Game talk

I almost linked this beautiful Second Life video the other day, but didn’t. Now New World Notes has an extended article describing how it was made.

Some interesting things to think about with this:

1. This was done in a multiplayer world. There’s nothing multiplayer about it. The power here comes from the ease of construction, not the setting. This could have been made in Maya or 3DStudio Max. But I bet the presence of an avatar adds a lot to the vibe.
2. The movie is, to my mind, art. In other words, it’s art in the form of machinima, made with a VW as a tool. But I am less sure that the in-world installation would be or was as powerful — the lack of music, of narrative, and so on, probably made it far less compelling.

How times change.

The site was knocked out of commission yesterday by a link from Penny Arcade. In his usual inimitable style, Tycho commented that perhaps I wasn’t crazy when I said that single-playing gaming was doomed.

Read More “Single-player Singularity”

According to a blogger over at Scientific American,  the 3m is in the span of 60 days.

 Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep–who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie–told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they’re adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.

“Could Barbie Girls Become The Largest Virtual World?” has some good discussion over at TechCrunch, including some controversy over the stats. Among the other comments that caught my eye:

• It has to be fun for me to be there: “I think Niche games like this will end up being more popular that games like second life. I have no interest in second life, but if there was something that was a little more specific that was interesting to me I might be motivated to try it.”
• Probably less than you think: “out of the 3M users, lol – how many of those accounts are pedophiles?”
• Yeah, good idea: “These virtual worlds should allow users to travel to other virtual worlds through special “gates”.”

From the Joystiq article:

They fully updated the graphics, including doing motion capture for the avatars, and the NPCs in the background, like the go-go girls in the stage that’s set in a strip club. Neversoft has a full-sized motion capture studio at their facility in California, so why not make good use of it? Especially if you have to mocap some strippers. Tough work, this rock stuff. Based on what we saw, the dancers will be giving Soul Calibur a run for the money. Jiggle factor five, Mr. Sulu.

Dammit. Wasn’t it obvious already that this was a crossover game of broad appeal? One played widely by families? Sure, it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Well, guess what, ten year old daughters like rock ‘n’ roll too.

*grumble*

So SWG is taking a small step towards player government. This is nice to see, though I note that even though players can nominate, they can’t vote on the Senators. Instead, Senators are picked by the community team.

One of the powers of a Senator is to vote on legislation. There’s nothing in there about what exactly Senate legislation is or what it can accomplish, though. 🙂 But they do get some forum mod powers, the ability to sticky posts, and stuff like that. It isn’t a hollow title, basically, though it’s also not true power.

Long ago, I floated the idea of actually let.ting players vote in Correspondents. Kinda neat to see the meme still around (though who knows to what degree this was inspired by that…)