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: Social Structures, Social Upheaval
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Responding to my post on VRChat's emerging new creator economy featuring the video above), longtime reader Martin K. has some provocative thoughts on the sociology of virtual worlds: One interesting thought that jumped at me in the context of monetization was this: When your world is Quest-compatible, more kids get in; it's just a fact…
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Now available on my Patreon: First launched in 2006 as a rickety RPG where stories and quests were conveyed by in-world notecards, the core player base has remained, evolved, and grown together. To this day (by Nadir’s estimate) some 5,000 SLers visit the mini-world of Crack Den every month, perhaps to participate in the mayhem,…
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When I ran an anonymous survey of Second Life merchants to help prepare this Patreon report on the Second Life economy, I included an open form option that asked, "Is there anything you'd like to say that wasn't covered by this survey?" One merchant delivered in thunder and fire. Read it all below, and if…
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We should explore a key finding from my recent Patreon report, that nearly half the Second Life merchants surveyed believe the virtual world economy is dominated by oligopolies (see above). A solid plurality of merchants believe some SL brands have oligopolistic power over the virtual economy, while 37% are open to that possibility. Anonymous comments by…
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In Sign of Growing Protest Over Heavily AI-Enhanced Images, Primfeed Adds Restrictions to AI Content
Here's a small but notable update from Primfeed, the new, quickly growing social network/Flickr alternative for the Second Life user community: AI is allowed on Primfeed, however it needs to follow simple rules: If it's a vendor ads, you must use the AI tag. If it's not, it doesn't need the AI tag. – Your…
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Primfeed, a new social media service for Second Life users positioned as an alternative to Flickr after SLers on the photo sharing site experienced a wave of penalties and bannings, just launched. I just created an account here, and so far, the set-up process is pretty impressive and perfectly optimized for Second Life users in…
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Last week's post on Dr. Ruth Diaz's new project to interview and better understand virtual world trolls helped provoke a pretty interesting reader conversation that's difficult to summarize, but here's one particular highlight — longtime reader Martin K. makes the provocative argument that trolls are somewhat necessary to the long term health of virtual worlds:…
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Above: Dr. Diaz talks with someone who formerly trolled them As Meta learned the hard way, avatar trolling is a core behavior in virtual worlds that needs to be dealt with on a constant basis. Surprisingly, there’s not much shared research around the phenomena, or best practices for how to address it on an essential…
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Image by Orion Octane from Crack Den's Flickr pool Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO in Second Life, is like a version of Grand Theft Auto Online from an alternate timeline where the Hot Coffee incident scarcely elicited a shrug (if you know you know), and its user community was free to wildly build…
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Right: User-made agit-prop poster for the Helldivers 2 protest Pretty interesting Polygon story on the successful user community-led uprising against Sony's policy changes to Helldivers 2. The multiplayer game is reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven's version of Starship Troopers, satirizing war movies heavy on propaganda while also succeeding as an enjoyable war movie in its own…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 