Reuters and C|Net in Second Life

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life, and C|Net is following suit. Both companies are joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet. Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit a Reuters news site at: http://secondlife.reuters.com/"

Secondlife is the new hype machine

[jandrese]

For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.

Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[cryptomancer]

Secondlife? Other than pioneering some odd intellectual property (IP) rules, where they don't own things in the game, how is it even vaguely interesting, much less "hottest on the internet?"

WoW is certainly a hot item, but it doesn't need a news outlet to let the outside world know what's going on. ...Actually, come to think of it, news outlets have reported on it fairly often.

Obligatory: So did you see the South Park episode?

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[cowscows]

Second Life is more interesting I think because most of what you see in the game is player created. WoW may have more people playing it, but they're spread across a bunch of different servers, and they're generally just interacting with pre-made content. Second Life takes place in a huge online world, where almost everything can be modified by players, and almost everything can be sold/traded/exchanged/given away. It's much more open-ended than WoW.

The downside is that you have a lot of less-talented people creating the world, so much of what you see is crap. But there's still plenty of good stuff, and just because someone isn't that great at creating doesn't mean they shouldn't be given the opportunity to try, or to share what they've made.

News of the outside world

[Rob T Firefly]

Starting on Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members

Does this seem bleak to anyone else? I don't play SL, but I do get heavily into the games I play, and I don't quite see stuff like "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle. In other news, spinach may kill you, a baseball player just crashed his airplane into a building, and Adam Sandler is working on a hot new romantic comedy. Now, here's Luigi with the latest updates from the Iraq war..." doing wonders for game immersion.

Re:News of the outside world

[CerebusUS]

There's not much to worry about there, because there's really no "game" to be immersed in. Since SL is all about social interaction above all else, perhaps having news right there inside the world makes sense...

But then you could just play the game in a window and tab over to a web browser to read C|Net a whole heck of a lot faster.

Re:Hottest virtual world on the Internet?

[jandrese]

SL is not so much a game as it is a toy. You can chat and roleplay if you want, but you can do that on IRC just about as well, and the IRC client is a lot lighter than SL. Where it really shines is when you start playing around with creating the most artistic and astetically pleasing objects/structures that you can. If you're really good at it, you can make stuff pretty enough to pay off your monthly game fee (or rental costs if you don't want to become a paying member and instead just rent mall space). You can also fly around and look at what everybody else has done, which can be fun too, even if most of it is crap. There are a small number of people who make real money on the game, but they're almost all in the land speculation business.

Seriously, can we get a poll?

[soliptic]

• I play second life regularly
• I have played it in the past at least a bit
• I never have yet
• I never have and never will

Just curious, because we seem to get an awful lot of Second Life stories on slashdot these days, but AFAICS the comments section doesn't support the idea that a large number of people on slashdot actually, y'know... care.

Not trying to have a troll, saying it sucks, or trying to issue some lame diktat that there "shouldn't" be Second Life stories here. I just genuinely wonder if the frequency of SL stories actually tallies with the level of interest/participation in SL amongst /. membership.

Re:Secondlife is the new hype machine

[jandrese]

That's not how the hype went though. The idea with VRML is that you'd load a page with your VRML enabled browser and insead of looking at a big wall of text and pictures, you would be dropped into a 3D environment that would be better somehow. It was the Net, but in 3D. Secondlife is actually much the same way (you can click on a secondlife:// URL and get dropped into a specific place in the game), but it actually works on hardware that doesn't cost $10,000, so it does have a leg up there. Still, it's another case of 3D that's fun, but ultimately kinda useless.