Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.

The Virtual Worlds Museum. Click here to teleport to their Second Life hub with tribute to sunsetted worlds!

“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.

The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.

Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.

  • Listen: Second Life Tries to Go Mainstream in Part 3 Of The WSJ’s Podcast, “How To Build A Metaverse” — And What I Wrote at the Time

    Streamable above or at the links below, part 3 of The Wall Street Journal's "How to Build a Metaverse" podcast mini-series just went up. Featuring Jeska, Daniel, and Yoz Linden, along with Electric Sheep Company founder Giff Constable, it tells the story of Second Life's entrance into mainstream awareness, with a whole episode on CSI: New York, major companies entering the world, and the every-recurring problem: How do I use this thing anyway, and what's even in the point? 

    At the time, my concern wasn't so much on scalability, but that marketing campaigns and big brands. were overshadowing the grassroots creative community. Which as I wrote on GigaOM at the time, defeated the purpose of big brands even being there:

    To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

    Fashion companies have it even harder. A thriving homegrown industry of avatar clothing design (free of production costs and overseas mass production) already exists, largely ruled by housewives with astounding talent and copious amounts of time, and since the designers are popular personalities in Second Life (whose avatars become their brand), they enjoy– and frankly deserve– the home team advantage.

    Faced with such talented competition, smart marketers should concede defeat, and hire these college kids and housewives to create concept designs and prototypes that re-imagine their brands merged to existing SL-based brands which have already proved themselves in a world of infinite possibility.

    There is of course much more to the story behind the episode, some of which was featured here at the time:

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  • Fashion Friday: Halloween Months from Styles Nimoe Constantine

    2022-10-07Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    It’s that time of year again and Nimoe Constantine, a microblogger on Flickr, gets us off to a spooky start with 💀Your Skull💀, Really, the skull is one thing, but look at that face! The pose prop is magnificent and is out at the Anthem October round. The face to haunt your nightmares is at the Uber October round. 

    – The Skinnery: Luna BOM skin/shape (Sorbet Tone) on Lelutka Avalon 3.1 bento head @Uber Oct Round closes 10/22

    – The Skinnery: Creature add-on @Salem after @The Skinnery Mainstore

    – Ascendant: Medusa Nails @Ascendant Mainstore

    – Avi-Glam: Occult Eyes @Salem (closes 10/22) after @Avi-Glam Mainstore

    – Pose and prop by Secret Poses – Your Skull set @Anthem Oct round ends 10/30

    For a glam October look, click here:

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  • Meta / Linden Lab Veteran: Metaverse Platforms Which Don’t Learn the Lessons of Previous Virtual Worlds Are Doomed to Repeat Them

    Jim Purbrick Linden Lab WJS Metaverse Podcast

    With episode three of the Wall Street Journal's podcast "How to Make a Metaverse" dropping tomorrow, Linden Lab/CCP Games/Meta developer veteran Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who spoke with the podcast team for the show) has thoughts on Episode 2 (listen to it here), and the disasters which were unleashed when Second Life's early community management policy was simply, "Be Nice". Citing some highly memorable Not Nice examples, here's the problem as he sees it:

     A Rape In Cyberspace was already 10 years old when Second Life launched and Linden Lab were talking to many of the pioneers who worked on early virtual worlds. Philip should have known better, but pursued a wishful, naïve approach to moderation and Second Life ended up learning a lot of lessons that had already been learned the hard way…

    When I first visited San Francisco I hosted a party on Russian Hill to get to know my colleagues only to end up huddled in the living room with other engineers battling a plague of grey goo spreading across the grid that was enabled by an over-permissive API. The API allowed scripted objects to self-replicate and so exponentially overwhelm regions until firewalls of shut down simulators limited the spread and space lasers were able to delete scripts to purge the world of the menace.

    Shortly after I returned to the UK I woke up one morning to my first encounter with the infamous Goatse image which a resident had pasted across the world so that it would show up on the live map that had been naively been added to the front page of secondlife.com without enough thought about how it might be abused.

    If you don't know what Goatse is, don't Google but click the Wikipedia link above for the love of god.

    At any rate, Jim recommends that metaverse platform developers not just read Snow Crash (or forget the dark side of the Metaverse that Stephenson writes about there), but points people to this very helpful list of non-fiction books on the metaverse/virtual worlds.

    As regular readers will remember, Purbrick was previously at Meta, begging the team to read  A Rape In Cyberspace and consider the implications. But people at Meta didn't prioritize it, and… here's what happened.

    He's also concerned other metaverse platforms may not be learning the lessons of community management. For instance, he tells me, VRChat:

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  • Today’s Flickr Pick: Ross5 Turns SL Screenshots Into Amazing Comics Panels

    Comics Shop Opening @Suffering

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Ross5 Comics is a photostream full of comic book hero/antihero adventures. What could be more apt to present their work than the opening of their in-world Comic Shop. [Click here to teleport]

    As you can see in the window, The Vampire Elf is a featured comic strip adventure that you can explore in this Flickr album. All of this is just teasers, though, for their YouTube comic strips where you can find twenty-five episodes of The Vampire Elf as well as two seasons of The Vampire Letters. 

    For more comics, click here:

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  • New World Notes Seeking New Sponsoring Media Partner – Here’s Details!

    New World Notes partner ad

    In the run-up to the publication of Why the Metaverse Matters, we're looking for a new media partner! If you're reading this post, chances our your customers and potential customers are too. Our ideal partnership are brand(s) active in Second Life, VRChat, Roblox and other metaverse platforms featured on New World Notes, along devices / software that virtual world/sandbox/immersive PC gamers are most likely to use.  

    Here's details:

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  • Sannyのおすすめバーチャルワールドニュース : 2022年9月 Sanny Reports For Virtual Japan

    NWN(5)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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  • These Stunning Second Life Landscape Images Blur the Virtual & Real

    [Celestine]

    Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

    Just Hanna is a Second Life traveler, exploring and documenting her adventures visiting beautiful places. The picture [Celestine] is simply gorgeous. I love the mist rising reminds me of living in the Cascades where the mornings were foggy until the sun burned it off. It was a lovely way to start the day. I love how the trees frame the bridge and divide the picture in thirds. Teleport here.

    For more stunning landscapes with teleport links, click here:

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  • BREAKING: Second Life Again Available on Browsers & Mobile… For Premium+ Subscribers; UPDATES: Added Pic of Current SL Streaming Experience

    Second Life speedlight mobile browsers

    As teased back in July, Linden Lab just announced an option to access Second Life on a web browser and mobile devices for people willing to pay:

    Second Life Premium Plus members already get many benefits that help them get the most out of Second Life…and now we’re partnering with SpeedLight to add even more value!

    The Speedlight mobile app is already popular with many of our community members since it enables Residents to stay connected with Second Life while on the go, and now Premium Plus subscribers get access to additional Speedlight benefits: no online time limitations along with prioritised online support. Now you can enjoy Second Life on your mobile devices (or in a web browser) with the freedom to stay connected as long as you like! To get these benefits, all you need to do is access Second Life using SpeedLight with your Premium Plus account.

    Premium Plus costs $25/month. When I surveyed readers in June, asking how many were interested in upgrading to that for added benefits, only 1 in 4 said yes. With a long-awaited mobile/browser option added to that mix, I suspect many more will upgrade.

    I haven’t yet tried Speedlight, by the way, but did help a company called OnLive launch a short-lived streaming option for Second Life in 2014. Back then, it cost $9.99 a month for unlimited use or metered service at $1 per hour.

    So an unlimited streaming option via SpeedLight as another add-on to Premium Plus at $25/month is a pretty good deal.

    As to whether you would like it, here’s what it currently looks like running Second Life:

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  • I Tell CNN Why Realistic Avatars Bring Real Prejudice to the Virtual World

    SL mesh avatars real life prejudice

    "Virtual body-shaming: Why the metaverse won't fix our IRL beauty standards" is a thoughtful CNN article partly inspired by a New World Notes story from 2017, about full-figured avatars protesting a fat-shaming Second Life store. I largely lay the blame on the arrival of mesh-based avatar enhancements, which placed a premium on realistic human appearances. Because the more realistic human avatars become, the more our offline prejudices around physical appearance are provoked. As I told reporter Oscar Holland:

    "Up until then, there was definitely much more tolerance for diversity of avatar types… But putting a premium on highly realistic, beautiful avatars amplified existing prejudices that we took from the real world into the virtual world." For those users whose avatars fall "outside the norm," incidents of harassment still happen "all the time," Au added. "Anyone with a large avatar is going to get at least a few nasty comments."
    It's the reverse side of the "Proteus effect" first observed and coined by researcher Nick Yee: The more attractive our avatars, the more confident the avatar's owner becomes. But by the same token, the more those attractive avatars are realistic, the more our real world biases can come roaring into the virtual world.
     
    Here's the full article I wrote back in 2017, excerpted below:

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  • Sign-Up for the Open Metaverse Conference In LA Next February Featuring Neal Stephenson, Philip Rosedale, Many More Luminaries

    Open Metaverse Conference Neal Stephenson Philip Rosedale

    In case you missed it, Neal Stephenson's Lamina1 is hosting an inaugural Open Metaverse Conference featuring the author, Philip Rosedale, and other metaverse luminaries next February in Los Angeles — sign up for updates here.

    While the jury is very much still out on just how much web3 has anything to do with the Metaverse (if at all) — a topic I just discussed with Stephenson himself last week — this conference aims to bridge that conversation:

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