Filed under: Virtual worlds

Planet Calypso continues to bring in the big spenders. At the end of December, word got around that a Planet Calypso player had won an auction for the Crystal Palace Space Station, paying $330,000 real world cash for the item. A few years ago, another player mortgaged his home to pay around $100,000 for a virtual nightclub in Planet Calypso. Hold off on the laughter, though: the nightclub wound up turning quite a profit, and the space station looks to be well on its way to the same.

Now another player is following in the footsteps of those two, taking a chance on the mysterious Atrox Queen Egg. David "Deathifier" Storey purchased the egg in a public auction, paying the equivalent of $69,696 for the item. The egg has been around since 2006, and players don't know when it will hatch, or even what exactly is inside. Deathifier is taking a bit of a chance with his purchase, perhaps hoping it will turn the same sort of profit as previous newsmaking purchases in the game.

You can take a look at the full story here.

Linden Lab is in the throes of closing the official Second Life forums and is creating alternative discussion spaces in its Clearspace blog/forum hybrid.

According to previous figures from Linden Lab staff, fewer than 700 of 18.1 million registered Second Life accounts ever participated in the official forums provided by the Lab. The partial closure of many of the most heavily trafficked areas of those forums when Lab announcements were migrated back out to the blog in 2006 did little to boost participation in the official forums.

The official vbulletin-based forums "did not scale" according to Linden Lab and were difficult to maintain, even for such modest usage levels as they experienced.

One of the biggest differences between EVE Online and most other MMOs is the lack of a humanoid avatar. Even when you're docked up in a station, you can't leave your ship and walk around. The detailed avatars we create on starting the game are not so much avatars as passport photos; seen only as little square mug shots in chat channels and the official forums. In their never-ending quest to make EVE the definitive Sci-Fi simulation, this is something the game's developers CCP have always endeavoured to change. The introduction of a full body avatar feature, code-named "Walking in Stations", "Ambulation" and now known as "Incarna", has been undeniably the most anticipated feature since EVE went live. It's been in development since 2006 but has proven a much larger task than CCP originally anticipated. With the expansion tentatively slated for winter this year, new information on it is still harder to find than a sober Icelandic game developer.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I take a look at Incarna's development so far and why it hasn't been released yet.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a selection of reader questions that we've received in comments and in the virtual mailbag and do our best to offer up some useful answers. Join us as we whirl through the mail.

There's a been talk going around among users that a Linden Dollar bonus made to users that sign up for Second Life premium accounts is not paid to users who are upgrading an account from basic to premium. That is, it was said that only users creating a new premium account got the bonus and users who upgraded did not, despite Linden Lab's advertising material apparently promoting it for both.

A number of you wrote in asking us about that yesterday, and we contacted Linden Lab for you to get an answer one way or another. That line of questioning bore some definitive fruit.

"Get a life", "Get a first life", and so on, and so forth. If you're involved in virtual environments, you've probably heard this phrase a lot. Wagner James Au of New World Notes suggests that people who use those phrases are among the least likely to 'have a life' themselves.

Well, we'd say he's half right. It's more that the people you hear it from don't really have much of an idea of what life is all about and how it works. It's not an uncommon theme. Botgirl Questi points out that in order to see something more clearly, sometimes you have to look at it from a very different perspective.

This week, in The Virtual Whirl, we're going to take a couple perspectives for a spin, and talk about the meaning of life actually is, insofar as the phrase "get a life" is concerned.

Traditionally, Linden Lab's blog communications have seemed to be reserved for things that had been finalized, were being finalized but already set in stone, or may not have been set in stone but gave that appearance by being nearly identical both before and after user-feedback. All this punctuated by a smattering of video tutorials, infomercials and statistics.

Wallace Linden's recent attempt at (what we think might possibly be) a productive conversation on Second Life identification linking looks like a bit of a failure, mostly because it seems to have failed to distinguish itself from these traditional developer/operator communication patterns.

Come February, Linden Lab is having yet another attempt at enforcing the existing rules for event posting in Second Life. In the past, the Lab's gone at the process in a rather determined fashion on a number of occasions, but its energy each time ran out after only a few weeks of vetting events listings.

One of the matters of concern would be how event rules are actually applied this time around. If we were to divide events listings into quality events and spammy junk, quite a large number of the quality events don't actually comply with the posting rules – usually due to the number of events being held, and limits on the number of listings (or of listing changes) that the events system will tolerate.

Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Registrations are presently open for SL Pro! a two day conference being run by Linden Lab for 'serious' professional Second Life content-creators to take place in late February this year, in Second Life itself, with a bit of help from NMC (the New Media Consortium).

Unfortunately, it's a conference with more than one track, where the two tracks generally have a fair bit of overlap, so that's a bit of an issue. The two tracks are building and scripting, each with eight sessions.

Linden Lab says it hopes to have a public beta of the Second Life 2.0 viewer in February, presumably targeting an official release in March. Given that the Lab wants to move forward with quarterly planned viewer releases, this means that the current Second Life 1.23 viewer will lose official support at approximately the end of June.

Linden Lab says it has already finalized features and the user-interface at this stage, and is not planning on making any substantive changes between now and release. Any work beyond bug-fixes and stabilization for the viewer is to be deferred to the mid-year 2.1 release.

This week Linden Lab published a set of economic data for Q4 2009, and for 2009 as a whole. After going through the data in detail, and discovering at least one important typo and one important calculation error, it looked like we were going to have to recheck every figure before presenting them.

That's a lot of work, especially as the data published in the quarterly/annual reports doesn't follow the same definitions as the ongoing statistical feeds or is not represented in them.

So we thought, well sod that for a game of soldiers. Instead, let's talk about the report's claim that the Second Life economy has grown 65% in 2009 over 2008, and why that's just rubbish.

Linden Lab's last CFO (Chief Financial Officer), John Zdanowski oversaw one of the largest growth periods in the history of Second Life. That growth came to a bit of a shuddering halt around the time of his departure last March, though we think that's just coincidental [We'll be looking closer at the 2009 Second Life metrics later this week].

Throughout the comparatively flat second, third and fourth quarters of 2009, the CFO's chair has remained unwarmed, but Linden Lab announced today that the position has now finally been filled by Bob Komin.

Just lately, over the last month and a half or so, regular Second Life users will have spotted an increase in subsystem outages, including transaction failures, object and teleportation problems, and just general weirdness. Systems seem to be experiencing trouble that you could just about set a watch by.

Linden Lab's Frank Ambrose explains that that is to be expected and there's some more to come as some of the oldest pieces of the Second Life infrastructure are ripped out for replacement or relocation from their original site at the San Francisco data-center.

So, as you may recall last week Linden Lab responded about what appeared to be Second Life advertisements that capitalized on the recently-released James Cameron film, Avatar.

Linden Lab implied (though didn't actually state plainly) that the advertisements were not intended to cause confusion between Second Life and Avatar.

Since about Christmas (just after previews showing the blue-skinned Na'vi began to become available to the general public) IMVU started running some blue-skinned ads of its own.

It was when we saw the blue-avatared IMVU advertisement that sprung up during the same period that we inevitably started thinking about Sea Monkeys.

There's more similarities going on here than just the visible, so let's rummage around and see if we can't find one of the old advertisements in our files.