3pointD.com

• thepeoplesmario.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)
  The People’s Mario (flash animation)
  (tags: flash humor games mario animation)

Entropia Universe continues to baffle. The virtual world just closed an auction of three “prestigious” shopping malls, which brought a total of US$179,666 in PED, their virtual currency, which is fixed at 10 to the US dollar. Bids had started at PED1 just a few days ago, if I understand the situation correctly. They were won by two Entropia players: Onkel RobRoy Bob took the Twin Peaks and Emerald Lakes malls for PED350,004 and PED746,007 respectively, while the Port Atlantis mall went to Epsilon Eps Vaz for PED700,667. I’d be interested to know whether this was money these players earned in Entropia or bought with real-world currency. Can a virtual shopping mall really make back that kind of investment? Well, they do each come with space for 36 shops and three Trade Centers, as well as rooftop spacecraft landing pads (pictured) “for future use.” More details on how all this works would be welcome, if any Entropians are reading this.

Very worth noting: The intensely creative Ordinal Malaprop, one of Second Life’s most prominent Steampunk figures, is in the process of putting together “a triple-barrelled Snowball Cannon, as well as an attachment which makes one vulnerable to the excessive chills of snowball assault.” A Snowball Rifle (pictured) and a free handheld Thrower of Snowballs will also be available. Bless her clanking, contraptionary heart.

Second Life resident Max Case, inventor of the free Babbler heads-up display that allows translation between various languages in text chat within SL, has now come up with a standalone object called the De-Babbler that translates other people’s chat for you. The Babbler required the speaker to choose a native language and a language for their chat to be translated to. The De-Babbler (which is still in testing) allows the listener to choose a person in the vicinity and receive a translated version of their chat. This seems like a nice advance, since it means you no longer have to give someone a HUD and teach them how to use it — in a foreign language — before you can converse. Nice job. Available free at this »Second Life location« from the object pictured above.

Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company (3pointD’s sponsors) has an incredibly thorough year in review on his blog, giving a month-by-month recounting of what he sees as the most important events of 2006 for the virtual world of Second Life. Now, I’m not a terribly big fan of year-in-review posts, nor of prediction posts, but Giff’s is just so highly detailed I thought I’d link it here. What was your most important Second Life moment of 2006? For me, it was probably either Reuters coming into Second Life (for a variety of reasons, including the personal), or the NBC Christmas tree lighting. Both were watersheds in media discovering SL, if you ask me, which is going to be one of the most important uses for the “platform” going forward.

Check out the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies, which says it’s building something called a NeuroNet (announced in a press release today), that’s to be “a first generation network created specifically for the transmission of real-time, virtual reality (VR) and gaming data.” There doesn’t yet seem to be much to the organization, which bills itself as a kind of ICANN of virtual worlds, just a well made Web site, a few email addresses, a fax number and a mailing address in Vancouver. They don’t even provide a name of someone who’s heading the initiaitive. They’re holding a conference at the end of September (details to be announced in February) and they’re seeking advisory board members, but other than that, details are slim. The idea is well fleshed out on the site, however, and it’s an interesting one: to create a separate Internet-like network devoted to virtual worlds, virtual reality and gaming. But is this really something we need? (more…)

Gamasutra is running a nice feature in which a team from Intel that’s “focused on pushing the limits of PC gaming” describes the experience of creating a game for Google Earth. Called Mars Sucks, the game really just involves navigating to specific locations based on a series of clues, whereupon your spaceship starts blowing up the invading Martian craft you’ve found. Intel’s account of making the game is interesting, though. They used the Google Earth client and server, the Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a Web server and PHP5. They’ve made the source code freely available (via this zip file), and have described what went into the game in some detail. Their conclusion? “We learned that very simple games and casual games are possible now on Google Earth. We also learned that Google Earth is not yet ready to be the foundation of a serious action game. While we think the prototype [of Mars Sucks] is fun to play, it is just an early prototype. Further enhancements—some by Google and some by game developers—would go a long way to improving the game and making bigger and better games available.” (more…)

• Seriosity: Products: Carbon (beta)
  surfing helen cheng’s site (after valleywag laser story) i realized i missed seriosity’s 1st (beta) product launch back in october. virtual currency for email exchanges. very cool
  (tags: games productivity email management)

Three nice Google Earth items to bring you (one of which includes Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, actually). First up is a nice piece in Spiegel Online about the race between Google and Microsoft to virtualize the planet. It’s linked from the All Points Blog, which notes, “I didn’t learn anything new, but it’s a nice article. And, there’s no mention of how the two will monetize these investments.” That’s a good assessment, of the piece, which still makes for worthwhile reading.

Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth also points out some nice functionality for those using Google Calendar to schedule their days: “you can put a link to a KML file in the “Where” field of an event, and Google will map it for you in Google Maps.” Nice. Here’s more info.

Lastly, Stefan also turns up Google Earth Chess! I haven’t tried it so I can’t tell you exactly how it works, but according to Stefan, “You play against others online, make your moves in the browser, and then see the resulting game develop on a big 3D chessboard in Google Earth.” This is really interesting, as it (like a few of the other Google Earth games that have come along) begins to push the app toward a more multi-user situation. Although, as Stefan points out, “I also wish it would be possible to get network links for games in progress, so we can watch along.”

It’s no Snakes on a Plane, but it’ll do. Since I can’t be bothered with pre-ordering things, I suffered through the holidays with an Xbox360, but I’m feeling more and more like I need a Nintendo Wii. Not because I’m such a hot gamer (I suck at Gears of War worse than Matt Mihaly), but because of the possibilities presented by the Wii’s Web browsing capability, which people are already starting to make use of. Besides the invaluable ability to read 3pointD (thanks to Glitchy for the pic), Slashdot reports on a tabbed browsing interface that’s been developed, “which makes browsing on the Wii more efficient until the fully realized Opera build hits later next year,” and also revives the robot Roomba trend we (at the Second Life Herald) reported on from South by Southwest last year. The WiiRoomba “is entirely controlled by the Wii remote accelerometers,” and looks totally DIY-able. That’s the best thing about the new generation of game consoles; they’re not just all about the games anymore.

It took place this week on Monday afternoon, apparently because of the Christmas schedule, but it looks like NBC, which has already held a couple of events in the virtual world of Second Life, is now trying out Sunday Night Football in the virtual world. The Christmas game between the Cowboys and the Eagles was not simulcast in SL but instead accompanied by a “guess the play” game (run from a heads-up display) that rewarded virtual armchair quarterbacks with prizes of Linden dollars at halftime and at the end of the game. The event, a beta test, according to the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), was held at NBC’s virtual sports bar in the »Second City 3« sim, and was attended by about a dozen people, I’m told by one sports fan, who didn’t seem to mind watching the game on TV while they carried on in high Second Life style within the virtual world. No word yet on whether the event constituted a success for NBC, but I’m betting it worked well enough that we can look forward to more such Sunday night games in SL — which clearly has greater potential than the lame offerings that used to be known as “interactive television.”

The All Points Blog links to a report in PC Advisor about a new program to outfit Tokyo’s high-end shopping district, the Ginza, with 10,000 RFID tags and other digital beacons. The project, led by Ken Sakamura, a professor at the University of Tokyo, will bring location-based information to people carrying prototype readers developed for the trial. From the article: “Bringing the terminal close to an RFID tag on a street lamp will pinpoint the user’s location and the system will be able to guide them to the nearest railway station, while walking past a radio beacon in front of a shop might bring up details of current special offers or a menu for a restaurant.” This is more of the kind of thing we were jawboning about at the Metaverse Roadmap summit. This is the metaverse all around us, the physical-world extension of the metaversal computing power we think of as residing mostly on our desktops or laptops. The Ginza project should be an interesting test of just how useful such technology can be at the moment.

As Ogle Earth points out, the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth is taking place June 5-9 in San Francisco. This sounds like a very cool event, devoted to an “international vision” that “encompasses the virtual and 3-D representation of the Earth with vast amounts of scientific, natural, and cultural information that is spatially referenced and interconnected with digital knowledge archives from around the planet to describe and understand the Earth, its systems, and human activities.” This is one of the things we were kicking around earlier this year at the Metaverse Roadmap summit that looked at how various technologies might develop not just to create richer and more extensive virtual worlds but to replicate the real world in a digital medium as well, and how that might become useful in various ways. While the program for the symposium isn’t set, speakers will include Al Gore and Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers of computing as we know it today. (A call for presentations at the symposium is open until January 15.) Attendance is a bit expensive, at $650 for the whole shot, but if you can swing I imagine it will be a very interesting place to be.

• GRINDHOUSE on Yahoo! Movies
  um, when’s the videogame come out?
  (tags: film movie trailer grindhouse)

Matt Mihaly is blogging about a new experimental virtual world from the makers of Habbo Hotel. Called Mini Friday, it’s designed to work on Nokia mobile phones. The experiment is admirable in its simplicity: “We are trying to find out if real-time virtual worlds make sense on mobile devices.” I’d wager they do, although they may be better off when linked to a PC-based world as well. It seems to work for Neopets (insofar as Neopets actually constitutes a virtual world). I know of several other virtual world / MMO companies that are contemplating adding a mobile component, or already have one in the works. As processing power increases and storage and display become more efficient, it would seem to be inevitable. We like having the option of checking our email and even browsing the Web while we’re on the go, why wouldn’t we want to have the option to check into a virtual world?

Raph Koster flags an Escapist article in which Allen Varney covers “boutique MMOGs” and the fact that they can not only be profitable but can garner significant niche audiences in a similar manner to very narrowly focused Web sites. This kind of thing is along the lines of some of my thinking about virtual worlds. I’m pretty sure we’ll start to see a proliferation of 3D virtual spaces as time moves on and the tools for building such places get cheaper and easier to use. These will be not just individual islands (or collections of islands) floating in 3D cyberspace, built on a platform that resembles an open-source Second Life, but a metaverse of things like MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach (built on the technology behind There.com), and games and social worlds built on a free platform like Multiverse. Eventually, a large handful of these will come to capture audiences in the hundreds of thousands. The business model is totally viable. It’s working for the games mentioned in Varney’s article, as well as for a game like EVE Online. The Web has shown us that huge “category-killers” like World of Warcraft need not actually kill a category at all; you can successfully launch and run a Web site or a virtual world that aims at a narrower audience. Will the category-killers one day fall away altogether? I doubt it, but perhaps the rallying cry will be something like, “The category is dead! Long live the category!”

Reader Sterling Whitcroft tips us to the fact that the Washington Post has a good wrap of some of the legal issues that have been facing the virtual world of Second Life in the wake of the recent CopyBot uproar. What’s nice about the piece is that it comes at the situation mostly from the viewpoint of the law, and still manages to get the SL resident perspective as well. It’s good to see virtual worlds start to get the kind of coverage they deserve, coverage that treats them not as fantasy realms but as an extension of the “real” world around us. More and more legal scholars and legislators are beginning to realize that these places merit more serious consideration as well. It remains to be seen what the eventual disposition of legal and taxations questions will be, but it’s beginning to look like the law will not reflexively accept whatever strictures game and virtual world companies lay down, but will instead seek to bring some kind of more broadly just legal regime to bear on such places. Good news for all.

• www.myspace.com/8bitoperators
  kraftwerk approved, 8bit tribute album coming out in january. 2 sample tracks on myspace r awesome
  (tags: 8bit music kraftwerk)

A while back, Glitchy and I were contemplating creating a comic book that instead of being drawn would be shot in a virtual world or computer game. You set up the scene for each panel in a place like Second Life, World of Warcraft or (as seen at left) Lego Star Wars, take the right screenshots, put it all together with Comic Book Creator, and hey presto, you’ve got yourself a cool graphic novelette. Well, it seems someone beat us to the idea long before we even had it, as you can see from yesterday’s Glitchy Links, which flags a report from Matteo Bittanti, who’s writing about the Gamics site. There, Nathan Ciprick has been creating “gamics” for some time now, and has cool offerings from all kinds of games and online worlds. Comic books, of course, are one of those media that do not suffer from existing in two dimensions. But I love the fact that you can go through 3D to get there. Is anyone doing this in Second Life? Plywood was an absolutely fantastic SL comic strip, though it’s no longer in production. What I’d really love to see (or create) is a comic that isn’t tied to the fiction of the world in which it’s produced, but that only uses that world as art to illustrate a fully formed story that stands on its own. Can anyone help us out?

I saw some relatives for a holiday dinner last night out in Queens here in New York. We had a lovely time — as well as an interesting 3pointD moment. A new addition to the family — a Windows laptop — was at several points the focus of attention. Not only were my cousin and her husband proud of the fact that they’d been able to set up a wireless router (without technical leet skillz other than the ability to hook up game consoles for their son and daughter), but she told me the family’s favorite app these days was Google Earth. Apparently, they spend hours sitting in front of the computer, touring not only the sites involved in the kids’ homework assignments, but my cousin also sometimes stays up after everyone has gone to bed, just poking around the planet. I was really struck by the way this resembled television consumption (which until now, and perhaps still, remains the family’s media of choice — they are huge sports fans). And when I showed them how to turn on the layer of 3D models, things got even more exciting. Soon we were downloading Shea Stadium and dropping it right where it belonged — much to the wonder and delight of my cousin’s 12-year-old son. Everyone also seemed to grok the fact that the 3D models had been made not by a company, for the most part, but by other users. The death of television as we know it is closer than you think. Make way for the New “New Media” ^tm — entertainment in the 3pointD mode.

The Reuters news service, which has a bureau in Second Life, has just scored a huge coup, having recruited comic book writer Warren Ellis to write a weekly column on Second Life. Ellis’s musings on SL at his own site are always interesting, and pleasingly bloody-minded. It’s both pleasing and surprising to see Reuters land him, as the news service is not exactly known for its reverence irreverrence. When I worked there, more than ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to establish a news bureau anywhere near cyberspace, let alone recruit someone so resolutely individualist as Ellis to write a column about it. The column will also bring greater exposure to a writer who definitely deserves it. Go, Reuters!

• mbf tod@y: Gamics: Experimenting with Comics and Games
  game theorist Matteo Bittanti experiments with PlanetWide Media’s Comic Book Creator using Ballard, Baudrillard, The Sims, F.E.A.R, and Burnout (via GameSetWatch)
  (tags: games comics literature)
• TechEBlog » Wiimote Meets Google Earth
  wiimote hacks r the new roomba hacks
  (tags: games hack wii google)
• Celebrity Mii Contest results! (kottke.org)
  from real life people to ficitional movie character to straight up cartoon characters; amazing what you can do with the simple interface
  (tags: art avatar blog celebrity culture design funny games humor nintendo wii)

It’s audio file day here at 3pointD, apparently. This is a kind of cool thing forward to me by a friend: young indie-emo-whatever-rockers Cartel, who’ve been featured on MTV’s reality show Laguna Beach, have released a three-song mini album of the live tunes they played during a virtual gig in the network’s online world, Virtual Laguna Beach. The tunes have been released through MTV’s Urge music-download service, of course, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a nice instance of media mashup: a band from a reality show whose gig in a virtual world has now been pushed back out through a more traditional media channel. I’m thinking we’ll see more and more such convergence between old media (television), current media (the Internet) and new media (virtual worlds) in the coming year.

The joint State of Play / Terra Nova symposium at the New York Law School earlier this month was filled with interesting chatter and debate, as previously mentioned. Now you too can get an earful of what some of the smartest thinkers on virtual worlds are chewing over these days, by downloading the audio files that were recorded during the event. Just navigate over to the program page and click on the panels you’re interested in, which will launch iTunes and grab the files. If you don’t have iTunes or have trouble with the files, contact Elizabeth Reilly at ereilly05 AT nyls.edu. Happy listening.

Matt Mihaly, CEO of Iron Realms Entertainment, which makes text-based MMOs like the highly entertaining Achaea, has an interview with Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges up on his blog. While there’s not much there we didn’t already know, there is an interesting passage in which Corey talks about how the platform — which is designed to provide a universal portal to games created with Multiverse — will bring “the right game to the right player.”

That’s absolutely, hands-down critical. Otherwise, only the top couple dozen games will ever be seen. There are many ways to do this. When a consumer launches the client, they go to the network login screen. . . . As you log in, for example, you could see a message saying “Oh, you play games X, Y, and Z. People who play those games also play game A.” There will also be taxonomies (categorized lists, a la Yahoo) of the worlds on our network, as well as search engines. We’ll also have at least one virtual world that functions as a hub–-The Nexus we’ll call it–-for finding other worlds. You can meet your friends there, and talk to an NPC who asks you what sort of experience you’d like. It will eventually point you through a portal. Jump your avatar through the portal, and you’ll go to that particular game. Part of the “long tail” notion is not just the democratization of creation, but also the democratization of distribution.

Nice stuff. For more interesting tidbits about Corey’s recent experience at the Firefly fan convention and how Multiverse fits with the long tail, read the rest of the interview.

I’ve been a bit delinquent in blogging the many events that have been taking place on Pontiac’s Motorati sims in the virtual world of Second Life, where it seems some cool stuff has been going on. The latest was a Monster Truck Rally that took place last night (and continues this evening) as part of the Motorlympics, whose champion will be crowned on Friday. The great thing about this stuff is that it looks like fun. Pontiac and virtual-world services shop Millions of Us seem to have found a great way to merge their promotional initiative with native SL culture. The other nice thing about it is that the Motorati Life Web site is chock full of information, including a directory, a blog,l forusm and more. Here’s hoping for more such integrated events in future.

After this recent post flagging tonight’s appearance in Second Life by Robert Randolph and O.A.R.’s Marc Roberge (at 5:00pm SL time), a couple of people dropped me a line asking for more details — which can be found below. Also want to note, though, that this event looks to be generating an interesting televisual moment. NBC will apparently air some brief footage of Second Life (see video above, though I’m not sure whether that’s what will end up on air) as a way to drive people to VirtualNBC.com, a Web portal where people without SL accounts can experience and participate in the event. (more…)

I love London. I’d particularly like to be there today (or tomorrow), when the London Science Museum has a cool-sounding Future Playground showcase of gaming peripherals of the future (described in detail on the BBC’s Web site), as part of its Game On exhibition on the history of computer games. It’s worth pondering what such 3D peripherals — stuff like the Puffer Sphere, on which images can be projected, and an interactive film that’s navigated by song — could do for your virtual world experience as well. The “pneumatically driven” Active Chair, especially, sounds perfect for Second Life.

I love it. Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh is selling copies of his He Is Just A Rat comic book series (which he wrote and drew) for Linden dollars, the virtual currency of Second Life. The comics are available for L$2,000 exclusively on SLBoutique, one of the major SL shopping Web sites. Tony’s comics aren’t the first real item to be sold for L$ on an SL shopping site, but I like that he’s putting them up for sale there. The ability to make money within the confines of Second Life is regularly trotted out by residents, journalists and Linden Lab, but it seems there might also be potential to make some spare cash on the edges, by marketing real items to a captive virtual audience. Not everyone wants to spend their L$ on prim skirts, after all. Why not provide them with some physical goods they can spend their virtual money on?

Thought it worth noting that Second Life resident Jordan Witherspoon passed away recently at the age of 28. Jordan was a member of the Alliance Navy, a really intersting role-playing group that was committed to policing portions of SL on its own (though opinions as to its beneficence differed, depending on which end of the policing you were on). We covered the Navy and related groups several times in the Second Life Herald. Jordan’s passing was marked by a memorial that drew some 200 SL residents. As noted on eightbar (where I first read about this), our thoughts are with Jordan’s family.

Raph Koster, revered designer of massively multiplayer online games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies (as well as being handy with a guitar and a line of verse) has announced his long-awaited startup. Known as Areae (the pronunciation is up to you), the company is dedicated to “taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new,” according to the site. While few — make that practically no — details have been forthcoming, the site gives some tantalizing hints. “We’re working on some new tech that will literally change how virtual worlds are made,” it says. From now on, if Areae has its way, it sounds like virtual worlds will be “Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.” So what are we getting here? An easy way (a la Multiverse) to build your own game-world? A tool for putting together a smaller, more stand-alone 3D space (something like a distributed Second Life)? Something in between, or maybe completely outside? Who cares, it’s exciting, and anyway, only the Areae team (of two so far, but they’re looking for more) and its advisory board (peppered with veterans like Richard Bartle and people you may have heard less about but who are doing some really interesting thinking these days like Amy Jo Kim) know for sure. I’ll bring you more news as soon as I can cadge it out of Raph — or come down to South by Southwest, where I’m hoping to have both Raph and Multiverse’s Corey Bridges on a panel I’m moderating on user-generated content (though no one’s confirmed for it yet, to be sure). More news on that as it develops as well.

Philip K. Dick got me through my teenage years. I read all of his novels, many of them multiple times, but among my favorites was always A Scanner Darkly, the twisted tale of a drug-addled officer assigned to spy on some drug-addled layabouts, with mind-addling results. (I also really dug Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, as well as any number of others, on up to and including Valis. Plus, it’s really worth checking out his non-science-fiction fiction, like Confessions of a Crap Artist. But I digress.) Now the DVD of the recent Scanner Darkly movie — a cool, rotoscoped experience starring Keanu Reeves and Woody Harrelson, which is actually pretty good — is getting a release party in the virtual world of Second Life, kicking off next Monday, December 18, from 6:00pm to 10:00pm SL time (from 9:00pm Eastern). Sounds fun, too: “There will be music and a lot of imagery and visual experiences reminiscent of the film or trippy to the point that a Pokemon level seizure isn’t far behind,” according to a flak. (Pokemon seizures in Second Life? I’m so there.) There will also be audio and video clips from the film, and a few surprises. SLurl on over on Monday. And don’t forget to check out the advert in the Second Life Herald sidebar for a cute quip from the movie, heh.