It talks a little about crafting in a traditional MMO, and why SL is cooler. Then we (well, mostly I) go on about what kind of sense of place that SL creates and what kind of thing might be more interesting.
I've edited it to take out some irrelevant stuff and some silliness.
I'm HorkusBoy, My friend is devboy00.
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HorkusBoy: yeah SWG, it wasn't good in some way.
HorkusBoy: it lacked some depth or something.
devboy00: that's hard to do, i think
HorkusBoy: MMO's have the treadmill curse.
HorkusBoy: none of them really break out from the mold.
devboy00: treadmill?
devboy00: oh, right.
HorkusBoy: I could go on forever about SWG, the hype was the whole player economy thing, but it turned out like communism.
devboy00: bleargh
HorkusBoy: and you still had the whole, fight, gain a level, fight, gain a level thing.
HorkusBoy: they tried to micro-manage the economy.
devboy00: hmmm, those things should be organic
HorkusBoy: which is somethign that you can't do, an economy isn't a game mechanic, it's an emergent property.
HorkusBoy: exactly.
devboy00: damn kids
HorkusBoy: I have a lot of respect for Raph Koster, the lead designer on SWG, but they messed it up pretty badly.
devboy00: I know no Ralph Koster
HorkusBoy: I imagine the developers sitting around telling stories about what the game experience should be like, and then going overboard in trying to incent the players to act in certain ways.
devboy00: sort of funnelling the players to do stuff?
HorkusBoy: yeah
HorkusBoy: http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/
HorkusBoy: He's a guru in the MUD world and he was lead on Ultima Online.
devboy00: is that good?
devboy00: i mean it sounds ok, but...
HorkusBoy: which ?
devboy00: Ultima Online.
HorkusBoy: Apparently there's a lot of crafting.
HorkusBoy: Which I believe, after playing SWG
devboy00: I am woefully ignorant
HorkusBoy: it was one of the original big two MMO's
devboy00: is Ultima Online still around?
HorkusBoy: yes, it's still there.
devboy00: hmmm, what do you do?
devboy00: just live and stuff?
HorkusBoy: it's like everquest, you fight stuff.
HorkusBoy: the world is a little richer, as I understand it.
devboy00: blah, can't you do a thing without fighting?
HorkusBoy: you can own a house and bake bread and stuff.
HorkusBoy: yeah, you don't have to fight stuff.
devboy00: I like bread
devboy00: mmmm
HorkusBoy: the thing is, that crafting stuff in an online game is kind of a sterile experience.
devboy00: i suppose
devboy00: chris is learning how to make arrows in runescape
HorkusBoy: it's like, I have 10 creativity points. I'm virtually creative. I'm playing a game where I'm pretending to create.
devboy00: it'd be nice to really create
HorkusBoy: Second Life is much better. The creativity you exercise is, in fact, real.
devboy00: can you do that with that hover thing?
[Note: 'hover thing' refers to a vehicle that I made, which devboy00 saw me working on when I showed him SL once.]
devboy00: yah that one
HorkusBoy: yes, that's the one I showed you.
HorkusBoy: There's no fighting though.
HorkusBoy: well, there is, but it's kind of a secondary system.
devboy00: I get enough fighting in wol
devboy00: they have a sdk or some such?
devboy00: how do you make stuff
HorkusBoy: not an sdk, everything takes place in the game world, and is all done through the client.
devboy00: are there scripts
devboy00: ?
HorkusBoy: the client has a kind of 3D modeller, and then you attach scripts to the object to make them do stuff.
devboy00: ones that you write?
HorkusBoy: yes, there's an API and stuff.
devboy00: interesting
HorkusBoy: and it looks like C.
devboy00: sweet
HorkusBoy: And it's free to play now.
devboy00: really.
HorkusBoy: well. 9.95 one time fee.
devboy00: blah, that's not bad
HorkusBoy: and then play forever for free, unless you want to own land.
devboy00: hmmm, for like a house?
HorkusBoy: yeah
devboy00: well, i'm gonna get the new client and see how this works
HorkusBoy: There are a couple of things that I would do differently if I were in charge though.
devboy00: ?
HorkusBoy: for example, the world extends about 250 meters from the ground.
HorkusBoy: there's no outer space.
devboy00: shit it's 81 meg
HorkusBoy: 81?
devboy00: err 18
HorkusBoy: I thought itwas more like 30
HorkusBoy: oh
devboy00: no space eh?
HorkusBoy: yeah, and there are no water-only servers.
devboy00: perhaps they can get that going
devboy00: still?
devboy00: you couldn't fly over water, i remember
HorkusBoy: well, there're quite a few canals, but that's not like the open sea.
devboy00: right
devboy00: you sort of went "whank" against the force field
HorkusBoy: you can't fly over the 'ocean', because it's really just the absence of servers.
devboy00: bummer
devboy00: blah, it died
devboy00: i have to give them money or some shit
HorkusBoy: and, as long as I'm wishing for things.. the fact that things are laid out in 3D space is stupid.
devboy00: what do you mean?
HorkusBoy: well...
HorkusBoy: ...
HorkusBoy: it's difficult to explain.
devboy00: heh
HorkusBoy: Ok..
HorkusBoy: It's like this.
HorkusBoy: Reality is really big.
HorkusBoy: So there's this illusion that space is fractal.
devboy00: k...
HorkusBoy: for example, if you drive past the park, it looks small.
devboy00: right
HorkusBoy: but it you leave the car and walk around in the park, you find that there may be several (or ten or 20) parts of the park that seem from the inside to be big.
devboy00: this makes sense
HorkusBoy: the park has internal areas that are psychologically larger than the park appears from a distance.
HorkusBoy: and that's because things in the real world are big.
devboy00: ok, that makes sense
HorkusBoy: and far away from each other.
devboy00: right
HorkusBoy: right.. so, in virtual reality you are constrained by what a computer can render and by how many humans you have to model every little rock and stream in the universe.
HorkusBoy: so things have a tendancy to get compressed.
devboy00: into a smaller space
HorkusBoy: land is so valuable that none of it goes to waste
devboy00: this makes sense
HorkusBoy: or, more accurately, none of it is irrelevent.
HorkusBoy: stuff seems far away when you have to pass by a bunch of stuff you don't care about to get there.
devboy00: right
HorkusBoy: so, like I said, reality give the impression of being fractal.
devboy00: so they should put in empty space that is non-do-a-thing-able?
devboy00: just to move through?
HorkusBoy: when you look at your house from the outside, it seems small compared to wandering around inside.
devboy00: right
HorkusBoy: it ramifies as you get closer.
HorkusBoy: right... so , the point..
HorkusBoy: it's hard to do in virtual space.
devboy00: i suppose so
HorkusBoy: partially because of the way things are rendered.
devboy00: well, shit
HorkusBoy: like the camera is above and behind you, so you're perception is larger.
devboy00: hmmm
devboy00: true
devboy00: they want my credit card
HorkusBoy: yeah, they have to verify that you exist and are a grownup.
devboy00: i suppose so
HorkusBoy: so, stuff that you want to seem big.. a cathederal for example, seems smaller than it really is in relation to your avatar.
devboy00: can't you change your pov?
HorkusBoy: you can do first person, but it gives you a sense of being disembodied.
HorkusBoy: since you can't feel your arms and legs.
devboy00: right
devboy00: hrmph
HorkusBoy: anyway, you can own a house that's big compared to your avatar, but it seems claustrophobic, partially because of your godlke viewpoint.
devboy00: bummer
HorkusBoy: and it doesn't have the fractally ramifying feeling that you get in real life.
devboy00: so it sucks
HorkusBoy: I don't know how many sims (servers) there are, but they're all something like 128 (I think) meters on a side.
HorkusBoy: which doesn't seem big when the whole world is like maybe 50 of them.
HorkusBoy: just building lincoln would probably take like 10,000 servers.
devboy00: realy
devboy00: blah
devboy00: too much crapola
HorkusBoy: so, when they made the decision that everything should be laid out in a single cartesian universe, they kind of handicapped themselves. Virtual reality has the potential to much more interesting things.
HorkusBoy: they should have used a portal engine.
devboy00: berf?
HorkusBoy: which is a 3D engine where there exist 'rooms', and in these rooms can exist quadrangles with the specific property that they can be looked through and moved through into a different room.
devboy00: ahhh, ok
HorkusBoy: a portal, you see.
devboy00: makes sense
HorkusBoy: and a room can be big, like, say, the woods, or small, like a closet.
HorkusBoy: so you have a cartesian space, linked to other cartesian spaces. and they can be linked together in a way that ramifies and stuff.
devboy00: more like we percieve reality
HorkusBoy: right.
HorkusBoy: every psychologically important space gets it's own dimentions.
HorkusBoy: that lets you do stuff like have Narnia in your wardrobe.
HorkusBoy: in SL, Narnia would have to take up literal space, like next door, and you couldn't move the wardrobe around. And worse, you can stand in Narnia and see a bunch of weird stuff, in the distance that isn't really a part of Narnia.
devboy00: ok, so how does one fix that?
HorkusBoy: by breaking up the world in to small pieces.
devboy00: hmmm, ok
devboy00: well you can't do that for second life i suppose
HorkusBoy: though, they have a bunch of tech designed to stream all the stuff in the world to your computer based on your location. A portal engine would have a more difficult time doing the same thing.
HorkusBoy: right.
devboy00: bleh
HorkusBoy: and, for many of the same reasons as I mentioned above, everything that you build in second life is public.
HorkusBoy: it all exists in the same cartesian space.
devboy00: right
devboy00: you should talk to them
HorkusBoy: I rememeber in MUSHs there used to be some really cool stuff that couldn't exist in SL.
devboy00: I bet they can fix it in a couple seconds
[Note: the above is irony, which you might not get if you don't know devboy00. He's acknowledging that this would, in fact, be a fantastically difficult thing to do.]
HorkusBoy: like, maybe you have an apartment in orbit, and you can look out the windows at an earthscape or something.
devboy00: that'd be cool
HorkusBoy: or a cabin in the deep wilderness for example.
HorkusBoy: that's definately impossible in SL.
HorkusBoy: because of massive overcrowding.
devboy00: right
HorkusBoy: compared to the real world, that is.
devboy00: it's dense with things
HorkusBoy: Psychologically it's like everywhere is New York. Except where building is prohibited, almost every inch is being utilized for something. Walking a couple of blocks in New York feels like walking 5 miles out here, in terms of the number of things that attract your attention.
[Another Note: we live in Nebraska, with cows.]
HorkusBoy: the view out your windows has a medieval castle one day an maybe a giant penis or something the next.
HorkusBoy: thematically uneven, is my point.
devboy00: out in the space that you don't control
HorkusBoy: right.
HorkusBoy: you have no semiotic right-of-way.
[Note: I'm very proud of the phrase 'semiotic right-of-way'.
]devboy00: shit that would be hard
devboy00: to impose some sort of node-ness
HorkusBoy: technically, I'm not sure it's that much harder than what they've done already, though it's already very CPU bound, because of the streaming and the culling (as I understand it). Adding portals would exacerbate that, like if you can see two portals at the same time...portals that occlude portals, etc.
devboy00: that you could still fly through
HorkusBoy: yeah, it wouldn't be like it is now.
HorkusBoy: well..
HorkusBoy: maybe there's still a 'prime material plane'. and everything is linked from there.
devboy00: yep
devboy00: i gotta work
HorkusBoy: yeah, I should be also.
HorkusBoy: I can talk forever about this... but later.
devboy00: yah, but reality would be skewed
devboy00: aight, later
HorkusBoy: yeah there'd be no outskirts or transitional areas, which are important for the psychological feeling of richness/distance. Ok, leaving now.
devboy00: heheh. later
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