Post cross pollination links here...

Sometimes, I come across links (usually in Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the like), which make me think of Second Life. As in, "That's a cool idea/invention/story that could be relevant to SL somehow." Sometimes it's about MMOs, social organization, or another topic specifically related to Second Life-- sometimes it's not. (Sometimes it's just really cool, and I wanna share it.) In the interests of cross-pollination, I'll be posting those links here-- and invite readers to do so, as well.

For starters, here's where *Night of the Living Dead* meets the Game of Life:

http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/

I saw that, and thought about the in-world Artificial Life simulation a resident was developing, which featured cats, mice, and cheese. This is sorta like that, just with, you know, zombies and human brains.

You keep asking people for stories when they are all around you. Try looking into the recent Private Investigator service that is currently forming. There's a story there, I even attempted to call your attention to it. Agreed, it might take work, but you are getting paid for this after all.

And these "please gimme stories" threads are really getting boring. Will you do my job for me if I ask nicely?

I guess that depends on what you do you do for a living.

But really, it has nothing to do with fishing for stories-- I'm way up near the brim with those as it is-- but more in order to have a place to share relevant links I happen to like with residents. You know, for fun?

I really have always appreciated how Hamlet has his unique style but how he reaches out and isn't like a remote, unfeeling alien -- he really covers story of personal interest to Second Life Residents in such a diverse variety of fields, and cross-pollination is yet another yummy mix to the blend, showing how tangential links -- these connections all over the place -- seem to meet at common junctions.

Aw, thanks, TT!

Also, the emergence of private investigators has already been noted, and is being looked into. (Watching the detectives?) But thanks all the same.

Meanwhile, back to cross-polli links...

My pal Cory Doctorow wrote this short story a few months ago, but it still sticks with me, because it's my favorite among all his great stuff:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/15/andas_game/

In the gym yesterday, it occured to me that it might be adaptable into a cool 20 minute machinima short. But read it, and judge fer yerself.

Hello,

I am fairly new to SL, although it took me about 5 mins to get hooked on the creative aspect of it. I have to admit though, that I find myself looking over the SL website for future development information, and maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see much.

One of the MMORPG games I usually play is called Star Wars Galaxies. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the game, so I won't go into details. The developers of this fun MMO have adopted a policy of constant communication with their customer base. One of the most important ways they are doing this is sharing information about their ever ongoing development cycle so that the community knows what cool new changes and additions are coming down the line. They have 4 stages of this communication. They are:

In Concept - Information about future changes that are in the early discussion stages. Nothing is promised or set in stone yet. Little or no actual code to speak of, but a general sharing of information about ideas for new game content and changes. SOE actively uses their message boards to get ideas from thie customer base, and takes them into account for new concepts.

In Development - These are ideas or plans that have been passed to the development stage. Code is being written/played with, and ideas for fine tuning the new features are still drawn from the SWG community boards.

In Testing - SOE has public testbed servers where anyone is welcome to create an account, and test/evaluate possible new features and changes before they reach the public servers. Obviously feedback from the community is still key at this point.

In Live - This is a finished "publish" and is the latest set of changes running live on the public servers. This page also displays current server status.

For more information on this, and current live examples, visit this page...

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/content.jsp?page=Development%20Cycle%20Index

Maybe a system like this isn't possible at Linden Labs, but I think Sony has proven that it is KEY too keeping the customer base happy. It also makes the customer base feel like they have a stake in the game. Finally, as is evident in the changes SOE makes to the game, that some of the BEST content in SWG is based on customer requests and ideas.

Thanks for listening.

Good post-- welcome to SL, Oceas! Some interesting ideas there, may be cool to see if Linden Lab ever tries them. (LL does do a variation of some of it already, such as hosting a Feature Suggestions forum, and inviting residents to play with an upcoming version's features on a test server, a few weeks before they go live.)

Meanwhile, just came across this today. Seems to me most of this is already scriptable in SL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/technology/24girlfriend.html?8hpib

Men, are you tired of the time, trouble and expense of having a girlfriend? Irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one?

Eberhard Schöneburg, the chief executive of the software maker Artificial Life Inc. of Hong Kong, may have found the answer: a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne who goes wherever you go.

Vivienne likes to be taken to movies and bars. She loves to be given virtual flowers and chocolates, and she can translate six languages if you travel overseas. She never undresses, although she has some skimpy outfits for the gym, and is a tease who draws the line at anything beyond blowing kisses.

If you marry her in a virtual ceremony, you even end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cellphone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right.

Make Vivienne into Victor. Have him send me virtual flowers and chocolates. Have him ask me about my day and volunteer to do the dishes in a skimpy gym outfit and Eberhard just might have a hot product on his hands!

Heh, Bel!

A Resident just passed along this fascinating (and extensive) link. Pretty heavy stuff, but worth at least a glance, or if you're feeling up to it, a thorough read:

Taking the Virtual out of Virtual Reality

... This is what I envisage:

A world in which the entire surface of the planet is turned into a three-dimensional hybrid of reality and virtual reality. A world in which people can construct three-dimensional objects, just as they can in SecondLife™, but in reality, not just on a computer system. If we do this we will have got virtual reality out of computers and into the real world.

Some readers may wonder what is new here: after all, have I not mentioned systems which overlay virtual reality data onto reality to let people 'see' buried pipes or to allow doctors to operate?

What I propose goes much further than this. I suggest this:

We should put the ideas of SecondLife™ - those ideas of making a public space which is altered in real-time by its users - into such a system.

The effect of this will be dramatic and will be:

A shared, virtual space, overlaid on physical reality, which can be altered in real-time by its users, giving those users the illusion that they can actually edit physical reality while they are walking around in it.

This means that people will be able to construct three-dimensional objects and leave them anywhere they wish and that other people will see them and be able to interact with them. The idea of anyone being able to do it is really important. Without this feature it would simply be a system imposed from above. This idea of getting everyone to do it is what would establish the idea as a pervasive system like SMS.

This may be an awkward idea to grasp. To give a better idea of what I mean I will give some examples...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_pollination
Kinda short:

Ooh, I wanna cross-pollinate Eggy!

The above-described practice must be considered a very good idea generally, because it is a fairly MMORPG practice. Ultima Online was doing this exact thing eight years ago.

It couldn't work in SL quite the way it does in these other universes, though, because of the (more inteligent and useful) way that LL clusters their servers. They probably could mirror a few servers for this purpose, though, and we would probably have smoother, more stable update rollouts.

INHO, it's *such* a good idea, that I wish I'd thought of and implemented such a system for my clients, back in the 80s, when I was running a small commercial programming shop!

Cory Linden blogged my "Finding Nemo" and "Grinding the World" entries in Terra Nova, and in response, noted game developer/intellectual/lovable curmudgeon Richard Bartle is issuing a challenge of sorts to SL Residents:

If you want to state that SL does have unique features that make the process of innovation in SL better than in other virtual worlds, I want to hear about them! I've seen birds-as-clothes in a demo for a graphics card (but not fish-as-clothes in virtual worlds) and I've seen co-operative real-time construction of filly-fledged room complexes including objects and (admittedly fairly toy) NPCs for a virtual world (but not a large, 3D graphical object). If SL is allowing people to indulge their creativity, that's great! What I want to know is what SL has going for it that makes what its residents create more amazing than what the residents of other construction-style virtual worlds create.

Anyone here feel like leaping into da fray?

This. is, in a word, hilarious.

I think a possible lesson for SL machimina makers is using the Skype audio feed as a humorous/weird/cool counterpoint to what we're seeing. Also a great workaround to our (current) lack of solid audio effects...

Anyone here a fan of fantasy writer Diane Duane? Cory Doctorow just pointed to her blog, where she's considering self-publishing her latest book:

Read here.

My first instinct was to contact her and suggest publishing a virtual edition in SL, do "meet the author" appearances in here, promote the print edition, take sales of the print edition via Linden Dollars, etc. But since I'm not familiar with work, I thought that might be better handled by Residents fans of hers...

I'm familiar with some of her Star Trek novels, which tended to be rather better than average quality (one of which, by the sort of coincidence that happens to me with annoying frequency, I just reread last week during one of my occasional trips back through my bookshelf).

I'm not a fan in the sense that I seek out her work particularly, but I could say the same about most living authors who aren't Gaiman. I'd take note if she'd happened to be the author of a book I picked up, and probably be more inclined to take a chance on her than on an author I didn't know, all else being equal.

Firefox Flicks!

The SL Trailer Contest was so successful, when I got word of this contest, I immediately thought of SL machinima-- make a 30 second ad for Firefox!

I just e-mailed Mozilla's contest organizer, and he told me machinima is totally acceptable. Celebrity judges include McG, the director of the Charlie's Angels movies and a buttload of MTV videos, prizes are thousands and thousand of dollars worth in sweet multimedia equipement.

Check it out here.