@Batters, we clearly hung out in different circles. I have encountered some amazing simulations built by educators over the years (Virtual Harlem, Virtual Theorists' Project, WW I Poetry site, Rezzable's Egyptian sim, & Globe Theater, off the top of my pointy head) with some good building and scripting skills. Granted, their content did not have game-style graphics or engines, but what does in SL? My last group from Spring 2013 really liked the House of Usher simulation we used, but they had two bits of advice: --reduce lag --make it *less* like a game. We'd added a combat system and some real perils. The students were more interested in the interactive-story aspect and solving puzzles. My sample-size is one class for that. Changing priorities and lack of support at my university make it unlikely I'll use SL or OpenSim in the near future, but I have run six sections through the world since January 2007. I suspect that cost accounts partly for Minecraft's success at the K-12 level, but also the lack of SL's reputation for adult content. That's one thing the new CEO can't change. Reducing tier and increasing outreach to educators would heal some old wounds and might lead to new interest. If game-style graphics were the determinant, Minecraft would not have enjoyed the success it has had.

@D / Hitomi: "Correlation does not imply causation" If Hamlet could sway trends negatively, his earlier promotion of SL would have killed it off and OpenSim would be the biggest thing since good beer again came to US shores. Once we get a VR rig light enough to wear without looking like Doctor Horrible, it will a neat tool at the right price point. Whether it is the next iPhone remains to be seen. Steve Jobs knew what he was doing. I just saw a student fall down flat while trying to walk and text. Others drop their phones into the toilet while "multitasking" (thank God I have not seen that). We are addicted. Will VR do that to enough of us to be really, really big?? Looking forward to Hamlet's coverage.

To the newcomer, it's all confusing. I tried explaining meshes to a non-SLer and he said "they are ALL mesh, just different ones." LL needs something like branding our older selves "Avatar 1.0" and "2.0" since, as I understand it, my gamer-geek friend is correct. We're all mesh.

"But what happened to his avatar with the spiky hair and the Rolling Stone T-shirt and most of all the rainbow codpiece?" Boy, you done up and stole my line. I was going to ask that very question. I missed VWBPE this year. Would have been worth a visit to see Phil 2.0. PS: That was a Rocky Horror T-shirt.

Correction, via http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Primitar By Alpha SL had the mesh-based avatars we all know. I'm guessing the avatars Philip and Emily show off will only improve by the time we get to an open Beta test. For now, it's great to follow Sullivan's Law and keep function before form. LL should have done that and made an interface that non-geeks could master fast. It *seems* that High Fidelity takes that approach.

When SL was in alpha, LL had The Primitar. I suggest that's where Hi-Fi is now. Give it time. I'm impressed by this technology (my already stated social concerns aside).

If paper-and-dice gaming counts, I'm drawn to games that don't have rigid classes but clusters of skills and a backstory that fleshes out the characters. That said, I tend to RP one of two types and carried this over to my one RP experience in SL was well: --A fast-talking scoundrel who ends up doing good things. Usually a criminal and a fop who can be murderous to enemies (think, Mafioso) but loyal to the point of silliness for real friends and family. --A badass pilot or warrior, not of the noble type but the Han-Solo (who shot first) sort. Usually with some "baggage" from the past.

Bukkake Bliss endures. How the mighty have fallen, to #39. If only all this shite were enough to pay the bills, then the clever creatives could build a utopia! We need to figure out a better way to milk the pervs and little bunny foo-foos so we can have what we want. Ideas?

@Metacam,what you wrote really worries me: "So if you live in a slum, or a third world country with nothing around. Not everyone has the luxury to live in "meatspace" and enjoy it." If it's that bad, I'd say "find some friends and change the world with an AK-47, if you can't do it in your tinpot-dictator nation at the ballot box." Surrendering to a rotten dominant paradigm is not reason to have a Metaverse. But having some fun? Running simulations? Enjoying a bit of mindless escape, as at the cinema? That's fine. To replace a horrid reality? No thank you, Cypher. Your Metaverse becomes just another version of Meth or Crack at that point.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that building a Metaverse is an awful idea? I'd prefer a future where we spend more time in the desert of the real. Maybe with more attention, we'd have more real places worth caring about again. Maybe we could build a garden of the real.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that building a Metaverse is an awful idea? I'd prefer a future where we spend more time in the desert of the real. Maybe with more attention, we'd have more real places worth caring about again. Maybe we could build a garden of the real.

Worth $9.99 for a month's testing. After that, it needs to deliver. I'll give it a go at that price.

@Pussycat, I was not trying to push your button. My own Middle-Eastern grandparents lost their home of many years and were paid a pittance by our city, when the fabled "Downtown Expressway" went through. The question here is this: Internet 1.0 and 2.0 have not lifted all boats, though it would be hard to imagine life now without them. So what about Internet 3.0? How can we make the next generation of tools benefit everyone, not just those wealthy enough to have full access to good hardware, software, and network infrastructure?

Arcadia, William Shatner invented everything seen in Star Trek. Including Styrofoam rocks. Just thinking, in response to your post, seriously, how our smart phones are primitive tricorders. Not as cool-seeming as our communicator-style flip-phones, but oh so much more capable.

General Motors in 1939 said we'd have 100mph superhighways elevated above cities where (roll the heroic music from the Futurama display at the NYC World's Fair) "rights of way have been rerouted to displace slums and outmoded business areas." Gumdrop-shaped cars designed by Norman Bel Geddes would travel in specific lanes and gridlock would be kept in check by radio transponders in each vehicle. Instead we Americans built 70mph highways that are now falling apart, bulldozed lots of city real-estate in the 50s-70s for urban expressways (also falling apart) and drive, like Mad Max until we get stuck in gridlock, to suburban places (soon to fall apart) that James Howard Kunstler calls a "cartoon landscape" even as we set the planetary climate-knob to "parbroil." Technology has a long tail and it's an alligator tail that can slap us silly. The visionaries' ideas often get twisted into a Bizarro-World version of what they intended. But this time, by God and Hiro Protagonist, someone will build that Metaverse where, on the other side of the scuba-mask, we can all be warrior-heroes. And I want Neal Stephenson's beard, whether or not he'll loan it to me.

The violence of FPS games makes me want to vomit. Let's hope VR tech can be used for other sorts of games and we can address any motion-sickness issues. One wonders if a wrist-band or similar might reduce the effects?

Running on a MacBook Pro...right on.

Tsk Tsk, Adeon. You did not include William S. Burroughs. My Style? Vaguely creepy Beat in dapper clothing with a dash of Steampunk.

Death of the Rift? I doubt it. But I don't fear FB. I use FB for the usual: a shout-out to old friends and a glimpse of the family who live far away. I figure Google is doing as much as FB with my personal data; my "block caller" and spam boxes take care of the annoyances. That said, I just cannot imagine how this marriage of FB and Rift makes any sense. FB can't be hoping to lure back Millennials with the Occulus Scuba-Mask; they are already leaving FB because Grammie and Gramps are there with the baby photos and chain-prayer requests. Maybe Zuckerberg is thinking of a new platform entirely with VR, since he, more than any of us, knows the trajectory of FB once the Millennial users begin to defect to other platforms.

@Pussycat, the Gorean-child-furry-sexbots did not drive away most educational or business users, at least in my experience. Educators were beginning to scale back after the 2008 Crash, and the Lindens' teeth-kicking of October 2010 accelerated the exodus when our costs for tier suddenly doubled. I suspect the bloom would be off the rose in any case, even with the Great Recession and higher tiers. There was not enough Return on Investment. Running a sim is not trivial work, so many campuses had to designate a staff member to do this, or an educator took this on and got limited credit in annual evaluations for something the administration could not understand as integral to education (or saw as mostly the realm of Gorean-child-furry-sexbot users). Unless one had a cadre of faculty with projects that justified a 3D immersive environment, it was not worthwhile having a sim at all. Many faculty shared land or rented a private plot, but these pet projects rarely got any institutional support. As for business, it had a similar trajectory. I once gave a person in marketing an orientation to SL. She spent a few months interviewing SL merchants, focusing on the fashion industry as it existed in-world in 2007-8. She did research of RL brands such as American Apparel setting up shop then. Her conclusion: what happens in SL will stay in SL. The ROI for RL brands was just not there in virtual worlds, she concluded. She also predicted the exodus we saw and even used the Gartner "Hype Cycle" to predict a crash ahead for SL. So LL may be correct in marketing to the beach-blanket-bimbo, I mean bingo, crowd. As noted by you and others, there are better ways to do that sort of markeeting, but I don't give a rip. The utopian promise of this platform is LONG gone, unless one is a Gorean-child-furry-sexbot. Maybe FB buying up Occulus will change that. Now I can look at the grandkids in 3D. Brave new world, that.

I chuckled when I saw Boo-boo, Foo-foo, and Chip Bimbo on the side of the NWN site. It's rather like a slightly better rendered version of the IMVU adverts, with the crappy vampiric avatars, that otherwise appear. If LL really wants sex to sell their signature product, they need to do a better job. Sexually charged ads are subtle (consider how effectively print ads about travel destinations pull this off). The Linden campaign (IMH academic O) hits two demographics: 1) marketing to bored or insecure tweens who want to play at being adult. 2) marketing to the cheeto-hoarding fatso in the basement, scratching his neckbeard and hoping the pixel-babe in the thong will fill that gaping emptiness that has reduced him to a Beckett-style absurdity.

Having been accused here at NWN of being an SL Deathwatcher, I could not resist pointing this positive news out to Hamlet and his readers. Is it a short-term trend? A "dead cat bounce"? The Ebbe effect? Market "finding bottom"? First-world problems easing? Actually, that last one probably can be discounted, given the time frame. We should have seen growth a bit earlier, if SL's fate tracks the rest of the economy. We'll find out and I may be proven wrong that SL can't grow again given the platform's limitations; @Vanadis, Volvo is in the midst of *completely* redesigning their offerings, something LL can't manage. LL is still stuck with the cybernetic equivalent of a 240 chassis and drive-train but now SL has a heads-up display and new sheet metal.

Eastgate Systems worked so well with the academic customers who developed their own IP using the StorySpace tool set. It's a pre-Internet hypertext technology, for those who have not tried it. What a shame that a tool like Versu was in Linden Lab's, not Eastgate's hands. It might have re-ignited the mostly dormant market for literary hypertext, a technology that lacked the interactivity that Versu provides. LL has a proven track record of doing exactly the right thing to alienate academic customers, who have long memories since their annual evals might be tied to these projects.

Very impressive. Keep in mind that when Mr. Rosedale reached out really nicely to educators in 2010, it was mere months before our teeth were kicked by the Lab when tier discounts ended in the midst of a fiscal and academic year: http://iggyo.blogspot.com/2010/08/philip-rosedale-at-virtual-worlds.html I still don't know what was on his mind or whether he fought the Board on the catastrophic decision. There are fences to be mended for sure and with more than educators and nonprofits. I've no plans to teach in the next 3 years with SL but there are others still using the platform who would welcome some encouraging words from the new CEO. To his credit, he has brought encouraging words for many SL residents. Let's hope for some bold "road maps" for the TOS and tier to regain the trust of creatives and investors in this platform.

Maybe 3D printers are at the mid-1970s PC-hobbyist stage. Someone will bring out the Apple II and IBM PC for 3D printing, too. Here's an analogy, since I see this technology as a godsend to those who build scale models. Among my other forms of geekiness, I build WWII armor and WWII and some modern aircraft. After several years of humming and hawing, I bought an airbrush. It changed my builds by taking them to a new level of detail. In fact, it is my "preternatural attention to detail" as a builder that made me take the leap to air-brushing. It took a while for the price point for a really good airbrush to match my need. I see that for a 3D printer. I'd consider one if 1) I could get plans for kit parts and 2) the price were under $500 to print in plastic.