Linden to put adult content on own continent

 Posted by (Visited 10170 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 122009
 

As reported by many sites, Linden Lab is going to move all adult content to its own continent.

Snarky folks may wonder what will be left on the main continent, but that’s really unfair. There’s a ton of stellar content in SL that isn’t sex related.

Access to the new continent will be gated by real world age verification — credit card, ID, that sort of thing. The challenge, of course, is rating the content. Apparently community feedback will be gathered on establishing guidelines. Edit: more details here.

This is an area where SL’s embrace of the tyranny of geography has made things a bit more complicated for the Lindens, of course. Let’s say that there’s something borderline on the main continent. It goes along fine there, until enough people protest the rating. Then it gets moved. Then it gets appealed, and moved back… possibly not to the same place, since the old location may have been taken… It doesn’t take walking through usecases for very long to find ways in which the ties of spatial contiguity complicate matters.

The flip side, of course, is that the discoverability of walking from one sim to another (or overflying, or whatever) can lead to serendipitous discoveries that are often the neatest moments in SL.

We’re in the midst of implementing our own handling of mature content in Metaplace, so I’ll be following this with some interest!

Live concert dual-streamed to Metaplace & Second Life

 Posted by (Visited 8149 times)  Gamemaking, Music  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 102009
 

Is this a first? I dunno, but it’s darn cool! 🙂

Earlier today, I had asked Grace McDunnough if she could help out one of our users, Fredriksson,  try out live concert streams in Metaplace. Grace jumped in with both feet, and after we got it working (using the off-the-shelf guitar I made a while back!)  she mentioned that she had a concert this very evening…!

So at the very last minute, with no prep, Grace suggested dual-streaming the show, and Fredriksson volunteered his folk music cafe… and a few hours later, there we were, listening to live music played in two virtual worlds at once!

A few folks even watched the show in both worlds at the same time… here’s screenshots taken by one of them:

Watching GraceMcDunnough’s live performance in Metaplace and then on Second Life!

The new trophy husband: a night elf?

 Posted by (Visited 6150 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Nov 142008
 

Taylor said she had caught Pollard’s avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute: “I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned.”

The couple’s real-life wedding in 2005 was eclipsed by a fairy tale ceremony held within Second Life.

But Taylor told the Western Morning News she had subsequently hired an online private detective to track his activities…

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a “girl in America” but denied wrongdoing. “We weren’t even having cyber sex or anything like that…”

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

Second Life affair ends in divorce – CNN.com.

Almost reads like an Onion article, honestly.

UGC and IP in a cloning world

 Posted by (Visited 9585 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Nov 042008
 

Slashdot is discussing an article at Joystiq about UGC and IP rights which comes from a GamePolitics news item of a few days ago about the update to the PSN TOU around UGC — specifically because of LittleBigPlanet.

The bottom line, amidst all that linkage? Sony is taking a fairly traditional approach to IP rights, from a networked game sense:

Sony can use user content without restriction to advertise. They can also ‘commercially exploit’ your creations without permission, and if they do benefit ‘commercially’ (read: monetarily) from your creations, they owe you nothing. You’re also agreeing to abandon your moral rights to the work. Most importantly, you’re not allowed to commercially benefit from your creation without their permission.

— Mark Methentis, Joystiq

Now, LittleBigPlanet feels more like a toy in a lot of ways — you work with the pieces they give you. Then again, it took mere moments in UO for someone to grab a bunch of fish and spell out a dirty word on the bridge in the middle of Britain. (What’s more, seeing that occasioned a moment of glee from the team, though perhaps not from management).

Continue reading »

Avatar-the-word

 Posted by (Visited 7367 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Oct 292008
 

I turned to F. Randall Farmer, a creator of the online multiplayer game Lucasfilm’s Habitat, for the origins of the term’s current incarnation. He and Chip Morningstar invented the game in 1986, when they also coined avatar in the “online persona” sense (though gamers had already been exposed to the word’s Sanskrit meaning with the 1985 computer role-playing game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.) “Chip came up with the word ‘avatar,’ ” he recounts, “because back then, pre-Internet, you had to call a number with your telephone and then set it back into the cradle. You were reaching out into this game quite literally through a silver strand. The avatar was the incarnation of a deity, the player, in the online world. We liked the idea of the puppet master controlling his puppet, but instead of using strings, he was using a telephone line.”

–On Language – Avatar – NYTimes.com.

Very nice, but — “toon” does not come from Toontown, Randy! I first heard it in connection with Sierra’s The Realm; I remember being slightly confused when some Realm players logged into UO and started talking about how small their toons were.

Most mudders, of course, referred to this as a “character,” taken from D&D, and that carried through into UO, since we were mostly mudder types. But to my mind, both the avatar and the character are the same sort of thing — a graphical version of what we tend to call a profile in a broader web sense. Be it icon, textual description, or a/s/l, it’s just identifying information.

It may be that Second Life is indeed why “avatar” is so widespread today, though I would be just as likely to give the credit to Snow Crash — a major inspiration to many of the virtual worlds of the 90s. There were bokos and conferences called “avatar” during this time period. Snow Crash frequently got mistaken credit for the coinage.

Another minor sidelight: a few years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary was running a project on finding the earliest citations of science-fictional words, and I did manage to get Chip & Randy proper credit. 🙂

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