New World Notes

Linden Lab on Display Name Confusion: It's "Easy" To Confirm an SLer's Real Username

Last week I mentioned a case of Second Life avatar identity confusion caused by users with matching display names (which can be changed). I asked the Lindens about this -- specifically, how does Linden recommend SLers protect the identity and brand associated with their avatar name, when display names can easily spoof both? And company spokesman Peter Gray told me this:

"As the Display Names FAQ notes, Display Names are not intended to be unique identifiers and your Display Name could be the same as another user's. By default, a Username is displayed if it differs from a Display Name (as it would if a newer user selected a Display Name that matched an older user's Username), and it's easy to toggle them at any point to see the Username of the person you're interacting with inworld to confirm that it's the SL user you've known by that Display Name."

On Monday, I asked Pete his advice to SL vendors who discover people are creating a similar display name to game SL's search engine? (Which apparently does happen.) I haven't received a reply as yet, and will update this post if I do.

Game AI as Improv Theater: Or, Why Deus Ex's Cops Can't See You in the Elevator

When it comes to artificial intelligence behavior in games, the player and the developer often have to collaborate, to maintain the illusion of a world; then it feels less like a computer simulation, and more like improvisational theater, where the player and developer work together to keep the story going. I got a perfect example of this last night, playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution. As I mentioned Monday, the combat AI is really challenging, but that doesn't mean it's "real". During a mission in a heavily guarded police precinct, my character knocked a cop unconscious -- I'm a badass, goddammit, but I'm an ethical badass, zero bodycount! -- and dragged the guy into a nearby elevator.

Then something hilarious happened:

Wish I Could Get a Better Pic of This SL Airship Made of Mesh

I finally had a chance to try out the mesh-enabled SL Viewer 3 last night, and immediately came across this lovingly detailed airship in the first mesh sandbox that came up in search. (Wish I knew who made it, but keep reading.) There's a satisfying solidity to these mesh objects, don't you think? While you often come across prim-based airships in SL about as impressive as this, you can usually see the seams, their cobbled-together feel.

Anyway, I tried to get a better screenshot of this airship, but then I turned my graphics settings up to maximum, and even though I have an Alienware laptop which can play graphics-intensive games like Deus Ex Human Revolution just fine, my viewer promptly froze, and refused to respond. So that's my mesh-filled Second Life so far, how's yours doing?

Should Access to Social Networks be a Basic Human Right? Google & Facebook's Recent Moves Make Me Think So

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said that joining his company's new social network Google Plus is voluntary, and so people shouldn't complain about its policy forbidding pseudonyms. As he puts it:

Google+ is completely optional. In fact, many many people want to get in, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to.

However, in the very same talk, he says the reason Google wants your real name is this:

[W]e could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, we could give them things, we could, you know, bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons. [emph. mine]

These two statements seem contradictory, or soon will be. Google is currently playing catch-up with Facebook to create an online identity management service that's intended to be used for billing and other important online transactions. There's a lot of industry talk that Facebook's launch of Facebook Credits is a strategy to become the Internet's "e-wallet", and supplant Paypal in that role. (Paypal, incidentally, doesn't require real names, beyond what you internally tell the company, but isn't anywhere near Facebook's size.) In that regard, Google has its own competing service, Google Wallet. Facebook already has 750 million users, and thanks to Google's pervasiveness on the Internet, Plus has a very good chance of reaching user levels close to that.

In other words, here is the problem with what Google (and by extension Facebook) is doing:

How to Skin Clothing Mesh for SL in Blender - Tutorial

This video is from a valuable series by ashasekayi that shows you how to skin clothing mesh for Second Life in Blender. Fashionista QueenKellee Kuu recommended it to me highly: "It doesn't cover any actual mesh creation, but all the other admin stuff: exporting your shape, getting rigging into your clothing. Probably the most helpful to all audiences is the one about simply the uploading into SL and all the details on that upload window." (That video above; click here to see the whole series.)

Chat With Award-Winning Cleverbot A.I. Here on NWN

If the embed code works, you should be able to chat with Cleverbot, an award-winning AI, right here on New World Notes; give it a try:

Sim Deathwatch: Second Life Loses 2 Grendel's Children Sims After Losing Linden Lab's Attention

Grendel's Children, longtime creators of incredible custom avatars in Second Life, is closing down two of its four SL sims, Prim Perfect reports, but not for lack of funds. Rather, they're claiming a lack of support or response from Linden Lab, and communications frustrations so great, they resorted to contacting CEO Rod Humble via his Twitter account, which is not exactly the most direct way of asking for technical help. Says co-creator Toady Nakamura:

“We took this problem all the way to the CEO,” says Toady, “and it was fixed for 3 days. Then it broke again. We can’t keep going to the top for routine things like ‘we cannot move in our sim’.”

Read much more here. While Grendel's Children still remains in SL, users will have to make do with less land where their are creations showcased -- while the Lindens will have to make do with some $7000 less yearly revenue from Grendel's Children. Ironically, Toady Nakamura contacted me very recently, noting that on September 1, 2011, it will be the fifth anniversary of Grendel's Children as an SL business. "It's a shame to see others leaving SL," Toady told me then, "we're still here and planning to stay." I just didn't expect them to stay in such a diminished footprint.

Pictured above: A still from "Wizard & the Ozimal", an excellent machinima featuring hordes of Grendel's creatures: Watch it here.

SL Relay for Life 2011 Raises $375K From 115K Donations

You've probably already heard that SL's annual Relay for Life raised $375,000 in donations that'll go to the American Cancer Society this year (that's 75.5 million in Linden Dollars, before being converted to cash), but here's a figure that's just an interesting to me: According to Poppy Zabelin, who handles SLRFL's publicity, this amount came from approximately 115,000 donations.

That's an impressive number: assuming some of the donors made multiple contributions, I'd estimate SLRFL had somewhere in the range of 40,000-100,000 individual donors. While Second Life has about a million monthly unique users, only about 464,000 of them are economic participants who received or distributed L$ last quarter. So if my 40-100K estimate is right, 8% to 21% of SL's economic participants contributed to SL Relay for Life, which is easily the most prominent non-profit fundraising effort in Second Life. So I'd say that's the maximum number of participants you can currently expect to get involved in a given in-world fundraiser.

This is, by the way, quite a leap in donations from SLRFL in recent years; in 2010, the total was US$222K, in 2009, US$275K. While SL itself is still at a growth plateau, it's good to see the existing userbase putting more of their money into a worthy cause.

Image from Daniel Voyager's blog.

Deux Ex Human Revolution Shows The Limits of Immersive Storytelling (Except for Shooting People, Flushing Toilets)

I spent a lot of last weekend playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution (via Steam), the latest installment of a gaming franchise that’s near and dear to me: The first game in 2000 was among the very first I wrote about at length (along with Thief: The Dark Project, an even more beloved predecessor.) They established for me the possibilities of immersive storytelling, or what the first game’s developers called “emergent narrative” - a 3D game world that was so deep, realistic, and interactive, players could figure out their own ways of accomplishing tasks within it.

First impressions after five hours of playing:

Last Week's Top 7 New World Notes Post: My Picks

• Ophelia's Gaze: 3 Great SL Fashion Items Which Show Off the Potential -- and Limitations -- of Mesh
• SL Display Names Causing Account Identity Confusion - and Opening Potential for Malicious Impersonation
• Meet Bibbe: The Artist Who Created Art With Andy Warhol and Now Creates Art in SL
• Beautiful Second Life Machinima Inspired by Snowcrash & Thoughts on Humans & Being Virtual
• Google Profiles Adding Twitter-Style Verification Badges for Identified Users; Backdoor Solution to the Pseudonym Mess?
• High Noon, Innovative iOS Shooter With MMO-esque Features, Now Has 1 Million Monthly Players
• 2 Ways Forward For Second Life: Evolution & Preservation