in MMOs, especially compared to what's found in most single-player games. (Which are often limited to over-endowed sexpots, or cartoonish cooks and caregivers.) MMOs offer us a way to play more powerful and palatable female lead characters, the kind who aren't usually featured in their own single-player titles.

All too often, however, MMO developers sabotage this potential (and themselves) by ignoring female players -- or worse, insulting them. These mistakes are evident in numerous popular MMOs, starting with the very biggest, World of Warcraft itself. Keep reading to find out how.

The Future Look of Second Life (Now If It Could Only Scale)

Thanks to Tesla Miles, here's a retina-licking look at Second Life with mesh objects and all the sweetest graphics features enabled (dynamic lighting, depth of field, deferred rendering), captured with the Mesh Project Beta Viewer:

Scrumptious. Last time I posted eyeball truffles like this, a reader named Loki argued, "[I]s it perhaps wrong for machinimas to present Second life turned up to 11, since I assume only a tiny percent can see SL like that?" Which is true enough, though I don't totally agree, since videos like this validly show off Second Life's full potential as a 3D graphics and machinima platform. Then again, Loki has a point: It's difficult to imagine Second Life ever looking this fine for the vast majority of users -- or for that matter, even most of those with good enough hardware specs to get visuals like this. (After all, put more than a dozen avatars in this scene, and they'd surely start collecting lag and gray.)  But oh how pretty it is for us to see it from this distance.

Hat tip: Mal Burns' video stream.

In Virtual Animal Copyright Suit, Judge Grants Injunction Against Ozimals' DMCA Notices (But Horse Breeders Still Not Immune From Protest)

Fluff Enemies: Amaretto Horses and Ozimal Bunnies

UPDATE, May 2017: This story continues with a new legal dispute leading to a mass extinction of bunnies.

In a recently filed Copyright Infringement lawsuit pitting the creators of two competing virtual animal breeds in Second Life, the judge has issued an injunction against Ozimals, a breeder of bunnies which don't exist, forbidding it from filing any more DMCA notices against Amaretto Breedables, a breeder of horses that are merely binary code. (Read more about the case here.) Originally, the judge granted a temporary injunction that applied to Linden Lab as well; however, law blogger Eric Goldman reports, this time "the court granted an injunction that only applies to Ozimals' sending of takedown notices and makes no reference to restrictions on Second Life." (Unsurprisingly, Linden Lab filed an opposition to that original injunction.) All this heated and ongoing courtroom wrangling leads Goldman to observe in wonderment

I'm a little baffled how the revenue streams from these virtual animals can profitably support full-scale litigation warfare. Unfortunately, the parties seem to be going down that path.

I'm a bit baffled too. For apparently, bunneh and horsie are still at legal loggerheads. And in an apparently unrelated incident, a number of sign-waving protesters besieged an Amaretto Breedables store, complaining about abuse and exploitation of virtual horses. (Or I should say, inveighing against virtual neighing.) Watch:

What Are Your Favorite Second Life Groups on Facebook?

Second Friends is the name of a pretty good Facebook group, primarily a place for Residents to promote content and events in Second Life, displayed in a near-real time stream. With nearly 1600 members, it's fairly large and busy, and could probably use some curating, to better expose really noteworthy events. This Facebook group and some others I've joined use life Facebook group chat, providing like Plurk another alternative to Second Life communications besides those offered in, well, Second Life itself.

What other SL-related Facebook groups do you recommend? Of course, New World Notes has a Facebook group of its own, which has hundreds of lovely people, but needs more updates (ahem.) And yes, Facebook does technically forbid accounts that are pseudonymous avatar names, but as a Facebook rep told me a couple years ago, the vast majority of the "fake" accounts which Facebook actually bans are reported by other users, not from active policing by the social network. Which probably explains why Facebook has so many accounts which are actually avatar names. (The official Second Life page has over 107,000 members, many or most or whom are avatars.)

Another Second Life on Kinect Project Unveiled - But When Will We Get the Source Code?

Unveiled on YouTube less than a week after USC's Institute for Creative Technologies showed of their version, here's another Kinect-to-Second Life hack, this one from developers with the Digital Media Zone in Toronto:

Interesting ways for controlling the avatar and the camera, somewhat different from those in the USC project. The next question, of course, is when we'll get a version of this SL-to-Kinect interface open sourced, so many more variations can bloom?

Miss Ophelia's Metaverse Manners: Finding Friends, Mitigating Masters, and Tempting Trolls

Exclusive to NWN, Iris Ophelia's take on etiquette and ethics in virtual spaces

This week we have a mixed bag of questions, but don't forget that the next Metaverse Manners column will have a theme: Shopping! Submit your shopping and customer-service related etiquette issues on my Formspring, or in the comments (and don't forget to identify yourself with a pseudonym!) Now, on with this week's questions...

What is the best way to find and make friends? I tried hanging out at the clubs, but they are usually cliquish and boring. I explore a bit here and there, but usually there are not many people at places I have visited.

Oddly enough, most of the social activity between SLers seems to happen outside of SL, especially in terms of meeting new people and groups. For example, Plurk is a major social and networking hotspot for residents (to the point that they even let you pick "Second Life" as your location). I've met more likeminded SLers through Plurk than anywhere else. Another helpful place to look are photosharing sites like Flickr and Koinup. Flickr in particular is full of Second Life based groups for just about every interest, so pick a few that you like and start communicating! While it may seem counter intuitive to look outside for people to socialize with inside, a lot of the relationships that start on these external services turn into in-world friendship offers, parties, and eventually a clique of your own-- all you have to do is put yourself out there.

Keep reading for the answers to more social conundrums!