virtual-worlds
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Linden Lab relocates Brighton UK office
Sharp-eyed Massively readers spotted Linden Lab Brighton office staffers hard at work shifting premises over the weekend, with everything being moved upstairs. Was this some sort of fiery, demonstrative protest where office furniture would be flung from the roof? Could it have been some penthouse variant on the yard-sale, and we could get a deal on that slightly balky laser-printer that we've had our eye on for a while? Alas, neither was actually the case. The Lab was moving to larger premises within Brighton's prominent Tower Point building.
Linden Lab investigates new/updated technologies for Second Life
Over the last few weeks, Linden Lab staff have been talking about a few upcoming Second Life projects during their in-world office-hours sessions. Now the Lab has always been quick to stress that the accuracy and reliability of information obtained through those venues is questionable, and that we shouldn't assume that anything said at them is actually accurate. With that in mind, we went back to the Lab about several identifiable (or at least apparent) projects to get the skinny on them and find out what's actually happening with them, and where they're at.
Virtual worlds for kids an ever-growing market
Kids -- particularly tweens -- are big business today, with an ever-larger percentage of the family budget being used for and influenced by this age group. Smart businesses everywhere are hurrying to get in on the gold mine, and MMO gaming is no exception. MMOs and virtual worlds like Free Realms and Club Penguin are enjoying growing success, and there is still plenty of room on the bandwagon. More and more MMO companies are turning an eye to console development, and that road runs both ways: The Escapist took a look at the possibility of upcoming virtual worlds for the 8-12 year old market. The focus was on franchises that have traditionally been known to be console only, particularly those coming from Nintendo. Nintendo enjoys a nearly unshakable hold on the young casual console gamer market, thanks mostly to the Mario franchise. A virtual world filled with Mario and all of his friends? Why not? Take a look at what The Escapist has to say on the matter.
The Virtual Whirl: Of villains and crusaders
This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're taking a look at the vigilante side of intellectual property rights. For many, it seems like a good idea to mass-report or name-and-shame intellectual property rights violators whenever and wherever you see them ... but is it really?
Xstreet wishlists beta for Second Life users
Linden Lab's pushing Valentine's day in Second Life pretty hard this year, particularly the commercial aspects of it. In fact, it feels like it's being pushed hard enough that it has taken on a slightly creepy and embarrassing air, rather like that guy at the Christmas party who won't shut up about the mistletoe. Nevertheless, the Lab's implemented an open beta of product wishlists on their Web-based shopping portal, Xstreet. There doesn't seem to be much that is overtly difficult, weird or special about the implementation, though we'd question the wisdom of launching a public beta of the feature right on the verge of the heavily-promoted Valentine's day. Far better, we'd think, to let it settle a while first and get the inevitable kinks out of it before a major commercial date rolls around.
Second Life official forums to be replaced Tuesday
Linden Lab is in the throes of closing the official Second Life forums and is creating alternative discussion spaces in its Clearspace blog/forum hybrid. According to previous figures from Linden Lab staff, fewer than 700 of 18.1 million registered Second Life accounts ever participated in the official forums provided by the Lab. The partial closure of many of the most heavily trafficked areas of those forums when Lab announcements were migrated back out to the blog in 2006 did little to boost participation in the official forums. The official vbulletin-based forums "did not scale" according to Linden Lab and were difficult to maintain, even for such modest usage levels as they experienced.
Rumor: Bonus payment premium incentive not being paid to upgrading Second Life users? [updated]
There's a been talk going around among users that a Linden Dollar bonus made to users that sign up for Second Life premium accounts is not paid to users who are upgrading an account from basic to premium. That is, it was said that only users creating a new premium account got the bonus and users who upgraded did not, despite Linden Lab's advertising material apparently promoting it for both. A number of you wrote in asking us about that yesterday, and we contacted Linden Lab for you to get an answer one way or another. That line of questioning bore some definitive fruit.
The Virtual Whirl: The meaning of life
"Get a life", "Get a first life", and so on, and so forth. If you're involved in virtual environments, you've probably heard this phrase a lot. Wagner James Au of New World Notes suggests that people who use those phrases are among the least likely to 'have a life' themselves. Well, we'd say he's half right. It's more that the people you hear it from don't really have much of an idea of what life is all about and how it works. It's not an uncommon theme. Botgirl Questi points out that in order to see something more clearly, sometimes you have to look at it from a very different perspective. This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a couple perspectives for a spin, and talk about the meaning of life actually is, insofar as the phrase "get a life" is concerned.
Linden Lab acquires Avatars United, Enemy Unknown AB
In a move that will no doubt perplex, flummox and befuddle many media commentators and technology columnists who erroneously believed that Second Life was a Web 2.0 social networking tool, Linden Lab has acquired social networking site, Avatars United (and developers of same, Enemy Unknown AB). This also has the side-effect of shooting down any semblance of Wallace Linden's identity piece last week being an overture of a conversation, instead making it look like the usual introduction to a Linden Lab fait accompli. We've written about Avatars United on a couple of previous occasions, but never really had much call to get involved ourselves. The social networking tool includes a large number of MMOGs and non-game virtual environments, being best known for it's strong application support of open-ended space-based MMOG, EVE Online.
Will the real topic please stand up? Anatomy of a community communications breakdown
Traditionally, Linden Lab's blog communications have seemed to be reserved for things that had been finalized, were being finalized but already set in stone, or may not have been set in stone but gave that appearance by being nearly identical both before and after user-feedback. All this punctuated by a smattering of video tutorials, infomercials and statistics. Wallace Linden's recent attempt at (what we think might possibly be) a productive conversation on Second Life identification linking looks like a bit of a failure, mostly because it seems to have failed to distinguish itself from these traditional developer/operator communication patterns.
The Virtual Whirl: Community guide to Virtual Worlds
Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it. Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more. Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.
Registrations open for SL Pro! conference, February
Registrations are presently open for SL Pro! a two day conference being run by Linden Lab for 'serious' professional Second Life content-creators to take place in late February this year, in Second Life itself, with a bit of help from NMC (the New Media Consortium). Unfortunately, it's a conference with more than one track, where the two tracks generally have a fair bit of overlap, so that's a bit of an issue. The two tracks are building and scripting, each with eight sessions.
Second Life 2.0 viewer for February/March
Linden Lab says it hopes to have a public beta of the Second Life 2.0 viewer in February, presumably targeting an official release in March. Given that the Lab wants to move forward with quarterly planned viewer releases, this means that the current Second Life 1.23 viewer will lose official support at approximately the end of June. Linden Lab says it has already finalized features and the user-interface at this stage, and is not planning on making any substantive changes between now and release. Any work beyond bug-fixes and stabilization for the viewer is to be deferred to the mid-year 2.1 release.
That's not the Second Life economy!
This week Linden Lab published a set of economic data for Q4 2009, and for 2009 as a whole. After going through the data in detail, and discovering at least one important typo and one important calculation error, it looked like we were going to have to recheck every figure before presenting them. That's a lot of work, especially as the data published in the quarterly/annual reports doesn't follow the same definitions as the ongoing statistical feeds or is not represented in them. So we thought, well sod that for a game of soldiers. Instead, let's talk about the report's claim that the Second Life economy has grown 65% in 2009 over 2008, and why that's just rubbish.
Linden Lab appoints new CFO
Linden Lab's last CFO (Chief Financial Officer), John Zdanowski oversaw one of the largest growth periods in the history of Second Life. That growth came to a bit of a shuddering halt around the time of his departure last March, though we think that's just coincidental [We'll be looking closer at the 2009 Second Life metrics later this week]. Throughout the comparatively flat second, third and fourth quarters of 2009, the CFO's chair has remained unwarmed, but Linden Lab announced today that the position has now finally been filled by Bob Komin.
Second Life grid flutters to flutter a while longer
Just lately, over the last month and a half or so, regular Second Life users will have spotted an increase in subsystem outages, including transaction failures, object and teleportation problems, and just general weirdness. Systems seem to be experiencing trouble that you could just about set a watch by. Linden Lab's Frank Ambrose explains that that is to be expected and there's some more to come as some of the oldest pieces of the Second Life infrastructure are ripped out for replacement or relocation from their original site at the San Francisco data-center.
The Sea Monkey experience of avatars
So, as you may recall last week Linden Lab responded about what appeared to be Second Life advertisements that capitalized on the recently-released James Cameron film, Avatar. Linden Lab implied (though didn't actually state plainly) that the advertisements were not intended to cause confusion between Second Life and Avatar. Since about Christmas (just after previews showing the blue-skinned Na'vi began to become available to the general public) IMVU started running some blue-skinned ads of its own. It was when we saw the blue-avatared IMVU advertisement that sprung up during the same period that we inevitably started thinking about Sea Monkeys. There's more similarities going on here than just the visible, so let's rummage around and see if we can't find one of the old advertisements in our files.
Second Life scripted agents to be exempted from traffic this month
Well, it's been a long time in coming, but it is finally just around the corner. Back in October, Linden Lab added a facility where Second Life users could flag the accounts of their scripted agents (commonly called 'bots'). That was in October and the flag itself has had no effect so far. However, along with the search update on Wednesday, 20 January, user accounts (whether they are actually scripted agents or not) who have chosen to turn the flag on for their account will no longer count towards the per-parcel traffic data generated by the system.
Educators find common ground in Second Life, for now
There's no doubt in our minds that virtual environments are here to stay, for a significant fraction of the foreseeable forever. Love them or loathe them they're in their third decade now, and like the Web, it's now more a matter of how they fit in to the rest of the world, rather than if they do. In education, virtual environments are now a part of an educator's toolbox and as education continues to combine, refine, and recombine tools, virtual environments will find increasingly better, more effective uses in education. There's no doubt about that among educators, even if the technologies aren't ready for widespread educational uses today.
Korea rules that virtual currencies can be exchanged for real money
The odd thing about us gamers is that we seem to think of the various doodads in our games as being real -- even more to the point, as being ours. We think and act as if we're owed some compensation if we're deprived of them. Which is silly, really -- after all, that Monster Signa isn't a real staff, that Deputy Chain Coat isn't a real coat, and all that gold isn't real money. Except that now, in South Korea, it is. A ruling by the nation's supreme court has stated that virtual currency is the equivalent of real-world money. Even more sweeping are the details of the case that led to the ruling, in which two men were on trial for exchanging a large amount of Lineage II Adeena for cold, hard currency. For those of you who might not be drawing the link, the core there is that selling in-game currency for real money is essentially just an exchange of currency and perfectly legal in South Korea. This could have sweeping implications for RMT operations the world over, not to mention free-to-play games and... well, online games in general. The official story is available online from both the Korea Times and JoongAng Daily.
