The Birth Of Onder Skall
As we come down to the end of the year I find myself once again in a strange moment of transition. A few months ago I said goodbye to my little Games Park and settled on Metaversed Island. Now we’re renaming the island and moving it… I’ll fill you in on that some other time. Nick Wilson officially added another member to our team too, although I wouldn’t dream of stealing his thunder by announcing who that was here. We’re launching two gigantic, v-world changing projects next year… which means lots of late nights coming up on my part.
On a professional level, I went through a number of transitions this year. I made a go of it as a full-time v-world journalist, but I discovered something along the way. While I could rock the job, I’d rather make things move.
I started off the year creating Second Life Games. It was fun, and had the edge of being unique: I couldn’t even find someone interested in doing games reporting. Based on that I ended up with a weekly at New World Notes and settled into some freelance work for the Second Life Herald.
It kept me in Linden Dollars, and I was skilling up my writing as I went, but it wasn’t doing much else. I needed to get serious about the business of virtual worlds. So I started looking, and discovered Metaversed.com.
Nick Wilson was one of the few people writing no-nonsense business news about virtual worlds. We started talking, and discovered that we wanted the same thing: to learn more, and to work in these new places. I started writing for Metaversed for free with the understanding that we were going to work toward extremely high quality content that would be worthy of sponsorship. Eventually, while somehow putting full-time effort into Metaversed and at the same time a day job, we made it. I was working in New Media full -time.
Nick and I surfed the absolute bleeding edge of business in virtual worlds, reporting what was going on in the industry, interviewing the influentials, and digging for answers. It was thrilling and, at times, downright mind-blowing. Every day we found a new frontier that was being explored for the first time. We were discovering things that nobody knew about, and often things that nobody had imagined. I was living in a constant state of amazement.
Somewhere along the lines, though, I think we both realized that being a newsie wasn’t really going to change things. Yes, our blog absolutely kicked butt, our events were awesome, and the podcasts were followed closely… but none of that was changing things “out there”. We started talking about a “Project X”, another kind of business we could start that would change the way things were done in v-worlds. Eventually we settled on two.
Of course, I’m not quite ready to tell you what those are. I don’t mean to tease, but all good things…
This meant that Nick would need to do some running around in preparation, and I would have to hold the fort around Metaversed. I stopped contributing to New World Notes, and eventually even my one-offs to the Herald stopped entirely. I was chasing stories, making contacts, doing the whole “investigative reporting” thing and at the same time I was producing events. Eventually, I hung my reporter hat up as well to focus down on the events and on planning for the “Project X” I’m heading up next year.
I was sitting in my office in Second Life, taking care of some IM’s and juggling notecards, when I took the picture above. That was earlier tonight. The artifacts around me (there are a dozen more just off-camera) each represent entire stories that I could fill volumes on. Let me end this post by telling you a bit about what you’re looking at in the picture above. Hopefully it will help to paint a picture of how much humanity fills a v-world, and why we’re all bothering to be there.
The red cup is a re-creation of a Tim Hortons coffee cup – instantly recognizeable by any Canadian. It was created by Jade Serdyuk as part of her incredibly true to life rendering of a Tim Hortons franchise. We met randomly in the Straylight sim, and it turns out she’s the one person in Second Life that I’ve met in real life. She actually hired me for a job a few years back.
The glasses, I’ve written about in the past. Incredible creations by someanimal Arnold. When I bought them the permissions were set wrong, and the copy on the shelf actually disappeared. There was a bit of a scramble to get them back up there, as I recall, as I think there was some land permission oddities.
The retro-style 35mm camera is from Tooter Claxton and is highly detailed. Look him up – Tooter makes some of the most fascinating avatars and grungy/dirty/rusty/dusty builds in Second Life. You’ll feel transported just walking into his main shop.
Just behind me is AngryBeth Shortbread’s “SL version” of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. It constantly transforms, and I’ve never seen the same image twice. Annie Ok put up an incredible Flickr stream of the show. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure this is how I first met Annie Ok. Very cool person.
The sword. It’s like the ultimate symbol of New Media. Danny Zelmanov created this version, and it sells well to the folks who frequent the Midgar sim. (My article about the Midgar sim got Digg’ed big-time, earning Wagner James Au a nice boost to his traffic.) Lots of fan-fiction has revolved around that blade. It’s is based on the one that the character Cloud uses in the movie “Final Fantasy: Advent Children”. It’s a composite of several swords, actually. The movie is actually based on the incredible game “Final Fantasy VII”, which is legend (and rightly so). When you play as Cloud you swap out various giant swords.
So there was a game, a movie, fan fiction, a v-world community, and eventually a v-world rendering. The artifact represents volumes of experiences and emotions that have transcended generations of media. Looking at it I feel… I don’t know… connected to the media itself.
I’m in my “real” avatar; the one I wear when I’m dealing with executives and professors entering v-worlds for the first time. I change into “Mr. Generic” when I meet them, but I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I do. There’s a picture of both of my avatars on the desk there, standing back-to-back. I’m still sorting out how I feel about adopting two unique and completely separate looks. It’s still strange to me.
I’ll tell you about the year to come very soon, I promise.