Meta Grinding and Nemo

Second Life so many stories that I try not to clog Terra Nova with them, but two articles on New World Notes deserve your attention.

The first, "Evolving Nemo", details the creation of evolving AI creatures within Second Life. While boids and genetic algorithms built on top of SL's scripting language are interesting, what pushes this effort over the top is the use of shared code and standards within SL's ALife group.

The second, "Grinding the World" covers the exploits of residents determined to ride skateboards all over Second Life. What sets this effort apart from previous attempts is that they've actually built a board that's fun to ride (and shot a video to show what it can do). It certainly isn't THUG 2 yet, but there is something magical about grinding a 30 meter tall replica of Tin Tin's rocket with a group of friends!

It's amazing what SL's residents make as they combine community, creation, and markets with a pinch of physics and scripting.

Comments

[Nathan Combs]

1.

from "Evolving Nemo">

“There is a command in [Linden Script Language] script called Sensor,” she says. “It is what the fish use to see. And my bracelet which holds the master copy of the program sees the fish using Sensor… So I can make a change to the program in my wrist band and send it to the fish. If they perform better than the old ones then they get the next update.” Those that don’t get deleted at Surina’s command. (It’s a little like Darwin hiking around the Galapagos and clubbing the weaker animals with his walking cane, so he can speed things up.)

Viscerally neat! I was scratching my head as to what the value-added of doing this in a virtual world (vs. simulator) - but perhaps the answer may lay with being able to ask others to participate in the "evaluation" with different set of methodologies and perspectives. Perhaps there is a way of exploiting this openness.

[jr]

2.

cool articles

[Richard Bartle]

3.

Cory Ondrejka>It's amazing what SL's residents make as they combine community, creation, and markets with a pinch of physics and scripting.

It's people in general who are amazing, not just SL's residents. SL adds marketing to the mix that wasn't there in the heyday of MOOs, but what qualitative difference does it make whether people create for the fun of it or for the profit of it?

Richard

[Nathan Combs]

4.

Nate> "participate in the evaluation"

the analog here was HubNet which enables multiple Netlogo clients to synch up - "participatory simulations"

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/3.0/docs/hubnet.html

Strikes me that this is the role the bracelet plays. The advantage here would be that it then becomes possible to overlay multiple "hubnets" within single interaction space. To what purpose is the next question.

[Mark Wallace]

5.

Nathan > "To what purpose is the next question."

Does there need to be a purpose? Second Life is so rich with possibilities that once you get a grasp of what you can do there it kind of sets you on your heels and makes you think, "This is so cool, I must do *something*." The first thing I scripted in SL was a kind of 'exquisite corpse machine' that let people play the old parlor game together (I wanted to do something textual). It didn't work very well but it was satisfying to create, and I think that's what SL offers that most other worlds don't: the chance to be a creator of things that are robust and useful and complex and are not just skins on pre-modeled content.

I also think there are valuable real-world applications that could be launched in Second Life. Easy 3D conferencing is only the most rudimentary example. Companies are already starting to consider applications like this in SL. And as these little viral apps like AI fish and Squagmire Stravinsky's "Innernet" and others start to combine and grow, I wager we'll see things spring up that none of us have yet dreamt of.

[Jim Purbrick]

6.

Richard>SL adds marketing to the mix that wasn't there in the heyday of MOOs

I've been thinking about what SL adds over and above text MOOs for a while. Grinding skateboards off arbitrary 3D objects or building shoals of fish which flock around each other would both have been impossible in text MOOs.

[Jerry P]

7.

Richard > It's people in general who are amazing, not just SL's residents. SL adds marketing to the mix that wasn't there in the heyday of MOOs, but what qualitative difference does it make whether people create for the fun of it or for the profit of it?

Speaking to this generally, I just can't say it any better than Cory already did in his Changing Realities paper:

"By building upon advances in disparate technologies, digital worlds enable easier and more powerful forms of creation and communication, allowing digital worlds to be more innovative places than the real world. The power to be more innovative makes it inevitable that digital worlds grow beyond their social and game roots. Furthermore, market and economic forces seen as detrimental by conventional massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) accelerate this transition. Ultimately, entertainment and economic incentives will integrate digital worlds into everyday life."

BTW, an anecdote about those evolving fish: The other day I showed the "Evolving Nemo" article to friend who'd never used Second Life. Impressed and intrigued, we decided to hop in-world to check them out. While he looked over my shoulder I made my way to the location and went down under the water. Sure enough the swarm was soon upon us. While we were exploring how they behaved, I showed off by trying my Seburo Compact-eXploder on them (that's a fancy pants gun in SL). Unexpectedly*, 3 of the swarm burst out of existence (*I'd never seen this before). My friend started yelling, "Duuuude! Noooo! Stop!" and I started freaking out too, not knowing whether I had killed something or destroyed someone's property. So of course, like little kids, we nervously ran away and logged out before laughing it off and talking through all the issues involved :-D The whole thing took place over the course of 5 minutes, and that my friends, is a Second Life moment. Saying nothing of the real world applications Mark mentioned (which are what I'm currently most interested in with SL), this is another example of Jim's things you can't do in a text MOO.

If you want to honor text MOOs as an original Shakespeare in the changing world of graphical user-created virtual world platforms, at least keep in mind the Charles Bukowski spirit and admit: "Shakespeare Never Did This" 8-)

P.S. Sorry about shooting the fish. I have learned my lesson. Next thing, I'll have to worry about leaving grind marks on someone's virtual curbs...

[Nathan Combs]

8.

Mark>
"Does there need to be a purpose? Second Life is so rich with possibilities that once you get a grasp of what you can do there it kind of sets you on your heels and makes you think"

No there doesn't. I was wearing my "hard-core" hat which looks at this through the prism of simulation and analysis: how is it better to do a flocking sim in 2nd life than netlogo, for e.g. In terms of coolness and the human experience, well, we're all on teh same page.

[Richard Bartle]

9.

Jim Purbrick>Grinding skateboards off arbitrary 3D objects or building shoals of fish which flock around each other would both have been impossible in text MOOs.

So? Adding smells is impossible in SL but possible in MOOs.

I'm not suggesting that what's going on in SL isn't different, indeed some of it is quite original and interesting. It's just this suggestion (perhaps not intentional, but there nonetheless) that creativity such as this has reached some kind of higher plane in SL, for reasons particular to SL. I don't buy that.

People are creative, and SL does indeed give them ways to be creative that aren't there in other virtual worlds (while removing some ways that are). Does it make their creations (or the fact that they created something at all) any more amazing than for other creation-focused worlds? No: it's just another avenue for people to express their creativity.

SL is exceptional in many ways, but this isn't one of them.

Richard

[Jerry P]

10.

Nathan > I was wearing my "hard-core" hat which looks at this through the prism of simulation and analysis: how is it better to do a flocking sim in 2nd life than netlogo... In terms of coolness and the human experience, well, we're all on teh same page.

Back on teh same page, please keep your hard-core hat on too, Nathan. What else can you think of? In terms of other multi-user evolving simulations, Darwin@Home (playing off SETI@home) is a new challenger using distributed simulations that can interact with users (not fully clear on how). The long term ("couple of years") goal of Darwin@Home is to create an X Prize for ALife called the AlivePrize. A process like Will Wright's "massively single player" evolutionary game, Spore, where users' evolved creatures enter the worlds of other players, seems like an interesting approach too.

Back to doing this in Second LIfe, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale's first blog post was actually called "aLife and sLife". From the post:

"...you create an AI simulation on a powerful computer, then hook it into Second Life by connecting it either to an object or possibly even avatar. Let it run around 24 hours a day talking to people, interacting with things, getting in trouble - see what happens. In the early designs of SL, we used to love the idea of organisms that wandered around the world, relying on the kindness of people to keep them alive - perhaps by requiring the occasional L$ to keep breathing or something. Indeed, it seems that this sort of selection pressure would be the most interesting for evolving aLife organisms: rather than some basic culling test like whether a program can sort numbers into a list, have the selection pressure and fitness test be "can you entertain people?". Imagine how strange and interesting that would be - a world evolved not by the rule of whether I could kill or eat you, but instead by whether I could somehow please you."

[Richard Bartle]

11.

Jerry P (quoting Cory)>By building upon advances in disparate technologies, digital worlds enable easier and more powerful forms of creation and communication, allowing digital worlds to be more innovative places than the real world.

I've no problems with that, although I'd add that the the worlds in people's imaginations are more innovative than the real or virtual (digital) worlds could ever be.

>The power to be more innovative makes it inevitable that digital worlds grow beyond their social and game roots.

Again, I've no problem here, although again I'd add something (namely that growing beyond those roots doesn't mean the roots themselves can't grow).

>Furthermore, market and economic forces seen as detrimental by conventional massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) accelerate this transition.

Again, this is true. Again, there is also much unsaid. Market forces can be at work without using real-world money (eg. build points); the transition can be accelerated in other ways (eg. political or educational will); market forces can push in the "wrong" direction as well as the "right" one (eg. it could lead to the collapse of IP legislation).

>Ultimately, entertainment and economic incentives will integrate digital worlds into everyday life.

That's correct, too. I'd just like the option to stop everyday life from integrating into every digital world.

So, my having agreed to all that, why can I continue to say that SL doesn't add anything qualitative to the creative process? Well, it does add to such processes as they exist in the real world, but it doesn't add to them in virtual worlds (rather it changes some of the medium of creation) and it doesn't rival the creativity of the human imagination (but then neither do other virtual worlds).

If you want to state that SL does have unique features that make the process of innovation in SL better than in other virtual worlds, I want to hear about them! I've seen birds-as-clothes in a demo for a graphics card (but not fish-as-clothes in virtual worlds) and I've seen co-operative real-time construction of filly-fledged room complexes including objects and (admittedly fairly toy) NPCs for a virtual world (but not a large, 3D graphical object). If SL is allowing people to indulge their creativity, that's great! What I want to know is what SL has going for it that makes what its residents create more amazing than what the residents of other construction-style virtual worlds create.

Richard

[Jerry P]

12.

Richard > If you want to state that SL does have unique features that make the process of innovation in SL better than in other virtual worlds, I want to hear about them! ... What I want to know is what SL has going for it that makes what its residents create more amazing than what the residents of other construction-style virtual worlds create.

Great question, Richard. Want to come into Second Life on a Sunday in July to ask it with a bunch of Second Life users? I've been setting up these Second Life Future Salons (archives) for the last couple of months, which are like mini-conferences in SL. This would be great! You could even break your "Not Yet you Fools!" rule and use our voice software :-D Seriously, please let me know if you're interested (and I will never again try to lasso presenters from the TN message boards--this just seemed to further the discussion).

[Cory Ondrejka]

13.

Richard > If you want to state that SL does have unique features that make the process of innovation in SL better than in other virtual worlds, I want to hear about them!

I've stated them several times. Here, here, or here would be good places to start. Briefly, the factors that combine in Second Life are real-time, collaborative creation, atomistic construction, markets, and real-world connections, all operating against the backdrop of a 3D, physically-simulated world.

I suspect that we're going to need another thread soon that debates the whole "are there really differences between 3D and text worlds or is 3D just window dressing?"-thing again.

[Jim Purbrick]

14.

Richard> Adding smells is impossible in SL but possible in MOOs.

Except by maybe using green clouds rising up out of an object, or clouds of flies buzz around it, both graphical symbols for "this smells". You could even resort to text above the object saying "this smells of roses", which is what you'd do in a text MOO. Saying you can add smells in a text MOO isn't exactly true, you can describe smells which are imaginged by users. You can do that in SL too, but is arguably harder given that you're not appealing to the imagination for some other senses.

Richard> that creativity such as this has reached some kind of higher plane in SL, for reasons particular to SL. I don't buy that.

No, neither do I.

Richard> It's just another avenue for people to express their creativity.

Yes, and I think new avenues for people to express their creativity are worth getting excited about.

[Richard Bartle]

15.

>Want to come into Second Life on a Sunday in July to ask it with a bunch of Second Life users?

Not particularly, no. I want to see these reasons written down; I don't want to watch people doing stuff then saying "voila!" and making me construct my own reasons.

>I've been setting up these Second Life Future Salons (archives) for the last couple of months, which are like mini-conferences in SL. This would be great!

Great for whom? You're basically inviting me to a lynching!

>You could even break your "Not Yet you Fools!" rule and use our voice software :-D

That rule only applies to role-playing games. I've no objection to having voice s/w in SL whatsoever.

>Seriously, please let me know if you're interested (and I will never again try to lasso presenters from the TN message boards--this just seemed to further the discussion).

You'd want me to present? What would I present?

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

16.

Me> Adding smells is impossible in SL but possible in MOOs.

Jim Purbrick>Except by maybe using green clouds rising up out of an object

So how does a SL rose smell? You're not conveying a sense of smell; you're using cartoon-like ciphers that show the presence of a smell. Are you going to deprettify the rose's image by drawing scent lines all over it?

What about other senses, such as warmth or balance?

I'm not denying that SL is expressive, but you really do need to get some perspective on the limitations of its expressiveness.

>You could even resort to text above the object saying "this smells of roses", which is what you'd do in a text MOO.

It's what you'd do in a text MOO if you weren't all that great a MOO author, sure.

>Saying you can add smells in a text MOO isn't exactly true, you can describe smells which are imaginged by users.

This is what "virtual" means. If you want me to be obtuse about it, I can point out that a picture of a rose in SL is merely a description of a rose which is then imagined by users.

>Yes, and I think new avenues for people to express their creativity are worth getting excited about.

Me too. If Cory's original posting hadn't had its final line, I might have commented about something else first instead of coming across as some anti-SL curmugeon. SL is doing some things that really are exceptional and important - bringing the virtual to the real in ways we haven't seen ever before including the old MOO days. It gives people opportunities they can't easily get elsewhere, if at all. I'd rather be talking about this kind of thing than arguing the relative merits of creative forms in different media, but here I am doing so anyway.

Richard

[Nathan Combs]

17.

Jerry P>
"...you create an AI simulation on a powerful computer, then hook it into Second Life by connecting it either to an object or possibly even avatar. Let it run around 24 hours a day talking to people, interacting with things, getting in trouble - see what happens."

I think you hit it on the head - simulation as we've described it here (loosely) is useful in a virtual world when its outcome is a result (and meaningful to) of its involvement with people (albeit virtualized).

Those involvements may be direct -e.g. the Philip quote. Or it may be "meta" -as a "critic" (what I hinted at initially). It may even be passive -communal observation. But there is some level of (shared) involvement with people.

Whereas a closed simulation without those shareable/communal qualities I assert is of unclear value when performed in a virtual communal world - vs. a simulator, say.

[Jim Purbrick]

18.

Richard> I'm not denying that SL is expressive, but you really do need to get some perspective on the limitations of its expressiveness.

The same text descriptions can be used in SL as in a MOO. I suppose you could argue that the mixture of text, graphical and audio descriptions is less powerful than a purely textural description.

Richard> If you want me to be obtuse about it, I can point out that a picture of a rose in SL is merely a description of a rose which is then imagined by users.

Yes, but the grapical representation is more explicit and requires less imagination than the text description. Neither SL nor a text MOO actually output the chemical scent of a rose that can be sensed.

Richard> SL gives people opportunities they can't easily get elsewhere, if at all. I'd rather be talking about this kind of thing.

Me too. I'd have thought that a good approach would be to work out what is new and different and couldn't have been done before and then talk about it.

[Scott McMillin]

19.

As much as I love Second Life, I must agree with Richard on this one.

from Cory's paper:
"By building upon advances in disparate technologies, digital worlds enable easier and more powerful forms of creation and communication, allowing digital worlds to be more innovative places than the real world. The power to be more innovative makes it inevitable that digital worlds grow beyond their social and game roots."

It may be inevitable, but it certainly hasn't even come close yet. "Easier and more powerful forms of creation?" In the 2 years I've been involved with Second Life I've probably spent more time in Photoshop creating textures for Second Life, than in the SL client itself. The textures forum on SL.com is just a constant stream of people utterly confounded by alpha channels and the use of the UV map templates. The building tools within second life have come a long way, but can't approach any of the more robust 3D apps out there. The SL client can't touch Photoshop or Maya. As for communication, I'm not sure how SL's text chat can compete with email and Web communities (like this one) -- or even iChat video conferencing, which I've been using a lot recently.

And while "It's amazing what SL's residents make as they combine community, creation, and markets with a pinch of physics and scripting" I'd also like to point out that for the 20% of the great stuff in SL, there's the 80% that's absolute crap -- just like out here in the real world. There may have been a time early on in SL's history where I might have disagreed with Richard about that overall quality of SL's user base with regards to creativity, but not any more. People are people. Amazing people will make amazing things no matter what the environment.

Don't get me wrong, I think SL is a wonderful tool/place, but after two years is flocking fish what we're calling innovation? Mark Wallace mentioned something like 3D conferencing -- yes that was something we discussed 2 years ago; we were all bursting with ideas about the virtual office, etc. All I have to say is: show me how it works and show me why it's better than 4 people video conferencing face-to-face in iChat today. Some day - maybe. But right now, SL is still in its infancy. There's no doubt innovation will come, I'm just not sure we can predict what shape it will take.

[Richard Bartle]

20.

Jim Purbrick>I suppose you could argue that the mixture of text, graphical and audio descriptions is less powerful than a purely textural description.

I certainly can. It's hard enough watching a movie with subtitles when you understand the spoken dialogue; overwriting an image with a textual description detracts from both.

>Yes, but the grapical representation is more explicit and requires less imagination than the text description.

You say that as if you feel it's a good thing?

>Neither SL nor a text MOO actually output the chemical scent of a rose that can be sensed.

No, but you can get so immersed in a virtual world that it doesn't matter.

(Actually, you probably can't get that immersed in either a MOO or SL, but that's another story!).

Richard

[Ramesh Ramloll]

21.

Interesting debate. I just want to add the following. What is being discussed is perhaps related to the notion of presence that is often encountered in academic discourse dealing with VR research. I think it is likely that future fmri (brain imaging) studies are going to prove that far more extensive regions of the brain are involved when interacting with graphical/auditory environments than interactive text based environments alone.The experimental evidence so far suggests that with text alone, it is more difficult to create an environment that can engage the prefrontal cortext of a user sufficiently to allow processes typically involved in virtual reality (audio/graphical)based therapies to take place. For example, I have never seen a single interactive text based environment for treating phobias but there are many studies that show the effectiveness of VR based (read graphical/audio) environments that can successfully deal with maladaptive behavior to offending stimuli. I think there is a lot to be gained by looking at this issue from a neuro-physiologic perspective. I personally believe that VR(in the traditional graphics/audio) sense is perhaps more effective than text in many situations because many of the processes involved is far more basic/primitive and occurs at a subconscious level that those that are necessarily involved in 'reading' which is indeed a learnt and complex phenomenon.

[Richard Bartle]

22.

Ramesh Ramloll>What is being discussed is perhaps related to the notion of presence that is often encountered in academic discourse dealing with VR research.

Yes, it is (here is an 8-year-old paper about presence and textual worlds). I feel that the concept of imersion goes way beyond mere notions of presence, though.

>I think it is likely that future fmri (brain imaging) studies are going to prove that far more extensive regions of the brain are involved when interacting with graphical/auditory environments than interactive text based environments alone.

Well yes, of course they are. If you don't hear actual sounds when playing in a virtual world, the part of the brain that deals with processing sounds isn't going to fire, pure and simple.

>The experimental evidence so far suggests that with text alone, it is more difficult to create an environment that can engage the prefrontal cortext of a user sufficiently to allow processes typically involved in virtual reality (audio/graphical)based therapies to take place.

Anecdotal evidence would agree with that, too. It's harder to get people to become engrossed in textual worlds than in graphical ones. Then again, I'd argue that once you do get engrossed, it's easier to become fully immersed in a textual world than in a graphical one.

>For example, I have never seen a single interactive text based environment for treating phobias

Bizarrely, I read a 3rd-year project report yesterday that aimed to show just that! Sadly, its lofty ambitions were not reflected in its poor execution, so it didn't show anything either way. I suspect that there may be some isolated phobias that were better treatable in text than in other media (eg. triskaidekaphobia ) but you'd have to be pretty damned well immersed before it would stand the remotest chance of addressing arachnaphobioa.

>I personally believe that VR(in the traditional graphics/audio) sense is perhaps more effective than text in many situations because many of the processes involved is far more basic/primitive and occurs at a subconscious level that those that are necessarily involved in 'reading' which is indeed a learnt and complex phenomenon.

I agree. Then again, I believe that text can be more effective than graphics in many situations, too, particularly if the player is immersed (as in "jump out of chair when a dragon appears from nowhere" immersed).

Richard