Alternate Reality Games. The Beast At the beginning of 2001, visionary genius and all-around nice guy Jordan Weisman invited me to be the lead writer on a project designed to generate interest in the world of the upcoming Steven Spielberg movie, AI. I didn't know it at the time, but I had just fluked into the chance of a lifetime—to get in on the ground floor of what might be the signature art form of the 21st century. Jordan's idea was that we would tell a story that was not bound by communication platform: it would come at you over the web, by email, via fax and phone and billboard and TV and newspaper, SMS and skywriting and smoke signals too if we could figure out how.
The story would be fundamentally interactive, made of little bits that players, like detectives or archaeologists, would discover and fit together. We would use political pamphlets, business brochures, answering phone messages, surveillance camera video, stolen diary pages... Slouching Toward Redmond To Be Born What is an ARG? Broken Into Pieces. Openlife Grid. Virtual reality to get its own network? New non-Linden grid opening. Adam Zaius Quiplash announces the opening of Open Life, an alternative Second Life grid developed in conjunction with Finnish developer RealXtend (apparently the companies Admino and Ludocraft are in there somewhere too, but we're still a little hazy on the big picture [Did I mention we're a bit hazy?
Pardon the dust]) - who have developed a custom viewer with additional features (like real 3D meshes instead of prims, python scripting, textures-via-HTTP, multiple attachment points per body part, and more) that are unsupported in Second Life currently. The new grid is going live in the next few hours, apparently, and it seems that everyone's invited. Open Life appears to be renting out simulators for $75US/month. We don't have a lot more information available to us right now, but it all looks very exciting , though reportedly there are stability issues that make the new grid only for the adventurous. Correction time: One is the Open Life grid, as posted by Quiplash. As we mentioned above. MMORPG & MPOG top list. Game Development Tool. GameScenes.