Rebooting the Virtual Worlds Podcast!

Great to hear another metaversed podcast !

One interesting point with the Philip thing is that it may contradict itself. Sorting out the user experience, may require some new features to make it really work.. things like using web and more extensive media inside SL could enable a far more intuative way of explaining what new users need to do and interacting with the environment. This throws up the dilemma that adding new features ( hence potentially introducing more bugs ) may be necessary to achieve those goals.

However even if they don't - fixing bugs in itself often throws up more bugs! I would speculate that with the move towards open source and new grid, with many areas of the architecture being altered and even replaced ( the FMOD audio system being replaced by OpenAL for instance ) we may see a period of turbulence whilst this adjustment takes place.

The HiPiHi "entertainment partnership" creative arts and video trend is fascinating. It will be very interesting to observe the impact that worlds which have a larger amount of "professional" content in them ( esp Sony Home and A World of my own etc. ) have on worlds which are largely "user generated" like Second Life.

Re community : I think the 1000 = 0 arguement is true. However SL is a community with a fractured, non transparent but highly political and heirarchical structure. In truth there are 1000s of lobby groups, but there are a much smaller group of people who have real influence.

Using virtual environments for education, in the way that is proposed in Arden is fascinating. One thing that strikes me is that this may have a far bigger overlap with non user generated gameworlds than more social user generated worlds. It sounds like a Shakespearean themed WoW to me. Also, as the aim of the project is to excite through immersion in a rich atmospheric environment - it would make more sense to handle this client side with a large install pack similar to WoW.

Edit : Just looking at the site now - I see its actually a MOD of Neverwinter Nights a commercial MMO, and probably uses alot of the assets of that game as well as its engine.

Hey thanks Dizzy, glad the podcast is back too :)

Im with you on bug hunting. with a system like SL it'll be like whack a mole...

I'm a strong advocate for Second Life 2.0. I think they should just redesign the whole thing from the ground up with a "if we knew then what we know now" philosophy, and allow the community to migrate. Yes, that's possibly millions of dollars in assets left behind... but I took a poll on this idea about 6 months ago and people responded well, including store owners.

Of course I can say all of this because it's not my responsibility to implement it. :)

Hey guys,
Great podcast.

Second Life 2.0 eh? Yes, I'm an advocate for ripping SL 1.0 apart as I'm more of an observer looking for the real future of virtual worlds. I don't see it in Second Life anymore. They need a face lift. But they're trapping themselves no? They're business model is based on renting servers and the end goal for what people/companies want and need is complete open server assets, no? And the grid architecture and Linden Dollar? Is this scalable and trust worthy? I'm just not as sure as I use to be. And I think greed could play a factor if LL doesn't loosen their grib and co-develop this with the community. Full thoughts on my latest post still fresh on the mind if you care to humor me: http://www.rezyourmind.com/2007/12/second-life-vs-open-source.html

Caleb, I enjoy your insight very much. This podcast kept my interest in SL a little more. BTW while I'm throwing out complements - Nick, I think you need a second opinion ranter. Prokofy, not a big fan, sorry. More on that later though.

Cheers,
Ben Moore