Animal Crossing: New Horizons has only been on the market for under two weeks, but its user-generated content features have already encouraged quite a lot of emergent gameplay. Hong Kong protesters are using the game to create protest imagery on their islands -- including the Animal Crossing island of Joshua Wong, one of the movement's seminal figures, who tweets: "The #Covid_19 pandemic has halted public demonstrations, so protesters are taking their cause to Animal Crossing"!
"I'm in love with the ways Animal Crossing has become a full-on Second Life-style virtual social space despite Nintendo's actively hostile infrastructure," game academic Em Lazer-Walker observes. And as an example of that, notes how Animal Crossing players have figured out how to sell virtual items within the 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:
So it turns out that some of the monitor footage inside of #HalfLifeAlyx are just webms inside a folder, AKA you can change it to whatever you want. Already contributed my part pic.twitter.com/9pJxD9gP2j
If you're one of the many thousands currently playing Half-Life:Alyx and you have the tech skills to pull this off, here's a wacky hack to try: Go inside the game's folders, find the one labeled "intro_world_heist.webm", and replace it with another WebM video. It's a bit tricky to get working but Toby Norman posted these tips on Twitter so he could Rickroll Alyx:
Half-Life: Alyx has been a huge hit VR game since its launch yesterday, attracting a peak user concurrency of nearly 43,000 on Steam -- by far the highest concurrency for any VR-only game on the platform. (Beat Saber, the previous VR-only blockbuster, reached only as high as 4,472 concurrent players on Steam.) Over its first 24 hours of launch, it's probably attracted 150,000-250,000 total players.
Next question: How many owners of compatible VR headsets have bought and played Half-Life: Alyx so far? That takes some rough guesswork, but 8-12% of the potential install base is a safe estimate. Here's the datapoint:
Among my biggest disappointments about GDC being postponed due to COVID 19 is that I won't soon get a chance to demo Viewfinder, the mind-melting Unity-based indie game from student Matt Stark, who was planning to show off a playable demo at the conference's Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Matt tells me he has no plans to show it off at another imminent conference, but still might show it in the Summer, if GDC is pushed back to then.
"Either way," he adds, "I'm pressing ahead with developing the game."
As for how he created that bit of gameplay you see in the video above:
Many readers jumped on last week's alpha tester invite offer for CORE (now over, alas), the Unreal-based "digital playground and community" from startup Manticore. At the time, I didn't know many details about Manticore's vision for CORE, other than their intent to offer monetization options for creators. Fortunately, reader "vwfan" points to a Manticore blog post published during last December's holiday dead zone, which actually lays out that vision quite a lot:
Manticore isn't saying much about CORE at this point, beyond telling me that they do plan to enable monetization options for content creators. And as you can tell by the screenshots they sent me with the sign-up link, the creation tools seem pretty robust, and have a fun, cartoonish aesthetic that should especially appeal to the Fortnite crowd.
More screenshots below, along with a special note to NWN readers from Manticore CEO and co-founder Frederic Descamps:
Remember that cerebellum-straining Unity demoby game design student Matt Stark, which enabled a user to create mini-worlds within mini-worlds, simply by "photographing" aspects within them? Matt's now incorporating that feature into an upcoming game he's making, called Viewfinder -- watch some early gameplay above.
Since the effect reminds you a bit of the reality teleporting feature in the adventure-puzzle game classics Portal 1 and 2, you won't be surprised to learn that Viewfinder will also be a puzzle game:
Here’s a story for the holidays about how online worlds keep families connected, even across generations. It starts a decade or so ago with an artist named Jeff Berg, who discovered a burgeoning new virtual world called Second Life. So he made an avatar named “AM Radio”, and began to create a legend.
The Second Life works of AM Radio have been known and loved by millions, once even featured in the New York Times. Using SL’s rudimentary creation tools, AM Radio made immersive spaces in Second Life that poignantly evoked an era lost to time, as if remembered in dreams.
The first work in Second Life to bear AM Radio's name was "The Far Away," [above] a Midwestern wheat field players could walk around in, often making them feel wistful for a time and place they likely never knew... In an anonymous interview, AM Radio suggested he was creating these rustic places to puncture the virtual, to offer a glimpse of the real:
"Sunlight, for our generation, is something seen through Plexiglass windows, and my art is a reaction against that ... an attempt to tear down the fakery, all that plastic in impossible colors and awful rugs and terrible media, like television ... And now, here I am in a virtual world, trying to create the organic."
… They were 3-D sculptures that were mostly not animated, but their textures had a vivid lucidity that made them seem vibrant and alive. AM Radio made all this and much more. And as each new creation appeared in Second Life, word of mouth spread and thousands of avatars endlessly teleported there for weeks, months, years after.
In recent years, however, nearly all of AM Radio’s works have gone away from Second Life, largely dematerialized in the face of the high cost of virtual land. (That is to say, monthly server payments to Linden Lab.) So for most everyone, including Jeff Berg himself, his Second Life installations were only memories of the digital.
More recently, he lost another essential part of himself: His marriage.
And as he and his wife moved in different directions, they also moved apart. Their teen son Cary went to live with her on the East Coast, while he remained in the Midwest.
To keep connected with Cary, Berg bought an XBox. “All the boys where he lived are on it,” he remembers. “We probably have had some of our best fun together virtually.”
And to better reconnect with his father, Cary went much farther than that. One night he messaged Berg and said “Hey check this out.” And so he did:
In my latest essay for SEED, the exoplanet colonization, world-building MMO with a political system designed by Larry Lessig, I surveyed the game's most passionate fanbase on Discord, asking them how SEED might related to their real life political outlook. The results were pretty surprising, at least to me:
Regardless of national origin, most respondents [49.6%] are decidedly unhappy with the current state of their real-world government. Despite (or because of?) this dissatisfaction, a majority of respondents say that their real world politics will guide how they play SEED, with 44% saying it will have “some” influence on their behavior, while 1 in 4 answering that their politics will shape their gameplay on Avesta “quite a bit”.
But what are the real world politics of SEED’s first wave of settlers? We asked respondents to indicate their ideology along the traditional left-right axis. A plurality (36%) put themselves on the center-left, with 1 in 5 indicating that they are either left wing or center-right. Just as notable: Nearly 1 in 10 place themselves on the far left, while just a sliver of respondents (3.4%) place themselves on the far right.
As to the crux question, and a key reason why Larry Lessig is involved in this MMO: Will we learn anything about real politics and organization from this game? A strong majority of 56% say Yes, reflecting this opinion from one survey taker:
Manticore Lays Out "Creator Revolution for Games" Vision for CORE
Many readers jumped on last week's alpha tester invite offer for CORE (now over, alas), the Unreal-based "digital playground and community" from startup Manticore. At the time, I didn't know many details about Manticore's vision for CORE, other than their intent to offer monetization options for creators. Fortunately, reader "vwfan" points to a Manticore blog post published during last December's holiday dead zone, which actually lays out that vision quite a lot:
Continue reading "Manticore Lays Out "Creator Revolution for Games" Vision for CORE" »
Posted on Monday, February 10, 2020 at 02:13 PM in Comment of the Week, New World Gaming | Permalink | Comments (0)
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