I have spent 9 years exploring 3D Virtual Worlds, and 8 years playing MMORPGs. For the longest time they felt like two different experiences. 3D Virtual Worlds are a creative outlet, while MMORPGs are a mostly cooperative gaming experience. It seems that recently they have been merging. I have not been adding many new virtual worlds to my master list
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Catching up with the news on 3D Virtual Worlds, has been getting a little depressing lately. Bottom line: they are all down in traffic. Lets start with some news on the LL/SL front: Linden Lab announced two weeks ago that they bought an interactive fiction company called LittleTextPeople. The small company develops 2D interactive fiction for play on mobile phones
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I have not written anything in a couple of weeks because I have been busy working on the sequel. Meanwhile… There are many little things going on in metaverse land worth bringing up. First, is the fast decline of Worlds of Warcraft. They are losing net subscribers at a rate of about 100,000 a month. Currently they sit at 11.1
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A thread at Second Life Universe put up a challenge to show the evolution of your avatar. I decided to participate. Even though I first did this three years ago on my 4th anniversary, I thought it was worth updating. 2004: Creepy system avatar. Some would call this a “classic” SL avatar. For me it looked ugly, which is why
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So with a lot of State of the Union, and State of the Nation, and State of the State speeches the last week or so, how about a quick view at the state of the Metaverse? Growth: None Second Life has seen no real growth at all in the last calendar year. This according to their last quarterly report. IMVU
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So I spent a fair amount of posts devoted to what seems to be a battle of “visions” going on in Second Life. A string of posts starting with this one I wrote a year ago. I have written so many I just decided to create a new sl visions tag. Click to see all the related posts. So here
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From a Second Life perspective, a 3D Internet presents many challenges. The biggest one on the minds of most people is “How do I make money?” Because of the open nature of a 3D internet, any rules regarding permissions and copying simply cannot be enforced. The Second Life economic model will not work. There will be money making opportunities on the 3D internet, but the buying and selling of 3D goods for virtual cash can only be done in a closed off system like Second Life or an individual OS grid.
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I have been following the Open Sim development for a couple of years now. Some of the latest developments have convinced me that if there is ever going to be a 3D internet, it will be based on Open Sim. I say this knowing that Open Sim currently has a rather low population of participants, low enough that one could question the sanity of such a statement. Well here is a brief summary of this conclusion.
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Most people that play Second Life, run into this problem eventually: You want to build stuff, and cant afford a lot of land, so you go to a sand box region, and when you go, its laggy and overcrowded. There is a solution with OpenSim. You can create a free, lag free personal sandbox island on your own computer and build what you want.
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We used to go to really original places like Svarga, Straylight, and Insilico and be amazed. Now dozens of new servers pop up monthly with similar looks to these places. It is getting harder and harder for builders to trump the latest, and even if they do get something amazing built, it gets lost in the noise.
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