Second Life

…and I’m ending it as I began it…

If you were waiting for the second coming of Free Realms, Palia ain’t it. But, if you hate adventuring and love gathering and crafting in your MMO of choice, you might just find a new home in Palia, the new social MMO from Singularity 6.

Yeah, I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks now. Work time is creeping into home time. It’s so cold when I get home that I find myself cuddling up with blankets and a cat on the couch, watching Netflix (tonight: the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows”, season 1). I’m not wild about this “winter” thing in general. I haven’t been able to get on the bicycle for a few weeks now, and it’s really making me antsy. ...

If there could be a greater revolution in online gaming than Microsoft’s upcoming Avatar Kinect, I’m not really sure what it could be. uses its popular new peripheral to track your gestures, mouth movements and even your eyebrows and use this data to create a lifelike puppet of you in an online chat room. The traditional problems of the Kinect remain; your avatar won’t be spending much time walking from place to place, but it is certainly worlds better than having to clean house to have friends over. ...

I suck at predictions, but everyone else is doing them. Luckily, I have a Magic 8 Ball. I’m just gonna list some games, and ask the Magic 8 Ball what it thinks of them. Question to the 8 Ball for all of these games: Will this game have a good year in 2011? Age of Conan: “Outlook Not So Good”. AoC released its first expansion, “Ride of the Godslayer”, last summer, and that’s pretty much the last I’ve heard of the game. I don’t think the Magic 8 Ball is correct; I think Funcom is content to support their current player base without feeling the need to go F2P. Their massively hyped launch should have helped them recoup their development costs years ago. ...

Working on a first impressions piece about Mabinogi. Will keep the self-flagellation to a minimum but really, I only do it because it feels good when I stop. On to the blogs! Are persistent henchmen the new groups? Syp thinks they might be. Star Wars: The Old Republic will have them (echoing the party you gathered in Knights of the Old Republic). Guild Wars has their henchmen. EverQuest has their mecenaries. Star Trek Online has their bridge crew. Have MMOs truly come full circle back to their single player, you+your crew of helpers, roots? Is it truly not worth the trouble anymore to be part of a group that includes other living people? ...

I was reading Scott Jenning’s concise explanation of the uproar over Linden Labs’ changes to the open space sims in their Second Life virtual world simulation, and as I read it, I wondered why I never really ‘got’ Second Life. I mean, it has everything I like, right? It’s almost ENTIRELY about community and creating things. All the cool things I am doing in LittleBigPlanet right now, could be done better in Second Life. Second Life, after all, does not restrict your objects to three units in depth, and it lets them turn as well. ...

I had the pleasure of being on SUWT #22 this weekend. I was first on SUWT #12, so I guess I’ll get another chance to mix it up with the crew on SUWT #32! The fights, the yelling, the smashed windows, the death threats and broken relationships that make podcasts fun, are all here. Our souls laid bare. Tune in and listen to the terror that inevitably occurs whenever someone lets me get too close to a microphone. ...

One of the dubious advantages of moving from one guild to another is learning new ways of defeating old encounters. Delusions of Grandeur kills Venril Sathir and the Overking in entirely different ways than did Clan of Shadows, and I had to suppress my urge to shout “you’re DOING it wrong!” because, hey, DoG gets results. So I shouldn’t have been all that shocked when we got to Leviathan, the Tier 3 raid that is the gateway to Veeshan’s Peak, and the leaders decided on something different than the slow range game that CoS did while I was with them. ...

In response to yesterday’s post about my return to Second Life, reader Deep Semaphore pointed me toward Play2Train, a simulation of various emergency scenarios done in Second Life, developed under the guidance of the Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program. From their site: Play2Train is a virtual training space in SecondLife designed to support Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), Simple Triage Rapid Transportation (START), Risk Communication and Incident Command System (ICS) Training. This virtual environment spreads over two islands Asterix and Obelix (65536 x 2 sq. meters), with one island dedicated to a virtual town and the other a virtual hospital. The design of this virtual environment is influenced by dioramas frequently used by emergency services to support their tabletop exercises. A diorama is a partially three dimensional full-size replica or scale model of a landscape typically showing historical events, nature scenes, cityscapes, etc. for purposes of education or entertainment, source: wikipedia. Play2Train will provide opportunities for training through interactive role playing and will be the foundation for our emergency preparedness educational machinima. ...