The Metaverse

Squawk To Add Deliciious and Magnolia Support

Nick over at the wonder Metaversed reports that everyone's favourite Twitter/Jaiku SL client, Squawk, is to Add Deliciious and Magnolia Support :

In its bid to become the dominant web2.0 integration app for Second Life, Squawk, which has long been my app of choice for use with Twitter and Jaiku, is about to release version 1.4 with Delicious and Ma.gnolia support. The added features provide a "backbone" for Squawks new gridmarking feature according to developer Evan Sims.

Secondfest

Secondfest at Second Life (Friday, June 29, 2007) - Upcoming

Secondfest is a virtual three-day music festival inside Second Life realised by The Guardian and Intel, featuring live music from offline and online performers, theatre, ballet, cinema, animation and general chaos. It kicks off Friday 29 June at 6pm GMT (10am SLT) and rocks and rolls until midnight (GMT) Sunday night.

Incidentally, I'll be at SLUK on Saturday, so if you see me come up and say hi!

The only Star Wars I've ever really enjoyed

I've had a long and checkered history in MMORPGs, from Ultima Online to World of Warcraft and, of course, Second Life. After Dark Age of Camelot, but before WoW, I spent quite a lot of time in Star Wars: Galaxies.

That in itself is a bit weird. After all, I can't stand Star Wars. But I'll try any game for a while, and SWG hooked me because of its variety. You didn't have to spend lots of time rerunning the same quests, you didn't need to group, and it was easy to run at your own pace.

I became a scout, then a ranger, and was getting close to Master Ranger when the infamous NGE - New Game Enhancements - game along and pretty much broke the came. My class, along with some much loved other ones, disappeared over night. I never logged in again.

There's a brilliant account of what happened - and the lessons for game designers - at The Escapist. One of the lessons it outlines is this:

• Many players don't experience a persistent online world as "a game." They experience it as "my life." An online world's hardcore players view themselves as citizens. Some want to be good citizens, some bad, but the entire core wants to believe they belong to something permanent.

That's something, I think, that Linden Lab ought to take on board, before it repeats some of the mistakes that SoE made.

Surprisingly, Sony wants to control Home

Via Second Life Insider comes a link to an interview with Peter Edwards, the Sony executive responsble for the company's Home virtual world. As I've predicted before, Sony intends to be pretty restrictive about what you can and can't do in Home, including controlling what you can dress as:

"If everyone's walking around dressed as Orcs or Stormtroopers or whatever, then you lose that welcoming, accessible element that means Mum, Dad and your sister might get involved as well," he said. "The idea is to keep it as accessible, mainstream and friendly as possible."

This, of course, means that Home is a long way from the "Your world, your imagination" approach that Second Life takes.

The key thing to know about Sony and its ilk is that they're not interested in your creativity, only theirs - or rather, the creativity of the people who work for them under contract. Even if Sony allows you to create objects for yourself, I doubt very much that the tools they provide will be good enough to create professional looking-products, no matter how good you are. They want you to buy, to consume, not to create - because the more you create, the more competition there is for their products.

About

The Metaverse is a blog run by Ian Betteridge. I found that I was blogging so much about Second Life on my main site that I decided to hive it off to a specialised one.