Second Life is a brilliant sandbox, and there are some real opportunities that Linden could have taken to make it something beyond a fairly limited community. They may be too late now, but they have little to lose in trying:
SL has always been a lousy game environment, but that’s largely because Linden refuse to focus on the opportunity and optimize a set of servers for it (enabling some level of pre-caching). If they did do so, it could be an intriguing platform for free-to-play games. And, not only would it work for conventionally developed games. It could include an integrated marketplace for user-generated content that would leverage the most accessible tools for 3D creation, and a significant existing developer base. Questions of game balance and style always come up when discussing expansive approaches to in-game content, but this can be resolved either with structurally or societally enforced rules within each game environment. [I co-founded Gameflood to do something like this, but left it as it became something modder-centric, as a result of just this debate.] Read More »