New World Notes

Day in the Life of One of Second Life's Most Stylish Avatars

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

O'Clock is a Second Life fashion magazine with a damn clever premise. It follows a single featured avatar through their "day", starting in the morning, with each spread themed around their daily activities. It's an interesting twist on its own, but this month's issue of O'Clock is even more special. Issue number five's highlighted avatar is Matilda Soon, a mature lady who oozes class out of every virtual pore.

Matilda's not the first stylish avatar to take on the chic older woman look, but unlike many of the others she might share the category with Matilda's not too married to her cateye frames and pearls. She dresses the part of an aging Coco Chanel as easily as she slips into trendier, more contemporary galaxy-prints and geometric motifs. In fact one of my favorite spreads in the magazine features Matilda's morning yoga routine, expertly shot without an ounce of farce or comedy.

That's an important aspect of Matilda, too. She's absolutely not a joke, and she's made that abundantly clear:

SL Go Places: Mayfair, a Stylish Little City Sim for Shoppers and Sightseers Alike

Even if you have a decent computer, there are some things in Second Life that require technical compromises. Case in point: Occasionally crowded shopping sims with beautifully built surroundings. Mayfair is the perfect example of this, a place full of clean, classic mesh buildings. It's also home to popular brands Celoe and Mon Tissu, meaning that you'll rarely find yourself there alone, even if you visit during the current lull between releases.

That said, visiting Mayfair in SL Go was a surprisingly different experience than I'm used to having there. Here's why:

Second Life Machinima: Mr. Bones Meets a Mermaid

The latest hilarious and lovingly produced installment in the Second Life adventures of Ole "Mr. Bones" Etzel is full of disaster and danger and maybe some hotly hot hotness with a mermaid in the deep blue sea:

"Mr. Bones" is Ole Etzel, a German SLer with a knack for American folk music and machinima, who told me this about the latest adventures of his avatar:

New World Notes Seeking Guest Posts on SL & VR

We are looking for guest posts to run on New World Notes, broadly around the topic of Second Life, virtual worlds, and virtual reality. You'll get a chance to express your opinion in the largest SL-related blog online, and you can include a link to your SL blog/SL Marketplace listing/whatever in the process.

If you have an idea you'd like to outline, please e-mail me at [email protected] or send an IM to me in Second Life, to Hamlet Au. Express your idea for a post in a "nutgraf".

What's that? Well, this:

Back to Nature: Paint and Explore an Idyllic World in Toca Boca's Latest Game for iOS

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

Toca Boca's iOS apps might be better described as toys than games. They specialize in providing the foundational elements of play and then letting their players loose without any further guidance, leading to a lineup of products that resemble dollhouses more than they resemble a lot of their fellow child-oriented apps. Their philosophy is clean and simple, with an up-front cost and absolutely no in-app purchases.

But even though Toca Boca's work is designed with kids in mind, you can still get a lot of joy out of them as an adult. For example, consider their latest: Toca Nature...

OpenWorm Nervous System Simulated in LEGO Robot

I for one welcome our artificial worm-robot powered overlords:

This is the latest from OpenWorm, a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form -- a simple worm, computationally created from the cellular level to a point where it's sophisticated enough to solve, as the site explains, "basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance". As Cory Doctorow explains about this update:

[T]hey've sequenced the connectome of all 302 neurons in a C. Elegans worm, simulated them in software, and put them to work driving a Lego robot. The legobot's sensors and motors are connected to the software in a way that corresponds to the worm's sensory apparatus and motor neurons, and the researchers claim that the resulting robotic behaviors are strikingly similar to a C Elegans' own. The significant thing here is that these behaviors were not programmed: they emerged naturally from mere act of simulating the worm's neurons.

So yes, OpenWorm has moved from the digital realm into robots. And our world will soon be dominated by them.

I've written a lot about the OpenWorm project, because a well-known SL programmer was part of the lead team during its inception:

Linden Lab's Blocksworld Now Has 400K Monthly Users - Here's How They Can Grow it to Be Larger Than Second Life

VentureBeat has a long interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, which mainly hits points he's discussed with us here and here, but he also reveals a new data point which helps explain why the company kept Blocksworld, the LEGO-like tablet-based application targeted at kids, while selling off properties like Desura:

We’re learning a ton about how to make creation easy and fun. We’re learning how kids interact with a device like this. We’ve done barely any marketing around this. We’re still evolving this product, still early. But we’re already up to just about 400,000 monthly users. We’re a top-ranked game in the education category. We tend to be near the top in both the family and education categories of the App Store, at least in the U.S. The app is available globally, but at the moment, it’s English only. (Emph. mine)

That's really impressive, especially without much marketing and no non-English versions to speak of. Second Life has about 600,000 active monthly users, so Blocksworld is already within striking distance. Create a version of Blocksworld for the Japanese and Korean markets (which monetize best) and for China (which has the largest install base), not to mention Germany (the EU's biggest mobile market, I believe), and I can easily see Blocksworld getting a monthly user-base far larger than Second Life itself.

Speaking of which, Altberg describes a rich ecosystem of user-genreated content in Blocksworld:

Inquiring About Inquisitors: Who's Your Hero in Dragon Age: Inquisition and Why?

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

The character you make in a BioWare game can be a strangely personal thing. Unless you're one of those weirdos who goes with the default (bo-ring) there's a lot for you to consider before you even start playing. Where's your character from? What life have they lived? What kind of person are they/will they become? What do they want out of the world? Appearance customization is almost the simplest part of the process, even though Dragon Age: Inquisition offers more customization options than ever before.

I mulled all of these things over last night and came up with something I'm happy with, but what about you?

Three Items from The Kawaii Project Guaranteed to Make Your Second Life Cuter

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

I don't get excited about new shopping events in Second Life very often, but when I do they're almost always kawaii. It's true that every week it seems there's a new event, a new hunt, a new fair, a new something pulling SL consumers in every direction, so these days only a handful of them ever really catch my eye. The Kawaii Project is one of them, promising to be a monthly event where designers inspired by all things cute and lovely can gather together and flaunt their latest work.

I've picked out three items you won't want to miss from the debut round of the Kawaii Project, so keep reading for the details!

Consider Kickstarting: That Dragon, Cancer, a Bereaved Couple's Interactive Memorial to Their Cancer-Stricken Son

That Dragon, Cancer, is a new, heart-wrenching Kickstarter project which is both a game and couple's memorial to their very young son, who recently succumbed to cancer:

Click here to consider funding. Despite all the drama and rancor around the game industry this year, the medium of games continues to be more ambitious, more willing to take on painful and controversial subjects -- and in the end, that's what really matters.