Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: New World Culture
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"I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game" at first seemed like a mean snarkfest against There, the virtual world that went defunct in 2010 then relaunched as a subscription-based platform in 2012. Homepage here. But longtime virtual world denizen Cube Republic convinced me to keep watching: "I was prepared for another troll video and…
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In case you missed the Oscars last weekend, the Best Animated Feature award went to Flow, an amazingly beautiful, even heartbreaking movie which beat out big budget entries like Disney/Pixar's Inside Out 2 and Universal Pictures' The Wild Robot. Even more amazing, Flow was made by a small team of artists using Blender, the free…
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This long inZOI playthrough by Rudi Rennkamel (watch above) is from a few months ago, but it's the most thorough I've seen so far. The avatar creation and 3D building system is quite impressive, with some caveats. Unless I missed it, sadly no mention of inZOI's cat god though. Brendan "PLAYERUNKNOWN" Greene is making a…
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I’m seriously psyched to play Thick as Thieves, an upcoming PC/console game first teased at the Game Awards a few weeks ago. It has a direct heritage to the original Thief games from the early 2000s, milestones in immersive simulation. (And as a young gamer, got me personally ebullient about interactive immersion as an emergent…
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Premiering online and at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah next week, Reality of Hope is a short documentary depicting two friends who first meet in VRChat's large furry community — and after a medical crisis emerges, the friendship deepens into real life in a surprising and powerful way. It's directed by Joe Hunting, whose…
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I have no choice but to blog Grand Theft Hamlet, an acclaimed all-machinima documentary about two out-of-work actors who during the pandemic, log into Grand Theft Auto Online to try and stage a live production of Shakespeare's most famous play. Watch the trailer above! Now playing in the UK and debuting in the US this…
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Coming January 31 (at least in the US) in the acclaimed indie movie Love Me, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are a sentient buoy and satellite (respectively) who meet, fall in love, and re-create themselves as human avatars who live out the end of humanity together. The trailer at least looks pretty powerful, though I'm…
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It's been a few months since we checked in on the Virtual Worlds Museum™, the largest online info/community resource for virtual worlds, past and present — so I just had a chat with founder/CEO Julian Reyes, to get the latest updates. Turns out, there's quite a lot! For one, it's now officially trademarked (a milestone…
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New World Notes columnist Cajsa Lilliehook just locked up her fairly large X/Twitter account (with nearly 20,000 followers) and opened up shop in Bluesky here. I wasn't surprised when she told me this last night (for reasons I'll explain below), but it's actually part of a larger trend: In the last couple weeks, my mostly…
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Last week my little-used Threads and Bluesky accounts gained a trove of new followers for Totally Mysterious Reasons. So if you're looking to follow me on either platform: On Threads, I'm "wjamesau" On Bluesky, I'm "SLHamlet" Advice wanted: Is there a good service for quickly cross-posting to and from these platforms, or also to/from Twitter/X?…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 