Arcade Exchange Update

Revision 2.95

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Marketplace: http://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/22206

What’s New

AES (Audio Engine System)

When we first built the arcade series, we weren’t entirely knowledgeable about scripting in the high-end. Of course, there was the llPlaySound command to handle short clips, but when you’re dealing with arcade machines that have audio loops measured in minutes, even for the attract modes, you can see how this falls short as a solution. Stringing together the audio commands with llSleep in between only goes so far, and when you begin extending the amount of files needed in that loop, the rest of the menu system begins to stall while it waits for the audio and sleep commands to complete.

This has been an ongoing issue for the life of the Series III Arcade Exchange, but we’re proud to announce that as of Revision 2.95, it is no longer a problem.

We’ve re-written the audio engine system (AES) to be more dynamic, pre-load items in advance, and handle hundreds of audio clips in a loop without interfering with the main script.

What his means for you: The menu system is now responsive, even when playing the audio loop, as the AES has been separated into its own script and handler to multi-task.

As a result of the AES upgrade, your arcade machines are now able to loop many minutes of audio when toggled – in many cases, an entire run through the game itself.

That being said, please keep in mind that the pre-loader is not an indication of actual time to pre-load but merely an estimation. The actual time to pre-load and play those clips is entirely dependent on your connection speed and other various factors such as sim lag and Second Life itself. You may not hear the entire loop the first time through because of this, but we’re pretty certain the second time through you will.

Support Call Decal

On the back of every arcade machine, there is now an Andromeda Games Support Decal (Upper Right Corner). Because your arcade machines are under “Second Lifetime” Warranty, you can always trade-up to the latest revisions or have broken machines fixed for free. However, it hasn’t always been clear who to contact or get in touch with to handle this. Sure, we put that warranty information into your Instructions card that is included, but we also know that customers aren’t always interested in reading.

As a result, we’ve put the support call decal on the back of every machine, and made it an active call sticker. Which is to say, if you click on them, it’ll give you the warranty information, and contact for support. It’ll also page me (Aeonix Aeon) in-world and let me know who is requesting support and what machine you’ve invoked it on.

We don’t think it gets any easier than this, really.

Various Updates

There have been some amount of various issues (minor) which have gone unfixed in the past on our arcade machines. While not all game-breaking, they did warrant another look during this update and a correction. TRON, for example, had a minor alignment issue with the side panels which left a small gap. The Glow was set way too high, and so on. It is also currently one of two arcade machines that do not have an animated screen (Space Invaders being the other). With this machine there are some technical limitations in-world which we haven’t quite sorted out yet – the screen is not uniform and due to the complexity involved with the build (geometry and faces) it isn’t feasible to animate the screen as of yet. We’re still looking into it.

Fix-It Felix Jr has had the animation set for the screen re-done with better quality, and the audio is now much better without the lag. However, this game is only available in the Arcade Exchange Mega-Pack as a bonus.

Joust had the same panel alignment issue as TRON, and so it was also corrected in this update.

Tetris as of 2.91 and earlier is now broken – the game itself no longer works. The 2.95 update corrects this.

Instruction Card

The instruction cards on all of our Arcade Exchange have been entirely redone for legibility and to include new information. This includes a better explanation of your warranty so you know what is and is not covered. I’ve made the card more unified with ASCII headers and such, so now it should be quite easy to discern all the main topics as you scroll through. The same has been done to the card for “How to fix Flash for Second Life”.

Marketplace Availability

During the long tenure of the Series III Arcade Exchange, our customers will have noticed that the original premise of the name meant that you could purchase only the Polybius arcade machine on Marketplace and then trade it in-world for the one you really wanted. While available in-world via our vendor boards at certain locations, we didn’t make them available on Marketplace directly.

That is until recently.

There are many pros and cons to doing this, and most importantly is that being a near perfect replica of the original arcade machines in real life poses a bit of a problem. Many hours of debate and discussion have happened over the years about this very issue – IP Infringement.

While we absolutely will not contest that our arcade machines are IP Infringing, there is a deeper explanation about why they should be left on Marketplace. If you read below, we’ll get into those details.

Marketing

One of the other things you may have noticed as of recently is that the ad-copy and marketing for our products has been updated to be more uniform and professional.

Having a real life marketing background helps in this case, in that I used to work for Pulse Point Media as a VP of Operations.

Now, just as a reminder, when I use “we” and “I” in these posts, it’s a matter of who in AMG I’m talking about. I refers to me (Will Burns, the founder) and We refers to the rest of the team involved with the products (such as RobsterRawb Jaxxon, Jon Dragoone, et al) inclusive.

When writing these blogs, I’m writing them on my own and so it’s always coming from “me” as a representation of the group interchangeably. Just wanted to clear that up in case you were wondering.

In any event, as I have had years of marketing experience, I decided to go ahead and apply that to our forward facing image by creating proper ad-copy for our arcade machines. A unified look and feel so to speak. It is purposefully reminiscent of an Atari logo in a subtle fashion.

I think it’s something you don’t normally see with a lot of items on Marketplace or in-world. Of course, the bigger brands do this properly, but that’s the difference between the big kids and inexperienced. Doubly so for the listings involving Arcade Machines on Marketplace – but we’ll get to that below.

The ad-copy is mirrored on our boxes now, and the look/feel is also in our magazine advertisements (as you see above at the beginning of the post). We regularly advertise in both Attention! Magazine and Playdolls as a two page spread. It is clean, gets attention, and gets to the point with a visual and short, witty slogan.

We’ll be using this format going forward.

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Backstory

In the course of the Series III Arcade Exchange, we’ve undergone quite a lot of updates and revisions. Originally conceived in 2010 before Second Life had mesh ability, it was a major overhaul when we started updating them all in higher quality mesh.

Back then, and even today, we spent quite a lot of time sourcing our materials and pouring over reference photos for the arcade machines in real life. There was and still remains a lot of points to why we would go to such painstaking trouble with these builds for what amounts to a virtual product with a limited audience.

VIPER Licensing

One of the biggest issues with doing something like this is the obvious elephant in the room: IP Infringement. In the modern age, it is considered the scourge of IP Holders, and takes up quite a lot of time attempting in vain to police their Intellectual Property online.

The standard tools for this give those IP Holders the legal precedent to DMCA or issue a Cease and Desist order. On Youtube, we see this as “Copyright Strike” where a claim is filed against a video.

But does this really solve the problem? It’s a never-ending battle that is both costly and time consuming, with little result. You win battles but arguably are losing the war.

In the example of the fan created game AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), it was a brilliant game made by fans out of the love of the game. In my opinion, it absolutely did justice to the franchise and IP. However, it still remains that they did not have permission from Nintendo to use that IP and so Nintendo issued a DMCA to take it down.

But here is where it gets tricky.

The tools of DMCA and C&D are not effective in the bigger picture. If anything, it is akin to cutting the head off of a Hydra and being surprised when it grows back a thousand heads. What DMCA and C&D invoke in the modern age is known as the Streisand Effect – which is to say the thing you want to get rid of instead draws more attention and becomes more available as a result.

In the case of AM2R, this was true. Yes, the fans who made it took it down and complied with the DMCA, but those who had already downloaded it simply mirrored the files all over the world and on BitTorrent.

If anything, AM2R ended up with far more visibility in the media and higher accessibility as a result of the DMCA from Nintendo. In short, it had the opposite effect they wanted. Their strategy backfired spectacularly.

Back in 2013, I wrote a chapter in a college textbook whereby I outlined the solution to this miserable state of affairs: VIPER.

In the beginning, I outlined that IP Holders rarely (if ever) have a clear avenue to pursue in the instance of user generated media. For instance, most companies have a clear protocol to handle either a Producer of content or a Consumer of content, whereby a producer is seen as a large media firm that can pay a large licensing fee up front and a consumer is just the person who is expected to buy such items or be exposed to what the producer has created.

But what about the prosumer culture? The user-generated media made by the consumers as non-professional producers?

This is where we get into the grey area of legality and approach as we look at spaces like Second Life. Yes, those companies have every right to issue DMCA notices to take content down – but is it effective? In this case, the answer is absolutely not. If anything, it only exacerbates the problem as we see with AM2R.

You take one down and twenty more pop up to take its place.

So the premise of VIPER is to be an effective tool for IP Management in a user-generated content environment. Something that Second Life is sorely lacking, and companies in the real world do not currently subscribe to, which is exactly why we see this Streisand Effect continually playing out despite their best efforts.

VIPER is an acronym for: Virtual Intellectual Property Engagement and Recourse. The premise is simple: to manage IP on the prosumer level effectively and without the content explosion back-fire otherwise seen with typical DMCA approaches.

In the case of the Arcade Exchange, the premise is quite clear – to make available the best options for those media examples as a poison pill approach to IP Infringement. If high quality versions exist, it makes the countless low quality knock-offs irrelevant and so they will slowly cull themselves. By leaving the best options to fill a need in a space whereby a company would otherwise not be engaged, it has far more positive impact in regard to IP Management and Protection than had the same companies sent an army of lawyers to issue a paper storm of DMCA notices.

In short: Absolutely, these arcade machines are IP Infringing. By no means should DMCA take-down be implemented as a recourse. They are there to actually cull the plethora of existing knock-offs that are low quality, and in effect have the actual intended outcome that the constant DMCA take-downs and account bans have tried to accomplish all these years.

VIPER is a mindset that follows one of the biggest rules in user generated worlds; Whether that is the hobbyist at home making a fan game, somebody making creative content on YouTube (Adult Wednesday Addams for example), or virtual worlds like Second Life: Work within the system.

In this case, “the system” means not the legal recourse you’ve been given (DMCA etc) but the mentality of the community by which the IP is existing.

In order to understand VIPER licensing mentality, you as a company must ask a few questions to qualify the action:

• 1. Will a DMCA result in the desired outcome, or will it backfire and cause a Streisand Effect?

• 2. If our end-goal is to reduce or eliminate the IP Infringement, protecting our intellectual property, then would engagement in the system to fill the supply where there is clearly a demand actually achieve this end?

• 3. What is the least involved manner by which we can accomplish #2 on this list?

• 4. Does it make sense to engage and ask for a marginal licensing fee on each sale of said item in a virtual world (percentage) or is it enough to sanction the item as a preventative measure to cull the majority?

The answer in this case is obviously to identify the best version of the IP Infringing material and sanction it. However, one must also be willing to leave the other low quality versions alone to their fate as a result. This is how to eliminate the Streisand Effect in virtual worlds and elsewhere while actually accomplishing your end goal.

That doesn’t mean as a company that you should be saying “This is an official product” of our company. What you’re really saying here is: This is a licensed product in a virtual sense, we acknowledge it, and it represents the IP and brand in a positive light. It is the responsibility of the content creator to handle the sales, the marketing, the updates, and customer interaction.

In the event that said virtual item no longer represents the IP in a positive light, then you have a dialog with the end-user about how this can be corrected (reasonably). Again, we’re not going into things DMCA-Akimbo. After all, you’re running the risk of punching a hole in the dam of IP infringement and letting the torrent of knock-offs take its place.

We clearly don’t want this to happen.

This is also entails that companies (internally) set up some sort of “Best Practices” guidelines exactly for this purpose, and to convey to the end-users (consumers) that should they wish to use the IP in this manner, these are the rules they must follow.

Of course, in this document, the point is to be fair about it. So don’t go into it with massively unbalanced disincentive. In example – saying “Sure, you can make and sell this in a virtual world, but we expect a 90% cut on money earned.” or “Sure you can make this but you cannot sell it in the virtual space or make any money on it.”

Let’s be real here. If your goal is to cull the IP Infringement and protect your IP, it does you no justice to create a hostile environment whereby it makes more sense to just ignore you and do as they please, albeit in a less visible manner.

See also: BitTorrent and AM2R.

You absolutely don’t want to drive those virtual goods underground, because then you’re really screwed. So be fair about it, make some light concessions, and be willing to work within the system and with the end-users themselves to achieve these means.

The perceptual cost of those virtual goods sales versus the amount of money you’ve been burning trying to DMCA everything is like night and day. The perceptual loss of revenue from said virtual goods is negligible by comparison and is far less than what you would spend to police it otherwise.

So instead of approaching as a loss, approach it as a quadruple positive in your favor -

1. The loss of perceptual revenue from said virtual item costs you far less than trying to police it via typical DMCA means. Instead of counting it as a loss, count is as time and money saved. You could be paying lawyers ten or one hundred times as much to have zero impact on the state of affairs versus the negligible loss of the virtual item for sale having a massive impact on the state of affairs. It just makes perfect business sense.

2. Because the items in question are high quality, consider them as a marketing gain instead of a lost sale or cost. You’re not paying for that marketing, nor the time it takes to create the items and maintain them. You’re not paying the person responsible for making it either. You, as a company already know how costly this normally would be if you hired a marketing firm to develop this sort of content and maintain it. Again, this is advantageous to you.

3. High quality items in a virtual world represent your brand in a positive light and are the antithesis to low quality knock-offs, thereby killing two birds with one stone that costs far less than the DMCA nuclear bombs you’ve been using that apparently couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. It is actually effective, and that’s what you’ve been trying to accomplish all this time – isn’t it?

4. Instituting negative penalties for IP Infringement when it is presented in he best possible light to do justice to the brand is actually counter-productive in the most exponential fashion possible.

Allow me to expound a bit on the last point further.

Normally, yes the companies can issue a DMCA to Linden Lab concerning said items. Linden Lab would, therefore be legally required to comply, and as a result likely issue a temporary or permanent ban on my account in the process. This, again, is typical. It happens the same way with YouTube, and elsewhere.

But here’s the fallout from those actions:

1. The highest quality items would no longer be available, thus creating a void to fill in the market.

2. That void would quickly be filled not with one but likely dozens of IP infringing materials to take the place of the dam you just broke.

3. What is eliminated on the open marketplace will thrive in-world under the radar, making it impossible for the same IP Holders to find.

4. You’ve punished one creator for doing the one thing you actually needed done, and undone the positive outcome of those actions while vastly multiplying the negative outcomes. You’re back to square one.

It wouldn’t make any logical or reasonable sense to therefore issue a DMCA or Account Ban. There’s literally no positive outcome to doing so, and it amounts to dropping the bomb on your own foot making matters worse instead of better.

That doesn’t mean companies will listen to reason.

VIPER is simply an appeal to reason, and to accomplish the IP Management companies so desperately need in a world that is exploding with content. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

What the Arcade Exchange represents is a viable means to accomplish exactly what the owners of the IP have been trying to do all along and have been failing at.

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High Quality vs Low Quality

When it comes to virtual worlds, or any other media, there is no shortage of high quality examples. Just the same, for every high quality example there are ten times as many low quality “cheap” knockoffs.

You can very well buy a Galaga arcade machine on Marketplace for 99L$ and you’d get something like what you see to the left from Brazilian Surf.

Yes, it works (if you’re lucky)… but that’s about it. What you’re getting is a generic cabinet haphazardly retextured with a media prim glued to the screen.

It doesn’t have the game history, it doesn’t have an extended audio loop, it doesn’t have an animated screen, and more importantly it looks nothing like the actual arcade machine. We’re not even certain it has any sort of warranty or support if it breaks. This is the standard fare when it comes to arcade machines in Second Life.

Then you have the Arcade Exchange version of Galaga to the right which, as you immediately notice is of much higher quality and detail. It has far more features than the cheaper knock-offs, and is jam-packed with attention to detail.

If you were Midway (or whomever owns the rights to Galaga), which one of these would you want representing your IP?

Only one of them actually does it justice, and that is the entire point of VIPER.

We’ve supported the Arcade Exchange since 2012, with bug fixes, updates, and revisions. As of Revision 2.95, there is a service call sticker on the back of them all to quickly and easily contact us if ever your machines break or you would like to trade-up for an update.

So long as you own one of our arcade machines, we will support them and continue working to make them better.

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Emerald City Blues

Where’s a bucket of water in #SecondLife when ya need one?

 

Recently a partial transcript hit my inventory in SL and it looked quite innocent until I got to about 15:57 to 16:01 in the transcript. Apparently in a recent meeting with Oz (The Great and Powerful) Linden, a familiar name came up in passing like it was no big deal, when it should have been a very big deal.

 

 

 

 

[15:57] Oz Linden: maybe another commit hook test...
[15:57] Jonathan: Oz, do you still want me to file a storm for those gsavedsettings that should be cached or
[15:57] Phoenix-Firestorm Viewer Rocks: a lot of the headers need to be updated anyway to have the correct file name in thtem, or to add the file name to them thats missing currently
[15:57] Jonathan: do you want to look at the whole lot of them as a bigger study?
[15:58] Jonathan: (the settings in the music playing code)
[15:59] Oz Linden: Jonathan... sure, a collection of settings caching improvements would be most welcome
[16:00] Jonathan: I'll need that code from Skills Hax then
[16:00] Oz Linden: Tank... I ran a script to check that recently, and was intimidated by the number of files it would touch
[16:00] Mona: The one of Emerald "fame"?
[16:01] Jonathan: Oz, you had another prject in the works, and that was eliminating references to "dead" settings
[16:01] Ima Mechanique: Oz any news for onRegionChange best practise?
[16:01] Jonathan: from settings.xml
[16:01] Oz Linden: Skills has been making an apparently sincere effort to be helpful for quite some time now

 

 

Ok wait... you mean Skills Hax, notorious for the Emerald Viewer debacle (along with a handful of others), and who was essentially forced out and the imminent collapse of the most popular TPV of the time mandated by Linden Lab as a result, is and has been working on and contributing code all buddy buddy with Linden Lab all this time?

 

I’m trying very hard to parse this information... because really Skills didn’t change and suddenly see the error of (his) ways. But it seems like one of more notorious of the group (maybe except Phox/LonelyBluebird) wasn’t really exiled but given a chance to contribute to the official viewer instead as a consolation prize for having the biggest competition to the official viewer be dismantled.

 

Forgive me for this, but doesn’t that seem like a Borg assimilation scenario?

 

I’d write more on this, but I’m more interested in letting the community chime in and have their discussion on it. Far as I’m concerned... it’s a pretty big deal... but what do I know? It just struck me as a what dufuq moment...

 

It’s just another day in Pixel Paradise lately. I just wish somebody would throw some water on the Wicked Witch and call it a day, ‘cause all of these flying monkeys are getting on my nerves and I just wanna go home.

 

 

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Meanwhile, back at the Lollipop Guild...

 

Haven’t been in Second Life much lately due to real life obligations and projects. When last I publically said anything on the ToS topic it was about the deliberate attempt to smear Bryn Oh on Metaverse Week in Review by LaPiscean who (a part of the LEA) was looking to justify victimization and “poor me” on the air while painting Bryn Oh as doing the wrong thing and hurting the poor artists and LEA in the process.

 

Bottom line is, if the LEA exists in Second Life, then it is bound by the same ToS and rules as everything else in Second Life, and that ToS is detrimental and hostile to content creators and artists. Ergo it’s not a leap of logic in any capacity whatsoever to say that if your stated mission at the LEA is to encourage the arts in Second Life, and convince artists to come into Second Life from the real world, then you are part of the problem in knowingly shilling a situation that is hostile to those artists and content creators as a good situation. You’re acting like an official Linden Lab lap dog too afraid to bite the hand that feeds you no matter how much that hand beats the ever loving piss outta you.

 

To say I was offended by the attempted hit and run of Bryn Oh on the air was an understatement. Bryn did the right thing in leaving the LEA because it was a conflict of interest and crisis of conscience to be the poster child for a hostile ToS under the guise of doing right by them as a public figure. Bryn did the responsible thing, while LaPiscean took the low road and gave us a tour of the gutter. To say I was offended that nobody else thought what was going on was unacceptable on their own stage, and instead repeatedly offered the platform for him to continue speaking like he hadn’t just tried to smear Bryn on the air is also an understatement.

 

On that same episode I made it a point to say that as a public figure (which a lot of us are) we are in the position to represent what is morally correct as if we were role models to be looked up to as the example. I take that seriously as a public figure, and so I lead by example (just like Bryn Oh did). I haven’t uploaded anything to Second Life since, and I have no plans on doing so until the ToS is no longer overtly hostile to content creators and artists.

 

 

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MAME Showcase Cabinet: Series III

 

However, like I also said, I have a few projects in SL that are unfinished and said that (given time) I would try to tie up the loose ends for them but start no new projects until the ToS is rectified. I’m quite serious about not uploading anything more to SL until Linden Lab get their chronic case of stupid out of their system. While time has been a commodity in short supply lately, I have been putting some time here and there to finish up or work on pre-existing projects that I didn’t finish prior to the whole ToS fiasco.

 

One of which is the last in the Arcade Legends Series III cabinets, which I’ve had sitting in inventory for months now and hadn’t really touched. The final arcade cabinet in the series is different than the others in that it’s a Showcase Cabinet for MAME, mimicking the Dynamo Showcase Arcade Cabinet in real life. The MAME cabinet also is scripted differently in that it allows for many games on shared media to be loaded by clicking the coin slot and choosing a game, which sends the information to the shared media screen to load the game. In this way, the MAME cabinet in-world acts like a true Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

 

This led me to the idea of making a home console that would load games to a television in world playable, but as I’ve already said before – I’m not starting any new projects in Second Life until the chronic idiocy of Linden Lab is less obnoxious. I might have a very long wait judging from the transcript at the top of this post.

 

As far as the trade-in equivalent for the MAME Showcase cabinet, considering the amount of games I’m putting into it and the nature of it being a showcase cabinet and not a smaller cabinet, and that it’s running on an entirely new script, I’m considering trading two Polybius cabinets for it instead of one. I think that’s fair.

 

 

 

 

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eureka!

 

I’m pretty sure some are wondering what became of eureka! content discovery since it was announced in production a few months ago. Progress is coming along fine, though some things had to be redesigned and overhauled to compensate for some SL related glitches in how shared media was displayed (or not) consistently across viewers. So the UI and stuff had to be reimagined to handle it, as well as some other considerations in order to make the system a bit more powerful and robust.

 

Since eureka! counts as one of those “pre-existing” projects, the work continues on it. More-so the bulk of eureka! work is done on a server outside of Linden Lab and the system is not dependant on in-world for the bulk of its abilities. This was a conscious decision from the beginning of development so it could (theoretically) be ported over to OpenSim and Hypergrid at a later time. However, that would only happen when the 4096 issue is reliably wiped out across the Hypergrid – so it’s probably a good idea that people update as soon as that issue is resolved so you can teleport across the entire Hypergrid in one shot and not multiple hops.

 

Back-end and front-end overhauls aside, progress is coming along and we’re back on track again for beta testing. I’ll keep everyone posted just as soon as I find out if I can break it before private beta.

 

 

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So what’s shakin, bacon?

 

What’s been happening in your world that’s keeping you busy or interested? What do you think of the transcript with Oz Linden? Are there any particular games you’d like to see on the MAME cabinet? Do you have any questions about eureka! that you’re dying to ask?

 

Feel free to drop your thoughts into the comments below, and remember to Share, Plus and Discuss in the social sphere.

 

 

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One Step Beyond

There’s always more to my projects in #SecondLife

 

I’ve been taking a bit of a break from writing lately due to some external projects and implications thereof, but if you’ve been following my twitter feed @DarianKnight then you know I’ve been talking a lot about the creation of the mesh arcade machines in Second Life with Robbie Heath. For some, I know the seeming barrage of pictures comes across as a one-note tweet and beating a dead horse – “Look how real they look!”, but there is far more going on with the purpose of this project than I actually let on.

 

There is, of course, the aspect of how detailed one can get with in-world mesh and more appropriately how accurate a virtual representation of a real world object can be. That’s a given, though there is still more to this which I’ll explain.

 

 

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For starters, I’m exploring the differentiation of texture quality versus subtle realism that such textures would imply. Just because you can have an ultra-high resolution independent vector graphic as your basis doesn’t mean that the crispness and detail translates into a warm and believable texture in-world. Sometimes the HD quality works against you and offers too much crispness and detail, or as I often say –

 

Imperfection is actually a cue for implied perfection, where overt perfection is a cue for fakeness.

 

Therein is the first part of this puzzle – implications of attaining an organic feel to your builds versus something too perfect, which in itself destroys your attempt at believability in a virtual sense. The subtle imperfections add the organic feel, and thus raises the believability factor far more than the high definition textures with crispness would – and to wit the ultra high detailed and crisp textures often times sabotages your efforts toward atmosphere believability.

 

The rest of this project is information that I hadn’t really talked about much, but it’s just as important overall. The reason I chose arcade machines as the subject of this project was multi-fold:

 

1. Recognizable brands
2. Defining the state of prosumer interaction with companies
3. Learning a bit of history as well as the climate of existing communities
4. Define a working solution that addresses the context of prosumer overall

 

 

 

Recognizable Brands

 

It’s nearly a universal understanding that the arcade machines are immediately recognizable. You probably have fond memories of your childhood in an arcade, the many hours pumping quarters into that digital hypnotist which compelled you to continue. While all of this is very important, it is not just the machines themselves that are important but also (and maybe more importantly) the memories and atmosphere they invoke.

 

There’s a certain feel you get from the arcade, and the arcade machines themselves definitely contributed to that. There’s far more, however – the actual building, the darkened rooms filled with lines of lit marquees, the smell and conglomerating sounds that came together in ambience, which despite the “noise” you somehow managed to focus just on the game you were playing like a laser.

 

 

Then there is the external factors that are attached to this project – so let’s get into the second bullet point:

 

 

 

Defining the state of prosumer

interaction with companies

 

Definitely of interest to me is the relationship that the social media prosumer (producer + consumer of content) has with companies today. After all, social media is quite the driving force in our online world but companies with recognizable brands are still thinking in 20th Century logic. There’s the controlling factor of push media involved, wherein the companies create and control the message, method and form that their brands take in the public. This could manifest as television, print, and radio advertising but also these methodologies are used in the social media aspect with mixed results at best.

 

So I’m looking at this aspect in terms of 21st Century Prosumer culture, and whether or not companies are actually within their right corporate minds to actually engage intelligently with this paradigm.

 

For this point, I came across some really interesting situations that had arisen within existing communities concerning the companies who own the brands. Allow me to explain -

 

In the case of Ms. Pacman, which is a world recognizable icon owned by NAMCO, there are the original arcade machines and a large community of collectors which meticulously restore and refurbish original cabinets with artwork and hardware in order to get the machines back to not only working order but near pristine condition as if they came off the factory floor in 1981.

 

These arcade cabinets are worth quite a lot of money fully restored, with estimates ranging from $1,500 all the way up to $6,000 in some cases. Restoration of these original arcade machines is a serious endeavor, and not taken lightly by serious collectors.

 

In order to restore a Ms. Pacman arcade cabinet to factory glory, you need the replacement hardware (if the existing hardware is faulty) and you also need the vinyl decals and artwork. For this you go to an authorized reproduction printer that specializes in arcade graphics for cabinets – in which you are looking for your basic sets:

 

CPO – Control Panel Overlay

Side Art – Cabinet Side Artwork

Marquee – The plexiglass title on the top front with the light behind it

Bezel – The artwork around the screen as an insert

Kick plate – Usually under or surrounding the coin doors

 

Now, it’s not as simple as just going to a printer and saying “I would like the Ms. Pacman CPO” because within that domain itself there are reproduction artworks which are not the same as the originals but sometimes are preferable to the collector in a personal sense, and then there is the idea of NOS reproduction which are “New Old Stock” or reproductions of the original artworks for actual collectors trying to restore the cabinets accurately to retain the value or increase the value on resale.

 

And this is where it gets interesting in terms of Ms. Pacman (and likely many others). When a company is authorized and licensed to be the official reproduction artwork outlet for these machines, that company is then charged with the retracing and reproduction of the original artwork in high quality.

 

In the case of Ms. Pacman the company who has the license and rights to reproduce the NOS artwork is a company named TwoBits. The problem is that the actual collector community realized that TwoBits, the only company authorized to officially make NOS reproductions of the original artwork, clearly and unrepentantly did a horrible job. Such a bastardization of the original graphics ensued (not to mention the bad quality of the stickers instead of using vinyl) that actually using the official NOS artwork will devalue a restored cabinet.

 

 

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Apparently NAMCO enjoys forcing a pile of crap down people’s throats

 

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At this point, I’m still talking about arcade machines and detail, and I know some of you are tapping your fingers impatiently wondering when I’m going to stop beating the dead horse. Well, for those of you tapping your fingers and getting impatient, I suggest you instead sit on your hands and keep your mouth shut while I continue. The blatantly obvious seems to have escaped you for why I’d even bother with this project to begin with.

 

Herein is the important part of this story, and the real relevance to our second bullet point:

 

The community, upon realizing the horrible botch job that TwoBits was doing with their beloved NAMCO icon, refused to purchase the only official NOS artwork available for their own cabinets because (obviously) they didn’t want to devalue their hefty investment, or effectively destroy something they’ve put so much work into restoring.

 

But that didn’t stop them from continuing to restore their cabinets to factory appeal, which means they must have had another option than TwoBits.

 

This is where the relevance to the prosumer community comes into play, and why I chose arcade machines as the subject of this project. What happened next succinctly defines the prosumer relationship with companies in the 21st century versus the 20th century push mentality that companies exhibit. In short – one of the answers I was after in doing this project.

 

And here you thought it was all about how cool they looked in-world…

 

The community of prosumers – producers and consumers of media, are no longer in a position where they are forced into a single channel of consuming whatever media is prepared for them without any other options. That’s the old way of thinking, and companies today still (strangely) believe they have this control in the digital age. Since this is the new paradigm, and our prosumer community is no longer bound to accept media as defined solely by the companies within the channels the companies define nor the circumstances, they did what anyone in a social media industry would expect them to have done.

 

Somebody with the artistic know-how and printing background went out and purchased a high quality original Ms. Pacman machine with as few defects as possible in the original artwork. In short, as near to pristine condition as they could get. This alone set them back quite a lot of money, but it was seen as a beneficial investment for the entire community and world. Therein is one aspect of the prosumer mentality that companies don’t seem to readily grasp – altruism.

 

They then scanned the entire machine into a computer at high resolution photography, and then meticulously retraced the entire machine – including printing layer separation, into vector format. The results were a near perfect NOS reproduction set.

 

So what did the community do with this holy grail of arcade artwork that they now possessed?

 

They attempted to give it away for free to TwoBits, so that TwoBits could sell it back to the community who would then be willing to purchase it. This saving TwoBits and NAMCO further shame in authorizing and producing a bastardization of artwork.

 

Let’s recap for a moment:

 

An active and detail obsessed community bent on authenticity was given only the option of decidedly non-authentic media for which to consume and use. Being a prosumer community, they rejected the sub-par offering and set their expertise on recreating accurate artwork instead for both the benefit of the community and the company authorized to reproduce that artwork, as well as do right by a brand name they supported (NAMCO), and they offered that work at absolutely no charge or stipulation.

 

If anything, TwoBits was now in a very lucrative position.

 

Any company with a shred of common sense would see this. The community which they were targeting with their products has essentially boycotted their product because of the horrendous job they have done, but is now offering them a highly accurate NOS artwork set that they (a detail obsessed group) have meticulously produced. They are offering it to that company for free and without stipulation, because they want to do right by them, NAMCO and their own community in staying on the right side of the law and supporting both that company and NAMCO.

 

They stand to make a lot of money and regain their reputation in the process, as well as the universal good will of the very customers which they have wronged. This, for all intents and purposes, is a situation that is entirely in their favor on all accounts.

 

What did TwoBits say?

 

They flatly refused, opting to keep their own product offering instead.

 

So this community of prosumers, still wanting to do right by NAMCO, did the only thing they could at that point. They went to NAMCO and attempted to apply for licensing of the NOS Artwork so that they could legally reproduce it for the community and still do right by NAMCO in the process. Again, there were no stipulations involved in this, other than that they explicitly stated that they weren’t interested in a profit margin and wished only to charge the cost of reproduction, printing and shipping. If there was a licensing fee involved from NAMCO, they would gladly add that to the costs to pay their dues but did not want to make any profit themselves.

 

After many unsuccessful attempts to get the time of day out of NAMCO, and what I believe was close to a year of waiting, NAMCO finally responded not with a well thought out reply or addressing the devotion and altruism to their iconic IP from die-hard fans, but by stating flatly that only TwoBits had the license and rights to reproduce their artwork.

 

Open and shut case.

 

Well, not quite. There is one option left, and this is the option that so many prosumers just skip to from the beginning. Faced with a brick wall from NAMCO and TwoBits, the community still had the holy grail of reproduction artwork on their hands. They sure as hell weren’t going to buy TwoBits reproduction artwork because it would devalue their hefty investments in restoration.

 

What was left, is what sadly is a normal occurrence in the prosumer culture – they as a community simply gave each other the accurate artworks freely to be sent off to a third party printer. No costs, no production fees. They just gave the vector templates away freely to each other. This in and of itself is IP violation, but that’s the situation that so often rears its head in the 21st century paradigm. These IP violations happen (quite often) not because prosumers haven’t tried to do things the correct way, and follow the appropriate channels – but because companies that own these IP and brands act without common sense, even when the situation is handed to them on not just a silver platter but a platinum platter.

 

Now that we’ve covered bullet points 2 and 3, we’ve defined the deeper purpose for producing arcade machines in Second Life. That being said, detail is actually a large part – so we’re coming full circle for a very important reason.

 

 

Biff to the Future

Make like a tree, and get outta’ here

 

A few years back, I originally followed a similar path with the Series I arcade cabinets in Second Life. It was an exercise to demonstrate the reluctance and outright ignorance of companies when dealing with prosumer culture. Like the community and the Ms. Pacman scenario, I jumped through countless hoops to get the time of day out of NAMCO and other companies, only to be met with silence or the equivalent answer of:

 

We’re not in a position to either authorize nor ignore this request. We reserve the right to request removal of your offering at our convenience, but in the meantime we’re not outright telling you no.

 

Essentially it was the greatest non-answer they could construct. This in itself was intriguing to me because it implies that these companies have no protocol to handle or engage with prosumer communities for their own benefit. You’re either a producer or a consumer to them. Producers create stuff for money and make a profit, they pay you licensing fees and are professionals. You can measure the units of sales, the demographics, etc easily and construct appropriate licensing fees. Consumers are just the people those producers are supposed to be selling to, and companies usually have a strict “No Solicitation” policy in place barring consumers from playing the part of the producer.

 

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You have permission only if we can revoke that permission and claim we never gave you permission.

Also, we reserve the right to hold you responsible for what other people are doing unrelated to you.

 

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The problem is, this situation worked well in the 20th century when consumers were largely not enabled to produce high-quality media on their own so quickly and cheaply. But in the 21st century, it’s a whole other ballgame – and the consumers are now the high-quality producers of content as well, with the ultimate realization that in many cases your customers can actually do a better job than you as a company.

 

The really interesting thing is that those same customers aren’t looking to compete with you, but are so devoted to your brand and company that they only look for a symbiotic relationship whereby they can offer their devotion freely and for the benefit of all. It’s that altruism and devotion that companies seem to have a problem comprehending.

 

So the prosumers largely end up on their own little black-market mentality. They’d love to openly show their devotion and support for their favorite brands, but the brands and companies are forbidding it. Regardless, that isn’t stopping the prosumers from going ahead anyway and producing content and showing their support for their favorite brands. For a different context, one need only search for popular music on Youtube.

 

 

Devil in the Details

 

And now we’ve come full circle to why the detail of the mesh arcade machines in Second Life is important.

 

After learning the current prosumer situation, the attitude of the companies involved, and (yes) even putting in those requests personally myself though I know it’s just a good faith gesture, I’ve come to an expected impasse.

 

 

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This time around, the arcade machines aren’t for sale. You won’t find them on Marketplace. That much I’ve clearly decided. They do, however, stand to represent a highly-detailed representation of the prosumer concept in action, which is why I talk about how detailed and accurate they are. If there is really any chance of convincing a company like NAMCO (or any company for that matter) that such a thing is in their benefit, it helps to start with an accurate and detailed reproduction in order to show that the quality assurance aspect is not a problem.

 

That’s one less thing for them to worry about, assuming they bother giving it the time of day at all. The solution for this prosumer atmosphere is still the very thing I’ve been saying since 1998, in that it needs to be addressed on a case by case basis and taken into context of the situation at hand in order that these companies can reap massive benefits in the process in the form of self-propelled social marketing initiatives.

 

It’s a whole new ballgame for them, and I know change is fought hard.

 

That being said, the original hypothesis stands – ignoring prosumers doesn’t make the content go away. Better to have the high quality content be official from them than to allow countless low-quality knockoffs that make you look bad. Celebrate the dedicated community making you look good instead of ignoring them and punishing them.

 

The problem is… those low quality knock-offs are turning out to be the officially licensed products themselves while the unauthorized stuff is putting it to shame.

 

So here’s the solution (our 4th Bullet Point):

 

 

 

Virtual Intellectual Property and Electronic Revenue [VIPER] Licensing

 

To an extent, this already exists in a primordial fashion. You see it on Youtube when you search for music and the Artist shows up with an iTunes or Amazon purchase link, but I’m talking about the virtual world context here and further integration in social prosumer context. The thing about the situation is, until recently I hadn’t bothered trying to sort out exactly how to address this gap in a way that would be beneficial for all, and even though I’ve hinted at ideas for this (X-Factor, etc) it has only been recently that I’ve been tasked with sorting that out in detail for an entirely different project outside of Second Life.

 

What transpires below is just a basic overview of what I’ve been working out in detail. It should give a better idea of what I’ve been up to and how all of this relates. The description here isn’t complete, so implementing it “AS-IS” would probably be volatile at best without those missing pieces which I am keeping to myself.

 

Essentially it works like thus -

 

1. Consumers are also producers of content. In a social media age, this is a no-brainer to admit.
2. Prosumers are passionate about your products or brands. Again, no-brainer.
3. They are often quite brilliant and creative. Still not a far stretch and quite obvious
4. You no longer control the message or direction of the message
5. Prosumers will still create content whether you like it or not
6. You do control the brand and image
7. It’s better that you enable an outlet for that creativity and call it marketing
8. Automate the channel for prosumers to register projects/products
9. Set an automatic licensing percentage on digital content sales
10. Ask only that the company retains the sole right to do quality assurance before and during availability, which the company may invoke at any point before or during the digital offering

 

We’ll call this the ten commandments of VIPER Licensing. The point is to establish a prosumer friendly situation which takes into account both the prosumers and the community which is capable and already producing content with your brand (overtly or covertly), and giving the option to simply register that creative project/product as a prosumer and agree to a preset licensing fee tier based on the price of the digital asset, context, and volume of sales.

 

VIPER Licensing does not ask the prosumer to predict demographics, or any of the statistics up front like you would normally ask with a Producer. They aren’t treated like consumers (ignored) and they aren’t treated like production companies (massive licensing fees, etc). Instead, VIPER licensing does what the name implies:

 

It is a method by which a surgical precision can be applied to a prosumer context, whereby evaluation on a per project basis is enabled but not required. VIPER Licensing is also preemptive in that it automatically assumes clearance and applies a percentage fee for licensing to be paid to the brand owner/ IP owner. Upon review, that licensing may be adjusted or revoked at the discretion of the brand/IP owner.

 

The purpose of VIPER Licensing is to enable a marketing aspect from prosumers, while also fast-tracking and enabling virtual worlds prosumers to import real world brands. In context, a company/brand that enables VIPER Licensing for their brand in a virtual environment… say like Second Life, would simply set the brand name, the license fee tier, and any additional QA requirements on a Corporate Control Panel of Marketplace.

 

The company would be alerted whenever a project/product in a virtual world is registered for VIPER Licensing for their brand/company (email) and they may review them at their leisure – either revoking the VIPER License for projects or requesting some changes to keep in line with the QA requirements in order to remain authorized.

 

Only the projects/products from prosumers that the brand/IP owner feels meets the QA guidelines would remain after the filtering process. Overall, the brand/IP owner can use this wisely or to further defeat the purpose of this system by using it to abuse the good faith of their prosumer community through systematically denying any and all projects/products willingly registered in VIPER Licensing for such brand. In which case, a company is then no better off than they began because they’ve fostered a situation whereby they’ve destroyed the faith of the prosumers who will merely continue creating but no longer trusting your brand in the VIPER Licensing system.

 

Because the virtual world system (I’m still using Second Life as the example) would be making a percentage of the transaction on Marketplace, and the VIPER License would be setting aside a percentage for the brand owner, while the content creator is still making something for their efforts – everyone wins. VIPER Licensed digital products in a virtual world would likely sell far more since they would be officially sanctioned (and legal), which means that there is a huge benefit for prosumers to have their virtual products registered under VIPER.

 

It’s a flexible, agile, and elegant solution to the prosumer context with real world brands. It offers real world companies a zero-cost marketing solution that actually returns revenue. It’s a system that is automatic and as painless as choosing from a list of VIPER Enabled brands which are participating. It raises volume of sales being officially sanctioned, which means that the marketplace that enables this makes a larger volume of money through transactions while offering a method by which real world brands can re-enter the virtual world without the overhead.

 

And now you know the point of the arcade machines.

 

 

 

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Wrap-up

Other things of interest

 

Yes, I’ve been quiet and really haven’t sounded off on anything going on. We can blame that on my crippling Minecraft and Google+ addictions for which I may need to seek a rehab. In any event, this post is much longer than usual as I attempt to catch up.

 

Let’s get this out of the way in the short version:

 

New Materials coming to Second Life –

 

Specular and Normal Maps, thanks to Exodus team. Great start, but still needs Parallax Occlusion Mapping added to that materials list before I get giddy. Still, some kudos are in order for this. I’ll add it on the list with Mesh Deformer, Built-In Weather, Zones, and a laundry list of other things I expected 5 years ago when I first came to Second Life.

 

Still, better late than never I suppose.

 

 

It doesn’t require Crysis level graphics to do.

 

 

Everyone/Nobody is Going to Leave Second Life!

 

I’ve heard this one too many times.

 

It’s a statement that only holds true because Second Life is a virtual monopoly with no serious contenders. They can get away with bloody murder for all it matters at this point because there is nowhere viable to go. However, it’s unwise to make an assertion based on an assumption.

 

It is a situation that is contextual and almost always likely to change going forward. See also every other virtual environment that has come and gone prior whereby they thought they were immune to an exodus and so started pissing all over their customers. Before Second Life there was ActiveWorlds – and they said and did the same things under the impression that there was nowhere to go and so they could use and abuse their community at will.

 

Funny how that worked out. Linden Lab is not immune to this fact, so don’t jump the gun quite yet. If ever there is an equal or better alternative, you may as well pull the plug on the bathtub, because that’s the sound you’re going to hear in Second Life if they continue pissing on their community. Just because right now there isn’t a compelling alternative doesn’t mean that there never will be one.

 

At this point, all it’s going to take in order to meet that single requirement is to piss off enough open source programmers who specialize in virtual worlds that they organize and push advanceme – oh wait, yeah that might actually be happening.

 

Relax and just watch the situation. It could go both ways, really. I wouldn’t say “never” but in the same breath it’s premature to state that right now the situation is enough to trigger that exodus. What I will say to this end is simply that Linden Lab seems to be doing a great job setting themselves up for a future fall, because actions in an ecosystem tend to have a long-tail effect which aren’t apparent until the tsunami comes to shore.

 

Try switching to herbal non-caffeinated tea. No reason to be bent out of shape for either talking point. We can all come to a happy medium and just be patient to see what transpires without polarized fear mongering and sensationalist rants.

 

One thing is for certain – with the recent cutting off of open source grids, the Metaverse just got a hell of a lot smaller today. Maybe that’s actually for the best… I’ve always contended that in order to grow into something bigger and better, the open source end had to cut their apron strings and hold their own.

 

I see this as a fantastic opportunity for the future of the Metaverse. The real question is whether or not the community will seize that opportunity.

 

 

Minecraft is the Metaverse?

 

In a word: No.

 

I’ve been paying attention quite a bit lately to the latest updates (1.3.1) wherein Mojang changed the server code aspect to where each local client is also acting as a server. I find this interesting because it’s similar to the Hybrid Decentralized approach that I advocated years ago with Solipsis. It’s also one of the future looking requirements for server architecture proposed in the research paper I wrote with LMU for Association for Computing Machinery journal.

 

There is still quite a bit of lag involved with the new architecture of 1.3.1 Minecraft and the “everyone is a server” mentality. To me this means that the Area of Interest networking nodes aren’t quite optimized yet and the balance between decentralized and centralized communication haven’t been fine tuned. I’m pretty certain though that those aspects will iron out.

 

If not the Metaverse, I would say at least that Minecraft is serving as a wonderful template for the Metaverse for some crucial aspects. So there’s that – and I’m quite happy to see at least that coming of it.

 

 

 

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