I have to admit, I hadn’t understood the weapons in Second Life thing. For me, there were so many gaming worlds around where you can engage in combat that I just didn’t see the point of Second Life weapons.
I spent some time tonight being guided around the showroom floor for the Second Life Combat Expo by its creator, Australian Apollo Case. It then started to dawn on me why weapons are such a big deal in Second Life. There’s the obvious testosterone-laden image side of it, but it’s also another creative outlet. The level of design and scripting with some of the weapons is as complex as anything you’ll find in Second Life. As Apollo Case said during the guided tour, “weapons are a very competitive business, so the people in it need to be very good at what they do”. From my time browsing I don’t doubt there’s some real talent here.
The Expo has two workshops and five product demonstration sessions with at least three products per demo. I was interested in whether any real life weapons manufacturers had explored opportunities in Second Life. Case’s repsonse: “not directly, but I have suspicions a lot are playing around the edges and need their hand held coming into SL”. Then he couldn’t resist saying “and we can do that”.
The expo kicks off Sunday morning east coast Australian time (5pm SL time May 17th).
(Disclosure: Apollo Case is an intermittent advertiser on The Metaverse Journal)
Oh no! That will take all my money again.
We do have parts of the grid that are weapon free, right?
I agree Lowell, I hope that one day we can have a weapons free grid.
There are plenty of games out there with the type of graphics gamers want,
Leave SL for those of us who just want to build and make friends in peace.
Wolfie!
Thanks for the write-up Lowell. Also, I think a lot of companies from many sectors will be looking for skilled builders, scripters and other content creators. Either to build initial content or help maintain it later, and also guide them around Second Life. This would include how to make their parts of the Metaverse weapons free, if they choose to, or to choose the level of security they wish to have. As Dandellion says, there are parts of the grid that are weapons free, and that policy can be set (if they choose to) by the owner of the land.
You know, weapons used in grief attacks are rarely those used in combat. Griefing is a matter of security of the software not existence of weapons. Speaking of which, we could do a bit more about security. Please sign this JIRA. Thanks.
SL is easily big enough to cater for both viewpoints.
Dandelion, I think the idea of letting estate owners set script and rez permissions according avatar age or account type is certainly a good idea. Also as SL moves to open servers, sim owners will have even more choice as to how to control access and security on their land.
There are weapon free sims, but griefers still turn up with them and cause problems.
Many of them are just buying weapons from somewhere.
I’d like to see a system where an object had to be marked as a weapon by it’s creator, and if a person tried to rez a weapon on a weapon free sim, they couldn’t… that simple.
Wolfie!