Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Author, strategist, virtual world reporter

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

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Chipotle’s Burrito Giveaway in ROBLOX Attracts 5 Million+ Extra Visits — RoMonitor Stats

May 12, 2022

Remember Chipotle's ROBLOX giveaway last month, offering free real burritos for the first people to play Chipotle's virtual burrito builder game? This one:

Chipotle Burrito Builder on Roblox, a new simulation experience that will challenge players to roll burritos in the metaverse to earn Burrito Bucks, the brand's in-experience currency on Roblox1, starting on April 7, National Burrito Day. The first 100,000 Roblox players to successfully roll a burrito will earn enough Burrito Bucks to exchange them for an entrée code that can be used on the Chipotle app, Chipotle.com, or Chipotle.ca

While the announcement attracted much coverage, few to no reporters followed up about its actual ROI.

So I did! By contacting the folks at RoMonitor Stats, which tracks experience metrics on the metaverse platform for kids.

While I was skeptical at first, the results they sent me seem pretty impressive:

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Tab Tatham Takes Interior Design Photos of Second Life Homes More Sumptuous & Detailed Than Real Life Photos in Dwell Magazine

May 12, 2022

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

Tab Tatham is a Flickr microblogger whose style is maximally appealing. Whiskey Monday pointed me her way with this comment, “I LOVE it so much. I'm a maximalist and this just makes me want to move in.”

I’m not a maximalist and this makes me nervous, but that does not mean I don’t think it’s gorgeous. I admire the exuberance, the abundance of color, texture, and layers of elements to catch my eyes, but every item on the floor makes me think of Dorothy McHugh calling that she’s fallen and can’t get up. [Click here for hilarious compilation.] Thankfully, trips and falls in Second Life never leave a bruise.

For more maximalist designs click here:

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As She Celebrates 15 Years in Second Life, Avatar Influencer Strawberry Singh Discusses the Tedium of Creator Credits & Ways to Bring Back the Fun

May 11, 2022

Strawberry Singh, who became the SL community's top social media influencer and then went on to work for Linden Lab in 2019, has a new post celebrating her 15 years in the virtual world. It includes a surprising confession — she almost quit SL entirely, mainly due to the tedium of posting credits to her avatar fashion reviews:

I had been feeling like the creative light Second Life had always been for me was diminishing because I was getting bogged down with doing mesh head reviews. I have to be honest with you, I absolutely hated doing those videos. I had come to a point where I loathed all the time I was putting into reviewing things and sharing style credits and not being able to just be more creative and have the time to do fun things in Second Life.

"Writing out style credits for every single item I was wearing in each post was a lot of work back then," she tells me. "I had so many blogs just saved as drafts at a time and I couldn't publish them until I took at least 30 minutes to sit there and write out all the style credits. It was time-consuming, exhausting, and not fun at all." (She hastens to add that she's still glad she made those reviews: "[A]s much as I was tired of it at the end, I know how important those videos were and many people have reached out to me and said that they learned a lot from [them].")

This is actually a common theme in SL social media, and a recurring complaint that comes up when Cajsa writes about Second Life fashion blogs — either the creator credits are non-existent, incomplete, or not informative enough for readers to know where they might buy those listen items. It's the blessing and curse of a virtual world where everything is user-generated: If you're really trying to give credits to every creator whose work is depicted in a screenshot, it's a painstaking process where you will need to credit the creator of everything in view, up to and including the literal sky.

That to one side, Strawberry has ideas for how the community could inject more fun into the social media ecosystem of SL:

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Study: Online Video Meetings Impair Creativity — Opportunity for Virtual World-Based Conferencing?

May 11, 2022

The title of the study published in Nature is "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation", but it's specifically referring to Zoom-style online video calls:

In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas… Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.

This tracks with my personal experience. I do countless editorial/brainstorming calls on Zoom and Skype video, and to make real substantial creative progress, find myself putting a browser window in front of the video feed, so I don't get distracted by people looking at me (looking at them). Or only having my camera on for the Hello and Goodbye portions of the call.

This strikes me as an opportunity for virtual world/metaverse platform-based meetings where typically, there is no direct eye contact, and the visual cues are immersive 3D graphics:

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Today’s Flickr Pick: Wren Alcyone Depicts SL Avatars Like Art Nouveau Paintings

May 11, 2022

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

Wren Alcyone has a lovely stream full of beautiful and fantastical portraits. Recently, she created a four-part series that reminds me of Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha (if he could have worked with neon). With “Ducky” she uses his motif of a frame adorned with vegetation that reflects her outfit. I love it when someone does an homage to the artists of the past. I love it even more when it is a cheeky homage like a neon frame. So much fun!

For more Muchaesquerie, click here:

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The Sandbox’s Terms of Service Says You Don’t Actually Own NFTs Associated With The Sandbox

May 10, 2022

While I've written about how The Sandbox's blockchain-based metaverse platform has a small user base despite (because of?) NFT sales from major brands, Indiana University associate law professor João Marinotti recently made an equally salient point — you don't actually own the NFTs associated with The Sandbox:

If The Sandbox “reasonably believes” you engaged in any of the platform’s prohibited activities, which require subjective judgments about whether you interfered with others’ “enjoyment” of the platform, it may immediately suspend or terminate your user account and delete your NFT’s images and descriptions from its platform. It can do this without any notice or liability to you.

In fact, The Sandbox even claims the right in these cases to immediately confiscate any NFTs it deems you acquired as a result of the prohibited activities. How it would successfully confiscate blockchain-based NFTs is a technological mystery, but this raises further questions about the validity of what it calls virtual ownership.

The Conversation reached out to The Sandbox for comment but did not receive a response.

Much more here. I took the screengrab here from The Sandbox's Terms of Service, and the terms are as drastic as Marinotti describes them.

I don't necessarily blame The Sandbox for having such a drastic "in case of emergency break glass" clause to cover itself.

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Today’s Flickr Pick: This SLer Turns Screenshots Into Clownishly Surreal Comics

May 10, 2022

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

Pete Clownie’s stream is hilarious. He is having fun. Here we see him in a competition Clown vs. Seal. My money’s on the seal. He asks what we think the bet was for. Add your ideas.

For more fun, click here:

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Shock Web3 Stat: Way More People Still Buy Virtual Items in Second Life Than Buy NFTs on Coinbase & OpenSea — Combined!

May 9, 2022

Shocking or hilarious (depending on your point of view) stat of the day from the sarcastically-named Web3 is Going Great blog:

[Though Coinbase] claimed to have 3 million users on its [NFT marketplace] waitlist, the public marketplace release has gone shockingly poorly given Coinbase's existing reputation. The platform has yet to see more than 200 transactions in a given day (compared to OpenSea, which regularly sees more than 100,000 transactions a day, or its smaller competitor LooksRare which sees more than 1,000 daily).

As I noted back in January, NFT sales compare quite poorly to virtual item purchases in Second Life, which hasn't been considered a "hot" platform in tech since at least 2010. But Second Life still attracts about 200,000 daily active users, and it's fair to estimate each of those users buy an average of 1-2 virtual items per day. (At a conservative guess; 3-5 per day is probably more accurate.) In other words, at least twice the daily sales than OpenSea, and 1000x more the NFT sales on Coinbase.

Somehow this reality hasn't registered with the many companies, brands, and celebrities involved in NFTs:

On its site Coinbase claims 65 million+ users, and is currently getting 47 million+ monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb. OpenSea gets even more visits: Nearly 78 million/month! Then there's all the promotion of NFTs by celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Grimes, Emily Ratajkowski, Eminem, Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis, and Paris Hilton. (Who cringe-ingly declared herself "Queen of the Metaverse".)

Despite all that attention, NFTs are attracting less actual sales than the platform known by most people as "Oh yeah, that thing from The Office, right?"
Metaverse Content Creators in Developing Nations Can Do Quite Well — Once They Break Into the Market (Comment of the Week)

May 9, 2022

Great comment from a reader based in Brazil, expanding on my point (and that of a fellow Brazilian) about the difficulty for metaverse content creators in the developing world to succeed, due to high costs of entry:

It works the other way round too, the $ is very valuable and gets me a higher standard of living than using that dollar in the USA.

I can eat well, afford rent and my bills, all from Second Life content creation. Adobe prices their monthly subscriptions in the local currency too, but yes [avatar software creation tool] Marvelous Designer is very expensive compared to Adobe's monthly subs.

Reader "Reiille" from Mexico, echoes that point:

1 USD is worth 20 pesos to us, which of course, if you earn that back in revenue, it can be a huge financial help. I myself have been trying to break into the market, but the investment to be made to put a new brand out there is more than I can afford, so it's been a slow burn.

So while breaking into a relatively static market* like Second Life is difficult for creators in the developing world, once they do break in, they have a tremendous edge:

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Top 6 Posts Last Week Including Linden Lab’s First CMO & Why BONELAB Could Be Garry’s Mod-for-VR

May 9, 2022
Screengrab above via this multiplayer demo from YouTube's Downloadable Content.