Can SL survive this?

a world without building and scripting is useless

And when one reaches the limits and has no alternative but either to sit and wait or quit? one debates that. If there was something available that offered more than SL i would consider it, so will anyone with unfinished purpose, including those who create SL. only fools or happy folks sit still.

It appears to me that the future depends on ones determination, the consequence for users of the source is self derived as much as the consequence for sources is derived from the source provider.

Ive not been a happy chappy for a while now, but i cant leave.. there is nowhere to go except give up. SL keeps me because i sense it has so much fundamental knowledge that if the possibilities are viable for both itself and me - the user, it will create it and i will use it.

The deal is about ones preference.. what does one want? who can give it? for how much?

Choose your place on the ladder. The top will not always be the top without demand and input, time waits for no one.

comparison is subjective.. the light that shines for one is dim for another, there will always be brighter lights.

One is what one is. Ones truth is ones own, not anyone elses because the truth is in change, all the time.




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That's why Lego went out of business decades ago.

its a game not a virtual world i wont even go and look at it.
i like to create no fun playing in someone elses sandbox and not being able to touch the toys

I can't really say that I would leave SL for sheer looks of another VW.. I did leave "There" to come to SL but that was because of the ability for content creation was much better. Besides would all your friends follow you?

I tend to keep happy in SL by taking breaks every now and then.. And by that I mean maybe one night or a weekend. I'll run off and play city of heroes etc.. But always manage to come back to SL. It's not a game it's and addiction. lol

Visually, Blue Mars looks amazing. It would be interesting to see but nothing was said about content creation by users. The boastful tone of the presenter might not go down well in a lot of markets, including Britain.

I try to keep up with what's going on in virtual worlds and since I came to SL 2 years ago hardly any of the supposed competitors have come to anything. OK there are the Chinese ones - Hipihi and Novoking, while all the others like There and Kaneva look exactly the same as they did when I first found them.

The only worlds that come close to SL are the clones like Open Life, made from LL's open source data.

I noticed they dropped Roger Dean's name, but there's another name I didn't hear and was expecting to...

And that's Kim Stanley Robinson.

Did I miss it?

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0553573357

Lego is not a virtual world. It's not freely customizable (that's why they can sell unusually shaped blocks). It doesn't have unlimited resources (that's why they can sell huge buckets of blocks). It's.. not a good comparison.

It looks like a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

I have a nitpicky obsession with consistent metaphors. What do they do about the gravity?

It's a serious question. If you put a virtual world on a planet with different physical characteristics, and you take those factors into consideration, the end result should be something very different from what I saw in that video. It was largely an Earth-based fantasy. Water didn't move differently, the giant dog robots ran just like dogs on Earth, and the leaping dolphins fell back into the water they same way they do in Florida.

A virtual world on a planet with different physical rules would be a lot of fun.

This looks like more of a theme park. Again, nice to visit. But would you really want to live in Disneyland?

Maybe it's just me. I'm not overly impressed. The thing that stuck out the most, for me, was the McDonald's logo. Bleh.

The rest just seemed animated - basically a cut-scene. The graphics are always better in the cut-scenes of a game than in the actual play.

If that was actual game-play, what size computer did they use? All I can think is, lagggg.

Lego has the same relationship with typical games that a virtual world like Second Life does with typical MMOs.

Entropia and Eve are not virtual worlds, they're MMO resource allocation games. IMVU and Lively are 3d chat systems. Sony Home is a place to download Playstation games from. I've been looking for something even close to SL and come up dry.

If you don't understand what a difference building makes, go watch Robbie Dingo's "Watch the World" video again. That should explain things better than I can.

And that is what SL is for 75% of its users. Content creation is great, but it just isn't that popular.



Oh, I've seen it. It's fantastic. But Robbie could have made it with any 3D editor. In fact, it really illustrates my point that you'd illustrate how great content creation is by.. asking me to _watch_ something.

speaking of lagg.i saw a few spots in the video itself that the camera suffered some lag..
maybe this will cure some of the over crowding in sl and we can finally get fully stable..
lol
it won't kill sl it's gonna make it betta hahahaha

It saves on diversity and excitement also.

I dislike the corporate feel of this ad, and as someone said, the boastful tone. But there's really no telling from the ad what the actual game would be like, or the environment (not the visuals - the experience, the interactivity). If it's mostly just watching things happen, meh. I already have computer games.

The same thing I prefer about SL is the same thing I was daunted by back in 2001 when lack of time, experience and a powerful computer sent me running. (Other than the high tier payments and basic rules) it's ours. We built it.

I don't mind a few corporations - gotta butter their bread like everyone else. But to have a McD's logo in the ad itself, while touting the game as the best thing since sliced bread? (Two bread metaphors, one sentence. Wooo?) SL still wins, for me.

The Corporates are advertising there? Definitely not interested then.

Yes, and the first part of the narration made it sound as if the whole place were being pitched to corporations as a place to advertise/do business. Bleh.

Then it's just like SL will be soon.

I hope not - but everything does evolve, question is always, into what.

I hope it can at least be like the internet, where there are ad-free places, if nothing else. My fear is that the net and places like SL will both go the way of 'tolls' where you either have to pay or watch an ad to get in or through each gate.

Quote from the Blue Mars Vid:



By the way they are wording things, it sounds to me you need to pay them to set up a shop in one of their appointed areas near "clubs/hangout" areas the company makes. I would think these commercial opportunities are only opened to a select group of people (Eg,big name RL companies. Even in the video you can see RL business logos lit up...like Mcdonalds), okay business for them if the world gets active and people are forced to chose between 15 different places to shop.

Looks pretty cool but it really seems this is a huge playground set up by the company for people to play in. Which is nice of you are into socializing but not if you are a creative person or a person who enjoys viewing the creations of your fellow residents.

It seems this Blue Mars place is going to be very much governed and some (not all!) of those builds are not textured well at all, I have seen better created by SL residents...

I could be way off, but this is what I got out of the video. I wonder how much an account will be.

Exactly how I felt, too.

Thanks for taking the time to quote that narration. That was the part that got my back up right away. It sounds like they're pitching to big corporate brick and mortars and are willing to include startup companies too. But either way, sounds like a big virtual shopping mall. SL has a lot of shopping too but the users made a lot of the stuff. I find the corporate products in-world a lot less compelling. JMO.

If I'm going to socialize in a place full of RL corporate advertising, I can do that quite easily in RL.

As they are in SL, because of the 10% effect.

It isn't only corporations and real shops that have businesses and can create and impact the look of the world in SL, though. Users do, by and large.

Yumi you have expanded the word 'select' to include your supposition that only ten percent have the skills/vision to create at a certain level, but to me, that's not the worry. It isn't what percentage can create at that level but who and why.

It's creepy to me that this game's being pitched as a cash cow from the start, I guess. SL in 2001 seemed pretty open-ended.

And I understand that point of view, but the problem is, it tends to come down to "it's ok as long as I get picked". After all, if you _don't_ get picked, it doesn't make that much of difference whether it was because you weren't a business than because you weren't talented.

The danger is that a virtual world along these lines will be able to remove the majority, who are not in the 10% creators, from the world. Having done so, SL will have difficulty because those 10% will be alone, and will be unable to (for example) sell things to make tier because there are no consumers.

Just saw your tagline Yumi - Lol.

As to the first point - for me, at least - the point I was trying to make wasn't that "I won't get picked." I'm not likely to get picked either way - at least, until I learn a lot more, and then, meh? Who knows. The point for me is the impact a corporate universe would have on the environment, overall aesthetics, the socialising, etc.

Which brings me to your second paragraph - I don't know that everyone would flee SL for this 'superior' corporate made world. I'd think it would be the opposite.