Kami Harbinger

After days, even weeks of laborious research, the mad scientists here at Kami Harbinger Labs have managed to shrink avatars down to teeny-tiny little figurines that obey your commands! Naturally, the first use my demented mind could conceive for such subservient and tiny creatures was RPG miniatures.

KamiMinis are a revolution in gaming in SL! By dropping them into the world (usually on a Kami Gaming Table), they will snap into position on the grid, every quarter-meter. Touch the mini, and you will get a menu allowing you to turn and move the mini by precise steps, change its color, number (for identification), or select one of the 64 images in each KamiMini!

You can copy your original mini (you won't be able to copy rezzed minis) as many times as you like, and changes you make to the color, image, or number will remain even when you take it back to inventory!

Many more sets, including very different genres and art styles, will be coming in the weeks to come, and custom requests are considered.

All products are available at Kami Harbinger's Curiosity Shoppe (Magritte, 148,202,29).

The Kami Gaming Table, FREE with any KamiMini! A graph-paper table for RPG miniatures! (click to zoom)

KamiMini: Hero1, only L$250 ! Scripted RPG miniatures! (click to zoom)

KamiMini: NPC1, only L$250 ! Scripted RPG miniatures! (click to zoom)

I just finished reading the AvaStar (<http://www.the-avastar.com/>, no link because I don't want them to have any googlejuice)... Their obnoxious press release claims it's "the first professional publication", which is a total lie; depending on what you mean by "professional", it was either Second Life Herald née Alphaville Herald, or Reuters, and more recently In The Grid, Metaverse Messenger, and SL Pixel Pulse. There's many more, but that's what's on my regular reading list. It's simply retarded to claim any priority over these existing publications. AvaStar is merely one of many rags published at SL residents.

So, that aside, what's the paper like? Is it worth L$150?

It's crap.

Newbies will learn more from just reading the SL Knowledge Base and the aforementioned free periodicals. Experienced residents will find it pointless and condescending. Their "business tips" might be suitable for a child making a lemonade stand, but are obvious and a waste of time to say to adults trying to do real business. The commentary on 2 million Residents is empty noise, and doesn't Catherine Linden have some real work to do, anyway, not stand around talking to these bozos?

The ads and the back-page girl are all fully-clothed. This would be expected in a non-SL publication, but it's actually shocking to see this kind of modesty in SL. The first SL tabloid, Second Life Herald's Post 6 Grrrl pinups (here's another if you're not into catgirls) are far more... Well, more.

And then there's the price for this pile of electrons, all 31 pages of it, including the cover and non-pornographic girlie pic. You can grab it from their website for free as a PDF, and have something almost readable, or, this is the great bit, you could spend L$150 of your hard-earned camping-chair money on it in SL!

If they were aiming at professionals in SL, they've failed miserably at the content. If they were aiming at newbies, they've failed miserably at the pricing. The advertising rates are astronomical, so expect either a gigantic drop in rates before the next issue, or a totally ad-free issue. I don't know who'd ever buy this. Certainly not me.

For even less generous commentary about the publishers and their corporate tool Aimee Weber, see The First Second Life Tabloid, Second Life Herald and the links in their comments.

I slept. I dreamed I had a robot brain, not a horrible decaying meat brain like you disgusting fleshy things. I was very happy. I woke up and realized how boned I am... I'm one of you mammals. This sucks.

Raph Koster (of whom I have previously written) has announced what he's working on: Areae... "Areas", except you probably can't trademark that, so instead he uses an unpronouncable and unspellable Latin word.

And that's fine, except he's got nothing. No screenshots. No product description. Zilch. It's less than vapor, it's less than smoke and mirrors, it's an empty space filled only with the lonesome echo of public relations bafflegab. Here's the front page blurb, in case it gets edited out later:

Areae means "many places" in Latin. Depending on who you ask, you pronounce it "Airy-eh" or "Airy-eye" or "Area-ee"... well. It doesn't matter. What matters is what it means: many places, many worlds.

Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new. Something anyone can jump into. Something where anyone can find something fun to do or a game to play. Something where anyone can build their own place on the virtual frontier.

Feel free to wander around the site and learn about us. We're hiring!

You know, it's a bad idea to tell people your company name doesn't matter. Claiming to be everything to everyone, and so easy that Helen Keller could hit max level in 2 hours, despite her trivial handicaps of being deaf, blind, and dead, isn't particularly encouraging, either.

(click to zoom)

Then there's that company logo (see right), where apparently a child's conception of a medieval castle, a giant kaiju dog chasing a car with no doors, a medevac chopper, a UFO and a Flash Gordon rocketship landing next to the Space Needle, and some high-fiving stick figures are all part of the same world. Someone should tell Raph that "user-created content" doesn't mean "random nonsense".

Looking over the jobs, it's obvious why there's nothing there. They haven't even started. They're looking for the most basic technical talent. Maybe they can get the one artist they're looking for to make them a logo that doesn't look like a child doodled it on a Denny's placemat with the free crayons.

Elsewhere, Raph writes, "We're working on some new tech that will literally change how virtual worlds are made. We've got a cool world or two incubating on the back burner."... What he's talking about here is Magic Pixie Dust^TM. Magic Pixie Dust^TM is any unspecified and nonexistent "technology" that allows you to create vaporware and fuel fanboy discussion without actually committing to anything. He has no technical people on-board in the company, only marketroids, ergo, he has no tech. This is a bald-faced lie, of which any man of honor would be ashamed.

Mark Wallace, usually a sane enough mind, calls Vaporeae "exciting". What, exactly, is so exciting? There's no game. There's no world. It's an empty Web 2.0 marketing website. If it was late March, I'd figure this was an elaborate April Fool's joke.

People, think about this. It's Raph Koster. He's left after trashing [ed: changed from a previous, inaccurate phrase] two giant online worlds already: Ultima Online had to have most of his virtual-world ecology and economics modelling removed because it was completely inadequately designed, it didn't work, it was completely unable to withstand contact with actual players, and anyone who had ever run a MUD for real would have known that and could have told him right up front. Then he repeated the same catastrophe with Star Wars Galaxies, first making the most deathly boring, often just plain unplayable, MMORPG in the history of the world, before saner heads prevailed and fixed it by removing his influences, finally dumping the entire game and starting over from scratch. The man made a freaking STAR WARS game where you couldn't play a Jedi!!! Hey, while you're at it, Raph, why not make a WWII game where you throw flowers at Hitler's troops, or an adaptation of Citizen Kane without a sled? Hardly an inspiring record. If anyone is going to take the "tired old MMO" and make it "fresh and new", it ain't gonna be Raph Koster. The man does not learn from his mistakes, and has such hubris, such hilariously total lack of self-awareness, that he published a "theory of fun", after making two of the most unfun game experiences in the history of gaming. Unspeakably slow level grinds, grubbing in the dirt endlessly for resources so you can build your way up from the stone age every single day and then getting paid nothing for your work, and hunting rabbits to extinction are Raph's idea of "fun".

The rest of his team and advisors are old MUD people (of the lot of them, Richard Bartle is the only one who seems sane and capable of learning from experience, but he hasn't done anything new lately, either...). Great, glad that they're all still around and theorizing about how they'd fix things if they were in charge, instead of these young whippersnappers with their modern technology... But none of them have implemented anything new in 15-25 years. Raph rails endlessly about others not learning the lessons of the past Ancient Wizards of MUDdom, but seems unable himself to learn the lessons of the present, for instance that people like games that don't suck.

What's depressing is, they're probably going to get a few tens of millions in venture capital, based only on their vapor site. In 2 or 3 years, in the unlikely event that they make it that long, in the totally improbable--bordering on supernaturally impossible--event that they finally start to have the vaguest hint of a shippable product, that's the time for them to be announcing stuff. Raph is doing the same routine as Tim Roberts of Infinium's Phantom console: lots of PR for a vaporware Magic Pixie Dust^TM-fueled product that doesn't exist and never will, take the money, and run.

Quit rewarding vapor with praise, people. You just encourage them.

Apparently, it's not "tactful" for me to say that running an application server on Windows XP Pro is retarded. I'm even informed that they're trying their best. Hey, I just tell the truth. I'm sure people participating in the Special Olympics are doing their best, too, but they're still retarded, and shouldn't be running application servers.

Oh, geez. I just checked specialolympics.org:

   Linkname: Special Olympics Public Website                                    
        URL:                                                                    
          http://www.specialolympics.org/Special+Olympics+Public+Website/       
          default.htm                                                           
    Charset: iso-8859-1                                                         
     Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0                                                  

It's hard for newbies to get into SL. They're given the standard substandard run through Orientation Island, then dumped in the toxic wastelands of Ahern. Much like Kansas farmgirls getting off the bus in New York, they tend to fall into lives of debauchery and stripping. If only there was some way to tell them you're more experienced, and willing to help out!

(click to zoom)

So I've made a little freebie gadget: the Volunteer Mentor Armband. This has no relation to Linden Lab's own "mentor" program, which is about perpetuating the Orientation Island situation[0]. Instead, it's a way for established Residents to bring newbies up to speed and into the culture of SL, on their own.

Come by my shop and pick one up--it's completely free and open source--and wear it when you're feeling helpful. When you put it on, it'll give you instructions, and it contains an instruction notecard.

Use '/411 mentor' to show the hover text, or '/411 nomentor' to hide it. By setting one or more topics with '/411 topic +SOMETHING', you can focus on what you're good at instead of trying to be everything to everyone, like the "official" Live Help and Orientation Island people do.

Orientation Island[0]: Orientation Island's not a bad idea, but it's a very passive education, so only self-motivated learners will ever learn anything there; the people who need it most will never do so. And it's so understaffed and overloaded that there's no chance of getting the help you need. I recently created an alt, and never once saw a mentor.

For a while now, I've been thinking about store presence. It's important to have someone in your shop or club or whatever, even if you're just sitting around building, because that green dot draws other green dots, and they can ask you questions and see demonstrations of your products, and soon you have a wild party of commerce. Camping is the lowest form of this, but something to draw people to your store is essential.

Products don't sell themselves, which is why we have salesmen. Advertising helps, but an empty storefront doesn't sell very much. For a few months earlier this year, I wasn't in-world much, so I didn't sell nearly as much as I had grown to expect. Even now, lag in Jiminy is getting insane, so I can't often work there, and I may be moving soon.

Let's say you're obsessed, and spend 8 hours of every day in-world (as I do on the weekends). SL is world-wide, so that's 16 hours a day that you're not there when potential customers are. You might be able to hire someone to be a salesman; it's a reasonable job for a newbie you can trust, but training them consumes time you may not have, and people wander off, and don't really want to do "Second Work" for a few L$ an hour... Not to mention the minimum wage laws, which may apply here.

(click to zoom)

So I came up with a cheap technical fix. THE KAMI ROBOT! The Kami Robot is a simple scripted agent that monitors for chat and responds or hands out notecards, can detect people to greet them, can page you if something important comes up, and can even sell items or accept tips. It can be a receptionist, a bartender, a salesman, or that weird guy at the tavern in every RPG that hands you the Spatula of Destiny.

Now sure, any scripter can spend a few hours or days and write one of these from scratch, that does some specific set of tasks. What separates the Kami Robot from all others is the magic of "Robot.cfg". A notecard with events and commands, simple enough to be written by any non-technical person, will control your Robot's every behavior. Here's an example of a rather surly receptionist:

listen/robot/say/0/I'm not a robot, you're a robot!
listen/kami/say/0/Kami Harbinger's not in right now. If it's urgent, slip me L$10.
money/10/msg/owner/%u has an urgent message for you.
touch/say/0/Don't poke me, or I'll poke you.

The Kami Robot is available now for the low, low price of L$1000! If you'd rather not use my last-minute-design shiny robot body, you should be able to just pull the script out and drop it in something else.

If response to this model is good, I'll be making a 2.0 version (with a free upgrade for any Kami Robot 1.0 owners) with some simple animatronics and a range of more charming humanoid bodies.

Coincidentally, C.C. Chapman in Managing the Gray #21 mentioned a friend volunteering as his secretary for a day, and that it worked great; people were constantly coming by and asking questions. That is the kind of interaction you want, but can't always provide.

"Good design, as far as I am concerned, embodies these six points:
relevant, intelligent ideas;
function,
expression (semiological appropriateness and aesthetic originality);
appropriate use of technology and materials;
minimal impact on the environment (throughtout the full product cycle);
and high quality (including maintenance and durability).
Good design can also alter human behavior and create new social conditions."

-Karim Rashid, I Want To Change The World

I'm still just skimming it, but it's a fantastic book; the objects he makes are weird and alien, but comfortable and organic. Certainly it raises my bar for what I'd consider attractive building in SL.

I just had a moment of self-awareness; the me-of-20-years-ago just looked out through my eyes and freaked out. I'm sitting in a cafe, listening to Japanese pop music, writing a videogame in a virtual world, using a bottom-of-the-line laptop that's more powerful than any but my latest workstation, using a wifi network that's as fast as most company T1s I've used over the years. The me-of-20-years-ago would say it was too cliché and cheesy a cyberpunk moment even for me to write, and I was Cyberpunk Boy #1 (I read Johnny Mnemonic in OMNI when it came out...).

So yes, there's a lot of hype about Second Life these days. Ooh, Ben Folds, ooh, Reuters, ooh, Nissan, whatever. Taken individually, these events aren't that significant. There are concerts in SL all the time, and Suzanne Vega is certainly more important than Ben Folds.

There are in-world news agencies already: New World Notes, the Second Life Herald, , and In the Grid.

The Dominus Shadow and the Cubey Terra Ornithopter 2 are more interesting than a Nissan Sentra.

So, yes, there's a lot of hype. Yes, there's a lot of newbies who don't know what they're doing. Yes, there are a ton of marketers looking for new ways to reach your eyeballs...

But what is interesting is the awareness this brings to Second Life. There's new people who will be enthusiastic Residents, who will create fascinating new things. There's more money for Linden Labs, so they can scale up.

Some people find hype deeply offensive, and I feel sorry for them, but they need to get over their disorder. Hype is vital at the start of a new thing. Hype was good for the Web. It's shining a light on SL, and bringing more energy to the world. Don't attack the hype. The hype brings good things to the world.