Second Life – Page 60

June 3, 2015

Gamefly Enter The Streaming Games Arena But Only For Amazon Fire TV

As many of us know, it didn’t end well for OnLive as they attempted to bring streaming gaming to the market. The service had potential and a lot of people enjoyed it, including those of us who utilised SL Go to enhance our Second Life experience. However OnLive were never able to turn that potential into profit and eventually they sold a lot of their IP to Sony and the ship sailed.

When it comes to a replacement for SL Go, Bright Canopy have been at the forefront of developing an alternative. However an alternative to OnLive’s gaming service hasn’t yet appeared.

However The Verge have reported : GameFly’s new streaming service wants to be Netflix for games :

We still don’t have a true Netflix for games, but that isn’t stopping companies from trying. The latest is GameFly — the rental service that sends you games in the mail — which today is launching a new video game streaming service. As part of the announcement GameFly revealed that it has acquired streaming company Playcast, which will power the new service.

Now to be clear, this is not OnLive 2, electric boogaloo, for a start, the service is currently only available for Amazon Fire TV, which I’ll be honest, I’m not really familiar with. However the service currently offers packages bundles of games for $6.99 a month, each bundle contains around seven games, The Verge article states.

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June 3, 2015

A Dwarfin Storms 1920’s Berlin On Relaxed Rules Day

The 1920’s Berlin Project in Second Life is a roleplaying region that takes its history seriously. The year is 1929, Germany is a republic and you get to see an authentic representation of Berlin of that era.

To enable authenticity, Frau Yardley enforces a strict dress code. Now don’t worry, for two reasons. The first reason is that there are freebie clothing outfits at the landing point to enable you to visit without looking out of place. The second reason is that today, June 3rd 2015, is relaxed rules day in 1920’s Berlin.

What does relaxed rules day mean? Well it means this :

As you may know, Berlin has a dress code, we ask all our visitors to look realistic and authentic for the theme of our sim.
But now and then we decide to relax these rules to give new people a chance to explore our sim even if they don’t feel like dressing up or having a realistic avatar.

So, on Relaxed Rules Day we will NOT be asking people to dress in the 1920s style and we will be welcoming avatars such as furries, tinies, demons, fantasy animals, etc.
The only rules we will be enforcing are that we will not accept public nudity or Nazi related behaviour and dress.
Of course anyone bothering or harassing people will also be send home.

This may be a good day to show Berlin to your friends who have not been here before and may feel a bit intimidated by our rules or roleplay.

We will also allow flying on this day so you can see the city from a whole new angle.

This therefore means that as a Dwarfin King I was able to roam the streets of 1920’s Berlin in my full regal attire, therefore earning the respect I deserve from these humans.

Obviously I have taken full advantage of this and done the whole tourist thing by taking plenty of snapshots.

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June 2, 2015

Exploring The Dirty Grind And Jasmine’s Hollow

Second Life is at its heart a social platform and that means engaging in social activities such as lively debates, the arts, music and more. Fortunately The Destination Guide has a section to help us find music and from there I decided to head off to The Dirty Grind overlooking Jasmine’s Hollow.

There I found a delightful steampunk inspired sim that ticks a long very nicely, this may be in a large part due to the cogs and clocks that are scattered around the location.

The Dirty Grind describes itself as an Independent Artist Community. When you land there a notecard is offered, which provides some information on the region. There’s also a website and from there we learn :

Open to the public 24/7! The Dirty Grind™ is a steampunk™ haven for music and visual art. Come for over 30 hours of eclectic live professional recording artists that span from heavy metal and rock to folk and jazz and explore the venue’s many surprises and games. Enjoy our family of musicians featured on our 24 hr radio station, Radio Grind™ and explore our artists and buy their work at Radio Grind presents…

They also offer in Jasmine’s Hollow shop and home rentals as well as having options to hold events or rent gallery space. Independent musicians are not the only artists here, there are quite a few independent artists displaying their wares.

Bear in mind though that this is a moderate rated region so you are likely to be chased out of town if you want to commercially run anything adult. This isn’t a place for overtly adult activities and they make this clear in their information.

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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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