Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah I am seeing articles about Second Life™ popping up much more often. Today I see another article appearing on PC Gamer. This one is by Ian Dransfield and titled: Remnants of Earth: the MMO inside Second Life.
Again, this does not appear to be written by one knowledgeable about Second Life. From just this article, I suspect whatever experience Ian has with SL is cursory. I suspect most of the story came from watching the video trailer about Remnants of Earth.
Strawberry started it… we’ll blame her… (reference) Hamlet has joined in and made a statement in: The Capricious Cruelty of Mean Anonymous Comments. I had a bit of say in: Second Life: How to Stop Mean Comments… But, we often get things all out of proportion, losing all perspective. I’ll see if I can bring some perspective to a number of related issues.
First, blaming Strawberry is ridiculous, she called our attention to a human behavior I believe we need to consider. But, my first sentence is something we see too often; spin, direction, implied critique, implied wrongness of some unspecified kind… Someone writes something in jest, error, or maliciously then someone else takes it seriously, believes it true-accurate, or for their own reasons and/or agenda finds the maliciousness servers them and jumps on the wagon.
Touch Arcade has an article up that gets into the politics and corporate infighting that is affecting us all. See: Onlive is Dead – What does this mean for Game Streaming on iOS? Carter Dotson is the author. I think Carter has made several mistakes in his (?) analysis. But, overall however we get there the result is the same.
My primary take away is Carter is saying that Sony is attempting to break Apple’s choke hold on game streaming for mobile devices. He could be right about that. The idea that if something is not available for iOS via the Apple Store, it loses a huge market share is true. But, I am not sure you can base the hypothesis Apple has a stranglehold on the gaming market.
Aka: Second Life™ 12th Birthday… its coming around again. Daniel Voyager has a post about the regions for SL12B opening. See: SL12B regions have arrived.
His picture of the World Map view shows 12 regions. Otherwise there are no announcements from planners or the Lab. In recent years the birthday celebrations have become more of a user organized thing than a Linden sponsored event.
Another article on Second Life has popped up. It seems this one is spawned by the video promoting Remnants of Earth. You have likely seen it on several SL related blogs. (5 min video)
If you were starting to imagine the media was becoming more… accurate, balanced, truthful, and actually researching their thinking before writing, give that idea up. This writer seems to have formed most of his opinion of SL from watching the video.
See: Players Build An MMO Within Second Life, Looks Amazing.
At least there no erect noob photos… So, this article while not as accurate as it could be, doesn’t present SL in a false light. …if omitting comments about lag in a game like this isn’t a concern.
I am curious how gamers, the EVE and WoW type gamers, will review Remnants after they try playing it.
We seldom get stats on how many are using which viewer. But, there is a post over on Gaming World about the Imprudence Viewer and they include the most stats I’ve seen in a long time. Or so I thought. This page just popped up in my reader, but it is dated 2/23/2015… and the data seems to be much older.
See: Gaming World Imprudence Viewer. (read on before you click) If you are clicking to the page, WARNING: be careful where you click. The page is full of ads and most clicks will speed you to someone’s ad site.