Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Just before Christmas it was announced that EA’s Man In Charge Of The Sims, Rod Humble, had upped sticks and moved to the peculiar worlds of Second Life. Fascinated by this decision, we tracked him down to a tower made out of penises, sat on a throne of eyeballs that sing copyrighted Disney tunes, and asked him some questions. (Please note, while Rod Humble does live in a tower made of penises and sits on a throne of eyeballs that sing copyrighted Disney tunes, this is in no way reflective of his activities within the world of Second Life, nor his work at Linden Labs.) He tells us about why he made the move, ways to get around the perceived inaccessibility of Second Life, and the plans to roll out new tech that will make the world look “dramatically different”.

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Rod Humble, you might recall, has been at the controls of EA’s The Sims projects for the past few years. But no more. Linden Lab have just issued a statement, full of comments about “growth” and “exciting opportunities”, saying that Humble (pictured in his previous state) is taking over as CEO. Not much more than that at the moment, but this is the first thing Linden has done for a while that has made me sit up and take notice. I’ll be intrigued to find out more. Maybe you’ll tell us more, eh Rod?

Pay any attention to that irreverent, smiling spectre we call technology journalism and you’ll probably know two things about Second Life. ONE: That it’s very successful, and the millions of dollars it rakes in are shared with its dashing player entrepreneurs. TWO: That it’s full of sex. You’ll know this from the chocolate-box of articles ranging from I Was A Prostitute In Second Life to I Hired A Prostitute In Second Life to I Was Raped In Second Life to I Was A Rapist In Second Life. Wait, maybe not that last one. Wow. Must remember to pitch that to The Escapist.

Thing is, these two headlines have a habit of existing independently from one another. What I feel no-one’s talking about is that if Second Life is even partially successful because of the sexual freedom it offers, that raises a fat question about the games industry as a whole. If you’ll pardon the euphemism, I think there’s a huge, important point this game is making, and it’s waving it in our direction. Come over here and look at this, will you? [Needless to say, it's NSFW from this point.]
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A while back, we made a Hivemind vow to steer clear of Second Life reportage, as it’s an MMO that so often suffers a ridiculously inflated, distorted profile in its press coverage, and we really don’t want to add to that. Occasionally though, there’s a story that isn’t about some past-it band holding a fake gig there or someone else revealing that they regularly have fake sex in it, and it’s worth a mention here.

In this case, it’s the news that The Trident Media Group, which is responsible for the much-milked Frank Herbert Estate, has dealt out a harsh smackdown to a few Second Life Dune Fans – demanding they remove all direct references to the books from their carefully-made Arrakis-inspired areas because…. because…. well, you tell me.
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We at RPS like the PC because it gives us a big mess of stuff. There’s more things to play out there than you can fit into a lifetime, and it’s growing, non-stop, like a formidable fungus. We must therefore applaud those people who want us to make even more stuff. Well done you.

Some fun, yesterday.

One such gentleman is bearded theorist (and occasional practitioner) of fun, Raph Koster. He’s the man who directed the development of Jedi-vending system, Star Wars Galaxies (the first time around), and then wrote a book. Koster has decided that all this virtual world stuff needs to be centralised and exploded at the same time. It doesn’t need Second Life, instead it needs a “virtual place” on the web. We don’t want a single, all-encompassing world, says Koster, we just need an appropriate, networked toolkit. We needs something like a Blogspot for virtuality.

And so mr Koster’s company has announced Metaplace – a net-based virtual world toolkit for making mini virtual worlds. You won’t need the equivalent of Second Life or World Of Warcraft clients installed on your machine if this takes off, you’ll just need Metaplace. Anyone will be able to make an online world in five minutes, and dropping in and out of different online spaces will be as easy as surfing web pages. It’s Internet II: The Revengening taken to its logical extreme.

Koster announced this today, the internet went wild, the Metaplace website stopped working, and we all agreed that it’s exciting stuff. Too exciting.

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