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 Gaming
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A thrilling trend I'm starting to see in popular new games is a mash-up of multiplayer combat with virtual world gameplay, where customizing your avatar, crafting your home, raising/caring for pets, and casually hanging out with friends and exploring the world together is just as emphasized as the face-shooty aspects. Once Human is among the…
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It's impossible to understand US politics or Internet/gaming/virtual world culture without knowing about Gamergate, the numerically small but highly coordinated online harassment campaign unleashed almost exactly 10 years ago. Fortunately there's a new oral history on the topic: The Hivemind Swarmed by David Wolinsky, and the book's summary puts it well: Gamergate holds the grim…
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Tiny Glade, the ridiculously adorable procedural indie sandbox "doodling" creation game from PounceLight, launched yesterday on Steam (with a 15% early bird discount), and it's already a runaway hit. With over 2000 Overwhelmingly Positive ratings, it's fair to estimate Tiny Glade's likely sold over 100,000 copies on Steam in its first 24 hours. I played a…
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After nearly a month worth of buzz because of the character creator alone, we're starting to see some gameplay preview videos of inZOI, the upcoming life simulation game from South Korean-based KRAFTON. This one above by Sarah Thwaites is a good place to start; if you want to jump right to the creation tools, that…
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There's continued buzz for inZOI, the upcoming life simulator/character creator game from South Korean-based company KRAFTON — but also some gamer grumbling over reports that inZOI reportedly includes content created by generative AI. Such as this rant: It’s unclear if the database used for these tools draws from stolen work, or if it’s an internal…
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If you're looking for a quirky immersive game for this long weekend, check out the Crush House (Steam page here), where you play the camera person in a reality TV show from the 90s/early 2000s. I've been playing off-and-on since blogging about it last April, and it's enjoyably creepily voyeuristic, surreal, and tense — though…
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Lots of interesting reader feedback to my interview with Irena Pereria, on what went wrong with WoW, based on her insights as a former Blizzard designer/developer. Irena’s core argument is that changes to World of Warcraft starting with the Cataclysm expansion degraded the sense of World of Warcraft as a dynamic, living virtual world and…
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Chart via u/Kamikaze4228 based on open source data Ever wonder what became of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft? The groundbreaking MMORPG is still successful to be sure, but in recent years, it has fallen far from its 2010/2011 peak of over 12 million subscribers. Since then, its subscriber base has been on a sharp steady decline,…
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Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO in Second Life — think a text-driven GTA Online, but both more creative and adult-rated — just added AI interaction to its roleplay gaming systems. If I’m not mistaken, this is one of the first live MMOs to integrate LLMs like ChatGPT into gameplay. (It might actually be…
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Stars Reach is an upcoming sandbox sim just unveiled by legendary game designer Raph Koster and his startup Playable Worlds. And while it's very much an MMORPG, Raph tells me fans of open virtual worlds like Second Life and VRChat should find it appealing: "It is a game, not a pure social world," as he…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 