Lindens Makes a New 3-D Shareable Etch-a-Sketch (or 2D?)

 

Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, have now at long last announced the new products they are making outside of our beloved virtual world.

Creatorverse looks to me like a 3-D Shareable Etch-A-Sketch. Or is that 2-D? I can't quite tell, because some of the pictures flying by looked 3D-ish like sculpties, although technically maybe it's 3D?

It looked primitive to me despite its sophisticated physics because the shapes look for all the world like the Colorforms on the 1960s Capt. Kangaroo show -- remember those plastic shapes you arranged freely on a backdrop board? It was one of my favourite toys as a child:

From Babyboomers' Museum.

The idea might take off and every kid in American might want this new modern Etch-a-Sketch or Colorforms on his i-pad for those long, boring family car rides or just life in the living room while Mom is making dinner and Dad didn't come home from work yet.

It might teach kids physics -- because it's precisely a lack of knowledge of physics that might prove a barrier to people adopting this product. It sure did for me. It lost me somewhere on the frame where it was trying to illustrate something dropping on a see-saw and making it go up. I'm fairly certainly that even with drag-and-drop, I'm not going to "get" this. Girls especially still do bad in physics in school, and it's hard to teach, adjoined as it is with math. Even boys don't tinker like they used to do in the old days with old radios or spare parts of things like alarm clocks -- all those things are now digitalized, on the Internet, and on a flat screen, not in your actual hands.

So this game/world is actually as old-fashioned as the 1950s audio-visual club in high school or the ham radio clubs touted in old science magazines for kids -- it's teaching them a skill that they no longer use in the real world because few things have moving parts relying on physics anymore.

Apparently you draw the shapes with your fingers. The inability to draw free-hand is what always made Photoshop and impossible tool for me and most people. If the writing and shapes look that kindergarten in the hands of skilled Lindens, what will result from my hand?

What I do wonder is whether you will be able to upload and import shapes or images. Imagine if you had these "creativity tools" to put to work not on your own hand-drawn vehicle, but a sports car clipped out of a magazine.

You can make creations and share them with others -- that had to be Will Wright's work, because he had that same idea with the Sims, with the family albums and then later the houses and families themselves in the game -- and then, of course, with Spore, which sadly never took off (I never got it to work. My son played it for awhile but it was hard to stick with.)

I don't have an i-pad and I won't get one to play this game or any other SL game, sadly. I can't afford it. Maybe my kids will?

 

Comments

[c3]

similar to kids /edutainment software from the 1990s... only it probably wont work as well when new- since they never make gold copies anymore, just release alphas called betas// and never really care about bugs or it ever working since all one can do today is rent.. never own the toy.

[Prokofy Neva]

They don't have a way of selling the creations, do they?

You know, in the Sims offline, you had to use the company to display your albums and families.

But I broke away from that and started displaying the albums as big HTML pages with jpegs on my own site, so they couldn't censor. The families were harder to do because of the files.

Yet there were third-party sites that had furniture and skins and such which you could either get for free or buy or subscribe to. They were hugely popular. I used to spend hours browsing them and arranging my house and my stories -- more than I spend on Second Life, odd as it seems because I actually could control the scene and photography more in The Sims than you can in SL.

[cube3]

the good thing is that no one will confuse any of these products with "betterverse" platforms... etc

theyll just be another toy/activity thingie for the ipad kiddies.

just a product with actual customers... mainly parents for kids. lets see if the Lab... can make a normal customer "happy"...
a good test for the Linden machine. Love or just Money

[Prokofy Neva]

You know something? I don't think LL is capable of making some normal project with no ideology or wonkery in it. That is, I'm sure that both Rod and Will Wright, who is now on the board, are capable of making interesting mass games, as they did with the Sims. But neither of them stayed with the Sims because they have aspirations of being more ideological and wonky.

This product has the feel of an indie game or of Metaplace. That is, Metaplace was great and I liked it and it did a lot of things right, but it always had that game god cerebral quality to it that prevents games from becoming massive. Then when Raph made the Island thing, he was closer to the mass quality, it's too bad that game went down as I would have stayed with it most likely as would others.

The problem I see is that it puts too much emphasis on physics that people will either not get, not have the patience for, or not be impressed with if they can play a pre-made game with the physics done for you.

But I'd only be happy if Linden Lab could make a hit that would make them money and make people stop laughing at them or dismissing them, that would help SL.

[c3]

you want physics... toss a bird..lol

i always hated "management" games...
nothing could be more boring to me.

anyhow...

the market has /will have more than enough competition here for them.. they WILL hope their still loyal fanz will shill/ er sell for them... but with such simple "activity" type software... and no way for others to really make a buck... the whole shebang will just place LL into the masses of the ipad developer depths. probably its a portfolio play... to get LL bought by EA.