Ciaran Laval

May 30, 2015

Virtual Churches And The Challenges Of Online Worship

I’ll be honest, Christian Today isn’t on my regular reading list. However an article by Martyn Casserly entitled “What happened to online churches?” caught my eye as it relates to Second Life and communities. The article makes for an interesting read.

Martyn hadn’t logged into Second Life for several years and the first issue he ran into as he stood outside The Anglican Cathedral on Epiphany Island was cloud syndrome, that is, his avatar appeared as a cloud. Although Martyn eventually resolved his avatar issue, Helene Milena (Aisla Wright outside the virtual world) , Lay Pastor at the Cathedral explains to him that his situation isn’t unusual, Helene also explains that avatars of many different shapes and sizes visit the cathedral :

“There’s one person who attends the Cathedral who I’ve only seen as a non-cloud once. We used to have a hippo that worshipped with us quite a lot, the church warden’s a mermaid…and another regular’s favourite avatar is a parrot. There’s a perch over there, that’s for him.”

Virtual world worship appeals to avatars of many variations it seems.

There is an interesting issue regarding virtual worlds that Martyn says, would make real life church services 100 times better, that is the ability to turn down all the other extraneous noises. There are many scenarios where this would be advantageous to us all and it goes beyond church services. However there are some aspects of the virtual world experience that aren’t as engaging as the real world.

One aspect is with people who no longer come to a church service. Martyn points out that if a friend doesn’t attend a physical service, then someone may call round to see if they are ok. Online this can be far more difficult, we often don’t know where people live, emails are asynchronous communication and are often not replied to quickly. However that’s not to say that online communities don’t miss people or wonder if they are ok, it’s just that online communities can be more detached in some areas.

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May 30, 2015

Twitch Bans Second Life as Adult-Only Because Twitch Do Not Understand How Second Life Actually Works

Over at New World Notes, Hamlet Au has posted : Twitch Bans Second Life as Adult-Only Because Twitch Understands How Second Life Actually Works. I disagree, strongly. Now before we get into this, I want to ask people to not abuse Hamlet (or me) for having differing opinions. I was most disappointed when I returned from my holiday to read a blog post from Canary Beck entitled “Please Stop The Social Shaming Of Hamlet Au“. I fully support Hamlet’s right to an opinion, no matter how much it differs from mine.

The Second Life community can at times get heated, but generally, they are far more tame than other communities I’ve been part of. Hamlet and myself should be free to disagree without name calling, insults, or twitter abuse.

Now on with the show. I disagree with Hamlet on the Twitch issue, rather strongly and one of the main reasons I disagree with him is that the idea that something can unexpectedly happen in Second Life whilst streaming is something that can also happen when humans are involved, and yet Twitch aren’t silly enough to decree that no humans should be on screen in case something unexpectedly adult appears on the screen.

One of the most surprising points Hamlet makes in his post is :

Twitch, which actually has former Linden Lab staff working for it, knows how Second Life actually works.

How on earth can a company with a former Linden working for them be so wide of the mark when it comes to how Second Life works? Yes, there’s adult content in Second Life, but there’s a hell of a lot of non-adult content and when this furore blew up initially, it was over a stream where someone was scripting, not stripping.

Look, it’s possible to roam Second Life without seeing anything overtly adult for hours on end. Can adult content appear unexpectedly? Absolutely, but Twitch’s rules of conduct make allowances for the unexpected :

Sexually explicit acts or content: Nudity can’t be a core focus or feature of the game in question and modded nudity is disallowed in its entirety. Occurrences in game are okay, so long as you do not make them a primary focus of your stream and only spend as much time as needed in the area to progress the game’s story.

I’ve stated many times on this blog that I’ve been to an adult region whereby I’ve witnessed no overtly adult content. Having an adult rating on your region does not mean your region is full of porn and it gets tiresome seeing this myth about Second Life being about nothing other than adult activity repeated time and again.

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May 29, 2015May 29, 2015

1920’s Berlin Project Starts Sixth Anniversary Celebrations

Frau Yardley’s 1920’s Berlin Project has started to celebrate its sixth birthday in Second Life. There will be six days of festivities, which started today with an open door day. That is a day when homes within the project that have a sign stating “Open House” can be explored inside without the owners chasing you out on to the streets.

Further activities are planned for the forthcoming days too, including (but not limited to) :

6th Anniversary Dance at the Pariser Platz (At the foot of the Brandenburger Tor) with a show by Fraulein Sonatta Morales and with DJ Myron Byron.
Unveiling of the Community Quilt at the Library.
Miss Berlin pageant!
Relaxed Rules Day: All day.

For a full list of planned activities, times and dates go here.

The 1920’s Berlin Project is without any shadow of a doubt, a Second Life success story and one that warms the cockles of many a heart, and also makes others scratch their heads at how Frau Yardley has managed to get this all to work, thrive and grow. I really should ask Frau Yardley about this at some point.

Frau Yardley has had some assistance with the project of course, most notably from Mila Edelman. However the way this community has thrived is certainly something to admire.

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May 29, 2015

From Second Life Merchant To Improbable Technology

I’ve talked about Improbable before, Improbable is an exciting looking technology, still shrouded in a degree of mystery that could offer a solution for virtual worlds and MMORPG’s as well as much more.

When I blogged before I mentioned that one of their employees was Dave Hillier, once worked for Second Life. However now I’ve discovered another link with Second Life, albeit from a merchant angle.

Pammy Olson has published an article on Improbable over at Forbes : Meet Improbable, The Startup Building The World’s Most Powerful Simulations. This article expands more on the progress Improbable are making. Improbable’s founders, Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead feature in the article, they met at the University of Cambridge and the article provides some interesting background on the pair :

Narula wanted to code, teaching himself to write in C++ at 12. While studying computer science at Cambridge he met Rob Whitehead, a Liverpudlian who had paid his way through college by selling weapons on the virtual-world site Second Life.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realise there was that much of a market for weapons in Second Life! There’s also the fact that both of them, initially at least, were very interested in creating a virtual world :

They began working on an ambitious virtual-world videogame in which you could drop an object, then log back in the next day and find it still there. When they couldn’t find software to help them scale up, they built the tools themselves.

“Eventually we realized the tech we were working on was bigger than the game,” says Whitehead.

This is not an unusual development, quite a few products have started life aiming to be one thing and ending up being another. However it’s interesting that the technology they’ve created is being welcomed by those who want to build MMORPG’s and it also appears, on the face of it at least, that it’s a technology that could be used for virtual worlds.

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