DMC on the left and the new Zyngo game on the right.

 I’m sorry to see that some of the bigger places I used to play tringo and slingo are gone. IceDragons Playpen for example. Slingo turned into DMC and is rarely searchable in the events. Zyngo which is similar to DMC but is created by another person is now the most playable game. They have Zyngo multi boards and solo machines all over second life.

 Teazers where I learned some stuff in classes is now gone. I did find some other classes in other places which I will want to try. Couldn’t find any places which show Rocky Horror Picture Show anymore but MST3K theaters are still around. Dr. who has gotten a lot bigger with a great place to visit with a museum and fun stuff to do. Couldn’t find any podcasters around or adam curry’s avatar anymore. Surprisingly I can’t find too many places that have tringo anymore. There are some new RPG games which are being played worldwide with vampires. Need to check that out soon. Dark Life is still running in a new place with new scripts too.

Big brother in SL and fishing in SL.

 Found Ice hockey with their leagues still being played. Seems like they are going strong. Snail races are still being done but in a different area I think. I missed this weekend’s race so not sure if it’s all the same yet. Fishing is still being played in the same places I found and updated to a new version.

 Universal Motown Records Group, movietickets.com and Infinite mind is still there but geek squad, sundance channel and virtual nbc are gone. Found a pizza hut place you can order your RL pizza’s from which I haven’t tried yet.

 I recently found a blog post which describes a nielsen rating for March 2009 of Top PC Game Titles. Second Life came in at #2 with WOW at the very top. There is a big discussion going on in that post which I’ll leave for interested users to read. What the chart really says is that users of Second Life play it a lot more hours then users of the other games. There was also a correction post describing that SL was the 8th game in popularity in the nielsen ratings. In my opinion, Second Life, has a small amount of users but those users are dedicated and find many reasons to play for hours a day. I find the nielsen chart to be very interesting from my own personal experiences. I find myself wanting to find new places to explore, create new stuff and make new friends. SL is more a social place for many people I talk to. There is a wide amount of different communities for everything. I also find a lot more international people doing business inside SL.

 I still think SL has some promises but there are some major competition coming up this and next year. I think Second Life will still be the best virtual world for user created content. Some of the upcoming virtual worlds may get more advertisers from big companies, though. That could get more users to their worlds and leave SL behind.

 None of my accounts are there to lie or be very different from myself. All are aspects of my life that I like but don’t blend very well. That might not be clear but it feels comfortable to me. Each avatar has their own place and groups they like. One loves to dance at clubs with DJ’s. Johnnyrs plays zyngo and looks for games to make money. Another looks for fetish places to have fun. Then there’s the one who is usually found in an adult area.

 Two of my accounts can make money every day. Zyngo can bring in some good money daily if I’m lucky. Some people are making thousands of lindens a day. I don’t make that much. I am starting to use the profile picks camping system to make some money as well. Regular sim camping makes money too but the money is so small that I’d rather do something else now. Dance clubs, tipping and special contests are other ways I’m making money too. In the future I want to describe some of the different ways of making easy money in a future post.

 Lot of money trees and other camping systems now check to see if you have credit info before paying. I found a few that will check to see if you have used that credit info to buy something yet or if you are a paying account before paying. I didn’t find any problems with this stuff. Age verification was easy for me. Soon SL will restrict access to adult areas using the age verification which could cause some problems with others. Right now it’s the owners job to restrict access.

 The one thing I find different from LOTRO and SL is the community. For me at this time I like a community with very little drama and changes. LOTRO provided too much drama and changes that drove friendships to fall apart. I found some small issues ended up to be bigger then it should be. It also got boring after doing the same raid over and over again. In SL I am finding very little change and less drama with the groups I am hanging out with. Lot of support from groups for many issues which I needed. Something different to do when I want a change. I will go back to LOTRO one of these days but only when I’m ready. I resubscribed to runescape this month also for another form of entertainment. Lot of changes in that game which I’ll be posting about.

Are you approaching this with a virtual worlds mentality first, or a gamer mentality? The contextual difference and expectations are vast. Sony has a great framework here to a) create mini games in a social/waiting space, b) social spaces around brands (there are others built, not released yet: Watchmen, Red Bull, Warhawk), and c) a tremendous catalog of media between movies and music.

Eric is a smart guy who is well traveled in the virtual world and MMO gaming space. When I saw his comment I nodded thinking yeah, I see where they could go too, but we’ve been down this road with other virtual areas. Kaneva? Lots of potential there too. Don’t recall that materializing yet.

Eric nailed a big problem with Second Life perception that has always plagued them. Interesting noting he also commented on a recent VTOR post saying he was selling “the last of” his sims in Second Life and getting out too. I think patience only goes so far and the amount of time people are willing to give companies who are working on something virtual is shrinking not increasing. Show me how it’s useful now, show me why I spend any time here now, not how you think it could be cool someday. Maybe.

Who does Second Life appeal to? Is it the virtual world crowd who wants limitless creativity? Gamers? Or both? When I got into Second Life I wasn’t thinking of it like a game platform although I went on to create games on it. One of the other VTOR authors ran a casino in world for a little while and became a good customer and supporter of a game I had in world. Success was fairly short-lived there as Linden Lab declared casinos in world as a form of gambling and goodbye to all that. But the point I’m trying to make was Second Life to me was about making it easier to customize a virtual world. While there were other attempts at doing this, Second Life has done the best at this to date.

HOME should promote playing games on the PS3 and it doesn’t do enough of that yet

Conversely, I went into Playstation Home with the impression that it would be more gaming focused. Sure, I expected some commercialism. Nothing is free in the real or virtual world.  I hoped to find a cool, in my dreams revolutionary, interface to replace the somewhat boring but functional Xbox dashboard. As I wandered around Home and saw tons of beautiful scenery that I couldn’t interact with and a store in the mall that had a messages like: “nothing available yet” (the Stuff store) and a scattered few extremely simplistic games (breakout? lol, come on), I could only shake my head.

The most excitement found in my first experience with Home may have been awkwardly searching for ‘secret’ keycodes to enter into some areas. So secret that one could easily find the codes on the web and other people in the area pushing and shoving their virtual avatars to enter the door key codes. By the way, here’s a tip: just have a friend invite you into these secret rooms and then add to your favorites and access without the key codes. You’ll skip the rush.

Someone in the chat suggested you might also receive those codes by playing the game in the area, but I didn’t try that game (they were all being played, naturally). What I really wanted to do was be able to put some arcade game machines, pool table, air hockey, heck, why not a mini-bowling lane in my apartment and invite friends over. Nope, can’t do that. So instead you are supposed to wait in line for what, a small few crowded bowling lanes? Not even the PS3 faithful think that’s enough bowling lanes for the masses.

With that said, I still think there is potential here to do what is described above. This would be cool for gamers, especially if the games are exclusive to be played inside Home that would drive people to their home virtual space. I hope that’s where Sony is headed. Crowded public areas do not appeal to me either virtual or real world. I was impressed with how many avatars were in these public area without any slowdown or lag. Linden Lab needs to contract with the Sony scaling engineers because they got this part figured out. That said, it wasn’t easy or smooth logging into Home with the massive onrush of people checking it out, so that’s where the bottleneck is happening. Once logged in my experience from a lag standpoint was unnoticeable.

Also was able to chat with Darius via bluetooth headset while navigating different menus and even separate areas. You want to “call” your friend to enable that type of persistent chat. That is a useful function but didn’t test to see if it was possible to have multiple people. A keyboard is a necessity in group chat if you can’t do voice. The whole push R2 trigger to talk thing has to go too for phone conversations with friends. I can see the R2 thing making sense in open space conversations but it should be non push to talk in phone calls.

Darius lamented there not being enough brands represented yet. Two games with areas? That’s all? I would have thought they’d have a space set aside for every game in the store. No, not a detailed walk around area, but at least a generic room as a placeholder space.

In these spaces you could teleport in and find a link to the store to download add-ons or trailers and perhaps some Home-only downloads. I see the potential here but they are missing a golden opportunity with the number of people eager to see what they are up to showing them an experience with too little content. I know, I know, it’s open beta, it’s not finished. Guess I’m saying with as long as they’ve been working on this, they should have had more.

Effort feels rushed for holiday season 2008

The Home open beta feels too rushed. Before you say, wait, how can an open beta be rushed? Well, just login and see for yourself.

It’s like the dev team needed another year in closed beta to get this thing closer to the way I described but executive pressure and their own timeline goal of releasing it in the Fall (which they missed anyway, December not Fall) made it a necessity kicking something out now. As much as I was eager to see this – yes, even in beta form – they should have put out a statement saying they were increasing private-only invites but it was still way too unfinished to make it an open beta. I would have been frustrated and maybe even bitched about this in a blog post saying what’s taking so long but you only get one first impression.

I realize this is open to debate. Let people in and test the mass scaling capability. That’s an important part of the testing before adding too much more content, but many of those who see this won’t be as excited about coming back because there wasn’t enough to see and do.  You have to weigh these concerns when rolling out an open public release. Sure, you can chat and pay to setup some virtual club. Whoopie, you can do that from a website for free.

Where does Sony go from here? I hope they stay game-focused with Home. They don’t appear to be going down the Second Life open virtual world path which is good. If Darius somehow did think – and I doubt he did – he was entering some Second Life-like world, he would have been hugely disappointed there too. But if he was looking at it as a cool interface to enhance gaming on the PS3 it’s a bust there as well.

Snake eyes either way

More work needed. More effort. Maybe in a year if Sony doesn’t pull a Google Lively and unplug, we’ll see something useful. I can’t see logging into this game UI to view movie or game trailers in the theater or walk around my apartment that has no games in it or go shopping with real world $$ regularly for fake clothes and furniture. Now if they put games in that Stuff store or create more mini-games that can be playable among the crowds, that changes things.

There is something to be said about making a social area to find people to play games with but they could have done that through their website much more inexpensively. You can’t even go out of Home and do much in the Playstation dashboard while in Home, why not? All the flash, all the cash in an open launch beta decision that was rash.

There is potential here as Eric suggested but it could be so far off from becoming a reality that it will be too late.

It’s curious that TimesOnline is calling this Sony’s own version of Second Life. The article offers additional details about the monetization strategy for Home:

Sony has high hopes of Home becoming a digital clubhouse where those with time on their hands can let their avatars hang out together online. Most of the service’s initial features will be free, and you are given a harbourside apartment that you can furnish as you choose. If you want to embellish your virtual home with fancy furniture or bling up your avatar with posh clothing, this will inevitably cost real money. For example, a pair of jeans will cost about 85p and a flash apartment will cost about £4. This will be paid for via PlayStation’s online store.

For Sony’s sake they better hope that their world doesn’t become the PS3 Second Life. It seems these days that more people I know who once were excited about Second Life are getting out, not in. On the other hand, Second Life has had an impressive amount of press written about it, both good and bad, so maybe Sony wants the comparison to be made.

The official Playstaton Home forums are already buzzing about Home. Some, well, over-exuberance in effect I saw already like Home was going to “kill Xbox Live” — I’ve been looking forward to seeing what Home has to offer and will be in there tomorrow taking a detailed look. Am looking forward to hearing/reading fellow VTOR author and PS3 owner Darius opinion on Home as well.

This positive Home is launching news comes among much more grim news that Sony is sacking 8,000 of its 160,000 employees.

The textual evidence:

Feeling strangely melancholy about this. The writing was on the wall. Our group wasn’t using the space any more for meetings or get togethers or, well anything. We’ve moved away from using the Linden Dollar for our dealings and back to the RL dollar. I’m hopeful that we can find another virtual world to inhabit and possibly start trading using those funds instead.

On January 4, 2009 my yearly premium account at Second Life is set to renew for $72. The only reason I can see to continue that subscription is to get the weekly L$500 stipend which is grandfathered from the L$300 new premium members receive weekly. I’m leaning toward putting those dollars toward a different virtual world instead.

Homeless. Virtually. Now. Where should we buy a new virtual home?

This is bound to stoke the fires of my friendly challenge to get fellow VTOR author Darius to buy an Xbox 360. He says there aren’t enough good reasons to buy one. On Black Friday, the Xbox 360 sold 3 consoles for every one PS3.

Kotaku:

The Xbox 360 experienced “record-breaking console sales” during the post-Thanksgiving weekend, Microsoft corporately gloated today. It estimated a 25% increase in sales from Black Friday 2007 and boasted that it outsold the PlayStation 3 three-to-one.

Darius, you paying attention? No knock on the PS3 which is a sweet and infinitely more reliable gaming console than the Xbox 360 but the whole buy one for the Blu-ray deal isn’t as compelling any more when you can get standalone Blu-ray players for around half the cost of a PS3. Add to that the anemic Blu-ray library compared to DVD.

Microsoft released their fall update recently which added custom avatars (mine is pictured above, dig the suit?) while Sony continues to keep their Home project in private beta. Will they open up the beta to the general public before the end of the year? Will it make any difference?

Talk about virtual life being snubbed out quickly! It’s like you create an avatar, walk around, get to know a few places and then BAM! Gunshot to the head from some dark alley. Come on, Google, give Lively a little more chance:

Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year

Virtual world can be harsher than the real world, indeed.

the two met online in 2003 and married in 2005 both physically and in a lavish Second Life ceremony. According to Ms. Taylor they spent as much of their time together in the virtual world as they did in the physical one. When she suspected her husband’s Second Life avatar of cheating she hired a virtual private detective to catch him in the act.

The virtual private detective was a type of service in SL I didn’t realize existed and it even has its own name, cyber spying:

Last month, a 43-year-old Japanese woman killed her virtual husband after he broke off their relationship on the popular game MapleStory, where the two met. Spouses neglected by their partners’ constant video-game or Internet use have banded together, calling themselves “cyber widowers” or “gamer widows.” Cyber spying is also common.

Darius wrote about Maple Story back in October 2007 and it seemed a little too cartoonish to interest me at the time. Seems like there is more virtual to reality stuff going on there than I imagined.

Killed, seriously? I’m all for living your virtual life to the fullest and even taking some aspects of it out of the virtual world, but killing somebody for what was done inside a virtual world? That’s crazy. And if there are too many stories like this, it will just make real world courts clamp down and make the virtual world increasingly restrictive. Where is the fun in that?

 

Elsewhere, dozens of Obama supporters clapped, danced and cheered inside the behemoth virtual world Second Life immediately after the Democratic nominee seized the electoral votes. Many avatars were left out of the virtual celebration in Obama’s unofficial Second Life headquarters because the digital enclave had reached maximum capacity Tuesday.

Although running out of space at Second Life may not be surprising, I wonder if researchers Bringsjord and Smith are going to program this virtual evil bot named ‘E’ to react according to how avatar crowded it is around it?

The researchers have placed E in his own virtual world and written a program depicting a scripted interview between one of the researcher’s avatars and E. In this example, E is programmed to respond to questions based on a case study in Peck’s book that involves a boy whose parents gave him a gun that his older brother had used to commit suicide.

If you see ‘E’ walk the other way, this virtual bot is bad to the bone. Thanks Boing Boing for the after Halloween virtual chills. Curious what a search for ‘evil’ under places in Second Life would return, I typed in and the results are shown in the picture above.

Funny thing, while logging in to run this search, a stranger holding a KFC chicken bucket stopped by our VTOR parcel to offer me some chicken.

Nothing evil about this offer. Thanks Shaolin!