Virtual Worlds – Page 135

June 28, 2014June 28, 2014

Danko Whitfield’s Photographs Of Winterfell In Second Life

The Storytellers pub stands proudly near the water’s edge in the sim of Winterfell Laudanum. The pub and surrounding area are extremely picturesque. The pub has as its landlord one Danko Whitfield, who as well as having a home in Second Life also has homes in Opensim and Kitely.

Danko has also decided to open an art exhibit in one room of the pub, where he is currently exhibiting his photographs of Winterfell in Second Life. Winterfell itself is compromised of a series of sims that make up the Winterfell estate, it neighbours Caledon and there is some light roleplaying involved in these areas at times, don’t let that put you off!

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June 28, 2014

Ebbe Altberg Throws Down The Gauntlet Regarding Fixing Second Life Group Chat

I like Ebbe Altberg, he talks to the community, he’s not afraid to tell people they are angry :

Wow, you are an angry person. Ok, so, why are you so angry?

He talks to the press and has recently been talking to Re/Code in an article entitled : Second Life Creator Linden Lab Says Virtual Worlds and Virtual Reality Belong Together. Early on in that article we see that Ebbe has learnt how to talk the talk :

“We don’t call it a game,” says Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, almost before our interview has begun.

He’s talking about Linden’s most famous product, Second Life, now 11 years old. That’s old by game — sorry, “virtual world” — standards, but its “significant revenue” means the 185-person company is profitable, Altberg said. Coming to Linden from BranchOut after the departure of CEO Rod Humble in January, Altberg does not mince words about Second Life’s past mistakes.

That article also talks about Oclus Rift usage in Second Life, including a shout out to Jo Yardley of 1920’s Berlin without mentioning her name :

“One creator went into her virtual world in Oculus for the first time and was crying,” Altberg said. “It’s very powerful stuff.”

Philip Rosedale also features in the article with talk of High Fidelity but I’m going off on a tangent here, the point is Ebbe engages and it’s very encouraging. However one of the problems with engaging is that everything you say is dissected, analysed and at times misunderstood. Then there’s the fact that what you say is remembered, especially on the internet. So it was with some surprise that I witnessed Ebbe getting involved in a Twitter exchange about group chat. Not only did Ebbe get involved, he actually suggested that group chat will be fixed before the new world launches, an extremely bold claim indeed.

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June 27, 2014

Why Linden Lab Should Not Open The Content Migration Can Of Worms

When buying this package of textures, what you are really buying is a legal limited license to use and modify them according to your specific needs insides Second Life. You do not actually own them, nor the copyright.

The above are pretty standard terms for content creators within Second Life when they purchase textures. Textures really need to be sold as full permissions for people to use them in their creations and therefore the person selling the textures wants to place restrictions on use outside of Second Life. There are other items that will come with similar terms, building kits etc.

However they highlight an issue when it comes to Linden Lab’s new world because I’ve seen a lot of talk of people wanting to know if they can bring their content across into the new virtual world Linden Lab have planned. Some content simply won’t be compatible, some will. However even when it comes to content that is compatible Linden Lab should tread very carefully because of issues such as the Licence terms I opened this post with. Mesh and Textures are likely candidates to be compatible with the new world but just because they are compatible it doesn’t mean Linden Lab should facilitate transfers.

Then there are issues that have arisen since Linden Lab’s controversial terms of service change. Website CG Textures announced :

6th September 2013: Terms of Service update, using our images in Second Life is no longer allowed.

What has changed?

From 6 September 2013 you are no longer permitted to add our images to Second Life or other Linden Lab products. The use of textures downloaded prior to this date is allowed.

CG textures did not like the Linden Lab terms of service change and it remains a problem today, ten or so months on from when they were changed. The word on the street is that Linden Lab are trying to change the terms to reflect their intent but it has been an extremely slow process. However that’s an aside, the simple matter is that migrating content that has been built with CG textures content would be controversial to say the least.

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June 26, 2014

The Drax Files Radio Hour – Immersive Journalism

Last week’s Drax Files Radio Hour has been put on the back burner because of the news of Linden Lab’s proposed new virtual world and SL11B. This is a bit of a shame because not only does Drax have a fantastic interview about immersive journalism with Nonny de la Pena, but the interview also touches upon some of the pros and cons of Second Life. This is actually extremely relevant when you consider the news about Linden Lab’s new virtual world.

Nonny de la Pena is a journalist and documentary maker who moved from traditional media such as Newsweek to creating immersive spaces in virtual and digital environments to tell news stories, amongst other things. The subject matter is often controversial and political, for example in association with Peggy Weil she built Virtual Guantanamo in Second Life. I’ll embed a 2007 youTube video by Draxtor Despres about that at the end of the post.

Nonny speaks about how the idea was to bring an experience such as virtual Guantanamo to a virtual world environment such as Second Life to bring the news and issues to a more immersive environment. The idea being that this was a different means of raising awareness about such issues. Actually it’s probably better if I quote Nonny’s website about section in part :

The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the participant to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The participant will be typically represented in the form of a digital avatar – an animated 3D digital representation of the participant, and see the world from the first-person perspective of that avatar.

This is further expanded upon :

Immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative.

There’s a far more in depth explanation in the link above but the basic idea is to tell a news story in a different environment. Nonny felt that one of the advantages of Second Life was being able to talk and collaborate with people all over the world in a virtual environment as well as being able to bring the news story to people all over the world too. Nonny also feels that in some ways Second Life was ahead of its time.

However there was a downside and that’s in relation to an old bugbear of mine. Virtual Guantanamo is no longer in Second Life and one of the main reasons for that is because …. The Tier Is Too Damn High! I’m not making this up. The expense of land in Second Life stifles development of projects such as this. However Nonny wasn’t put off from using virtual worlds by this and moved on to Unity to build immersive journalism and in doing so highlighted another issue regarding Second Life. Via Unity people can enter the immersive environment without downloading a client, they can enter via the web. This has long been considered a weakness of Second Life, although personally I don’t think it’s a major one, it is an issue that means that people who just want to casually pop in to view something are thwarted somewhat.

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June 25, 2014

SL11B – She Sells Sanctuary

A journey from Flickr to a blog post about Sanctuary CCS Dark Role Play Comminity’s Exhibit at SL11B aided me on a voyage of discovery at SL11B thanks to Bambi Chicque of BamPu Legacies of SecondLife.

This is an exhibit from a roleplaying community, an adult roleplaying community at that but they prove that it’s perfectly feasible to advertise on General rated sim because the content on display, the notecards, the information is all general rated.

There’s a rather nifty story too that explains the background to the roleplay. I’m a fan of roleplaying in Second Life and one of the reasons for that is that roleplaying in Second Life can be quite open ended, but that is seen by others as an annoyance. The team behind Sanctuary explain this :

Roleplay in SL is different from video games because there is NO concept of winning or losing. The goal of roleplay is to tell a story, and whether your character is the winner or loser can be equally fun. Your character in CCS is not you, but a separate person you have created within the roleplay world. Keeping this in mind can help separate yourself from your character, and help you keep having fun even when bad things are happening to your character. That’s what dark RP is all about.

Maybe one day virtual worlds will have roleplay that is guided by the creators in a more tightly knit fashion, but for now this works for Second Life and plenty of people enjoy it.

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