Welcome to the Battlestar Pacifica, the new sci-fi RPG zone in Second Life.

I’m Lt. Ariane Brodie junior officer and viper pilot. Here we are in the CIC of this huge and vastly detailed Battlestar. There are four decks complete with quarters for all the crew (to help pay for the game) engineering, galley, officers quarters, gym, briefing room, two landing bays, 8 launch bays on 4 decks.

I’m scheduled to go on a routine patrol flight of the nearby fleet. There are four ships in the fleet at the moment. The largest is the Battlestar of course.

I’m first doing a flyby of the luxury ship 7th Heaven. This is the first ship new people go to first. Looking up through the glass dome you will see the Pacifica. Each ship has a docking bay where you can catch a shuttle to the other ships.

Here is an outer view of the viper flying past the mining ship and worker quarters. The worker quarters are actually nicer than my cramped pilots rack. There is also the Celestia which is nicer, but not as nice as the 7th Heaven. All the ships currently have plenty of rentals for people interested in joining the fleet.

Patrol is finished, time to come in for a landing on the port side strip. The Pacifica is a downright huge ship. but still landing can be a little tricky. Once on the deck there is a ship elevator back to the bays.

Perfect landing and the ship is safely in the bay. Patrol is over. Mission accomplished.

Time for a much deserved rest. Things have been pretty routine. We have not seen real war since the Cylon war nearly 40 years ago. What could possibly go wrong?

*

Meanwhile…

Now is the time to join, the war begins soon… TO BE CONTINUED…

Virtual Society Battlestar Galactica, exploring, role play, sci-fi, secondlife

Today Linden Labs took the sad but inevitable move of outlawing all casino games in Second Life. Here are the key paragraphs:

What kind of wagering games are affected?

The policy applies to gambling games which:

(1) (a) rely on chance or random number generation to determine a winner, OR (b) rely on the outcome of real-life organized sporting events,

AND

(2) provide a payout in (a) Linden Dollars, OR (b) any real-world currency or thing of value.

Does the policy apply to all games based on real-life sports activities?

The policy prohibits Sports Books or Sports Betting, including the placing of bets on actual sporting events against a book-maker or through a betting exchange. However, the policy does not prohibit “fantasy sports” leagues if the rules and operation of those games comply with all applicable laws.

Does this policy apply to “skill contests?”

This policy only applies to wagering games that meet the criteria listed above. If your game or contest does not meet the above criteria, it is not restricted under this policy, but applicable laws and local practice may impose additional requirements on you. This policy does not give you guidance on what your legal obligations are – as noted above, that is your responsibility to determine.

Now some fundamental questions must be addressed. For example, I’m a big fan of Tringo.

People put money into the game, and at the end of the game the winner collects the pot. No one is obligated to put money in, and it is a game of skill mostly but there is a chance element. Is it gambling?

I hope not, but personally I’d play for free. In fact, I’m a big spender. I throw in money just to make the game more exciting for others. But if they stopped the pots and payouts, I’d still play (in fact I suspect a lot more people would, its intimidating to play when you are broke).

Then there is piggy:

Poor piggy, no one will play with him anymore. He looks so sad.

He is one of a class of "moneyball" games. People put money in to play, after 5 minutes, piggy randomly redistributes the money people payed in. Sometimes you get more back, sometimes less. But all the money gets payed out (as far as I know).

Moneyballs have been a staple of parties in Second Life for 3 years now. Its a way owners can attract a crowd that is more fun and exciting than money chairs.

While games like Tringo may be able to skirt the definition, moneyballs and piggys probably will not.

P.S. If LL wants to get really mean and strict with their gambling ban, all they have to do is change the script compiler so that the llFrand function will cause a script error when transfer permissions are set.

Just an evil thought.

Metaverse News gambling, secondlife, virtual economy

An interesting but long article about the merging of virtual worlds appears in this months Technolology Review. Here’s the link, but it will probably require registration to read it.

This of course is an interest of mine. I love exploring multiple virtual worlds, and two favorites are Second Life and Google Earth.

The cliff notes version of the article is this:
Second life is a social virtual world you can explore and interact with using a customized avatar. People are building and programming cool things in Second Life, the scripting langage and access via XML allows people to build objects that tie the second life world to the real world.

Meanwhile, Google Earth is adding all sorts of cool things to their map of the world software, like building 3D models of buildings where they exist, linking to photographs, wiki information, restaurant and driving directions, pointing out geological features etc.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could merge the two?

Personally, I do not think we could geographically merge the two, in fact I do not think we need to. I do not see the point of making the continents of Second Life conform to the real world.

What would be cool is to merge the abilities of both games, add avatar walking/flying and local chatting and maybe even scripting in Google Earth, while adding geotagging and other advanced web integration to Second Life.

As currently constituted though, this makes no sense in either program, If you want to add links to photos or geotags to wiki info in Second Life, just put a scripted object on your land. On the other hand, while it might be cool to be able to explore google earth with a customizable avatar, it would not really add much to the experience (unless it were possible to take your avatar to say Times Square and be able to chat locally with anyone else whose avatar is in Times Square)

What should be a goal is to create a 3D internet standard “browser” that can handle both kinds of environments. Instead of launching Second Life or Google Earth, you could launch one browser that could read both kinds of data and link back and forth or with the 2D web.

Click on a link and Boom, you are in Google Earth’s version of Times Square where you can get a geo link to the wiki page.

But, lets add a geolink to someone’s recreation of Times Square in Second Life, and instantly teleport there.

As you can see, this is already fairly easy to do. but you have to launch 3 seperate programs to do it. What if we only needed one, and what if the links all work the same way, and the avatars and usernames stayed similar, etc.

That is the goal of various metaverse projects. Thats where we are eventually headed.

Virtual Society googleearth, mirror worlds, philosophy, secondlife, virtual worlds