Game Development

Second Life and Linden Lab Dying?

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Update: 2010-08-14 (at end of article) – I’m depressed. Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote Good-bye, meshes! Gwyneth works in the RL virtual worlds service fields and apparently has contacts among the Lindens. She writes about the status of the supposed coming Collada meshes. Seems they may not just be delayed but canceled for the foreseeable future. Bummer. (Her blog changed appearance, a nice new look.)

Second Life Dying
Is Second Life Dying?

Gwyneth describes why this is likely to become a major disadvantage for Second Life’s ability to compete with other virtual worlds. I think it is so important that it may mean the end of SL, not tomorrow or next year, but…

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Are the Linden Lab Layoffs a Good Sign?

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I wrote about Linden Lab laying off 30% of staff here: Linden Lab Layoffs. I wrote that in the next few days we would see more information coming from those with an inside line to Linden Lab (LL). New World Notes (NWN) and Massively are following the layoff story and speculating. NWN’s Au is digging out more facts. I think my favorite SL blogger, Gwyneth Llewelyn, in [Reset] and do a 180º turn gives a vastly different insight than many headlines in the SL-blogosphere suggest.

As usual predicting the future is speculation. However, what Linden Lab is planning is not speculation. Whether they actually get it done… But, a direction is a direction and that can give us perspective. Gwyn’s writing gives us a new insight.

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Why Games Succeed – THERE.com

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A researcher working in the game THERE has written a thoughtful article about her findings. For those of us interested in what makes a game tick and succeed or fail it is a great read.

In-Depth: Requiem For A World

For those of from the Myst-Uru community it has special interest as Celia studied the community of Myst-Uru that fled into THERE when Uru closed. The result was a book: Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds