Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
Making a Metaverse That Matters
Contact me — links below!
My Patreon Supporters
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.
The Virtual Museum Team hosts several museums in Second Life, Wolf Territories Grid and Roblox. Check out all the teleport links here.
Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.
This is an epic, thought provoking new article in the latest SL-focused ECLIPSE magazine on real life Black people in the virtual world, reflecting on Black Lives Matter and their experiences in SL. It’s written by New World Notes contributor Cajsa Lilliehook. She interviews many Black SLers, who discuss racism in SL — everything from avatar skin color discrimination, to coming across people roleplaying in a plantation.
Read an excerpt below:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Mac Massimo’s The SL Spoon is a virtual cooking blog, featuring the best of SL foodstuffs and cuisine. As a food blogger myself, this really appealed to me. I particularly loved “How to Make the Best Mediterranean Wild-Caught Fish on the Grid” as it contains a recipe along with fabulous food photos like the one above.
In the next post, Mac introduces us into a whole new genre of Second Life.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Génesis Rodriguez’ “Your Name Makes Me Think of Good Memories” is a beautiful and emotional resonant composite photo, overlaying a photo of a “memory” with a headshot. I love how the memory is in color while the person remembering is not. It shows us how memories can bring things and people to life long after they are gone.”
Rodriguez has a light touch, even with the macabre as in the next picture.
Here's a really interesting "Economy of the Metaverse" conversation with Epic's Tim Sweeney and game exec Joseph Kim. A lot of its focus, of course, is on how Epic's Fortnite might be a future model for the metaverse. But much of it is actually about the current platform ecosystem (Apple's App Store, Google Play, Amazon, etc.), which Sweeney finds too closed and prohibitive to birth the metaverse:
I think the most plausible way the Metaverse is going to rise isn’t from one company even Epic building this thing and forcing everybody to use it. It’s going to be from more and more companies and brands connecting their products and services until you have a much, much more open thing that everybody participates in… I think interconnecting systems is a great way to to to move forward with this. I think, you know, a lot of the big game companies and even many of the ecosystem companies have come to the realization that they’re never going to be the one monopoly that dominates the whole thing. And so it’s in everybody’s interest to really interconnect and standardize over time. And to build this more connected world and to all benefit from it side by side with no one company dominating.
Which is a great vision, but while reading this interview (actually a transcript, video the actual video below), I kept thinking about the biggest barrier to building THE Metaverse — a coming competition between the 3D engines required to build it. Sweeney more or less alludes to this:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Geyer Schnyder’s “Just a Nightmare…” is well named. A nightmarish picture of a desperate man with a serious looking military knife. The background lighting suggests a car is off to the left but without certainty. This captures how when you are frightened your vision narrows to the essential, how everything else just disappears.
Schnyder enjoys illustrating the gritty side of life. More below.
Estimated visits to Seraphimsl.com via analytics site Similar Web
While Second Life might be smaller than many other virtual worlds, do not underestimate how passionate and engaged its core userbase is. As an example of that, consider SeraphimSL, one of many hundreds of user-run sites and blogs advertising SL fashions and housewares. (And Seraphim is probably the very largest, at least in the English-fluent Internet.)
According to SimilarWeb, Seraphim rakes in over half a million pageviews a month. As I was telling someone else in the SL business recently, that's more than enough eyeballs to make a six figure income in real dollars, via advertising.
In terms of unique eyeballs every month, 500K+ probably translates to roughly 100,000 actual people. (Way back in the day, unsurprisingly, metaverse expert Gwyneth Llewellyn estimated 100,000 as the approximate number of SL's most engaged community members.)
The number is pretty impressive even when you pull outside the userbase of Second Life: Seraphim's page views are larger than many news sites about virtual worlds/MMOs, like this one. It's even about as large or on par with some fairly well known tech news sites and blogs.
What's this mean?
