So despite my vows not to go to Skin Fair 2016, I did.  Only to discover that almost no vendor creates system avatar skins anymore.  They only skin mesh heads now and mesh parts.

This awful outcome is the result of two things...market exploitation and and ideology.

Market Exploitation

I suppose most avatar creators feel that mesh parts and mesh avatars are the end all and be all.  Little does it matter that Mesh bodies and parts are unalterable by their purchasers. If you buy a mesh body, it will deform a bit in correlation to the system avatar body, but not by much.  Mesh heads cannot be changed at all.  So a customer will look like every other customer who buys the same mesh head.  If they try to alter their look, they can buy the now legion offerings from various skin creators.  But that still doesn't stop them from looking like every other person who purchased the same skin.  I can also see why creators are clamoring to skin mesh avatars and parts, it's easier.  The bodies and heads don't change.  In fact all they really need to create are the heads.  The body skin can be the same across all lines since only the head will change.

Ideology

For many years now, there have been motivated howlers, mainly creators, screeching how the average SL user creates lag.  That all of us ruin SL by making our avatars too tall and many bodies are also out of proportion.  Their opposites would point to the "your world" ethos of SL and stated that people were allowed to design their own looks.  Now I can see both sides of the argument.  Yes, out of proportion avatars can make designing items harder in SL.  However telling people they can't design their own features in VR is just as awful.  Now I see that the Mesh avatar movement has done by stealth what the vocal restriction advocates wanted for years.  It prevents people from designing their own avatars.  We have in  proportion avatars that are cookie cutter boring.

The almost total abandonment of people who do still design their own avatars is heinous.  There are people in SL who do have a sense of proportion and enjoy playing with the body controls to create their look.  Why should these people (I am one) be forced into mesh body pieces?  Not only that why should I have to suffer the fetish peccadilloes of certain creators (Big Asses, Big Lips, Big Hips, Big Boobs etc) when I buy items for my avatar?  Why is it a crime that I want my avatar to share some of my own features?

What is even more disturbing is that the few creators who do still create system avatars put absolutely no enthusiasm into these items.  Almost all the creators at this year's skin fair, the few who did create system skins, used the same skin template.  Hence every system avatar looked the same no matter what creator stall you visited.  Now that is just miserly.  Unless it's a subtle dig at mesh resistors and meant to push them into the standardized clone economy of mesh.

So now it seems that I will be locked mainly into skins created in 2015 and before.

This is what I will be prevented from doing from now on.  I can't look myself with mesh heads:





Nor can I design Portrait Avatars such as these with Mesh heads:

Ready Player One Mix

A Ready Player One 80's Mix from Melponeme_k on 8tracks Radio.

I can't believe I didn't cross post this when I created this playlist last year on 8tracks.

Despite the tech industry totally misunderstanding the point of Ready Player One and wanting to turn us all into VR vegetables, I liked this book.  It contains a lot of touchstones from my childhood that I remember from the late 70s - early to mid 80s.  It was a great time back then and video games were considered very advanced.

I believe I received my Atari 2600 sometime in early 1982, not really sure but I did have Pac-man.  Since history websites state that Pac-Man was released for the 2600 in March 82, it had to have been around that time.  Maybe I got it for Easter that year.  Even though the price for the console had come down, it was still considered pricey at about $150 which would equal about $380 dollars now.  Not only that the price of the cartridges were about $30 ($75 today)  to $50 ($125 today) dollars a piece.

Truthfully I remember liking the games a lot.  But it never really turned into an obsession.  After the Atari craze, the game system was taken off the main TV set and attached to a rinky dinky black and white TV set in our basement rec room.  Then fell into oblivion.  My family never purchased the next latest and greatest video machine.  The next video set I owned was Playstation in the early 2000s  and subsequently Playstation 2.  I got into WOW over the consoles and never felt the need to get an extra machine.  Truthfully first person shooters never interested me.  They make me nervous.

But that time in Spring to end of 1982 was fun for a kid.  I remember hanging out with friends and fighting over who would play the next round.  I had Pac-Man, Pong, Missile Command, Asteroids, Centipede, Casino, Atlantis, Barnstorming, Demon Attack, Frogger, Night Drive, Adventure, ET (What an awful game), Raiders of the Lost Ark and of course Pitfall.  I think I had a few more titles but the ones listed are the ones I remember the most.  It is Pitfall that was the most popular.  Because we played so often, the game noises and 8 bit soundtrack became psychologically disturbing. So we would mute the sound and listen to the radio.  For the rest of my life I will always associate Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf with Pitfall.   

That song is in my playlist along with other songs from late 70s to mid 80s that remind me of the early era of video games.  Most of the music listed in the book didn't resonate with me.  But on this playlist, it takes me way back, way, way back.

Come Smile with Noodles

So Ciaran Laval linked to a company that has a new demo showcasing an Oculus VR experience.

What does it showcase?  Nothing more or less than a nod at the latest dystopian novel that Tech heads want to make flesh..."Ready Player One".

Thanks to Digital Cybercherries, you can go back to a 1980's arcade and even listen to old tunes.  If you've never experienced said time, no matter Digital Cybercherries has recreated this sad little mess for you to experience.

An experience that ironically captures the pathos of VR itself.  A time when people stopped looking at one another and just stared into a box.  It was the natural outcome of television but so much worse.  Because now we gained an actual gateway into psychosis.

But now with this new groovy VR step, you can live the psychosis.  You can be in the 80's with the box strapped to your head, entering a black box space only to stare into a virtual black box with old arcade graphics.

Are you living?  Or are you lying down on that bed with Noodles hitting that opium only to smile like a daft idiot.

Oh in the past, everything was so much better.  Its much easier to hide there and not face the problems of today.  Easier than actually getting out to do something about inequality and loss of freedom/privacy. It's so modern, so futuristic, so like "Ready Player One".

As usual the tech heads failed to take away the one main theme of the book they idolize.  The character Halliday created his VR to hide from the world.  When he hid, he lost out on love and life because an hallucination was more attractive.  In the process he pulled his whole fictional world into that VR opium dream along with him.

Noodles likes the past, he wants to go no further.  Do you want to join him?

Long Live the New Flesh

There is a ramping up of motion capture hype in regards to Philip Rosedale's new VR Hi-Fi.

And of course, it is all another sign of what Mediabastard (another SL alumnus) calls the aptly named Media Induced Psychosis or MIPS for short.  Mediabastard was the one who really tuned me into Marshall McLuhan and the Medium is the Message theory.



Watch the video, then read the comments...also read Ciaran Laval's blog about the video here.

Now imagine if you were face to face with someone in deep conversation.  But what you saw were the "expressions" that were "captured" for the Hi-Fi avatars.  Honestly...would you accept those expressions in every day life?  Or would you deduce that there was something wrong with your conversation partner if his/her mouth continually hung open?

One of the things that Mediabastard and Jaron Lanier write about is dumbing ourselves down to accept the new media hype, the latest thing.  Lanier wrote that current AI is only acceptable because we have to take ourselves down to its level.  In a way that we would never do for another human being.  In essence, we are denying our own humanity and highly evolved senses to buy into AI/VR media hype.  Because it is cool and the idea is exciting, we are willing to accept the good enough, the very large shortcomings.  People may think, that it is only temporary but it isn't.  It changes us.  This technology is not making us better.  It is devolving our own advanced social processes.  This would not be the first time we have all degenerated because of technology.  Lanier pointed out that people now feel more comfortable typing into devices rather than having conversations.  That young people have a harder time with eye contact due to technology.  He also concluded that this is no surprise since technology is developed by a group of people who by and large have problems with the interpersonal aspects of life.

Technology people are more likely to suffer from forms of autism or have conditions on the spectrum.  They use technology to cope with a world that at times baffles them or even frightens them.  I have nothing but empathy for them.  Not being able to hold a comfortable level of eye contact nor being able to properly read facial expressions is akin to being blind on a very basic level.  Imagine all the visual information about friends, loved ones, and strangers that is lost simply because you can not see it.

These are the kind of people now involved with motion capture in VR technology.  They can't see where they are going wrong.  But they are asking people who do know, to get excited over the promise of Mocap not the shoddy way it is designed.  The great majority of it depending upon all of us dumbing ourselves down to accept a facsimile of "human expression" in VR that in real life we would rightly conclude is evidence of mental disability.

Mocap could lead to problems of a new generation not being properly able to read real facial expressions much in the way young people now cannot hold eye contact.

Where Mediabastards MIPS theory comes in, is that no one can see that they are making gargantuan amends to accept these poor simulacrums because the ideas are so alluring.  We are embracing the illusion, the psychosis over the reality.  THAT is quite frightening.

So...death to videodrome...long live the new flesh indeed.

Ready or Not Player One

Above is my current avatar standing in one of the patches of land that I rent.  At the time it was taken, this SL visit was just like any other day.  Little did I know that a few days later I, and other SL players, would discover that Second Life is basically over.  And not over by any other company than its parent company Linden Lab.  Due to a planned or unplanned leak, Linden Lab has confirmed that it is building another virtual world.

At first I was excited.  Second Life needs a great many quality of life upgrades which are mostly out of reach due to the age of the platform.  A new place with better avatar tools would be great.  But as I came down from my high, other more logical questions started to surface.

Mainly about land. The land market is now essentially dead and that is a little frightening.  Because Second Life's revenue stream is land.  Prokofy Neva wrote a great post about it from the rental business viewpoint.  This could potentially be a fiasco that could be a bigger than the Zindra shakeup a few years back.  Ebbe Linden answered a few basic questions on Sluniverse.com regarding the new world.  He mentioned that they were thinking about lowering land costs in favor of item taxation.  A concept which I thought was strange.  Does the lab think that they can make more from adding fees to creators and buyers?  Did they have an accountant look into this?  Or is this another pie in the sky idea from some insane ideology that Silicon Valley people love to worship?

How will LL plan to deal with all the landholders, including myself, who are now holding the bag for worthless land that costs a monthly fee?  Granted I only hold almost a quarter of mainland.  Not a lot compared to people like Anshe Chung, Prokofy Neva, etc.  but it is still a big investment compared to most single users in the world.  This isn't including the land I rent from themed estates that I love such as Winterfell and 1920's Berlin.  I admit I spend much more on land in Second Life than I should.  But I look at it as an entertainment expense on par with going to the movies.  When all is said and done, I would spend the same amount attending the local movie house.  But I get more joy from Second Life than I've ever received from passive film watching.

Will there even be land, as we know it, in the new place?  Already people on sluniverse are screaming for no setup fees or tier fees.  They are campaigning for bubbles (like the failed Cloud Party) that will disappear when their users are not logged into the world.  So there will be no world, no places to visit, and no homes or landscaping to admire.  That would be a deal breaker for me.  I simply would not move over but stay in old SL until the lights go out.

According to Ciaran Laval's site, he pointed out a Linden post on sluniverse that Second Life isn't on par with World of Warcraft but more like the old Everquest.  Which just flabbergasts me.  Why is an employee of the company downplaying the success of the company's core product?  What possibly good could that do in the public image?  This indicates to me that LL, as well as the rest of the VR tech community, are still beguiled by the Snowcrash/Ready Player One fantasies.  Fantasies that have been shown time and time again to be just fantasies.  WoW didn't get made with fantasies that there were about 10 million people out there waiting to play its game.  They were hoping for old Everquest success of a few hundred thousand to a million people.  That they attracted more was an outlier.  So developing the next VR with the idea that millions of people will pile on is laughable.  Especially when it has been proved that only a small number of people feel comfortable with the avatar experience and an even smaller who are capable of self directed play time.

Recently there was a news story which stated that children who don't learn their letters through penmenship (just by typing or tracing letters on a computer pad) are not forming the same neural connections as people who did learn their alphabet by writing.  Technology is literally changing the human brain.  And I'm beginning to suspect that this has a large bearing on Virtual Worlds.  Mainly because the audience for a free form virtual world that only LL offers (SL) has an audience that skews older.  The known, guaranteed audience for virtual worlds are old as in old enough to have gone through the schooling system before new technology.  This is something that must be taken into account and in fact should worry virtual world creators.  If this is the case (as it appears to be)  their audience is old and getting older with no one to replace their numbers.  I speak from experience.  I'm in middle age and getting older than that soon, I love SL but my young niece was wary of it.  All the people who grew up in new technology either gravitate to on the rail games or just hang out in Facebook like interfaces but mainly text message/twitter.  Twittering, by its very nature, doesn't encourage exploration, it doesn't encourage deep thinking.  What it does encourage is burp like exclamations about lunch and bathroom habits.  That is not the kind of thinking that takes well to virtual world experiences.

Despite warning signs, I really hope that it will be Linden Lab that creates the next popular platform.  Mainly because I'm more comfortable with the devil you know over the devil you don't idea.  Linden Lab does like doing things its own way but it also has consistently changed its direction due to public feedback.  Granted many changes were due to outcry but at least things got changed.  Worlds don't get made without protest or the ability to protest.  Unfortunately the fascistic turn that real world and the tech world are experiencing actively discourages protest.  Where will that leave us?

Right now, we are left in a holding pattern.  Land will become a lot cheaper as people dump their holdings in preparation for the new place.  But I don't see much of this land being purchased.  Who would want to buy something that will not carry over to the new place?  I'm at the max of the tier I can pay, I should probably dump what I have but I can't do it.  Not yet.  I already came to the conclusion that I will not recoup my expenditures.  Not only will the land market suffer but I see people holding back on home purchases such as housing and landscaping.  Maybe fashion will be able to hold up.  But really why spend loads of money on things that will not transfer.  This is worrying because by all accounts the new place will not even be ready for another two years.

Whatever the case someone's goose is being cooked.  Just whose it is, is not clear.

He who walks behind the Mega-Grid...

The SVVR conference is still all the news in Second Life circles.  Mostly the discussion centers around Palmer Luckey's (one of the Oculus crew) pontificating about the future of VR.

Of course, he has joined the chorus that Second Life is too old and too difficult to use.  He, like many other people in the VR biz (including SL founder Rosedale), is in a very keen display of downplaying SL's success.  SL's influence is being minimized to the point of ridiculousness. This is really underhanded and awful because if we all step back and look at reality...SECOND LIFE IS THE ONLY VR ON THE MARKET.  It is the only one successful and still standing.  I reiterate again, the other contenders failed.  They failed big time.  They failed because they didn't take into account what makes SL successful.  The reason they didn't take into account was all about ideology and an almost religious fundamentalism.

1) Ideology - Most VR bigwigs are extremely invested in Creative Commons.  Which means the little people, us, give up our intellectual property rights.  While the bigwigs get to keep theirs AND profit off of ours.

2) Religious Fundamentalism - Many in the tech biz, out of fear of death, are enthralled by the idea that they will transcend their bodies and become one with computers.  No, I'm not making this up.  They really think they will be post human.  They are so deluded by this fantasy, that they are actively coding our technology with an eye to when they will experience their IT Rapture.  The left behind (us) will have to deal with their crappy software architecture.

The main crux with their problems regarding Second Life are that people who use it fought hard for their VR rights (and we are still fighting) and we may be the only audience for VRs.  Second Life grew as much as it could and reached just about all of the people who are comfortable with the VR experience.  This is worrying for VR creators.  Because that means the dystopic fantasy VR they want will never come to pass and their dreams of enslaving everyone into VR will not be attainable.

Audience question for Palmer: You and Carmack talk about building the metaverse as a moral imperative - why? 

Palmer: "This is one of those crazy man topics", he begins, but says it comes down to this: Everyone wants to have a happy life, but "it's going to be impossible to give everyone everything they want", such as expensive consumer items. With VR, however, you can do that. It's easy for us to say, living in the great state of California, that VR is not as good as the real world, but a lot of people in the world don't have as good an experience in real life as we do here. Also, it's going to be useful for training, and education, "There's a lot of reasons that it's imperative we create a perfect virtual reality."  Ed Mason also mentions people who are bedridden can benefit from VR. 

Luckey Palmer - The Mix Agency May 19, 2014

There you go, straight from the horse's mouth at the recent SVVR.  Scary isn't it?  The moment I read that, I immediately thought of that crazy old horror film Children of the Corn.  Luckey Palmer is Issac.

Instead of using his influence and billions to fight for the rights of people in technology, Palmer wants to feed off our misery.  Tech people are all about rights for themselves and kicking the ladder out behind them rather than give a helping hand to their fellow man.  Its their mentality.  I'm not saying that they haven't created great tech for everyone, but I am saying that they are deluded enough and rich enough to make a real everlasting and horrifying effect on our lives.  As drug companies and insurance companies have turned the wheels to benefit their business over the public, as food companies have turned the wheels to make sure that the food they want to sell takes precedence, so will tech companies turn the wheels to sell that they want.  Our rights be damned.

The VR Hat trick

The hype is starting.  The VR hype.  The Snowcrash fantasy that never dies, now colored by Ready Player One fantasies.  Also a side helping of transhumanism via Singularity.

I'm not adverse to big dreams, big hopes, and big ideas.  But there comes a point where reality needs to take the main stage.  Reality has not come to the VR business, in fact most ignore it.  As in they ignore the fact that Second Life is the one and only successful VR ever.  But because it didn't fulfill some fantasy from a science fiction book, it is decried as a failure.  A failure that is losing customers, losing money, losing content and, most pointedly, it is not Snowcrash.

Is Second Life declining?  It is hard to really argue that it is not.  Like it's MMORPG sister juggernaut, WOW, it is an old warhorse platform that is starting to really show its age.  But as of yet, nothing more advanced or more attractive has taken its place.  There have been contenders, from the many opensim worlds to the more advanced Blue Mars and Cloud Party.  Blue Mars failed and was sold to Ball State University who use it as research.  Cloud Party was just as empty and sold to Yahoo as soon as it received the offer.  The Opensim worlds remain remote also rans that no one ever visits except for those who are disappointed in Second Life.  So if Second Life is the only VR left standing...why is it a failure?  Most likely because the populace turned it into their fantasy, fantasies that are more life affirming than Snowcrash.

You see the problem with the Snowcrash VR mavens and the transhumanists is that they have a dirty little secret.  They WANT the fascistic world, the outright misery of a world gone bad that forces the fictional people in their favorite books to hide inside a VR.  Inside that VR, they become the gods, the artists, the politicians and the enforcers.  They want us to dance to their tune.  They want us to experience their rights free world in which a twisted form of corporate communism reigns with an iron fist.  Our only recourse to individuality is the ability to choose a funky avatar.

Damn did they try hard to push that sop in Second Life.  Fortunately, the people in SL fought tooth and nail for "land" rights, intellectual property rights and free speech while wearing funky avatars.  We didn't eschew real world living for a fantasy prison.  We didn't "move" into a VR and make it more real than real.  Instead we made VR an extension, a playground for relaxation.  Second Life is a virtual Club Med not a dystopic altworld.  That was what got up the nose of Philip, Mitch, Corey and the rest.  We just weren't good enough, we were real and not fictional.

So like Vladimir and Estragon they all wait for Godot Snowcrash.  He is coming don't ya know!  He is just a few hours away and he promises to arrive.  If they just get more people and more technology, Godot Snowcrash will appear with his holy Oculus device.  All the while they ignore the flesh and blood reality of the only successful VR ever made.  My forecast is that the Snowcrash will never arrive.  But the second coming of a Club Med Second Life?  Almost certainly.

And hopefully, sometime in the near future, someone will take away Lucky Kurzweil's hat.

Quote of the Day

Suzan Mazur: David Orban, founder and director of Singularity's Institute for Artificial Intelligence Europe, told me at a robotics conference in Bergamo a few months ago that people who don't embrace robotics in the future will not be able to survive. Do you agree?

Jaron Lanier: First of all, I think it's the stupidest institute ever. It's purely about this religious fantasy of superiority. The whole basis of it is repulsive. Yet the people there are great friends of mine. I admire them. We have fun together. And I tell them all this to their faces. I've also given talks at Singularity about how ridiculous I think it is. Here's the problem. They say people won't be able to survive if we don't have robotics. Well, how is that different from saying, "Oh, if we don't like the way people are, we'll kill them." What is the difference, ultimately? There's a way in which the new sort of vaguely Asperger-like digital technocrat is absolutely lacking in any self-awareness of ethics or morality. It astounds me, again and again. They're my friends, and we like each other, but I do think it's astonishing.

 Huffingtonpost Interview

I'm so glad that someone who is big in Tech circles is finally taking a stand against the fascist, body/tech purity elitism that is Singularity.  I hate that it has its odious claws in the tech we use and influences its development.  Talk about a concept not being user friendly, it actually hates its users.

I launched an IPO and all I got was a Lousy T-Shirt!

Welly, Well,  Well, Well

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/03/25/facebook-pays-two-billion-bucks-to-acquire-oculus-rift-company/

Facebook just purchased the current darling, Oculus Rift.  They thank the fools who invested through Kickstarter and saved them money in research and development.  Now they can pick up patents and an almost shelf ready project for peanuts.  Obviously they expect the technology will be worth more than just 2 billion in the future.

This sale goes beyond VR for the masses.  It will spell the end for Kickstarter.  Simply because the "investors" AKA Suckers will now realize that IPO investing requires more than just cheap t-shirts and early access to whatever they funded.  Especially when a company like Oculus used that goodwill money not to allow small investors company ownership via stock options, but to roll it over into a company sale.  This is an ethics free move on Oculus' part and their small investors could rightfully sue for fraud.

Kickstarter is just another get something for nothing that Silicon Valley LOVES.  They want programming for free via open source.  They want workers for free via work clubs (more like online sweatshops).  They want graphics and art for free via social networks like Flickr, Pinterest and Tumblr.  They want content for free via Creative Commons.

Is anyone seeing a pattern here?

The only reason why these companies and owners get mega millions/billions is because they are depending on free work, free content and free money from the customers.  They have no development overhead because all of us are paying for it.  The rest is just gravy.

We, the investors, need to step back and demand more for our money.  We have to make demands and get off the animal farm.  Because that is all we are now to the tech industry, slaughterhouse animals.

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Oh Bother

Eve Online, yeah, EO.  *sighs and shakes head*

What do you think about when this game is mentioned?  Spaceships? Space? Wild scandals in which players gang up on other players in order to make them commit suicide?  More scandal in which a popular blogger (Mintchip) was hired as community manager by CCP and led to slander and pillaging of her character?  Ayn Rand idol worship?

So having only 4% of the player base claim to be female is surprising?

Although CCP claims not to worry about this minuscule number, I have a feeling that they do anyway. Why?  Because, even though most male gamers don't admit it, any game that attracts a large female player base makes money.  Lots and lots of money.  Really, what developer would turn up their nose at money?

So now CCP has a hit a wall with subscriptions and their mostly male player base holds part of the blame.  But still the majority of the blame is due to CCP's lax policing of outrageous behavior.  They don't govern against harassment, threats, cheating (in fact their own devs took part in early cheating scandals), the list goes.  The player government had that famous scandal with the Goon Squad suicide campaign.  I haven't looked into what happened to Mintchip, but I've seen the comments on her recent vlog post and they weren't nice.

I do have to say that the hiring of Mintchip is due to CCP holding out a tentative hand to female players.  Mintchip has a fun vlog and she is one of the few female gamers who is very enthusiastic about EVE Online and it's sister game DUST.  At times I have been leery about Mintchip's giggly female persona but I never thought that she wasn't serious about her gaming hobby or the games she enjoyed.  The reason for my hesitant support was not because of jealousy over a younger, pretty female gamer but because her behavior was bound to attract misogynist male gamers of every age.  It also made me angry that I even had to worry about this, because it shouldn't matter if Mintchip wanted to be flirty.  She is young and pretty and has every right to enjoy being so.  But now she is accused of sending sexy photos to someone for game money.  Is it true?  Don't know.  More likely it was embellished by jealous male gamers to get her fired.  Even it if was true, SO FUCKING WHAT!  None of us know the details except for the stories spewed on game boards and youtube comments from a bunch of men screaming like sexually frustrated, hysterical Church types.

I'll be pissed if CCP folds for these screechers.  Seriously these men need someone to get Freudian on their asses.

Anyway besides the previous story, why doesn't Eve Online attract women?

Is it because the avatars are just spaceships?  Partially, I've written about that in previous posts.  But not totally.

Is it the PvP?  There are plenty of women who enjoy PvP.  My friend who got me into games (WoW) played on a PvP server and she enjoyed it immensely.  I, myself, loved WAR to death.

You know why it doesn't attract women?  Take a look of that screenshot in the header that I've included with this post.  Look at that godawful UI.  I mean seriously.  You want another gander at it?  Look at an official screenshot of it.

Holy CRAP!  What the hell is going on in there?  It literally takes a few weeks to learn all the menu and sub-menu systems.  There has to be a better way.

How do you drive your ship?  Do you see it on that nightmare of a UI?  Nope.  

Another reason, there is no codified attempt to guide the player into missions or crafting.  After the tutorial (which is better than when I first signed up), the new players are left high and dry.  The developers figured that the rest of the training would be completed by the many player corporations in the game.  Which considering the bullying scandals, is laughable.

The questing....whatever there is of it,  is enjoyable.  However, and a BIG however, whatever questing there is in the game is spotty, ridiculously arcane and purposely obscure.  Even if a player manages to follow the quests/agent missions in the game, there is a ridiculous jump in skill levels.  Since the game does not label its levels or allows easy tracking of skills, it is possible for a player to accept a mission that they cannot complete but won't know it until they accept the mission.  That leads to the PvE faction that gave the quest to permanently ban the player from future quests.  Nice.

I won't get into the crazy that is mining/crafting.  The UI doesn't even tell you how to fly your ship much less how to mine.

Whatever.  I would say to CCP, if you want to attract female players do the following:

1 - Properly police your user base in game and out (forums), even the popular players/corporations.

2 - Clean up that UI

3 - Ban obscurity in everything.  The mechanics of every feature must be transparent.  It isn't dumbing down.  Believe me, the main features of the gameplay can stay as is without alteration.  But it is not shameful to allow the player to easily understand how, why and what.

I have a feeling though, that CCP has painted themselves into a corner.  Any change would alienate the players they have, but no change will continue to keep females out of the game.

Jaron's Internet Class critique

Jaron Lanier's book "You are Not a Gadget" was so revolutionary and clear headed in its critique of internet culture or really, lack of culture.  In fact, Lanier presented evidence that the internet was actively destroying culture.

His main argument was that cultural music, films, photos, television shows were being decontextualized from their time period, mixed and mashed into meaningless bits.  Our cultural heritage, both high art and pop, were  being ground into meaninglessness.  In turn, new ideas were being subjected to the same grindstone so that nothing new was taking hold.  The music of the 1960's and 1970's into the 1980's had a distinct sound.  But everything past the 1990's, when the internet culture took hold, is generic and rehashed.

In essence our culture has frozen in time.  We are in stasis.

Unfortunately, Lanier's amazing book did nothing to wake anyone up from their dreams.  The Internet class is still spouting off the decayed and contaminated mantra of the opensource web.  While unable to see that it destroys IT jobs and benefits only the richest few.

Now Lanier is back with a new book that carries on with what he discovered in his last.

He granted an interesting interview with Salon

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/

This time Lanier digs deeper into why the internet and its no culture locust mentality is actively destroying the middle class.  His interview reveals that outlier success ventures on Youtube and other social networks are masking the damage being done to the middle class worldwide.

The interview goes into interesting views on the fall of Kodak and that internet success story of Jenna Marbles is built on a mountain of failure and ponzi scheme dynamics.

Anyway the his new book, "Who owns the Future" has my attention and I plan to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Pandaria

Way back before the holiday mayhem started, I received a promotional from Blizzard to play the Pandaria expansion for two weeks.  I wasn't feeling any real need to go back to WoW but I heard so many good things about the latest expansion that I took them up on their offer.  Amazingly, Blizzard managed to get back a little of the magic that surrounded the game during the heady Lich King days.

What Blizzard had managed to do was keep all the great things about the Cataclysm expansion and curtail its excesses (such as too many cutscenes, phasing and vehicle quests).  The smooth sailing questing lines that I enjoyed in Cataclysm, with no back and forth to the same areas, has been introduced to Pandaria as well.  I loved the new story lines and the mysterious Pandaren continent.  As crazy as it may seem, Blizzard managed to throw off its European Middle Ages Sword fantasy shtick and totally immerse itself in Chinese Middle Ages Sword fantasy shtick.  The new expansion feels like a different game.

The artwork is absolutely fantastic.  Despite the low fi graphics, Pandaria looks lush and colorful.  Great attention was paid to creating wide open spaces as players leave the initial forest area.  The vistas are gorgeous and created with care to mimic real Chinese scenery.  The game's equivalent of The Great Wall is a true achievement.  What is even more, the new score for the expansion is just as beautiful and matches the art.

The class tree lines have been pared down to very straight and simple techniques.  On my Paladin main, this was a relief.  I mostly played as a Retribution Paladin since I mainly just solo play.  During Cataclysm my Pally was hamstrung because her hits depended on the game's casino wheel to roll triple diamonds.  This meant she either wiped NPCs with just a look or she would be forced to keep hitting for minutes on end.  It was strange and frustrating.  Thankfully that is all gone.  The wheel of big hits has been tamed and now Pallys do reliable damage.  I spent a bit of time on my other main, a warlock and she is doing rather well too.  However the warlock is nowhere near the powerhouse it used to be and was once the scourge of PvP and PvE alike.

Cross server areas....  I'm holding back my opinion on this element.  This was Blizzard's way of trying not to close empty servers.  In fact I was a little dismayed and confused when I was visiting Silvermoon to see it filled with players with hyphenated designations/server names.  There are only certain areas where the cross servers work and those areas are mostly low population.  However I've noticed that it hasn't led to happy, happy family results.  It mostly leads to people from my server snarling at cross server visitors to go back to their own servers.  It doesn't help that the players sharing my server are from Moonguard (which has a terrible reputation as being the red light district of WOW).   We'll see where this goes eventually.

I have run two dungeons so far, Stormstout Brewery and Shado-Pan Monastery.  Both times I held my breath when I signed up for LFG.  WoW still has a terrible reputation for nastiness among its players.  I have to admit I rarely experienced this in any group, even during my heyday in the game.  However I am no longer the player I used to be nor even half as good.  So I was terrified of being cut out of a dungeon run.  My fears were unfounded and the two groups I was matched with were calm and cool.  Out of the two dungeons I found Stormstout the more enjoyable.  The fights were slapstick instead of the intense atmosphere in Shado-Pan.  I especially enjoyed rolling barrels into a monkey boss who liked to throw banana peels at players.

So far I have found a lot of enjoyment in this expansion, and I was glad to purchase a few extra months to see it develop.  Does that mean I will be going back to WOW.  I'm not sure.  I'm not the motivated player I was years ago and there are times when weeks go by in which I don't play any games.  A regular subscription isn't cost effective for me at this time.  But I can say that I will probably spend 3 to to 6 months in Pandaria.  Because right now, looking out at the game scenery while standing on the Great Wall is just too enchanting.

The closure of a game...

A few days ago, Tiny Speck announced that they will be closing Glitch.

I am rather saddened by the news but also extremely unsurprised.

When I started to play the game last year, it amused and charmed me.  It also had a rather grim, creepy, horror tale vibe that appealed to me.  Despite its cartoony graphics, the game reminded me of the more involved gameplay in such games as Second Life and Eve Online.  Strange as it may seem, Second Life and Eve Online share quite a number of gamers between them.  Glitch entered this strange relationship and became a third in a gaming triangle of weird, wacky, dangerous and thought provoking games.

Tiny Speck's announcement that its closure was partly due to being unable to find a large audience, unspoken was that the audience it did have didn't pay it enough.

Well I don't think the game's audience should be blamed for outright mismanagement on Tiny Speck's part.

They didn't promote their game enough.  They heavily relied on the word of mouth viral idea.  Which isn't a bad thing but it should be done ALONG with regular marketing.  The viral needs to get started than as people become more curious more professional marketing should take up the slack.  Tiny Speck just did the viral and never backed it up with concrete advertising.  The actual marketing they did do was in the form of one release trailer two years ago, that baffled prospective fans and gave them no idea what was actually IN the game.



I mean really, even myself (a fan of the game), said WTF WAS THAT?

Consider that the trailer was released two years ago and it stated that release was Spring 2011.  By the time I joined, Fall 2011, the game was barely out of beta.  It wasn't even accepting open sign ups.  I believe I just sent in an email to Tiny Speck and a few weeks later, I received an invite.  Truthfully I don't even know how I won this invite because I heard that a lot of people never received one.  Was it a lottery system?

Why did a newly released game need a lottery system?  Why did it need to throttle and bottleneck its audience?  Again, it could be my previously stated thought that the game wanted to be a viral success.  But we also need to get a more reality based reason, this game could not properly scale with its potential audience.  Prokofy Neva, in regard to Second Life, has often thought that Linden Lab purposefully throttled its audience due to scaling issues.  I think Tiny Speck did the same with Glitch.

In fact they slowly allowed more and more people into the game Fall 2011 into Winter 2012.  And most of these new people were due to established players sending out personal invites.  Mind you, there were still potential fans waiting for invites from their emails to Tiny Speck.  Apparently most of these people were ignored.  And that had to create a kind of blacklash to the Viral goodness that Tiny Speck was trying to establish.

One of the major signs that the game was not scaling properly was centered in the issue of housing.  The housing in Glitch of Fall 2011 consisted of the player becoming authorized with a game permit.  This required the player to apply and wait in a crazy office staffed by lazy NPC monsters asking inane questions.  It was a hilarious send up of any professional bureaucracy.  After receiving a permit, the player had to gather up game money then buy a house in a desired district.  Each district had its own style of houses and different sizes from hovel to mansion.  However within each district was a number of "streets" shared between a few players.  Once these streets were full, the housing was sold-out.  It turned out to be an incredibly popular gameplay option with the game's fans, it forced Tiny Speck to constantly be spewing out new districts along with their streets.

As I said, the game was failing in the scaling area.

Instead of working with the issue, Tiny Speck did the worst possible thing to do, they pulled their game out of release state and sent it straight back to Beta.  Yes.  Crazy wasn't it?  Whatever marketing they had planned (and it had to have been more than just that one awful trailer) was nixed and signups were closed.  Even personal invites were no longer an option.

What did this mean for the game?  Their audience was kept small ON PURPOSE!  It was not allowed to grow.  They never left BETA.  They used the illusion of all those potential fans, languishing on a wait list, as a reason to throw more money away on the game.  They counted the proverbial birds in the bush rather than the one in their hands.  So folks, they ballooned their costs in man hours, game assets and other development on an illusion of more fans.  Meanwhile back in reality, those potential fans chalked off their unreceived invites and rightly deduced that the company was mismanaging its game, then moved on.

I even saw this problem and left the game because of it.  The ill conceived beta was mainly to deal with the housing issue.  In place of what the game had, the houses were now all free, turning a previous achievement and valuable commodity into something worthless.  The new houses were ugly as sin.  The ways to "expand" these new houses were slipshod and unappealing.  Of course, the small fan base was ecstatic over these changes.

However the game never opened up its signup page again.  It didn't even allow players to send personal invites until just before the closure announcement.

And their announcement had the gall to state that the game never received the audience they thought it would attract.

Well its hard to get an audience if you don't allow them into the front door.

Of course, there was also a problem of the game being built on Flash.  Which is dying and being superseded by HTML 5.  Obviously Tiny Speck wasted all of its money on the jackass BETA ONCE AGAIN plan instead of getting a start on reconfiguring its code into the new standard.

Well no use crying over the mistakes.

It is a shame.  The game had potential, it had a potential audience.  Which the company allowed to slip away.  A cautionary tale.

Some Time Later...

It's been some time after the release of Guild Wars 2 and updates are trickling into the gaming blog/news community.  Tobold had an interesting post regarding falling play numbers for GW2.

This is not a surprising result to me or many other people.  In today's game environment, new mmorpgs only have a small window of opportunity to make a mark.  GW2 attempts to keep this window open with their buy2play formula.  The company is, in essence, trying to recoup their expenditures as close to the front as possible.  Then glide on store purchases.

So at this point, a fall in the number of hours played are not a worry for GW2.  What would cause worry is a fall in store revenue.  Anet has not released any kind of serious financial health information on the game (except that it sold 2 million copies), so we can't tell if their store is a success or failure.

Since the game marketed itself as casual friendly and no subscription, the creators may have counted on the ebb and flow of players.  They released the game knowing that Blizzard was going to send out a big expansion (Pandaria) in the same time frame.  I feel they knew they would lose players to the biggest game in the industry.  The question is, how much did they plan around that fact?  Will Anet crumple into a heap much in the same way that SWTOR did when it flagged in numbers?

It is still too soon to tell.  As for me, my own hours in the game have flagged.  This is not due to falling interest in the game.  I still enjoy it.  But I find myself engaged in RL activities and I feel that is much healthier than loafing about in an mmorpg.

Also, for the record, I did not buy nor do I plan to buy Mists of Pandaria.  I'm taking a wait and see attitude toward WOW right now, especially since I felt burnt from the Cataclysm expansion.  The expansion I am thinking about buying is, crazy enough, RIFT's Storm Legion.

To Rohan

A few months ago I received an invitation to participate in Turbine's Riders of Rohan closed beta program.  The email didn't make an impression on me since I decided to write it off as a phishing attempt.  To my surprise the legitmacy of the email was confirmed when I logged into Turbine's LOTRO forums and was able to see the Closed Beta discussion site.

I downloaded the program to both my Windows computer and to, my surprise, my Mac computer as well.  The majority of my play time was dedicated to testing the Beta client for the Mac.

Mac Client

As far as performance for the Mac client, I had no major problems.  My Mac is a mid-2007 and it ran the beta client rather well.  My graphic settings ran comfortably on mid to high.  There were a few strange artifacts here and there (such as flickering) but those problems were also shared by the windows client too.  However, I can't vouch for the client staying playable for older macs for the release in October (if they release the mac client with ROR).  Many things could change and that may make the client unusable for older macs.  As of now, it works amazingly well.

Rohan

I don't want to release too many spoilers for the new expansion.  But to just say that right now, the quest stories for Rohan are very interesting.  Every quest left me waiting to learn more as I traveled to each new quest hub.  The graphics are outstanding.  The Turbine art team really went to great lengths to capture the area from Tolkein's books.  The area now has new music scored by the Chance Thomas (returning due to popular demand).  All I can say is that theme used to introduce the player's entrance to Rohan is wonderful.

Game Play and Mounted Combat

Regular game play has not radically changed in this expansion.  Everything is still the same for most classes with some added tweaks.

The real change comes with mounted combat.  Mounted combat is not like the mount system used in WoW's Lich King expansion.  Turbine is really taking chances with this new system and tailoring it to act as closely as possible to real world dynamics.  Each class has mounted attacks that closely mimic their regular combat technique.  But just punching out these attacks are not where the difficulty comes into the picture.  Every player must learn how to maneuver their mount around enemies.  The horse mounts are based on heavy combat destrier models used during the Middle Ages.  Since they are large and muscular, they don't turn on a dime once they are up to full speed.

This is where Turbine has added in a special trait line, in which players can choose between speed or strength or a mix for their mounts.  If you choose a quicker horse, a player will gain speed and manuverability over health.  These horses suited for DPS classes need to keep moving since being unhorsed is an ever present probability.  Believe me, you don't want to be unhorsed in the middle of an NPC warband.  The trait line geared for strength and health are for the tank classes.  But that doesn't mean a player gets to stand still while attacking.  A player needs to move to build up fury for their mounted attacks.

The mounted combat tutorial does give good basics but the majority of the learning curve is spent in regular combat.  Once you learn how to maneuver the mount into and out of combat, it makes this new fighting style very exciting.

Delayed Launch

ROR was originally set to release today, the 5th.  But due to various bugs, the date was pushed back to October 15.  I believe that was a very good decision.  The major reason why this was done was to ensure that mounted combat was as smooth as possible.  There will little issues with mounted animations and manuverability.  I believe Turbine is really close to the end result so an extra month is just what was needed.  There were also little graphic anomalies during quest instances and some broken NPCs.  Which shouldn't be too hard to fix up.

All in all this will be Turbine's most exciting expansion in quite awhile and I'm looking forward to it.

The launch of the good ship GW2

So it has been a little over a week since GW2's launch.  This is counting my extra days because I pre-purchased.

And I must state that I am satisfied with the game.

The problem that irked me the most, the female caster armor, looks as if it has been addressed.  The starting gear is still that atrocious bikini miniskirt lacy underwear number.  But as soon as I was able to level up the tailoring craft, the outfit turned into a harem dance girl outfit.  Still a little squicky but not as bad as the mini skirt.  Later on a quest reward gave me an even better looking shirt with fuller coverage.  The character still looks sexy but just not the stripper-in-search-of-a-venue look.  I'm hoping that as the character levels there will be a consistency in the gear.

The game has been crowded beyond imagination from the first day I logged in.  Most thought that the majority of players were the pre-purchase crowd and things would be smooth for actual launch day.  The auction house was down for the majority of the headstart.  Which most overlooked since the game had not officially launched.  So I know that I was hoping that it would be up for opening day.

It was not.

In fact I think the game developers miscalculated how popular the game would be.  They were happy with the pre-purchase numbers and most likely did not count upon fence sitters (after all you can't hope for hypothetical crowds).  But it turned out that they showed up in greater numbers due to word of mouth.  I think I've spent more time on overflow servers than I have on the server that I chose to play on.  Even though the overflow servers were created to address large crowds and forestall the need to add extra servers (which may go empty a few weeks down the line), this nice solution groaned under the weight of all the players.  I heard of tales of disconnects, crashes and groups being split up due to being sent to different overflow servers.  The auction house has not been up yet.  ArenaNet has not opened up its forums so a true account of player discontent or lack of it is unknown.  However they did bite the bullet and started to add more servers.

Personally I haven't experienced any major problems.  The AH being down is inconvenient but not game breaking.  What would concern me would be actual problems with character attacks.  But unlike SWTOR that suffered from ability delay, GW2 is blessedly free of that problem.  The attacks are just as smooth as the ones in World of Warcraft.  Which is a very genuine achievement and it is practically the only game that has come close to that gold standard.

To conclude, I'm very happy with the game.  I can see myself spending time in its world more than I planned.

Hypothetical Gaming of Reality

This eerie and frightfully prescient little short film was showcased on HuffingtonPost.com today.

Yes we can laugh at the absurdity and shudder at the thought of people sitting zombie like in empty rooms staring into a Facebook inner space.  But the reality is, is that gaming tech developer's are already trying to make this dystopia a reality.

Check out my posts previous posts about gaming reality here and here.

The other shoe...it dropped

Well, well, well.

Just in the time to steal the thunder of GW's last Beta hype and ahead of LOTRO's hype of its new mounted combat reveals, Blizzard announces that Mists of Pandaria is releasing soon.  Real soon.

On September 25, stalwart WoW fans will be able to roll their favorite Panda class.  So the cancellation of their Blizzcon event did portend a nose to the grindstone release schedule as some hypothesized.  I believe this is the first time in many years that Blizzard has released before the Holiday season.

Interesting.  Competition is tight in MMORPGs today and Blizzard won't give up its crown easily.

Read all about it here at Blizzard's site.

Dionysian Bacchanalia

History is a study of circles.  We all know this and yet we travel in the same rut.  We ignore the well worn signs.

Life at the end of Weimar Berlin is now.  Just as Weimar Berlin was the same as any great culture on the verge of collapse from Greek to Roman to Ming to Mayan.  People sense the impending disorder, get nervous and mindless just like wildebeest do when sensing an approaching predator.

Leave your Troubles Outside!

So Life is Disappointing?  Forget it!

In here, life is beautiful!

The Girls are Beautiful!

Even the Orchestra is Beautiful!

At those tipping points, people find release in fantasy.  We create a spot for ourselves in that cave of wealth and death (written about by blogger Elaine Meinel Supkis).  In that cave we play with mirror societies.  Those mirror societies are decadent, they push social norms and explore new expression.  Of course, this all has to do with sexuality because the cave is sex at it's most basic and it is a death too.

In the past, these mirror societies were created by artists.  Audiences with similar desires, but with no talents, would vicariously live through the artists' work.  But at our moment in time, that has been destroyed. Our current art and performance offerings are not allowing us the release we need.  In fact, our current culture is fighting the very need for release.  But this impulse cannot be denied, it must find an outlet.

Virtual reality has allowed the previously untalented spectator to recreate the cabaret, to celebrate the Bacchanalia and push boundaries.  In VR, as the song says, life is beautiful even the girls are beautiful. In VR we explore sexuality and gender roles.  In VR, women can be men and men can be women.  What is beauty or sexy?  In the past, the artists had all the fun while we watched.  Now, in this temporary bubble of order and disorder, anyone can take part in the cabaret.

In most articles on VR, Second Life is most often pushed as the pinnacle of decadence.  But SL is not the only cabaret.  It exists even in World of Warcraft, where many have designated the Inn at Goldshire (on just about every server) as a free zone for Bacchus.

Of course, the developers have no idea what they created or why it makes people drunk.  I believe Prokofy Neva once pointed out on his blog, that the developers are largely conservative.  They are more attracted to tight-ass, fascistic movements such as Singularity.  They have no idea what to do with the "freaks" who settled in their utopia.  Far from playing masters or mistresses of ceremonies, they want to change everyone into their ideas of what VR should be, of what avatars should be or how we should play their games.

If only some enlightened developer would come along and willingly become an avatar of Dionysus.  To delineate for the revelers the sensible division between fantasy and reality.  To stop the nonsense that VR drunkards are currently telling everyone, that their drunken revelries are part of real life.

But I suppose we should be happy with what we have now.  It won't last...when the money runs out and the backlash takes back our new ground.  The merry-go-round goes on....

Cigarettes

I've only been traipsing around the online game scene since 2007.  Four years.  Four long damn years.  I still can't believe it.  And what ever game I've played, I've seen the same outbreaks.  If it isn't IP rights in SL, it's leechers in WAR or Ninjas in WoW.  And everyone is convinced the sky is falling.  Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.

But then I saw this clip of "One Flew Over the Cukoos Nest" on youtube.  And it reminded me of all those game communities I've been in.  They are all asylums.

Perhaps it is time to break free.

Give me my damn cigarettes.