New World Notes

Read Reconfigure, a New Cyberpunk Novel by Metaverse Pioneer Ian "Epredator" Hughes

Reconfigure is a new cyberpunk sci-fi novel from Ian "Epredator" Hughes, and it's the story of some lines of code gone horribly wrong (or maybe horribly right):

Roisin Kincade is a young, talented, full stack techie. Her mind is full of thoughts, ideas, film quotes and analogies... We have all done it, typed the wrong thing into the wrong window, deleted the wrong file, messaged the wrong person. This time she typed a Linux command in the wrong place. She missed the terminal window and managed to Tweet the World instead... A world of Fractal Iterations, Quantum Computing and strange side effects opened up. It appeared to offer a programming interface to everything around her.

Ian, as longtime readers know, is a metaverse pioneer from way back in the day, an IT Specialist an IBM who helped drive Big Blue's adoption of Second Life. Ian -- whose SL avatar, as you may have guessed, looks like the Predator, tells me Second Life and virtual worlds were a big inspiration for his novel:

Most Second Life Users Self-Identify as Roleplayers & Other MMO Game Types -- Very Few as Educators

Canary Beck has a very interesting survey of over 3000 Second Life users (one the biggest data samples I've ever seen), asking them to describe their main activities in SL, and whether they recommend Second Life to others. Respondents could choose three categories, and by far, the largest preferences were Roleplayers, Socializers, and Explorers. These are very familiar and core types of activities in most other MMOs, while other top preferences like Decorator, Fashionista, Creator, and Photographer are very much consonant with activities in sandbox-type games like The Sims franchise and Minecraft.

Just as notably, "Educator" was among the very least designated categories. Taken together, this should finally put to bed a long-running controversy among the SL user community and Linden Lab itself: "Is Second Life a game?" As I've argued before, most people who use Second Life use it for game-like activities or explicitly play it as a game, and this survey data seems consistent with that. 

So why do so many SLers insist Second Life isn't a game? More key, why does Linden Lab keep insisting that, even saying so on national television? Canary's survey provides a strong hint of that too:

The Second Life of Fallout 4 & Rise of Solo Virtual Worlds

The Verge has a really interesting post on how Fallout 4 is becoming some gamers' second life:

Two days, nine hours, and 17 minutes — that’s how long I’ve spent playing Fallout 4, the post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, since its release on November 10. I know this because the game keeps track and tells me every time I start it up. That’s 57 hours and change — almost one and a half workweeks — since the game arrived on my doorstep, and an even larger percentage of my waking hours... The game posted a record number of players on the PC game service Steam, too, reaching about 470,000 concurrent players. Judging from the online conversation, I’m not the only player who’s become lost in the game. Some appear to have far surpassed me, putting in 100 hours or more before the end of November. I guess I’ve got some catching up to do.

That's roughly more people having a second life in Fallout 4 than having a second life in, well, Second Life. What's really interesting is that Fallout 4 is single-player, but the world is so deep and self-consistent, it enables a lot more room for consistent, ongoing roleplay:

SL Flickr Stream of the Day: Flit Ulrik, Badass Action Girl

Flit Ulrik has a Flickr stream of unending action girl badassery, beautifully composed and photographed at that. Like this pic above is actually called "Relentless Oblivion", but it could just as well be entitled, "Furiosa at the Fair". Much more where that came from, which is here - and be sure to check the image description, as Ms. Ulrik often leaves a story for the image up in there.

Top Futurists & Philosophers Debate Moral & Legal Issues of Sentient AI - This Thursday in Second Life

“Moral and Legal Imperatives for Sentient AI” is a very potentially interesting colloquium that's being held this Thursday at 10am in Second Life. Sponsored by Terasem, a transhumanist non-profit organization, it's bringing together several leading philosophers and futurists who've written a lot on the topic of artificial intelligence. That includes Susan Schneider, who wrote this New York Times editorial on the movie Her, along with Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and John C. Havens, UK Guardian/Mashable contributor and author of Hacking H(app)iness. Go here for all the details, including direct teleport into Second Life.

The Making of Nethack, the Legendary Game That's Still Being Improved Three Decades After Launch

Nethack has just been updated after a decade-long hiatus, which means the incredibly influential game -- it's basically the inspiration of pretty much every "rogue-like" RPG, including the Diablo franchise and mobile games like Pixel Dungeon -- is still being developed 30 years after launch. A testament to online collaborative content, Nethack has been improved by dozens of developers working together online for free over the last few decades.

As it happens, Nethack is also one of the very first games I wrote about for Salon, at the start of my career, and it's influenced my thoughts about games and collaborative creation ever since. Read the original article from 2000 below!

Why Second Life's Prim-Based Era Was Its Golden Age of Creation (Comment of the Week)

"Lost Gardens of Apollo" - a classic from SL's prim era

Veteran Second Life builder P. Gibbs wrote a really interesting rant on the state of Second Life creation today in comparison to Minecraft now and SL in its pre-mesh era which is worth excerpting here, because it expresses some key challenges Project Sansar faces now: 

Just let me get some things out of the way. I love SL, you really gotta like something to spend 8 years of your life logging in daily on it, learning to create, perfecting your modeling, learning a new programming language and everything else that comes along with it to be a successful builder. I am a user and I create content, I love to visit other people’s sims, check out their own creations and pretty much the whole experience with "be what you want, do what you want".

But as it helped me grow as a creator (it drove me to study 3D Studio Max, Blender, Photoshop, Gimp and a bunch of other softwares for years) it didn't follow along the growth rate, and every minute studying just helped me to notice how harder it was to make something nice for SL than anywhere else. If you ever work with UDK, Unreal 4, even Unity, you will know that it's much easier to get something there to look and behave as you intended than it is in SL, and that is hell to content creation.

PG goes on to compare this to creation in Minecraft:

It's Now Possible to Make Video Calls from Minecraft

Yes, this was sponsored by Verizon as a marketing gimmick, but that just means it's one of the few (only?) cool things Verizon has been involved with:

Top Five New World Notes Posts from Last Week!

• Virtual Reality Movies Are "Not Storytelling", Says Pixar Co-Founder; VR Pioneer Jacki Morie Agrees -- For Now
• That Time Jim Trolled Dwight in Second Life in The Office
• Please Don't Feed the Linden Lab/Second Life/Sansar-Hating Trolls
• Google VC Thinks We'll Want VR & AR in Contact Lenses -- Does Anyone at Google Actually Wear Contact Lenses?
• What Are Linden Lab's Plans to Create a Sansar Community?

SL Flickr of the Day: Moos Makes the Metaverse His Canvas

"Lost" isn't some mid-century masterpiece you forgot you once saw, it's a screenshot Second Life (at least it started that way):

Moos Hultcrantz is the man who made the metaverse his canvas in this way, and the rest of his many SL photos (some more post-processed than others) is a perfect stream of moody eye candy for the weekend. Here's a stream featuring the late-lamented Venexia in SL: