Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Sports in SL

As I explore different avenues that would attract more users to second life, I am realizing that something must be started that stimulates interest. Then I thought about sports. Sports generate possibly more interest than anything I can think of. Politics, music, the arts, etc....all fall behind sports. Events such as the World Cup and the Olympics bring together the entire world like nothing else can. Even countries that are in the middle of major wars participate in events like these that take their minds off their other issues.

If there is a way to set up sports like video games in second life, I think that significantly more people would become involved. I'm sure issues such as the speed and "gameplay" would have to be improved. But, if possible, this could be a very large step in the right direction for SL.

2 comments:

Brandon said...

Awhile back (when I was first exploring SL) I stumbled upon a bowling game on some island. You put a HUD on your avatar and you can control where you throw the ball, how fast, etc. It was rather simple and nowhere near as fun as real bowling (not that I was really expecting it to be). Overall, I the SL engine is too slow and clumsy to provide for any really fun games.

Javahawk said...

The fact is their engine isn't slow or clumsy. The people at Linden actually know what they are doing. Its just that they have to hack it to the extreme to get it to work as open ended as it is. You aren't going to get Madden 09 on SL anytime soon, but I would wager to say that it's technically feasible to create a game like you would have seen on the atari, given the appropriate developer tools, and not just the basic scripting language that is currently available. Given the trend in technology advancing as quickly as it seems to be (remember what games looked like 10 years ago?), I think its entirely feasible to assume that in 10 years from now you will be able to have something like Madden on something like SL. (2cents)