Tag: virtualworlds

Towards hybrid events

“It’s hard to imagine to going back to 200 shows a year on the road, which is what I’ve done for my whole adult life” Instead, he pictures a combination of in-person and virtual concerts. While a show at home is obviously different than onstage, “We’re sharing a moment, and that’s at the heart of any live musical performance.”

They are in talks with venues to partner on integrations, which would allow them to put cameras in bars and clubs across the country to stream shows even when touring resumes — along with clear restrictions, such as not offering a streaming option until the in-person show sells out.

many events in the future will be hybrid, and the more seamless the interfaces are, the more impactful.

Fresh machinima

“Lang began as a joke, and in many ways, it still is – at its core, it is a parody of the ‘original series’ we all like to binge on Netflix or HBO. The idea was always that Herman Lang believes he is the star of one of these highbrow TV shows, and acts accordingly. Sadie King, the show’s true protagonist, keeps things grounded. In short, Lang is a comedy series about 2 private investigators, one that’s competent, and one named Lang.”

2021-08-13: The show is getting better every season, check out

Yet another Metaverse

Not sure the world needs another furry universe.

by harnessing the shared power of home PCs, “We could collectively create a space whose literal scale is comparable to the landmass of the planet Earth.

Virtual ghost towns

a new line of work for tour guides?

much like the physical world, whole swaths of towns, islands, forests, palaces, and simple shacks have been constructed digitally and then abandoned. These are the forgotten wonders of the digital world—in this case, the World of Warcraft.

The virtual afterlife

Fun speculation

I have heard people say that the technology will never catch on. People won’t be tempted because a duplicate of you, no matter how realistic, is still not you. But I doubt that such existential concerns will have much of an impact once the technology arrives. You already wake up every day as a marvelous copy of a previous you, and nobody has paralyzing metaphysical concerns about that. If you die and are replaced by a really good computer simulation, it’ll just seem to you like you entered a scanner and came out somewhere else. From the point of view of continuity, you’ll be missing some memories. If you had your annual brain-backup, say, 8 months earlier, you’ll wake up missing those 8 months. But you will still feel like you, and your friends and family can fill you in on what you missed. Some groups might opt out — the Amish of information technology — but the mainstream will presumably flock to the new thing.

Procedural Universes

the state of procedural universes:

You’re building a blueprint. So say one of our artists will build something and that will take say a week. But what they get from that is every possible variant of that. So if you build a cat, you also get a lion and a tiger and a panther and things that you’ve never seen—kind of mutations beyond that

Towards the far lands

On March 28, 2011, Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft and started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach the end of the universe. Nearly 3 years later, Mac is still walking, has quit his job and has made virtual exploration his career. Kurt has been travelling since March 2011 and as of September 2018 is expected to take another 20 years to reach his destination.

The legacy of Myst

improbably, the company behind myst is still around, 20 years later, and figuring out their next move:

Yeah, why don’t people make these games? Why can’t we just explore? Why do we always have to shoot things?’ So, maybe the time is right again to try that. That’s exciting. I still think there’s plenty of room for something really cool in this genre out there. And I don’t think we’ve done it yet.”

Real economic experiments?

Valve’s digital economies are a marvelous test-bed for meaningful experimentation. Not only do we have a full-information set (making sampling superfluous) but, more importantly, we can change the economy’s underlying values, rules and settings, and then sit back to observe how the community responds, how relative prices change, the new behavioral patterns that evolve. An economist’s paradise indeed

Nullsec space

this is extremely fascinating. the null sec areas of the game sound like the perfect place to send ron paul and his friends to.

The open-ended game is like a Hobbesian dreamworld in its no-security (“null-sec”) areas, that are open to scamming, murder, corporate espionage, economic manipulation, ruthless warmongering, and mind-boggling heists. But many of EVE’s law abiding players stay within safe high-security (“hi-sec”) areas that have mostly protected them from null-sec raiders, much to the chagrin of Goonswarm and its allies. Many of those in null-sec, including Goonswarm and its leader, resent hi-sec’s existence and aim to force their vision of the game on hi-sec players (who they insultingly refer to as “empire dwellers”). To accomplish that, they’re waging economic warfare and aiming to strike fear into all those who play in hi-sec space.