3pointD.com has the scoop on Kaneva. Definitely worth a read.
Kaneva had first announced quite a while ago, but then they seemed to go away to retool for a bit. Now they’re talking about being fully launched this summer. In short: a marriage between social network and virtual apartments, with stuff on your MySpace-equivalent page easily pulled into your virtual apartment.
Clickable Culture reports that The Electric Sheep Company gets (more?) funding to the tune of $7m. As part of the article, there’s a quote from Sheep competitor Millions of Us saying that the market for third-party services of the sort these two companies provide is pretty sizable — that the estimate of $10m worth of projects in development is “pretty low.”
For those who don’t know, what these companies do (and others like them) is act as third-party content and systems creators for virtual worlds. If you want to have a presence in Second Life, or make a pile of clothing for IMVU, or build a Virtual Laguna Beach, you call one of these companies and they will make the stuff for you.
I am running out of bits of the Jungle Book poem to post. 🙂 There were only seven segments that I finished, out of many more planned. Ah well, I doubt I will ever resume the project, given that it’s from 14 years ago. I was discouraged from proceeding with them by my thesis advisor, actually, who disliked the style — basically prosy, observational and imagistic.
The way these developed is that they were actually written based on room descriptions I had done for the LegendMUD Seoni Jungle area. When I read them now, they read less like poems about the original Kipling stories, and more descriptions of a place, a setting that is somehow a fantasyland, an ur-version of the Seoni, as if it were a real place that Kipling and I both dreamt of. That’s what gameworlds try to pull off, often, so it’s unsurprising that these read to me like poems about a gameworld with trees larger than possible, civilizations more ancient than history, and so on. And of course, often our gameworlds are greatly incomplete — lacking in solidity. As this poem says, “…everything is shaped… like the spaces between plants.”
So, after wrestling more with my network connection on the PS3, I downloaded this. My impressions comparing it to the Flash original:
I did an interview for GamesIndustry.biz maybe a month ago, and it showed up today. Curiously, they entitled it “Virtual Sanity” — surely a play on the song title, but I guess they found deeper meaning in something I was saying. 🙂
A sample:
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