Second Life MMORPG (lots of pics)

Avestan · Post by **Avestan** » March 20, 2006, 10:21 pm

http://www.zazzle.com/veeshanvault*

PM me if you want to add more shirts

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 29, 2006, 8:24 pm

80 lbs!

Yesterday I had a friend call me and tell me his wife was divorcing him, we had not been in touch for a while and when I asked him what happened he told me he is addicted to second life. He was spending every non working moment playing, had put on 80 pounds and spent a lot of money in the process.

I told him about my experience after 9-11 of being unplugged from the Internet for 72 days while deployed overseas, and how it changed me, and made me understand that their is more to life than sitting in front of a computer screen. I am not sure how it is going to go for him, but I told him if he cared about his real life then he needed to walk away from the computer for a minimum of 60 days.

The net for some people is a physical dependency so take some time and unplug from the virtual world and get out in the real world.

SL is still fun fun fun and my weight has remained the same! You could copy and paste this quote and change the name to any online game. If you've got an addictive personality, you'll find a way to get hooked on something. If the internet wasn't around, they'd be hooked hoolahooping or Tiddlywinks.

Picts soon! No really. I'm not an addict. Could I get some more coffee?

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » March 29, 2006, 9:00 pm

The internet is not for the weak. Everyone has different levels of stability and clearly the person being referred to in your quote there has issues. It pisses me off when someone else sees an instance like that and then assumes everyone else who does X is the same - and are bad people for it.

P.S. Why didn't you let this thread die?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 29, 2006, 9:30 pm

Rellix wrote: P.S. Why didn't you let this thread die?

No particular reason. I didn't know if people wanted to see picts anymore. After 250 posts and a bazillion pictures, either you're going to try it or aren't!

I should post some picts of Cid's new house though. Pretty snazzy! I'm still meeting interesting people from around the globe and messing around with building some.

Some stuff isn't fit for posting like naked pictures of Cid or Les riding a sheep!

Arsecn · Post by **Arsecn** » March 31, 2006, 2:27 am

Winnow wrote:
Rellix wrote: P.S. Why didn't you let this thread die?
No particular reason. I didn't know if people wanted to see picts anymore. After 250 posts and a bazillion pictures, either you're going to try it or aren't!

I should post some picts of Cid's new house though. Pretty snazzy! I'm still meeting interesting people from around the globe and messing around with building some.

Some stuff isn't fit for posting like naked pictures of Cid or Les riding a sheep!

Heres Les riding his Cow... now wheres them Cid pics!

cid · Post by **cid** » March 31, 2006, 3:53 am

LOL I dare you!!!!

Laliana · Post by **Laliana** » March 31, 2006, 3:57 am

Cid's new place is pretty sweet.

And don't let Les fool you, once night falls, his cow turns into a goat!

That reminds me, I have a contest to win. Best excuse ever to buy a new outfit.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 7, 2006, 8:27 pm

Another article on SL. Peeps end up focusing on the sex part and make it sound like prostitutes are running around. That's not the case. Here's the article anyway!

Multiplayer Games Attract Virtual Call Girls
By Shawn Elliott

On the surface, social experiment Second Life is clean living: an oft-cited MMO used for college-level coursework in the design of digital spaces, in art and architecture, and in media studies and sociology.

Count real-life Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig among its 148,000 citizens; this January, the copyright guru addressed an in-game gathering to promote his recently published book, Free Culture, and embossed online copies with an electronic signature (to glorify the performed-for-publicity gimmick, he mentioned inviting members of Congress to create accounts).

Insofar as consuming and creating makes them so, Second Life citizens who're neither enrolled at state universities nor capable of persuading congresspersons to appear in virtual utopias are similarly upstanding.

Because residents retain the rights to what they build and buy, Second Life's goods and service industries boom. According to Catherine Smith, director of marketing for SL owner Linden Lab, "In January of 2006, Second Life residents exchanged $1,384,752,765 in-world 'linden' dollars, or over $5 million U.S. dollars, based on the current exchange rate of 276:1."

Gowns, cars, kittens, rocket packs, lunar rovers, condominiums, turntables, couches--players make or mod scads of shop and show-off opportunities in SL's unbounded buyosphere, from personal appearance to animations to architecture. SL citizens are designers, crafters, cinematographers, engineers, civic planners, real estate agents. And prostitutes.

Amster-Dame, one of Second Life's red-light districts, can't decide what to wear. A patchwork of imported JPG porn and candy-coated graphics, it's the id-as-image series, a woody in kaleidoscopically shifting search of wank material. On one side of the canal-cleaved street, an adults-only cinema flashes real skin flicks free of charge for the horny or hard up. On the other, Blade Runner-esque boutiques vend mixable, matchable parts--pristine, tattooed, or pierced.

Taboo Heart (who'd rather CGW not reveal her real name) is on the job, along with the many other working women milling around here, making bedroom eyes at browsing passersby.

Here's another article about the business aspect of SL. IT's a little long and a tad boring:

'Second Life' dreams of Electric Sheep

By Daniel Terdiman
http://news.com.com/Second+Life+dreams+ ... 56759.html

Story last modified Mon Apr 03 07:08:13 PDT 2006

Phillip K. Dick would be proud of Electric Sheep Co.

The famous science fiction writer, whose short story "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" led to the movie "Blade Runner," wrote about artificial life and digital worlds. Now, Electric Sheep, a 13-employee start-up in Washington, D.C., is making a business out of creating spaces entirely in a virtual world.

The year-old company is helping big customers create a presence inside "Second Life," the popular virtual world in which people can do or build just about anything they can imagine and socialize with others anywhere in the real world.

Suffice it to say, Electric Sheep is an entirely modern concoction. And while it might seem hard to imagine that corporate types in Fortune 500 companies would ever have the vision to engage in the creation of virtual projects in an adults-only, 3D world where it's just as easy to come across like someone looking like a butterfly as someone looking like a human being, that's precisely what is starting to happen.

Last year, for example, Wells Fargo Bank wanted to build an island in "Second Life" where the bank's young customers could play and learn lessons about financial responsibility. Instead of hiring Linden Lab, publisher of "Second Life," it hired some of the virtual world's users--though not Electric Sheep.

In fact, said Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, his company has made the decision to leave all such building projects to the "Second Life" community and focus instead on developing the infrastructure and tools that make such work possible.

That's where Electric Sheep comes in. The company, technically based in Washington D.C. but operating more often than not in the virtual world, has been booking six-figure deals from members of the Fortune 500 who want to engage their customers/communities, though Electric Sheep CEO Sibley Verbeck would not name any of the corporate clients.

Of course, it's not all corporate customers. Electric Sheep's employees can find themselves hired by a client to customize an island, or what in "Second Life" is called a "sim"--a 16-acre piece of land that users can buy and do with what they like.

Verbeck said Electric Sheep tends to charge around $15,000 for a complete customization of a sim that includes terraforming the land, constructing buildings and scripting interactivity into objects throughout the space.

One organization that has hired the company for such a purpose is the New Media Consortium, a nonprofit group consisting of 200 members, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, many other top American colleges and universities and many museums.

"We're building an experimental space in 'Second Life' to look at ways a 3D environment can be used to do real work," said Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, "to bring people together, to have meetings, for knowledge sharing, for learning and to do conferences."

As such, NMC contracted with Electric Sheep to take over the heavy lifting on its sim. That, said Johnson, meant that Electric Sheep "terraformed" the sim, and is constructing buildings and objects on the island and designing the overall interactive experience that visitors will get there. It's "meant to entice the visitor because it's very, very beautiful," said Johnson, "so (Electric Sheep) has done a tremendous job of building something very, very rich."

Johnson said that working with Electric Sheep--which had won out in a competition for the NMC contract against other "Second Life" developers--has been a new kind of experience, especially for a 55-year-old man who isn't used to playing around in futuristic virtual environments.

"Our home base is Sheep Island in 'Second Life.' We meet up in our sheep tower. That's our place."

-- Jerry Paffendorf, Electric Sheep project director"For me, the most interesting thing was that...much of our interactions (with Electric Sheep) took place in 'Second Life,' avatar to avatar," said Johnson. "The social aspects of 'Second Life' were a very interesting part of the project for me because a lot of this took place in that world, even though it was a real-world contract between two companies."

In fact, because Electric Sheep's employees are spread out geographically, its functional work space is a building in "Second Life."

"We're a virtual company," said Jerry Paffendorf, Electric Sheep's project director. "We're spatially distributed. Our home base is Sheep Island in 'Second Life.' We meet up in our sheep tower. That's our place."

Meanwhile, in addition to working for Fortune 500 companies and institutions like NMC, Electric Sheep has worked on several other projects, including Jibun Life, which is a "Second Life" teens-only environment that connects classrooms and youth groups around the world in an immersive, 3D environment. The company has also worked on SLE-CERT, a Dartmouth College program designed to give first-responders in Hanover, N.H., a way to practice dealing with urban emergencies.

And of course, not everyone looking to hire someone for project work in "Second Life" contracts with Electric Sheep.

"We have no artistic talent ourselves whatsoever," said Monty Sharma, Vivox's vice president of marketing. "You want somebody who's actually a 3D artist and, second, somebody who's familiar with the modeling tools in 'Second Life' and the behaviors needed to make things happen."

Linden Lab is often involved in connecting clients with developers. But Paffendorf explained that while Electric Sheep is currently doing some work for Linden Lab, it is totally independent from the "Second Life" publisher.

And that's just how Linden Lab wants it, even if the success of outfits like Electric Sheep means that the cost of engineers and developers versed in "Second Life" building and modeling skills goes up.

"I love them," Linden Lab's Rosedale said of Electric Sheep. "They're deadly, and they're hiring the best developers...We're competing with them to hire some of the same people. They may end up increasing the salaries of everybody working in 'Second Life.' But I'm so happy to have that competition."

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » April 22, 2006, 12:49 pm

SL continues to improve. Don't expect for this game to ever die like a regular MMORPG. It's evolving at a rapid pace and is a monstrous success financially.

I continue to take picts but won't flood the thread with them anymore. Here's two through.

First one is an example of the latest skins. The one I'm wearing is a demo skin. (skins are the most expensive items in the game so you can buy demo skins to try on before you buy to make sure you like them)

They're getting pretty detailed.

Second is one of my build projects I'm working on in the sky above my land. It's still worth checking SL to see all of the creativity in the game. Some of you might enjoy just using the build editor.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 10, 2006, 12:02 am

This game's still chugging along at full steam.

I met this lady and chatted with her briefly on my virtual land. My brush with virtual fame!

(Story left out of quotes for easier reading)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co ... 982001.htm

MAY 1, 2006

COVER STORY

My Virtual Life

A journey into a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives. Some even make a good living. Big advertisers are taking notice

As I step onto the polished wood floor of the peaceful Chinese country house, a fountain gurgles softly and a light breeze stirs the scarlet curtain in a doorway. Clad in a stylish blue-and-purple dress, Anshe Chung waves me to a low seat at a table set with bowls of white rice and cups of green tea. I'm here to ask her about her booming land development business, which she has built from nothing two years ago to an operation of 17 people around the world today. As we chat, her story sounds like a classic tale of entrepreneurship.

Except I've left out one small detail: Chung's land, her beautifully appointed home, the steam rising from the teacups -- they don't exist. Or rather, they exist only as pixels dancing on the computer screens of people who inhabit the online virtual world called Second Life. Anshe Chung is an avatar, or onscreen graphic character, created by a Chinese-born language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany. And the sitting room in which Chung and my avatar exchange text messages is just one scene in a vast online diorama operated by Second Life's creator, Linden Lab of San Francisco. Participants launch Second Life's software on their personal computers, log in, and then use their mice and keyboards to roam endless landscapes and cityscapes, chat with friends, create virtual homes on plots of imaginary land, and conduct real business.

REAL BUCKS

The avatar named Anshe Chung may be a computerized chimera, but the company she represents is far from imaginary. Second Life participants pay "Linden dollars," the game's currency, to rent or buy virtual homesteads from Chung so they have a place to build and show off their creations. But players can convert that play money into U.S. dollars, at about 300 to the real dollar, by using their credit card at online currency exchanges. Chung's firm now has virtual land and currency holdings worth about $250,000 in real U.S. greenbacks. To handle rampant growth, she just opened a 10-person studio and office in Wuhan, China. Says Chung's owner, who prefers to keep her real name private to deter real-life intrusions: "This virtual role-playing economy is so strong that it now has to import skill and services from the real-world economy."

Oh yes, this is seriously weird. Even Chung sometimes thinks she tumbled down the rabbit hole. But by the time I visited her simulated abode in late February, I already knew that something a lot stranger than fiction was unfolding, some unholy offspring of the movie The Matrix, the social networking site MySpace.com (NWS ), and the online marketplace eBay (EBAY ). And it was growing like crazy, from 20,000 people a year ago to 170,000 today. I knew I had to dive in myself to understand what was going on here.

As it turns out, Second Life is one of the many so-called massively multiplayer online games that are booming in popularity these days. Because thousands of people can play at once, they're fundamentally different from traditional computer games in which one or two people play on one PC. In these games, typified by the current No. 1 seller, World of Warcraft, from Vivendi Universal's (V ) Blizzard Entertainment unit, players are actors such as warriors, miners, or hunters in an endless medieval-style quest for virtual gold and power.

All told, at least 10 million people pay $15 and up a month to play these games, and maybe 20 million more log in once in a while. Some players call World of Warcraft "the new golf," as young colleagues and business partners gather online to slay orcs instead of gathering on the green to hack away at little white balls. Says eBay Inc. founder and Chairman Pierre M. Omidyar, whose investing group, Omidyar Network, is a Linden Lab backer: "This generation that grew up on video games is blurring the lines between games and real life."

Second Life hurls all this to the extreme end of the playing field. In fact, it's a stretch to call it a game because the residents, as players prefer to be called, create everything. Unlike in other virtual worlds, Second Life's technology lets people create objects like clothes or storefronts from scratch, LEGO-style, rather than simply pluck avatar outfits or ready-made buildings from a menu. That means residents can build anything they can imagine, from notary services to candles that burn down to pools of wax.

PROPERTY RIGHTS

You might wonder, as I did at first, what's the point? Well, for one, it's no less real a form of entertainment or personal fulfillment than, say, playing a video game, collecting matchbook covers, or building a life list of birds you've seen. The growing appeal also reflects a new model for media entertainment that the Web first kicked off: Don't just watch -- do something. "They all feel like they're creating a new world, which they are," says Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale.

Besides, in one important way, this virtual stuff isn't imaginary at all. In November, 2003, Linden Lab made a policy change unprecedented in online games: It allowed Second Life residents to retain full ownership of their virtual creations. The inception of property rights in the virtual world made for a thriving market economy. Programmer Nathan Keir in Australia, for example, created a game played by avatars inside Second Life that's so popular he licensed it to a publisher, who'll soon release it on video game players and cell phones. All that has caught real-world investors' attention, too. On Mar. 28, Linden Lab raised a second, $11 million round of private financing, including new investor Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com Inc (AMZN ).

Virtual worlds may end up playing an even more sweeping role -- as far more intuitive portals into the vast resources of the entire Internet than today's World Wide Web. Some tech thinkers suggest Second Life could even challenge Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) Windows operating system as a way to more easily create entertainment and business software and services. "This is why I think Microsoft needs to pay deep attention to it," Robert Scoble, Microsoft's best-known blogger, recently wrote.

WEAK SPOT

A lot of other real-world businesses are paying attention. That's because virtual worlds could transform the way they operate by providing a new template for getting work done, from training and collaboration to product design and marketing. The British branding firm Rivers Run Red is working with real-world fashion firms and media companies inside Second Life, where they're creating designs that can be viewed in all their 3D glory by colleagues anywhere in the world. A consortium of corporate training folks from Wal-Mart Stores (WMT ), American Express (AXP ), Intel (INTC ), and more than 200 other companies, organized by learning and technology think tank The MASIE Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is experimenting inside Second Life with ways for companies to foster more collaborative learning methods. Says Intel Corp. learning consultant Brent T. Schlenker: "We're trying to get in on the front end of this new workforce that will be coming."

The more I kept hearing about all this, the more I knew this was wa-a-a-ay more than fun and games. So early this year I signed up at http://www.secondlife.com, downloaded the software, logged on, and created my persona. As reporter "Rob Cranes," I embarked on my journey.

And promptly got lost in the vast, uncharted terrain.

Click: I land at the Angry Ant, a nightclub holding a "Naked Hour" where avatars are in various stages of undress, dancing lasciviously. Is it getting warm in here?

Click: I stumble upon someone teaching a class on how to buy and sell virtual land to a motley crew of avatars sitting attentively on chairs watching PowerPoint slides. Do we get a toaster when we're done?

Click: Suddenly, I'm underwater at Cave Rua, watching a school of fish swim by. Cool, but what do I do here?

Click: Here's a virtual doctor's office, where a researcher runs a simulation of what it's like to be a hallucinatory schizophrenic. A menacing British voice from a TV urges: "Shoot yourself. Shoot them all. Get the gun out of the holster and shoot yourself, you !@#&!" Yikes, where's that teleport button?

My disorientation points up one of the big challenges of these virtual worlds, especially one so open-ended as Second Life: With nothing to shoot and no quest to fulfill, it's hard for newbies to know what to do. Virtual worlds require personal computers with fairly advanced graphics and broadband connections and users with some skill at software. "The tools are the weak spot," says Will Wright, legendary creator of The Sims video game, who nonetheless admires Second Life. For now, he says, "That limits its appeal to a fairly hard-core group."

Still, there's no denying the explosion of media, products, and services produced by users of these virtual worlds. IGE Ltd., an independent online gaming services firm, estimates that players spent about $1 billion in real money last year on virtual goods and services at all these games combined, and predicts that could rise to $1.5 billion this year. One brave (or crazy) player in the online game Project Entropia last fall paid $100,000 in real money for a virtual space station, from which he hopes to earn money charging other players rent and taxes. In January inside Second Life alone, people spent nearly $5 million in some 4.2 million transactions buying or selling clothes, buildings, and the like.

That can add up to serious change. Some 3,100 residents each earn a net profit on an average of $20,000 in annual revenues, and that's in real U.S. dollars. Consider the story of Chris Mead, aka "Craig Altman," on Second Life. We exchange text messages via our keyboards at his shop inside Second Life, where he hawks ready-made animation programs for avatars. It's a bit awkward, all the more so because as we chat, his avatar exchanges tender caresses with another avatar named "The Redoubtable Yoshimi Muromachi." Turns out she's merely an alter ego he uses to test his creations. Still, I can't help but make Rob Cranes look away.

SHOPPING SPREE

Mead is a 35-year-old former factory worker in Norwich, England, who chose to stay home when he and his working wife had their third child. He got on Second Life for fun and soon began creating animations for couples: When two avatars click on a little ball in which he embeds the automated animation program, they dance or cuddle together. They take up to a month to create. But they're so popular, especially with women, that every day he sells more than 300 copies of them at $1 or less apiece. He hopes the $1,900 a week that he clears will help pay off his mortgage. "It's a dream come true, really," he says. "I still find it so hard to believe."

His story makes me want to venture further into this economy. Besides, my photo editor is nagging me to get a shot of my avatar, which needs an extreme makeover. Time to go shopping! First I pick out a Hawaiian shirt from a shop, clicking on the image to buy it for about 300 Lindens, or about a dollar. Nice design but too tight for my taste, so I prowl another men's shop for a jacket. I find something I like, along with a dark gray blazer and pants. As a fitting finishing touch for a reporter, I add a snazzy black fedora, though I'm bummed that it can't be modified to add a press card.

I'm also feeling neglectful leaving my avatar homeless every time I log out. It's time to buy some land, which will give me a place to put my purchases, like a cool spinning globe that one merchant offered cheap. And maybe I'll build a house there to show off to friends. I briefly consider buying a whole island, but I have a feeling our T&E folks would frown on a $1,250 bill for imaginary land. Instead, I purchase a 512-square-meter plot with ocean view, a steal for less than two bucks. Plopping my globe onto my plot, I take a seat on it and slowly circle, surveying my domain. My Second Life is good.

I soon discover that Second Life's economy has also begun to attract second-order businesses like financial types. One enterprising character, whose avatar is "Shaun Altman," has set up the Metaverse Stock Exchange inside Second Life. He (at least I think it's a he) hopes it will serve as a place where residents can invest in developers of big projects like virtual golf courses. In a text chat session in his slick Second Life office, Altman concedes that the market is "a bit ahead of its time. I'm sure it will take quite some time to build up a solid reputation as an institution." No doubt, I'm thinking, especially when the CEO is a furry avatar whose creator refuses to reveal his real name.

Premature or not, such efforts are raising tough questions. Virtual worlds may be games at their core, but what happens when they get linked with real money? (For one, people such as Chung's owner start to take changes to their world very seriously. She recently threatened to create her own currency inside Second Life after the Linden dollar's value fell.) Ultimately, who regulates their financial activities? And doesn't this all look like a great way for crooks or terrorists to launder money?

Beyond business, virtual worlds raise sticky social issues. Linden Lab has rules against offensive behavior in public, such as racial slurs or overtly sexual antics. But for better or worse, consenting adults in private areas can engage in sexual role-playing that, if performed in real life, would land them in jail. Will that draw fire from law enforcement or, at least, publicity-seeking politicians? Ultimately, what are the societal implications of spending so many hours playing, or even working, inside imaginary worlds? Nobody really has good answers yet.

My head hurts. I just want to have some fun now. It's time to try Second Life's most popular game. Tringo is a combination of bingo and the puzzle-like PC game Tetris, where you quickly try to fit various shapes that appear on a screen into squares, leaving as few empty squares as you can. I settle in on a floating seat, joining a dozen other competing avatars at an event called Tringo Money Madness @Icedragon's Playpen -- and proceed to lose every game. Badly. I start to get the hang of it and briefly consider waiting for the next Tringo event until I see the bonus feature: a movie screen showing the band Black Sabbath's 1998 reunion tour.

Instead, I seek out Tringo's creator, Nathan Keir, a 31-year-old programmer in Australia whose avatar is a green-and-purple gecko, "Kermitt Quirk." It turns out Keir's game is so popular, with 226 selling so far at 15,000 Lindens a pop, or about $50, that a real-world company called Donnerwood Media ponied up a licensing fee in the low five figures, plus royalties. Tringo soon will grace Nintendo Co.'s (NTDOY ) Game Boy Advance and cell phones. "I never expected it at all," Keir tells me, his awe evident even in a text chat clear across the world. He's working on new games now, wondering if he can carve out a living. That would be even cooler than the main benefit so far: making his mum proud.

TALENT BANK

After all my travels around Second Life, it's becoming apparent that virtual worlds, most of all this one, tap into something very powerful: the talent and hard work of everyone inside. Residents spend a quarter of the time they're logged in, a total of nearly 23,000 hours a day, creating things that become part of the world, available to everyone else. It would take a paid 4,100-person software team to do all that, says Linden Lab. Assuming those programmers make about $100,000 a year, that would be $410 million worth of free work over a year. Think of it: The company charges customers anywhere from $6 to thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of doing most of the work. And make no mistake, this would be real work were it not so fun. In Star Wars Galaxies, some players take on the role of running a pharmaceutical business in which they manage factory schedules, devise ad campaigns, and hire other players to find raw materials -- all imaginary, of course.

All this has some companies mulling a wild idea: Why not use gaming's psychology, incentive systems, and social appeal to get real jobs done better and faster? "People are willing to do tedious, complex tasks within games," notes Nick Yee, a Stanford University graduate student in communications who has extensively studied online games. "What if we could tap into that brainpower?"

In other words, your next cubicle could well be inside a virtual world. That's the mission of a secretive Palo Alto (Calif.) startup, Seriosity, backed by venture firm Alloy Ventures Inc. Seriosity is exploring whether routine real-world responsibilities might be assigned to a custom online game. Workers having fun, after all, likely will be more productive. "We want to use the power of these games to transform information work," says Seriosity CEO Byron B. Reeves, a Stanford professor of communications.

BUILDING BOOM

Whether or not their more fantastic possibilities pan out, it seems abundantly clear that virtual worlds offer a way of testing new ideas like this more freely than ever. "We can and should view synthetic worlds as essentially unregulated playgrounds for economic organization," notes Edward Castronova, an associate professor in telecommunications at Indiana University at Bloomington and author of the 2005 book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

I get a taste of the lack of regulation just as we're about to go to press. Logging in to Second Life after a few days off, I see that someone has erected a bunch of buildings on my avatar Rob Cranes's land, which is located in a region called Saeneul. The area was nearly empty when I arrived, but now I'm surrounded by Greek temples under construction. So much for my ocean view. Online notes left by one "Amy Stork" explain that the "Saeneul Residents Association" is building an amphitheater complex, and "your plot is smack bang in the middle." She's "confident that we can find a *much* better plot for you than this one....Love, Amy xx."

Oh, really? For some reason, this causes Rob Cranes to blow a gasket. He resists my editor's advice to "head to the virtual gun store," but he fires off angry e-mail complaints to Ms. Stork and Linden Lab and deletes the trespassing buildings, planting some trees in their place. Then he reconsiders: Maybe a ramshackle cabin with a stained sofa and a sun-bleached Chevy up on blocks would be a great addition to his plot.

At first, I wonder why I (or my avatar) has such a visceral reaction to this perceived intrusion. Then a flush of parental pride washes over me: My avatar, which so far has acted much like me, hanging back from crowds and minding his punctuation in text chats, suddenly is taking on a life of his own. Who will my alter ego turn out to be? I don't know yet. And maybe that's the best thing about virtual worlds. Unlike in the corporeal world, we can make of our second lives whatever we choose.

By Robert D. Hof

Hesten · Post by **Hesten** » June 10, 2006, 5:17 am

Great article.

Skogen · Post by **Skogen** » June 12, 2006, 11:54 am

wtf is in this "game" that makes it more than a glorified chat room?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » June 12, 2006, 1:17 pm

Skogen wrote:wtf is in this "game" that makes it more than a glorified chat room?

What makes current MMORPGs more than glorified MUDs?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 15, 2006, 6:31 pm

More SL news from Wired:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/in ... =rss.index

Second Life Rocks (Literally)

By Robert Andrews| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Aug, 15, 2006

Move over, MySpace: Pop legends and aspiring rock stars are heading for an online outlet that's more Sims than social networking.

With thousands of bands now crowding the pages of MySpace.com, acts like Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega are turning to the online virtual world of Second Life to make themselves heard.

Artists are creating avatars and using the game's audio-streaming features to play "live" concerts on stages made of polygons. With nearly 400,000 members, Second Life is considered by some record companies to be a good venue to reach fans.

"Certainly it's part novelty, but I also see it as endemic to music to push performance into different dimensions," said Ethan Kaplan, senior director of technology at Warner Bros. Records.

Later this month, the '80s superband Duran Duran will perform on its very own 3-D luxury island. Rap star Talib Kweli is set to join in, according to Kaplan.

"When the video revolution began we instantly saw the opportunity to experiment and explore a new form of expression to enhance the musical experience," said keyboard player Nick Rhodes in a statement. "Second Life is the future right now, offering endless possibilities for artists."

On Aug. 3, singer Suzanne Vega became the first major artist to play a live gig in Second Life. The performance was simultaneously broadcast on public radio, with someone controlling Vega's online avatar as she sang.

The only problem with this in SL atm is that individual Sims can only handle 50-60 avatars before bogging down so while the wolrd can support many thousands of people on at once, it can't handle them all crowded together.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » August 15, 2006, 7:08 pm

Skogen wrote:wtf is in this "game" that makes it more than a glorified chat room?

The ability to own virtual property. How exactly you "own" something that could vanish forever at the push of a button is beyond me.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 15, 2006, 7:30 pm

masteen wrote:
Skogen wrote:wtf is in this "game" that makes it more than a glorified chat room?
The ability to own virtual property. How exactly you "own" something that could vanish forever at the push of a button is beyond me.

Value is determined by how people perceive it. I sold a Blight, Hammer of the Scourge for $500.00 U.S. to some shaman nut early on in EQ (Clancy) that refused to stop bothering me about it. I had traded for the hammer in North Freeport for 4 Yaks so it wasn't awarded to me by a guild or anything.

That guy valued the hammer at $500.00. How much is it worth now?

In SL, land sells for anywhere between $10-15.00 to up to several thousand dollars for an entire Sim. On top of that, there is monthly rent that ranges from 10.00 to ~300.00/month for an entire Sim. Some people buy and pay the monthly fees because they enjoy owning and building on their own land in the game while others use it fo create stores and sell various in-game items that net them anywhere from enough to offset what they pay for the land each month, onwards up o 100K or a Million/year in the case of Anshe's Dreamland business. The best part about Sl is that you don't have to pay a dime and can still make money if that's your goal as there is no mandatory subscription and yo ucan build your items in the free sandboxes that are all over the world.

The market is totally open with Lindens (Second Life currency) trading on the open market. It usually ranges anywhere from $1 U.S. = $270-300L.

Who cares what some people think, what matters is if there's enough people that value your products in the game or land to pay you for it. If so, you make real money and make a real living by sitting on your ass having fun in a computer game.

Of course, most people just like to hang out and have fun in the virtual world but it's entirely up to you.

Shaerra · Post by **Shaerra** » August 17, 2006, 7:44 pm

Wow, that looks very interesting. Winnow, you still playing?

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » August 17, 2006, 7:54 pm

He was online one day last week when I logged in and roamed around while waiting on an AV queue on my Alliance character in WoW

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 17, 2006, 7:55 pm

I'm still playing : )

I'll be heading out on vacation for a week soon but will give you a tour when I get back if you want. If you try it out beforehand, give yourself some time on the newbie island and help island to get familiar with things before heading over to the main land.

It's more of a social experiment than a game though. The building part can be a lot of fun as well : ) As others that play Sl here on VV can tell you, there are better places than others to see so it takes some time to see what it's all about. Some places are a mess of newbie houses, etc : )

Shaerra · Post by **Shaerra** » August 17, 2006, 7:59 pm

Cool. I think I'm gonna check it out. So you're Zed? eh?

Last I heard, Zed's dead.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 17, 2006, 8:06 pm

Yep, that's where I got my name from only I'm a little more perverted than the guy in the movie.

Send me an IM while I'm offline and I can put you on my 'leet friends list : )

Hesten · Post by **Hesten** » August 18, 2006, 4:37 am

Im still playing too

Canelek · Post by **Canelek** » August 18, 2006, 11:03 am

I will play if I am allowed to kill people with preppy mohawks.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 16, 2006, 12:37 pm

Second Life is still going through some growing pains and has been getting hit with grid attacks more often recently but that's not stopping companies from jumping into the virtual world.

It's been interesting watching the world develop over the past year. It looks like Second Life has the infrastructure to be a long term player.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061016/tc_ ... uters_dc_2

Reuters opens virtual news bureau in Second Life

By Eric Auchard and Kenneth LiMon Oct 16, 3:53 AM ET

Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life this week, joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet.

Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit a Reuters news site at: http://secondlife.reuters.com/

Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet. Akin to the original city-building game SimCity, Second Life is a virtual, three-dimensional world where users create and dress up characters, buy property and interact with other players.

More than 900,000 users have signed up to build homes, form neighborhoods and live out alternative versions of their lives in the 3D, computer-generated world. Players spend around US$350,000 a day on average, or a rate of $13 million a year. Usage is growing in rapid double-digit terms each month.

Players buy and sell goods and services using a virtual currency, known as Linden Dollars. An online marketplace allows users to convert the currency into real U.S. dollars, enabling users to earn real money from their activities.

Adam Pasick, a Reuters' media correspondent based in London, will serve as the news organization's first virtual bureau chief, using a personal avatar, or animated character, called "Adam Reuters," in keeping with the game's naming system.

"As strange as it might seem, it's not that different from being a reporter in the real world," Pasick said. "Once you get used to it -- it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years."

Car maker Toyota (7203.T), music label Sony BMG, computer maker Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW - news), and technology news company Cnet (Nasdaq:CNET - news) are among the companies taking part in Second Life. Adidas (ADSG.DE) and American Apparel sell clothes and accessories for people to dress their avatars. Starwood Hotels (NYSE:HOT - news) has built a virtual version of "aloft," a new hotel chain it plans to open in the real world in 2008.

Reuters will have journalists reporting and writing financial and cultural stories within and about Second Life as part of the London-based company's strategy to reach new audiences with the latest digital technologies.

"In Second Life, we're making Reuters part of a new generation," Reuters Chief Executive Tom Glocer said in a statement. "We're playing an active role in this community by bringing the outside world into Second Life and vice versa."

Second Life citizens can stay tuned to the latest headlines by using a feature called the Reuters News Center, a mobile device that users can carry inside the virtual environment. Stories will focus on both the fast-growing economy and culture of Second Life and also include links to Reuters news feeds from the outside world, ranging from Baghdad to Wall Street.

Pasick said Reuters was not bending any editorial rules to operate in a world that blends fiction with reality.

"Being unbiased, being accurate, being fast, all the things that Reuters strives for, they hold true in just about any environment in which you would want to report the news," he said.

Residents of Second Life who read a Reuters story that interests them can, with the click of a button, go to a community center called Reuters Atrium to meet others to discuss the latest events in both the real and virtual worlds.

(Read an interview with Pasick at: http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/)

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 16, 2006, 7:22 pm

Ack! so much for the easy buck:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061016-7997.html

Coming soon to an MMORPG near you: taxes

10/16/2006 2:28:26 PM, by Eric Bangeman

Governments may start paying more attention to MMORPGs for one simple reason: money. The boom in virtual economies has one congressional committee looking at whether there is an opportunity for the IRS to get involved, making sure Uncle Sam gets a cut of whatever real-world money is generated from online gaming activities.

Dan Miller, senior economist for the congressional Joint Economic Committee became interested in the issue after getting into MMORPGs in his free time. His personal gaming activities will form part of the basis for a report on the issue that will submitted to the full committee early next year.

"We are starting with a blank slate and going through the various dimensions of virtual economies, and seeing where they might intersect with public policy," Miller told Reuters. "Right now we're at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise—taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth."

Of particular interest are games such as Second Life, which has its own, thriving in-game economy. Linden Dollars, the official currency of the game, are easily convertible to real dollars. As a result, online activities can ultimately be monetized, enabling users to cash in on their virtual activities. And if a Second Lifer can make money off of playing the game, chances are good that the IRS will want a piece of the action.

One game designer thinks that taxation is inevitable. Sam Lewis, who was on the team that designed Star Wars Galaxies, says that the real world has yet to catch up to virtual economies. "Ownership, property rights, all that stuff needs to be decided. There's just too much money floating around," Lewis told Reuters. "The tax laws don't know how to behave because these are virtual items: ones and zeros on a database we're allowing you to play in."

When the ones and zeros turn into sufficient quantities of tens and twenties, color the IRS interested. Current US tax law requires people who leave a game and convert their virtual holdings into real-world money to report any earnings to the IRS, and the same is true in many other countries. Once Congress and the IRS gain a better understanding about how virtual economies work, the tax code will likely change to reflect that.

Gemily · Post by **Gemily** » October 16, 2006, 10:36 pm

So far I dont see anything adult in this game other than some sexy outfits for females. Where are the male packages? Show me some e-penises.

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » October 16, 2006, 11:07 pm

Gemily wrote:So far I dont see anything adult in this game other than some sexy outfits for females. Where are the male packages? Show me some e-penises.

They're there. While skin shopping, that's all I found one night.

Gemily · Post by **Gemily** » October 17, 2006, 1:41 am

hah show me where

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 17, 2006, 3:04 am

Gemily wrote:So far I dont see anything adult in this game other than some sexy outfits for females. Where are the male packages? Show me some e-penises.

There's a ton of that stuff! You're not looking hard enough! : )

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 1, 2006, 2:29 pm

Bah. The initial fun of SL might be giving way to the almighty $$. It looks like this price hike is mostly aimed at the corporations that are starting to claim space in the virtual world though.

Time to see if Linden Labs can make Second Life profitable.

'Second Life' land prices get hefty hikes

By Daniel Terdiman
http://news.com.com/Second+Life+land+pr ... 31334.html

In a bid to get into the black, "Second Life" publisher Linden Lab has unveiled a new pricing structure for private islands in the virtual world.
The move has angered some community members, since Linden Lab gave early warning of the price change to some developers.

Until now, anyone who wanted to buy a small private island of about 16 acres could do so by paying $1,250 and a monthly maintenance fee of $195. But as of Wednesday, the company plans to bump those fees to $1,675 and $295, respectively, for all new sales.

"I'm not sure we know yet how it will affect resident behavior and growth patterns."

--John Zdanowski CFO Linden Lab said the fee hikes would not affect existing islands or land on the "Second Life" "mainland."

"It's basically recognition that there's a whole lot more value for private island regions," said John Zdanowski, Linden Lab's new chief financial officer. "That's why our demand for them has been so much higher" than similar size real estate on the mainland.

"Second Life" is an open-ended 3D virtual world in which residents create nearly all the content, including fantastical buildings, vehicles, outfits, avatars and much more. "Second Life" is free to play, but anyone who owns land has to pay maintenance fees. In large part, Linden Lab's business model is about selling such digital real estate--each island is stored on a single server--and charging those ongoing fees.

In effect, the company's business model is to sell server space. Along the way, it has sold more than 2,000 islands to customers like Sony BMG, IBM and General Motors.

Zdanowski said Linden Lab has not been profitable to date, and that with the existing island price structure, the company has been "subsidizing" the growth of the virtual world. It now has more than 1.2 million registered accounts and has recently seen a rush of famous companies jostling for position in-world.

Zdanowski said Linden Lab's cost for servers, bandwidth and engineering talent have risen significantly in recent months and that those factors were involved in the company's decision to raise island prices.

He also said that one of his first orders of business upon arriving at Linden Lab was to address profitability.

"The way (islands are priced) now, we would always be on the verge of profitable. The new CFO comes to town and does some analysis and recognizes that fact," Zdanowski said.

Linden Lab said it would take a final inventory of 150 islands available at previous prices. After those are gone, all sales will be at the new prices.

Zdanowski said corporate customers will not feel any squeeze from the rate hikes.

"It's a non-event" for them, he said. "They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up an in-world presence, and they're paying almost nothing for the land."

Not the only pricing move
But Linden Lab isn't sure what the effect on the rest of the "Second Life" community will be.

"I'm not sure we know yet how it will affect resident behavior and growth patterns," Zdanowski said, "and I think anybody who thinks they can doesn't understand how complex the system that the in-world economy is."

The island price change isn't Linden Lab's only pricing move. Earlier this month, the company also began charging $9.95 for users' second accounts. And in a blog posting that was blasted by some community members, Robin Harper, Linden Lab vice president of community development and support, floated the idea of charging residents for technical support, something that has so far been free.

Prior to publicly announcing the island pricing policy change, Linden Lab let a small number of developers know about the impending change. And some users are upset about that, charging that such a heads-up gave those developers an unfair advantage in the rush to try to buy islands at the old, lower prices.

Among those who got the early word was Electric Sheep, the biggest third-party "Second Life" developer. Its clients include Major League Baseball, Nissan and Starwood Hotels.

For Electric Sheep and other developers, the advanced warning allowed them to give their own clients the most up-to-date information.

"Let's face it, they're a business, and they have to operate as a business."
--Alice McKeon, "Second Life" resident "I think the primary reason they did it is that they know we're out proposing and negotiating large projects with 'Second Life,'" said Giff Constable, Electric Sheep's vice president of business development. "We had just had a situation where Linden Lab changed the policy and pricing for custom (avatar) names, and so we had to go to prospects and reset expectations. I would bet that was the primary reason why they notified us."

For its part, Linden Lab said it was chastened by community anger at the early warning to some developers.

"I was taken by surprise when the information leaked to some people who might have tried to take advantage of (it)," said Zdanowski. "Clearly, there is a delicate balance between soliciting feedback from our customers while also not giving them an information advantage--and we will be much more careful in how we approach this in the future."

Meanwhile, opinions appear mixed about how the price change will affect "Second Life" and its existing residents.

On the one hand, most "Second Life" users don't own islands and never will. So those users will not be directly affected. On the other hand, small business owners, or those who rent space on islands--there are many such businesses--may well experience a downside.

At least one "Second Life" landlord has seen enough to say goodbye to his business.

"I'm sure you can appreciate that (the price changes) will have a huge effect on the rental market," wrote Hiro Queso, an owner and landlord of a number of "Second Life" islands. "With great sadness, I hereby give you notice that I will no longer be offering rentals and all (islands) will be cleared" within a month.

Of course, there are other rental businesses in "Second Life." An owner of one of the busiest said she isn't sure how the price changes will affect her outfit.

Alice McKeon, who runs d'Alliez Island Rentals in "Second Life" and rents 39 islands along with partner Tony Beckett, said she was not surprised Linden Lab raised the price of islands, but thought the fee increase was unexpected.

"Naturally, we will have to (raise prices) to recoup our investment" on new islands, McKeon said. "We'll have to see what supply and demand is (for islands). We will not grow as fast as we have in the past."

She did say she bears Linden Lab no ill will for raising the prices.

"Let's face it, they're a business," McKeon said, "and they have to operate as a business. I'm in their ballpark and either I believe in them and I stay, or I don't believe in them and I leave. And I plan to stay."

Kwonryu DragonFist · Post by **Kwonryu DragonFist** » November 1, 2006, 3:55 pm

Have they buffed tiny toons or are they still imbalanced?

They were nerfed by a huge amount while i was playing (much more polygons than the rest).

If Tiny toons are getting fixed i might start playing again.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » November 1, 2006, 4:22 pm

I'll keep you posted Kwon!

I read all the patch messages to see if there's any significant additions that might be of interest to ex players.

Dal-KoE · Post by **Dal-KoE** » November 7, 2006, 2:16 pm

Island prices too high... you can always try to win one.

"Big Brother" to be launched in Second Life
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061106/wr_ ... demol_dc_5

The popular reality TV show "Big Brother" plans to expand into virtual reality with a new edition in the online world of Second Life, the Dutch unit of television programmer Endemol said on Monday.

ADVERTISEMENT

Second Life is a three-dimensional virtual world with more than 1 million registered users and its own economy and currency. It was created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab.

Endemol will select 15 international Second Life contestants to spend at least eight hours a day inside a specially constructed glass-walled house for one month. As in the real-world version of "Big Brother," the contestants will be voted off until only one remains.

The winner will receive a virtual island within Second Life, worth about US$1,675.

"Big Brother Second Life represents a fantastic opportunity to amass knowledge of the virtual world. In the future, we will use this experience to develop specific content for online communities," said Endemol Netherlands Managing Director Paul Romer.

A number of real-world companies have entered Second Life in recent months, drawn by its rapid growth and large pool of tech-savvy consumers, including Toyota Motor Corp., Adidas AG and Sony BMG. Reuters Group Plc also recently launched its own news bureau in Second Life.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » December 4, 2006, 1:58 pm

I saw this coming. Second Life is expanding way too fast for the 100 employees of Linden Labs to handle it. They have 4,000 servers according to the article and need 2,000 more a month? Not gonna happen!

I know a lady in Second Life that started the game about six months ago. She learned how to script and started making poseball animations. She now owns five full sims (cost about $2,000 U.S. each to buy and $300/month rent afterwards per Sim) and is making money selling those animations.

Another lady makes clothes while playing within the game and is bringing in around $60K a year.

Those are just two people I know fairly well. Lots more where that came from.

This Virtual World stuff is here to stay. Linden Labs needs to get serious about upgrading their game engine to handle the huge influx of people or there will be major problems with that kind of real money involved.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16023313/

Falling house prices in the US, unsold properties and builders dramatically cutting starts on new homes might as well be in another world to the residents of Second Life, the online universe where construction is booming to keep pace with rampant immigration.

One resident of the rapidly expanding multiplayer online game has made the ranks of real world millionaires – by building shopping malls and homes as a virtual property developer and selling them to other players for real dollars. And a new breed of web services firms is emerging to satisfy demand from corporations who, rather than a new website, want to recreate their brands and offices in a three-dimensional online universe.

Dutch bank ABN Amro this weekend opened a virtual branch alongside commercial operations by the likes of IBM and Toyota.

The virtual world's population is increasing by about 40 per cent a month. From about 100,000 at the beginning of the year, it hit 1m in October and is expected to reach 2m this month, putting strains on San-Francisco-based Linden Lab, creator of the fast-growing virtual universe.

Second Life is suffering from major growing pains – servers and databases struggle to cope with increased loads and volunteer guides are overwhelmed by the influx of new residents. At the weekend, residents were complaining as water, land, homes and even parts of their bodies disappeared as an upgrade of Second Life's databases went awry.

The Orientation Islands, the first landing screens, are now full and most immigrants are quitting the new user-created world as soon as they enter it, baffled and put off by its complexity.

"In that [first] screen, there's something so profoundly intimidating that it scares most people off," says Philip Rosedale, founder and chief executive of Second Life's creator. He says only about 10 per cent of new residents are still logging into Second Life three months later, but these numbers still represent a challenge for a company of just 100 people.

"It's hard to scale the physical infrastructure much faster than 40 or 50 per cent a month. We have more than 4,000 servers now, so to deploy 2,000 servers a month would be difficult and we will have challenges meeting that."

Linden Lab's plan is to hire more people and to open up its system to the Open Source community to aid its development.

Mr Rosedale calculates the ecosystem of professional builders working on virtual world properties and islands for the likes of IBM, Dell, Sony and Nissan already far exceeds the size of his own company.

Anshe Chung – real name Ailin Graef – accumulated virtual real estate equivalent to 36 square kilometres of land to develop property and earn her first million, all from an initial $10 membership sign-up.
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.

Syenye · Post by **Syenye** » December 4, 2006, 3:42 pm

i hadn't realized how huge second life was til i saw a company post about palmisano giving a speech in second life a few weeks ago. IBM is putting $100 million to open 10 new businesses in second life. 3D is the new 2D.

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » December 4, 2006, 3:47 pm

I nominate this thread for worst thread of 2006.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » December 4, 2006, 3:53 pm

That honor should go to any thread started about Vanguard.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » December 10, 2006, 2:44 am

Some random pics snapped in SL over the past months. This page doesn't feel right without more pics!

SL's first millionaire selling me some land.

Someone recreated the French Louvre Museum. It wasn't bad. I can see the potential for a virtual tour of historical places, etc.

I don't care if I'm in a virtual world...gotta have cool displays!

DJ animations. Can see some of the lighting/effects scripts that someone built into the DJ booth.

The designers continue to improve on clothing in the game as well as everything else.

I little fishy swimming around in a shoe. Can't do that IRL!

Most of Second Life areas are warm and sunny so here's a snowy area for you!

Some good T-Shirts. (Vega's are good too!)

Tropical area.

Showing some leg and the cool Vans shoes.

One of my Skyboxes that someone designed to look like the Tyrell Office from Bladerunner.

here's a link to the actual office from the movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BladeRunner_Sun.jpg

The columns are in the SL version, I just removed them to save prims. The background is an animated gif so you'd see ships moving through the sky in spacelanes if this image wasn't static. Nice job by the designer.

A couple of Veeshanites at a dance club awhile back...had to break out the cows!

Cars don't work very well yet in SL but this one can be converted into a hovercraft and functions better while flying.

Cool necklace (and an example of what clothing looks like when it's not fully rez'd)

Funky wireframe view. I suppose you could use this mode if you were super laggy!

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » December 10, 2006, 9:19 am

What kind of emo bitch needs her SL name hidden in screen shots?

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » December 10, 2006, 4:33 pm

Zaelath wrote:What kind of emo bitch needs her SL name hidden in screen shots?

I post pictures here so others can see what the game looks like as it evolves. It's just common courtesy to not post names on a flame board with its share of dickheads.

You can see Anshe Chung's name and the Veeshan peeps names! Go bother them!

Kwonryu DragonFist · December 10, 2006, 4:49 pm

Still no update for the Tiny Toons eh?

Shorties always have to take the backseat and wait until the regpeeps get all their updates first!

miir · Post by **miir** » December 12, 2006, 5:14 pm

http://edgecase.net/devsite/blogs/a_clo ... -lies.aspx

Second Lies
I doubt if any of the site members or the dev team are in any doubt about my opinions on Second Life - i think it's shit.

However, i'm gratified to note that Linden Labs apparently also think it's shit. I can't see any other reason for them to actively lie to the BBC about it. As those of you who check the External News link will know, Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms spotted one of those lies first and he covered it pretty well but for those who dislike jumping around through hyperlinks (in which case, maybe HTML isn't your medium, folks, try a newspaper) here it is:

"World of Warcraft touts a six million or larger active user base - but they shard their world off into smaller servers so you never see 16,000 people in the same place", said Mr Miller.

"That's unlike Second Life, where tonight you will see 16,000 people enjoying exactly the same world all able to communicate with each other, all attending the same live music event should they wish to."

If SL now supports more than about 12 avatars in any area, they've changed something. If SL now supports 16,000 avatars at any event, they've changed everything. The "Mr Miller" in question is their head of technology so it's not like he's misinformed. He knows Second Life is shit, he's just lying to the BBC who have some new-wavy gullible journo ready and waiting to eat it up and crap it back to the rest of us while drinking his skinny mochachino latte and listening to his iPod. I hate him already, i bet he has a trendy haircut and carries a manbag.

But the second lie... nobody seems to be commenting on the second one, also in that article.

...this was something of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment for me - an opportunity to peer behind the scenes of this social phenomenon with over three times the population of Luxembourg.

Given that a phenomenon is just a "thing that happened", i'll let that one pass although i do feel a strong urge to point out that describing Second Life as a social phenomenon is much akin to calling syphillis a social disease. It's that population thing that's eating me.

A population is, for the purposes of this kind of bullshit statement, the mean number of people who live in any area. Second Life recently announced one million registered users, but registered users do not make a population. Anyone who ever downloaded their (free) client anmd signed in to look around is a registered user. I am myself a registered user. I have only ever logged in twice in the year since i downloaded their client and i have never made any objects, spent any Lindens, made any Lindens or anything except first time, log in, look around, get bored, look around some more, get propositioned, run away, look around more, log off in horror. And second time, script something up to head as far in a single direction as possible and run bandwidth metrics while it ran minimised. All your bandwidth are belong to SL, btw. It crashed after 90 minutes, which i am assured is above-average performance.

I'd bet $500 dollars of my own money right here and now that I have logged on to Second Life twice as many times as the average person downloading their free client. $500 bucks to the person who can prove to me that most downloaders log in more than once. Go for it. I bet you can use the money. I know i can, and i'm absolutely certain you can't take it from me. I'm serious, go get the stats, i'll be waiting. Linden don't give out those stats. Because if they did, they couldn't crow about having a million registered users.

What Linden does give us is this:

Residents Logged-In During Last 7 Days 209,832
Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days 325,755
Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days 475,569
Residents Logged-In During Last 60 Days 700,950

They don't give us a definition for "residents" and i for one do not believe that 209,832 individuals logged into SL since last Thursday. They don't give us Peak Concurrent Usage stats either but i think that 16,000 is probably the highest PCU they've ever had. I do believe that SL's login server counted 209,832 individual logins since Thursday. That'd give us 29976 logins per day. Respectable certainly, but not insane. That's a user-base.

Except that it isn't. As mentioned, the client is free. How many of those 29976 per day logged in half as many times as i did? How many clients have been downloaded in those seven days? More to the point, how many of those users have ever paid money to Linden Labs? A user-base is worthless unless it's self-sustaining financially. Have Linden Labs ever made a profit? I think not.

I think Second Life is everything that Jack Thompson wants to ban (and you know, this is one case i hope he actually wins because that shit is sick), i think the technology is interesting but so is the technology of a Rubik's Cube and a Rubik's Cube doesn't have a population of furries and paedophiles, and i think the press releases are simply lies.

Luxembourg has a population of 474,413, by the way. So even if everyone who had ever downloaded their client had stayed and paid them money it'd still be a lie - only twice that number are usually even claimed, not three times.

I want to stop seeing stories about Second Life. I want reputable journalists to stop making themselves look like brown-nosing paid spokesmen for something which is frankly a waste of everyone's time except those who like to masturbate at the keyboard while looking at furries and little kids.

One day, Jack Thompson and the public at large are going to find out about Second Life and when they do, every online environment is going to be in deep, deep trouble because of what Second Life has allowed, no, encouraged, to go on in their systems.

Second Life Must Die.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » December 12, 2006, 5:45 pm

There's no doubt that Linden Labs needs to upgrade Second Life's engine (in the works). It's an evolving social experiment more than a game which I think has been made very clear here.

Second Life crashes a lot, especially after patches. They've got a long ways to go to make the world stable but that's not stopping corporations from jumping in and testing the format for themselves.

It was mentioned somewhere that Linden Labs is up for sale. (unconfirmed by me) which may be a good thing as the original developers are on to a good thing but may not have the resources or manpower to expand it.

If that guy's point was that SL doesn't handle masses of people well atm, he's absolutely correct. Neither did EQ1 in the beginning! The lag was outrageous but we kept playing and it got better. : )

miir · Post by **miir** » December 12, 2006, 5:54 pm

If that guy's point was that SL doesn't handle masses of people well atm, he's absolutely correct. Neither did EQ1 in the beginning! The lag was outrageous but we kept playing and it got better

I think you missed the point entirely.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » December 12, 2006, 6:01 pm

He just sounds like a disgruntled person.

He seems upset with the numbers of people online being reported and doesn't sound happy with how the "game" works presently. He seems to be wanting to compare SL to a game like WoW which it is nothing like. SL isn't really a "game" at all and anyone logging on thinking it's more than an experimental social/chat 3D world is going to be disappointed. What else did I miss?

SL can support up to 60 people in an area now, not the 12 he mentions, although even with 60, you're in for a lagfest with the current engine. The prims (objects) on the detailed avatars all need to be rendered which lags the shit out of present video cards.

miir · Post by **miir** » December 12, 2006, 6:19 pm

What exactly would he be disgruntled about?

He's just ripping that Miller dude for spewing blatant horseshit about second life.
And he's got a point. If the game is as successful as people would have you believe, why does this Miller fellow feel the need to throw out such blatant lies?

Eve Online doesn't get a fraction of the mainstream publicity (actually I think it gets none) as Second Life but it frequently gets more than double the maximum concurrent connections second life has ever had.

What about if.. oh I dunno.. let's say that someone from SOE went around doing interviews and tried to sell the superiority of EQ2 over WOW by claiming that EQ2 servers have higher populations per server.

Truant · Post by **Truant** » December 12, 2006, 6:40 pm

spin it winnow, spin it!

we all know you're full of shit. Now's your chance to prove us right! Now's your chance to make something of yourself. C'mon, you can do it!

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » December 12, 2006, 6:41 pm

miir wrote: He's just ripping that Miller dude for spewing blatant horseshit about second life.
And he's got a point. If the game is as successful as people would have you believe, why does this Miller fellow feel the need to throw out such blatant lies?

I agree. He's over hyping the number of people in the game...a fast response by me would be that they are currently trying to sell Linden Labs and want to put it in the best light possible.

Second Life itself gets a bunch of press from outside sources. I don't think this guy needs to try and exaggerate things.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » December 12, 2006, 7:33 pm

miir wrote:
If that guy's point was that SL doesn't handle masses of people well atm, he's absolutely correct. Neither did EQ1 in the beginning! The lag was outrageous but we kept playing and it got better
I think you missed the point entirely.

I think the author of the article missed the point entirely if he thinks SL is all about 'furries and paedophiles.' And he should at least learn to spell if he's going to use big words like pederast.

miir · Post by **miir** » December 12, 2006, 11:23 pm

I think the author of the article missed the point entirely if he thinks SL is all about 'furries and paedophiles.' And he should at least learn to spell if he's going to use big words like pederast.

And maybe you should actually learn the orgins of the languange that your country has butchered before you criticize someone for spelling.