This is probably the best machinima I’ve seen from SL! It’s a great promo for SL!

I disagree with Wagner James Au of New World Notes, that this video would be something to get a gamer to try out SL. I am a gamer. I am also a gamer that had a hard time getting into SL back in 2005. It took me at least 6 months to figure out the place and try to build things. Which I enjoyed immensely! I learned so much about 3d graphics and I still want to learn more and more.

I think this other video by the same people is a better intro for a gamer to SL. Since most games are about the story.

Still you won’t find a game play excerpt in there. (Combat games in SL are rather clunky. It’s more for the socializing and role-play than game play.)

I finally watched the documentary on gamers called, Second Skin. I had heard about this film through some blogs on virtual worlds related to Second Life. Since I haven’t been to a film festival in over 15 yrs, I knew I wasn’t going to see this till it hit DVD or cable. Luckily Hulu is showing the movie free until Aug. 13.

I used to be a serious MMO gamer.  I gradually reduced my own game play to that of a casual gamer now.  I can relate to a few of the people profiled or at least remember meeting people online that were similar. I suppose the overall direction that this film does is make it seem that anyone playing any MMO is an addict. Yes, there was an extremely brief positive note about a person playing Second Life and how it was a positive experience for him to over come his disability. Maybe that was just thrown in there to reduce the negativity of the entire film.

Is it a bad film? No, it does show the average age group of gamers and different aspects of their own experience playing an MMO. The main thing people must keep in mind it does not show the average gamer. Instead it shows mainly stereotypes of gamers. Stereotypes always have some truth in them, but they are still stereotypes and do not go for all people.

I think the most irksome part of this film for me was having the mother of a mentally disturbed person that committed suicide over EverQuest. She is apparently still in denial of her son’s fragile mental state and still blaming EQ for his death. It was a very tragic out come for her and her son. I am not minimizing that at all. But he needed mental help in a bad way which seems to have been dismissed by either him or his mother. I am only going by what was said in the movie and some old news articles. It just seems that since the therapist didn’t tell her that yes, the video game was a problem which is what she wanted to hear, that the therapist was dismissed entirely. The other thing the movie did was to basically place her as the “expert” on gaming addiction. Or in her view that all gamers are addicts. Neither of which is true.

Also the gamers that they show in this movie are only MMORPG gamers. They do not go into gamers on game consoles. Believe me there are probably just as many gaming addicts on those consoles as on a MMO. Call of Duty:WAW has levels that you have to grind up to. Each level will unlock more equipment for the player. Sounds familiar to a MMO player. So there you go, people are playing that just as much, but not for years on end like an MMO. Why? Simple, in an MMO you build relationships up with other people that you play with. On something like CoD:WAW, well…..it’s a little hard to build up a relationship with guys that just trash talk in the mic.  Yeah, the older players seem to try to get people to do actually strategy but good luck with that. Although people do have Clans (aka guilds) for CoD now, which could help build up relationships and tactical play.  (One note, I’ve only watched my husband play the game. I’ve only played that in Co-Op with him or the solo campaign. ) So for MMO players you do get a bit more interaction with other players which can further draw people into the game. There is simply more time to communicate with each other.

So to sum it up, even though there is a rather negative slant to this film, I would still recommend this to people to watch. Especially if you’ve played any MMO. You’ll most likely say to yourself, “Hey, I know someone like that!” or “That’s hitting too close to home”.  Just prepare yourself mentally if you are a MMO gamer for basically the usually negative stereotypes. Then you’ll be happy to see it isn’t that bad except for that mother. Ugh…

Edit Note: Fancast has a very good interview with the director of Second Skin.

If you missed the ceremony this morning or live in another country. I encourage you to watch Obama’s Inaugural Speech on CNN.

I haven’t bothered to express my opinion on this since I believe that just about every single gamer out there is against it. I’m strongly against it. Since the first person sold their EQ account on Ebay, I’ve been against it.

Of course in EQ when someone was dumb enough to buy and account you could spot the ebayed account right away. They would usually be someone of a high level that had no idea of how to play their class. It was sad since they would usually get their group wiped out somewhere. Then they were just plain blacklisted so it ended up being a waste of money for the person. Later on people would simply buy a higher level character of the same class they were playing.

In WoW it’s so common placed that players are buying gold just to buy better gear, that it’s just about unstoppable. I do appreciate Blizzards strong stance against gold selling and all the efforts they are going through to stop it. I had a guildie that admitted to buying gold for better gear the year before Burning Crusade came out. Then that expansion came out and all the gear he bought was obsolete. Rather funny really. But sad for the people that actually raided for the gear.

Ok back to the point, gold sellers. I had a random, out the blue gold seller message me on one of my IM programs I use. It was very strange and disturbing. I asked how he got my name. He claimed to have found it on a game forum. I only had it up on one game forum, a forum that I created for a guild I was in. Plus it was a game that you can not easily sell gold on. So I tell this guy that I don’t buy gold and no longer played the game. He asked me to basically spam my friends with his website. Needless to say I just blocked him at that point.

So it’s not bad enough that gold farmers ruin the games we play by hording all the monsters or camping spawns. Now we have to get spammed on our IM programs we used! I mean it was bad enough to have the constant spamming of gold sellers in WoW but this?

And here is why I finally wrote my opinion on gold sellers. I recently did a Google search of my alias name on Second Life and for this blog and found something that’s just very irritating. Some gold seller has posted my entire review for LoTRO, everything including all the comments for it! Didn’t bother to do a simple link back to the blog, but they did credit me for writing it. Which makes it look like I wrote the review for this asshat! View it here in all it’s glory.

Yeah, I’m surprised and shocked, but mainly I’m very very disgusted. It’s a straight rip off. I don’t even understand the continued popularity of that review since it’s a year old and was from closed beta. What I really don’t understand is why this person didn’t just do a link instead of making it look like I wrote this for them.

You need to “register” to post a comment on their gold selling blog. I rather not hang out my IP address for this jerk. I’m just pissed.

*Special Note* – I want to make a special distinction between gold sellers/farmer and RMT (Real Money Trading). When a game like Entropia Universe or Second Life has RMT built into the economy then any game money that’s being sold is not against their rules. Nor is it ruining the game for other people. Sony did give up the fight against gold sellers and put in a RTM market system for EQ 2, which basically blows away outside gold sellers since a player can sell directly to another player with their system. I am not against RMT that a game has in place. Actually with Second Life, people are able to pay their monthly subscription off by selling their game money.

Let me first say, yes it’s been a long time since I posted anything. I just haven’t felt like writing much of late. Plus I was trying to refrain from joining in all the rants against Linden Lab over the past few months. That’s sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to having ready made topic to write about. Which is why I’ve tried not to. I do have a few other topics floating in my head finally to post about.

First is about Improv Everywhere. I’ve been following their blog of late after first hearing about them from Geek Gestalt. Very creative group of people! There are more groups around the world now. I believe it all started in New York City. The New York group has some great videos on YouTube. My favorite from NYC group is this one:

It’s just so harmless and fun! I did have to wonder why the DC group had problems with their Ipod “silent” dance. They weren’t silent, from the horrible video they had they were noisy. Still I wouldn’t think that would be a cause to be arrested. Although there is a difference between the DC group and NYC group. The NYC group did state plainly that if you are asked to leave to just leave. Don’t fight it just go. The DC group made it into some weird political statement instead. Hey I agree with them, but it wrecks the process of the improv.

Although I love seeing the videos of the various groups, I have to say some of the taping is so bad that you can’t hear or see what is going on. Yet most of the taping in NYC was pretty good. I wonder how they did their taping without looking obvious about it.

Enjoy their work or join or start a group. They have more information on that on their website.

I found this very funny photoshop tutorial series on photography blog, Photojojo. Photojojo is something to check out in itself for photography and photoshop tips. This photoshop tutorial series comes from a comedy internet tv site called, My Damn Channel. If you’re getting bored with regular tv since the writer’s strike started, check out this site for some comic relief. Some very funny stuff in there but there is also a lot of just plain silly stuff too.

What made this particular episode of You Suck at Photoshop really funny was that his eBay post was really on eBay for one day. The auction started off with a starting bid of $0.99 and went up to $750 by the time it was canceled. To see some of the Q&A comments from eBay you’ll have to go to the Digg story at the bottom. Those were equally entertaining as the video was! I’m not sure if there will be more episodes in this series, but I am hoping for more!

Oh yeah, as for the actual “photoshop tutorial” part of the videos, you can actually learn something from them if you already have some familiarity with photoshop. Right before episode 4 came out I had just started getting my feet wet with the pen tool and paths. Masks I haven’t tried yet. He did give some small tips on how to edit your pen paths.

This episode brought to you again by Donnie, is about paths and masks. Have fun and learn a thing or two.

digg story

I wrote a couple of posts about this when it first came out in May, that Linden Labs was going to put in age verification. I wasn’t happy with the way they were going to implement or the fact they needed to clean up their own mess with the whole, no credit card needed thing. (That just opened the door for anyone to go on the Main Grid were it was adult only. Yet on the Teen Grid you still need credit card info. *boogle*)
Ok, /rant off.

Last week it was announced that Linden Labs has put age verification into beta testing. There are some glitches in the system though. Massively has been publishing some very good articles on the subject, this one has some very good info in it. I would have to say after reading that article, Linden Labs should scrap this age verification system and go back to the drawing board. Maybe put back the old credit card verification system they once had and charge the one time fee of $9.95 again. Basically, if an under age person really wants to get on the Main Grid in SL, all they ever have to do is pose as one of their parents. So no system will ever be full proof.

Edit: 12/9/07 – Linden Labs has their latest blog post to answer resident questions. They are answering most of the questions we all had back in May but were not answered at the time. Probably because they didn’t know the answer then. Massive has another insightful post today. It’s a rather funny post on how many people are using dead celebrities and even live ones to verify with.

I was very excited a month ago when I saw this post on Voodoo Extreme. But I was cautiously happy, since there was nothing official on it yet from Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls site. Well I just found this post on QJ.Net. (I’m a month late seeing that post though.)

I’ve seen many blogs buzzing about this since Voodoo Extreme first posted. Still there was nothing concrete yet. QJ.Net is the closest thing to concrete so far. Massively had several articles with different speculations on it.

I’m still worried that Elder Scrolls Online will be yet another WoW knockoff. I would like to see something new or improved in the way of MMORPGS. There are several things about the Elder Scrolls series that I really like. One main thing that I noticed right off with Oblivion, was the quests. They are not straight forward, some are even hidden quests. Even the Thieves and Assassin Guilds were hidden. The second thing was all the mods available to tweak the game itself. Plus you can even make you’re own mods for the game.

Ok, the quests are somewhat easy to incorporate into a MMO, although the guy you were just sent out to murder will be alive again for the next person. But allowing for the flexibility of all the mods will not be the same. If they do allow player made content into the game like Ryzom did, then it’d have to be restricted somehow. Ryzom has their player made items only working inside the player made dungeon. There is also a rating system for player made dungeons so if they player abuses other players inside their dungeon they can get reported or have a low rating.

Now Ryzom added this feature to their already established game. There’s a quote from one of the developers of WoW that I can’t find right now (I read it almost a year ago.), where he said something that made a lot of sense about incorporating player-created content into an MMO, it has to be done from the very beginning and not added on. I have never played Ryzom so I don’t know how the player made dungeons are or how unincorporated to their game it feels.

So in the end I’d try out Elder Scrolls Online. I would probably need to upgrade my computer in order to run it smoothly if it’s anything like Oblivion. I’ll also have to pray it’s not just another WoW clone.

I’m finally getting a bit more into SL again. I guess I just needed the SL vacation time. Plus I was having some creative blockage. Anyway, JEVN recently had an update for their vendor system. In the release notes she mentioned that the vendors are now First Meta compatible. Since I love to tinker with gadgets and learn about different ways JEVN can be used, I needed to look into this First Meta thing.

First Meta is a credit card for Second Life. They also offer a saving account. The credit card idea sparked my interest. I have no need of using one but enabling my vendors to accept a credit card is a great idea! Their current merchant list is not fly by night merchants either. So I do have faith in this company. It will be interesting to see how many people use their credit cards.