Second Life?

Games
1

I just found a GamaSutra article, http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030916/rosedale_01.shtml, which talks about Second Life’s technology. It ends with:

“So what’s the result for players? Imagine a world that stretches to the horizon, where trees sway in a virtual breeze that blows across all the simulators. In the far distance you can see an amazing complex city - dozens of flying avatars arc into and out of it. Lights detail the buildings. Your friend drives up to you and gets out of her hover car. You take a snapshot of her and playfully drop it onto the mirror shades of her sunglasses (she can see it the instant you drop it into the world). She asks for some help with the code that drives the car - you click on the fuselage and pop open the script, edit the thrust levels, save, and have her test it. She gives you an earring she is wearing – a jewel lit from within that lights up the detailed tattoo on her cheek. You get on next to her as she heads for an Unsafe area kilometers from the city. You pull out a rifle that you bought, confident that the arms merchant who built it knows her stuff. The roar of the bike’s engine mixes with the wind in your ears as you cruise down into a dark canyon, dodging a bridge that hadn’t been completed the last time you flew this route. This is what you can do today in our game, thanks in large part to the adoption of our server grid.”

So… is this all hype? Or is Second Life really something new & interesting?

And another question altogether: is it a game?

http://www.secondlife.com

2

Nah, it’s art. Or it’s the war in Iraq or something.

Get the SL scoop from “embedded journalist” Wagner James Au (known in-world as Hamlet Linden).

3

Yes, the technology is amazing. The amount of objects that can exist in the world is stunning, and I was able to do effective development work on an Athlon 700 w/ a GeForce 2, although I don’t think that’s considered to be an optimal platform. :)

I’d say that it’s more of an economy, a toolset, and a community than a game, although there are certainly games played within the world.

4

Welcome to SecondLife.com!

This…is SecondLife.com! Welcome!

You can do ANYTHING at Secondlife.com! Anything at all! The only limit is yourself!

Welcome to SecondLife.com!

5

This is pretty cool…you can fly a biplane with no propeller! Take that A IL2!

6

Can it snap roll?

7

This is that game Wagner James Au is being paid to write about – well, I assume his regular series of articles are the result of being paid.

8

If you look in the Archives of his work at Second Life he (Wagner James nitwit) did an interesting piece on a clash between the Second Life Artistic Types (read: ultra-liberal left wingers) and WW2 onlines more conservative types (right wing nutters) who, for some unknown reason, decided to try out SL en-masse. This all happened around the time of the Iraq invasion and shows the WW2 onliners building a fortress then going on a muderous rampage and SL’s more benign citizens taking up arms along with a lot of political grandstanding about the war in Iraq, etc. …ugh, your better off reading it cuz I can’t write for shit:

http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_07_07_archive.php

start from the bottom of the page and scroll up. Its a 10 part story.

I really ought to get around to checking this out one day

9

That is hilarious.

Some Outland natives fought back. Malaer gathered a sizable group of fellow Outlanders and confronted the WWIIOLers in the Hawthorne sim, where the newcomers were building a giant fortress. “Next to some guy’s art gallery.” WWIIOLer Eukeyant Skidoo notes.

Malaer’s entreaty quickly backfired. “They started on a genial note,” says Eukeyant, who was in the bunker at the time, “sort of ‘we don’t appreciate that eyesore here’. Then we told them to suck it up, or thereabouts, and they didn’t like that either.”

“So you guys show up,” I ask Malaer, “this ten-fifteen member coalition of the willing, and try and talk with them, and they open fire and it’s a huge battle?”

“Ya, pretty much,” he says, " 'til [the server] crashed, over and over and over that night."

The firefight lasted the entire evening.

ahahahaha

A lot of WWIIOLers apparently considered this to be some kind of confinement, and chose to lash out.

“Since it’s a mature sim,” says Malaer Sunchaser. “You get away with a lot. So they’d come around with penis attachments on their head, or wherever, and raise hell with people.”

“In Jessie?” I ask him.

“No. ALL OVER. Even PG eras. Even Linden Sponsored Events.”

I gotta play this game.

One more.

“Here’s the deal,” Kathy finally says after more of this. “You don’t shoot me and – as I said before – I will not bother your stuff, shoot you, post posters, talk naughty or look mean. That’s the deal.”

“Well that’s the thing, Kathy,” says chaunsey, “we never started the whole problem with you. But neither did you.”

“Well, if you really believe that,” says Kathy, “then we should be able to agree now.”

“Are we on the roadmap to peace?” I ask.

And after a bit more bickering, and cross talk, and a WWIIOLer who flies by stark naked (“Dude, put some pants on,” says Syank), Kathy leaves Jessie unscathed