Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Several bloggers have pointed to a bit of video from a recent talk that John Carmack made. He is well known in gaming circles. If you don’t know the name, you’re not keeping up with your game history or Oculus Rift.
Ciaran provides a quick review of that bit of video. See: Joyce Bettencourt Captures Fascinating Chat With John Carmack At Oculus Connect 2015.
From a speech by by Philip Rosedale, former Linden Lab CEO – 28 minutes. Philip uses Second Life to show what is happening in virtual worlds and how it will affect society. His thinking is interesting and in some ways a bit scary.
The video is the basis of an NPR show TED Radio: Why Build a Virtual World? Follow the link to see the video. I can’t embed it, only the audio portion, which is 9 minutes. The video and audio have different content. Both are interesting.
NPR/KPBS presented a radio show titled Screen Time. Philip Rosedale was a guest for the show. The audio above is also here: KPBS: Screen Time. The video is where some of the sound track for the show came from. The video is more interesting than the audio. The radio show has more context and less content, the audio is only 9 minutes long. It is worth checking both.
With Project Sansar in development at the Lab the inhabitants of Second Life™ are wondering what avatars will look like in the new world. I don’t know. But, a game just reaching its final Beta test may give a clue. It certainly shows what is possible. Check this video.
The game is Bless – Embers in the storm. An MMO. The Korean developers have been working on this game without much hype. The video shows an AWESOME character customization capability. You may have noticed it includes tattoos and even scares. You can tweak the eyelashes… (Note: Bless is just completing its 3rd closed beta and headed toward open beta. Bless news. And we have no idea when a US version will be available.)
Yeah… week 30. I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and it got lost. The information is still good, so today it gets published.
Massively Overpowered pointed me to a video showing how big World of Warcraft is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=32&v=ihF0wJlYSus
SL Blogger Support has an article about problems some bloggers are having. One is in regard to voicing opinions. Check out comments below the article: She’s mad as hell and she’s not going to take this anymore!
Hamlet has an article where he is pointing to Kat Alderman’s comment (here) on Hamlet’s article: Second Life No Longer a Creation Platform, But an End-Point Display for Creativity.
Kat’s statements that caught my attention are:
An in-development game named Ark: Survival Evolved is available through Steam. It apparently is drawing a crowd of players. Everyone likes dinosaurs. Gamasutra has an interview with one of the developers. See: Cretaceous creativity: Designing dinos for Ark: Survival Evolved.
With Project Sansar approaching and Advanced Experience Tools on the verge of release game design is going to be a bigger part of Second Life. We will likely have more people like Loki Elliot and more teams like MadPea making games in SL and/or Sansar. I expect to see more people move beyond just making things.