I’ve received an urgent transmission and need your help! Beware the pink pony-tailed menace!
BEGIN TRANSMISSION 1 (07.31.07). S.O.S. - S.O.S. - IBM CODESTATION is breached. Infiltrator appears to be horrible pink beast with devastating pony-tails. Our defender, SENTINEL, is defeated – broken in four and scattered across Second Life. [See attached movie.] You are our last hope. Find the four parts and rebuild SENTINEL. The black boxes will lead the way. Prizes and glory await all those who complete the challenge… END TRANSMISSION 1 (07.31.07).
Way back in its earliest beginnings, Second Life was conceived in part as a platform for game development. But as SL designers will eagerly tell you, hacking the code to support a playable system is a massive challenge. Accepting it are CCS and DSC, two robust gameplay engines already in use by many gamers in SL. NWN game correspondent Onder Skall breaks down the pros and cons of both in a compare and contrast accompanied by uniformly kickass screenshots. Whether you’re a gamer or game developer, it’s mandatory reading. Join Onder after the break.
An official press release (see below) announces the launching of Tournament.com where players can wager real money on their skills playing popular first person shooter games. You can wager up to $10 per match and you’re limited to depositing $150 per month into the system, but that doesn’t mean that people won’t figure out how to cheat the system. I’d be shocked if there wasn’t somebody out there making a living playing FPS through this site within six months.
Even without cheating it’s still better than gold farming.
Rifkin Hasburg must be a saint, because if I were in his place, I’d have killed me by now. I’ve been stringing the poor guy along on this Danger Zone review for ages now. I’ve told him “oh yeah I’m going to get to that this week” or “oop sorry guess I’ll do it next week” for months. It’s a wonder he doesn’t have a “kill Onder Skall” group formed.
Alright, so lets (finally!) talk Danger Zone. It’s a winner-takes-all (minus the rake) bidding game for 2 - 8 players, and it’s really fun. The pictures above are from the first game we played with just four people, but we all hung out afterward and played a seven-player game that was even more fun.
Gameplay is easy to understand as soon as you’ve done it, but difficult to explain. There are five “rounds”, and during each round a cube is randomly drawn. After each cube is drawn you choose to “Stay” or “Run”. If you “Run”, you’re done for that round. If you “Stay”, another cube is drawn until the round ends.
With me so far? Good. Now here’s the trick: some of the cubes are good and give you “gems”. Whoever ends the game with the most wins the pot. Some of the cubes are BAD, however, and activate one of the traps. If the same trap comes up twice in a round everybody who stayed gets smashed/sliced/zapped/blasted/eaten, and loses all of the gems they got for that round. At that point the cubes all go back into the pool, the traps are reset, and the next round starts.
There are a few extra little things about how gems are divided up and how a pot of gems in the middle is handled, but that’s the general idea. If you’re still confused, don’t worry: as soon as you’ve played one round it all becomes crystal clear. The HUD is entirely optional and it really is as simple as mashing one of the two buttons on the table. The one feature people had the hardest time with was the point where, after they pay, they need to sit on the platform that has their name. Maybe the platforms need to blink or something.
Anyhow, huge huge fun. We got smashed by boulders, struck by lightning, slashed by spinning blades, blown up by dynamite, and eaten by sharks. Hillarious, fun animations and a deceptively simple interface with lots of strategy behind it makes this a game you’ll want to play over and over again. If you like Poker, you’ll love Danger Zone!
Fight freely - community combat system combat system to be released in May
by Onder Skall, Gaming in SL desk
I’ve been billing the City of Lost Angels for awhile now as the “queen of SL RPGs”. It’s among the oldest, has the most unbelievably hardcore players, and has been tested as having the fastest and most lag-free RPG interface. The sim owner, Suzanna Soyinka, has been expanding the game by several sims. Tonight she dropped a major bombshell on me though: they’re making CoLA Combat System an open source project.
Got a dream for an RPG you want to run in SL? Now you won’t have to reinvent the wheel, and you won’t have to pay rent to have the privilege of using somebody else’s system.
Onder Skall: You are my goddamn hero today. Suzanna Soyinka laughs Suzanna Soyinka: Peoples games shouldn’t be about making a few people rich Suzanna Soyinka: Not here Suzanna Soyinka: Not in this world Suzanna Soyinka: There are ways to support yourself here, through creativity and not selling other peoples concepts
… Suzanna Soyinka: Oh also the sim of Primordealism has joined the CoLA/NoR RP chain, even moved their sim to due ease of the NoR Reliance sim. Suzanna Soyinka: So we’re up to 7 continguous sims. With an 8th on the way Onder Skall: available right now? Suzanna Soyinka: Yes its there right now actually. Just not on the map, probably won’t be til tommorrow. Primordealism or Noumenon Roleplay as its called is a more dark fantasy based play area focused on faeries and elves and demons in a quasi modernistic steampunkish atmosphere. Suzanna Soyinka: We’re working with the admin of that sim, Super Calamari to implement it as a parallel realm that supports our supernatural races and will be expending the CCS system to integrate them into the game more fully with more defined race and class choices for that style of character.
NOTE: this article was actually written several weeks ago and sent in to the Herald. It got lost in the shuffle and never saw the light of day. For ongoing coverage of the Life 2.0 event, see Metaversed.
When I had first heard of the Dr. Dobbs Life 2.0 event (through channels I’ve since forgotten) the details were pretty sketchy. We knew it was going to be in-world, and roughly what it was about (the journal is about hardcore code-crunching, after all), but there was nothing really beyond that. A perusal of the “Life 2.0″ website shed some light on the matter:
[...] John Jainschigg, Director of Online Technology for Dr. Dobb’s Journal, announced Dr. Dobb’s Life 2.0 http://www.life20.net, a new initiative aimed at providing software developers with a resource for events, training, and business development within the Second Life virtual world.
According to the program summary the hardcore basics of LSL and building in SL will be covered April 28/29, followed by a series of two-hour seminars over the next few days on topics like “SL as Platform” and “SL is Not a Game/SL is All Games”. Still, there was a serious lack of names here. I went to the island, took a look around, and found it to be a vacant work-in-progress. What’s going on here? (Side note: turns out I’m just a little early - they’ll be almost done building the place by the end of the week.)
After about five minutes another green dot appeared on the mini-map and I chased it down. Maybe they knew something. As it turned out this was Rissa Maidstone, an independent consultant helping to put the place together. She contacted John Jainschigg (John Zhaoying in SL) who quickly joined us, and the three of us settled in for a chat. What is this event meant to accomplish? Who is it for? Is this going to be a one-off event, or is Dobb’s going to make more than just another corporate brochure site?
The fact is, I’ve really lost touch with Dr. Dobb’s Journal. I hung up my programmer hat years ago when life pulled me in another direction, and only had a distant recollection of having owned C++ manuals that they produced. They were, and continue to be, the ultimate resource for software developers serious about staying on the cutting edge. They were the first to print Richard Stallman’s “GNU Manifesto“, were all over the introduction of Linux, and recently explored how to prepare for the so-called “Vista Killer”, SLED10 Linux. You don’t get any more bleeding edge than these guys.
As it turns out, these days, this is just the tip of the iceberg for them.
The ironic thing about finding this article via such a convoluted path is that it was written by Wagner James Au of New World Notes. You’d think I’d have found it via his blog. Ah well. Anyhow, the point is: NASA has money to sink into a 3-space promo, and John Carmack (programmer of Quake and Doom) recommends they not reinvent the wheel. Here’s the hot quote:
“[I] do support efforts to enhance math/science/engineering education, and I could imagine something interesting coming out of it if they were willing to focus on game-like scenario and actions, rather than trying to be some sort of generic Second Life sort of environment.”
Sounds like just the sort of thing that Millions Of Us or Electric Sheep or River Runs Red should be chasing down. Time to hustle boys!
The tens of thousands (soon to be capped off at 100,000) signed on as “developers” for Project: Top Secret recieved further details today. Specifically, we now know a bit about how the business model will work:
We’ll be making a very relevant massively multiplayer title. (Meaning hundreds of thousands of players, but to keep things under control, they’ll be playing in 6 person groups, with up to around 3,000 players per server.) The game will be free and yes, we will let you have builds along the way to experiment with.
[...]
Making a business model from selling items is actually quite an interesting design challenge (as you will see later.) This is how games in Asia are made, but you must understand that people only buy them after they like the game. If the game isn’t great, you won’t sell anything. (So this is a tougher business than just selling Console Discs or Cartridges. At $60 less than today’s games, I believe this model will be very popular in the future.)
The comparisons to SL are a obvious: a free-to-play game funded by corporate sponsorship and the transaction of in-world items. I don’t mean to imply that this is any kind of replacement for Second Life, but there are financial parallels here that may help us to understand how to take advantage of the SL environment a bit better.
The numbers are rather significant considering what the major complaints about SL are. We generally worry about not being able to fit more than ten people into a sim before suffering major lag, but here is this “major MMO” proposing 6 people at a time, tops. Granted, they’re talking about running the equivalent of 500 sims per server, which is a major expense, but it does begs several questions:
Have we seen the limits of what can be accomplished with a full-sim game yet?
Is it feasible to run a full sim, or a series of sims, supporting a low number of players if we could guarantee full occupancy?
Exluding casinos and RPGs, are there any full-sim game spaces (sims exclusively for play) maintaining a profit in SL at all?
I’m going to be conducting a major census of games in Second Life soon (check back on the blog), which may help to answer these questions. In the meantime, what other questions should we be asking? Are there other lessons to be learned here?
Name: Take It or Leave It Genre: Gameshow Creator(s): Artemis Cain Estimated Number of Players: One player at a time, and as many audience members as can cram into the sim. Gameplay: Drama and tension as one lucky contestant gets a chance at big cash prizes Top Qualities: Really packs a room. Tweaked to create as little lag as possible. A rare opportunity for large groups of avatars to shout without it being considered rude.
Current Shortcomings: Needs a really good host in order to be enjoyable. No one-player version possible. No models holding the cases. Where to Play/Buy: Play at Under the Boardwalk, purchase on SLX
When “Deal or No Deal” hit the airwaves I asked myself how long it would be until somebody made an SL version. Apparently the answer is 2 seconds. “Take It or Leave It” started popping up around Second Life in October of last year.
I found a copy of “Take It or Leave It” running at Under the Boardwalk over in Caeshu. The contestant picks a case valued anywhere between L$1 to L$10000. Next, they choose from several other possible cases, whose values are revealed and removed from the board. The host answers a phone call from “the banker” with an offer of slightly less than the average value of the remaining cases. The contestant is then faced with a choice: do they take the deal, or do they eliminate more values from the board and get a new offer from the banker?
The trick with a game like this one is that audience participation is critical. You need a crowd interested in being an audience, and who won’t all leave as soon as they find out that they aren’t tonight’s lucky contestant. Drama and excitement are critical so the host is the key.
Stuart Warf, the host at Under the Boardwalk, was charming and helped to get the crowd whipped into a frenzy. Apparently he gets to know the contestant a bit and works personal details into the back-and-forth between player and host. Whenever the whole crowd started yelling “leave it! Leave it!” Stuart would step in and help the contestant weigh the options, walking them through why they just might want to “take it” and end the game. Stuart was a maestro at creating tension, which made the entire experience that much more exciting for everybody.
If you’re looking for a great way to get some dwell, hire yourself a charismatic host (I hear Stuart takes bookings!), pick up a copy of “Take It or Leave It” and prepare yourself for a great show.
[Originally posted to the Second Life Herald. BTW, check out Wonderland, it's one of my favorite blogs.]
Wonderland’s world-travelling gaming guru Alice reports that “business life”, an in-flight magazine for British Airways, carries a cover story featuring our own Anshe Chung. Unfortunately, as she puts it: “no mention of flying willies.” I guess you can’t have everything.
That cover art is really something, though. Anybody know how to get my avatar to look that smooth?
Speaking of Wonderland, Raph Koster (of Areae Inc.) ran an interesting comparison based off of Alice’s ponderings of NCSoft’s claims. A figure of 67 million was given as the number of NCSoft’s customers, although later comments clarified that this was a figure for total registrations. Sound like a familiar story?
Meanwhile, Raph says, Habbo Hotel claims 70 million. That’s a 7 with one-two-three-four-five-six-seven zeroes after it. After a wild claim like that, is it even humanly possible to feign shock at Linden Labs’ population claims?
Let me start this off by stating that I have no interest in the “world vs. platform” debate. It’s boring and played out, so don’t you dare try to draw me in. What I’m trying to do here is answer the simple question:
Where are the best candidates as viable alternatives to Second Life?
In order to answer this question, I’ve come up with the three things that in my opinion make Second Life irreplaceable at the moment. Since these are entirely formed from my little brain, we’ll call them “Onder’s Big Three”. They are:
Cash transactions must be easy and readily accommodated flowing both into and out from the system.
Users must be able to create unique content and retain some form of ownership over it.
The fabric of the world itself must be possible to affect. IE: land ownership, room decoration, or some other content that remains viable even when the player who created it is logged off. (”Pervasive” is the word I’m groping for here…)
I guess one last note here: devkits don’t count. To even make it into this list it has to be a running, functioning environment that people can walk into, not a tool for developers only. Let’s take a look at the candidates:
HiPiHi - Chinese only right now. The YouTube demo reel shows very many SL-like things like custom avatars and building. It remains mysterious as far as economics or whether or not you can upload files to the world. They’re in closed beta so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Point 1 - No idea.
Point 2 - You can definitely create, but uploading is unknown and ownership is unknown.
Point 3 - Definitely.
Here, check out the demo reel. Anybody know if there’s an English translation of the voice-over somewhere?
[Oh and speaking of The Herald... this was posted there awhile ago. It's a big deal, and I wanted to make sure they had the exclusive. The big event is coming up on Thursday and I'll do my best to be there if you will!]
Never underestimate casual games. The video gaming industry is buzzing about them lately, billing them as a fast-growing frontier where indie shops are king. While many oldbie SL residents may look down their noses at Tringo, Slingo and the like, the fact remains that people play these games and have fun doing it. These games have a short learning curve, offer a reward for playing, and they make the owners money.
With that in mind I wasn’t about to shrug off the invitation I received for a sneak-preview of Zingo. I may not be a very casual gamer (even new members in the Second Life Games group are called “Hardcore”), but these types of games have already dramatically changed the landscape in SL. It was worth checking out. Read the rest of this entry
I had a big scare the other day: I had too much L$! We all go through this now and again, but usually we can count on Tier fees to bring us back to a happy state of bankruptcy. Unfortunately that wasn’t going to cover it and I was going to end up with a spare few hundred L$. What was I going to do?
Now, I could just go and buy some stuff from native builders or designers and then delete the items from my inventory and my troubles would be over. Unfortunately I would then be burdening these innocent people with spare L$ of their own and the cycle would just continue. No, if I really was going to obliterate this cash completely, I had to find a pit of despair from which no L$ would ever return.
A quick search of the Classifieds later and I had my answer. Raiden Gold Casino was dumping hundreds of thousands of L$ every single month into advertising. You couldn’t avoid their ads even if you tried (believe me, I’ve tried…). They must be a L$ eating machine. Perfect!
When I arrived at the casino I knew right away I was in the right place. I think we’re all tired of stumbling across brilliantly intricate and gorgeous builds. Thank goodness we have none of that nonsense here. The exterior was completely devoid of any artistic touch. Factories have more character. Its bland facade screamed: “shut up and get in here so we can take your money.” My God, they were efficient!
Everybody writes about Tringo. Everybody. Basically, there’s a rule that says that if you write about Second Life more than once, you must mention Tringo or somebody will burn your house down. Write. About. Tringo. NOW.
So here it is, my token article about Tringo. Happy?
I’m forced to write about Tringo because it’s this big SL success story. Game invented in SL becomes a smash hit, pervades every single island in SL, has spawned many online immitators, and is making a debut on the GameBoy soon. See? SL is a legitimate media! Everybody get all hard about legitimacy!
I could care less about legitimacy. I care about fun. Is it, or is it not, FUN?
As competetive gambling goes, yes, it’s fun. Picture a Tetris game where everybody gets the peices at the same time and vies for the highest score. Winner takes all (plus a bit from the house). I’ve given you a link to the IceDragon’s Playpen version because they have a great host and don’t spam you with constant announcements. It’s a relatively civil playing environment, and you’ll have a good time.
Devils Moon / Abranimations, Devils Moon (166, 116, 251) - At first glance the place doesn’t look all that hot. Dark brown wood, dirty outside, weird haunting soundtrack… but after a second or two you start to realize that it’s a compelling cyberpunk build. Amid the puddles on the sidewalks and neon glow, there’s an incredible atmosphere being built.
Of course this is a blog about play. Let’s get to the games.
This is a great place to go if you want to buy some games for your lot to play with friends. Mud wrestling, spin-the-bottle, and arm wrestling are actually very fun. Cleverly, the store owners have allowed customers to demo the games before purchasing, so grab a friend and stop on by! (If your friend is of the “special friend” variety, check out the adult animations downstairs.) They also had frizbees, soccer, and yo-yos, but I didn’t get to demo any of it so I have no idea how good any of it is. Anybody try these out? Email me.
by Onder Skall
