At his recent town meeting, Philip Linden talked about Second Life becoming the WWW or the MSN of MMORPGs. I took this to mean that SL might turn into a giant mall, where you would wander from store to store, seeing what sort of internal games people had devised using the tools of SL.
A group of developers within SL called Simcast evidently purchased land as a group and have been busy creating a game-within-the-game, which they describe as something like a D&D PVP type entertainment. Urizenus Sklar, the notorious gonzo journo of Alphaville Herald (now Second Life Herald tho it still reports on AV), is among the group. The game is on a sim (i.e. a plot of land in SL-speak) called Bedford.
The first time I flew over there, I banged my head on one of those no-go red fences people erect to keep others off their lot. Oh, a gated community, thought I, but after a little chat, I got Uri to give me a magic tag to wear that gained me admission to his game area, still in the beta phase. I crashed around endlessly, falling down stairs and getting trapped in dungeons until Uri finally led me out to a monastery.
"Have you visited the monastery at Petra?" he asks, as if everybody has been a tourist to Jordan. He and his confreres have made a striking liklihood of this awesome structure evidently known as the Kaznah, which actually wasn't a temple or a monastery, but a treasury. (We're reminded here that the Russian word for treasury is also "kaznya" but that they also use this root for "punishment" and "execution" as in "kaznit'").
I had thought he might be referring to Simonpetra, the monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, as in "Thou are Peter, and upon this Rock I will build My Church." No, this Petra is from ancient Bedouin belief.
Uri said the game had been modeled after Beowulf -- dragons and sacrifice and pre-Christian anticipatory symbolism and all. There was a certain amount of bone and crunching consonant sounds to be had...and even a mountain sacrificial area -- which Uri assured me was for goats only...
but I couldn't help thinking that the game was mixing up time eras. If it was medieval, why were there abandoned mines? Did they smelt ore in the medieval period? I guess they did, but the abandoned mine had a decided Wild West flavor to it.
The cemetary was taken out of every horror flick you've ever seen where the bony hand reaches up to grab you...there were Viking ships and various ghouls rising up out of the earth like the ghosts in a Harry Potter movie -- actually quite effective.
Then there was the hanged man on the bridge --
and I figured Uri must have been in the same 6th grade class in the 1960s as me, where we had to watch the 1962 Cannes Palme D'Or prizewinner, "Occurrence at Owl Creek" about the civil-war soldier who seemingly escapes a hanging on a bridge.
Remember how you thought you would live your life in fast-forward, as if the noose was around your neck and you were hurtling down to the creek? Now there's a new version of Owl Creek out...
I checked out the mead hall, but it was rather dull...possibly because all the exotic wenches with plunging necklines so beloved by SLH haven't been imported yet. Meanwhile, people decked up in sort of LOTR garb are busy making stuff. Well, it's not the milkshakes they're going to have TSO, but something appropriate to the era...erm 1377 different things you can make out of silk thread? Uri confessed that he might have cribbed some notions from A Tale in the Desert.
Finally, I asked Uri what they will call their game. Simcast, he said lamely. Surely they'll think up something better? I had a suggestion: how about Dragon's Cove? Har har. I asked him if the lowlands of Dianistan were near the dragon's cave I stumbled on while touring the sim....
For more screenshots, check out my photo album.
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