Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Vanka Machiavello’s “Art is in the eye of the beholder” caught my eye as I was browsing Flickr with its simple red, black, and white color story. I love how the red on the wall seems to bounce back and color the street. I love the grittiness of the textures in the brick and the bike. It seems to tell us a story without even having an avatar to convey the message.
To see what other stories bike can tell, click here:
With Linden Lab banning Gachas in Second Life at the end of this month, " irihapeti" and others have noted the rise of Gacha-ish systems like the one above:
Many professional gacha machine makers have developed conveyor machines ready for the 1 September rollout date.
Those that haven't will have to close down their gacha operations.
The basic conveyor machine will display an item from the set. When the customer purchases the displayed item, the machine will 'randomly choose' the next item to be displayed. Customers can buy it or not as they please.
The items in the conveyor machine can be NoCopy Transfer.
So basically systems like this are Gacha-like, except without a completely randomized reward aspect that made Gachas so popular, and also a form of gambling. (And also, for many, so fun.) It also looks like a direct response to a question fielded by Linden Lab in its original announcement banning gachas:
Visible, physical changes to your avatar body based on how you interact in-world. (Watch the demo above!)
“If your avatar dives into water or goesswimming, he or she will emerge with water droplets on the face and body, and dripping wet,” says HUD creator Grace7 Ling. “If your avatar is tired or sleep-deprived (according to the HUD), they will get eye bags. Don’t drink enough water, your avatar gets chapped lips; don’t shower for days, your avatar starts to look grimy! Izzie and I think this will raise the level of realism for roleplayers who desire a truly immersive experience.”
So pretty much Second Life meets The Sims. Here’s all the details from Grace herself:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Skye Donardson has started a brand new blog called The Feathered Nest. She loves to buy homes and decorate them and decided to share her nest feathering adventures. The initial post, “Let’s Get Started” provides tips on buying homes so they fit on your land.
We’re at a critical inflection point. This ultra high-tech ad-driven machine, epitomized by Facebook, represents a new kind of Trojan horse that we’ve only just recently welcomed into our world. Night is falling and the sacking has barely begun. In the future, we run the risk of being so entranced by our shiny new gifts that we lose the will to fight entirely.
On the other hand, if Facebook and others really become true privacy-first, consumer-first companies with business models that reinforce it, if they listen to criticism and welcome independent oversight, they could still become the core companies we depend on, with enough meaningful introspective data and the right protections to actually make our lives better than today.
I just hit up Avi to quibble a bit with his roadmap; while it looks roughly plausible to me, I spy some problems for Facebook's plans: For instance, Quest 2 sales are slow, the PSVR is giving them heavy competition, and Horizon (from what I'm told) is having development challenges; and now, a lot of people are laughing at that Workroom thing. Wouldn't all that change this roadmap?
I usually blog Matthew Ball's Metaverse Primer on Thursdays, but this new exposé by freelance UK journalist Quintin Smith (Wired, Edge, Eurogamer, Kotaku) is important viewing now — and is just as important if not moreso for the future of the Metaverse, and whatever it becomes.
In his report (watch above on his People Make Games YouTube channel), Smith delves deeply into the ways ROBLOX monetizes user creators on its massively popular platform — many or most of whom are minors — with mechanics that he deems so exploitative, he compares them at one point to the infamous scrip that abusive companies used to "pay" its workers.
"For me," as Smith puts it to me, "the most egregious part of the whole story is the platform's minimum withdrawal amount of 100,000 Robux, which equates to $350 US when a developer withdraws it. If you take into account Roblox's cut of 30% of every transaction on the platform, it means a developer needs to have taken 143,000 Robux from its users before they're allowed to withdraw it as actual cash."
In practice, Smith goes on, this tends to lock ROBLOX creators into the system: "The cost for users to buy 143,000 Robux is around $1430. So your game needs to have raked in $1430 in Robux before you, the developer, receive so much as $1." (Also, a ROBLOX developer can only cash out if they have a $5/month premium subscription.)
"If you accept that we need to treat minors who are doing a job better than we treat adults doing the same job," says Smith, "that's just abhorrent. Especially when you consider the platform is encouraging kids to come and work for them."
He tells me he reached out to ROBLOX the company about his report, but received no reply.
Then again, even as ROBLOX enjoyed a speculator IPO earlier this year, few if any reporters have explored the company's monetization policies:
"Very happy to see it out after lots of lobbying that VR for work shouldn't just be an aspirational future dream for Michael Abrash keynotes, but something that could be useful now," as Jim puts it to me now, who left Facebook last year. "Something I was convinced about because Second Life had already been useful for work, as discussed here." (Jim last featured on on New World Notes here.)
The Facebook project was actually started before the pandemic, and enables up to 16 Quest 2 users to be in the same virtual space, with 50 others able to join by video streaming. Despite Second Life being a seed of its inspiration, Jim tells me he's most psyched by its mixed reality features:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Polvere Di Gesso’s “The Man Who Sold His Shadow” evokes such a feeling of alienation. He is leaning forward intent on the screen which seems to be melting, becoming disembodied. His reflection below is divorced from him and from what now appears to be a painting on an easel. His shadow leans back, not forward. How alien to your own life can you be when your shadow does not follow you? Blue is a cold color, the color of sadness, of the Blues. The empty landscape without boundaries or walls and the cold blue are all evocative of loneliness and alienation.
His inspiration was the song “Storia dell'uomo che vendette la sua ombra” which gives us the title. I listened to it and liked its creepiness. It reminds me, in a way, of Leonard Cohen who never tried to sound pleasant. Of course, in literature there is Peter Schlemihl who sold his shadow to the devil for lots of money but being without s shadow, society rejected him. Without our shadows we are alien. Though, The Inkspots used to tell us, “We three we ain't no crowd. Fact is we ain't even company. That's my echo, my shadow, and me.”
For more stark, yet emotionally powerful pictures, click here:
Here’s a fascinating new report on avatars and gender from longtime game culture researcher Nick Yee, based on a survey of nearly 3,000 gamers. Nick’s topline takeaway is that 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars, which is more than many might assume.
Two other learnings stand out to me even more:
Avatar gender preferences among players have remained basically the same since Nick started studying questions like this during the peak of Everquest — over two decades ago! This despite the fact that MMOs have become much more mainstream since then, attracting many millions of players where they once only drew hundreds of thousands.
“This implies that whatever is causing this to happen (for both male and female players) has been consistent for the past 20 years,” Nick tells me, “so it's a function of some stable sociological dynamic and/or how we've been making games/avatars for the past 20 years.
“Back in EQ days, I think it was easy to imagine that this phenomenon was idiosyncratic to MMOs, because the genre was more niche back then. But perhaps the MMO findings were always pointing at deeper, stable findings given that much of MMO mechanics and the live services model is now everywhere.” (In other words, online games like Overwatch and Fortnite also have heavy MMO features.)
Nick’s other standout finding: Very few females want to play as male avatars. Seriously few:
