SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Books 2, 3 and 4 showed up today - I’ll review each one in its own post.

 

So, onto review #2, The Dark Side of Game Texturing. I’ll try and start out positive - the book handles concepts and tutorials in a way that seem geared to the Photoshop beginner - it even has a demo version of PS CS on the included DVD, along with two pages of Photoshop keyboard shortcuts (always good) and, like the book in review #1, takes some time to go over the basics of composition and art, including demos of tileable textures that show repeating patterns.

Unfortunately, the bad outweighs the book’s good merits. Some of the fault isn’t necessarily that of the book - it concentrates highly on creating textures for the Quake 3, Half-Life, Unreal, and Torque engines, and makes no apologies for it. Its absolutely geared towards the PVP shoot ‘em up gamer that wants to make their own mods - a legitimate market, but not one with a lot of stylistic or technical crossover to creating textures for use in SL.  Where this bogs the book down for SL texture artists is the sheer amount of time and print spent on explaining how textures and UV maps work for these engines, what color translates as transparency, how to make sprites for gunshots and blood spatter, animated textures that work in traditional game engines, etc.

Which leads to the next aspect of disappointment - the approach to texturing and the quality/content of the tutorials. I can forgive tutorials that concentrate on a specific genre (in this case, the rusty metals, pipes, and worn crates of the aforementioned games) as long as the quality of the final product, and the techniques taught during the course of the tutorial, are good enough so that one can apply what is learned to other scenarios. This book does neither very well. The actual tutorials are pretty much surpassed in quality by almost anything you can find for free online, plus online you don’t have to flip back two chapters when the author says “repeat what we did in Chapter 3’s tutorial”. Another aspect I really didn’t like, especially after my first book’s review, is that the author overly relies on photosourcing to create things like brick walls, wood, etc. When he does attempt to create a texture without photosourcing, the results are so abysmal you feel like he purposefully half-hearted the effort just so he could skip to ripping a photo. Now I don’t have a problem with photosourcing per se - photos are an invaluable way to add realism to a texture - but with the myriad problems with licensing and copyright, its automatically limiting to restrict yourself to only photosourcing when you could be learning the techniques to create beautiful textures completely from scratch. Not only is scratch 100% legit, but its infinitely more flexible and saves tons of time. For SL artists that want to make sure their work is completely OK for resale or use in projects for pay, this book doesn’t address your needs - again, its target audience is for the hobbiest that wants to play with specific game engines.

After chalking up the book as a general bust, I popped in the DVD to check out the promised royalty-free textures. You aren’t missing anything. They’re all photos, but poorly taken ones (especially if you’ve read the chapter in book #1 about taking photos for your own texture work). Crooked windows, extreme perspective angles, flashbulb burns, stark shadows, backlit signs - just about every photography mistake is on display, making the vast majority of these worthless. Stick with GIS or any of the royalty free online sites.

Overall score is 2 out of 10. If you’re in the target audience for this book and you’re just starting out, you may find some worth out of it, especially if you don’t have an Internet connection. Otherwise there isn’t anything in here you can’t find online for free, and usually of better quality.

Aaaaaaaarg, it’s the future salon on ARGs. Theater with your software and stories gone wild:

Come to the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower on Sheep island (<–SLURL) at 4 PM PST *tonight* 11/27 for the Second Life Future Salon meeting and podcast on alternate reality games (ARGs). Tonight’s guests are:

*Tony Walsh, Clickable Culture

*Elan Lee, 42 Entertainment

*Dan Hon, Mind Candy

*hosted by Jerry Paffendorf, The Electric Sheep Company

If we fill the sim (likely since we often do and this one got picked up on Boing Boing), overflow access will kindly be provided on the web by DestroyTV.com
– the hardest working avatar in show business — where you’ll see and
hear streaming video and audio of the salon, and can even chat with
everyone from the comfort of your browser.

For those new to the salon meetings you can subscribe to this blog
for future updates (please let me know if
you’re interested in helping on some light, credited design work on the
SLFS blog–we’ve been between looks for a while), join the "SL Future Salon" group in SL for inworld
announcements, and the Yahoo! group for emails. Last month we began posting SLFS podcasts to metaversesessions.com, so you can check there for audio archives.

For some background and scope of what’s fair game at the salon, here
are some links ranging from ARGs to just plain AR that influenced my
prep:

ReGenesis (one of Tony’s ARGs, via Clickable Culture)

I Love Bees (one of Elan’s ARGs, via Wikipedia)

Perplex City (one of Dan’s ARGs, via Wikipedia)

ARGNet

"Lisa the Skeptic" episode of The Simpsons

ARG influence on the Lost TV series (via Clickable Culture)

lonelygirl15.com (I really liked this month’s Wired cover article, but there’s no link yet)
Borat

Infocult on ARGs in Second Life

Gary Hayes on ARGs in SL and virtual spaces

Andy Havens questions for the salon (in a comment on this blog)

Chris Carella/Satchmo Prototype on Software Theater

Nick Yee on The Blurring of Work and Play

The Yes Men

Ze Frank

Incident at Loch Ness by Werner Herzog

The Idiots by Lars von Trier

Four Eyed Monsters

Cory Edo’s response (and follow-up here and here) to the SLLA’s bounty for attacks on Electric Sheep, Millions of Us, and Rivers Run Red

Who Killed Miss Norway?

Zombo.com

As you can see from the links, I’m drawing this pretty widely, not
minding dropping the G in ARG, like SL drops the G in MOG. I’m really
interested in exploring the possibilities of all imagined stories and
characters that mix with reality as usual (are purported to be true or
real — or in the case of events in a virtual world, are technically
very true and real with the caveat that they take place in cyberspace);
alternate/reality generated content (like Sasha Cohen interacting with
people that don’t know Borat is a character, and recording the
encounters — which has it’s ethical and legal issues);
co-created storylines that take on a life of their own; community and
culture that grows up around ARG stories and challenges and how
widespread and sustainable it can be (I think of the characters in The
Idiots, as a kind of obscure example for anyone who’s seen that, who
try to take their idiot behavior home to their families as a test of
how committed they are and find themselves completely shunned); ARGs as
a more efficient platform for celebrity for their participants (so the
best contributors to the stories are more fully recognized for their
talents and further incented to participate); ARG business models and
how they can reward their participants; real work and ARGs
(ARGsourcing, ha — couple of wild ideas here), and anything that a big
fat, unfolding interactive story that spreads across many kinds of
media would just make more interesting. Which is pretty much
everything, and a lot more things in virtual worlds like Second Life.

As the poet Muriel Rukeyser put it, from the human side: "The
universe is made of stories, not of atoms." I’m looking forward to
hearing from everyone how the future of unchained interactive stories
might meet with the future of work and production of media. Lots to
noodle on, and hopefully some very cool creative ideas for people to
run with. Definitely some theater with your software, or your new
media. Send me any questions for tonght. It’s all fair game.

Update: More posted here. The SL Future Salon on ARGs will meet in the 5th floor auditorium of Sheep Tower (<–SLURL) at 4 PM PST, Monday, November 27th (if all goes well the tower will be talking to us ;)). Destroy Television
will be present so you can watch, listen, and chat from the web, and
the audio URL will be made available for overflow. IM SNOOPYbrown
Zamboni/Jerry Paffendorf with any questions. And heya, Boing Boing readers, come on inworld.

Thanks to those on the SL Future Salon Yahoo! group who chipped in with thoughts on this one: On Monday, November 27th from 4-5 PM PST the Second Life Future Salon will meet on the topic of alternate reality games or ARGs with Clickable Culturist and ARG designer man Tony Walsh; I Love Bees-making 42 Entertaiment creative Elan Lee; Adrian Hon and/or Dan Hon from Mind Candy, the creators of Purplex City,
and me on the 1s and 2s. Please send any ideas for questions or topics
for these guys to jerry[at]electricsheepcompany[dot]com, and I’ll post
an outline and location later this week.

From Wikipedia:

An alternate reality game (ARG) is a type of game
that overlaps the game world with reality, by utilizing real world
media, in order to deliver an interactive narrative experience to the
players — a kind of surrealism.

ARGs are typified by involving the players with the story and its
characters, by encouraging them to explore the story, solve plot based
challenges, and interact with game characters. ARGs can be delivered
via websites, email, telephones, or any other means of communication
which is readily available to the players.

ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly.
They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through
supporting products (collectable puzzle cards in the case of Perplex City) or because they support or promote an existing product (Halo 2 in the case of I Love Bees).

Tony points me to some thoughts by Bryan Alexander that popped up on the Infocult blog yesterday, who’s riffing with Andy Havens (probably my favorite commentor on Terra Nova) about ARGs in virtual worlds like Second Life. Since Destroy TV
came on the scene (she’s now streaming video after the big move to
Chris and Becky’s place) I’ve thought about ARGs and involving people
in co-creating massive stories quite a lot (how can something like DTV
take on a life of its own?), and the recent Wired cover article on lonelygirl15
and how it came about completely pushed me over the edge. I’m
completely hooked on ideas for stories that are platforms for people’s
creativity and involvement. More on that later in the week as we
approach the salon, and of course nothing but that stuff at the salon.
I’m psyched.