New World Notes

Things We Lost in the Flood: A New, Massively Multiplayer Loneliness Simulator Where Players Can Only Share Messages in Bottles With Each Other -- And If Enough Players Win, Self-Destructs

Things We Lost in the Flood is a new, free-to-play indie MMO with a brilliant twist: It's a massively multiplayer "loneliness simulator" where each player is set adrift on a boat in a post-apocalyptic world that's been flooded over. So instead of forming into groups or communicating via chat or instant message, players can write and send messages in bottles for other players to find. Some of those messages can advance the game (more on that below), or simply just be personal expressions, anonymously shared and set adrift into the pixelated sea.

Created by indie developer Dean Moynihan of Awkward Silence Games (who also created the acclaimed, deeply moving game One Chance), Things We Lost was first conceived to be massively multiple storytelling game: 

"The original idea was for players to find notes that I had written, to tell a short story out of order," he tells me. "However, I'm no writer... Once I figured out a way for the players to be doing all the prose work, it was smooth sailing from there." 

That decision enhanced his intent to simulate loneliness: "The only thing that could feel more lonely than floating in the middle of the ocean by yourself," he explains, "would be floating in the middle of the ocean by yourself -- and reading notes from other living people."

Though the game has only been out for a short time, players have written over 6,000 notes to each other, running the gamut of useful to the game, to creatively discursive, to surprisingly profound:

Google Gets Back Into Virtual World Creation Game With Game Builder

Game Builder is a fun-looking game platform free on Steam for Mac and PC from Google's Area 120 incubator.  With block-like graphics and easy to use tools for creating games from scratch without having to know any coding (though you can add code to any game with Javascript), it's more or less a direct competitor to Roblox and Minecraft. But as explained on Google's blog, it's also a persistent virtual world: 

Multiple users can build (or play) simultaneously. You can even have friends play the game as you work on it.

As virtual world veterans might remember, this isn't Google's first foray into the virtual world/online game business:

Seed, the World-Building MMO, Has Yet to Launch, But Fans Have Already Created Competing Political Factions & Other Groups for When It Does

My latest story for Seed, the world-building MMO with a political system designed by Larry Lessig, delves into the many fascinating fan groups that have already formed around the yet-to-launch game:

They're inspired by government systems throughout history, including a dictatorship in which the scars of memory are still fresh. Many got their start in other online games, and are now in search of a new world. In real life, they're from across the European Union, North America, Australia, New Zealand and beyond - from Iceland and Russia to South Korea and Vietnam. Some even drive big rig trucks across America while they plan a new society. Between them, they make up the player-created groups of Seed.

While some factions got their start in game worlds like Grand Theft Auto Online and Second Life, others have  also been inspired by real-life governments throughout many eras, including feudal Japan and the Austria-Hungarian empire. And as its name suggests, the government structure of the Usamgov faction is inspired by the United States - just without some of its key flaws.

"For example," says founder Michael Weston, "we do not have an Electoral College."

More on the group that originated in Second Life:

With Worlds Adrift Closing, Promise of Ambitious, Improbable-Powered Single Shard MMOs in Peril

Oh this is heartbreaking and more than a bit frustrating:

Worlds Adrift was an ambitious undertaking for us: a community crafted MMO built on freedom and player agency with multiplayer physics, set in a huge world...

However, Worlds Adrift just hasn’t reached the level of popularity it needs to continue. The challenges that came with our ambitious project meant that all our work went into making the game work rather than making it the experience we wanted it to be. As a result we failed at making a game that could capture the imaginations of millions. Creating an MMO like Worlds Adrift is a huge financial commitment and unfortunately the game is just no longer commercially viable.

I've been following Worlds Adrift as a fan for years, because it had all the markings of an incredibly ambitious MMO/virtual world crossover that could potentially bring hundreds of thousands of players together; in fact, it's arguably the most ambitious single-shard MMO that's currently playable on the market right now. Or rather, was.

Even more disappointing, Worlds Adrift was among the most ambitious MMOs deployed on Improbable's Spatial OS technology, which was designed to make truly massive, single-shard MMOs possible. But as I reported last March, the company has mostly been moving away from single-shard MMOs:

Cajsa's Flickr Pick: Horizon Zero Dawn Screen Shots As Artful Portraiture

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

Mandalorian Captures takes excellent screen captures from several different games. Luckily for us, he organizes them into albums such as this album of pictures from Horizon Zero Dawn. This one expresses emotion so well; Mandalorian named it “Dreamer” but I would call it “Askance.”

Play Pathway: Perfect Blend of Virtual Nostalgia for 90s Games & Graphics

Pathway is a great new indie game (for PC/Mac/Linux) on Steam that beautifully encapsulates a recent trend in games and other Internet culture at a time when 3D graphics are almost indistinguishable from real life: Virtual nostalgia for simpler, more abstract simulations. Obviously Minecraft with its charming blocky graphics (which the creator made blocky by choice, he told me years ago) is the king of this phenomenon, but games like Pathway take this nostalgia several steps further, consciously evoking user interfaces and gameplay styles from decades ago. Specifically:

Virtual World Marketing of Media Brands Becomes Mainstream - But Does It Finally Have Good ROI?

The latest update to Fortnite has content tie-ins to the upcoming Keanu Reeves/John Wick movie (a recreation of Wick's house), and this is very shortly after Fortnite launched content tie-ins to the latest Avengers movie.

Which is to say, with little fanfare, using virtual worlds to market major media brands has become a mainstream, accepted practice. 10-12 years ago, this kind of marketing was in a very experimental phase. Back then, movie studios sponsored Second Life-based tie-ins with the movie 300, and A Scanner Darkly (also starring Keanu!) among many others. But all these campaigns quickly generated a heated debate (led by Wired magazine) as to whether this was a waste of marketing dollars. Did the virtual world content actually inspire consumers to pay real money at the box office?

Obviously Fortnite has a far more massive userbase than Second Life, so any marketing tie-in will inevitably draw in more eyeballs. But even then, I'd say the ROI question still remains:

Even in Early Access, User-Created Worlds in PS4's Dreams Already Amazing

Dreams, a PS4-only game from Media Molecule, is still in Early Access and only lifted its NDA in January, but its small user community is making incredible experiences. Take this one above from "I AM JONA", which rather blew Polygon's Patricia Hernandez away:

Introducing “Haus Of Bevis,” a strange level that cannot be explained, but must be witnessed in its full glory. The entire thing is like a fever dream. I love it. If the dialogue in the level seems familiar, you’ve probably watched the classic and equally bizarre YouTube video, “You Could Stop at Five or Six Stores.” Somehow, though, the Dreams level manages to completely repurpose those lines into something even more otherworldly.

Most times when we talk about next gen virtual worlds and the metaverse, we talk about platforms available on PC/Mac or VR. But clearly it's time to put Dreams and PS4 near the top of that conversation.

And no, it's not just one-off users like JONA making works like this -- look at this montage of others' creations he shot:

Avatar Cosplayer Creates Tracer of Overwatch By Recycling Second Life Parts

Tracer SL cosplay by Alexandria Brangwin - see high res version here 

Avatar-based cosplay has been popular in Second Life since the world started, but the introduction of mesh into SL has somewhat spoiled the fun, since it's not uncommon to find unauthorized 3D models that have been ripped and plopped right into the world. Where's the challenge in that? Longtime gamer and SLer Alexandria Brangwin, however, created this truly impressive Second Life cosplay of Tracer from Overwatch the old-fashioned way:

"There are a lot of pre-made full avatars on the Marketplace but they often suck really bad," as she tells me. "They're scanned or lifted from other game files so they miss a lot of fine detail and end up looking very low quality -- even have no animations, no bento hands, not even eye movement... death to the project if you're trying to achieve specific poses." 

So instead, she went virtual world dumpster diving through Second Life's massive library of content looking for parts to recycle:

Philip Rosedale & Other Readers Ponder the Appeal of "Living, Breathing" Simulated Worlds

Great conversation that spun out of last week's great podcast interview with Philip Rosedale by ex-Linden Melinda Byerley, spinning off from my comment that "I'm a bit sad that he talks so much about how in the beginning, the focus was on making Second Life a living, breathing world with a simulated ecosystem and realistic ocean, sun and moon cycles, and so on... [when] both Second Life and High Fidelity, which now look, feel, and operate far more like interconnected 3D chat rooms."

To that point, Philip comments:

I so much agree about the magical appeal of the 'living, breathing world' - but why is it so appealing? I think about this a lot, and although I feel it in the most passionate way, I still wonder where the feeling comes from.

To that question, Mac speculates:

It may be because we, in our 'real', breathing lives, live in a vast ecology. We live on the ground (even if our feet are in an apartment 20 stories high). We exist in a network, invisible to us though it may be. We are solidly of our earth (and will return to it!). We are alive within an unimaginable connection which we evolved through and grew up in, through countless generations and millennia.

That may be why a series of discrete 'interconnected 3D chat rooms', as Wagner puts it, feels unnatural. The 'imagined reality' of these rooms technically and practically ends at their borders, unlike physical reality (in the physical reality of our world, you cannot get to the end of reality; you can't reach out and find that it has ceased. There is always something beyond your reach, be it air, space, vacuum, the rest of the universe. You cannot get to a point of 'nothing'). A teleport between rooms isn't quite the same as a physical tunnel. Discrete 3D chat rooms push against an internal fundamental knowledge that the world is still 'of a piece' even though it has become many pieces, many places, many communities. I would imagine that this feeling (analogous to the uncanny valley) will fade over time as we get used to non-geographically-designed digital landscapes: people can, have, and will adapt to situations which seem uncomfortable or unsuitable at the start. We are, after all, discursive and negotiable creatures. These are still teething times for the digital human.

In other words, he's arguing that it's a feeling we can evolve away from. Melinda herself makes a comment which suggests it's a feeling mainly confined to childhood: