Pathfinder Lester (formerly known to Second Life residents as Pathfinder Linden) gave a talk about hypergrid adventuring at yesterday’s VWBPE conference. As reported in my last post, it’s exciting but still the stuff for pioneers, reminding me more of my early days in virtual worlds in 2003 than of current day Second Life.
Hypergrid adventuring is jumping between virtual worlds (known as grids). The picture shows what can happen when the jump goes bad. In this case, six or seven of us ended up merged into one avatar somewhere at sea. I did manage a few hypergrid teleports yesterday, but as you can see from this picture, they didn’t always go smoothly!
The analogy I used in my last post was touring in a car a hundred years ago in 1911. There were no paved roads outside of big cities, no maps, no gas stations, no AAA to rescue you when things went wrong. If your car got stuck in a muddy bog or ran out of gas or broke down, it was up to you to somehow get it home. Most people in 1911 preferred the relative comfort and security of a train or horse-drawn carriage for venturing beyond urban limits. Only pioneers used cars. Everyone “knew” that cars weren’t practical. And they weren’t. But it was those intrepid pioneers whose adventuring led to interstate highways, AAA, and reliable, comfortable cars.
Just like with cars a hundred years ago, hypergrid adventuring isn’t for everyone. For most people, the best choice is to belong to a few virtual worlds and just log into them separately. But it’s the intrepid adventurers breaking the ground of the new hypergrid who will lead to the day when you can host your own little virtual world on your own computer but have it linked into the hypergrid of hundreds of other virtual worlds, some big and some small like yours, with avatars able to teleport at will between them.
That’s an exciting prospect. It’s today’s hypergrid adventurers who will make it happen. If you enjoy breaking new ground like this, hypergrid adventuring may be for you.
You can learn more at Pathfinder Lester’s Hypergrid Adventurers Club website becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club. Also, CNN Second Life iReporter any1 Gynoid has written a tutorial about hypergrid adventuring: ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-555219.