Yet More Machinima Clips

This one appears to be inspired by Overman (at least according to the credits). It's a Sims2 music video of Nine Inch Nails "Something I Can Never Have". Well done.

It looks like IBM is starting up a game in Second Life. This vid on YouTube (SL machinima) describes The Sentinel 2.0 project (Sentinel - the last defender of Codestation - who fought the monster - was defeated - and his pieces scattered in SL). Now you have to put Sentinel back together again. Interesting. I went to the island (SLurl) but all I found was a bunch of stage 01 black boxes, a video console that did not appear to work, and nobody in sight. Hmmm...maybe try again later.

A somewhat amusing machinima discussing the parasitics and necrotics to be found in the Half Life universe.

Another HL machinima, Vitamin Orange, set to music by the Doors. by Zachariah Scott of Lit Fuse Films and in conjunction with Pessimist Productions.

Second Earth

Back.

Just finished reading an article in MIT's Technology Review on Second Earth, the merging of Second Life and Google Earth (unfortunately requires registration). There's some interesting tidbits in the article, including a reference to a book I've never heard about called Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter (from 1991 - interesting - also covered in Second Life Herald).

It really is too bad the focus is on the merging of virtual worlds (or basically the ability to control or manipulate avatars and interact with the world) with real world data in Google Earth. I find that concept rather dull what with the real world just outside the window and covered in glorious and spectacular HD on shows like Discovery or National Geographic.

No, what will be interesting is the creation of imaginary worlds for the collective experience ('consensual hallucination') of everyone. Not real boring worlds (Earth, Mars), but imaginary ones for the purpose of collaborative storytelling and experiences, virtual religions and the like. Funny that the article mentions the creation of the web as being akin to the creation of these virtual worlds and expects, somehow, that what will be in these virtual worlds will simply mirror the real, and somehow these worlds will reflect places like Amazon (what, a gigantic warehouse of books and electronics with spamavatars trying to recommend this or that purchase?) that grew from the nascent www technology. I suspect in twenty years the most traveled virtual worlds will not be the real (Google Earth), the commercial (WoW, Lineage), or the social networking sites/worlds (Second Life, My3DSpace, FaceBust), but will be imaginary ones created from the ground up by the collective users and by that I do not mean Second Life (which is a cross between a sandbox and the nearest shopping mall) but 'real' virtual worlds that will rival the greatest works of fiction/cinema of the last century. Or religion (what was the last religion 'created' - Scientology?). When we see the emergence of a virtual religion, then we will know the 'consensual hallucination' is real.

Seriously, walking across some rain clouds over Tennessee is just not an interesting use of a virtual world technology.

IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable | CNET News.com

Terra Nova's State of Play Symposium took place this weekend. Apparently the most interesting session was the one discussing the taxation of virtual goods, services, exchanges. It has been covered here, and here). Are there any H&R Block offices set up inside of Second Life yet?

In other news, the World Series of Video Games will have extensive TV coverage on CBS, CSTV, and Voom HD (from AmpedSports and NYT). Unfortunately, it sounds like it will have to be edited so that the 'violent' parts are not shown. Wow, how exciting.