If you stay on the ‘business’ side of Second Life for too long you’d almost forget it’s still so much fun to be inside social virtual environments such as Second Life. There are a lot of developments everyday, new opportunities and serious technological progress, but above all, it’s its a new and entertaining environment. That’s why it’s not surprising to see several traditional gaming genres already being developed inside Second Life, and be responsible for large chunks of hours spend within the Virtual World by its residents.
Roleplaying Games
Roleplaying has been around forever on the internet (and before), and Second Life is no exception. The 3D environment offers a new dimension to the textbased roleplaying of old. You simple choose your role - an elf, a princess, a police officer etc. - adjust your appearance accordingly and play the part in the Roleplay sims with like-minded people, join associated events or play out your own storylines.
Locations: Avillion, Midian City
Combat Systems
The combat systems in Second Life are best comparable to a crude version of Counterstrike. First person shooter games that give the player the objective to kill as many opponents in a certain setting. Weapons, armor and even objects have been fully scripted to be part of these Combat sims. As you play more some combat systems even allow you to advance as a character with more accurate shots or being able to take more hits before death mimicking the ‘levelling systems’ of MMORPG’s.
Locations: Fulda Gap, City of Lost Angels
Racing Games
Though not as big as the previous two genres, racing is pretty popular in Second Life. You can race in about anything, cars, motorcycles, carts, quads, boats, helicopters and many more vehicles. The vehicle scripting system in Second Life can be pretty accurately tuned to create a wide diversity in cars and create a fun racing experience on the various racing tracks.
Locations: F1 Racing Track, Racing Island
The future of Gaming in Second Life
So what’s stopping Rockstar Games from publishing their next GTA in a Social Virtual World? The obvious answer is the platform of Second Life is simply not ready technically yet, and games have just started experimenting with a ‘free2play’ system and in a very early stage. Lack of direct control of data without having to worry about ‘cheats’ and the required level of manual moderation make SL a hard platform for serious game development.
What’s more likely at the moment is an inworld game rising from the community itself as a successful gaming platform. The roleplay community ‘City of Lost Angels‘ already attracts large numbers of players daily and has the potential to grow into a fully developed gaming environment once the software allows it, and revenue models on free2play social games become more of a standard.
Posted on: March 10, 2008 | Share on:
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Aleister Kronos
said on March 10th
What about the media-led SL games like CSI:NY and I Am Legend?
Electric Sheep have looked to use the SL platform both to assist with media product marketing and to test out the extension of media brands into SL, using gaming as a suitably engaging solution.
Also there’s the problem-solving games, in the style of Myst. Actually, I’m surprised at how few of these there are… I only know of one: pothealer (?). And howzabout a copyright-defying game of SLuedo? [ Dammit... Google returns no meaningful hits, have I just named a new gaming trend for SL? LOL ]
Oh… and don’t forget Slingo. It may not be a major splatterfest - but it is an innovation that came out of SL.
Rick van der Wal
said on March 10th
I’ve even seen a 3D pacman game out there that was quite fun to play, where your avatar becomes the ‘pacman’. You are right of course, so many more games out there, scavenger hunts, spell battle systems, ‘knight tournaments’, traditional scripted games as chess and hangman, tetris, target practise shooter games. I just captured the 3 major genres right now but I’ll see if I can update it with a list of game landmarks :D (and please feel free to contribute any LM’s/links you might have!)