- Richard Bartle, Legendary MMO Designer, Reviews Amazon MMO New World
- When Will We Get AI-Powered Virtual World NPCs? Seasoned MMO Game Designers Weigh The Possibilities & Perils
- Visits To Controversial Bonnie Bots Website Displaying SL User Data Drops To 26K Per Month — Likely ~5000 Unique Visitors
- ChatGPT Is Not Reliable In Serious Use Cases – Here's Yet Another Example
- Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2023年3月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan
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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 of content with it, so I took this as an opportunity to uninstall (total time played: 360 hours).On the whole, I rather liked New World. OK, so the quests were truly awful and 100 hours elapsed between my being given the final main-story quest element (a dungeon run) and my being geared up enough to complete it, but the lore was well-constructed and the world was very nicely put-together (except for the towns, which in common with those of every other RPG in existence were confusingly or irritatingly laid-out).What I particularly found refreshing, though, was the way it encouraged players to make their own goals.For example, in the end game there are areas containing chests guarded by elite mobs, and players self-organise "chest runs" to descend en masse on such areas to lay waste to the guards and loot the chests. There's no formal quest to do this, it's more of a "here's some stuff you might want" challenge thrown down by the designers that the players have accepted.Other such challenges, such as pop-up events ("corruption portals" here — they're FATEs in FFXIV and rifts in Rift) were not so attractive, though, and something of an inconvenience at times if they appeared right where the mobs that you have a quest to kill were roaming.As usual, I knew when I started that I'd be leaving after a couple of months so I didn't join a guild. I couldn't really join one anyway, because the server population was so low. There are three factions in New World, and all members of a guild have to be in the same faction as each other.As is often the case when three-way inter-faction PvP is involved, one faction completely dominates, another just about holds its own and a third is nowhere. I didn't know what the situation was when I signed up to a faction, and happened to plump for the middle one. Its guilds were very PvP focused, because of the hold-their-own requirement, and they weren't looking for people who didn't perhaps enjoy having their heads handed to them on a plate on a daily basis.I think I only ever saw one recruitment ad for my faction, excluding plaintive ones in French, German or Polish that could have been for anything for all I knew.NEXT UP — combat design, crafting, music, developer notes, and more:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Lucky Spiritor is an unusual Second Life blog. Most SL bloggers focus on fashion. They style an outfit, post the credits, and if they’re writers, add some text about the outfit, their inspiration, or their life. Lucky Conundrum, however, writes a story and creates pictures to illustrate and share the credits. VIII: A Twist of Fate is the most recent installment of an ongoing story called Fate and Fortune. He also writes about life, sports, music, and what else that catches his peripatetic interests. For this picture, his alt looks slick, sleek, and ready to wreak havoc.
- Jacket: Blueberry – Spotlight – Leather Jackets – Brown
- Pants: Blueberry – Unbothered – Pants ~ BlackDark
- Boots: Wicca’s Wardrobe – Gypsy Boot ~ Redclaw Inshan
And then there is LeBron James, click here:
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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 resembling a sandbox video game, similar to The Sims. Each agent was assigned a unique background and participated in a two-day simulation. The study observed various remarkable behaviors:
One agent planned a party, informed several friends who then invited others, and collectively they coordinated the event.
Another agent decided to run for mayor, sparking organic discussions about their campaign and political stances among the community. Different agents held varying opinions on this candidate.
Some agents retained memories with human-like embellishments, occasionally imagining additional details or interpreting events with their own perspective.
Developed by AI researchers at Stanford (read their academic paper here), some enthusiasts are effusive about the implications, declaring, "Entire virtual worlds could be populated with these agents, producing emergent behaviors."
Definitely eventually, on some level — but the practical applications are still pretty challenging:
"First," veteran game designer Damion Schubert tells me, "we're at the very infancy of this kind of technology. Both the technology and game designers' capacity to work with it and shape it are going to be very different even six months from now than it is now.
"Second, every game is a different design, and what you need NPCs to do in every game is very different. Chat GPT today could probably make NPCs that spewed out random dialogue and light worldbuilding facts, but it's a longer walk to, for example, have NPCs be at a Bioware Companion-level of intelligence. But there's a lot of room between those extremes!"
Damion, as it happens, was lead designer of Bioware's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO.
I've been excited about GPT-powered NPCs for quite awhile, but thinking about actual multi-user virtual worlds I actually play and enjoy, not to mention single-player sandbox worlds like Skyrim, it's difficult to imagine autonomous agents wandering around on their own devices without it becoming a vexing traffic jam. Like, what happens when the town blacksmith who's supposed to upgrade your broadsword decides that he'd rather become a master of interpretive dance?
Damion again:
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Vandom excels at creating role-play characters. He also shoots some pictures on commission. He created this character for Right of Conquest, a roleplay sim based on Game of Thrones. He has a gallery of his role play characters. [To teleport to the sim, click here} As with any roleplay sim, it’s a good idea to check out the rules before going.
For more for Game of Thrones, click here:
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Here’s an interesting footnote to the story of Bonnie Bots, the web site that collects and displays Second Life user data gleaned from in-world bots — a practice so controversial and provoking so much outrage, Linden Lab had several internal conversations and debates about it, posted a new policy statement, and even added new tools for landowners to block bots.
Hardly anyone has actually ever visited the site. And even less so since the controversy began.
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Pretty much the moment after the latest trailer to Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie dropped, SLers have been taking the official meme generator, and uploading pics of their avatar to it. Here's a gallery of some so far on Cajsa's Flickr gallery, which — Second Life being Second Life — may be a bit edgier than your usual Barbie.
Submit your own to Cajsa's feed:
- Go here to make the meme.
- Upload to Flickr, tag your pic with #SecondLifeBarbie
- Creative and subservice captions highly encouraged!
We may devote another post to our favorites, but only if they're wild enough to impress Greta Gerwig herself! Here's the trailer to get into the vibe:
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Sanny Yoshikawa が、New World Notesのなかから、毎月おすすめのバーチャルワールドニュースを日本語で紹介します
Sanny Yoshikawa covers the monthly virtual world highlights from New World Notes for virtual Japan.
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Steven, a graduate in technology studies and longtime New World Notes reader, has been working with a non-profit org to help develop a system for tracking infectious disease, and his higher-ups have been encouraging the team to use ChatGPT to build out the data base.
The trouble is, when Steven asked ChatGPT for knowledge of recent outbreaks of monkeypox, he got this result:
ChatGPT fails to mention that there is also a current outbreak in Africa. Nor mentions the outbreak last year. (Nor that it's now called "mpox".)
Again, this answer was going to be put into a database of infectious diseases for use by NGOs and government bodies, before a human (i.e. Steven) caught the error.
"[I'm] not quite sure this is the slam dunk my boss thinks this is," as he puts it about ChatGPT.
To be sure, the program does include some warnings about the possibility of hallucinations (i.e. incorrect output) and that version 3 — the one this non-profit project is using — is only trained on data up to 2021. But Steven is concerned that the average user may not notice these qualifiers.
"[ChatGPT has a] quick dialogue box when you first open the page, but who reads that?"
And again, Steven's superior is the one who ordered staff to develop the database with ChatGPT!
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Pelayo Martin’s photostream should be followed by whoever designs villains and superheroes for Marvel and DC. The outfits he styles are just so outrageously inventive that they compel attention. Take “Cyber Lover.” Wouldn’t you love to see him rob a casino on Mars?
For more wildly creative characters, click here:
