I’m writing this from the State of Play confrence right now, in the afternoon of the second day. I’ve had an amazing time, although being 3rd shift, I’m also horribly tired.
This is a terribly truncated summary, as there are much more detailed descriptions out there. Most of them have probably posted by now as well. :)
Day one was Oct 7, Friday. There was an initial discussion about the financial possibilities of the Meteverse applications like [Second Life][1] and [There][2], as well as the MMO environments like [WoW][3]. Questions ensued regarding regulatory and legal issues, and I think was quite interesting; I even had a shot to pop a question in myself.
Most of the late morning and the afternoon was evoted to workshops. I participated in one which was discussing virtial identities, and the sharing of such. A very good real-life example – maintaining reputation across MMO environments – was used as the starting point of the second half of the workshop, which was to come up with possible solutions. Suggestions from a simple linking mechanism to more details forms which would be useable by MMO hosts for quicker authentication were discussed, and all of them viable to one degree or another. It would be quite exciting to see if any of this actually comes to frution; Time will only tell.
The evening dinner was a discussion on the expansion possibilities of the more larger metaverses, in particular [Eve Online][4] and [Second Life][1]. Both use different forms of scarce or basic starting tools and/or resources, and for the most part allows the customer base to generate the content and interact as they see fit. They also are what’s called ‘one shard’ or ‘one location’ systems – unlike an MMORPG like [WoW][3] where its one fixed content server which is repeated as many times as needed to get your customer base up to the millions. It had also turned out to be quite an interesting discussion.
For the completeness in context of this weblog, I must remind that Until Uru is also a multi-shard system; However, though the content is both fixed and (currently!) not extendable at the moment, the players there have done an amazing time generating their own with tools even more scarce than what is available in an MMO. One upcoming example, the [D’ni Olympics][5], I in fact will probably be attending based upon the possiblility of my pulling out the Honor Guard ‘uniform’ again.
At this point, I collapsed at home for over eight hours; I had very little sleep Fri morning, but was quite enjoyable. Definately going to do this again.
So I arrived back here late in the morning, about 11 AM or so. Spent most of the time so far in the main lobby; Some PCs were set up (one of them crashed already :) ), available with the Second Life environment for login.
I did have a brief chat with Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), regarding the 1.7 Preview, and the odd fact that I noticed some driver files of theirs says they are owned by NVidia. That was for my own curiosity, but I may post it. Still thinking about it…
–Alan
[1]: http://www.secondlife.com
[2]: http://www.there.com
[3]: http://worldofwarcraft.com
[4]: http://www.eve-online.com
[5]: http://www.dni-olympics.info/