March 2014 – Page 6 – Ciaran Laval

March 11, 2014

Hypergrid Stories Project Launches

I’ve mentioned The Hypergrid Stories Project before, but now Nara Malone, who has a name that sounds like she’s some sort of super sleuth, has unveiled some meaty details about the project. Now this is a catch it whilst its hot deal because in its current form, it’s running until St Patrick’s day.

Now don’t be put off by the fact that this is billed as a Hypergrid stories project, yes it is largely an OpenSim venture, but not exclusively, from Nara’s blog post we can see a list of participating grids and they include Second Life:

Participating Grids

Next Reality Grid: Redlight Hotel from Mike Hart
Metropolis: Independetly Spoken from Crystal Brewton
Craft Grid: Spirit of Arcadia: Cogtown from Virtual Christine, Pitcairn: 111shawn from Shawn K Maloney, Aquarium from Tao Quan.
OS Grid: Virunga Mountains: from Debbie Edwards and Fred Beckhusen, Transmedia Learning 1 and 4 from Nara Malone.
NarasNookGrid: Greyville, Quarterz City, Siobhan Muir 1, Tina Glasneck 2, Series, Shadowling Manor, and Theria from the Greyville Authors.
Second Life: Phaze Demesnes from Debbie Edwards and Fred Beckhusen, Karpov from an anonymous donor.

The project is taking interactive fiction in a new direction, you actually walk into a giant book to follow the story! Then you’ll be teleported to a scene in the story and will eventually find a landmark to the next scene.

The stories are in the short story category, 500 – 1300 words but if you’re not that interested in stories you can follow the poetry trail instead or simply explore the builds.

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March 10, 2014

Philip Rosedale, Ebbe Altberg And Maria Korolov Amongst Keynote Speakers For VWBPE 2014

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) will be holding their 7th annual conference in Second Life and OSGrid between April 9th – 12th this year and the keynote and featured speakers have been pencilled in. Some of them should be extremely familiar, especially High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale.

Another familiar name for some of you, especially those in OpenSim circles, is Maria Korolov of Hybergrid Business.

Then of course there’s new Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, who is a late addition to the schedule, so late that he wasn’t in the email I received about the conference!

The full schedule for the conference will be released soon, but here are the known keynote and featured speakers :

Opening Keynote: Closing the Gap: Virtual Reality & Education

Presenter: Philip Rosedale, CEO High Fidelity

Date/Time: Wednesday April 9th, at 1:00pm PDT

Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium

Featured Keynote: Connections in an Open Place

Presenter: Justin Clark-Casey, President OpenSimulator umbrella Overte Foundation

Date/Time: Thursday April 10th, at 7:00am PDT

Location: OSGrid – VWBPE Gateway

Featured Keynote: The Coming 3D Future Shock

Presenter: Maria Korolov, Editor in Chief – Hypergrid Business

Date/Time: Thursday April 10th, at 10:05am PDT
Location: OSGrid – VWBPE Gateway

Featured Keynote: Using Virtual Worlds and Gamification to Enhance Learning

Presenter: Andrew Hughes, CEO Designing Digitally

Date/Time: Friday April 11th, at 7:00am PDT

Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium

Featured Keynote: TBA

Presenter: Ebbe Altberg, CEO Linden Lab

Date/Time: Friday April 11th, at 1:00pm PDT

Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium

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March 10, 2014

Linden Lab Followed The Rule Rather Than The Exception With Versu

Although many of us are disappointed with Linden Lab’s refusal to sell the IP and codebase of Versu to Emily Short it should be pointed out that Linden Lab are following a well trodden path. When titles shut down there is often a clamour for it to be saved or for the code to be made Open Source but this does not happen very often. There is no Open Source version of Cloud Party for example, it just vanished without much of a trace.

When City Of Heroes closed down there were campaigns to keep it alive and calls for it to be open sourced, but alas those calls fell on deaf ears. However Open Sourcing a project isn’t as straight forward as some may think, as Shava Suntzu points out in the comments of a previous post of mine about Versu :

There are lots of reasons applications can’t be open sourced. They may include proprietary libraries, or work by people who won’t release rights.

On top of this Linden Lab most definitely spent money on Versu, as Emily herself explained :

To be clear, Versu benefitted a lot from Linden’s early support, and I’m grateful for that. Without external support, what we would have now is not a well-developed open source project; what we would have is nothing in particular, because I would have needed to get a job doing something else.

Emily was of course a paid employee of Linden Lab so it’s not as if Linden Lab have taken her work away without recompense. In situations like this it’s all too easy to paint the company as the baddie … much too easy and whereas it does seem silly to spend money on a project and then shelve it when others are willing to take it off a company’s hands, this is generally the norm, rather than the exception.

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March 8, 2014

Report Compares Second Life, World Of Warcraft And Eve-Online To Real Life

GamesBeat have published a very intersting article : Comparing the virtual worlds of Warcraft, Second Life, and Eve Online to our own yields some surprising stats. The article itself links to a funky report by digital marketing agency Epiphany with a blurb of :

The online world is very different to our own, with new rules, new races, and new ways of living. There are, however, some similarities – take a look at our breakdown of the internet’s biggest virtual worlds to find out how they measure up against real life.

This isn’t the most detailed report in the world but the site does provide some interesting stats. Introducing Second Life they say:

Second Life is seen as an online marketplace as well as a game, and many players have been able to earn serious cash thanks to the easy way in-game currency can be sold for real-world money. More casual players use the game to build, customise and create, developing a literal second life in which their character can live out the player’s desires and fantasies – whether that’s a mansion and a helipad or the romance of a lifetime!

The website has a series of icons which lead to other little gems of information when clicked, I’m not going to cover them all but I’ll mention a few. In terms of Second Life they point out that English is the most popular language with 54% of users speaking that language, which compares to 18% in the real world.

In terms of user growth we’re told :

Between 2006 and 2011, global internet usage doubled in growth – in the same timeframe, Second Life saw a 4000% increase in users.

That’s rather impressive. Another interesting point is made with regards to financial institutions and economies, although I’m not sure things happened exactly as they seem to suggest :

In 2007, Second Life saw a huge financial incident which mirrored the bank crises we’ve seen in the real world since the start of the recession. When the developers announced that gambling in-game would be officially banned, thousands of users rushed to Ginko Financial, an in-game bank offering astronomical interest rates, to retrieve and sell the currency from their accounts. This caused a run on the bank which eventually resulted in a complete shut-down – wiping out around $750,000 (£457,736) in real world money. The incident has since been used by financial experts across the web as an example of what happens when banks fail to self-regulate.

The part where I disagree with them is regarding the rush of people to Ginko. I don’t remember that happening, I do remember the Ginko scandal but I don’t recall a rush due to the gambling ban. I can recall arguing with people that if real life banks faced a close down in the manner that Second Life banks did that there would be a rush on the banks that they wouldn’t be able to handle.

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March 8, 2014

Linden Lab TOS Issues Should Be Rectified Sooner Rather Than Later In Light Of Versu Decision

First of all there are some key differences between The Second Life TOS change and what has happened to Versu. The most glaringly obvious apparently being that Linden Lab are not asking Second Life content creators to give up their intellectual property rights and they are not asking for an exclusive license.

Emily Short who was a main developer of Versu was employed by Linden Lab and would have known the details of providing her content to Linden Lab. Emily appears to have lost control of her own content in the process but that is not something untoward if the terms of the contract stated this was the case.

Terms are important and this is why Second Life content creators are not happy about the TOS change by Linden Lab. One particular cause of concern for Second Life content creators has been :

Except as otherwise described in any Additional Terms (such as a contest’s official rules) which will govern the submission of your User Content, you hereby grant to Linden Lab, and you agree to grant to Linden Lab, the non-exclusive, unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, and cost-free right and license to use, copy, record, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sublicense (through multiple levels), modify, display, publicly perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, translate, make derivative works of, and otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of your User Content (and derivative works thereof), for any purpose whatsoever in all formats, on or through any media, software, formula, or medium now known or hereafter developed, and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed, and to advertise, market, and promote the same.

Whereas Second Life content creators do not give up their intellectual property rights, they give up a hell of a lot more than they previously had to in other areas. The old TOS for this part read :

You agree that by uploading, publishing, or submitting any Content to or through the Servers, Websites, or other areas of the Service, you hereby automatically grant Linden Lab a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the Service.

That’s a far more friendly reading TOS than the new one. There has been some speculation that the reason for the TOS change was due to SL Go from Onlive. The arguments goes that Linden Lab need to allow Onlive to use Second Life content and therefore the TOS had to be changed to allow this service to run.

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