The Human Touch

I was very pleased to see that someone within Second Life remembers the human touch. Almost immediately after the tragedy at VPI the other day, some stalwart in Second life has put together a memorial to the fallen. I was quite impressed.

SL URL (slurl) - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lion Sands/180/222/21
SL URL (global) - secondlife://Lion Sands/180/222/21

New Horizons of Interest

My experience with Second Life has opened my eyes to other worlds to conquer.. and through a rather interesting article in MAKE, I have come across a group billing themselves as "multiverse.net".. allegedly the "next big thing" in immersive 3D worlds. They tout a more "open source" approach to virtual world building, and essentially give the shop away to developers to set up their own worlds:

By giving developers our platform technology with no upfront costs and eliminating barriers to entry in this market, we’re making virtual world development faster and less expensive than ever before. (from the multiverse website)

That may be true.. but my first experiences with "Multiverse" (having signed up for the Beta test) had me thinking it was a paltry thing indeed. Washed out colours, a very non-descript and bland looking AVI, a very limited, boring world.

And yet.. there is some hope. On Multiverse.Net's "Upcoming Projects Page" I noted this:

Victoriana Online

For anyone who has dreamed of stepping back into a time where elegance, manners, and the pleasures of high society masked a complicated web of intrigue and social climbing, we present Victoriana Online: a gaming experience set at the height of Queen Victoria's reign. Amidst a glittering backdrop of fashionable English society, conspire against your rivals, cultivate your reputation, and secure your family's legacy.

Now, I rather like the sound of this! It seems that multiverse.net would be as accessible as Second Life, and perhaps inexpensive! Maybe a lot less expensive. One can hope. I only hope that Multiverse keeps track of the things that have gone WRONG in Second Life-- land barons, exploitation, griefing, crass commercialism, etc. and take some signficant steps up front to keep it under control EARLY.

Virtual Party Games

I had opportunity to run a game of RIPPER, my conversion of WEREWOLF for play in Virtual worlds, in Second Life on Saturday.



That's me in the 95th Rifles rig. I wear it running these things so I can stand out a bit. Hard to do in a virtual world when anybody can be anything they like!

The game is played at a table in RL, so I figured what the hell, why not, let's recreate the experience. With the help of "Eva Bellambi" from SL, I set up a game area in a low-bandwidth part of SL. Eva, you will note, is one of our BPD maniacs, and doing rather well for a beginner.



I planned for a maximum of 15, I think we got ten to a dozen players. I facilitated the game reasonably well, I thought. I have run WEREWOLF in real time many times, and I love the game. The RIPPER variant is almost identically themed (thematically swapping out Jack the Ripper for a Werewolf, and the Great Detective for A Mystic) and it takes advantage of Second Life's utilities to exchange information back and forth and keep the voting in order.

Basically RIPPER plays identically to WEREWOLF but utiilizes chat technology to recreate some vital features of WERWOLF:

1) The Roles are randomly assigned via dice roll (in RL, by me). This will change now that I have found a SL die roller script.
2) The players get their Roles via a SL Notecard. They are pre-written by me. I have also given them the RULES in advance.
3) I narrate the evening turn. I declare:

++ RIPPER, SEND ME A VICTIM! (the two pluses are for people to see me in the din of conversation generated by chats)

The Ripper player then Sends me an IM (instant msg) with the Victims' name upon it.

I then say:

++ GREAT DETECTIVE, SEND ME A DEDUCTION! (The Great Detective/Seer character sends me his or her guess at who is the culprit. I IM back "Yes" or "No").



Then it is the Morning Turn... "Day breaks, a beautiful day for everyone except for... (VICTIM'S NAME!). At this point I send the person a little object I scripted that maintains a floating text, red for a murder victim, Gold for someone who has been dispatched by votes. They attach it to the avatar's chest. In this fashion it becomes VERY easy to follow who is dead and who is not.

I handled VOTING by IM as well, but it was a bit clumsy even with only 10 or so players. I had to count carefully. I believe there are some utilities that assist with voting in SL, I will seek them out.

The game proceeds normally until we hit a victory condition. In our games on Saturday, we had a villager victory and a Ripper victory. Not bad at all! The game was enthusiastically received by the players and many requests were made to run it again. I likely will in about a month or so.

I spoke with a "Zenmodo" character who is interested in scripting an animated spurting neck wound we could affix tot he players who have been murdered. Gory, but fascinating! Truly, Second Life has vast potential for moving some forms of parlor games to virtual space. This is merely a beginning.

Munchausen by Wiki.. and maybe in Second Life, too

Peter Cobcroft (aka Curufea), that talented Ozzite that wrote a variant of my own Le Grand Cirque back a few years ago, is another talented lad with delightful lack of focus... delightful, in that he has many design projects going at once. ONE of them that caught my eye was a link off of his main page, called MUNCHAUSEN BY WIKI. Basically Peter has created an electronic, wiki-based method of playing the fantastic but sadly out of print Board/RPG storytelling game by Hogshead Publishing, THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN. The advantages of his approach over PBeM are clear: no waiting for emails, an immediate response, and hyperlinking in various places to keep the source material (and preceding paragraphs) all sorted out.



Description:

Quite the best game of competitive boasting that has ever been written, based on the exploits of a real-life German aristocrat, soldier and adventurer in the eighteenth century, whose after-dinner tales of his extraordinary exploits were immortalised in a book by Rudolph Raspe, and turned into several films.

An extradordinary game that takes an hour to play and there’s an actual winner. You can start playing three minutes after starting to read it, it’s so easy to learn. Instead of dice or cards, its system of mechanics uses money and fine wines. And you don’t need a GM.

The players all play eighteenth-century noblemen, and challenge each other to tell stories of their amazing adventures. For example, if it was my go, I might turn to you and say, "My dear Baron, do tell us the story of how you defeated the entire Turkish army with only the aid of two rabbits and a piece of cheese."

I can add my enthusiastic endorsement to this wonderful game-- alas, very difficult to run without the right crowd in tow. I have only played it at conventions (so far) and I own a copy of the original. I have so far been thwarted in my attempts to run it locally, but I stil have hopes. On the good news front, I recently received an email from the author, James Wallis, that reports:

(Mr. Nizz)

I've no idea how long your mail's been sitting in my inbox -- apologies if it's been a while -- but the book is now out and in fact I received my author's copy today. The title is Second Person, the editors are Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and contributors include Greg Costikyan, Jonathan Tweet, John Tynes, Bruno Faidutti, Kim Newman and George R. R. Martin. I recommend it highly.

-James

So we can look forward to this great game being back in print (after a fashion) pretty much as of now. The book is not cheap at 40 simoleons but I think it will be worth it.

I like Peter's approach but I can see that it would take a long time to get through a game via email or even via his Wikified approach. I have decided I will try to distill the essence of this game and see if we can't possibly run this in SECOND LIFE, the virtual world I have been shamefully addicted to of late. The immediate response (and ability to create 18th century style AVIs in an 18th century setting) strikes me as really being evocative of the source material. More on this as my evil plan develops; I am right now working on a way of bringing WEREWOLF to Second Life (specifically in Caledon) in a format called "RIPPER".

The World is what you Make it

Images: Mouseover for caption, click to enlarge
I reported on my first steps in SECOND LIFE recently. I was pretty impressed in general and still am. The virtual worlds concept itself, first hinted at in postmodern science fiction novels NEUROMANCER and SNOW CRASH, is still pretty mind-boggling to envision. Until recent years, I would have relegated the notion to another poorly written Science Fiction plotline-- the kind of second-rate rehash of NEUROMANCER that plagued the genre for a decade after that book's release. Second Life and other Virtual Worlds have undeniably demonstrated that technology has advanced to the point where we can interact with a 2D representation of a 3D world on our home computers.
Accessing a world where almost anything you can envision can be created is a heady concept. Barsoom, Middle Earth, Victorian Science Fiction.. they're all in there, in various degrees. One of my personal favorites is a virtual 'place' called "Caledon", which punctiliously recreates a genteel Victorian world with heavy gothic and VSF subthemes, a place where a man can kiss a lady's hand, bow, make outrageous, flowery compliments to the female company and retire for port and cigars, b'Gad! (that's your intrepid reporter dancing at the Caledon Winter Ball, top right) This modern REAL world being a poor reflection of our real world's genteel past, it's amusing that we can recreate bygone days as a fantasy, although it feels a tad bittersweet. Of course, there's a flip side to all this fantasy, as you may well imagine. There are plenty of "sims" (lands rented to create a theme based reality, not the popular computer game) that are not so pleasant or PG13 rated as the ones I have mentioned. Every tawdry aspect of the human mind can be played out in Second Life, after a fashion. I was astounded at the amount of "Gorean" sims based upon the work of the late John Norman, for instance-- but then again, should I really be this naive? "Virtuality" is the ultimate safe environment. There's no injury, no disease, no consequences. Developments such as these are bound to happen in an open environment. Give the kids a big enough sandbox, and the inevitable results. One hopes that the boundaries between the more mature content and impressionable minds are more rigorous than clicking "I certify I am over 18" in a box somewhere-- though I can't imagine a young man connecting to second life for a porn fix when the real stuff is so abundantly available elsewhere (I wish that was a joke!). With all the pitfalls that lurk within a virtual world, one quickly learns how to navigate between the tawdry and the worthwhile. An entire lexicon has been built up around the tension between the folks who are trying to have a good time and the folks that wish to intrude with their own sick notions. For instance, an avatar (usually male) that persistently bothers a female avatar is a "Griefer".. and griefers are fair game for abuse in turn. Fortunately, the griefers tend to cluster (remember that phrase from last time?) in areas where female avatars will respond to them.

The virtual world can be highly seductive, since it promises much. What it can actually deliver is a shadow play of reality. It would be best to remember that-- beware the landmines of the Id and libido.

Virtual World Madness

After hearing a short report about Virtual Worlds on NPR (This American Life, I think), I decided to check out the much touted SECOND LIFE virtual world system by Linden Labs, since it's free. Well, most of them are free, come to think on it, but they were pimping this one heavily, so that was where I went first. What impressed me was that outside world (what the Second Life community calls "First Life") entities are starting to wake up to the real world profit potential of the booming virtual economy that is for-real taking place in virtual space. Corey Doctrow recently gave a lecture there (not for profit; he's too cool for that-- but that's the subject of another posting). Circuit City has opened up a virtual Outlet in Second Life. Some Asian guy is now a real world millionaire based upon money made in virtual space on Second Life. That sounded intriguing to me. So I downloaded the client (for free), set up a Basic Account (for free), and 'jacked in'.

What's it like?

Pretty amazing. For one thing, you, the user, are in control of your own destiny. There is no "game" there, no end-game strategy, no rules (beyond the obvious ones dictated by group dynamics and the limits of technology). You're not "playing" anything in Second Life. You just exist. And you can be almost anything you want to be, within the limits of technology. Want to fly around on Angel or Demon wings? You can, very easily. Want to dress like a cowboy? A hobo? A Koala Bear? Anything you can envision, it can be done. You can edit your respresentation in Second Life, called an Avatar, to look like pretty much anything you like.
Two things amaze me about Second Life... the clustering effect, where all the avatars come together to socialize and interact together (2L is not an environment for loners). The virtual environment has the same mores, foibles, gaffes and pitfalls as the "Meatworld". I found myself just as shy and unobtrusive in Second Life as I am in real life.. ain't that a bitch? The other element that is astonishing is the breadth of the virtual economies floating around 2L. It's free, sure... but much of what you might want to have for day to day use comes with a cost.. people create things that are useful and then they have the option of selling them. And sell them they do, all over the place in virtually every little subsection of the vast virtual world (called the Grid in 2L parlance). You can just guess what element of our nature this kind of economy might pander too, if you think on it for a second. Virtual Guns, lap dances, even genitalia, are all "extras"...

Now, much of 2L is free, don't get me wrong. There are even groups within the world that celebrate a possesionless lifestyle by making stuff and giving it away. You might, if you decide to try this out and visit, find me in there, as "Hotspur", living among a tribe of the virtual anarchists, called "The Hobos". My Top Hat with feathers, hornrim glasses, and bicycle zeppelin built out of rags is distintive and (dare I say it) eye catching. Drop on by and say hello. My "Avatar" is always travelling, but the Hobos are my home. One of my favorite things to do is to take my "extraction belt", fly up to 5000 feet, and deploy a parachute, drifting along for miles and miles and ending up... somewhere, in this vast virtual landscape. I'm not sure what the future holds for this technology, nor am I clever enough to become a virtual millionaire, but for the nonce, this thing is great fun and as addictive as black tar heroin....