New World Notes

Half Life: Alyx Usage Figures Suggest It's Not VR's Killer App After All

Today's Half-Life:Alyx stats on Steam

Couple somewhat surprising data points (via SteamDB) since Half-Life Alyx debuted last week, attracting the highest user concurrencies (nearly 43,000) for a VR-only game:

• Usage hasn't reached anywhere near that peak since then. I had thought the game might have seen a significant uptick last weekend, as people who bought it would have more free time to play. (Then again, under quarantine, don't we all have way more time on our hands?) But, no.
• If you look at Half-Life: Alyx's usage patterns, there's almost always way more people on Twitch watching Half-Life: Alyx being played, than actually playing Half-Life: Alyx. That was even true shortly after Alyx went live last week, with nearly 100,000 Twitch viewers watching while half those numbers played.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this data strongly suggests two suppositions:

Kimika Ying Creates Second Life Photos Inspired by Tweets & Real Life

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Kimika Ying’s “Curiosity Rover” adds a touch of sarcasm with a photo of the Mars Rover on Explorer Island. It appears she was inspired by a tweet from SarcasticRover, a twitter account that says stuff like:  “Suddenly spending the rest of eternity on a lifeless planet devoid of any human contact while wandering an endless wasteland doesn’t seem so bad." It is one of the pictures in her Pandemic album.

Another Twitter-inspired pic below:

Unable to Present Her Work in Los Angeles While in Quarantine, Renowned Afrofuturist Artist Nettrice Gaskins Sets Up Gallery in Second Life - Today!

Click here to visit the MuseWeb art gallery in Second Life, where a special event is taking place today:  Acclaimed Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins will be there in avatar form today at around 11am and 1pm PST to show off her gorgeous artwork -- stunning portraits of black artists using Deep Dream AI algorithms as a kind of palette. (She's "Nettrice Bethune" in SL.)

Dr. Gaskins was originally planning to present this work in downtown Los Angeles at the MuseWeb conference, where she would also do a keynote talk with Cory Doctorow. But with the Coronavirus quarantine in full effect, she and the conference organizers have rapidly scrambled to turn it into a virtual event. ("Everyone is scrambling," she tells me. "This was supposed to be a face-to-face event.") 

Fortunately, MuseWeb has an island in Second Life, and Nettrice is an SL veteran, having first used it in her education and art work nearly a decade ago. So she was able to go in-world to upload her works and prepare them for a public, virtual world showing.

Once again, click here to visit the impromptu gallery and if you're lucky, meet the artist as avatar there too.

With Sansar Gone, Second Life Needs a New Vision -- And Strawberry Linden Appointed CEO (Comment of the Week)

Most readers weren't exactly enthused about Engadget's interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg talking about his company's defenestration of Sansar, his calling Second Life a "cash machine", or of his list of improvements to Second Life, such as moving its infrastructure to the cloud. It inspired this rant from reader "Anne Frank" (I sure hope that's her real name):

Color me skeptical. I have about as much faith in these plans as I do that the US is moving in a good economic direction. It just assumes that the little people are always going to be along for the ride.

Why should I care about "the cloud"? Why should I care that their power structure is preserved after their huge failure? Why should I care that moving some free WindLight settings might become a commodity? Let's all hold hands and get stupid together. I didn't hear anything about "names". I guess now is not the time to want anything more than making sure you don't get less. Yay for us.

This is an unimaginably horrible time in our history, but we can celebrate an uptick in SL business. It's all good, babe. We're here for you and we're not planning to do a damn thing to make your experience better in the future.

Did I hear about any generous economic incentives to actually encourage broken people to engage in their tired old game? What are they giving to the future?  They seem to be giving their own well-being and we're supposed to be happy about that and give them our resources.

If ever there was a time for vision, it's now. If ever there was a time to lay the foundation for a better world, it's now. My god, the message LL should be sending is one of hope and compassion to its users. It should be sending an invitation to rally the troops to build, network, and engage. LL should be engaging directly with its base and its world.

Speaking of vision, Anne ends with a pretty visionary proposal of her own:

Philip Rosedale, SLers and Me Tweet About Overhauling Second Life's UX/UI & Whether Third Party Viewers Could Do It

Hiring a 5 person team of great UI/UX designers with a game industry background to fix Second Life’s vexing user interface & 1st time user experience would have cost about $5 million.

Instead, Linden Lab spent about $50 million developing Sansar.

Which they just gave away. https://t.co/KKNqGQmkl6

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) March 28, 2020

If you're on Twitter you may enjoy reading or contributing to a tweet thread I started over the weekend (I blame quarantine fever) by somewhat ranting about the opportunity cost of spending so much on Sansar when a fraction of that budget could have been spent on overhauling Second Life's first time user experience and user interface. Philip Rosedale comments, as do several other smart SLers with developer chops.

Top 8 Posts Last Month, Including: Sansar Acquired by Little-Known Wookey, the Corovirus Reshapes Second Life

• Sansar Platform Acquired By Wookey Project Corp, Linden Lab Confirms
• Alyx Estimate: 8-12% Of Compatible Install Base Playing Half-Life VR Game
• Cajsa's Choices: Powerful Coronavirus-Themed Second Life Images -- That I Found After My Doctor Said I Myself Likely Have Coronavirus
• In Coronavirus' Wake, Virtual World-Based Educator Using Both Zoom And Second Life To Teach Her Classes
• Cajsa's Choices: Images From My New Flickr Gallery, "Coronavirus In Second Life" -- And Coronavirus Advice From My Doctor In Real Life
• Italian Second Life User Criticizes Coronavirus-Themed Content Sales In SL
• Linden Lab "Very Profitable Company" With Sansar Gone, CEO Tells Engadget, Says Cloud Deployment & Other Improvements To Second Life Still In Works
• Danielle's Totally Productive Quarantined Work-At-Home To-Do List

Danielle's Totally Productive Quarantined Work-at-Home To-Do List

Linden Lab "Very Profitable Company" With Sansar Gone, CEO Tells Engadget, Says Cloud Deployment & Other Improvements to Second Life Still in Works

Good long Engadget interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg just posted, who addresses much (if not all) the speculation around the recent acquisition of Sansar by an unknown company called Wookey, and how it will affect the future of Second Life. I've heard much Internet chatter that Linden Lab or even SL itself is now facing dire times, but in contradiction to that, Ebbe is ebullient:

With Sansar off its books, Linden Lab is now "a very profitable company," according to Altberg. "Second Life is an older, very established cash machine that works really well, and right now, we're seeing some tremendous growth happening as we speak. Whereas Sansar is a VC, more long term, need-more-investment-type-of-thing. Mixing those two within one small studio like Linden Lab was kind of tricky, so it was easier to have them go separate."

...  Linden Lab, meanwhile, is going to double down on Second Life. The company is currently in the middle of moving its cloud-based infrastructure to a third-party platform. "Instead of having to nurture and build and maintain our own infrastructure for a lot of things, we're going to be able to rely on someone else doing it for us," Altberg explained. Linden Lab is also working on a number of user-facing improvements, such as the ability to customise worlds and "trade environments in ways they haven't been able to do before."

Good to know the cloud deployment of SL is still happening, though kind of odd that it's moving to an unspecified "third-party platform", when the project was originally specified as going to Amazon Web Services.

As for Wookey, the mystery of what it is and how it will turn Sansar into "a new generation of online AR/VR experiences" (Linden Lab's words) remains, though I suppose Ebbe drops a few hints there:

Cajsa's SL Friday Fashion Blog Pick: Gogo's Juicy Bomb

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Juicybomb is among the oldest and most popular Second Life blogs. Gogo is the main blogger, though she shares her blog with her friend Cake. One of the excellent features of her blog is that she does more than list credits. In “Coronavirus and Second Life” she speculates what the effect of coronavirus will be on Second Life. She’s less concerned about the operations of SL, since many staff worked remotely in the first place, but what about the many residents who are laid off to reduce the spread of the virus? She even has a proposed solution. And of course, this comes with her always recognizable photos. Clean, well-lit, and instantly recognizable as Gogo. 

• Exile – Gwen
• Decoy – Renee White Top, Mini Shorts @ the Arcade
• Pink Fuel – Delina (Peach) Skin

Here's Gogo's post on for a new mesh head from LeLutka:

Italian Second Life User Criticizes Coronavirus-Themed Content Sales in SL

Photo near Ellendir Khandr, and her SL avatar (both courtesy Ellendir) 

We've uneasily chuckled at all the satirical Coronavirus-themed content that's been springing up in the Second Life Marketplace over the last few weeks, most of it avatar fashion accessories. But longtime Italian SLer Ellendir Khandr recently posted this important reminder in the Facebook group Second Life Friends: 

I live in Italy where are a lot of people are dying everyday. I'm sick to see some [Second Life] designers that sell masks or other things against COVID-19.

I just ask for RESPECT, and if you want do something, donate to the Red Cross instead of making a joke about a thing that is taking so many lives.

Quoted with her permission. Ellen went on to tell me her real life situation, and as you'd imagine, it's incredibly dire: