Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 6

In today's session, I thought of exploring the Welcome Area in the game as I mentioned I would in the previous diary entry. As you can see in the screenshot above, this is the outdoors part of the Welcome Area anyways. What caught my attention here, was the appearance of James Bond in a billboard in front of me there, as well as the Britfilm 2008. Since the little blue squares are present, it is evident that you can click on them to go somewhere, but I haven't tried it yet, although it is a possibility for the future. I decided to go into the large building nearby instead and explore what is inside it anyways.

The inside of the building was a fairly impressive sight actually, as you can see in the screenshot above, there is a pond in the middle of the room on the ground floor with a tree in it as well. I really liked this touch actually, as I am fan of landscape scenery and all that. The fact that there were also little streams flowing around the room was a pretty cool touch, and the abundance of lily pads everywhere just added to the beauty of the room.

After having a walk around on the ground floor, I decided to have look at the upper floor too and found out something quite amusing.
You may have already noticed it in the screenshot above, but I'll say what it was in a second. I sat down at a chair neways, and I randomly just right click on everything around me to see how I could interact with them...only to find the report abuse option that normally is used for reporting abuse related to other users, was available for inanimate objects too! It was tempting to try and report abuse on the plants, but I just wondered if the support staff would really see the funny side of it XD.

Anyways at that point, I remembered I was supposed to visit the real estate office to try and get my own place as I said I would in the past, hence that became my next destination. The real estate office had to be accessed via the website for Twinity, and I soon discovered that getting my own place might be an idea worth reconsidering to be honest. You can buy apartments for an astonishingly low price, but you have to upgrade your membership to premium first though. I'm not too keen on upgrading to be honest, as I only go on this game every now and then, I'm not a serious user of it, hence paying to use it would most likely end up with money being spent for next to no reason to be honest. You can rent apartments though, but then again like I thought, Im not a serious user on this game, so it wouldn't be worth it really, as I would need to keep earning Globals (the game's currency) through doing odd jobs or replenshing the total myself, which are normally things a more regular player would do, rather than such as casual one.

There is another reason for me not wanting my own place here too, there are 2 other online games I want to look at, which are World of Warcraft and IMVU (well its more of just a massive, online 3D chat messenging program but it seems like a game). My attention will be divided between these 3 games as a result, so I cannot undergo hobbies and and such in one game that will require a lot of time and attention, as I will be playing through 3 different games at once, and I know WoW is an absolute social life destroyer, so I'm am not completely sure I will go for it to be honest.

Sorry for the sudden change of plans, I'll have a look what else I can do in Twinity anyways, especially exploring all the major locations and landmarks for a start. I may reconsider getting my own place in the future, but for now, I'm not so sure it is a good idea.

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 5

Today was a very busy day for me actually. Recalling the events from the last session, I decided to head out to where the christmas tree was once again and this time manage to get a screenshot of it. Luck was on my side today as I immediately went to the Brandenburg Tor and saw the tree in it's whole behemoth glory.

The screenshot doesn't do the tree enough justice unfortunately, you have to be there yourself to truly see how bewildering the height of the tree is, it is phenomenal. Something like this could easily make as a famous landmark to be honest. Moving on anyways, I decided to take more screenshots of the surrounding area as promised, which can be seen below. As I was admiring the scenery, another player suddenly appeared alongside me and said hello to me. Unfortunately for him, I was too distracted by the fact the guy HAD NO CHEST... I had to look at him twice as he was stood there as a floating head and arms above a pair of legs. I figured something must have gone wrong with the rendering but it didn't stop me finding it pretty funny though :P. The guy seemed like an alright person but then I discovered soon how rude he actually was. He asked me where I come from and then I asked him and he said Berlin. Whilst continuing the conversation onwards on Berlin itself, he interrupted me to say he does not like my language or something? 0_0... And then says he cannot understand me before disappearing off to wherever he went, leaving me standing there quite bemused. I would like to mention what my reaction was, but I feat it may be a tad too rude for the innocent eyes reading this...







After the other player's sudden disappearance, I decided to explore the area and see what there was for me to discover. After lots of random running around, I found a pretty neat feature which grabbed my attention as soon as it appeared.



As you can see in the screenshot above, I found a digital reaction of the fabled Sword in the Stone from the King Arthur mythologies. I was quite impressed to find it in this game, but it did make me wonder why it was in Berlin though? Examining the sword caused a blue door icon to appear which means it can be used to teleport to a specific location like the billboards, hence I decided to have a look to see where this would take me. I wasn't really expecting to go to Camelot though, although that would be an awesome touch regardless :P.



After being teleported by the sword, this is where I ended up which wasn't Camelot unfortunately but it'll do. I wasn't sure where I was, and just like where I was just now, it was deserted of all digital life (apart from plants and trees of course), and after running around the area, I noticed quite a few massive cranes which could mean the construction of a new building, which is an interesting touch to see in a game :P.


After seeing this area, I decided to call it a day for now anyway. On the next visit though, I'm gonna have a more in depth look around the Tutorial Area as I still haven't explored there properly and also I will visit the Real Estate office to find out about getting my own property. So yeah, in a dodgy and extremely pun of Toy Story...To Twinity and Beyond!

Sorry, that was bad.

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 4

With my 4th day with Twinity, I have to say it was my best experience on it so far, which I will explain why in a minute. As soon as I logged in today, I was alerted that I had received a message from someone called Lars who turned out to be one of the staff of Twinity. Lars had contacted me to tell me he had read my blog on Day 3 of Twinity and he offered to take me to see the tree as it turns out it was still there! This was a very pleasant and unexpected surprise, especially as I felt I had come across very angsty in the blog, which was a conseqeuence of all the personal problems I'm having at the moment. I actually panicked a little, but upon conversation with Lars, it turned out he actually liked my blog a lot mainly because it was so objectionable.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I'm in the midst of my conversation with Lars but this was later on after my computer crashed. Before I logged back on and took this screenshot, I was shown the route to the christmas tree, which really embrassingly was accesible via using the sign BEHIND me to teleport there...yep -_-' Somehow, I managed to miss that... But anyways, the christmas tree was an amazing sight to see, it literally was gigantic as depicted in the advertisements for it, and Lars told me the tree itself stands at around 50 feet tall! The sight of the tree was definitely worth the effort and journey to reach, that was my highlight of today's adventure. Lars gave me a quick description of the area, including the German market stalls (just like the ones in Market Square in Nottingham at the moment!^^) and the British Embassy. Unfortunately though, whilst Lars was giving me a talk about the area, my game suddenly crashed without warning on me and I was forced to restart my computer, thus losing all the screenshots that I had built up in my image editor , which was extremely frustrating.

I really appreciate the time and effort Lars went into to help me out today though as well as his patience with dealing with me as well, and I would just like to say a big thanks to him and I would recommend seeking him out if you have any troubles in the game yourselves.

After logging back in and talking to Lars again, I went off back to Brandenburg Tor to see if I could retake my screenshots of the area including the tree, but unfortunately I think something went wrong then. When I arrived there, the tree was now a silhouette instead which was an odd sight, I'm not sure if it was due to the sun setting at the time or the rendering of the tree messing up. Hence due to that, I'm going back to area on my next visit which will be very soon and make sure I do get some screenshots of the tree as I would love to show it off ...I mean let everyone see how awesome the tree is. I took a quick screenshot of the stalls though, which can be viewed below:

I will include more screenshots of the area with my next visit definitely, but for now I'm done with today's session and I'll see you after my next visit to Twinity!

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 3

With the 3rd day, things started to look up for me. I didn't have much time to spend on the game today, due to being busy but a couple of pretty interesting things happened anyway though. When I loaded up the game, I found that someone has requested a friendship with me which surprised me, as I haven't done much in the game so far. The person's name was Josie and I decided to accept the request and see what happens. I haven't spoken to her yet, but I will send a message to her on my next visit to Twinity. It was a pleasant surprise to have made a friend already, and I hope to do make a fair few more on this game as I spend more time on it in the future.

After the friend request was sorted, I decided to have a quick look around Berlin City Centre. This is where I discovered something pretty useful, all thanks to a fair bit of curiosity.

If you look in the screenshot above, my character is standing in front of some of the previous mentioned billboards. As well as being able to embed websites into them, I learned that billboards have another more useful and efficient feature. There are certain billboards in the City Centre (as well as other main areas I imagine), where pictures of the various landmarks and tourist hotspots that you can visit are embedded in them. They are not there just for show though, if you click one of these billboards, it will teleport you to the area represented in their respective image. I found this out after clicking on the billboard with the Musuem on and suddenly being whisked away to the Musuem area. This was definitely a great discovery as it makes it easier than going into the main menu and finding the area you wanting to teleport to there, and I think the less significant areas that you cannot teleport to usually also appear on the billboards.

I'm afraid I really didn't cover much in today's post, but I will spend more time with the game in each session and thus have more to talk about in the diary. The original plan was to continue looking for the christmas tree at Brandenburg Gate, but I didn't have the time or motivation to do it unfortunately. Actually, if you look at the left billboard in the screenshot, there is the advert for the christmas tree that I saw, but you cannot use it to teleport due to some technical problems. One thing I would like to mention before I finish for today though is that when I logged in, I noticed a couple of people having a conversation but it happened to be in German which was an odd but definitely intriguing experience. I was so used to seeing everything and talking in English, that I forgot that there would be players native to Germany and similar countries playing this as well and also talking in German to each other, especially seeing as the game was built in and based on Germany itself. If only I had studied German from past Key Stage 3 level, I might have stood a chance of communication with some German players, but alas I am reaping the consequences of not taking German all those years ago. Now if only I could find a game based in Japan (preferably with romanized subtitles or no kanji if thats even possible), things would certainly become very incredible and fun for me =].

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 2

With my 2nd day on Twinity, I was pleasantly surprised with the sudden and friendly welcome I received from nearby players as soon as I logged into the game. The first person who welcomed me was called Simone, and upon further conversation with her, I discovered she was actually a member of the support staff. Although, running into a member of staff was quite beneficial for me as I was able to ask her for some help I needed, including my difficulties with the camera controls. The camera is pretty horrendous in this to be honest, if you turn around for instance, it will swing around immediately and this can get very confusing and nauseating if end up turning a lot at once. I tried zooming the camera out to reduce the problem, but it still kept doing it, which was pretty annoying. I decided to ignore it and continue in the end, although the movement controls do still annoy me a fair bit at the moment. You can only move around with the keyboard, the mouse cannot be used to move around by the looks of it which is annoying, as I hate playing games with a lack of mouse based movement.

On a brighter note, whilst I was chatted to Simone, I discovered the game was completely German based, hence explaining why there is a digital recreation of Berlin in the game. She also told me about websites being embedded into billboards which can be seen in the screenshot below. I found this quite impressive especially seeing as you can embed any website you want in your own apartment as well by the use of blank photo frames in the game. Although to be honest, with the freedom to embed "any" website you want, this feature could easily be abused by the naughtier variety of players out there :P.
As you can see in the screenshot above, I managed to get into conversation with 2 other players as well, as they greeted me whilst I was talking to Simone. They did not say very much though, but one of them was new to the game like me so I assumed they were taking some time to familiarise themselves with the interface and controls.

Whilst I was waiting for the game to load the Welcome Area earlier, I noticed an advert on the loading screen, which mentioned the display of a gigantic christmas tree at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin City. This immediately grabbed my attention and I decided to set off on a hunt to find where the tree is, which I ultimately regretted. You know when they say the game is digital recreation of Berlin city...they aren't exaggerating! I teleported to the centre of Berlin city, and assumed I'd be able to find this tree in no time. Within minutes of arriving there, I was just as lost as the next guy. Due to the camera still being a nuisance and the limited movement controls, I wasn't up for running around especially considering how huge the city actually was!
I immediately went back to the Welcome Area and asked Simone for the best route there in roder to make my life a hell of a lot easier.

After speaking with Simone, I learned I could teleport to where the tree was located directly, which pleased me a lot but it wouldn't last long... Ironically, I wasn't sure why but you could not teleport there for the time being due to some technical problems, which really annoyed me. I dont mean to rant, but why go to all the effort of creating a magnificient, eye teasingly good chritmas tree for curious people to hunt and discover if you cannot even teleport to the location for the duration of the time the tree is up? It was only up until the 5th so I a few days left to go find it, buy my search eventually become very uneventful and disappointing.

Simone told me I could reach the Brandenburg Gate area by walking from the Musuem area, so I thought I'd give it shot and see what happened. I teleported to the Musuem area, only to get a kick of deja vu. As this is is a digital recreation of a city, the Musuem area alone was fairly huge which intimidated me a lot, and it did not help I forgot to ask Simone what direction I should walk in when at the Musuem, which was a very "clever" move. Seeing as I have no knowledge of the geography of Berlin at all, and that my patience and enthusiasm were fading, I decided to give up on finding the tree, as I could end up going in circles or going a considerable distance in the wrong direction even.

My impressions of the game actually have become fairly negative now due to my experiences today, but I'm nowhere near creating a final impression of it. There is still a fair amount of things to do in the game, and seeing as I'm new to this game as well as a complete greenhorn to online games, I've decided to ride this wave along and see where it takes me. Who knows after all, I may actually end up enjoying my experience after all in the future...I am interested in the fact that you can buy your own apartment and customise it to how you see fit, so that is something I will definitely look at in the the future.

Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 1

After my recent "success" with Runescape, I thought I doomed to be honest. But thankfully, one of my friends recommended a couple of other online games to look at, and one of them turned out to be my saviour! The first game was called VSide, and it mostly centered around forming and joining parties, socialising, partying etc. I didn;t really get much of a grasp on it, but I thought I'd try it anyways. The character creation system at the beginning is pretty simplistic like Runescape's, because you only get a few hairstyles, tops and such to wear from the off.

Upon downloading the game and getting ready to play, I loaded it up only to be faced with a scary looking menu with several options all the place in different categories. There were venues I could visit, existing parties that could join which were set up by other members and so on. But whenever I tried to visit a venue or a party, I kept getting the same weird error message which just frustrated me as I didn't know what to do at all. Seeing as the game was centered around partying, I figured it wasn't for me anyways, and I decided to leave it and look at Twinity instead.

At first glance of Twinity, I was already impressed especially with the level of character detail, as it seems to be on the same level as Second Life by the looks of it. I had a look around the homepage for the game and I was generally impressed with it, especially seeing as it seemed a lot like Second Life, but I COULD RUN IT. Thus I immediately signed up for this one and got decided to start playing straight away upon installing it.

This screenshot is what I saw when I first loaded up the game anyways. I chose to go to the Welcome Area and I immediately spotted people buzzing around talking to each other, even though it is a bit empty. As you can see though, the character customisation options are definitely more advanced and specific than the other games I mentioned, which pleased me a lot, as I can now create a much more detailed avatar of my inner personality woot :P. There are a couple of options that have intriguied me a fair bit, there's an option to create yoru avatar's face using a photo, which I will test in a minute and report on it. Also in the bottom middle of the screen, there isa silver toolbar with an "animations" option in it. Upon reading the user guide, I found that you can make your character perform a series of preset animations such as dancing and cheering, which is something I usually like in a game with 3D avatars in :P.

In this second screenshot above, I've managed to create the look of my ideal persona. Unfortunately, the range of hairstyles in this game is also fairly limited but it's the best I have seen so far despite that. I really wanted to have a spikey hairstyle for my avatar, but it wasn't available so I chose my next favourite style, the dreadlocks. As I mentioned in the Runescape blog, blue hair is a must for me, hence the blueness of my dreads. I really wanted a fire coloured theme for my character's clothes, and this shirt was the closest I found to it, but I am really fond of the design and colours of it. I thought I'd add fingerless gloves for the fun of it, as I've always imagined my ideal persona to be wearing them, and I added headphones in too, to reflect my deep passion for music and the importance of it in my daily life. The shoes were a brilliant find though, I found some black boots with flames on the side of them, which just screamed out to me to get them. I also put in a random sword because I'm a big fan of sword games, so that's a good way of summarising me I suppose. I am really happy with the appearance of my character despite the lack of a spikey hairstyle, because I feel that my personality truly has been projected onto this chaarcter via his image.

I didn't bother with the feature that lets you put a photo of yourself as your avatar's face because I didn't have a photo that met their requirements, and also I realised more importantly, that this character is supposed to be a self expression of who we are on the inside, so there's no point basing the character's appearance around mine, as I didn't choose how I would look on the outside when I was born, but I chose who I was on the inside when I grew up instead, and that is what is important after all for this module (I have to say though, I think I was starting to sound a little poetic just there!).