I have been a fan of storytelling ever since I can remember, and before that too. I can remember watching and listening to Jackanory on the beeb as a very young boy, yes I was once a young boy. I can remember my parents reading fairy tales to me as I went to sleep at night to the likes of :
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he live, or be he dead I’ll grind his bones to make my bread
I’ve read stories, interacted with stories, played in stories and so forth. I’ve long been interested in the art of storytelling in virtual worlds and have recently been taking an interest in The Hypergrid Stories Project, which I think is a wonderful project. However before that I discovered a storytelling venture in Second Life, one that very much impressed me and that was Seanchai Library.
I’m always interested in seeing Second Life or virtual world related uses of media coming to light and a tip off from Saffia Widdershins has pointed me in the direction of Cultured The Magazine, AKA CTM.
The magazine is the brain child of Cali Karsin and Zephyr Windgate with contributions from a number of other writers, photographers and even a model. The magazine is published on ISSUU, which is a platform I like the look of because it works pretty damn well.
The first edition covers a wide range of features, such as breedable fashion .,… seriously, breedable shoes and bags are featured! There are features on regions, combat, music, machinima in the shape and form of a feature about The Blackened Mirror and much more. The magazine has some adverts but they blend in well as they do in normal magazines.
The plan is for this magazine to be published every two months, which emphasises that putting together something like this isn’t something that can be done overnight. What I particularly enjoyed was the range of subjects. Fashion is ideal for a publishing source such as this, but as I’ll never be a fashionista I’m glad to see more social avenues being covered too.
Markus “Notch” Persson is the owner of Mojang, the company behind Minecraft and he has also announced he has decided to part ways with Oculus after they were purchased by Facebook. Notch explains his reasons in a blog post entitled : Virtual Reality is going to change the world.
A few things are clear from the blog post, Notch is very excited about virtual reality and he was very excited about Oculus Rift too. How excited you may ask, well on the Kickstarter page for Oculus Rift, those who pledged over $5,000 got all the goodies backers at other levels got plus:
VISIT OCULUS FOR THE DAY : We’ll fly you out to the Oculus lab where you’ll spend a day hanging out with the team and checking out all of our latest work (and maybe playing a few games too). You’ll also receive a developer kit, a copy of Doom 3 BFG, Developer Center access, the t-shirt, and the poster, all signed by the entire Oculus team, in person.
Notch qualified for that offer, although he’s not a US resident as far as I know, so I’m not sure how he sneaked in, but hey, he pledged funds for this kickstarter, but, as he explains in his blog post, the Facebook purchase changed the game :
Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.
Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?
But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.
In some ways it may have been better had Notch waited to see what transpired, but as someone who put his money where his mouth is on this product, I certainly respect his view and as I’ve said on these pages before, I’m not Facebook’s greatest fan.
At times it is best to take a deep breath and not blog, which is what I did last night when I read the news that Oculus Joins Facebook. The news that Facebook, the company who kick the virtual out of reality when it comes to their main platform were buying a piece of hardware based on putting the virtual into reality was beyond irksome for me. Judging by the comments around I’m not alone in that view, although I’ve calmed down somewhat now.
Q. What does this mean in terms of data collection on FB’s end? Will us early Oculus users have to mitigate the NSA everytime we decide to jack in?
A. Nothing changes. Keep in mind that Mark Zuckerberg has publicly spoken against NSA surveillance.
I’m not a big fan of Facebook, I don’t like a lot of their policies, I don’t like the way they treat people’s privacy and I don’t like their attitude to pseudonyms. However a lot of people do get pleasure out of Facebook, it’s a product with plenty of reach and plenty of users, even if it is apparently on the wane. They are at their heart a data mining company, it’s a trade off between users creating free content and being rewarded for that free content by being able to stay in touch with family and friends, it’s a model that works but it most definitely has a dark side. The comments on the Oculus blog should also firmly put to bed claims that Facebook comments mean people behave better, some of those comments are horrendous.
There’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of disappointment and there’s a lot of debate. Some of the anger is misplaced, some of the disappointment is misplaced too. However the people with whom I have the most sympathy are the Kickstarter backers, some of whom are also expressing unhappiness over this move. Now if there’s one group of people whom Facebook and Oculus should be scrambling to appease it’s the Kickstarter backers because without them, this whole debate wouldn’t be raging as there would be no Oculus Rift for Facebook to buy.
The other issue is that this is a major kick in the teeth for crowd funding and Kickstarter itself.
To fully appreciate the full extent of the slow down in region losses it’s best to turn to an expert. Unfortunately Tyche Shepherd doesn’t blog here, so you’ll have to read me instead. However the good news, I’m basing this post on the expert work of Tyche Shepherd and Tyche has kindly agreed to let me use her charts. Now please remember, these charts are Tyche’s work and copyrighted by Tyche, in other words, they shouldn’t be used without permission.
Ok on with the show.
Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014 (2 years)
Private Region Changes 2012 – 2014
Unfortunately this chart doesn’t display well on a blog this small, you can get a much better view of it on SLUniverse because there when you click the link, it enlarges. This chart shows the change in private regions between 1st Jan 2012 and 29th December 2013, so that’s around 2 years, give or take a few days. Private regions shrunk from 23,857 down to 19,273. A loss of 4,584 regions or 19.2%. That’s an alarming figure but hopefully you can see the slow down. The second half of the chart shows very few weeks where the third line down was reached.
Private Region Changes 1st January 2012 – 23rd December 2012
Private region changes during 2012
This chart shows the private region changes during most of 2012, 51 weeks of it. Two things to note, the losses during 2012 came in at 2,863, this means the majority of the two year losses came during 2012, it works out at around 62.46% of the two year losses coming during 2012, which of course means, the slow down in private region losses did not get well under way until we hit 2013.
Private Region Changes 30th December 2012 – 29th December 2013
Private Region Changes 2013
Above is the chart for those losses in 2013 and what we can see is that there was a total net loss of 1,719 regions or 8.2% for the year. As I said, this is considerably lower than during 2012 but still probably a little high. The losses are heavily loaded towards the first half of the year, the slow down really starts to become apparent around July and August but as we head into the Autumn we do some weeks where the losses picked up again. None of this really indicated what was to come during the first few weeks of 2014, but the slow down is most definitely apparent.
