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!
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Category: New World Gaming
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Will NVIDIA’s AI-Powered NPCs Make Games More Fun? This Star Wars Old Republic Designer Has Concerns
You probably saw this pretty impressive recent demo of NVIDIA's NPCs powered by generative AI, enabling players to converse in deep detail with an NPC (albeit with a cringey mechanical voice). And if you were to ask an AI evangelist, they'd pronounce it as The Future of MMO Games. However, if you were to ask…
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In March we got the first in-depth preview of Life by You, the new life simulation game lead developed by ex-Linden Lab CEO / former EA/Sims lead Rod Humble. Since then, the game’s YouTube channel has been steadily showing off various features, including Rod himself showing off the avatar movement interface. (Watch above.) I have…
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Amazing cyberpunk-made-real story of the month, made possible by the fact that Counter-Strike Global Offensive is extremely popular with young gamers in Russia (most of them either in Putin's military or likely to be conscripted into it), but where news of the nation's real invasion of Ukraine is censored. Here's what Finnish reporters did with…
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I first wrote about Viewfinder by indie game developer Matt Stark over three years ago, when it was just an impressive Unity 3D demo which went viral thanks to a pretty unique gameplay twist: It's a first-person puzzler where you alter reality by manipulating pictures within it. (Just watch the video above, for a glimpse…
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Intriguing reader comment by veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert (BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, among many other titles), discussing the potential uses of ChatGPT and other generative AI for designing games: AI is really good at generating ideas but none will be better than 80% of the way there. That being said, that's…
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Pioneering MMO game designer Richard Bartle, author of the monumentally influential book Designing Virtual Worlds, recently started playing the MMO New World. Here's his hands-on review, including design tips for the developers: I've been playing New World for the past couple of months. There was an update yesterday, bringing a whole new 50 hours…
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Screencap of generative agent simulation — playable here Last week I wrote about the game developer who incorporated ChatGPT into his NPC-to-player conversations in his virtual world; now comes an experiment with "generative agents" — AI-powered NPCs, who talk with each other: In the experiment, the researchers placed 25 generative agents within a virtual world…
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Here's the first in-depth preview of Life by You, the new life simulation game by ex-Linden Lab CEO / former EA/Sims lead Rod Humble (who pops up at around 8:35 in this video above). While an early teaser somewhat suggested it would be a Sims clone, that superficial appearance is deceiving: By the team's description…
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Well this is an interesting reveal from Paradox Interactive (watch at 16:10): Life by You, a new life simulation game that's getting a full reveal later this month. Project lead of Life by You is Rod Humble, the game industry veteran who was once CEO of Linden Lab, and before that, was VP at Electronic…
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Remember Viewfinder, that utterly cerebellum-frying Unity demo from 2020 by game design student Matt Stark? I'm psyched to say it's finally becoming a full-fledged game, available soon for PlayStation and Steam. (In fact, here's the fully built-out Steam page.) Viewfinder is for everyone who played the Portal games and said, "Yeah that was fun but…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 