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.

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

  • Core Launches Game Dev Competition With $120,000 in Prizes

    Core game Unreal festival contest

    Speaking of creating virtual worlds with in-game modeling/scripting tools, behold: The Core Invitational Game Jam, awarding $120,000 in prizes to games created on the platform. (Think Unreal meets ROBLOX.) Details:

    Manticore Games, creators of the Core platform for making and playing games, is calling on all indie game devs, creators and modders to apply now for one of only 50 slots in the first-ever Core Invitational, an exclusive game dev competition with $100,000 USD in prizes…

    Categories and prizes include:

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  • Artist’s Second Life Screenshots Look Like Stills from an Awesome AAA Game

    Recharge

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

    I love how Fireheart resisted the impulse to center her avatar in the column of light and kept from going for symmetry. That makes “Recharge” a much more interesting picture than what might seem the logical placement. She seems to like to play with expectations and reject them.

    Another play with symmetry after the cut.

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  • Second Life Co-Founder Cory Ondrejka: Adding Mesh to SL Without In-World Editing Tools Was a Mistake

    Fortnite creative Second Life AM Radio chairs

    Update, February 4:  In follow-up message, Cory told me: "I didn’t say meshes were a mistake — I said the lack of in-world editing and behavior tools [of and for mesh] is the mistake". With apologies, I've corrected the title to better clarify this.

    Last week's post on how bringing offline mesh to Second Life was a mistake inspired this comment from Cory Ondrejka, a Second Life co-founder and first CTO for the company:

    "Yup. Even among founders this wasn’t always clearly understood. Universal tools, available within the experience, differentiated SL from most everything before or since. Including later stage SL, Sansar, etc. Construction tools are insufficient, by the way, you need interaction and behavior, too."

    Cory, by the way, was the one who gave an early demo of Second Life when it was still prim-based to Epic Games and well you know the rest of the story from Fortnite. Jeff "AM Radio" Berg, an undisputed master of prim-based creation, also expanded on his thoughts there from the original post, and dismissed current in-world mesh tools as an equivalent alternative:

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  • Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins on Black Algorithms & Her Neural Net Portrait of Stacey Abrams

    Stacey Abrams Nettrice Gasksins AI portrait

    Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins, last seen here hosting an art gallery in Second Life since her LA show was cancelled by the pandemic, has a thought-provoking and actually rather thrilling post linking Black Algorithms of the past to the present:

    Kuba cloth’s complexity derives from semi-symmetric compositions of simple geometric motifs. The semi-symmetry in the motifs are similar to Ghanaian Kente and other African textile designs. You can also find these motifs in African American quilts. The knowledge and practice crossed the Middle Passage where it became codified and passed down through generations. These designs are also computational; they use a generative (shape) grammar that, in effect, formalizes an algorithm that generates strings in a language…

    This algorithm is also used to create music, as evidenced by James Brown (and others) who pioneered funk and hip-hop/rap. James Sneed wrote about it in a 1981 essay titled “On Repetition in Black Culture.” Snead says that human culture evolves and things from the past emerge in the future as either improved or retrogress. What is interesting to me is how, in computer science, the generative grammar used to create the textiles and musical sequences are linked to artificial intelligence, specifically neural nets and machine learning. I use the latter to create art such as this piece.

    She means the one here, an amazing portrait of Stacey Abrams she created using Gatys image style transfer, which is (as explained here), "[N]eural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images."

    She relates the Abrams portrait to improvisation: "Improvisation depends on the ability to extemporize new melodies (training data) that fit the chord sequence (model)," she tells me, citing her essay here. "Call-and-response participation is happening, too, as the medium (machine) responds to the data input." 

    Dr. Gaskins has a book touching on this coming soon from MIT Press, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation.  Meantime, here's my profile on her portraits of Black artists using Deep Dream AI algorithms from 2019, including Sade, Nnedi Okorafor, and (now tragically poignant) Chadwick Boseman (also below):

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  • Few ROBLOX User Creators Make Much Money from Their Creations

    1867 cyberpiper SL Sansar Roblox

    Venture capitalist and metaverse expert Matthew Ball has a new must-read (and Tolstoy-length) essay on Apple's relationship to the metaverse's future (spoiler: It can totally control it), but this particular passage punched my eyeball:

    Roblox’s platform is full of happy users and talented creators. But few of these creators are making money. Although Roblox has $2 billion in revenues, three billion monthly hours of playtime and more than 160 million users, only 29 developers (i.e. companies) netted over $1 million in 2019 and three crossed $10 million. This is bad; more developer revenue means more developer investment and better products. But revenue through Roblox is limited by the company’s paltry payment rates of just 24.5% of every dollar spent on their games, assets, or items. While this makes Apple’s rates 70-85% payout rates seem generous, the reverse is true.

    That's much less a split for creators than I inferred from Roblox's IPO filing last year. The fact that Roblox keeps growing suggests most user creators are OK with this revenue split — for instance, teens just starting out and overjoyed to rake a few hundred dollars, and creators more interested in attracting large groups of visitors (such as with this historical sim in Roblox, featured above). Then again, contrast that company/creator split with Second Life:

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  • Looking for Great Places in SL to Photograph? Pippa Laurie is a Good Guide

    au bord de l'eau cat

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

    Pippa Laurie is loving her Second Life. “Au bord de l'eau cat: or At the water’s edge” is a beautiful landscape photo. I love the cat. It seems as though the gate and the leaves are a frame for the cat, highlighted in the sky. The colors are so rich and saturated. She kindly lists the SLURL on her Flick photo so that you, too, can say hi to the kitty. 

    More travels around the grid…

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  • Philip Rosedale Created This Amazing Simulation to Explain Wealth Inequity

    What you're looking at above is a fascinating simulation from Philip Rosedale, who is known more for simulating virtual worlds. This project, however, is coded to help explain one of the real world's most vexing problems: Why do the rich get richer? While government regulations (or lack thereof) are a major factor, Philip's simulation is coded to illustrate a certain inevitability to wealth inequities, even when people start in a theoretical equal position. As he explains:

    Consider a group of a couple hundred people, wandering around in a big town square, where initially everyone has the same amount of money. Whenever two of them run into each other, they make a transaction. To make these transactions random and unbiased, imagine it goes like this: Pick a random amount of money that is less than the amount held by the poorer of the two. Then flip a coin to determine who gives that amount to the other. That’s all there is to it. In the real world we would imagine that the seller gave in return some good or service of the same value to the buyer, but for the purpose of analyzing how wealth moves around over time, we don’t need to bother with that…

    But let it run for just a few minutes, and things look very different! Of 250 people, 5 rich ones have all the money (green), and 96% of the population is poor (red). We can call that big one ‘Elon’. The Gini Index is shown at the lower left, which is a widely used way of measuring wealth inequality. Zero means that everyone has the same amount and 100 means that one person has all the money. 

    Much more here. I don't know if he intended this, but Philip's simulation is an effective response to Robert Nozick's infamous "Wilt Chamberlain argument", in which the libertarian philosopher made the case that wealth inequities are justified if people starting at an equal state of wealth voluntarily make some of them much richer. (In Nozick's argument, pay a famous basketball player a lot of money to watch him play.) This simulation, by contrast, shows that inequities, once established, become intractable.

    If this seems pessimistic, don't worry — Philip tells me he has a solution in the works:

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  • Bridgerton Virtual World Cosplay Stylishly Soirées Into Second Life

    50832536968_3a64c519ee_c

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

    Homages to Bridgerton have come to Second Life, so I thought it might find some fun examples of Second Bridgerton. I like this picture from Panda Bandana that combines the regal splendor of Bridgerton with a touch of puppy whimsy. 

    A cover-worthy picture below…

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  • Google Stadia Will Still Struggle for Traction Even After Studio Layoffs

    2021-02-01 (1)

    Google's game streaming service Stadia is cutting its game development arm to focus more on growing the service as a publishing platform:

    Google is shifting away from making its own games for Stadia. It’s shutting down studios in Montreal and Los Angeles, and industry veteran Jade Raymond, who Google tapped to lead the game development division, is leaving the company. Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post that Google will keep investing in the service.

    From that official Google blog post:

    We launched Stadia with the goal of making your favorite games instantly available wherever you want to play them. With the recent successful launch of Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia, gameplay on all types of devices, including iOS, growing our slate of YouTube integrations, and our global expansions, it’s clear that Stadia’s technology has been proven and works at scale.

    "Scale" is a relative term, because while I've seen Stadia touted as a killer app for highly desired but difficult-to-run games like Cyberpunk 2077, actual active usage of Stadia still seems scant: According to Sensor Tower, the Stadia app was downloaded for use on Android devices only 40,000 times last December. (And that's only after exceeding 1 million Google Play total downloads last June.) At that rate, total usage of Stadia across all platforms is likely well under 5 million monthly users; it will take many millions more active users to make Stadia an appealing alternative to Steam with its 120 million monthly active users.

    One key problem: Stadia still isn't offering a unique enough offering for people who already have video game consoles and high-end PCs, and so have little incentive to switch, especially when streaming still isn't ideal for twitch action games where even a split second delay in responsiveness can ruin the experience. My proposal to Stadia remains the same as it was a couple years ago — focus on being the best platform for streaming virtual worlds and MMOs:

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  • Virtual World Location of the Week: Lavender Lake in Second Life

    Thanks to Caitlin Tobias for this week's virtual world location of the week submission: Lavender Lake in Second Life: "Currently hosting a Air Balloon Festival (with balloon rezzers free to use)". Click here to visit.

    Know about another great virtual world location? Click here to submit an image, background info, and a link for readers to visit.

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