Drama Comes to Simcast!

by Alphaville Herald on 23/11/04 at 2:02 pm

azelda.jpg

Well, as much as the Herald luvs drama, a nice fat scoop of it would have would have made it into these pages days ago if I hadn’t been all wrapped up in my rl gf who is visiting from some undisclosed central eurpoean company (hint, she’s an infamous game dev groupie!). Anyway…

…no sooner do I sing the praises of SimCast in this blog, and in a talk at the State of Play, and to a NY Times Reporter who reports on the project in the Circuits section, but things implode. Head Scriptor Azelda Garcia is off the team and dev team leader Prong Thetan vented on the forums, which were then locked when Azelda’s friend Eggy showed up and he and Prong got into a potential pissing match. Did someone say “locked thread”? Well, what is the Herald for??? My own take on this is that…

…Azelda was doing a great job, but anything short of open source code for these games is absolutely untenable. Every damn update by the Linden’s broke something, and the Simcast team members ended up being crack addicts to their scriptor — who was the only one who could fix the scripts. Given the moving target that is SL, open source is the only strategy that has any hope of success. But then the problem is, how does the scriptor/game developer make money/protect their investment? Interesting questions here.

As for SimCast — the attachment based PvP D&D themed game, it looks like it will proceed with Grim Hathor and Mystic Templar developing the new combat/crafting/spell system. And guys, please make it open source.

10 Responses to “Drama Comes to Simcast!”

  1. Kathmandu Gilman

    Nov 23rd, 2004

    I.. uh… $980 for an island, $500+ land tier and $2500+ in coding fees… to supply free content to Second Life? Egad

  2. ajdown@jp

    Nov 24th, 2004

    Well at least we know how Uri manages to get into all of these game conferences ….. he’s boning an insider!

    aj

  3. Prokofy Neva

    Nov 24th, 2004

    Erm…I think the groupie got access to the game devs via Uri, not visa versa.

    Let me commend Uri for finally blogging on this painful in-house drama. I was beginning to think he was going to keep the kind of Silence of the Lambs for which EA.com and Stratics are known on sensitive topics. LL locks threads way less frequently than Stratics, and when LL locks a thread just as a programmer is dissing it because it’s in-world capacities for game devving are too limited, we really need to take a second look.

    I must say I am utterly startled that somebody on an in-game game-within-game project had to *go to an outside programmer*. I thought the whole campus spirit there at SL was that everyone was supposed to be in this utopian project pulling together, donating time and hours for the Glorious Future. Or at least, accepting payments in in-game currency that they might later stealthily redeem on GOM for RL dollars, but which they might cheerily and publicly claim they were saving to “invest” in in-game creativity. I thought that was the myth, anyway. Instead, it seems that to get this hard, laborious job done, the guy had to go outside the game. Well obviously that player had to get an account to come in and look at the game, but it sounds like he wasn’t a beta tester or a founder or a Lifer of some kind dedicated to Higher Purpose with the Community Spirit required to generously give open-source code, just like, say, many of the best content creators in SL give away their houses or clothes or scripts.

    The debate on SL hinges on notions of work-for-hire and contractual obligations and we’re all in the dark because we don’t know which state this contract was executed in and what language was in it — but then, isn’t that a problem in general for cyberstate? Let’s say it was New York State, then he’d be out of luck — it is employment “at will” if there isn’t a spelled-out contract — meaning you could be fired at any time for any reason or no reason and generally the contract language tends toward “work for hire” — I know as a translator that I can work my butt off for kopecks but that work belongs to the person who hired me, full stop. I can grandstand as much as I want and hide manuscripts in the closet and go on strike, but then all I do is prevent myself not only from being hired by that employer again but by employers in general in the community. Who pays the piper orders the music. If it turns out that the programmers in this cyberworld are prima donnas who don’t believe work-for-hire or any kind of employers’ rights and think they are “special,” well, OK, but then…are they THAT special? Yes, they might screw over Simcast, but will they ever get hired in this town again? Explain how it works…

    What I have to wonder is how people doing something like Simcast, however laudable and kewl it is and Brave New World That Has Such People in It — who pays? How can you generate income to keep paying programmers to fix up the code that gets broken every time LL releases an update? You’ve got thousands sunk into the thing, and more expenses to come due to carrying charges. Can you force players to donate their 512s if they are landless so that you can collect tier and not tier up? Or can you force players to play Linden dollar admissions fees? Or what, you really think dwell points alone will pay you back for those thousands you sunk into this deal? Is LL going to give you a cut of the subscription fee or carrying charges revenue because you’ve created an attractive site within their game that makes players want to log-on? As I look around this world, I have to say it reminds me a lot of boats: holes in the water into which you pour money.

  4. urizenus

    Nov 24th, 2004

    hehe, it sort of is like a boat.

    Obviously it is a nonstarter to pay someone for code on a project like this if they are keeping the source closely guarded. Will people come together and develop a game like this with open source programming in a kind of wiki -style barn raising? Well maybe. I see that as fallout from all this, Strife Anizuka has released his source. Three cheers for that. There are a zillion open questions about this though, and it will be very interesting to see what happens. Many of these projects have stalled for lack of money, land, or programming knowhow, but they leave behind experienced people and fragments of code, so I’m confident that in fullness of time some impressive PvP games will emerge — if not from SimCast (which lives on) but from its ashes (and the ashes of many other such projects).

  5. ian

    Nov 24th, 2004

    I’ve read this article over 2 times, can you explain the just of it..the only thing i got out of it, is this girl screwed the owner of the operation?

  6. Urizenus

    Nov 25th, 2004

    Ian, first of all, she is a he, and in my personal opinion no one got screwed. It just became untenable to pay someone to maintain software that was being closely held. That is, since the scripts were not open only Azelda could repair them when the Linens introduced one of their weekly script-wrecking updates. Plus the team was not able to write and plug in their own scripts for the most part.

    Here is the dilemma: closely held scripts just are not feasible in this environment, but then how do the script writers get compensated. My own view is that it’s going to require people that want to work on these projects for the love of the game and the love of the hack.

    I also want to disagree with something that DB said about SL is supposed to be a kind of barn raising gift economy. It clearly isn’t such a place and the Lindens DON’T intend SL to be that. The came up in one of the question periods at State of Play where Cory kept insisting that all the cool stuff in SL was being driven by the profit motive. Yochai Benkler and I suggested otherwise (and in the question period I specifically suggested that the new age of hidden scripts had dampened innovation) but Cory was having none of it.

    So what we have is an attempt by the Simcast team to see if it is possible to have a kind of small scall Wiki effort inside SL. The Lindens don’t believe in it, but its pretty clear to me that if the effort fails then SL is going to be limited to shopping malls selling clothes, sex toys, guns, and other objects that a lone scriptor can turn out.

  7. BrokenScript

    Nov 29th, 2004

    Problem with LL scripts are – the more complex they are, the more likely they will break at some time in the future. LL has tried to get on the ball by announcing planned changes to code, but more often than not unintentional bugs from upgrades or last-minute additions are what bones the scripting community over.

    All I know about Azelda is, he gets the job done, but he’s the first to demand near-real-world rates converted to LL dollars. This is his perogative of course. How someone who paid him that kind of money also accepted a closed-source agreement boggles my mind.

    The golden rule about SL and scripting – anything you make WILL break. Plan on it. It also undermines a few future things, but as long as Philip gets Hold-Em poker, everything is swell!!

    So glad we have our priorities straight, LL.

  8. BrokenScript

    Nov 29th, 2004

    Problem with LL scripts are – the more complex they are, the more likely they will break at some time in the future. LL has tried to get on the ball by announcing planned changes to code, but more often than not unintentional bugs from upgrades or last-minute additions are what bones the scripting community over.

    All I know about Azelda is, he gets the job done, but he’s the first to demand near-real-world rates converted to LL dollars. This is his perogative of course. How someone who paid him that kind of money also accepted a closed-source agreement boggles my mind.

    The golden rule about SL and scripting – anything you make WILL break. Plan on it. It also undermines a few future things, but as long as Philip gets Hold-Em poker, everything is swell!!

    So glad we have our priorities straight, LL.

  9. Prokofy Neva

    Nov 30th, 2004

    Re: “I also want to disagree with something that DB said about SL is supposed to be a kind of barn raising gift economy. It clearly isn’t such a place and the Lindens DON’T intend SL to be that.”

    It isn’t that I think it is “supposed” to be. I’m just describing how some perceive it or wish it to be. I’m commenting on the 2 (at least) kinds of cultures you see in SL. One is the barn-raising wiki represented by people like Jai Nomad who make really cool things like scripted houses that turn colors and track guests, and who give it away or sell it for a $1. The other is represented by Phil Murdock, the bed guy, who innovates too but sells objects and works at aspects like customizing and on-site customer service (one of the few store owners actually found on the premises, an innovation in itself LOL). I suppose they both have their place. It’s the direction of either subsidized National Endowment of the Arts or Soviet Academy of Sciences kind of innovation, or the profit-motive venture capitalism innovation. But I agree with Uri that all you’ll see are a lot of sex, guns, clothes and cults like vampires and their outfits if you just have the malls and the profit motive. Oh, sure, there will be some groups scattered here and there like at the Script Trade Fair where there will be people making cool stuff and giving samples away. I’m not against the profit motive. In fact, I think it’s key. But I do think it will sink to the lowest common denominator. Then you have to harness all those oligarchs and get them to fund non-profit foundations so that people like Simcast can make free content. But we’re still in the wild primitive accumulation phase of capitalism, mixed with the odd socialist economy run by the Lindens (can’t wait for my pogey to show up in my box tonight : ).

  10. Torley Torgeson

    Dec 6th, 2004

    About Azelda, on a whim: I was fortunate to meet her inworld in the foresty bankstuffs of Waterhead. She was testing a new game to hunt Wisps. At this time, I was both tired and awake at the same time, and I really enjoyed it. Wisp-detecting and running through the woods really put the forum drama in the far blurry background for me.

    Every time I experience something like the aforementioned, I’m reminded about the magic of Second Life.

    Cheerio :)

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