I mean who the heck would even approve of this project? It seems that Ernest & Young, Microsoft, Merill Lynch, and others are participating in some study where they can do audio/video conferencing in an online world. As much as I am all for telecommuting, and much of a fanboy of Sony’s more than anything else…. SERIOUSLY?!?!?!

Give me a break. In the corporate world, Cisco rules in the audio/video world because you need some serious bandwidth and understanding of that. Outside of that, there’s nothing that Home brings to the table that hasn’t already been done via voip. Believe me, when I say that I’ve sat on enough conference calls with Netmeeting while telecommuting to know that Home just isn’t it. Period. If it was, Second Life would have already had this sucker made when they released audio support.

Truthfully, these virtual worlds are just that. Virtual. It doesn’t help anyone any to have access to shop around, or what not when you’re trying to have a meeting. It’s just not made for that and it’s not work conducive. But dream on academia. I suppose one day we might want this, but not on this console and not until you can beat out the good ole’ web + audio conferencing one-two combo.

What’s great is that Netflix is actually making progress with support which means that at some point, the content will eventually start flowing I assume. The terrible thing? With the Roku player, I would shell out $99USD and be done with it since i had a Netflix subscription already to watch instant streaming. But with the Xbox 360, you have to have the Netflix subscription AND a Xbox Live Gold account. That’s another $49USD annually that I didn’t want to spend, nor did I want the 360 to begin with and the value doesn’t make it any better. Now, if it was free for streaming like the Roku player, then we’d actually have something to talk about. But currently, to turn a value-added commodity from Netflix into an “obligation” since I’ve paid dues? Thanks but no thanks.

My Kaneva apartment Could you guess I am an LSU Fan?

I full well understand Kaneva is in beta testing and trying to get all the bugs worked out, but when Kaneva went open beta should have said that most of the bugs have been worked out and people can began socializing and having a good time inside their world…. but that is just not the case. I have been able to crash Kaneva several times to the point it takes kaneva’s browser about 5 minutes or longer to scan my system and build up a report to send into the developers, and after putting together the report it will take another minute to 3 minutes to pass all that data to them… and yes I have a rather high speed connection. Each time I have managed to crash kaneva I have signed my reports and given a contact email address where they might contact me back… has that ever happened….. nooooo!

They claim they wanted people that could break the game and furnish complete reports about what they were doing when the break down occurred… you would at least think they would take the courtesy to respond to the extra effort I put into trying to furnish as much information, which lead to the event causing the crash, as I could possibly include.

Renee and Me

Don’t take all the negative I am going to throw out in this article to far into the negative circle… In fact I guess I should tell you now about when my best friend Renee and I ran across this little place about 4 years ago that we thought might have a bit of promise and went to see just what was available in this place called Second Life… Both She and I were already webmasters, myself a true beginner and she a well experienced money maker from the web and attempting to mentor a hard headed beginner… anyway we went into this place called… hell I am not even sure it was called Second Life yet, It was still so new that what few people we saw looked so bad we laughed our butts off at how cartoonish they looked, and there was not very much content in the world at all. Still we looked around and laughed and decided that in time this could be something worth watching… we were intrigued enough to look around for an affiliate program which we were going to join and send traffic that direction, but their affiliate link didn’t work…. so we blew it off.

She and I both greatly regret letting that little event pass us by as the world expanded into Second Life, and grew up without us. I finally joined in Second Life a little over a year ago and begged Renee to come on into it with me then. She waited a year to finally come in and was so piss off at me for not nagging her to come in much sooner.

Now here comes Kanvea and I slide right over there and start trying to get invited into the closed beta test and of course I want my best friend to not be able to say I left her in the dark, so I called Renee and told her about kaneva… well we both remember that we had made a rather large mistake by not getting into Second life in its early days, so we are both over in kaneva now trying to be on the cutting edge of what we both think to be a good idea. But will it really be anything close to what Second Life is?

The avatars are so ugly they are almost scary…. but the first time I went into Second Life that was the case there also.

I like the fact that kaneva wants the learning curve not to be so steep that so many new people are overwhelmed and leave the “game” before even getting an idea of what can be accomplished, but ones ability to build is so limited at this time it is frustrating, and that is only the beginning of Kaneva’s problems.

Kaneva wants to create an environment in which both adults and young people can have fun, which is noble, but failing miserably at this time. There is a reason adults often want to be able to get away from kids to enjoy their recreational time and vice-versa. The maturity levels are simply to far apart in most cases. In Kaneva you can not get away from “annoying immature individuals” (poor substitute for the adjectives and noun I wanted to use) even in your own apartment.

The biggest boondoggle Kaneva is committing, in my opinion, is a serious lack of communication with the users of Kaneva. Emails go unanswered, announcements go unfulfilled, forums ignored, and user created content…. well that is a whole new post!

Howard said it was on YouTube if you do a search for “leroy jenkins” indeed it’s the top search result with over 425,000 views. I’ve embedded below to illustrate how seriously some people take their gaming:

Although I didn’t understand a lot of what these high level WoW characters were talking about — my character after almost a month of playing is only at level 20 — it seems like they had a plan rolling until one of the party just shouts “Leroy Jenkins!” and runs in by himself, pulling all the baddies onto his character. Must admit I chuckled at how quickly the high level monsters dispatched the party.

I’m not sure what the crying was about though (embarassed that he got everybody killed?) since WoW isn’t like Everquest in that you lose experience when you die. It would suck a lot worst if some of the characters actually lost levels that take a long time to build at higher levels. But tear-worthy? Don’t think so.

Update 11:07am PST: According to the Leeroy Jenkins Wikipedia entry there are widespread reports that this video was staged. Still pretty funny:

Regardless of the sketchy plans, a key fact that almost proves it was staged is that to “activate” the hatchling dragonlings, the player must click on them or walk over them. The video indicates that his error was in running in too early, before his team expected it, but it was not implied that he also clicked on the eggs or walked over them. Either way, it would require a further presumption that he went as far as clicking on them for what would seem a completely absent purpose, other than perhaps to stage a show.

I knew something didn’t seem right about this one. Machinima at it’s finest?

While reviewing the debate site ConvinceMe.net recently I created an open debate with Real Life vs. Second Life. Meant more for comedic value than seriousness, it’s fun to see the “arguments” that follow, particularly the first one from tsm26:

I personally like the much higher polygon count in the real world.

There’s a complaint about the Mac version of Second Life and a rebuttal saying to get a “decent computer.”

Good to see folks joining in and keeping things lighthearted. By posting here, I’m probably stacking the deck (a wee bit?) against Real Life, but too bad, go ahead and get over there and register your virtual conscience vote. Being the creator of the debate, I’m not allowed to vote, but if I was you know I’d be all over Second Life.

Then again I’m writing this during the second half of the Superbowl with throat lubed by a couple Budweisers …

Go Real Life Chicago Bears!

Did you realize people were auctioning off virtual goods on eBay? A search for “second+life” as of this writing yielded 107 items, most of which were items without any bids on large amounts of Linden dollars (pictured above). Maybe I’m not looking in the right place or maybe eBay has already pulled all the listings, but I didn’t find any virtual goods being sold on eBay. Not even one listing. I never thought of selling my Dice Cube on eBay but it looks that isn’t allowed any more.

Durzy pointed out that in reality, the company is just now following through with a pre-existing policy, as opposed to creating a new one. The policy on digitally delivered goods states: “The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner.” Given the nebulous nature of ownership in online games, eBay has decided the prudent decision is to remove the possibility for players to sell what might be the IP of other parties via their service. Mr. Durzy made it a point to say that initial listings of virtual property would not have punitive actions.

Valleywag which lately as frequently been making snarky Second Life and anti-VR related posts points out that:

eBay founder-chairman Pierre Omidyar … also invested in Linden Lab, makers of the virtual world Second Life

Just to backup how I’m coming up with “frequently” I decided to do a Valleywag search for “virtual” and “second life” to see how many recent stories (within the last few weeks) contained anti-VR snark, detailed below:

1/26/07: eBay doesn’t want your virtual goods – Linked above
1/24/07: The final moments of a Second Life resident – “The deserted Sears showroom was set up just this month, to an enthusiastic reception by marketers.”
1/23/07: BBC to offer avatars to real children – “This is not to be confused with the ageplay areas of Second Life, the Benchmark-backed virtual economy, where perverts or sex chat workers merely pretend to be 7-12 year-old kids.”
1/23/07: Virtual world’s supposed economy is ‘a pyramid scheme’ – “Linden Lab’s virtual world — a much-hyped online amusement arcade of cartoon porn, avatars of IBM executives and frog bands –”

Must admit I’ve never seen one frog band or IBM executive firsthand in SL, but surely they exist. Cartoon porn? Yes, you’ll find that in SL, but then lots of porn exists outside SL too. I’m not sure there is any higher concentration of adult material inside Second Life than there is outside. Are there more casinos and gambling in Second Life than Nevada? I’d say no. What do you think?

1/17/07: Press digs into cover star’s seedy past – “Anshe Chung Studios is the prime example of a business made possible by Second Life, their signature avatar making it to the front cover of BusinessWeek magazine; and blue-chip companies such as IBM and Sears, largely unaware of the sex chat that underpins the virtual world, have rushed to allocate marketing budgets to the creation of digital islands; and Second Life, if it fails, may well provide the iconic story of the second online bust.”
1/16/07: A virtual world’s tarnished icon – “Second Life’s most ludicrous scandal, the “sexual assault” of the virtual world’s richest entrepreneur by a flock of flying penises, just got more baroque.”
1/16/07: Second Life’s Press Hype – “Benchmark-backed Linden Lab claims 2.7m ‘residents’ of Second Life but concedes only a tenth of that number visit the 3D environment each month.”

There were at least three Valleywag posts referencing Anshe Chung’s “seedy past” as an SL escort, including Poster avatar’s seedy past. They have driven home the point that Chung was formerly an escort in case anybody else forgot.

1/12/07: Why gambling won’t fund Linden’s virtual world: “Reality check: there’s only one reason to prefer the crude Benchmark-backed 3D environment over a purpose-built online casino. The Department of Justice, which tracks down online gambling in the US, and Paypal, through which many Second Life users fund their accounts, simply haven’t grokked yet what’s going on.”

1/9/07: V-tail: “But less forgivable is Rubel’s latest crush: on Second Life, and efforts by Sears and others to promote shopping in the clunky virtual world. “Get ready for V-tail,” gushes Rubel.”

Got to admit I laughed out loud at the absurdity of the phrase V-tail, too. Snarky fun in this case. What’s not to despise about marketing catchphrase.

Increased Valleywag snark a good or bad thing?
I’m in the camp that believes bad publicity is better than no publicity. If you wind the clock back a mere 90 days ago, you will find the Valleywag anti-VR coverage has slipped from nearly daily to weekly and going back even further becomes a couple posts a month or less.

Clearly Valleywag appears to be going through a let’s regularly bash Second Life phase. To balance out the hype, I think it’s important to have anti-VR coverage, hence posts like this one detailing where to find the snark if you want more of it, but if you only read Valleywag, one might believe Second Life was Hell on virtual earth.

Important to note that snark is Valleywag’s M.O and they’ve been brutal to Google (particularly Marissa Mayer), Yahoo, Microsoft and many other companies in the past. Time will tell if all their snark toward virtual worlds, primarily Second Life, is deserved or the type of tabloid trash you find at every grocery store checkout area. For the time being this author is putting it in the latter column, but sometimes the tabloid trash can be good fun. Just don’t take too seriously.

This is a one page satire site created by Darren Barefoot. Thanks for the laugh this morning, Darren.

Update 11:26am PST: Good to see Linden Lab gets the joke too.

First couple of months I saw a huge potential for making money and having a good time creating stuff. But I also saw a lot of risk and was cautious. I didn’t have a lot of money that I can invest in something new so I only put in $10. I decided to stay a free member because I didn’t need a place of my own. Found sandboxes where I could make anything I wanted without needing to pay. The only way I could see myself making money would be creating something and selling it. I spent time testing and playing around with moving objects but didn’t come up with something that I thought would be interesting to others. I didn’t have a lot of time so I decided I would explore the world and see what others have done.

This opened my eyes to some very creative people making magnificent places and fun games. I played lot of games, attended some live events and visited wonderful places with beautiful scenes. Almost took my breath away seeing what people could make in this world. I gambled a bit but wasn’t happy to see my money disappear so quickly. I also tried the camping chairs but the money was too slow and too boring. I loved the games like slingo, tringo and dark life. I made a lot of money from some of these games. I also made money from attending the scriptschool radio program on Fridays.

At this time I have made over $100 US dollars in the world. The majority I put into a bank in Second Life which I know is a risky thing to do but that’s ok. I have never taken money out of the world and might not for awhile. I have introduced Second Life to my nephew who is on the teen world which he says is boring. My best friend also tried it but she only logged in twice and was never seen again. Everyone else just couldn’t understand the reason for it and looked too complicated.

Here are some of the problems I have with Second Life:

1. The amount of people who can be in a sim at the same time is too low. For movie screening it might not be a problem as long as there are other places showing it at the same time. But if a sim is full it should direct people to other sims that are showing the same movie. For townhalls and big chatting events their needs to be a way of others to read and interact with the chat if it gets too full. For virtual events where everyone is watching a group of avatars moving around on stage or building something there needs to be a way of showing the event on screens in other sims. I remember attending interview chats in AOL where they had a group of people separated in different rooms but could all see the guest chatting and could send in questions. I still would rather have more people being able to be in the same sim at the same time. It’s a virtual world where we all want to see and chat with everyone else.
2. The world is not stable enough to support business inside especially small businesses. Every hour the grid is down means less money for business. It’s not stable enough to support live events where time is a very important part. I wanted to attend a very special event once but the person who was doing it couldn’t login after the grid went down. This really gets frustrating. I see so many people complaining about new features being added and the bugs not being fixed. I understood all the programmers couldn’t work on the bugs all at the same time. But my opinions are changing. Adding new features will only bring in more bugs. Get it stable first then add more. I hope the open source will provide more stability. I personally have high hopes that this could help out a lot.
3. SL viewer is slow on some computers. My fastest computer has an AMD athlon XP 2000+ CPU, 1 Gig RAM, nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Graphic card. My slower computer has an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, 640 MB RAM, Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 Graphic card. The weird thing is the faster computer runs Second Life slower then my slower computer. I have tried to duplicate the options on both computers. I have it working a bit better now but had to turn off a lot of options. This is a big problem with new users. It should be addressed before more users enter the world.
4. The TOS scares me. Especially reading about what happened to the Furnation sims. There needs to be more rights for people inside Second Life. I hate hearing about good people losing money and all their hard work disappear for no good reason. Everyone who puts in so much time and hard work into the world needs to know they won’t be pushed out for bigger business or some scam. I see that all of us are partners in making this virtual world the best place on the Internet. This place is unique and can be very popular if we all work together. That also includes the lindens making sure that scammers get punished and not good people who follow all the rules.

I have to say I am very positive and willing to give every decision the benefit of the doubt. I can see that the lindens are trying their best to make the majority of people happy and also running their business for profit. There have been some decisions that I feel were not right like closing of the forums. The blog only gives the official news and updates. The comments are very hard to read and sort through. Some decisions were totally right and others I still don’t have an opinion about.

So this year I am going to be doing more building and working on some basic scripts. I will still look for those special live events I love! I also want to see a big game created in the world something like Dark Life but much bigger. I might not start my business in second life this year but I can always change my mind if things improve. Maybe I’ll get some inspiration and start a game of my own or put on a big event. You never know in this virtual world

Mechanical simulation — which is used, for example, to predict the crashworthiness of a new car design — is a $1.5 billion business and is growing at 10% to 12% a year, said Marc Halpern, research director at Gartner Inc. He says using virtual reality is less expensive and quicker than building and testing complex prototypes.

I didn’t realize VR was this big a business. $1.5 billion for only one segment of the marketplace? Wow. Just to stick up for my wife (a little), i don’t think she intended to blanket cover virtual reality as a whole, but was talking more specifically about online virtual worlds like Second Life and Runescape. She seems to view these places as glorified chatrooms with little value. Can’t say there was a single VTOR author that agreed, including me, but we can work on her each week showing her where there is value beyond what might appear on the surface.

Manufacturers of farm equipment, car seats, mufflers and other products have joined automakers and aircraft manufacturers in using the technology to speed up and improve product design, train workers and configure factories and stores.

While all of this is admittedly happening with non consumer grade virtual reality products and services, is it that far-fetched to imagine this type of VR inside worlds like Second Life someday?

One of the VTOR authors mentioned that it was difficult to explain the attraction and value of virtual worlds like Second Life to others. This is something I’ve heard before, although my wife has been registered in SL almost as long as me. She doesn’t do any business in there and has shown little interest in exploring virtual worlds. She’d rather read a book, watch a good movie or watch a live concert in person offline. I was successful getting her to admit that she likes money, so if she saw my virtual business generating a lot of $$$ I think that would go a long way to altering her perception. Somehow, I doubt she’ll be impressed that if I show here that while sleeping I made a L$600 sale for something I created, but hey, $2 USD is still $2 USD to me. I get excited by making money from creations and I still bend over and pick up pennies. Sure, I have to work on more products so that there are a couple more zeroes, but you need to start somewhere. How’s that for motivation?

Do you have spouse or significant other Virtual Reality support?
My own situation made me wonder about others. Does your spouse or significant other support your explorations in virtual worlds or does he/she think there are more productive things you could/should be doing? What about your friends that you don’t converse with online? What do they think about virtual reality and virtual worlds like Second Life?

Kara gave her opinion that online time spent in Runescape and SL was “worthless”, a point I would dearly have loved to debate. Don’t get me wrong, I think SL needs to be a first hand experience to make sense, and I don’t think that any amount of secondhand experience arguing the case would actually persuade someone. But Kara said that if Second Life shut down tomorrow, the time that had been spent there would be so much wasted time, and I just don’t believe that to be true.

SL is an experience like any other, we are never unchanged by our experiences. People who have entered online worlds and spent time in them often find that they have an experience which is beyond space and time, bringing them a feeling that they have had the experience of being in the same place as a group of people who are physically all over the world.

I have actually given up on explaining what Second Life gives to me, to people who don’t have experience of virtual worlds. There ought to be a name for that … Virtual Virgins? Thing is, I don’t think anything anyone said to me would have prepared me for what I found in Second Life. I found community, challenge, creativity and a lot of other things beginning with c. I have learned more about myself in three years in Second Life that a lifetime of life in the real world … and the things I have learned will stay with me, and have informed my real life already.

In the real world, you may be accepted or rejected because of the way you look. That may happen in the virtual world too, but there you will look the way you want to look. You can change your sex, species and anything about your physical appearance you wish, and therefore can observe the differences in how people relate to you.

In the real world you may be confined to your house by illness, agoraphobia or fear of mugging … in the virtual world you need fear nothing except possibly stumbling over pornography or disturbing ideas. Generally though, you can find what you want to find and ignore the things with which you’d rather not come into contact.

In the real world, people are friends with others for all sorts of reasons. You may have no choice but to see boring Bertha because you like to stop off at the local pub, or you may be saddled with gossiping Gwen, because she invites herself in for coffee. You may have to have dinner with the boss, or lunch with the in-laws and spend a considerable amount of time being nice to people with whom you have nothing in common.

In the virtual world, you can choose to have a lot of friends, close friends or no friends at all. You can be solitary, gregarious, or any combination of the two that suits you. Maybe for the first time in your life, you can find out which does suit you, without worrying that people will be offended, or never invite you for the weekend, or cut you out of their will.

For a while, for a lot of people, they are unbalanced by the virtual world. No matter how much they try to be the same in the virtual space as they are in real life, it is a culture shock which tends to tip you off balance. Many people find it hard to avoid the feeling that the world allows them access to people’s thoughts and minds, in a way that one doesn’t achieve in chat rooms and message boards. I do believe that is an illusion and that in fact people are generally quite as guarded after the first few months as they are in real life. But initially many people will be very open about their lives, thoughts, hopes and dreams.

Nearly everyone who comes to Second Life realises that there is a huge amount of creativity involved in the world. Nearly everyone is creating something, whether building, scripting, texturing, eventing. People look for their niche in the world, and some people are lucky enough to discover something new which not only gives them pleasure and enjoyable activity, but also an income.

Some people learn skills they haven’t had before… everyone learns something, I think, if they spend any amount of time in a virtual world. You have to learn new skills simply to walk, talk and interact with the world, but more than this, you learn in a way which is individual to you things which are individual to you.

If Second Life closed tomorrow, there would initially be a terrible hole in my life, but I can honestly say, hand on heart, that the things I have learned there have enriched my life and will continue to do so, even if I never log on to another computer again.

As for Runescape, some academics at Brunel University, which is close to my home, set out to discover if it was true, as some parents feared, that the game was having a detrimental effect on the socialisation of the children who played it. Their conclusion was that there were a lot of positive benefits to the game. You can read their conclusions here.