The L Word Comes to Second Life
Fans of Showtime’s long-running series “The L Word,” which is a kind of San Francisco lesbian version of Sex and the City (and a pretty entertaining show, actually), now have a place to hang out in the virtual world of Second Life. Built out by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), »The L Word« sim in Second Life is a hangout for fans akin to MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach, a re-creation of portions of the show that fans can occupy themselves. There’s a special L Word in Second Life page on Showtime’s site, and the Sheep have even taken advantage of Linden Lab’s registration API to create a Showtime-branded SL signup page. This is the first such page I’ve seen and is an especially cool development, as it starts to push SL more toward being a service and away from being a hermetically sealed world. The project also has its own orientation island.
Oddly, there’s no SLurl on the Showtime page. Instead, you’re simply rezzed in The L Word orientation island after you sign up; LL’s registration API lets the registering party set a new av’s first home location.
»The L Word Orientation« sim is very nicely done, with a well organized orientation to Second Life that’s arguably better than the one Linden Lab provides. But one of the things about the project that most excited me was the L Word heads-up display that’s handed out during the orientation. The HUD drops down a really nice set of windows that look and act like browser windows in a smoother fashion than any HUD I’ve encountered before. The HUD screens come with their own set of locations that you can teleport to, and can apparently be updated on the fly. I’m leaning on the Sheep to reveal at least the broad strokes of their technique, if not the trade secrets involved, but you’ll have to wait until that request passes security clearance. Here’s a shot of the HUD in action:
What I like about it is that the HUD is a great partial replacement for the native user interface, which, as we know, kind of sucks. Of course, this is only a workaround, and the fact that there’s now an open-source client means it will soon be superceded, but it’s still very cool.
So far, fans are taking quite well to the sim, 3pointD hears, which includes a coffee shop from the show, an L Word Club, and various shops and other hangouts. The project is only a single sim plus an orientation sim at the moment, though, which seems to indicate that Showtime will have to expand if they want to fit all their fans on a more constant basis. As an entry to Second Life and a place for fans to come back to occasionally and do things like hold events in, though, it seems like it’s already flying quite well.
Feeds
Nice build. Excellent sound system in the L Word Club. The ease of enabling/disabling dance (in the L Word Club) is user friendly.
Good insights about ESC enabling easier SL signup as well as a more user friendly HUD associated with this endeavor.
Ease of use, functionality, adding value (in many ways) ‘must’ be what this technology comes to (IMO).
The next million dollar question is how does a location ’stay’ sticky, meaning users return again and again, and it perhaps grows?
This will increasingly become important as users have a nearly unlimited selection of ever new location openings which ‘titillate’ the imagination initially.
I like all that vivid pink! I’ve got to take me a look. :)
That looks cool. Does the registration API then take you to a special customized WA somehow? Or do you still have to go through the clunk Linden WAs and wait for help? Or does a HUD drop on you somehow? I’d try it but I have so many alts they will ding me for $9.95.
To bad sho.com does some kind of ip check, to prevent non americans from visiting the site. :/
It allways feels really wierd experiencing that.
Actually Philip said last night after the town hall that he thought the L-word thing did skip the official OI and HI stuff and deliver people right to that sim where they wanted the content related to where they had started. But…has anybody actually walked through this yet?
Nicely executed SL world. Only complaint is, I wasn’t able to access the SL area witout creating a separate SL account by going through Showtime’s link at
http://www.sho.com/site/lword/second_life.do
So now I have two SL characters, which I didn’t really want to have. Maybe I didn’t locate the island in the correct manner the first time around, but when doing a “Search” for the l word location or “the planet” which is what they call their cafe, within second life came up with nothing i had to go ahead and create a second 2nd life character specific for this.
you don’t need to create a new second lfie account to access the l word island/orientation or join the groups there. follow the slurl given here and using your original second life username visit the l word island. I was just there and it’s GREAT! :-) they even have some streamed media there with interviews, previews and so forth.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20L%20Word/128/128/28/
for direct access.
the web page set up for second life sign in via shotime isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in fairness since the drop down menu for “last name” isn’t exhaustive and didn’t include my account’s last name. that’s when I went a different route and found it IN second life myself.
hope this helps!
Frank Lassard x
Fiona / Frank - I took the liberty of editing your comment in order to correct the SLurl. You have to put “%20″ in place of the spaces in the “The L Word” in order for it to work correctly.
thanks mark, was just about to fix it!!! you beat me by minutes!
[…] Mark Wallace’s piece titled A Second Life for MTV in the February edition of Wired has sparked a number of conversations today. After talking about Matt Bostwick, his Leapfrog units role within MTV and its success with Virtual Laguna Beach I popped into SL and did a quick walk-through the recently opened The L Word and soon to open AOL Pointe sims. With Nickelodeon’s recent launch of Nicktropolis, the BBC’s declaration of intention for CBBC and ABC’s announcement yesterday the Virtual Worlds space is about to become a whole lot more mainstream as Big Media carries it ever closer to the tipping point. :These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
video de bette & tina. helena
woww nice game…is the real actres from the L word play the game too??