The Creation Engine

Post Apocalyptic Robot Steampunk!

ls clearly right up my street, so I'm very glad that even though I managed to miss the Take5 festival, alt zoom studios has made the movies available online. Moebius Overdrive and Allen Kerensky's Start is a fantastic piece of machinima that imagines a bizarre alternate future in which steam powered robots are replaced by electron powered robots - an extremely fanciful notion, but one that makes for a great fiction.

The Babbage And Surina Show

The Babbage and Surina show hit the road last week when we went to talk at a day of seminars and discussions in Leicester on "3D Visualisation, Animation, Virtual Reality & Interactive Maps: New Creative Opportunities for Learning & Earning" organised by David Wortley, who came to the "C U in RL" event that I ran before Christmas.

Although Second Life was a perfect fit with the topics of discussion, it seemed that I provided an alternative to many of the viewpoints presented throughout the day. Where a lot of the presentations concentrated on using single user virtual reality to model current, historic and planned real world spaces, I showed the amazing things that can result when a community of creative people forgets about meat-space and sets off to create the world of their dreams.

David compared the dozens of London locations in Google Earth with the single solitary Leicester location shown and worried that this was even more evidence that the East Midlands was falling behind. I suggested that London was a collection of legacy artifacts from the epoch of human history when physical place mattered and that in the future we will build virtual places for learning, earning and playing in Second Life making physical place a lifestyle choice.

Without a doubt the highlight of the day was Surina Skallagrimson's presentation of her work on artificial life in Second Life. In order to emphasize the networked nature of Second Life after seeing only single user environments in the other talks I logged on from the audience over the wifi network and walked in to Surina's presentation to say hello, but our show boating and Surina's talk was hilariously cut short by a dreaded BSOD. Luckily I caught it on video phone and it and is now available for download from the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

The slides from my talk (which were a mashup of recent presentations by Philip and Cory) are also online here. I'm glad that we were there to show that there's more to virtual worlds than 3D walkthroughs of real places. Hopefully we gave people something to think about besides AutoDesk's take home message: "Normal Maps!"

Remix You're The Boss!

Just before Christmas I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay "Boss Frenzy!" day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage. Dozens of people came to the Broadway in Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and magazines to design bosses for our "You're The Boss!" shmup.

Well, I'm pleased to say that the game is available here and the Game Maker file (which you can use to remix the game) is now available here. The graphics and audio are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, while the game itself is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The intention is to allow the game to be modified and media added or removed to create a derivative work, but for the original media to be left unaltered.

So, download the Game Maker file, download Game Maker and have a play! Adding a new boss is as easy as copying one of the existing bosses, replacing its sprite and then copying one of the rooms and replacing the boss with your new one. You could also add new music, change the backgrounds or change the gameplay entirely. Game Maker is definitely worth a look as I think its scripting approach is really slick. I'm glad I've played around with it as it's given me a few ideas for LSL.

When you've finished remixing, please let me know! If we get lots of good remixes it might be fun to combine them all and then release "Super You're The Boss" in a few months. Also, let me know if you run a "You're The Boss" workshop. We had lots of fun at the original workshop as you can see below.

Do Avatars Dream Of Electric Racoons?

If you haven't seen it already, check out Paul Mason's BBC Newsnight piece on Virtual Worlds, including a lot of footage from SL and interviews with Robin and Philip. The video will only be available for a limited period, so check it out as soon as you can.

Your You're The Boss

A few weeks ago I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay "Boss Frenzy!" day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage. Dozens of people came to the Broadway in Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and magazines to design bosses for our "You're The Boss!" shmup.

Well, with many thanks to the 8bitpeoples for letting me use their great music, I'm pleased to say that the finished game is now available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Just unzip the file and run YoureTheBoss.exe on any reasonably up to date Windows PC.

I'll hopefully be making the Game Maker file available in the new year so other people can run their own "You're The Boss" workshops or just mod and remix the game to their heart's content.

My high score is 9465 on level 28. Have fun and Merry Christmas!

Mono Log

Lots of progress on the Mono front: LSL scripts can now be optionally compiled to CIL assembler in the viewer, uploaded to the simulator, assembled, verified, saved as assets, rezzed, run on the Mono virtual machine, persisted, reset and migrated across region boundaries between simulators.

Below: the first cilbyte asset; the first LSL script compiled to CIL assembler in the viewer and then rezzed in a simulator; the first region boundary crossing by a Mono script; LSL and Mono versions of a script running side by side.

C U in RL in SL

Thanks to everyone who came to the Euro Linden Christmas Party at the weekend. It was great to meet up with all the Lindens, residents and non-residents who helped make it such fun. I've uploaded a set of photos of the weekend to Flickr and there are more photos and write-ups in the forum thread.

For those of you who couldn't make it to the "C U in RL" event in real life, you can now see some of it in Second Life. A video of a segment of Surina Skallagrimson's talk on artificial life which I recorded on my phone is now showing at Ambleside (210, 25) and is available for download from the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

So, you can now see Second Life being shown in a talk in real life in a video which is being shown in Second Life.

UK Second Life Monster Christmas Weekender This Weekend!

Saturday 10th December: Meet in the main downstairs bar at the Broadway Cinema Nottingham (or in the lobby if the bar is too busy) at 8PM. We'll stay there until at least 10 to make sure we meet everyone, then may head off somewhere else as a posse. (so you know who you're looking for, I look like this)

Sunday 11th December: 2PM - 6PM, The Mezz Bar (upstairs) at the Broadway Cinema: "C U in RL", presentations on Machinima by Ricard Gras, SLRR by Nigel Linden, Artificial Life by Surina Skallagrimson and I'll be talking about Scripting and Mono. After 6PM there will be more drinking at the Broadway and beyond.

All welcome, all events are free.

C U in RL.

The Wisdom of Tipping Long Tailed Crowds With Content Powered Rockets

Raph Koster is currently wondering where popularity comes from on his blog, but although he starts from The Wisdom of Crowds, a lot of Raph's discussion of opening big versus opening small seems to have more to do with network effects such as those described by The Tipping Point: the viral spreading of recommendations that produce J-Curves after release, the film industry’s feting of connectors and mavens to build hype before a film’s release and the connected audience's use of communications to quickly kill turkeys regardless of the hype.

Does the difference in curves come down to a content versus network comparison?

If your product provides a short term blast of content, you hype it to connectors and mavens before the release, use the hype to make sure you get mind share at release and then use popularity and network effects to spread the product to as many people as possible before your content is consumed, the short term wow factor fades and your product is replaced by the next hit.

If your product relies on network effects you play the long game: release early, attract early adopters, mavens and connectors after release and then work hard to cross the chasm and enter the mainstream, relying on the fact that the early adopters won’t consume the content and leave, but will get more value through network effects.

Darniaq’s original question of how can things be popular when they’re so clearly broken also seems to be better explained by the long tail than the wisdom of crowds: popular things tend to have some appeal to a wide variety of people who may all love lots of different niche things more.

So, if you're trying to build a blast of content that's popular you have to get something that has some appeal to a wide variety of people, even though a lot of them may consider it a bit broken. In the case of films or traditional games you can tweak and focus test and try to fete connectors and mavens before release, but once it's out the gate it's a one shot rocket. In the case of online games you have more scope to change things after release, but you still have limited time as your content is burned through and we've yet to see how successful large scale changes like those recently made to Star Wars: Galaxies will be. As time goes on it will become even more difficult to create popular content with mass appeal as people find it easier to find niche content in the long tail that will appeal to them more. It seems that trying to tip long tailed crowds with content powered rockets is not very wise.

Far better to rely on having legs and network effects to build popularity over the long term without having crippling content creation costs. And if you can build in a long tail, all the better.

C U in RL

The UK Second Life Monster Christmas Weekender is next weekend! If you're going to be anywhere near Nottingham, England on the 10th or 11th of December, please come along.

The plan is to meet up at 8 PM on Saturday 10th in the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham for drinks and then return at 2PM on Sunday 11th for a Screenplay SD "C U in RL" event which will feature presentations and discussions on Machinima by Ricard Gras, the Second Life Railroad by Nigel Linden, Artificial Life by Surina Skallagrimson  and Scripting by me.

All events are free and you don't need to be a Second Life resident to come along (but if you are a resident you should definitely come!). If you're interested in coming to any of the events or would like to do a presentation at "C U in RL" on anything from something you've built or seen in SL to someone you've met or an event you attended, please let me know by leaving a comment here or posting on this forum thread. I'll be posting updated details both here and on the forums.