Mitch Wagner recently posted a piece on his blog titled “Why I hardly ever go on Second Life anymore.”
I respect and value Mitch’s perspective a lot. He’s been exploring virtual worlds for years, and it’s clear that he loves their potential. But he’s frustrated by their lack of broad adoption and the multitude of barriers to entry for new users.
Those are sentiments shared by many. But I have a slightly different perspective of the future.
“Oh, you bastard! Campers suck!”
“It’s a valid strategy!” screamed a voice from around the corner.
Those were the last words Jeff heard as red mist seeped into his vision. Headshot.
Found on the region Pathlandia on jokaydiaGRID, right next to the other strange things.
Definitely has something to do with this.
Hopefully we’ll learn more soon.
Many people are exploring virtual worlds such as Second Life as well as the growing constellation of Opensim-based worlds.
Here’s a neat device that can help you communicate between them all.
It’s called RADIONNE.
The region Help Island on ReactionGrid is being developed by Tinsel Silvera.
It contains resources for new avatars including a freebie area, a Gallery of Prims for new builders, and Hypergates to various places to explore.
For today’s two meetings we visited Tinsel’s region and had a great discussion about best practices for helping new users in virtual worlds.
What’s cooler than robots?
Giant robots, of course.
For today’s meeting, we visited FrancoGrid to explore a junkyard complete with a derelict giant robot, a toxic lake, and a submarine.
On January 23rd 2011, I was an invited guest on Paisley Beebe’s “Tonight Live” show in Second Life. Thank you again to everyone on the Tonight Live and Treet.tv team for working so hard to put on such a professional show and the opportunity for me to participate. I had a fun time, and thank you to everyone who attended as well.
I shared some of my thoughts about my time working at Linden Lab, some simple advice for Linden Lab’s new CEO, my new gig with Reaction Grid, the state of education in virtual worlds, and the future of interconnected virtual worlds in general.
I hope I was entertaining. If anyone would like me to expand on anything I said in the interview, please leave a blog comment and I’ll happily reply.
Here’s a recording of my interview.
-John “Pathfinder” Lester
“This is nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a biscuit on the floor over there?”
“Stop looking at it. You’re not going anywhere. I need your body heat right here, right now.”
“I swear it’s a biscuit.”
“It’s an inedible chewed rubber bone that you nevertheless tried to eat yesterday. Focus on being in the blanket.”
“I don’t remember…”
“Focus. On. The. Blanket.”
“Ok, ok…”
“It’s fascinating, really.”
“I’m half asleep. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The fact that we are the same species. I mean, look at our size difference!”
“What?”
“You’re 10 times my size! You’re gargantuan! Yet we are both Canis lupus familiaris. How is such disparity within the same species possible?”
“You think too much. Let’s snuggle some more. My butt is still cold.”
“I wonder if there’s a Wikipedia article about this…”
I’ve been getting into creative writing lately.
When I was in high school, I used to write a lot. Mostly short stories. I really enjoyed it, and apparently I was pretty good at it too. As a junior in high school I won a Brown University Book Award for my “academic excellence combined with clarity in written and spoken expression.”
I’ve always remembered that nice formal affirmation. Despite the fact that I never ended up going to Brown. And that I spent most of my academic focus in high school playing D&D.
But such an affirmation doesn’t mean anything if you don’t actually continue to write. Continue reading
Be Cunning and Full of Tricks 