Location: Virtual Death-Piggy Show (I wish)

I don’t have time for a third life, or else I’d draw up an avatar for MTV’s new virtual world, Virtual Lower East Side.  Dave Itzkoff, in the New York Times, covered the emergence of this limited-geography metaverse, with nightclubs and other music-related social venues.  A free client, like Second Life’s but sleeker looking (not hard to imagine) can be downloaded for Macs running OSX 10.4 or newer, as well as that other operating system from Microsoft.

Try VLES and judge for yourself, but from my peek at the nicely done video on the Web site, I’ll be catty about one detail: the VLES avatars, despite some good facial expressions, look like well drawn characters from a graphic novel. They lack the depth of well done SL avatars (though they are miles beyond the typical SL noob). The evocation of New York is, however, wonderfully done.

Imagine the Lower East Side as it was before gentrification: dirty around the edges, even a bit dangerous. More artists than business-clones, snotty Yuppies, and militant stroller mommies. Not a Starbucks in sight.  Almost: American Apparel, which left SL last year, is in-world at VLES. I guess there had to be some packaged hip for VLES…

This new, ostensibly gritty, world interests me because in most regions of SL, the idea is to be cleaner, safer, more fantastical than real life. Random teleports recently have landed me in a “mountaintop getaway,” a “tropical paradise,” an even a hobo’s junkyard at Calleta sim (keeping tabs on, and paying tabs for, our guest writer Pappy Enoch).  I know, I know: I need to spend more time in SL’s cyberpunk areas. They are not safe….and to this geek, having shootouts with rail guns mounted on flying cars in a decaying megacity is a lot cooler than grooving virtually to VLES’ indie bands.  So I’ll send a dispatch soon from Jessie sim in SL, where gunplay is common.

MTV’s experiment interests me because it suggests a direction that new virtual worlds may go to avoid SL’s “all in one” package.  As with online gaming (no Orcs in Star Wars, no Imperial Storm Troopers in World of Warcraft) future worlds online may be targeted to niche users.

Other than hoping for a really well done driving metaverse (which could be motivating Pontiac, for all I know, since Motorati’s demise), I personally am not interested unless they can support the user-created content that makes SL so appealing and, often, unstable.

Anyone out there with time enough to begin a Third Life and cover VLES?  Drop me a line…but one thing for certain: it’s about time MTV did SOMETHING related to music again.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

vLes is not really 3D..is more like 2.5D. And…only open part-time!

“The vLES 2D site is open 24 hours a day, every day | The vLES 3D environment is open from 6pm - 1am EST, daily.“

Even Katz’s deli is open more hours.

But LL has kicked open door for competition… see notes from our blog about statistics: http://rezzable.com/blog/2008/uncategorized/2006-vs-2007-second-life-data/

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