The New Myst Style Devokan
Second Life fans are discovering the Myst-Uru community within the grid. When Myst Online: Uru Live, a GameTap revived version of the game Uru Live, closed about 500 fans made it to SL. The more well known SL group is the D’ni Refugees. The Refugees are working in smaller groups to learn building and build new Myst-Uru style builds with puzzles and storylines. These have resulted in the opening of new regions. Now there is another region opening made by members of one of the ‘guilds’ from Uru.
Other posts here have links to most of the active regions, so I won’t repost here. The semi-secret Crux Isle (See mention NWN) is still in construction. But a new region known as Devokan is open now. A significant difference in Devokan is the history of the builders and their goals.
Strange Places
In the Myst-Uru Community fans are building new ages for the coming open source version of the game Uru Live. That is a daunting task, building an age… Blender, file conversions, Python code, UV-Mapping and all the quirks. Many opted for the easy building in THERE and Second Life. But one group is working to bridge these metaphysical worlds to create some type of unity. First forming the Guild of Maintainers (GoMa), historically the people that kept the original D’ni worlds functioning, these fans decided, as beta testers, they would be the Maintainers written of in the game. Now they test fan created content (ages).
Devokan Building, Stonehinge and Artifact Line Up
Some of those Maintainers moved to THERE. The fans in THERE have created an award winning outpost for Myst-Uru fans. The GoMa can be found in THERE. Recently guild members have made trips into SL. A new region is opening sponsored and built by fans and some GoMa members. Again a GOMa outpost is included.
There is some back story set for these new islands at the GoMa site (See New Myst Style Island). I suspect the idea is to tie the community together by relating a coming age for open source with an age in SL. We could be seeing a unique experiment in cross world games.
Consider the Myst-Uru fans, a group with a high diversity of reasons for liking Uru. Many of us like the freedom of SL to visit our beloved Ae’gura, a city in Uru, to dress wildly, learn fantastic dance moves and to visit strange and exotic regions of SL, i.e., Coffee Break blog and Jandai’s exploring. Others prefer the kid friendly THERE where parents can actually hang out with their kids. Others insist on the purity of the original Uru Live, if there is such a thing anymore. Whatever, they want to be as close as possible to the original game. Others loved the mind bending puzzles tied into a storyline and the history of the D’ni people. Many of us loved the parties in the Uru community neighborhoods, I think most of that type is in SL. Fans have friendships across all these virtual worlds. Now we have a new flood of fans from the Myst iPhone group. Many have wondered how to keep the ‘family’ of fans together. Few have taken steps to actually accomplish that. Devokan is an excellent step, IMO.