SL = Video Game

[Paul Hexem]

By almost all definitions of the technology, SL is a video game.

If Second Life isn't a video game, then games like Conan Exiles or Space Engineers or Empyrion or Ark Survival Evolved aren't video games.

Discuss.

[Clover Jinx]

The cake is a lie.

[Coffee Pancake]

Troll faced avatar trolling ... 

[Callum Meriman]

1 hour ago, Gadget Portal said:

By almost all definitions of the technology, SL is a video game.

Just like "Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures".

 

However... In the same breath I will say...

[Janet Voxel]

You’re right. It just sucks at being a video game. It’s good at other things though.

[Coffee Pancake]

I wouldn't call it a game even though it may contain or facilitate games, in the same way I wouldn't call a 3D steam client a game in it's own right.

 

OTOH .. I would love it if gaming in SL was possible, we're so close .. but LL senior staff really need to spend a few days playing WoW and then come back to SL with fresh eyes. We need a few architectural changes, such as authoritative client side physics and an attitude shift that SL can be brought forward, and not just tweaked and maintained.

[Penny Patton]

This may be a troll, but it's also accurate. 

The public definition of what we call a "videogame" is extremely broad. So much so that, in the past, many in the industry believed a more exact term should be coined. "Electronic entertainment" was usually what people went with, but that just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as "videogame". In more recent history, there have been a lot of new forms of videogame becoming popular which many gamers would decry as not actually being videogames. "Walking simulator" is the term they usually throw at them.

Anyway, I agree with Coffee here. I wouldn't call it a game, but we're so close to being able to create some game-like environments and interactions that would make SL a lot more engaging regardless of whether or not you consider it a game.

 The same features that can be used to create a horde of killer goblins you need to slash through can be used to create more interesting forms of breedable pets, or an NPC crowd to make anything from a role-playing sim to a casual hangout feel more immersive. The same features that would allow a sim creator to send you on quests in the fantasy world they constructed could be used to create a much more effective new user orientation, and a variety of in-world tutorials for everything from changing outfits to building your own fantasy world sim.

[Coffee Pancake]

14 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

The same features that would allow a sim creator to send you on quests in the fantasy world they constructed could be used to create a much more effective new user orientation, and a variety of in-world tutorials for everything from changing outfits to building your own fantasy world sim.

This is one point I feel rather strongly about, the blind adherence to the "shared experience" is crippling. I totally understand why it was created; to keep TPV's in line but there are other ways to do that

 

Simple example : It is impossible to show different things to different avatars

You're in a game type setting and have a mission to go collect 5 things. Upon finding and clicking the thing it's typical to denote it has been collected by you in some visual way. This is impossible in SL. If you collect the thing and it vanished or lost it's "click me aura effect", it would have to do that for everyone, negating the possibility that more than one person can be at a different point in the mission. 

The physics engine being server side is another side of this same coin. We all get to see Bob's terrible car glitching though the road. The only person who this really annoys is Bob, screaming in frustration at his useless car.

Combat games have a spam and hope feel to them, there is no room for skill when the lag between your actions and the physics engine can be measured in hundredths of second, worse than playing any other game over VNC.

There needs to be a shift to the importance of the "personal experience".

Edited July 31, 2018 by CoffeeDujour

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Troll faced avatar trolling ... 

Well.

4 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Just like "Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures".

 

However... In the same breath I will say...

I had to undo all that goodwill I built up in the other thread.

2 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

OTOH .. I would love it if gaming in SL was possible, we're so close .. but LL senior staff really need to spend a few days playing WoW and then come back to SL with fresh eyes. We need a few architectural changes, such as authoritative client side physics and an attitude shift that SL can be brought forward, and not just tweaked and maintained.

That's really the point of these discussions. Looking at things that SL could do so much better if they just glanced at other platforms and mediums for a few minutes.

12 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

This may be a troll, but it's also accurate. 

That's the best kind of troll.

12 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

The public definition of what we call a "videogame" is extremely broad. So much so that, in the past, many in the industry believed a more exact term should be coined. "Electronic entertainment" was usually what people went with, but that just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as "videogame". In more recent history, there have been a lot of new forms of videogame becoming popular which many gamers would decry as not actually being videogames. "Walking simulator" is the term they usually throw at them.

Anyway, I agree with Coffee here. I wouldn't call it a game, but we're so close to being able to create some game-like environments and interactions that would make SL a lot more engaging regardless of whether or not you consider it a game.

 The same features that can be used to create a horde of killer goblins you need to slash through can be used to create more interesting forms of breedable pets, or an NPC crowd to make anything from a role-playing sim to a casual hangout feel more immersive. The same features that would allow a sim creator to send you on quests in the fantasy world they constructed could be used to create a much more effective new user orientation, and a variety of in-world tutorials for everything from changing outfits to building your own fantasy world sim.

 

1 minute ago, CoffeeDujour said:

This is one point I feel rather strongly about, the blind adherence to the "shared experience" is crippling. I totally understand why it was created; to keep TPV's in line but there are other ways to do that

It is impossible to show different things to different avatars.

Simple example::It is impossible to show different things to different avatars

You're in a game type setting and have a mission to go collect 5 things. Upon finding and clicking the thing it's typical to denote it has been collected by you in some visual way. This is impossible in SL. If you collect the thing and it vanished or lost it's "click me aura effect", it would have to do that for everyone, negating the possibility that more than one person can be at a different point in the mission. 

The physics engine being server side is another side of this same coin. We all get to see Bob's terrible car glitching though the road. The only person who this really annoys is Bob, screaming in frustration at his useless car.

Combat games have a spam and hope feel to them, there is no room for skill when the lag between your actions and the physics engine can be measured in hundredths of second, worse than playing any other game over VNC.

There needs to be a shift to the importance of the "personal experience".

I would love to see the client and sim share the physics, collisions, and detection load like most FPS games do, so then you'd only have to grapple with desync instead of streaming all that data. Any time someone in SL asks me to join their combat sim or wear a combat meter, I can only laugh at them. 

[Coffee Pancake]

4 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

I would love to see the client and sim share the physics, collisions, and detection load like most FPS games do, so then you'd only have to grapple with desync instead of streaming all that data. Any time someone in SL asks me to join their combat sim or wear a combat meter, I can only laugh at them. 

Even the depressingly "safe" there.com managed to have racing and paintball that actually felt like you were responsible for your actions on screen.

[Penny Patton]

1 minute ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Simple example : It is impossible to show different things to different avatars

Totally agree and I'll even give an example that's more oriented towards a social experience.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to go into a sim, be it a club, a roleplaying sim, or even your very own home, and press a button to momentarily highlight all of the interactive objects? As a sim owner maybe you'd want to make it so not all scripted objects appear as interactive so you might want the ability to flag specific items to be highlighted by this feature so people don't try to sit on the bush that is emitting ambient garden sounds.

It's a simple thing but it would make this one universal element of SL so much more intuitive.

At the same time, you don't want all of the interactive items lighting up every time someone in the room wants to see what they can sit on. Only the person looking for it should see the effect.

[lucagrabacr]

I think it would need principal user objectives or forced limitations by design for the users to be called a video game, so no technically speaking it's not. 

Even the video games you listed have principal user objectives even though they are very open-ended which is to survive.

And even in sandbox mode of say, Space Engineers, there are forced limitations or set of rules imposed upon the users (you need to put certain parts to make your ship behave in certain ways, and there are limitations of what you can make, whereas in Second Life you can make anything).

And most importantly, the creator of those games meant those games to be video games, where Linden Lab explicitly stated that Second Life is not a video game.

[Paul Hexem]

59 minutes ago, lucagrabacr said:

I think it would need principal user objectives or forced limitations by design for the users to be called a video game, so no technically speaking it's not. 

Even the video games you listed have principal user objectives even though they are very open-ended which is to survive.

And even in sandbox mode of say, Space Engineers, there are forced limitations or set of rules imposed upon the users (you need to put certain parts to make your ship behave in certain ways, and there are limitations of what you can make, whereas in Second Life you can make anything).

And most importantly, the creator of those games meant those games to be video games, where Linden Lab explicitly stated that Second Life is not a video game.

SL has far more rules and limitations than Space Engineers, and that's just regarding prims, physics, and simulator size.

[lucagrabacr]

29 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

SL has far more rules and limitations than Space Engineers, and that's just regarding prims, physics, and simulator size.

Some technical limitations yeah, but there are tons of things you can do on SL that you can't do on Space Engineers. I can't pop into someone's server as a furry or an anime carrying longcat-shooting cannon without those servers having those kinda mods, for example.

Edited July 31, 2018 by lucagrabacr
addition

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

It's a pastime, which falls into the broad category of games but has no single goal or set of conditions by which it can be won or lost.

[Paul Hexem]

3 minutes ago, lucagrabacr said:

Some technical limitations yeah, but there are tons of things you can do on SL that you can't do on Space Engineers. I can't pop into someone's server as a furry or an anime carrying longcat-shooting cannon without those servers having those kinda mods, for example.

You can't pop into someone's sim in SL like that unless their rules allow for it, either. Having compatible rules is much the same as having compatible mods. The only real difference is that SL has many more of those compatible sims than SE has compatible servers.

[lucagrabacr]

8 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

You can't pop into someone's sim in SL like that unless their rules allow for it, either. Having compatible rules is much the same as having compatible mods. The only real difference is that SL has many more of those compatible sims than SE has compatible servers.

Which does mean SL is technically more versatile than SE, though SE is more specialized in certain areas as it is a game meant for those things.

Still, by definition SL is not a game as there's no set objective which is the definition of a game. If every 3D application where people have controls over 3D avatars is called a game, then it's a misunderstanding of the term and doesn't make every aforementioned kind of 3D application a game.

Edited July 31, 2018 by lucagrabacr
typo

[Paul Hexem]

12 minutes ago, lucagrabacr said:

Which does mean SL is technically more versatile than SE, though SE is more specialized in certain areas as it is a game meant for those things.

Still, by definition SL is not a game as there's no set objective which is the definition of a game. If every 3D application where people have controls over 3D avatars is called a game, then it's a misunderstanding of the term and doesn't make every aforementioned kind of 3D application a game.

Space Engineers, particularly in Creative mode, has no set objective either. So by that definition, Space Engineers is also not a game. However if we consider the previous post;

28 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

It's a pastime, which falls into the broad category of games but has no single goal or set of conditions by which it can be won or lost.

then by that definition they are still indeed both games, and therefore should be able to learn from each other.

[lucagrabacr]

2 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

Space Engineers, particularly in Creative mode, has no set objective either. So by that definition, Space Engineers is also not a game. However if we consider the previous post;

then by that definition they are still indeed both games, and therefore should be able to learn from each other.

SE as a whole package is a game, however, creative mode is a component of SE's whole package which is a game by definition, and as how it was conceived by its creators.

As for the previous post, not every pastime is a game.

[Paul Hexem]

3 minutes ago, lucagrabacr said:

SE as a whole package is a game, however, creative mode is a component of SE's whole package which is a game by definition, and as how it was conceived by its creators.

As for the previous post, not every pastime is a game.

Wait.

Are you saying SE is a game because it includes a mode that does everything SL does, but SL isn't a game because it does what one mode of a game can do?

[lucagrabacr]

Just now, Gadget Portal said:

Wait.

Are you saying SE is a game because it includes a mode that does everything SL does, but SL isn't a game because it does what one mode of a game can do?

SE is a game because it has set objectives and SL is not because it has no set objectives.

[Paul Hexem]

3 minutes ago, lucagrabacr said:

SE is a game because it has set objectives and SL is not because it has no set objectives.

The number one complaint on the SE forums is that there are no objectives. In fact, the creator described it as purely a building sandbox with a survival mode attached later. So we're back to SE not being a game if we're using that definition.

[lucagrabacr]

7 minutes ago, Gadget Portal said:

The number one complaint on the SE forums is that there are no objectives. In fact, the creator described it as purely a building sandbox with a survival mode attached later. So we're back to SE not being a game if we're using that definition.

Then SE is not a game.

I'd still say it's a game however because the survival mode does exist and you can die in survival mode if you run out of oxygen or get attacked by the planetary creatures or drones which count as an objective or goal to survive by design.

Edited July 31, 2018 by lucagrabacr
typo and addition

[Amanda Crisp]

Second Life is not a game; Real Life is an unmoderated game designed by a madman.

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, lucagrabacr said:

Then SE is not a game.

I'd still say it's a game however because the survival mode does exist and you can die in survival mode if you run out of oxygen or gets attacked by the planetary creatures or drones.

In SL I can attach a HUD to emulate SE's survival mode. That makes them both games, by that definition.

The real fun in this debate though? SL server: 512 meters with build limits well below what the server can handle. SE server: 987,345,946,560 meters (yes, that's the real number, 6.6au) with no build limit until you crash the server. And for a fraction of the cost.