New World Notes – Ciaran Laval

June 23, 2014

Linden Lab’s New World Gets Early Publicity Thanks To New World Notes

One of the reasons Ebbe Altberg cited for breaking the news about Linden Lab’s planned new world was because he had been talking to the press, implying that he had mentioned it to them. I decided to google the news and didn’t find many news stories featuring Ebbe Altberg. I did find one from San Francisco’s SFGate : Just how real can virtual reality get? This is largely about virtual reality itself and talks of the Oculus Rift. However Linden Lab have been in the news because of Second Life’s adoption of Oculus Rift and in the SFGate story they quote Ebbe Altberg :

This week, new Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg demonstrated for the first time how his company’s virtual online world Second Life looks when redesigned for an Oculus Rift.

Since taking over in February, Altberg has tuned the company’s focus to developing a next-generation Second Life that will include immersion technologies.

“We want to be part of it and help it succeed because it gets us closer to what we have in mind for what a virtual world should be,” he said.

However the press stories regarding discussions with Ebbe aren’t appearing in droves. The story that is appearing is the news of Linden Lab’s planned new world and those stories are largely based on Hamlet Au’s confirmation of the news over at New World Notes.

Digital Spy Uk : Linden Lab building spiritual successor to Second Life. That story doesn’t cite Hamlet, it cites Gamasutra’s story about the new world :

The team behind Second Life has given a statement to New World Notes about its next major project, saying that it is aiming to build the next generation of virtual world.

Polygon go with the spiritual successor headline too and say :

Second Life developer Linden Lab is currently working on the spiritual sequel to the massively multiplayer online social title, according to a statement the developer provided to Polygon.

This new game, first reported by New World Notes, is a “next generation virtual world” that is “in the spirit of Second Life,” an open-world game that will focus on user-created content and interactions. The San Francisco-based studio noted it is actively hiring for this project, which is still in its “very early days.”

The Gamer, gets itself a little confused in a couple of areas in their reporting of the story :

Linden Lab’s highly successful social experiment Second Life is today celebrating it’s 10th birthday, and what better way to celebrate than announcing to the world that a follow-up to the unique online sandbox is in the works?

According to a statement released by the developer’s New World Notes blog, this new ‘spiritual sequel’ will be “an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king.” Stopping short of admitting that the new game will be identical to it’s predecessor, Linden expand on the statement and say that “The next generation virtual world will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don’t want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start.”

I think we can forgive them for not realising Second Life is celebrating its eleventh birthday but New World Notes hasn’t officially been part of Linden Lab for many a year!

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February 16, 2014February 16, 2014

New World Notes, The Alphaville Herald And SLUniverse All Turned 10 In 2013

Many people celebrated Second Life’s official tenth birthday during 2013, but three Second Life related publications also turned 10 during 2013, New World Notes, The Alphaville Herald and SLUniverse.

Love them or loathe them, all three are important archives of virtual world history, discussion, debate, controversy and hope.

On 22nd April 2003, Hamlet Au, AKA Wagner James Au, introduced himself to the Second Life population :

Here’s the thing: ordinarily, I cover computer games for magazines like Salon and Wired. But for the next few months, Linden Lab has invited me to set aside my journalist cap, and instead, don the digital beanie of their in-house virtual correspondent. I’ll be writing about the creation of Second Life, their upcoming massively multiplayer online game, as it goes from Beta test to official launch, with frequent posts in this space.

Because what is happening now in the Beta test of Second Life is very much a social experiment in the making. Literally, “making”: thousands of volunteers are already in there now, buzzing around in Linden Lab’s servers, shaping their world out of thin air. From a default canvas of wide oceans and rolling hills, they’re cramming the place with coffee tables, exotic swords, sunglasses, ride-able rockets, electric guitars, readable books, soaring Japanese pagodas– pretty much anything you might imagine, and a lot more you wouldn’t dream of– to create a playspace as vast and varied as creativity and enthusiasm allows.

Back in those days New World Notes was officially aligned with Second Life. Hamlet was a Linden, hired by Linden Lab to write New World Notes. Hamlet has been gathering up old archived posts and adding them to his current blog, as exemplified by his 2003 interview with Philip Rosedale – The Price Of A New World : An Interview With Philip Linden.

New World Notes was an official Second Life publication until February 2006 and then of course, went its own way and is still going strong today covering Second Life and more.

The Alphaville Herald launched in October 2003, with Peter Ludlow, Glenn Given and Candace Bolter listed as authours. Pixeleen Mistral would arrive later. One of their first posts spoke of the potential power of virtual worlds and MMO’s :

In a recent study, Edward Castronova at California State Fullerton calculated that if the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) Norrath were “real” place, the per capita gross domestic product of Norrath would make it the 79th richest country in the world (per capita), just behind Russia, but ahead of Bulgaria.

This remarkable conclusion was based upon the sale of currency and virtual goods of Norrath on ebay and other online locations. Other recent work has pointed not just to the development of virtual economies, but to emerging governance structures, laws, and other institutions within virtual communities. If this is right, then virtual communities in general and MMORPGs in particular are not just games, and not just chat rooms, but are also real places that are developing real social institutions and real economies.

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January 25, 2013January 25, 2013

The Tier Discussions Need To Cut Out The Blame Game

Over at New World Notes Hamlet Au has made a series of posts about lost revenue regarding sim losses and a couple of posts on how to introduce revenue streams to try and help the situation. The discussions have been somewhat heated, but I welcome Hamlet’s ongoing discussions on the tier issue. I can recall (although unfortunately can’t find any old posts) Hamlet quite some time ago posting that the tier model was too large a plank of Linden Lab’s revenue and that long term it’s unsustainable, so Hamlet is not a Johnny come lately to these discussions. He also posts the awful sim deathwatch series, of which I’m not a fan, but hey, these sims are disappearing.

Now two recent posts were on ideas for new revenue streams:

How to Stop SL Land Loss: Require Land Ownership to Sell Lots of Items in the SL Marketplace (Comment of the Week)

Should Linden Lab Charge SL Users to Keep Excess Inventory? It’s a Hidden Subsidy Hurting SL’s Economy

Now I personally disagree with both premises, in the first case with The Marketplace, the horse has bolted. This is the sort of thing that needed to be there from the start, introducing it now would be chaotic and bad PR. However I’m still not convinced that people should be able to list items via Direct Delivery to infinity and beyond, people should need to relist, but you don’t need to charge fees for that, although maybe a fee could be introduced if people want to list to infinity and beyond, but that wouldn’t be a long lasting fee.

The latter post I disagree with because the horse has bolted on inventory limits, they needed to be introduced from the start and how on earth would this be introduced. People would not want landmarks or group notice notecards, they wouldn’t want textures advertising new content, they wouldn’t want free gifts in case they went over limit and most of all, people would be miffed that their purchases were in peril, this would hit the economy.

However, although I don’t agree with the ideas, I do welcome the widening of the discussion. Unfortunately the comments tell a pretty sorry tale of blame games.

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December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

2012 Reviewed – The Full Monty

This will be a rather long post as it’s a review of the year, this is the fifth in a series of annual posts, the other four look at different years… I think you’ll have worked that out already! This post isn’t made any easier by Linden Lab not being as active in their blog as they once were. This was also a very difficult year for me personally which meant I took a large break from regular blogging between April and September, with only sporadic posts appearing, so I’ll have to delve elsewhere for some information for the year, fortunately there are plenty of resources such as Inara Pey, Nalates Urriah, Tateru Nino and New World Notes amongst others, as well of course as Linden Lab’s underused blog, it still has some useful posts. Also a special mention for Tyche Shepherd and her awesome surveying which provides so much useful information.

I’m also doing things a bit differently this year as these posts are getting pretty epic. This is the full post but as it’s pretty TLDR, I’ve also broken the post down into four quarterly posts elsewhere, the information will be the same other than this initial commentary, but it may be easier on the eye to read in smaller chunks. To read the quarterly reviews go here.

2012 brought us viewer improvements, Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Direct Delivery and a lot of bug fixes by Oz Linden and his team as well as new scripting functions. I’ll miss plenty out in this review, I’ll also include trivial aspects. Some of the issues can be summed up in the following photo:

However there’s a lot more than that to cover, so let’s get this rolling.

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