New World Notes

Cassie's Clips: How to Reduce Lag & Griefing in Crowded Second Life Spaces -- By Making Avatars Disappear

For your upcoming weekend events, here's some tips from NWN correspondent Cassie Middles on improving your Second Life experience in crowded spaces -- just make the crowd disappear from your view. 

Seriously: "There's several ways to de-render avatars in Second Life," as she explains, "from right-clicking individuals next to you, to using the people tab, and even just using the 'show friends only' tab. If you ever de-render and want to see someone later, make sure to only click right click, de-render temporarily." Her own preference: "I always go for 'show friends only.' it will also de-render anyone coming into your sim as well, so that I don't have to keep de-rendering new traffic every few minutes."

Watch Cassie do that above, while standing, stressed out, in the middle of a rude and raucous safe hub. (More like unsafe hub.)

Single-Shard Worlds Encourage a Shared Culture - Including Virtual "Religion"

"Spiritual Expression in a Single-Shard Virtual World" is a new essay of mine for the development blog of Seed, the hugely ambitious MMO where players will rebuild society from the ground up. (Lawrence Lessig is helping craft a political system for it.) I relate instances of happening in pioneer virtual worlds like Eve Online, and also, of course, Second Life:

A single-sharded virtual world will inevitably wind up with recognizable groups which are identifiable by their real life nationality, ethnicity, or culture. And because many of these groups place a prime value on religious belief, they are likely to bring symbols of their spirituality to this new world. But religious divides can also follow users into the virtual space. One high-minded Second Life group founded its own interfaith metaverse religion called The Avatars of Change, announcing, “We are an ecumenical religious and cultural order, united by the Avatarian Way.” However, when disagreements over the members’ real life doctrines emerged, this new religious group quickly fell into chaos.

Read the rest here. I originally wrote about The Avatars of Change here on New World Notes here. If you missed it last Summer, Seed teaser below:

Second Life Avatar Fashion So Confusing & Complicated There Are Professional Makeover Agencies

Before and after with the Makeover Agency

SL social media queen Ms. Strawberry Singh has a fascinating interview with the founder of The Makeover Agency, which is more or less an outgrowth of Second Life's option-laden, confusing, user-unfriendly fashion marketplace and user interface. As founder SarahBeths  explains:

New VR Program Trains People for Public Speaking -- But A Social VR Version Would Be Even Better

This is one of the more interesting non-gaming use cases for virtual reality I've seen in awhile -- a public speaking trainer:

Inside the headset, Ovation offers up a highly configurable experience for practicing your public speaking. Scenes range from a handful of people in a boardroom to a large group of people in a conference hall. As most any public speaking engagement is supported by some sort of prepared material, you can import a range of ‘Speech Items’ which can be pure text, for placing on virtual notecards or teleprompters; powerpoint slides and PDFs, for showing on projectors and screens; and imported images, to place drawings for on whiteboards.

More on Road to VR here. As with many one-off VR applications for real world use, the need for an open-ended multi-user creation and deployment platform is really screaming out:

Mysterious New Second Life Continent Takes on Seahorse Shape, Grid of Tracks, New Emoji Island

The vast continent which emerged from the waters last Summer to the far NorthEast beyond grid civilization (first spotted by Tyche Shepherd) has taken on more detail since then. Comprised of 384 sims -- in real world terms, about 16 square miles, i.e. about a third the size of San Francisco -- it now looks somewhat like a seahorse, nibbling on a blade of seaweed. (Is that even a thing? Work with me here.)

Also notable, it comes with a grid of earthen tracks (roads? paths?) and two massive gray rectangles (runways?), one of which is floating in an circular lake. And where, back in August, it included an island in the shape of an emoji saying "Hi!", a new island-based-emoji has taken its place -- now sending a perhaps more mysterious message:

A New MMO Called New World -- Now Featured on New World Notes

12 years after this blog was launched and dubbed New World Notes, devoted to covering virtual worlds and MMOs, there's finally an actual virtual world MMO that's actually called New World.

Created by Amazon Studios, the simplest way to describe it, perhaps, is Day Z, but set during the conquistador era, in a persistent island world:

Cassie's Clips: Exploring the "Absolutely Stunning" Second Life Recreation of The Upside Down from Stranger Things

Monday's post about the Stranger Things fan community build in Second Life was so popular, I sent NWN correspondent Cassie Middles to explore in person, and file her report to YouTube. Is it laggy? Is it worth the L$1000 group admission fee? Is it as detailed as it seems to be? Watch and find out from Cassie. (And don't miss the moment where she wanders into Joyce's house only to find a couple, um, already there.)

Here's the top takeaway from Cassie:

Sansar & High Fidelity Not Growing Users Because They Miss the Point of Social Virtual Worlds, Says Expert -- But He May Miss the Point Too

Despite multiple partnerships with major eSports brands and an official tie-in experience for Spielberg's Ready Player One, Sansar's actual usage by actual users hasn't significantly grown. Will Burns, Vice-Chair for IEEE's Virtual Worlds Standard Group, believes the reason for that is obvious, and spells out why in a rather passionate rant:

This isn't a mystery at all.

Sansar misses the point of social virtual worlds, and flies in the face of open world persistent spaces like Second Life in favor of localized spaces that focus on form over function. The overarching mechanic of this approach has been done to death and constantly flopped:

BlueMars
Worlds Inc
Cybertown
and many others

There is an underlying set of "givens" when dealing with this stuff, mostly derived from even the moderate and persistent successes of predecessors. Historically speaking there is plenty of precedent for this stagnation, but nobody wants to acknowledge it; instead plowing ahead and constantly trying to dictate to the market what it wants so long as it's whatever it is these projects are offering while wholesale ignoring both history and precedent in the industry for what actually worked. Ultimately, it is entirely a tone deaf approach to virtual worlds on the whole.

He also addresses a recent conversation I had with him, in which I played devil's advocate and asked, "Where's the evidence there's actual market demand for a metaverse?" Will's take:

Sociologist Meets a Second Life Fairy in the Virtual Woods -- And the Disabled Woman Behind the Keyboard

Powerful comment by Alejandro Salazar, a sociologist reflecting on Tom Boellstorff's US government-funded study Of how virtual worlds affect disabled users. While exploring a forest in Second Life, and came across a fairy, who owned the woods. Then he saw her RL photo in her SL profile: 

[S]he lost two legs, one arm, one eye and can only speak with a voice device. She is a fairy in a forest designed to delve into the history she has created in her forest. It is a beautiful place where you can feel peace. When I started chatting with her, we immediately made a connection and after some time of conversation, she told me her story, that it is difficult for her to leave the house. She only goes to the doctor, some shopping, and occasionally goes to a park.

 

As a sociologist I did a mental exercise made by Max Weber, where we divest our values, thoughts and perspective that every human being makes of ourselves with our own life experience, and I entered in her perspective. Imagine having a life where you can not frequently see someone, without talking to anyone... thanks to Second Life, these people can have human contact, socialize, smile, create, fascinate others and touch our lives. 

He was so moved, he e-mailed Linden Lab's CEO about it:

Linden Lab Starting to Advertise Sansar to Casual Social Gamers

A Second Life user named Lisseh Resident was recently browsing a casual social game site called Game Point when she came across a familiar image -- an ad for Sansar. (Screengrab at right.)

"Today the ads are for Vimeo and something called Vanilla," she told me last me week. "Yesterday it was for Fortnite and Sansar." So this is the first sighting of Linden Lab advertising Sansar directly to consumers (at least the first that I'm aware of).

"They are Google-generated ads, but I never looked up Sansar [on Google] before," Lisseh adds -- in other words, these AdSense ads seem to be targeting users of social game sites in general, as opposed to people specifically searching for Sansar.

Seeing as Sansar is optimized to work with Oculus and Vive or high-end PCss, it seems pretty early to start going after casual social gamers more accustomed to light, web-based 2D games. But I suppose it's worth experimenting with.

Lisseh did click on the ad, she tells me, which just took her to the Sansar homepage (as opposed to an avatar creation/sign-up on-ramp). In any case, she says she's interested, but her hardware is a stumbling block for now -- as is what she already gets from Second Life: