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Tag: video games

  • It is as if you were on your phone: Why – Pippin Barr

    So what if we had an application on our phone that allowed us to seem to be on our phone, to go through those reassuring motions, to know what to do, to appear 100% like a human on their phone, but without having to actually be on our phone an exposed to the direness of the news, the panic of dating, the shitpile of social media, the emptiness of online video, the timesuck of games? A kind of contentless experience. For the win!

    That’s the underlying speculative but also totally honest motivation behind this particular game. I’m making it because I think it’s legitimately something people might use and find helpful and because it is fundamentally funny that that is a possible design goal. To me it’s both a piece of comedy and a piece of truth and I can’t tell which is more important or if they’re even distinct. (And I like that.)

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  • Introducing the Second Life AI character designer – Second Life: YouTube

    With the Second Life AI Character Designer, you can craft and customize virtual characters with intelligent responses, unique personalities, and immersive roleplay capabilities! It’s an exciting way to enhance community-building, storytelling, and social interaction in the virtual world.

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  • Video Game History Foundation Library

    The VGHF Library is operated by the Video Game History Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to the history of video games. This is the home for our collections of video game development materials, magazines, artwork, ephemera, and more.

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  • Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety – Reuters

    Egami’s study found that owning a game console and increased gameplay reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction among participants. The study found that spending just one extra hour each day playing video games was associated with an increase in mental health and life satisfaction.

    Other studies also point to a shift in perceptions of gaming. “As more research has emerged related to video games, we’re beginning to recognize that they can actually offer a lot of benefits,” said Michael Wong, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at McMaster University and former professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

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  • Linden Lab has spent $1.3B building Second Life and paid $1.1B to creators – VentureBeat

    Those numbers represent a huge digital business that is good to remember as we all continue to discuss the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that sci-fi folks would love to see connected together one day as the next generation of the internet.

    In modern discussions about the internet, Second Life — which was inspired by the 1997 Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash, where the term “metaverse” first appeared — is often dismissed. In fact, people normally think about Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft as today’s frontrunners for the metaverse. But Second Life is still around with a relatively small number of users in comparison to the frontrunners (Roblox has 89 million daily active users). Those users are dedicated and they have been on the platform for an average of around 14 years, Oberwager said. Second Life also has an economy of about $650 million a year, built on the buying and selling of virtual goods created inside Second Life.

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  • Second Life’s loyal users embrace its decaying software and no-fun imperfections – Document

    Perhaps as the software of Second Life continues to age and degrade, more pockets of resistance will form. Perhaps the platform may, ironically, feel more utopian, more like our own to choose, as First Life slides into an increasingly ghoulish metaverse and we reach peak “NPC syndrome,” overwhelmed with the sensation of being trapped inside a game where we don’t know the rules. The ambient indeterminacy of Second Life is always what made it a place worth preserving. Perhaps that generosity of opacity—and the generative affect of existing in a world that feels forever out of joint—could offer us the perfect place to respawn, reimagine, and reworld our own.

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  • Why The Sims is still so popular, 25 years later – Fast Company

    “There’s a certain amount of pushback that the game still needs for you to believe that these are little people that need you, and that could be a mode of failure, like having an accident or starving. We try to make those entertaining as well: things like being hit by a meteor because you were stargazing for too long,” says Pearson. “Because at the end of the day, that is a reminder that there is a little bit of humanity in them that you need to pay attention to, and that you can’t just treat them like some ants and it’s fine if they die. You want to care about them.“

  • Inside Project Zero: Philip Rosedale on completely re-making the UI — and re-engaging millions of former users – New World Notes

    “Meaning,” as put its it, “zero download, zero login, zero crashing, zero UI… a way to greatly amplify the number of people that are desirous of using Second Life already and basically can’t.”

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  • Billion-dollar video game: is this the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made? – The Guardian

    British-American video game developer Chris Roberts – famed for his 1990s Wing Commander spaceship fighting series – launched Star Citizen as a crowdfunded project in 2012, promising to create a digital universe so huge yet still so detailed that players would “forget it’s a game”. He raised its first $2m on Kickstarter and it has been growing ever since, fuelled by fans willing to put their money into a plan so ambitious in scope that no profit and deadline-focused publisher would consider the risk of making it. […]

    As time goes on, satisfying the community becomes increasingly important. Many fans have now given large sums of their money, including through a controversial money-making scheme in which CIG pre-sells spaceships online that they intend to make in the future. Some so-called “superbackers” have spent well over $10,000. […]

    CIG describes Star Citizen as “the largest scale open development game in existence” but that ambition has also meant the game has now been in development for well over a decade, with repeated, frustrating delays. In a 2012 interview with Roberts, the Guardian reported the plan was to release the game two years later, in 2014. Fan forums regularly question if the game will ever be properly released.

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  • The gentrification of video game history – Felipe Pepe

    For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends’ houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc. As celebrated as these LAN Parties are in media, it’s important to remember that owning a gaming PC was still extremely expensive for most of the world at the time — especially for those in the Global South. There, unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.

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  • The DeanBeat: Will the metaverse bring the second coming of Second Life? – VentureBeat

    Second Life has benefited from the pandemic, just like most games, as more users are coming into virtual worlds to socialize because they aren’t so sure about meeting in real life. “Second Life is back because it never went anywhere. Just 3.5 years ago, we were the same size as Roblox,” he said. “We’re starting to grow again. Now more people are, are interacting. It’s a re-engagement strategy.”

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  • Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

    For the Lab, the move towards browser-based accessibility to Second Life is based on addressing a number of long-term pain points in using the platform: The fact that it continues to require fairly high-end computer hardware to experience it at its very best – and roughly 50% of the existing user base do not have such hardware at their disposal. The fact that it requires a dedicated viewer to be downloaded and installed by new users as a part of the sign-up process. The fact that the viewer has a sprawling and complex UI which can be both hard to master by new users. Offering a browser-based / streaming solution can overcome these issues – and that is the point of what is being called Project Zero: to allow those on low-spec systems experience SL as if they were using a gaming rig with a high-end GPU, whilst offering incoming new users direct access to coming in-world via a URL within the sign-up workflow.

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  • DOOM: The Gallery Experience – Newgrounds

    DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings. In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).

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  • Browser-based access to Second Life: Limited testing begins today – Second Life Community

    Starting today, Second Life residents can help us test access to Second Life directly through the browser, with no download or GPU required. Initial testing will use the standard viewer UI, but in the next phase of work we will dramatically simplify the user interface, with the overall goal of greatly improving the accessibility of Second Life for a larger audience.

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  • Grand Theft Hamlet

    A documentary about two out of work actors attempting the impossible task of mounting a full production of Hamlet inside the ultra-violent online world of Grand Theft Auto. This ground-breaking film is shot entirely inside game.

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  • Rustica Cybercafe – Second Life

    Welcome to Rustica Cybercafe from where you can ‘surf’ the ‘information superhighway’. We also have photocopy and fax services but no laminator sorry.

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  • Meta Horizon Worlds has been taken over by children – WIRED

    This cultural shift is only growing more acute as the prices of VR headsets continue to drop, making them more accessible to more families, and as the big platforms build out new content tiers to appeal to younger and younger audiences. Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says that for a long time, people have worried about how VR affects kids. Usually, they’re worried about the prospect of adults harassing kids. That is a valid concern, of course, and still a very real problem. But in some ways, that dynamic has flipped.
    children metaverse video-games vr

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  • The limits of virtual democracy – Virtual Jungle

    The Power Elite within CDS is made up of avatars who have more time to devote than others. It is said that time is money, but within communities time is above all power, because influence is exercised by maintaining an active presence. Thus an “inner core” (borrowing the term from Prokofy Neva) has gradually formed over time in CDS. This is a relatively small group of avatars who have intimate knowledge of Second Life, of CDS and of each other, and who generally manage to steer the community in the direction that they want.

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  • Gamer role introduced in children’s hospital – BBC News

    A Scottish children’s hospital charity has introduced a gamer in residence for young patients in Glasgow. The new job involves visiting children to play video games with them, preventing boredom and providing some light relief. Steven Mair, who was appointed by the Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity, says gaming has already provided huge benefits to the patients. He said that playing Mario Kart has improved the mobility of a patient’s hand and that it was also a useful tool in distracting the children during medical procedures. “One of my first sessions here at the hospital was a patient who was on a plasma exchange and that can be quite intrusive”, he added. “When I went in to play with that patient, it kept him distracted throughout the whole procedure.” Josephine, the mum of eight-year-old Laura Jayne, said her daughter had been in hospital for six months. She said: “It’s been really good just to pass the time. Sometimes it helps her to interact with the gamers. She really gets a lot out of it.”

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  • Philip Rosedale Community Round Table, Nov 2024, with videos + Audio – Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

    Closing Comments: Is back at the Lab full time in the CTO role. Part of his focus is figuring out how to better communicate with everyone. Specifically as CTO is looking at what, how and why technologies changes should be made, and more broadly focused on strategy and product. Notes that of late, the comments from outside of SL have not been so much phrased in the past tense and in terms of acknowledging it is still going and available, and that this could be beneficial as LL starts marketing SL more. Expresses confidence that SL will start growing again, and reiterates that user can help in this. Does feel that in a time when technology and the Internet have done much to endanger democratic expression and the polarising of views, Second Life demonstrates there is a much more positive way for people to connect using technology, and how it can have a depolarising effect, allowing people who might not otherwise, become friends. In this, sees the opportunity to promote virtual worlds as beneficial environments for people to use, and which can be respected as such, and can help us face some of the broader challenges we face as a human society.

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