SL Bare is an SL blog which profiles Second Life bloggers and other content creators, and I'm liking it a lot, especially because the publishers TrinityBelle Meriman and Adorkable Peapod delve into the real life personalities of the people who contribute to SL, which offers fascinating insights into their motivations and perspectives. Here's the latest one on Isla Gealach (whose Flickr stream is here), and who's 29 (and turning 30 next Wednesday) and a young American woman living in Scotland.
Here's an in-depth look by Inara Pey at Second Life's new, experimental Communications Hub User Interface, which was just introduced this week, as an attempt to unify in-world communications for users. "Overall, this is a significant attempt to centralize in-world communications," opines Pey, "and there are some nice features here, particularly in the extended Voice options." Read more about it here.
Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
When I saw an in-progress picture of this new serpentine style on Plurk, I knew that I absolutely had to go to the The Ego Co.'s Costume Ball event [SLURL] where it was going to be available. It's not hard to get my attention with a release when it has to do with myths, fairytales, and fables, and I felt like we were long overdue for a realistic and detailed Medusa-style wig, so I snapped this up in a heartbeat.
This gem was made by Daphne Klossovskyfor her brand, HANDverk [SLURL] [SL Marketplace], where she releases a pretty eclectic assortment of products. Her usual work doesn't cut any corners, so the quality of this Medusa 'do does not disappoint. Let's take a closer look:
An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life. In other words, as he wrote on his blog, "Second Life is providing a big chunk of life satisfaction, just as big as the factors that previous researchers on life satisfaction have found were the 'biggies,' like health, employment, and family relationships."
I deeply suspect this is also true for people who extensively play other immersive virtual worlds and MMOs with similar features. Which would mean that for tens of millions of people, this famous scene (above) from The Matrix, in which a man betrays his real life friends for the chance at having a better virtual life, is relevant to their actual choices.
Of course, I think few MMO/virtual world players would make as stark and serious a choice as Cypher did, but at the same time, we are already well acquainted with many who do sacrifice aspects of their real life for their virtual one -- jobs and chores skipped, friends and loved ones ignored, so some of us could spend just a little more time socializing or gaming in a 3D digital landscape that doesn't strictly exist. This also calls the mind the "experience machine" thought experiment put forth by philosopher Robert Nozick, way back in the 70s:
Typing Karaoke is a simple but crazy brilliant indie web game, which as the name suggests, involves typing to song lyrics, as the track plays across the screen -- you have to type fast enough to keep up with the song, and if you don't (or make too many mistakes in the process), fail. Obviously this makes for a great typing tutorial, but also a fun casual game in itself. Right now there's songs from Radiohead, LMFAO, Carly Rae Jepsen, Usher, etc. in the game, so a lot of demographic tastes in pop music are covered. Created by Terence Chen, Typing Karaoke is still in early stages of development, but Chen has bigger plans for it:
Minecraft is now the most popular game on Xbox Live, which means it is more popular than Call of Duty, which is a franchise that's ruled the console space for years, which means an indie game pretty much made by one guy I talked to two years ago is now more popular than a game series made by hundreds for hundreds of millions of dollars, and which also means (to me) that we have entered a new era of gaming culture, where sandbox building and creativity are more valued than randomly running around shooting everything that moves (except of course civilians, who don't exist in Call of Duty's fantasy universe, since that would just be a bummer). Which finally means, for the interest of NWN readers, that it seems more and more the case that Linden Lab is right to pursue products like Patterns, which is the kind of product the next generation of gamers seem to be trending to.
Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
If you don't have an Android phone or an iPhone or even a tablet of some
sort these days with at least one game loaded onto it, you're in a bit
of a minority -- even my mom likes to sit in her recliner with "Say Yes
to the Dress" on the television in the background while she plays a
rather brutal-looking motorcycle racing game on her iPad. I'm no exception, so when one of my favorite mobile developers, Kairosoft, released a new fashion-focused game, it was so in my uber-fashionable wheelhouse that I couldn't help but share it.
Kairosoft games are easy to pick out of a crowd, and incredibly addictive. They've made games about managing malls, villages, spas, restaurants... But Clothier Story, a game about an up-and-coming boutique for the Androidandfor the iOS, might be the perfect gateway drug to get my fellow virtual fashionistas into the wonderful world of Kairosoft games. Here's why:
Second Life doesn't play nice with my AlienWare at the moment, and at times like this, I like to look at what Second Life can look like when it's running at graphically optimal heights, as here:
To get SL to look like this, the YouTube videographer, "boodleboy" had a pretty sweet system running the popular third party SL viewer Firestorm: "CPU - Intel Q6600, Palit Platinum GF 460gtx,4GB RAM, 64bit Ubuntu," he answered when I asked. "Capturing software limited performance a bit." Though he just uploaded it, the actual video was shot last year. Wonder what the latest viewer would look like on the best possible system.
