James and I booted up. We were supposed to wait until January. Then it was gonna be T-Day. But hell, we were talking about gaming and planning out some research and we just didn't want to wait any longer.
We loaded the discs and were getting kinda restless waiting for the patches to download. But we discussed characters and realms, races and classes while we waited. I really wanted to be a Tauren Shaman, but they're on the dark side of the game, and James was bent on joining the Alliance. Turns out he had a bud playing who was already a Level 60 something or other. So I agreed. James ended up being a dwarf; I went for the gnome, on the grounds that they are technology specialists. I imagined getting to the point where I could construct some useful, and therefore commercially valuable, offensive or defensive gadgetry. After much debate and consideration, I decided to be a female, and I decided to go with the warlock class. I'm a sucker for magic spells and charms and such. I wanted a suitable name and so Googled norse +names. Found a great page that even had them separated by gender. I kinda liked the sound of Hallgrima and went with that.
We logged in. James phoned his buddy, Luckbringer. We put him on speaker phone and he guided us in. He suggested we join him in the BlackHand realm, so we did. We stood there in what turned out to be a bit of an encampment in front of the big gates of IronSide. We stood waivering, vulnerable and clueless, until...
Luckbring rode up to us on a magnificent steed, though what creature this be I cannot yet say. Magnificent was its mane, and all many colored was the saddle and tack . We were but wee creatures it might have crushed underfoot. We stood but naught much higher than the fetlock of the beast. Luckbringer jumped down, and with much flourish proceeded to distribute many gifts to us. First was meade, which we drank till we was feeling not a bit of the damp cold around us. Then he brought forth gold. Five coins each we was given, and though it meant not much to his purse, for our Level 1 existence it was almost a king's ransom. Our last gift from this great warrior was a special backpack, which then gave us two backpacks each to fill with all manner of wonderous looted objects.
After some careful inspection of ourselves, Luckbringer set us off to fulfill a quest given by a strange fellow in the encampment, to bring him 16 hunks of wolfmeat. At last! We were eager to test our Lvl 1 might and weapons on the wandering wolves, rabbits, and trolls in the countryside. So off we did run, with Luckbringer guarding our backs and offering us much cleverness which we did then remember as our own.
In but a few minutes we had mastered targetting and attacking these creatures, and with some aid to each other, did accomplish the quest, for which we were handsomely rewarded with a new object and a level up.
But all this hunting left us hungry to taste some real meat of our own, and so we did log off and search our own environs for a bit of steak and meade.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Thursday, October 13, 2005
And then there was light...
SL is a bust. I mean, here's a programmable 3-D multiuser community and what do the members do? They make crappy, unzoned, crappy, unimaginative, and did I say crappy? strip malls. The place is littered with empty malls, and thinly populated bars and gambling joints. It's so American and so disappointing. There's the future of your tech generation: remaking the local mall in 3D. We're all fucking doomed, doomed I tell ya'.
There are allegedly thousands upon thousands of these residents but they are invisible. They have left behind wonderfully built completely empty homes and shops. It's kinda creepy in that scifi way. Every now and then (when not dancing in a bar with, maybe, 10 other people) I'll see a person fly by or catch a furry hustling past intent on some destination. I tried to follow one once but s/he obviously got spooked by that and ditched me. Then there was that time the fox in the tuxedo yelled at me for some reason I couldn't understand.
But, there's got to be something we could do in there that's interesting.
Initially, after I realized the paucity of imagination in there, I really wanted to subvert the whole place. Fuckin' tringo games. James wanted to create a ponzi scheme to swallow up a lot of Linden bucks and then flood the exchange and drive down their value, but that became impossible when the exchanges were suspended. Of course, there's still real estate speculation.
Well I thought we could unleash an idea virus, a meme, some little radioactive isotope of an object or idea that we could trace, like a virus simulation, through the population. The problem is that the SL society, such as it is, is hardly a cohesive community. How could a meme spread across a social desert?
Then, for some reason, I had a germ of an idea: let's put on a play. I know, it sounds bizarre. Maybe I was thinking about Stephenson's ractors or Gibson's Idoru. I imagined we could do a one-act, something simple. There would need to be props, costumes, scenery, direction, musical score perhaps, plenty to do and all of it SL object manipulation. Cool.
I mentioned it to James and we both met up in SL to screw around and try some stuff out. I was flying around looking for some textures for the seating I was building when James joined me, and we wandered into a theatre. It was empty of course, but dark. And when we walked out, it was light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light.
Finally I figured out they had set a wall prim to phantom so you could walk through it, and made a box that was transparent black. Well, it made sense to me. And to James.
We rushed "home" to try it out. I made a black, hollow, transparent box with phantom walls. It worked. Then James tried to make a follow spot. He had the brilliant idea of making a cone of light, also transparent, and wearing it (sorta like a party hat) so that the follow spot followed. It was fuckin' awesome. Great stuff. We got excited about learning how to do this on our own, through experimentation and dialogue. No f'n manuals. Just us.
...which is actually the point of the blog, the play late title being a reference to the notion that play, as a leading activity for learning and development, shouldn't mustn't doesn't end at the beginning of adulthood. Play is the best way to learn. Why dump it just when the stakes for learning are really getting high?
So we have learned about light...now we need to think about how the actors will actually give their lines... there is no voice stream in SL.
We'll think of something clever. Come back and check us out.
Meanwhile, play hard!
-- Valentine
There are allegedly thousands upon thousands of these residents but they are invisible. They have left behind wonderfully built completely empty homes and shops. It's kinda creepy in that scifi way. Every now and then (when not dancing in a bar with, maybe, 10 other people) I'll see a person fly by or catch a furry hustling past intent on some destination. I tried to follow one once but s/he obviously got spooked by that and ditched me. Then there was that time the fox in the tuxedo yelled at me for some reason I couldn't understand.
But, there's got to be something we could do in there that's interesting.
Initially, after I realized the paucity of imagination in there, I really wanted to subvert the whole place. Fuckin' tringo games. James wanted to create a ponzi scheme to swallow up a lot of Linden bucks and then flood the exchange and drive down their value, but that became impossible when the exchanges were suspended. Of course, there's still real estate speculation.
Well I thought we could unleash an idea virus, a meme, some little radioactive isotope of an object or idea that we could trace, like a virus simulation, through the population. The problem is that the SL society, such as it is, is hardly a cohesive community. How could a meme spread across a social desert?
Then, for some reason, I had a germ of an idea: let's put on a play. I know, it sounds bizarre. Maybe I was thinking about Stephenson's ractors or Gibson's Idoru. I imagined we could do a one-act, something simple. There would need to be props, costumes, scenery, direction, musical score perhaps, plenty to do and all of it SL object manipulation. Cool.
I mentioned it to James and we both met up in SL to screw around and try some stuff out. I was flying around looking for some textures for the seating I was building when James joined me, and we wandered into a theatre. It was empty of course, but dark. And when we walked out, it was light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light.
Finally I figured out they had set a wall prim to phantom so you could walk through it, and made a box that was transparent black. Well, it made sense to me. And to James.
We rushed "home" to try it out. I made a black, hollow, transparent box with phantom walls. It worked. Then James tried to make a follow spot. He had the brilliant idea of making a cone of light, also transparent, and wearing it (sorta like a party hat) so that the follow spot followed. It was fuckin' awesome. Great stuff. We got excited about learning how to do this on our own, through experimentation and dialogue. No f'n manuals. Just us.
...which is actually the point of the blog, the play late title being a reference to the notion that play, as a leading activity for learning and development, shouldn't mustn't doesn't end at the beginning of adulthood. Play is the best way to learn. Why dump it just when the stakes for learning are really getting high?
So we have learned about light...now we need to think about how the actors will actually give their lines... there is no voice stream in SL.
We'll think of something clever. Come back and check us out.
Meanwhile, play hard!
-- Valentine
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