West Karana

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.

While working at Massively, I had plenty of opportunity to talk, a lot, with Tateru Nino, one of the leading commentators on the goings-on within Linden Labs. And as a blogger there, I was in Second Life quite a bit researching articles. And I saw a lot of VERY COOL things in there — groundbreaking stuff in emergency preparedness, art and education.

Second Life, unlike the vast majority of the games I play, even worked fine on my Linux box.

So why am I not there?

I guess the largest reason is that I had no purpose. Nothing that made me think I had to log on to do something. It’s like EverQuest 2. Since my main character is maximum level, maximum AAs and decent gear, I have accomplished everything in the game, so while I love EQ2, I have no purpose there. Back when I raided, at least that was a reason. Friends are somewhat of a reason, but in this world of Twitter, XFire and blogs, I talk to them all the time and don’t need to necessarily log in to do so.

But this isn’t about EQ2. This is about Second Life.

No levels. No rules. No quest grinds, or grinds of any sort. No score, no xp, no death penalty, no loot. Okay, there is loot. But you can make your own loot.

The case could be made that it’s not a game at all.

Someone brought me once to a secret place in SL — an exclusive club in a satellite high above the Earth. She said it was so secret, no pictures could be taken (and though the SL client barred screenshots, I’ve relied on third party programs to take screenshots for a long time. I took pictures, but I never posted them anywhere).

The place was astounding, an amazing construction. But aside from taking illicit photographs, I just didn’t see the attraction. What you did there was mount your avatar on a dancing ball, and then your avatar would dance. That was pretty much it.

I just don’t get it. As much as I like the idea of sandbox worlds, I don’t like playing them. I tried so hard to like Star Wars: Galaxies, but a game like that with no goal is hard to love. (Get two missions. Run for fifteen minutes to get to it. Circle strafe some mound and kill bees for ten minutes. Run ten minutes to the next one. Circle strafe some more. Run back and try not to let yourself die to self-inflicted blaster shots). (Yes, I understand they added means to get places without having to run everywhere at some point after I quit.)

Second Life is like SW:G at launch, but without the mounds of bees.

People loved SW:G before NGE (apparently, haven’t played) added game elements, and they love Second Life now, but I guess, when I come home from work, I’m more interested in relaxing with a game then posing my avatar places. And anyway, I’m a writer, not a 3D artist (though at times I thought I might try), so when I want to create, it usually involves vowels and consonants, not spheres and cubes.

I guess the REAL question is — why do I like LittleBigPlanet so much?

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.

We talk about how many billions of dollars would be needed to compete with WoW (short answer by our guest presenter, the Ghost of Carl Sagan: BILLYUNS and BILLYUNS), what game we would unmake (my choice: hopscotch, because what is the POINT of that game anyway?), what we’re playing (um, my hopscotch team is first in the league, by the way) and all that drama last week about SOE making an EQ2 community leader into an EQ2 community wiener.

Check it out!

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.

Our way will take some preparation. We’re going to farm fifty explosive vials, and kill him from the inside out in five minutes. But first, we have to farm those vials, which involves being swallowed and killing mobs in his tummy who drop them. Last night we did the farming. Tonight, hopefully, the ’sploding.

With any luck, we’ll be seeing dead Leviathan in chunks all over the place… and we troubadours will get the second update for our mythical epics.

Speaking of CoS, I met (of all people) their most awesome dirge, Allegro, in Second Life! She invited me to tour an absolutely incredible space station — I wish I could show pictures of it, but apparently the owners don’t want anyone to know about it or to take pictures… it was really fantastic, though. Here we are a little later at a beach resort with a dragon theme, me in my Angel of Death outfit, she in her Easter outfit, chatting about the dragons of Veeshan’s Peak :)

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.

This is utterly incredible stuff, a fantastic amount of work went into this. Check out the site for some amazing vdeos of their simulation in action.

Tipa Hawthorne at the NPR Science Friday Pavilion

I think this blog could use a lot more news about Second Life, don’t you?

I haven’t run Second Life for quite awhile; according to my blog, I was still insanely running Gentoo Linux because I thought I was this hardcore Linux guru, which I am not. I’m just a happy Linux USER. I’ve been on Ubuntu or its variants (Linux Mint at the moment) for years, because I’m all about the USING Linux instead of FIDDLING with it.

Anyway, whereas getting SL running on Gentoo was frustrating (though eventually successful), this latest installation on Linux Mint went like a breeze — assuming you know your way around bunzip2, tar and a shell. And if you don’t, why the heck are you using Linux?

Sheesh.

Since it runs on Linux, my main game machine is free for, you know, gaming, while on my faithful, extremely low tech Linux box (1 gig of memory, nVidia 6600 GT video card, some old crappy AMD processor I rescued from another computer), I can wait for someone — ANYONE — to show up at Hillary Clinton’s headquarters (why they don’t have a Hillary Clinton pants suit available to copy… and that hairstyle… I can’t understand. Missed opportunity). Since nothing is happening there, I can IM people, check my feeds and dive into some juicy Python code… while on the OTHER screen, have GIMP running to fix up any screenshots I might want to make.

Linux is such a better OS for gaming…

Anyway.

Since last I played, SL has gotten big into the multimedia. Movies play, you can browse… you can do pretty much everything in game that you could do out of game.

Clinton’s HQ is boring. Let’s check out Barack’s.

Barack’s is even MORE boring! Not even the most basic Geraldine Ferraro effigy to slap. MORE missed opportunities! It does, however, have kiosks explaining his positions on various issues, something not found in Clinton’s HQ. His views on the use of megaprims were, alas, not represented here.

Oh, just for the heck of it. Let’s fly off to McCain’s HQ.

Oh dear. McCain doesn’t have a Second Life site. Um, welcome to the 21st century, Senator. Oh wait, you’re still back in the 20th?

I did find a cool caricature island which has a picture of him wearing an army helmet and trying to install Vista on his laptop or something. This same island has caricatures of all the other candidates, plus James Brown, Jesus, and other celebrities.

Why all this sudden interest in Second Life?

No reason! No reason at all.

Computer, locate Mr. Spock!

Some Dutch player said he wanted me to be his Deanna Troi. Awwwww….

An EQ friend, Caldabuse, and I were talking a few years back about what was right and wrong with MMOs. An individual player has no impact on the world, and has the same abilities as everyone else. In fact, conformity is seen as the perfect ideal in the MMO world. We’d both just started playing City of Heroes, which prizes individuality to some extent. But CoH was still just like the other MMOs. The devs plotted out your path, and pretty much all you could do was follow. Success was defined as how closely what you did matched what the devs designed.

Calbabuse suggested I try Second Life. Not a game, but a world, where anything you could imagine could become real.

It sounded like my days playing a PernMUSH back in the early 90s. There, you were whatever you could put into words. And what you could put into words became real items in the game, that could do whatever you wanted them to do. My specialty was toys made of colored glass that would crawl or hop around on their own mysterious errands.

I didn’t try Second Life. During my free time, all I wanted to do was play EQ, with detours to FFXI Online, DAoC, CoH et al for a few months at a time. I’d played MUDs and MUSHes back in their day, but the pull of “just one more level” kept me coming back to EQ.

That, and the friends I made in-game. They were and are like some huge family to me, and we’ve been through a lot together. I came for the game and stayed for the community.

Second Life is all community and no game, or at least, only as much game as you make it. I didn’t try it when it was new, but a few things prompted me to give it a shot.

Linden Labs does incredible PR for Second Life. They have a roving reporter who looks in on what people have created in the game. An island which is a complete biosystem with precipitation cycles and birth, reproduction and death among the island’s flora and fauna. A tower in the air which exists in four dimensional space. A government agency has created detailed climate models in game. Today, a politician is holding a meet-and-greet within Second Life.

It was time to see what all the buzz was about.

Linden Labs provides the Second Life client in Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux. Yay, Linux! If it weren’t for all the games I play, I’d never use Windows. My deluxe widescreen computer at home runs Gentoo Linux. My laptop and this mail server I’m using to write this post both run Ubuntu Linux. Linux is so much better than Windows for the sorts of things I do — except for games.

Can Linux handle a huge MMO game? That was my second reason to give Second Life a shot.

/techjargon on
I downloaded their newest Linux client, still in Alpha test. They didn’t statically link the libraries and the versions they wanted were a little newer than the ones on my Gentoo system. I softlinked older versions of the necessary libraries to the versions they required, grabbed some libraries I didn’t have from Gentoo’s repository, ran ./secondlife and…
/techjargon off

There I was, in the world, looking just like all the other newly-created toons popping into the world all around me.

Now, there’s no way a non-techie could have gotten this alpha client working. Unix and its cousin, Linux, come from a long tradition of getting your hands dirty. Gentoo Linux in particular is a distro for tinkerers. I’m sure the official release of the client will be tuned and ready-built for the most popular distros.

SL leads you through customizing your character, and it is no trouble at all to take the basic template and create something fairly original. It has the most powerful character creation system I have ever seen — and if you can’t find something you like, you can load in something new from your hard drive. It took about ten minutes to make my toon look at least somewhat like me. Hair is the wrong style and it needs glasses, but I’d wear that stuff.

While learning how to move, how to fly (!!), how to teleport (!!!), and how to make items of my own, possibilities assaulted me. Why…. I could take all of the fashions we make at Surya and put them in game! Sure, probably few, if any, of our customers would use Second Life to see our lines. But maybe if we put our stuff there, people someday would. Heck, maybe we could design our stuff there. Right now, it’s designed largely in Photoshop and Publisher, then we have to find the fabrics and have a variety of samples made. This means talking back and forth to Bali, with its huge time difference, the length of time it takes to ship stuff here from Indonesia and the time every package must spend in customs… designing something new takes a lot of time.

But if we could take that Photoshop file and wrap it around a real model in Second Life… Well. That would be something new.

I explored Newbie Island and Help Island, saw people with lightsabers and devil horns and littering the world, huge sculptures by artists working entirely in the digital realm, and had a long chat with a man from Buenos Aires who told me many times how much he loved California and the USA once he found out that’s where I lived.

The client was difficult to get running and it crashed a couple of times, but I could see Second Life’s attraction once I got there and started exploring. I haven’t left Help Island — once you leave, you can’t return — so I haven’t yet seen the extraordinary places I’ve seen on the web, in game. Someday soon, I’ll be in the background of one of those SL press conferences.

I’ll be the one with wings.