Category: Indie Stuff (Page 2 of 7)

CSI in Second Life

October 23, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Oh, hell yeah! You just KNOW I’m tivoing this shit: CSI: NY in their partner episode with Second Life.

“Log off!”
“I know what I’m doing!”
“Log off! Now!”
“I need an ambulance!”

Dear god, the trailer alone makes my brain numb. And I’m somewhat of an aficionado of idiotic media treatments of gaming.

This is already the second cop show with a Second Life twist to it – SVU earlier this year had an episode about a fictional game called “Another Youniverse”. The plot was (*spoilers*) a killer kidnaps a college girl who is also an ageplaying virtual hooker so he can lock her in his basement so she can… ageplay a 14 year old girl from him IN GAME all the time (being in college, she’s too old and busted for him IRL).

Fortunately, SVU used their cunning detective work to find her, since the kidnapper was foolish enough to shape his virtual land to have exactly the same geographic features as to where he had kidnapped another 14 year old years previously in real life. Which is good – you’d hate for the kidnap victim to have to resort to anything crazy like send a ‘tell’ command to another player. Apparently, he had never considered this possibility in his incredibly convoluted plan. Sadly, he killed her by accident before it occurred to her (and I suspect, shortly after it occurred to the writers).

Meanwhile, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but Second Life’s now typically counting 45K users simultaneously, which is roughly four times what it was about a year ago.

Original comments thread is here.

I’m Sure It Will Consistently Be A Place of Dignified Reflection

October 10, 2007 / Damion Schubert

The Vietnam memorial will be recreated in Second Life.

I’ve actually been to the real wall numerous times in my life. Knowing what I know about SL, this almost makes me angry.

Second Life Update: Lum Goes Native, Corps Go Elsewhere.

July 16, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Scott went and did the Jane Goodall thing, only where he was going, the apes all have detachable (and upgradeable — for a price) penii. Well worth a read – and it’s a much more positive writeup than you might expect.

In related news, the LA Times is talking about how marketers are pulling out of Second Life, and how it turns out that the entire concept of commercialization is a huge turn-off to the technolibertarian base that makes up the core of SL’s community. Gee, no one saw that coming.

Bragg v. Linden

July 2, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Linden Labs has filed their paperwork in their court case which has the potential to be a landmark in the virtual world domain. Matt’s got a good writeup, as does Prokofy Neva. I heartily recommend taking the time to read the writeups, and contribute discussion on Matt’s blog whose following details of the case much closer than I am, but I think the whole case has deep ramifications for anyone trying to protect their environment from troublesome elements.

Let’s Not Dismiss the YouGames Generation Just Yet

June 13, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Raph has been keeping an eye out on a lot of people promising to make a ‘YouTube for games’ or an ‘Open Game’ platform. Do any of these have a shot in hell? The industry vets seem to doubt it.

“There’s a reason some of us are employed and paid to make games, and there’s a reason why most people are not. It’s because they’re really bad at it,” added Starr Long, game director of NCsoft.

Big Brother Keeping An Eye On Second Life

May 8, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Not long ago, I wrote my opinion that the two core visions of Second Life are on a collision course.

Scott writes that he can see where the train tracks cross.

Short form: what happens when you tell an audience of idealistic libertarian technocrats they need to register with a site that is, among other things ‘Patriot Act compliant’?

Online Gambling Puts Second Life at a Crossroads

April 9, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Raph has been following this story for a long time, and he links to an excellent analysis over on PlayNoEvil. Short form: Second Life is no longer accepting ads for virtual casinos in their space (which, of course, traffic LindenBucks, which can be exchanged for real simoleans with relative ease). The official link from Linden Labs is here.

As Raph notes, the comments thread is particularly intriguing, with many people channelling Martin Neimollar to say “First, they came for the ageplayers, and then the casinos…”. The fact that this meme was repeated several times was significant, as it points to players concerned that their way of life is threatened. Continue reading

Behind Second Life’s Infrastructure

March 12, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Information Week has an utterly fascinating article about the tech behind the Second Life experience. Of particular note, the machinery runs on 2000 CPUs. The article claims that it’s capable of 100K users at once, but the article talks about how the system is already showing signs of stress at its current peak (which the article reports as having a record of 36K users recently).

When residents buy a whole island, they get dedicated use of an entire Intel- or AMD-based server, with pricing based on the processor, memory, and storage of that server.

Grumpy Warren Ellis Wants Kids, Bondage Gear off Second Lawn

February 24, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Warren Ellis has been day-tripping into Second Life, and god bless him, he seems to honestly making an effort to scratch beyond the surface. This doesn’t change him from having to solve some problems unique to Second Life.

I went in-world on Sunday evening to pick up messages and to look for some music to stream while I worked. Materialising on my new land, I immediately noticed two pings on the “minimap” radar screen that’s placed in the top left of the Second Life viewer. There were two people on my land….

The first thing I saw in the blockhouse was the avatar of a naked man strapped face-down over a piece of sexual apparatus that presented his backside. I then realised that the blockhouse had been filled with dungeon toys. A couple of dozen of them. And, sitting on a chair I didn’t recognise, was a dominatrix with long dark hair, idly waving a riding crop.

“Please be quiet,” she said. “We are busy.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I typed.

“Go away,” typed the slave.

“I not tell you to talk,” the dominatrix tapped out.

I resisted the urge to pull a weapon and blow them off my land like an enraged farmer. Instead, I used the Land tools in the menu. You can select every object on your land that doesn’t belong to you and send it back to the inventories of the owners. Therefore, Slave Bill flopped on to the floor as his wooden sex horse vanished from under him. The Land tools also let you ban individuals from entering your space. If they’re already on your land, it takes a moment; and then they quite satisfyingly fly through the roof and are dumped on the nearest available adjacent parcel.

John Edwards Moves Quickly To Lock Up Virtual Furry Vote

February 15, 2007 / Damion Schubert

As per Wonkette, it appears that John Edwards has opened up a virtual campaign headquarters in Second Life. Wonkette’s snide comment:

It’s just like the Dean campaign’s obsession with Meetup, except that instead of actually leaving your house to go to a fundraising party, you can pretend to be a huge-chested Japanese woman.