New World Notes

I Tell the BBC About the Culture War in Second Life During the Iraq War

Here's a fun new segment from a BBC podcast called The Digital Human, in which I tell longtime Internet culture reporter Aleks Krotoski about the "War of the Jessie Wall" in Second Life, which you can read more about here. (Also briefly mentioned is this story about a virtual mansion built by someone while homeless in real life.) I believe this is a segment to a much larger episode, but in any case, hope you enjoy, and see you next Monday!

I Tell Vice Why VRChat Has Gone Viral While Social VR Platforms Like Sansar & High Fidelity Have Not

Really good Vice article by Matthew Gault, giving an in-depth view of the madness, virality (and yes, unchecked racism and misogyny) that is VRChat. Matthew asked me why VRChat has gone viral where other social VR platforms haven't:

"VRChat seems to be taking off due to three factors that contributed to a perfect storm of viral growth,” Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life and the social VR blog New World Notes, told me over email. “[It] lets users upload their own avatars via a Unity SDK [a popular and accessible game making tool], and has a basic physics engine,” he said. “[It] can be accessed without having to wear a VR headset, enabling more gamers to join in on the fun. YouTube and Twitch streamers discovered this potential for freeform, grabass anarchy and went nuts creating lots of VRChat-based videos that quickly went viral.”

More than anything, VRChat reminds me most of the very early days of Second Life (2003-2005), when much of the main activity and excitement happened in the free build sandbox areas, where people would collaborate on all kinds of impromptu, wacky creativity. (While Linden Lab did a better job keeping the user abuse down to a dull roar.) Contrast this with local favorites High Fidelity (with a daily peak concurrency under 10 people) and Sansar (which by Linden Lab CEO's own admission, is "still low"):

2016 Recap: My Writing & New World Notes in the Media

My own writing:

• Wired, February: "VR Will Make Life Better—Or Just Be an Opiate for the Masses"
• Wall Street Journal, April: "Virtual Second Thoughts"
• Vice, April: "Bernie Sanders’ Second Life Headquarters Besieged by Trump-Supporting Swastikas"

As cited in these outlets:

Throwback Tuesday: Talking About Virtual Worlds in 2007

Someone just posted to YouTube this debate about Second Life I did on G4TV in 2007 with a Forbes writer, and while I can't watch it beyond a few seconds without wincing, I'm putting it here for posterity's sake. Variations of the same arguments we made back then are now being made about VR and VR-oriented virtual worlds, so it's a good compare-and-contrast reference point. Also, if you're a relatively new New World Notes reader and you're wondering, "Why is this guy writing about VR when he sounds so skeptical about it so often?", the video might give you a clue:

That Time a Rock Legend Retweeted My Story About Donald Trump's Virtual Troll Army in Second Life

Probably only interesting to me and definitely a humblebrag, but this retweet of my Vice story on Trump demons trolling Bernie fans in SL tickled me:

Yes, this guy. (Thanks to a Tweet by Riven Homewood.) So an already strange story about real world politics in a surreal virtual world now comes with a classic rock soundtrack. To wit:

New World Notes: Now With 5000 Twitter Followers!

In news quite possibly interesting only to me, my 7 year old @SLHamlet Twitter account now (finally) has 5000 followers:

Tweets by @slhamlet

If you're on Twitter and not following yet, I hope you consider doing so. I make an effort to retweet as much good Second Life-based content and events as possible, so if you have anything like that to share, please Tweet it at me!

New on Steam: It's a Robo-Dog-Eat-Robo-Dog World in Indie Action Platformer The Sun at Night

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

After the long and arduous greenlighting process, dog-lead indie action platformer The Sun at Night is finally on Steam. 

I haven't covered this game before, and it's not because I don't love the idea of Soviet cosmo-dog Laika being refitted with robot parts to fight alongside humans in a strange Cold War alternate reality. It's also not because I don't think the game is well made, clever, or challenging enough to keep fans of the "Metroidvania" genre happy. It's certainly not because a friend of mine works for developer Minicore Studios and recently presented me with a couple screenshots of a conspicuously named NPC he wrote; an NPC with a sense of humor who also happens to have Sailor Moon on her mind.

... Wait no, it might actually be that last one.

Obviously my word on this game is going to be anything but impartial, so all I'll say is that if The Sun at Night sounds like something you would be into, you can check it out for yourself on Steam. 

My Twitter Account Tries to Explain My Perspective on VR

My Twitter account is now updated with photos from two recent experiences: In virtual reality, at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference in May, and doing the pillbox hike in Kailua, Hawaii, during a short visit back home in June. I'm fortunate to love both virtual and actual reality, but over the next few decades, the two are going to be in more active competition than they've ever been before. Or as Palmer Luckey put it at SVVR:

"This is one of those crazy man topics".. but "it's going to be impossible to give everyone everything they want", such as expensive consumer items. With VR, however, you can do that. It's easy for us to say, living in the great state of California, that VR is not as good as the real world, but a lot of people in the world don't have as good an experience in real life as we do here.

Then again, the Kailua photo of the pillbox also has its own virtual reality going on:

Interested in Virtual Vistas and Carefully-Crafted Character Designs? I Might Have Just The Thing for You...

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

I don't usually like to promote my own little projects on New World Notes, but today I'm making an exception that I hope a fair number of you will enjoy. I recently started a Tumblr called SingleFrameVideoGame, with a very specific purpose in mind: I wanted to finally make use of the thousands of video game screenshots I've accumulated over the past few years.

And no, that number is not an exaggeration.

Game Designer Randy Smith Likes My Game Design Secrets

Acclaimed game designer Randy Smith of iOS studio Tiger Style has a very gratifying write-up of my new book, Game Design Secrets, which I love so much, I have to quote here:

"With lots of useful material like excerpted design docs, anecdotes, workflows, and copious interviews with numerous experienced developers, it’s a worthwhile read for anyone getting into the business." - Randy Smith, lead designer, Waking Mars, Spider, the Thief trilogy

As it happens, Tiger Style's award-winning design approach is featured in a chapter of the book, but after sending him the whole thing to read, it's an honor that Randy liked it all well enough to recommend it. I also interviewed him about Waking Mars here on this blog, and started writing about games with the groundbreaking Thief: The Dark Project, on which he was a lead designer.