[extropy-chat] second life question

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 01:29:13PM -0800, spike wrote:

> Forward another 5 years to around 99/00 when Pleasure Palace came along.
> Interactive avatars, real-time chat, intentionally set up for lonely hearts,
> still mostly men but a better ratio than before.

I've missed that particular fad. I don't think they had realtime
VR rendering, physics included.
 
> Looks like in some ways Second Life is an extension of Pleasure Palace, more
> polish, more real estate, more content, less likely to crash, more choices,
> better graphics, etc, yet much of the bandwidth is used for substitute

The interesting part is that, unlike Croquet, this is the first
user-extensible game world with a large user base (though
terrain inflation makes it into a desert) with the dedicated 
intention to not be a FPS. 

> meat-world social interaction and lonely hearts.  Most importantly, this
> incarnation appears to be approximately gender balanced.

Of course it's like the real world, it's monkey-driven. In fact
it's full of really young people who never used email so they're not
aware of wta-talk and extropy-chat yet have heard of transhumanists.
 
> Could this be?  Or is it a trick?  Am I the only one who has noticed this?

SL is full of virtual pornography (I hear there are even BDSM
folks who hold slaves). However, this doesn't detract one bit
from the fact that this is the first public VR system deserving
the name, including in-game object editor and a real programming
language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Language

Don't forget OpenCroquet, too, it's still very beta but it
has been making progress in regards to avatar animation and input
from popular 3rd-party builders. It's too bad it's so hardware-agnostic,
being based on Squeak (a Smalltalk implementation).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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