Is Second Life the best metaverse?

[Zalificent Corvinus]

12 hours ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

Neos is a really

A year or three back, I was at an old hangout of mine when one of the more infamous toxic-furs who used to go there, arrived, and started loudly telling everyone that SL would be gone in a year, and they should all go to Neos VR.

 

So I checked it's page on steam.

In Alpha release, and had been for 4 years,.

I read the change logs, for the weekly updates, and for every update "fixing a bug" in some aspect of the gameplay, there were a hand full of updates implementing new import codecs, to enable Neos players to illegally upload propriatory game content file formats ripped from commercial games, usually anime and /or furry themed games.

Reviews I saw of it also made a point of mentioning that if your avatar wasn't a "customised" anime/furry themed game rip, you were looked down at by the other regular players.

So basically "Fursona Copybotters World".

 

Needless to say I didn't bother downloading and installing it.

 

12 hours ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

Big Screen is

A platform I'd never heard of, that's stuck in the "dead VR gimmick" past, is your "closest competitor to SL"?

 

Let's be realistic here, there is NO "metaverse", it's a buzzword used my professional marketing liars, that means almost nothing.

 

[Blush Bravin]

12 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Maybe but I will point out that Tilia has been spun off on its own and could now theoretically offer its services to competing platforms, Also 2-3 years ago it seems to me the ToS was changed in such a way that the Lab could potentially offer MP content to other grids, which I thought was interesting but never really saw where they were going with that up to now. The way I read the change is that in theory at least, both the Lab and Tilia could offer the content and linden $ to Purchase that content to other independent Grids.

Linden Lab and Tilia are still very much related to each other. That's not where the problem lies. Once you go out into the wide business world and try to get other companies to work together, I see a mine field of self-interests and power struggles. I'm not saying it's impossible. I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

[Love Zhaoying]

Define "best"...

[Arielle Popstar]

11 minutes ago, Modulated said:

Not theoretically offer them, it does. That is the whole reason it was spun off, to be a payment service focused on virtual worlds and digital currency, and the metaverse in general, and not singularly focused on SL.

Well I said theoretically because afaik they haven't actually found any new clients yet though its been a bit since I last looked. I would have thought they might have been aggressive in marketing to Opensim, being it is already so similar it would have a reasonable easy sell. So until they actually have a client aside from SL, it is just theory.

[Love Zhaoying]

"Spin-offs" sound like something you'd expect in the Spiderverse, not a Metaverse..

 

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

35 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

A year or three back, I was at an old hangout of mine when one of the more infamous toxic-furs who used to go there, arrived, and started loudly telling everyone that SL would be gone in a year, and they should all go to Neos VR.

 

So I checked it's page on steam.

In Alpha release, and had been for 4 years,.

I read the change logs, for the weekly updates, and for every update "fixing a bug" in some aspect of the gameplay, there were a hand full of updates implementing new import codecs, to enable Neos players to illegally upload propriatory game content file formats ripped from commercial games, usually anime and /or furry themed games.

Reviews I saw of it also made a point of mentioning that if your avatar wasn't a "customised" anime/furry themed game rip, you were looked down at by the other regular players.

So basically "Fursona Copybotters World".

That doesn't totally surprise me.  To be honest, I don't know much about furry culture.  They were all extremely nice to me when I was there, though!  Neos just felt like too much work for me to log in more than a few times.  I mean, I love a good sandbox, but Neos was too technical for me.  When I'm on my PC, I can do a lot of work, and make lots of stuff, but when I'm in a headset I don't feel like working.  The headset makes me feel like relaxing, which brings me to your second point...

39 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

A platform I'd never heard of, that's stuck in the "dead VR gimmick" past, is your "closest competitor to SL"?

IDK why you think that gimmick is dead.  Big Screen is just fun!  Watching movies with friends just hits that sweet spot of relaxing with a headset, and socializing.  No streaming service does it as well as Big Screen, although they do try (Peacock, Prime, Netflix, and others all have their VR apps).  Just give it a try, bounce around a few open rooms.  It's hard to deny the fun, once you experience it.  Try it in SL, too!  A lot of groups have movie nights.  Ask around, find a movie night to drop in on.

42 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Let's be realistic here, there is NO "metaverse", it's a buzzword used my professional marketing liars, that means almost nothing.

LOL, yeah, 'metaverse' is just a term that some marketer decided to lift off Ernest Cline, without thinking too hard about it.  I can't find a link right now, but I remember an article about Zuckerberg meeting with a bunch of obscenely expensive consultants from Boston Consulting.  They pow-wowed all weekend about the metaverse and came up at the end with a proclamaition that, "There is one metaverse... it is THE metaverse, not A metaverse."  Which is the most worthless circle jerk BS I can imagine.  I hope Zuckerberg got a refund, LOL.

We all know what we are talking about here, though.  I talk about VR as a bunch of different grids.  There is the SL grid, the SL beta grid, the OS grid, the VR Chat has a bunch of grids, etc.  If the land is connected, it's a grid.  If the metaverse exists, that might be a grid.  All the grids are using TCP/IP, last I checked, so maybe if TCP/IP is a grid, then there is a metaverse?  I don't think that's what journalists mean when they talk about a metaverse, though.  So I doubt the metaverse exists.  If it does exist, it doesn't matter, so I don't care about it.  I don't think I want my SL avatar to play Dead Souls, anyway.  That would be lame.

[Modulated]

52 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Well I said theoretically because afaik they haven't actually found any new clients yet though its been a bit since I last looked. I would have thought they might have been aggressive in marketing to Opensim, being it is already so similar it would have a reasonable easy sell. So until they actually have a client aside from SL, it is just theory.

From https://venturebeat.com/games/tilia-spins-out-gets-minority-investment-from-jp-morgan-to-do-metaverse-payments/

Quote

Tilia LLC is a money services business and licensed money transmitter in the U.S. that powers virtual economies and provides secure transactions at massive scale. Tilia is partnered with several virtual worlds and metaverses, online games, and NFT marketplaces, including Second Life, Upland and Avatus.

 

[AmeliaJ08]

It's certainly the best virtual world, I don't really know the distinction between that and 'metaverse' though.

It's pretty much the only real virtual world, some old ones still exist like Active Worlds etc but realistically they are dead.

[Love Zhaoying]

I think there is "room for disagreement" whether "metaverse" means:

a) A world like Second Life, or

b) Multiple worlds connected (for example, if Second Life were to connect to "Meta", and "Sansar", etc. etc. )

The reason I think definition "a)" is just fine is, "b)" may not come to pass in our lifetimes. Definition "a)" covers things within Second Life such as "private" spaces, "connected" spaces, etc.  Who says we cannot call that a "metaverse"? 

I like the example of "Ready Player One" - why in "that reality", wouldn't they be allowed to call it a "metaverse" even if there were "only 1 grid"?

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

IDK why you think that gimmick is dead.  Big Screen is just fun! 

It's not the "movie nights" that's the dead gimmick, it's the VR.  It's the 3D equivalent of Betamax VCR's, and Steam powered Horseless Carriages.

 

1 hour ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

Just give it a try, bounce around a few open rooms.  It's hard to deny the fun, once you experience it.  Try it in SL, too!  A lot of groups have movie nights.  Ask around, find a movie night to drop in on.

One of my regular hangouts has movie nights, and I put together a cinema for a club I used to work for.

 

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

49 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I like the example of "Ready Player One"

A lot of people watched "Ready Player Moron" and it's "Doh-Asis", and exclaimed how utterly wonderful it would be.

That always makes me laugh, because in reality, it would be a nightmare. It only works because of "movie magic" specifically "Foley" and "ADR".

 

Remember the opening scenes...

 

80's Haircut Boy is walking along, breaking the 4th wall, while trying to look like a bad cartoon of an extra from an "Aha!" music video, he triggers his voice activated personal Artificial Idiocy Assistant, "Phone, Huge CyberMechanic Shooter Dude", and connects straight away, and they have a nice chat, while Cybermechanic Dude is in the middle of a multi hundred player Free-For-All Deathmatch where getting "killed" wipes out your RL finances and puts you in Corporate Debtors Prison. 

All "really cool", except of course in reality, it wold have gone very differently, and the movie would have had a different ending and been almost 2 hours shorter.

All the fighting is silent, the combat noises in the background are added later as foley effects, the actors do their voice overs in the ADR studio, and that gets over dubbed onto the silent movie with combat sound effects, all the channels carefully edited and balanced so you the viewer can hear them both speaking, AND they can hear each other.

 

*ring ring*

"Who the hell is this, I'm trying not to die here!"

*boom crunch dakka dakka dakka* 

"argh you shot me" "die in the name of Clan Fubar" "Heroes of Troll, ATTACK"

"hey bro it's me, 80's haircut boy"

*whizz foom dakka dakka dakka boom*

"Coalition of NerdForce, spam the frag grenades at the big dude who's winning!"

"Speak up I can't hear a damn word your saying, it better be life or death you calling me now. Oh crap, multiple grena...."

*boom boom boom boom*

"Hello? you still there? it's me 80's haircut boy, I thought we could hang out and talk cool nerdy stuff. Hello?"

 

 

So much for the "Ready Player Moron Doh-Asis", it would be worse than a SL info-Hub full of trolls with voice-spam enabled.

 

[Persephone Emerald]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I think there is "room for disagreement" whether "metaverse" means:

a) A world like Second Life, or

b) Multiple worlds connected (for example, if Second Life were to connect to "Meta", and "Sansar", etc. etc. )

The reason I think definition "a)" is just fine is, "b)" may not come to pass in our lifetimes. Definition "a)" covers things within Second Life such as "private" spaces, "connected" spaces, etc.  Who says we cannot call that a "metaverse"? 

I like the example of "Ready Player One" - why in "that reality", wouldn't they be allowed to call it a "metaverse" even if there were "only 1 grid"?

Let's look at what "meta-verse" literally means.

According to Merriam Webster online : "Meta" means showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category : cleverly self-referential. (Thus, breaking the 4th wall wouldn't seem to be a problem in the definition, though in this instance maybe it refers to those using the virtual platform/world/universe knowing it's virtual?)

"Verse" is of course short for Universe. Why is the concept of a universe used rather than a city, country or world? I think it's because a universe is a much bigger region, a widely encompassing region, if not a universally encompassing one. Thus a metaverse needs to be more than just a game or platform that many people use, but one that is virtually "universal" in use.

Note to @Zalificent Corvinus, I'm specifically discussing the book, not the movie "Ready Player One". I readily admit it's not a classic of science fiction. I think Snow Crash could be considered such, but I think Ready Player One is shallow, poorly written and derivative. It does however capture the imagination of the general public and feels how people tend to imagine a metaverse would be. As much as you might like to complain about the movie, I think it's actually much better than the book, because it benefits from having Steven Spielberg's input, rathan relying solely on the work of a very mediocre writer. It's kind of like the Twilight of virtual reality fiction, imo. Anything by William Gibson would be better as fiction, but might not always translate well into a visual medium.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

Lets go back and review who actually came up with this idea of a metaverse.

Start with Gibson.  He envisioned it to be a place where kids can enter their video games, bodily.  He was so computer illiterate, he wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter.  He had an inkling of the idea, but I don't think he developed it fully.

Stephenson's Metaverse was kind of a parody of Gibson's, but it was a bit more developed.  He himself says that no virtual worlds today are like his metaverse (Stephenson is a jerk, anyway, but that's a rant for another time).  Cline's Metaverse in the book isn't horrible.  I can see somebody like Zuckerberg trying to become James Halliday, but I can't see a reason why the people of the world would want Zuckerberg to become James Halliday.  I don't think any platform is currently either open enough to become a metaverse, or appealing enough to the masses to become the metaverse, as a walled garden, like Google and Apple created with their app stores.

So lets look beyond these sources...

What about 80s movies?  We all know Tron is a metaverse, right?  I would argue the Stay Tuned (1992) was also a metaverse.  Stay Tuned is basically Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, except instead of shrinking, John Ritter, is sucked into a new satellite TV system, to bounce around thousands of cable channels to rescue his family, while playing Running Man style life-or-death games (it's a hilarious, very underrated film).  People got sucked into TVs constantly in the 80s.  Remember Max Headroom?  Pleasantville?  Last Action Hero?  Lawnmower Man?  Videodrome, kinda?  Almost every kids cartoon had characters get sucked into a TV at least once.  Back in the 70s, they had Mike TV in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  OK, the TV shrank him, but he was still bodily taken in by the medium, and changed by it.

So this idea of being sucked into our favorite medium is a pretty old idea, from TV and film.  It's probably a more ancient idea, going back to the concepts of metamorphosis and apotheosis.  Everybody wants to be part of their favorite stories and songs, right?  We all want other people to remember us in the stories after we are gone.  I'll leave it to the theologians to figure out why we want this, and just take it as a given that we do.

So maybe, instead of arguing over which novel inspires the metaverse... maybe we should be asking what movie or TV show inspires it?

Also, maybe it would be useful to look back at the first online virtual world.  My first virtual world was Active Worlds, but before that there was Gopher VR.  It was first written by Mark McCall (some of you may remember them as Pixeleen Mistrial, from the Alphaville Herald).  The wiki sources now say it came out in 1995, but I clearly remember being surprised at sources that once said it came out in 1992, a year before the world wide web.  Either way, the world wide web and the first virtual world came about at roughly the same time, within a year or two of each other.  Mark was very into depicting relationships between objects and things, and he was especially into non-euclidean space.  Non-euclidean basically means portals, like in the video game Portal.  I don't think Gopher VR had portals, but his Croquet project definitely did.  I know from speaking to Mark that he was influenced by Gibson.  He would casually quote Gibson chapter and verse.  So maybe Gibson's Neuromancer is more influential than we thought.

We don't have to be influenced by Gibson.  I'm just saying that Gibson is what inspired the creation of the first virtual world.  If Mark had access to modern computing power, he may have been more inspired by Snow Crash, or he may have been more inspired by Tron.  There's no way to know.

If I was making a virtual world today, I think I would try to create something like Stay Tuned.  I would want everybody to be able to make as many grids as they want, like they can make as many TV shows as they want, and just make a minimum viable product type protocol to navigate between them.

Then, of course, I'd have to hire Jeffrey Jones to sell it door to door, as my demonic salesman, just like in the movie!  LOL

[Love Zhaoying]

I do recall some people declaring quite vociferously that "Second Life can't be a metaverse, a metaverse is only if you connected multiple XXX's." 

(I disagree, is my point.)

 

[Persephone Emerald]

@Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia,

I think science fiction inspires the people who create virtual realities. The more educated and older they are, the more likely they are to have been inspired by books. The people who just play the games or on the platforms might be more inspired by TV and movies.

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I do recall some people declaring quite vociferously that "Second Life can't be a metaverse, a metaverse is only if you connected multiple XXX's." 

(I disagree, is my point.)

I agree that a metaverse doesn't have to be connected to multiple platforms, though multiple simulations or worlds does seem to favor the *universe* concept. Ready Player One literally used the concept of a universe by requiring players to fly in spaceships to different virtual worlds.  Since Stephenson first used the term in Snow Crash and his virtual world was more like one giant city with a main street encircling one virtual planet, I don't think we have to include interconnected platforms in the definition of a metaverse, however.

[Lindal Kidd]

19 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

Think a thousand unique SLs. All connected.

I just quoted Katherine so I could say how much I love her new (new to me, anyway) forum badge! So CUTE!!!

[Love Zhaoying]

44 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I just quoted Katherine so I could say how much I love her new (new to me, anyway) forum badge! So CUTE!!!

IKR? I just want to eat her up!

 

[VenKellie]

to all those praising opensim. i guess you praise theift as well since most of the content in opensim are stolen stuff from SL including belliseria homes i have found, thats why i left OS and uninstalled the OS version of firestorm

Edited March 28 by VenKellie

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

48 minutes ago, VenKellie said:

to all those praising opensim. i guess you praise theift as well since most of the content in opensim are stolen stuff from SL including belliseria homes i have found, thats why i left OS and uninstalled the OS version of firestorm

If that was true, Open Sim would have a LOT more content!  Do you think SL is free of piracy?  LOL, you need to get out more.

3 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

@Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia,

I think science fiction inspires the people who create virtual realities. The more educated and older they are, the more likely they are to have been inspired by books. The people who just play the games or on the platforms might be more inspired by TV and movies.

That's a bit of medium snobbery, but I can't disagree.  Rosedale and Notch aren't citing Max Headroom when they talk about what inspired them.

Actually, now that I think about it more... of the serious, professional game developers I've known, the ones big enough to give keynotes at big conventions and things like that... the one thing they have in common is that they were all theater tech nerds.  Building theater sets for plays and changing them out seamlessly, to create an experience IRL is good training to make them with computers.  Or maybe it was all the sneaking around in the dark while wearing all black made them the super ninjas they are today, LOL

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

On 3/27/2024 at 6:28 AM, Aristocrazia said:

the best metaverse for both graphics and open sim interaction in Blake Sea.

That's a highly specific quantifier.

Given that Blake Sea is a set of regions in SL, and is specific to SL, then SL is of course the best option for going to Blake Sea.

 

There are several, if not most, MMOs that could easily be better at doing a 'metaverse' than SL does if they wanted to be that. This was very briefly semi-revealed to the world when EverQuest Next was in production a decade ago and had a side project that was basically a metaverse based on EQNext's technology. In the brief time it was around, it was just 'better' in terms of the experience of being in there. More modern UI controls, smoother graphics, etc. Build tools were limited - but so were SLs back then.

If you took the tech used to build one of today's MMOs, be it an old but updated one World of Warcraft, or a new one like New World - and bolted on build and full avatar design tools, you could rapidly outpace SL's abilities. There'd probably be massive security flaws for the first few years though as the platform would have been designed for something very different. But with some effort you could get there.

Newer Metaverses have all seemed to look at things from "ignore uses, instead what is the business use case" or "hey, lets be like LL and make a sandbox again as some kind of homage to Burning Man". Both lessons SL has already learned and moved on from. But this is why projects like Meta's didn't go as far as they should have. When all the Metaverse hype was around a few years ago, for some odd reason none of those companies looked over at SL's history to figure out what would or would not work BEFORE they three millions of dollars at already tried and failed ideas.

 

[animats]

Things are picking up in metaverse land. Now that the NFT clown car has crashed, and Meta/Horizon has peaked, the people who were quietly plugging along are starting to show things.

There's M2. This is based on the Improbable back end, and, I think, Unity graphics. It's a real metaverse, in that multiple users can create in the same space. It exists as a tech demo, and you can request a free account. Requires a Google or, I think, Facebook account to identify you. Philip Rosedale is on M2's board. M2/Improbable continues to lose money, yet continues to attract venture capital.

Disney recently put US$1.5 billion into Epic's metaverse project. It's not clear yet what that means. It will involve a large number of Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm/Pixar licensed characters.

Readyverse has the rights to Ready Player One and is making something based on that. They have a demo video of what looks like Aech's Garage from Sansar and a MMO which supposedly looks like the driving game in Ready Player One. You can request a test account.

VRChat continues to grow, slowly but steadily. 30,748 users on line right now. They're still a little behind Second Life, but may pass us in the next year.

Roblox is still losing money, but has a lot of it left, and has a huge user base, average age still stuck around age 14 or so.

So those are some of the major players.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

3 hours ago, animats said:

Disney recently put US$1.5 billion into Epic's metaverse project. It's not clear yet what that means.

Oh, I do:

It''l be EPIC (the tax write-off, that is).

Edited March 29 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[animats]

(Black hole) Actually, that was Meta.

I cannot imagine how Meta spent over US$36 billion on their metaverse and produced so little.

When LL made a big mistake, they produced Sansar, which looked good and worked OK. It just wasn't something anybody wanted.

I'm looking forward to seeing how LL markets SL on mobile. Apparently they can make it work technically, but onboarding has to be drastically simplified and the user's first hour has to be a lot better, or it's going to be a niche thing for existing SL users who want to log in on the go.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Apparently they can make it work technically,

I also am optimistic! I keep hoping they actually some basic things like wearing / using flexi.  Got an old outfit with flexi hair? Too bad, it sticks straight up!

But I do believe Mobile can be a possible path to the future, so long as onboarding / outfits / scripting / basic building are added at SOME point!

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

13 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I readily admit it's not a classic of science fiction.

Understatement of the year.

 

13 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I think Snow Crash could be considered such

Hahahaha, NO.

It's just a sad 90's Post-Gibsonesque School of Manic Depressive Bad SciFi piece of trash, that stole a concept from a short story by a better author, done years earlier., I have a copy someplace, but cant remember who it was by, Harry Harrison maybe, about a maintenance IT tech  who goes round to peoples apartments to top up the liquid food tanks, empty the body waste tanks, and make sure the tech is working, for the "Immersion VR" addicts who never unplug.

 

It amuses me when Metacrap-Does-Not-And-Will-Not-Exist-iverse fanatics claim that "obviously everyone in SL is here because they read SnowCrap", because most have never even heard of it, let alone read it.

 

13 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

As much as you might like to complain about the movie, I think it's actually much better than the book

I don't complain about the movie, and  the movie is actually decent AS ENTERTAINMENT. but it's not an advert for the MetaCrap- Will-Not-Exist-Iverse. The world of the Doh-Asis is a literal nightmare.

Play a computer combat game, and if you don't win, you lose all your money and possessions in RL, get arrested by private police, taken to a slave labour camp and kiss your life goodbye.

 

And then you hear idiots going "Oh the Doh-Asis, wouldn't it be cool to be able to switch badly modelled 80's haircuts at will just by talking to your Artificial Idiocy assistant...", and I'm wondering if we even watched the same movie.

 

13 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Anything by William Gibson would be better as fiction, but might not always translate well into a visual medium.

I'd rather see movies by Ian Banks that by Gibson. Decent storytelling, sometimes the main characters live past the end of the book, and with a touch of ironic humour that Gibson never had.

An AI Warship called the ROU (Rapid Offensive Unit) "Killing Time". Described by a girl as "looking like a sex toy" to which a Droid replies "appropriate, as when fully armed it can f**k an entire star system..."

An Alien race so unpleasant they were called an "Affront to Civilisation" by a diplomat, and then when they found out what "affront" meant, liked it so much they officially changed the name of their species to "The Affront".

Classic as opposed to merely depressing.

 

Hell, I'd rather read E.E. "Doc" Smith than Gibson, and his stuff is 1930's and socially unaware "Murican Patriarchy" and extremely dated.