I saw a comment recently about point and click that said something along the lines of Second Life not being a Lucasarts adventure, quite, but you know what, I’d love there to be a LucasArts type adventure in Second Life, you know, like Monkey Island! Now of course, Monkey Island has been done and Ron Gilbert won’t tell anyone the secret but wouldn’t it be great if someone like Ron Gilbert felt there was a big enough market within Second Life for him to create a bit of a fun adventure for the platform? There are of course obvious issues such as scalability, physics, data storage yadda yadda yadda but I’m sure something could be done point and click style, the big barrier really is how does one make games pay in Second Life?
How about going even more basic than point and click and having a text adventure, Scott Adams style, I’m sure something like that could be scripted. Why are you talking about games Ciaran, I hear my alt saying, well it’s because Rod Humble has been penned in to be a keynote speaker at The Inventing The Future of Games Symposium on April 15th, according to Gamasutra.
Other keynote speakers will be Jane Pinckard and Will Wright….who Linden Lab should have tried to nab a long long time ago, they should have also tried to nab Robin Harper and brought her home, but that opportunity seems to have gone as Robin has moved on to other things in the industry.
The Symposium will be aimed at bringing game research in academia and industry closer together and as Second Life can handle the academics, bringing some industry gamers here would be great….not that that’s what this symposium is about of course, I just went off on a tangent there, but whilst Rod Humble is there, he could chance his arm with a few industry contacts!
The problems with games of course are a practical one too, games don’t pay tier bills is part of the problem with Second Life, really people should be sitting down trying to work out how they can help pay tier bills, I mean you can sell games but that won’t pay tier on the sims they’re installed in, this is a challenging issue but I’d like to see Second Life expand into a wider appeal of giving people more choices about what they do here.
The potential of Second Life lies in the fact that it can be so many different things to so many different people, that potential is still largely untapped but I would hope that Rod Humble will open some new doors and opportunities in the coming months, it’s fair to give him time to settle in of course and the annoying things do need addressing, such as lag of course.
Of course what I want for Second Life probably isn’t what you want for Second Life, although I’d like to think that most of my readers here would agree that we want to see Second Life prosper.