New World Notes

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week

• Play This Weekend: Jazzpunk, A Game of Cyberpunk Spies So Stylish It May Make You Sick -- Literally
• Philip Rosedale on Low Latency in High Fidelity -- Can Online VR Interactions Become Faster Than Skype Video?
• Altberg Advice: 3 Ways Linden Lab's New CEO Should Start the Remaking of Second Life
• Fitted Mesh Finally Hits Second Life -- But With Some Serious Limitations
• Why Linden Lab Likes Blocksworld as Much as Second Life

You Could Be Playing Pokemon Right Now -- With Seventy Thousand Strangers

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Growing up as an only child with more than a few single-player video games, I considered myself pretty lucky. I didn't have to worry about older siblings stealing the controller, or younger siblings breathing down my neck. Playing a single-player game for an audience, as you would on a gaming stream, can have similar problems. Everyone has advice, everyone knows what you should do next, everyone wants the controller in their own hands. So what if you just gave it to them? What if you handed your audience the controller, gave them a pat on the back and said "Good luck."

All 70 thousand of them.

Twitch Plays Pokemon does just that, and it's a beautiful mess.

Visit This Valentines' Weekend in Second Life: Bryn Oh's Latest Immersive Art Installation

Click here to visit and experience the latest SL installation by acclaimed virtual world artist Bryn Oh, "The Singularity of Kumiko", which opens today. But first, you should probably read her introductory notes, both technical and artistic, on her blog. For instance: "[T]he best viewer to use is Firestorm as it has the most effective WindLight and shadow settings available... Some things that can help with the immersion is if you are able to turn the lights down low in the room as you explore, as well as turn up the ambient volume. Essentially you will need a special WindLight, shadows enabled and a headlamp."

Image of Byrn and hat tip to Kara Trapdoor, who has some thoughts on the show on her blog. And watch a machinima preview by Bryn below the break:

Play This Weekend: Jazzpunk, A Game of Cyberpunk Spies So Stylish It May Make You Sick -- Literally

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Games like Jazzpunk remind me that it's not a bad idea to buy games the same way you might buy shoes. You can buy a game because you need one, because you've worn out all the others you have, but there's no harm in buying a game every now and them purely for style, purely because you appreciate what it's doing, and how it's doing it. Even if it's not the most practical, even if it won't last you more than a season, sometimes you deserve a stylish (and fun) little indulgence.

Comedy-focussed indie release Jazzpunk is my indulgence of choice at the moment... Even when it has me reaching for a bottle of Gravol... But I'll get to that part shortly. Let's start at the beginning:

Philip Rosedale on Low Latency in High Fidelity -- Can Online VR Interactions Become Faster Than Skype Video?

Philip Rosedale says he wants his new High Fidelity virtual reality platform to operate at latency of 100 milliseconds or less, as I blogged last week, but after re-reading that post, I wanted to know a bit more precisely what he meant by that figure. So I asked him, and here's the thing: He is aiming to create a virtual reality platform where interactions happen much faster than they do when you are talking with someone on Skype video:

"[W]here I use the expression latency," Philip tells me, "I mean 'end-to-end latency', or as the ITU calls it 'mouth-to-ear' latency. I mean the elapsed time between my lips moving and you hearing it on your end. For a cell phone, this value is about 400msecs. On Skype video the delay between my eyebrow moving and you seeing it move is about 250msecs, although both our cameras are typically at 30 frames per second. Our goal with HiFi is to get that end-to-end latency to about 100msecs."

Speaking of FPS, he told me the kind of rates they're getting there, too:

SL Wishlist Makes Shopping for Your Virtual Valentine a Piece of Cake

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

One of the biggest oversights in the Second Life Marketplace is the lack of a wishlist feature. You can set items as a favorite, and that's helpful for keeping track of what you might want to get yourself in the future, but that doesn't do your Valentine any good when they're looking for the perfect gift. Shopping for die-hard fashionistas is especially risky; who knows what they've bought (and in how many colors) the second it was released?

SL Wishlist is a pretty long overdue service in that sense. If you worry that you might be a bit hard to shop for yourself, you might want to consider making a SL Wishlist account before Friday to help out any secret admirers fumbling desperately for last minute gifts. The site might seem a little bare-bones, but it can be searched by avatar name, meaning that anyone who wants to find your list can. Even better, you can do some nosing around yourself and find a gift for that special someone in your virtual life.

One word of advice: Because these lists are public, you may not want to add anything of a... Particularly personal nature, if you catch my drift. Nothing you wouldn't want your family (virtual or otherwise) to stumble across at least. Sometimes its probably best to share certain gift ideas directly, right?

Altberg Advice: 3 Ways Linden Lab's New CEO Should Start the Remaking of Second Life

Welcome to Linden Lab, Ebbe Altberg! You are the first second third fourth executive to become CEO of this revolutionary startup (that's been a startup since 2008 2006 1999). Before your chair is even warm, you're already being buried by unsolicited advice from Second Life users on Twitter, a lot of which probably seems obscure to you or besides the point, and that advice cascade is only going to increase. You'll get used to it (hopefully). Since I wrote a HarperCollins book called The Making of Second Life back in olden times (by which I mean 2008), and contracted for the company during Second Life's first three years, hopefully you won't mind if I add just a bit more to the advice pile awaiting you now.

As you can tell from your company dashboards, Second Life is not growing its userbase while its revenue base is eroding, so let's start with the good news: the existing userbase is never going away. Seriously. For instance, most of the established userbase hates the official Second Life viewer so much, they just use an alternative, rather than quit. So don't worry about them overly much -- just keep adding tweaks, fixes, and new features, communicate with them on the blog a bit more than your predecessor did, and they'll basically be fine. (Yes, they'll keep complaining like crazy, and say horrible things about you and the company, but that's just their way of saying, "Baby, I can't live without you".)

So the following three points of advice is all about growing the SL userbase:

Avoid Using Second Life as an Avatar Named "Linden" -- Instead, Start Exploring Second Life as an Everyday User

You're probably already getting pressured to create, customize, and use an updated avatar with the Linden surname, just like every CEO before you. Don't do this -- don't even use a Linden-named avatar except for rare, public occasions. Visiting Second Life with an identifiable avatar will give you a distorted impression of how the vast majority of users experience the virtual world. You are also going to get inundated with even more unsolicited advice (and complaints), these in the form of IMs and extremely long notecards which are difficult to read or export. ("I hate getting those," a former Linden Lab CEO once groaned to me.) Instead, to truly understand the challenges facing you, I recommend you experience the entire 6 hour on-ramping process that new users now face, from downloading the client to creating your first bit of content.

Two more quick points, but just as key:

Visit in Second Life: The Station, a Floating Steampunk Carnival a Bit Like BioShock Infinite (With an NSFW Twist)

Click here to visit The Station in Second Life, which is a steampunk city in the sky held aloft by balloons. Kara Trapdoor (a regular Station visitor) invited me there on a recent SL visit, and told me about the carnival games, and the place's many events (including karaoke -- how does that even work?), and it all kinda looked like the floating city in BioShock Infinite, but then Ms. Trapdoor led me through me a secret door where I saw a very interesting use of mesh that would have gotten that game an M rating. So it's got that going for it too. Click here to explore The Station yourself.

Fitted Mesh Finally Hits Second Life -- But With Some Serious Limitations

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Fitted Mesh made its long-awaited debut in the main viewer this week. Though designers have been able to experiment with it for a little while now, incorporation into the official viewer means that you can expect to see fitted mesh products on the shelves in many of your favorite shops soon... Though you'll need to update your viewer to see the shape-conforming benefits for yourself.

The promise? An end to cookie-cutter body shapes. No more "standard sizes", no more looking exactly like everyone else in those jeans or that shirt. While fitted mesh is an undeniable improvement (and a big step forward for Second Life fashion) it's not without its shortcomings. Here's why it's still not going to be the cure-all some designers and consumers had hoped for.

Why Linden Lab Likes Blocksworld as Much as Second Life

If you're wondering why Linden Lab's announcement of its new CEO put just as much emphasis on its new iPad game Blocksworld as its legacy product Second Life, this AppAnnie analytics chart will tell you why: Since launching last August, the LEGO-like creation game has been in the top-grossing chart among iPad apps in the Education and Family categories, both of which are pretty big for Apple's tablet, which has become a popular device for keeping kids occupied (and quiet, and not hitting their siblings). Notably, the game has remained close to the very top of those categories over the six or so months since its launch, which is extremely rare for apps. That suggests lots of hardcore fans of the game not only playing over many months, but paying.

It's likely Blocksworld still isn't making anywhere near the revenue that Second Life makes, but given the current trajectory of both that game and SL, this could eventually change: