Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.
Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.
While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.
All right! More ways to keep your kids indoors and quiet! Disney has announced that its upcoming variety puppet show Bunnytown will launch with its own virtual world, presumably eponymously named. So children can go straight from tv screen to computer monitor with needing to interact with their parents at all. Fantastic.
I'm being slightly ridiculous, of course, but it's all too easy to imagine this happening. In 50 years' time, our bodies will bloat, our limbs will wither, and our eyes will enlarge to better receive visual signals from the virtual worlds that we will all inhabit as a matter of course.
Seriously, this is a huge win for the marketing team responsible. Direct merchandising and monetization of your television show in one fell swoop! Bravo, Disney. Pretty soon, your living room will be the Happiest Place On Earth.
That diligent watcher of all things Oz, our friend Lowell Cremorne at SLOZ reports that Project Outback, the highly hyped and tremendously touted virtual world competitor has bit the big one, gone belly up, and is no more.
Check out Cremorne's post on the incident, and hang your heads for a moment for the passing of another startup project. The majority of MMO's/virtual worlds that have been started in the last ten years have never made it as far as an alpha, let alone a beta. At any one time there are generally forty or fifty in development. Of those, perhaps three will make it to launch. All that work and all those dreams are lost.
We might have problems of our own, but at least Second Life is here.
Well, almost everything, according to the full quote from Kunimasa Hamaoka, who is responsible for the upcoming Japanese-only virtual space 'meet-me'. He wants to promote 'meet-me' as being geared toward the passivity and need for predictability of Japan's residents, unlike the more aggressive and stimulation-hungry American SL.
There is something to be said for marketing directly to a demographic, and of course I don't know the culture of Japan as well as I'd like, but will 'meet-me' be so like RL it won't attract visitors? If Hamaoka is telling us that the Japanese population prefers to feel safe and secure (unlike SL, where, according to Hamaoka, "It's the kind of place where you can get shot in the back as soon as you log on"), then where is the spirit of adventure that would cause them to even try 'meet-me'?
I'm not quite sure who Lyndon LaRouche Jr. is, even after reading his "About me" page, nor reading about him on Wikipedia.
However, he's had a froth at the mouth about some MMORPG that's just been released (Halo 3), and in the same diatribe attacked WoW, Entropia, Counterstrike and the like. Apparently they undermine the social fabric of America. Second Life gets a special mention, as a hedonistic and for "the adoption of an arbitrary set of anti-scientific, anti-principled rules, like that of Second Life[.]" Even wikipedia comes in for a swipe or two.
Of course the fact that there are people that use Second Life for education, and there are some excellent science education sites within Second Life doesn't matter. There's no development of the argument that makes it clear how we're all hedonistic and how SL is anti-scientific and anti-principles, but if you enjoy reading rants, you might just enjoy his article. If you don't you might want to be braced in case your boss does when you try to sell him on SL.
Speaking of Identity Verification – Shanda subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen the accounts of any male players who play female characters in-game in their MMORPG King of the World. Pacific Epoch reports that "Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam,"
Identity checks via webcam? Not exactly hard to fake, if you have a handy female relative or neighbour around the joint. Okay, actually, trivial to fake. But imagine if Linden Lab implemented this policy. Just think of the blog comments.
Notably, there seems to be no mention of any effort to prevent female users running male characters. Now that seems a bit discriminatory and biased, if you ask me.
As far as catchy titles go, it's kind of bland, but it's the concept that will sell Raph Koster's latest project. Metaplace is a platform for developing virtual worlds that are designed to operate with already-available websites, as easily as embedding a widget into MySpace.
This has the potential to be huge. Imagine being able to create a little virtual world for visitors of your website, in which people can engage with each other and talk about your brand. Because it's designed to interoperate with existing Web technology, there's no need for visitors to download a client (as long as their browser can handle the protocols Metaplace worlds use, of course). Koster says that people will be able to take assets from other people's worlds to start their own, customizing it however they like to create their own unique experience. Currently available only in 2D, Metaplace is working towards 3D.
This approach is farther from the '3D Internet' that many believe will come about. It's more of a Balkanized version, where every website is its own little world, competing more or less equally with others. There is no mention of fees on the website, though likely the model will entail ad revenue, RL company sponsorship, and the like. Koster mentions that he expects an open beta to begin next Spring.
Vastpark is an up-and-coming virtual content platform that purports to enable users to easily and quickly create their own worlds that will link to the content of other Vastpark users. Clearly, this would be SL's closest competition, with user-development tools and the ability to update content from a single location.
While still in its infancy, the beta is approaching and questions abound: Will the tools and interface be easier to use than SL's? Is it smart for them to price according to storage space and bandwidth usage? What will their physics engine be like? Will creators be allowed to manage their own content free of restrictions? It's too early to tell, but surely the people behind Vastpark have been studying SL and examining how and where it falls short. Keep an eye on this, and we welcome any further information our audience might possess.
Aww, lookit the li'l things! They remind me of the tarutaru from Final Fantasy XI, even though I've never played it. This is on MMO Watch only barely, because it's a currently inactive world, having closed its doors in April due to lack of funds. They're currently soliciting offers, so if you have a solid business plan that revolves around teeny, brown-nosed homunculi (and I'm not talking about your office yes-man), give these guys a call.
Gives one shudders to think of this happening to SL, doesn't it?
My first thought, on logging in for the first time, was that this thing was well-named. 'Why?', I thought. Going to whyville.net immediately makes you ask that question. 'Why does the avatar creation process look like a bunch of 12 year olds put it together?' Whyville boasts a 1.7 million citizen population, skewed toward a pre-teen to teen demographic. Apparently, Sun Microsystems is involved somehow, though it's not immediately apparent how.
One of the demo slides on the front page has one avatar asking another 'Wut is ur salary?', prompting my by-this-point fevered brain to ask 'Why are they promoting themselves with this stuff?' All the avatars are squarish, and completely 2D, looking for all the world as though someone used an 8-bit program to create them. What's more, in a crowded room, you can barely see what anyone's saying, as the dialogue balloons overlap each other.
Obviously, this was just a cursory examination, and I'm not going back, but am I missing something really important that would make all of this make sense? Why ... doesn't someone enlighten me?
For those of you who have been complaining that you could create a better world than SL, now's your chance. CNet's Daniel Terdiman reports that Multiverse has just announced Version 1.0 of its virtual world development platform at last.
Use of the development software is free, and Multiverse asks a mere 10% of any revenue gained from whatever product is created with its software. I got really excited about this until I remembered that I'm an incredibly lazy creature. You guys make something and I'll go play in it. Thanks.
There's a new virtual space in town, and it's called Webbliworld. Produced in part by Aardman Animations, the guys behind the beloved Wallace and Gromit series, and in part by Enable Interactive, this isn't so much an MMO as it is a portal featuring an inspiring look and feel. Although none of it has that Aardman vibe, it's still very attractive. I almost signed up myself, except that I'm already signed up for tons of other things that I never spend any time in.
Oh, and I'm an 'adult'. *dubious look* How, then, does this story rate a mention in SLI? It made me wonder if LL would ever consider building a version of SL for the burgeoning kids' market -- with Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, et al., this is turning into something huge.
China's upcoming virtual world HiPiHi may have some tough times ahead, if history is any judge. China is notorious for its censorship of anything it deems offensive or against its views, which in the past has included support for Tibetan independence and mention of Falun Gong. If HiPiHi is to hold its own against SL, it might find it difficult to match SL's laissez-faire approach to governance of its residents.
However, if the Chinese gamers have no other virtual worlds against which to compare SL, then it might be that they'll be just as happy not missing any of the political talk, the freewheeling sexual activity, and any of the other scores of likely-bannable shenanigans that the Chinese government would find unappealing. What do you think: HiPiHi -- does it stand a chance?
What do you get when you mix a reliable, dense communication medium with a pocket 3D world? Probably what has to be one of the worst 3D environment concepts I've seen, and you don't even need Second Life to make it happen.
If this is what you get when someone else gets to control your 3D experience, then I think I'd rather stay with the cage-gunners and flying penises. No, this isn't an MMO - thank heavens. There are probably many halfway decent ways of mixing email with 3D. This is not one of them.
(Yes, I know, I've probably caused about a thousand of you to rush off to check this out. If all your email gets eaten by a shark, that isn't my fault)
Hey, I love it when my initial reaction to some bit of news continues to resonate when more information appears! So, to the point: A World of My Own, a new MMO backed by Virgin's Sir Richard Branson, has popped back up on the radar with slightly more information. It's a virtual world that lets users download PC games.
*blink*
Wait ... so, I can wander around this world, and ... wait for games to be available, so I can ... okay, if I'm playing a game I've downloaded from AWOMO, I'm not ... I'm not in AWOMO anymore, so why would I ... why is it a virtual ... I don't ... and this is the future of gaming, you say?
The waiting is over!
I'm not quite sure who Lyndon LaRouche Jr. is, even after reading his "
Speaking of Identity Verification – Shanda subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen the accounts of any male players who play female characters in-game in their MMORPG King of the World. 
Vastpark
