Slashdot Mirror
Companies Continue to Get a Second Life
PreacherTom writes "Reuters and CNET aren't the only players staking online claims in the virtual world of Second Life. Yesterday, Wired magazine opened their 1-acre digitized headquarters, complete with neon-pink sliding doors and a nouveau 50 person conference room. Businessweek takes a look at the new virtual offerings from Adidas, Toyota, Lego, and even Major League Baseball in their pictoral spread. 'We are this canvas that allows companies to do what they want to do in Second Life,' says David Fleck, Linden's vice-president of marketing. 'It mimics real life much more accurately.'"
I'm waiting for the day someone opens up a virtual world within second life.
Third life, as it will be called, will be paid for with second life currency. Your characters use SL computers to connect to it, which then runs in a nearly full-screen window within second life (other people who don't play third life can even watch over your shoulder and stuff).
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
If you want to call this an "MMORPG" then it has much more freedom than any other in existance. You can literally create objects from nothing and make them ANYTHING you want -- we are talking 3dsmax anything.
But the fact is... this "game" is not fun and straightforward enough for most users (like me!) We don't all know 3dsmax!!
A game like WOW is sucessful because it has: defined goals, defined structure, and defined limits. People actually like that shit.
(The download for SL is only like... 30 MB for windows, 60 MB for mac if you want to try it.)
Interestingly enough, that's pretty much with all new players have to do, since you don't start out with a home and the newbie plots are generally all grabbed up by unscrupulus land speculators with tons of alt accounts.
I read the internet for the articles.
It was free and even THEN it's not worth it. Now I have about the quickest high-speed internet connection and yet it still just sits there for a few minutes downloading everything you walk or fly through. Go to a new place, it starts downloading again....forever.....
Ok, so I know it's not all just about how fast your connection is blah blah, but it's a major problem for me as it NEVER feels like you're in another world. It feels like what it is, bad artwork in a bad 3D environment. Fine, but the people that play must really be nice right?
Well, every place I go where I see on the map a lot of people have gathered usually end up just being either virtual prostitution or porn. Or worse, just people sitting in these chairs that generate for them 1 Lindon per hour or something. Just sitting. Or dancing....AFK people sitting and dancing. Wow, fun!
Also, don't know what the point is. It's a chat/social/networking thingy that's laggy and unreal. Ok, so basically a instant messenger with badly made 3D avatars that all look like nymphet women wearing very skimpy clothes that still look unreal. We're talking animations and models that are pre Everquest. I felt like I was in some world that was made 15 years or go or something.
It also didn't seem finished. It felt like a beta of something that was abandoned about 3 years ago and just barely hanging on.
I don't know...I just don't get it.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Okay, I finally checked out the Second Life client yesterday, and flew around looking for something to *do*. There were about two billboards per active person in the world. It seemed like a third of the buildings I flew past were little businesses to personalize your avatar or house or sell real estate, a third of the buildings were nightmarish personal constructions that looked like those paintings done by elephants in the zoo, and a third of the space was blocked off by barbed wire ("not on the access list, cannot enter").
It seems like the only way someone would think it interesting is if they are playing with people they already know, 100% of the time. There was no call to action. There was nothing drawing my attention as an activity. I mean, I have actually WORKED in the MMORPG industry, have played several games and have thought about online social spaces for years. I still couldn't get a handle on what Lindon expects people to *do* in Second Life, except of course to pay Lindon some actual money.
What am I missing?
[
Thanks for your interesting comment. It just made me wonder about the gambling aspect... Wasn't there some sort of US law passed about that recently?
.sigs: Just Say No!
Is it just me or do you guys think Linden Lab is sponsering all these stories?
There have been at least a couple in a last few days on Slashdot and I have seen a few more other places. Feels like a giant marketing plan. I mean this is a hell of a lot of press for something with such a small online community. I think the general consensus about Second Life is "meh, kinda slow, kinda outdated, nothing to do, it has no point, boring".
I have tried it myself, it felt and looked pretty clunky.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Wow, how very conceited. Virtual crap is still crap, and people want entertainment, not crap. If making crap is entertaining to you, well and good. Just don't expect us all to look in your toilet and applaud. The difference between "content creators" like you, and the people at, say, Blizzard is that the people at Blizzard are getting paid while you are paying for the privilege of creating crap. Making crap on 2nd life no more makes you creative than paying to have a book published by a vanity press makes you a good writer.
If you were any good, people would be paying you, not the other way around. Second Life is for people who have no first life, not for "creative" people. Real creative people get paid for their creativity in this world, where it actually matters.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Your idea is great.
I started my serious online addiction playing LambdaMOO in about 1993. To sum up, it's a textual VR set in the then-house of Pavel Curtis, who created Lambda (and ncurses and other big unixy things) and you wandered around and played with things. One of the things was a computer, and if you could get it to boot (find the power switch, plug in the monitor, find the boot disc -- this was '93, after all) you could play games on the computer. As I recall, Adventure was on there, and I think there was a mini-version of Lambda, establishing recursion.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I feel this overwhelming urge to start a homeless character who will sleep in their bushes and pee on their steps.
They exist... in overwhelming numbers since it became free with no verification or IP logging to create such a beast... they're called griefers... and they brought the whole world down for the last three weekends in a row...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I don't play the game - never have and never will - but the idea of companies setting up locations inside a game intrigued me. While I was RTFA - which was shortly after reading about N. Korea, all I could imagine was having someone 'building a bomb' and removing the stores. How do the 'stores' recover? Is it terrorism? Is there a 'state' that can sponsor terrorism? Do they have 'gangs' running the streets in the game? How about robbing banks? Are there pickpockets? I can imagine a bored 12 year old wiping out large swaths of land. (Don't look at me to do any of it. I am way too old!)
OK I am a little warped. ;-)
This message was brought to you by "Lack of Sleep."
Here's the 30 second primer on Secondlife.
When you first sign up, you have a beginners account. This account cannot buy land, I don't think free accounts get a stipend anymore because people abused it like crazy, but you do get a signing bonus. The build system is integrated into the game, and it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are some areas ingame that have good tutorials on how to use it. Anyway, you can build anything you want most anywhere, however it is considered bad manners to build stuff on other people's land, and some people have building turned off on their land (although this is uncommon). You can also go to one of many sandboxes around the world and build stuff, however every few hours everything in the sandbox is returned automatically so you can't leave a permanent structure up. You can however save your work in your inventory and then bring it back out to work on it later.
If you want to leave your work up permanently, you need to either buy or rent some land. To buy land you need to upgrade your account. The upgraded account costs $10/month, but comes with a weekly stipend that you can convert into real $ to help offset the cost of the account. You can also buy a small plot of land that will let you leave a small structure (the complexity of your builds is limited by the size of your plot) up permanently. Renting is similar except that you can do it with a basic account and it can sometimes be cheaper monthly than buying. You lose out on any land appreciation, although that tends to be very low in Secondlife because new land is added all of the time. Landords can offer you land cheaper than buying because there are large bulk discounts for owning huge amounts of land. Landlords make a profit off of the difference.
Building is fairly simple. You start out with basic shapes called Primitives or Prims (Cube, Torus, Sphere, etc...) that you can deform, stack together, and texture to make whatever you like. While it is easy to make something in the system, it is somewhat difficult to make something that looks good. Like all artistic creations, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A reasonably powerful scripting language is also available that can add a lot of life to your creations.
You also have a lot of flexibility in your avatar's appearance. This is one reason the furry community has taken to Secondlife, it is not overly difficult to turn your avatar into an animal shape. The skeletal model the game uses more or less requires that you make your avatar bipedal if you want realistic movement, but other than that it's quite flexible. There is a big market in-game for new clothes and accessories for your avatar.
I read the internet for the articles.