Playing God in Second Life

Wagner James Au reports from the New World Notes blog about events in Second Life. Today, he's got a discussion with a woman growing her own garden of Eden in the alternate reality that is 2L. From the article: "The result of a year's work, Laukosargas Svarog's island of Svarga is a fully-functioning ecosystem, adding life or something like it to the verdant-looking but arid pallette Linden Lab offers with its world. It begins with her artificial clouds, which are pushed along by Linden's internal wind system. 'If I was to turn off the clouds the whole system would die in about six hours,' she tells me. 'Turn off the bees and [the plants stop] growing, because nothing gets pollinated ... '"

Comments

Financially Advantageous Slashdotting

[MattGWU]

Her Dwell bonus for the day is going to go through the roof! It's not even her own servers in jeopardy, it's Linden that has to hold up!

Really sweet area! I'm already there!

Re:Financially Advantageous Slashdotting

[Admiral Justin]

Sorry, but as of tomorrow, there is no bonus on Dwell in Second Life.

They've been phasing it out this month. On the 15th they reduced dwell by one half, and today is the final day.

They are doing this in order to try to stabalize the Linden (game money) to USD exchange rate.

When I joined, the rate was roughly 260L$ / $1 USD, now it's about 330/1

Re:Financially Advantageous Slashdotting

[MattGWU]

Really!! I knew they were phasing it out, just not NOW. Guess as a non-land-owning freeaccounter I didn't pay much attention. Man, what's the club industry going to do?

On the other hand, I cheer the end of camping chairs.

Re:Financially Advantageous Slashdotting

[GigsVT]

People will still use camping chairs to game the popular places listings.

Re:no one cares

[east coast]

no one cares about this game.

yeah, it's kind of an odd passtime. I really don't like to call it a game. I signed on to see what all the talk about this was and while I found that it was neat that some were so creative I think the enjoyment of it all as a tourist wears off fast. I might try to go and create a few things of my own but I can't see the point in using it as a social outlet.

Re:no one cares

[eln]

From what I understand of it, the type of people who used to play MUSHes back in the day (as opposed to people who played MUDs) would enjoy this sort of "game", since it's all about creating a new environment rather than actually playing a game. Personally, I found MUSHes insufferably dull, and preferred the gameplay of actual MUDs, but to each their own I guess.

Second Life and "game"

[DragonWriter]

Second Life isn't really a game in itself, even if it is superficially like a MMORPG. (I'd call it a Massively Multiparticipant Online Roleplaying Environment more than a "game"). But there are plenty of games -- and other diversions -- created by people within Second Life.

Re:Second Life and "game"

[eln]

That's what makes it like a MUSH rather than a MUD. In a MUSH, the primary focus is adding your own rooms and other objects to the world, rather than playing a game. Personally, doing that sort of thing feels too much like work to me, but there are obviously people who enjoy it.

Re:Second Life and "game"

[DragonWriter]

It seems to me quite likely that, in SL (and certainly it seems to have been the case with MUSH's as well), there are quite a few people for whom the main focus is playing games (or experiencing other pre-created content).

The difference between SL and a game is that the focus of SL isn't on providing the content, but providing the framework, tools, and access for both the creators of the content, and the people that are interested in simply enjoying created content (game or otherwise).

Now, generally, that means that you won't have as elaborate content in any environment in SL that you would in a major commercial game, but on the other hand, it means that you'll have a considerable variety of content from creators with different visions. Even without being a creator yourself, that's going to appeal to some people.

And, of course, a basic SL account is free (you have to get a paid account to get virtual real estate), as is the client, which gives it a price advantage over many games, too.

More please

[Turn-X Alphonse]

More of this please editors. It's an intresting article and was fun to read. Can we get more of this and less Sony/MS/Nintendo fanboys/rumours please?

I always knew....

[ImaLamer]

God was a woman.

Re:I always knew....

[dohzer]

As you say, she sure WAS. Back when she existed.

Fire up virtual ecology

[Nafai7]

I just checked this out in SL and it's cool, even if there isn't a lot to check out ATM. Linden Labs should be very intersted in this sort of thing.

Currently most of 2nd life is quite mechanical. By that I mean there are plenty of landscapes and cool plants in SL, but they are all meticulously hand-crafted by people, and mostly static once placed. Imagine if you could opt to have your SL land on "living land" that would actually have it's own ecology. Water flows and wind could cause erosion, birds could carry seeds from area to area... ultimately a system of DNA could be created to handle cross-fertilization of plants and wildlife.

Maybe they could even license the Spore engine to perform some of the work for them ;)

Re:Fire up virtual ecology

[MattGWU]

There has to be a better way to do plants than three or more intersecting rectangles overlaid with a tree-shaped texture, I just have no idea what it is. Done well they look basically alright, but with poorly-done textures they look awful, with white halos and things. Prim plants would be rediculous. Would have to be something in a distant update. Or just let people make Linden trees as objects rather than grown on land you own (thinking, for example, of the recent gardening competition I was in on land parceled out for the contest but with no ownership. Had to use transparency overlay trees).

I know what you mean about 'mechanical', but it extends to more than just plants! I think flexi-prims will help a little. The problem for me is textures. Some of them look too...'real'. Not real real, but very 'I did this very, very carefully in Illustrator.' Almost too high-res (even though it is decidedly not). Makes things stand out too much and look cartoony.

Re:Fire up virtual ecology

[drinkypoo]

The right way to do plants is with multires techniques; start with a high-resolution model, prioritize points in the mesh by number, and as you need to decrease poly counts for scenes, delete points and generate new, lower-poly-count meshes. Plants will generally have a fairly low scoring bias so that they have lower priority than other items in the scene, and be degraded first, but when you are right up in a bush then each branch can be rendered or what have you; when it's in the middle distance it might have gone from 5,000 polys down to 50 or 100 of them; On the horizon it might be 1 or 2 polys. Because the number of polygons changes smoothly, there's no pop-in problem, objects can be shown at their maximum visible distance, and they gracefully increase in complexity so they don't suddenly "sprout" features that you couldn't previously discern - at least, when done right. Multires is still mostly unexplored country, though.

Re:Fire up virtual ecology

[GigsVT]

The Linden made trees are like that, but there's not much selection in those.

Residents can only use primitives to construct stuff. Basically CSG except without all the boolean operators.

Swarga

[DevanJedi]

Swarga means "heaven" in Sanskrit/Hindi.

This is what is missing from WoW, etc...

[j1m 5n0w]

I would like to see a mmorpg that takes place in a real ecology, where trees can be planted or cut down, animals can flourish or die out depending on how much they have to eat, etc... Perhaps the players could be dependent on the land for food, water, and shelter.

The downside, though, is that the world would have to have a stable ecology, and be big enough that players can't kill off whole species or otherwise destabilize the system.

Re:This is what is missing from WoW, etc...

[kailoran]

If players can't kill off species or destabilize the system, it isn't much of a realistic one, imo. After all, isn't that what people have been doing since the stone age?

Re:This is what is missing from WoW, etc...

[Illserve]

It was called UO, it didn't work. They turned it off.

Re:This is what is missing from WoW, etc...

[tibman]

You might be surprised to know that something like this exists in Eve-Online, a space based MMORPG. Almost the entire economy is player based and fed. The ship i bought was manufactured by some guy who had to buy a blueprint copy from a Scientist player and then buy minerals from a Miner player. If a small group of players artifically increase the price of something they control, the local economy will feel it. Likewise, some pieces of equipment and ships are so impossible to make without help, it forces people into groups to achieve a goal.

Now i realize this isn't exactly what you were looking for, Trees can be cut down and planted or whatnot. But it's the same idea. If your Corporation has a starbase to mine a rare metal from a moon that nobody can get anywhere else, you have a lot of power over the local ecosystem.

The best part about the game is just flying around attacking pirates or whatever. If you're not into the economy much, it seems more like the weather. "Why TF are missiles so damn expensive today?!?"

Creative

[Is0m0rph]

I just fired up SL and went there (about the only time I "play" SL is when I see a post like this). Cool design wandered around a bit and that was enough. Not enough to make me want to explore anything else in the game.

Re:2L != SL

[Goaway]

So basically you pay to work for Linden Labs. Wow, sign me up!

'Turn off the bees.'

[RoffleTheWaffle]

I sure wish I had a bee toggle switch for my yard. It'd make mowing the lawn a lot less stressful.

Re:Whats the deal with all the press?

[GigsVT]

Maybe because it's not "franchise rehash 10" from EA?

Re:Whats the deal with all the press?

[DragonWriter]

Players can create things? Well how about trying to modding tools that come with almost every game that isn't an MMORPG these days, creat all you want.

Yeah, well, see the unique thing about SL is that it is a massively multiplayer online environment and it focusses on participant creation. Saying, well, yeah, there are plenty of non-MMO facilities that you can create custom content for misses the point.

stability

[j1m 5n0w]

If players can't kill off species or destabilize the system, it isn't much of a realistic one, imo. After all, isn't that what people have been doing since the stone age?

Well, people have been able to affect their local environment for a long time, but it's only recently that humans have been capable of affecting the environment globally in any significant way. Sure, it may have been possible for humans a thousand years ago to kill off the last of some species that was already on the verge of extinction, but they couldn't cut down every single tree in the whole world (and that would be hard for us to do now, short of using nuclear weapons). Similarly, it shouldn't be possible for some griefer to cut down every single tree in the virtual world just to see what happens. However, it should be possible (and part of the strategy of the game) to affect the local environment - the goal (or at least one possible goal) of the game could be to create a pocket of civilization in a vast wilderness.

On the other hand, a virtual ecology that is globally brittle may be an interesting game world as well, but only if the players don't mind the possibility of the permanent death of not just their character, but the whole world.

Can't be...

[Gryle]

since as far as I can tell the universe has never been rearranged or redecorated...

Re:Can't be...

[ImaLamer]

Two words:

Noah's Ark

closed economies and ecologies

[j1m 5n0w]

Now i realize this isn't exactly what you were looking for, Trees can be cut down and planted or whatnot. But it's the same idea. If your Corporation has a starbase to mine a rare metal from a moon that nobody can get anywhere else, you have a lot of power over the local ecosystem.

A realistically functioning closed economy (as opposed to faucet/drain in which bad guys drop loot that eventually gets used up and/or sold back to NPCs) isn't quite the same thing as a realistically functioning closed ecology, though they ought to share some traits: conservation of matter (iron can be made into a sword, or it can rust back into raw iron, but there is always a fixed amount of iron in the world) and it can be affected by the players (making new items reduces their price; chopping down a tree drives away birds that would nest in it). I suspect that a closed economy is a first step towards building a closed ecology. If the economy is dependent on the ecology, then one could introduce realistic tactics into a game, like conquering a neighboring kingdom by burning its fields and causing a famine. (A somewhat underhanded trick, but plausible.)

Eve online sounds interesting, though I prefer old-technology rural settings for purely aesthetic reasons. How well does the economy work? Can players crash the economy by hoarding vital resources, or is that self-correcting (all the other players attack the hoarder)? Are there problems with inflation or hoarding of currency?

Re:closed economies and ecologies

[tibman]

You're quite right in that the two are entirely different. But to answer you questions about the game. Player's could theoretically destroy parts of the local economy by restricting access to certain resources. Though i think most market manipulation is to create demand for a restricted product and raise it's value. Some ships and equipment are extremely rare because only a few players hold the Blue Print Originals used to create the items. The prices of some of the more rare items are 100fold the cost of what it took to create. It's a rather complex system though.

Advanced items need advanced materials to create. Which means someone needs to mine raw materials from a moon and react certain combinations of materials to create complex materials and again for advanced materials which can be used as ingredients in the creation of powerful ships/weapons. Most things can be reversed too. You can recycle a ship into it's basic raw minerals (with some loss) for use elsewhere. There is zero set price for anything player created. You can charge as much as you wish for anything.

I'm not much into the market as i am into finding and researching bluepints. Not to mention the constant battle with pirate players ;) It's a truely unique game. The first two weeks are free if i remember correctly. It's hard to convey the scale of the game without something to compare it to. But if you like the complexity that nature provides, there are many such aspects in this game.

Re:Whats the deal with all the press?

[Criterion]

"According to http://www.mmogchart.com/ it had 45,000 players at the last time they counted"

Seems that the last time they counted was a year ago :/. I think it's pushing 200K right now. Right up there with everything other than the heavy hitters like WOW and Evercrack.