New World Notes

Man Visits “Dead World” There, Finds There’s More There There in There

"I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game" at first seemed like a mean snarkfest against There, the virtual world that went defunct in 2010 then relaunched as a subscription-based platform in 2012. Homepage here.

But longtime virtual world denizen Cube Republic convinced me to keep watching:

"I was prepared for another troll video and I thought in the end it was well put together," as Cube puts it. "And the interview with the players were lovely, and them describing losing their friends that had left or died raises a lot of questions about virtual worlds and what they mean as communities and spaces that people live in."

So I kept watching, and Cube is correct! Also notable how expressive There avatars are, despite (because of?) the rudimentary graphics. It does make you appreciate how amazing it is that you can still meet both newbies and oldbies in Second Life:

Since Oscar-winning Flow Was Made on a Low Budget in Blender, Does Hollywood Even Need Gen AI?

In case you missed the Oscars last weekend, the Best Animated Feature award went to Flow, an amazingly beautiful, even heartbreaking movie which beat out big budget entries like Disney/Pixar's Inside Out 2 and Universal Pictures' The Wild Robot.

Even more amazing, Flow was made by a small team of artists using Blender, the free open source 3D platform that a lot of people reading these words already use in their own creative work. (Watch above.)

Film industry concept artist David Southen (previously interviewed here) just made a very good point about Flow versus the many proprietary, heavily VC-funded gen AI platforms like Midjourney and Sora:

What to Watch & Read This Weekend: inZOI Early Review, Philip Rosedale on Community Building & PlayerUnknown Makes a Metaverse Platform

This long inZOI playthrough by Rudi Rennkamel (watch above) is from a few months ago, but it's the most thorough I've seen so far. The avatar creation and 3D building system is quite impressive, with some caveats. Unless I missed it, sadly no mention of inZOI's cat god though. 

Brendan "PLAYERUNKNOWN" Greene is making a metaverse platform (something he hinted with a Steam demo last December), and now Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun has an in-depth look at his plans.

Such as:

There is certainly a grand design here, but it's more about the role Go Wayback will play in the aforesaid "3D internet" stuff, which I find pretty draining to describe. To recap, Go Wayback is the first of three games that are sort of one big rolling exercise in cultivating the technology for a bunch of "interoperable" gameworlds. As Brendan Greene explained to me after my hands-on, it paves the way for Artemis, which will run on the studio's own Melba engine, with the promise of much larger generated maps and "millions" of players per session. As for the eventual "Game Three" - this, seemingly, will be the capstone for an open-ended network of holodecky fantasies in which people can generate, modify, share and monetise worlds or bits of worlds via means yet to be fully described.

I can't believe people are still saying "3D internet" which is a term from when Nirvana was still touring. But then again, I can't believe people are still talking about web3, which Greene does. Still, the breadth of ambition is impressive.

Finally, there's Philip Rosedale's latest think piece, which also reads like a design document to a new social app (that he's maybe building?):

Thick as Thieves: Lead Devs Warren Spector, David McDonough & Greg LoPiccolo on the Upcoming Immersive Simulation's Heritage With the Groundbreaking OG Thief

I’m seriously psyched to play Thick as Thieves, an upcoming PC/console game first teased at the Game Awards a few weeks ago. It has a direct heritage to the original Thief games from the early 2000s, milestones in immersive simulation. (And as a young gamer, got me personally ebullient about interactive immersion as an emergent art form.) By putting the player in the role of a stealthy cat burglar in a steampunk city, Thief made you so keenly aware of the virtual environment (light/shadow, the ambient noisemaking potential of different materials, bored/agitated guards), you felt truly part of the 3D world around you. The original Deus Ex games soon expanded on those ideas in a cyberpunk context.

And now, developers on those games are making immersive simulation a multiplayer experience. If that’s even possible?

While Thick as Thieves' trailer bills it as a game "from" revered designer Warren Spector, lead creator of the original Deus Ex games (who also did some work on the original Thief franchise), the brunt of everyday development is actually led by veteran designers David McDonough and Greg LoPiccolo -- the latter who was project leader on the original Thief game. 

In recent weeks I’ve been messaging all three -- on Thick as Thieves’ heritage to Thief/Deus Ex, on the challenge of making an immersive world multiplayer, and much more:

Watch Next Week: "Reality of Hope", Sundance Documentary About Two Friends From VRChat's Voluminous Furry Community

Premiering online and at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah next week, Reality of Hope is a short documentary depicting two friends who first meet in VRChat's large furry community --- and after a medical crisis emerges, the friendship deepens into real life in a surprising and powerful way. It's directed by Joe Hunting, whose last VRChat-based documentary was picked up by HBO in 2022.

You can watch the movie online here between January 30 and February 5 here and/or if you're at Sundance, reserve a ticket.  

Watch: Grand Theft Hamlet, Madcap Machinima Documentary About Trying to Stage Shakespeare's Play Live in GTA Online

I have no choice but to blog Grand Theft Hamlet, an acclaimed all-machinima documentary about two out-of-work actors who during the pandemic, log into Grand Theft Auto Online to try and stage a live production of Shakespeare's most famous play.  Watch the trailer above!

Now playing in the UK and debuting in the US this weekend (check local listings), more from the official site:

Watch: In Love Me, Two Sentient AIs Played By Kristen Stewart & Steven Yeun Become Human Avatars After Civilization's End (January 31)

Coming January 31 (at least in the US) in the acclaimed indie movie Love Me, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are a sentient buoy and satellite (respectively) who meet, fall in love, and re-create themselves as human avatars who live out the end of humanity together. The trailer at least looks pretty powerful, though I'm avoiding reviews so I can watch it fresh.

More about the movie soon-ish, I hope: I recently reached out to the movie's writer/director team, Sam and Andy Zuchero, themselves married in real life, who put me in touch with the studio's publicist about an interview. 

Then again, the very next day, all parties involved (including me) likely fled Los Angeles at the coming of a raging, city-consuming firestorm. So our interview about a movie about the end of civilization may be indefinitely delayed. Which is an extra layer of tragic irony none of us needed right now or ever.

Virtual Worlds Museum Updates: Award Nomination, Spatial Video Tour, and Upcoming Crowdfunder Details!

It's been a few months since we checked in on the Virtual Worlds Museum™, the largest online info/community resource for virtual worlds, past and present -- so I just had a chat with founder/CEO Julian Reyes, to get the latest updates. Turns out, there's quite a lot! For one, it's now officially trademarked (a milestone in itself), and the project just earned its first contest recognition:

The Museum is a finalist for the prestigious AUREA Award, hosted by Germany's Europa-Park, one of the biggest theme parks in Europe. (Replete with a roller coaster ride integrated with VR headsets.)

"I'm thrilled to be nominated along with some other innovative projects alongside XR community friends," Julian tells me. "I'm looking forward to presenting our project January 22nd at Europa Park in Germany. A big shout-out to our team for helping us create our first exhibit which is one of six." (The one that's nominated is hosted in Arrival.Space, with the next exhibit expected to launch in Meta's Horizon Worlds next month.) Fellow AUREA finalists, by the way, include GroKit Core by 3lbXR, pioneering ways to build in VR, and Blockade Labs, innovating AI prompt-based VR experiences.

The Museum also expanded its Spotlight Videos tour page, with the latest video (above) featuring In Kenzo and AI archivist SEHU teleporting into Spatial, a new-ish web based virtual world:

I'm Seeing a Strong Shift to Bluesky by SLers --- Including Cajsa, Who Just Closed Her Huge Twitter/X Account

New World Notes columnist Cajsa Lilliehook just locked up her fairly large X/Twitter account (with nearly 20,000 followers) and opened up shop in Bluesky here.

I wasn't surprised when she told me this last night (for reasons I'll explain below), but it's actually part of a larger trend:

In the last couple weeks, my mostly dormant Bluesky account suddenly exploded with hundreds of new followers, most of them SL/virtual world-themed. (OK, maybe "exploded" is a bit hyperbolic, but certainly a fierce fucking puff of activity.) And there's more:

Philip Rosedale just joined Bluesky.

The official Second Life account too.

Plus here's a large Bluesky thread of SLers to announce yourself and meet others there! 

Also other metaverse platforms including Rec Room and VRChat are active on Bluesky.

This is part of an even larger trend, as Bluesky recently hit 20 million active users, in great part in an exile move from Twitter/X in the wake of the US election. That was the thing which pushed Cajsa herself over the blue edge:

Connect With Me on Bluesky & Threads! Plus Thoughts on Continuing to Tweet on X.

Last week my little-used Threads and Bluesky accounts gained a trove of new followers for Totally Mysterious Reasons. So if you're looking to follow me on either platform:

On Threads, I'm "wjamesau"

On Bluesky, I'm "SLHamlet" 

Advice wanted: Is there a good service for quickly cross-posting to and from these platforms, or also to/from Twitter/X?

As for Twitter/X itself, I'll keep posting there for the foreseeable future, if only to share new posts and chat with followers. Not to pull rank, but I've been on Twitter since 2007, three years longer than the current owner. I'm also very well aware of what's been happening to the social network since its acquisition, but in my experience, the virtual world/metaverse/Second Life ecosystem there is largely free from the service's worst levels of toxicity. What's more, I'd estimate 30% of them are not even based in the United States.

None of this is ideal, but then again, continuing to keep New World Notes operating basically means continuing to run every social media channel it's associated with. Speaking of which, also please consider following/subscribing to my Patreon!