Gothic Nightclub

Kevin (mycosys, Mycosys Schism in SL) has been having fun in Second Life by going to nightclubs. Last night when Kali and James dropped by I showed them both Second Life and There.com. One of the things that Kevin got me to go to was a nightclub called !Sanctuary ROCK~, Sanctuary Rock (145, 79, 54).

Now I'd been there before and despite the fact that it was very glamorous I wasn't all that impressed. Why? Because this is obviously a place designed for both high bandwidth and Windlight - the textures have so much detail, the avatars have heaps of detailed clothes, it plays streamed media and folk use all sorts of special gestures and the like. I only have the standard viewer so and a slower connection (much slower when we're both online) so it translates into slow rezzing and lag.

However, Kevin in real life suffers from Hypermobility and doesn't get a lot of dancing done, so somewhere like this is really good for him. Anyway, James went in to Kevin's room to have a look and Kali looked over my shoulder.

Now Kali's very practical, she's had to be running her own business (and making a success of it too) so the nightclub was not that appealing. And perhaps too, because most of what I'd showed her was changing clothes and dancing, she wondered what else was there in SL. How does one answer that? We went to have a look at a space port but my client crashed, and later I showed James hover boarding in There.com (much cleaner than in SL, as the only hover boards I've found here blow smoke like a chimney).

Maybe next time.

Virtual Space Wars

Here's an interesting lecture by Peter Ludlow, a professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Michigan (1 hour long), which talks about player's behaviour in The Sims Online and Second Life. Apparently players created "Mafias" and "Militias" and even fought wars of destruction in some areas!

Maybe though, the "real war" will start when other companies create popular rivals to SL, such as Sony and their PS3 'Home' system (maybe in Beta testing right now):

Apparently even ATARI are developing a virtual world. Maybe though, it will become really big business when Microsoft join in (and can that be far away?)!