BBC Program Broadcasts From Second Life

Via GameSetWatch, the word that BBC program Newsnight recently broadcast live from the virtual world Second Life. The broadcast included a lead-in shot on a backdrop designed to emulate the real-life Newsnight set. From the article: "Because the virtual money inside Second Life is convertible to US dollars, and people who make things can keep the intellectual property, it is possible to run a real life business inside the game. I got in touch with Cory Edo - real name Sara Van Gorden - who runs a business in Second Life designing avatars - the idealised 3D personas that people use as their online identities."

Comments

not trying to troll, but...

[aapold]

how can a game with so few subscribers get this much coverage? It gets more articles than just about anything other than WOW, and even that is close.

MMOGCHART.COM's most recent chart puts the subscriber base at 30,000. Second Life's own website claims 100,000, which at the time I write this (5:18 pm EST) claiming about 3700 online at this moment, which is about the number of players standing around in WOW's ironforge on a typical night on any given server. I tried second life during a trial period and the thing seemed more like still life than second life. I guess I'm asking a rhetorical question, it seems like someone would like to get more attention for it so it could do well, not necessarily anything sinister in that, but there just doesn't seem much interest here...

Re:not trying to troll, but...

[Dave2 Wickham]

Because SL is not really a game. There are no goals. It's not like MMORPGs like WoW or CoH - almost all of the content is user-created, and users just do what they want to. This concept is what interests people. They don't care that WoW has loads of players, and SL has a relatively small number, it's still just another MMORPG. SL is different.

In terms of there being nobody active, that completely depends where you are. Sims (squares of the map, each ran by its own server) that are relatively new are likely to have nowhere near the population of more popular areas - after all, there is a huge amount of space for a relatively small number of "players".

(Apologies for any difficulties in understanding this post, I am knackered.)

Re:not trying to troll, but...

[Gwala]

It's grown 70,000 in the last 6 months. MMOCHART is out of date at the moment.

3 questions

[heavy snowfall]

- What's the exchange rate?

- Does the dev studio exhange this money for you or do you have to sell it ala WOW?

- I guess you don't go around killing monsters that drop GP in this game.. right?

Second Life

[Digital Vomit]

I'd try out the game, but I fear I don't meet the minimum requirements.

*rimshot*

*chirp*

*chirp*

Get it? Second life? Get it? i.e. I don't have a life?

*chirp*

*chirp*

Oh you can all go to hell!

Second Life still sorely lacks UI scripting

[QuantumG]

Second Life is continually toted as a great platform for casual game developers to create interesting creations and, in fact, many games have been made in Second Life and the modelling and scripting available to every player is remarkably flexible. However, what is sorely lacking is the ability to script the UI aspects of a game. I read early last year that "viewer overlays" are currently under development, but to date there has been no progress. Without the ability to script the UI the kinds of games you can make in Second Life will remain limited to poor resolution puzzle games and gambling trivialities. With the ability to script the UI the possibilities suddenly become unlimited.

Another limitation of the current system is the third party tools required to make animations. These tools are expensive and/or hard to use. Building an animation editor into the game would make player interactions so much richer and encourage the creation of games that can utilize such richness (like fighting games).