Virtual World Has Billions of Residents

It's called First Life. Read a beta review here.

Comments

[Gabriel]

1.

It's alright, but the grind is pretty nasty - it took me like 360 days to level up.

[grant]

2.

The level-up particle effects suck too. I mean confetti? Get real.

[Elle Pollack]

3.

Oldie but a goodie - that's been around since 2003.

[Rory Starks]

4.

Oh sure, billions, but how many of those billions are actually online???

I can't wait for the expansion.

[Mike Sellers]

5.

I'm not sure about the wisdom of putting all billions of residents on the same server. One nasty crash and >foomph<. I hear there's no real backup system either, if you can believe it.

[Gabriel]

6.

This morning I was playing, and we had like 2 million people trying to log into the city, but the servers couldn't handle it - lag everywhere.

[Thomas Malaby]

7.

Rory's right. I don't think we can say anything intelligent about this so-called "First Life" until we have a metric -- one metric -- that tells us how significant it really is.

[Jerry Paffendorf]

8.

And as Google points out, after 4.7 billion years we're still in beta :(. I heard First Life was around even before MUDs.

[ron meiners]

9.

Quick question, does anyone know if this First Life activity has any carry over effects into any of the virtual worlds?

[Jerry Paffendorf]

10.

@Ron

Quite the contrary 'round these parts, young'n. /hocks into spitoon

[Gordon Calleja]

11.

It's been a while since I tried it. Some of the locations were quite impressive but the lack of flying mounts made it quite a pain to get to them. A lot of the avatars were quite lacing, design-wise. And where the hell's the undo/restart button in character creation. I tried a beer-belly on for kicks and got stuck with it!

[Enkaedu]

12.

SecondLife is part of RealLife:

I know getafirstlife.com is a terrific site and a reminder that the HDR effects in a real sunset can be totally amazing, but on the serious side, this seems like a volley in what Ted predicted would be one of several forms of SL backlash - the "oh, right, this isn't real" form. I feel a slippery slope coming.

And so on that slippery slope it occurs to me that Secondlife and other socnet worlds actually are fundamentally "real life", following a universal human tradition of creative self-expression. When humans create things (and this appears to be the #2 thing humans in real life like to do after destroying things), they invariably try to copy and then extend or reshape the work of "our heavenly dungeonmaster." Cases in point - monet paintings, soap operas, most anything a kid makes with lego, harry potter films (ok, that's a stretch), and writings from Gilgamesh, Cervantes, right down to Harold Robbins (with the notable exception of the genre known as Business Management books).

The problem with socnet worlds to date is that they possibly don't allow enough creativity. The painter wants his white canvas, the writer her blank page. Anyone attempting to create something from their mind's eye in SL will find the experience more frustrating than productive.

SL is a tremendous first step - a pioneer - in extending creative self expression to a 3D virtual world. Hopefully the titles that come after - the settlers of this new greenfield art form - will give us more scope to creat, more fun doing it, and less of the graphic metaphor of suburban hell that we get with SL.

[hikaru]

13.

"...this seems like a volley in what Ted predicted would be one of several forms of SL backlash - the 'oh, right, this isn't real' form. I feel a slippery slope coming."

I've been backlashing against SL here since before SL was media's baby. Talk to any real gamer out there, hun: SL ain't no beauty queen -- that slippery slope is like a few mountain ranges away from SL. Looking at SL, no one could mistake it for real life.

SL is AIM within a dirty sand box. Don't play with the lumpy bits.

[Alvis Brigis]

14.

Stranglehold on intellectual property, no guarantee that islands will exist just a few years from now, casinos are totally rigged, social networking features suck, and the AI empathy settings are set at an intelorably low level. There is no way this First Life thing is going to diffuse.

[Andy Havens]

15.

I read the text-only help files (1.0 and 2.0 versions) for First Life when I was young (and a couple times since then), and have been in almost daily contact with the system admin. He's been pretty good about getting back to me, though, admittedly, not always with the answer I was looking for... He has some good concept art available if you look around, though.

The one thing I like about FL is that it's one of the few games where you can choose your own rewards system, and where there's a rich (if subtle) feedback loop based on how you choose to implement it. I've heard it called, "WAGACA" rewards (WhAt Goes Around Comes Around), the "Golden Rule," or "He Who Lives By the Pwn Shall Die By the Pwn."

My biggest problem with the game, though, is all the folks who are playing as if their in-game currency is going to somehow transfer into perks in After Life, the Off-Line Massively Multiplayer sequel. So far, I haven't heard of anybody being able to RMT (Resurrection Money Trade) their First Life assets into any kind of bonus in AL. On the other hand, there's a rumor that if your character dies in FL with a certain amount of gold, you actually can't get into AL. Something about a camel and the eye of a needle. Weird, but it's behind some kind of fire-wall, so I don't have much more info.

[Daniel Speed]

16.

I think that Real Life is a model example in both the benefits, and issues with a Skill based progression system, compared to a class / level based system. It frequently has poor reward balance, but it really does allow for a much wider diversity of player occupation than a predefined set of combat classes.

[Michael Chui]

17.

One: I strongly disagree that server lag does not exist.

Two: Of course we're in beta. Does it look like we're ready for release? It's not like we have SpeedTree being run across the Great Plains.

Three: You can't fly. I quit. Er, oops. *poofs*

[Richard Bartle]

18.

Jerry Paffendorf>I heard First Life was around even before MUDs.

But some people argue that First Life is itself just basically a MUD.

Richard

[RedWolf]

19.

Too many bugs, lots of exploits and the perma death thing sucks.

[Kami Harbinger]

20.

The game design of this "Real Life" is terrible.

The forced downtime of 5-8 hours every night is incredibly restrictive. You can use Potions of Alertness to push the time out a bit, but you pay for it later.

No flight. No teleportation. You walk. Slowly. Or buy a vehicle, but that's an arduous quest and involves constant payments. The fatigue system is a total pain.

Growing old, getting sick, and dying is stupid, user-hostile design.

Permadeath is bad enough, but permadeath with an 18-year delay in creating new characters is unspeakable. The designer clearly loathes all players and wants us to be miserable. No wonder nobody from administration ever shows up in-world. There are lunatics who believe the designer's present, but they can't produce any evidence except forged chat logs and badly-written fairy tales.

The food, drugs, alcohol, rock and roll, and sex are pretty good, though it's often expensive and inconvenient to get them regularly, and the best stuff is illegal! Hookers aren't just illegal, they often have terrible infectious diseases!

"Real Life" land is extremely expensive (whether renting or owning and paying property taxes). Building things is even more expensive, difficult, and only really available to specialists. You can't even rez a prim for free, you have to buy materials at a shop!

No, I can't really recommend Real Life. I hope they go out of business soon.

[Moses]

21.

Amidst all the humorous and flippant remarks (and the occasional somewhat more profound comments) which I've greatly enjoyed reading, I just have to mention that the Beta Review is pretty heinously culturally biased.

I know that it goes against the essentially whimsical gestalt of the whole thing to dwell on it, but I find a line like, "for the most part, real life does a good enough job of making the punishment fit the crime, as it were, so in most regions there's a relative sense of order." (or the overly generous descriptions of family and financial structures in this game) fundamentally disturbing on some level.

[Tom Scudder]

22.

Linden Labs has sent the site in question a "don't-cease-or-desist" lettter.

[Amarilla]

23.

i'm stucked into a pre-defined avatar;but it's ok, all i have to do is to learn it and to love it . Free registration and membership, hmmmm....i doubt that; someone have to pay the bills , right ?! Awesome stuff there :)

[ErikC]

24.

1.FirstLife. Obviously not programmed according to Hinduism. What would that be, DejaLife?

2. regards http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
"Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."

I think the philosophical term for the 2nd clause is bollocks. We do so now.

[Peter S. Jenkins]

25.

When is the expansion pack going to come out?

[Prokofy Neva]

26.

What I don't like are all these "try-mes" that don't stick. User retention sucks.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/01/21/the-case-for-first-life/#comment-102383

[Endie]

27.

Version 1.0 was certainly innovative - very much defining a genre - but the devs were accused of openly favouring one character race (which got no less than 12 sub-races implemented!?!) which pretty much consistently pwnxored races like the Philistines (the red-headed stepchildren of FL1) in 1v1 combat.

Version 2.0 had balance issues with an alpha healing class that could have seriously unbalanced combat, even leading to a purely crafting-based game. Since that was nerfed (following a player demonstration that turned ugly) there has, however, been considerable ongoing player effort to get it brought back. The same patch nerfed locusts and prophets almost out of existence, as well as providing substantial survivability bonuses to firstborn.

The open PvP of the last patches (the 19th and 20th) was very popular with some players, particularly with the Teuton and Rus classes, but there was surprisingly little player protest when weak player-government institutions (no doubt influenced by Raph) made this less profitable, although some grief-play is still possible in a few instances and battlegrounds.

Finally, a lot of players suggest that the game went live without any means of unlocking Jedi, and that this is still the case.

[hikaru]

28.

Playing in Hardcore mode owns. Otherwise there's no sense of purpose, fear, reward, thrill, excitement, etc.

And if you die, you can just roll another avatar.

/former #2 top Diablo II Hardcore in the world. Necro power, baby.

[Jerry Paffendorf]

29.

Richard Bartle > But some people argue that First Life is itself just basically a MUD.

Haha, yes, I'm quite familiar, though I wouldn't describe that scenario as being like a MUD, more like a quantum kaleidoscope of everything you can (and can't) imagine. But I guess MUD works in a pinch :p.

Zoolander: "They're *in* the computer?"

[Bhagpuss]

30.

Everything is "real life". Assignment of higher or lower value to various subsets of behavior or activity seems somewhat purposeless, especially when, as here, the assignment appears to have been made from a highly specific cultural standpoint.

As far as I can tell, I only have one "real" life, and whatever I do in it is equally "real". "Virtual" life is just more "real" life.

[Moses Wolfenstein]

31.

@Bhagpuss

Thats funny I could've sworn you had it backwards here and "real" life is just another virtual world.

[ashok]

32.

I'm thinking of joining Second Life just to see what it is like. What phenomena should I pay attention to as I play?

(And yes, I will be back to see the comments, if anyone cares to answer).