Connected To The Sound, Pictures On The Wall

It must have been about six months since I last logged in to Occupy White Walls. I wasn't all that enamored with the direction it had taken and the updates I'd heard about weren't doing much to change my mind.

And then yesterday, while I was on Steam looking at something else, I happened to notice this. I've linked it from the OWW website because linking from Steam is a pain.

The feature that caught my eye was called CloudSound:

CloudSound - Add music from SoundCloud to your gallery

• 2 unique speakers, 2 Jukeboxes, and a turntable to choose from

• 4 different animation effects

• Load songs from SoundCloud to anywhere in your gallery

• Choose the radius distance of the music

• Let visitors hear your music all over your gallery with the global setting

• Place multiple speakers and only hear only closest (great for specific rooms)

That sounded like something worth patching up for.

Cue music!

 

Before I got started on my own gallery I had a wander round the new tutorial space, the Piazza Dei Miracoli. It's impressive. The game's gotten a lot slicker since last I played.

I looked around a couple of the gallery spaces there and listened to the music that was playing but what I really wanted to do was try it for myself. I was mostly curious to find out just what kind of tunes were available on SoundCloud that you could use in the game. 

I thought I vaguely knew what SoundCloud was but I think I must have been confusing it with something else. I remembered it as the place where I got the sound samples from Daria to use for my character in Baldur's Gate but that must have been a different repository altogether. SoundCloud didn't even come into existence until nearly a decade later.

The copyright issue, which was puzzling me a little, seems to be comprehensively covered by SoundCloud's own operating agenda. To link a track in game it has to be flagged as "Public" on SoundCloud and that already means "anyone can listent to it".  

That's how you do in-game help.

 

The platform has just moved to a system of "Fan-Powered Royalties", which is an intriguing concept. How that fits in with the OWW deal isn't mentioned but I notice that if you click on the image of the track in game it takes you to the relevant page on SoundCloud itself so I imagine what you could call active views and listens can be tallied that way. 

Anyway, that's not my concern. I was more interested to know whether there was stuff on SoundCloud that a) I knew b) I liked and c) I'd want playing in my gallery. And the answer to all three questions is a resounding "Yes!". (Hmm... I wonder if they have anything by Yes...)

I always have trouble of thinking of random band names to put into search engines. For some reason the ones that pop into my mind first seem to be Papertiger Sound and Scary Bear Soundtracks. I thought they'd be a good test anyway, what with being more than ordinarily obscure. Plus I love them both and they would be perfect for my gallery.

And there they were. Plenty of tracks by both of them. I spent a good while playing around with the controls in game and on SoundCloud, figuring out how to get something from one into the other. I bought a speaker and put it down then I followed the very clear UI instructions to get a track installed and playing. 

Paola's really into it.

 

It all worked beautifully until I had a couple of speakers placed and tried moving from one to another. Then things went a bit haywire. You can set the distance at which you continue to hear each speaker but the transitions are brutal. Also, OWW has its own (rather good) music, which carries on playing every chance it gets. Your speakers replace it when you're in range but as you move around the gallery the game's music comes back whenever you pass into a dead spot.

After a while I got that sorted but two of the three Papertiger Sound tracks I was using kept breaking for some reason. I'm not sure if the game streams them in real time or uploads them and holds them somewhere but whatever it does it wasn't working very smoothly. 

Eventually I got three speakers installed, each with a track that seemed stable. Then I thought about what I was going to post about it. 

I was always going to post but it seemed nuts to try and describe the whole thing (like I just have...) when I could just make a video and let the music play. So I did and here it is:

There's an official video but honestly I don't think it really shows how it works. And it's a little... well... Isn't it?

The update notes mention jukeboxes. A working jukebox would be A M A Z I N G! (Sorry, still thinking of that official video...). There was a discussion going on in chat while I was there about how to get playlists working (people had seen them in action but no-one knew how it was done). I'm wondering if that's what the jukeboxes do?

I'll have to go in and play around some more. The somewhat annoying thing is that OWW will insist on kinda-sorta being an actual game, so I'll probably have to level up before I can see the advanced options. Like jukeboxes.

I need to do that anyway to earn the right to make a second gallery. I was going to do it when they added the option but I somehow never quite got round to it. Being able to set my own choice of music might just be the motivation I needed.

D.A.I.S.Y. Age?

This morning I received a typically busy and garish email from DAISY, the A.I. from art MMO Occupy White Walls. For an artificial intelligence devoted to aesthetics her personal style certainly does remind me of a particularly intense Geocities homepage circa 1997.

OWW (suggested pronounciation, according to the website, "Owouawwouaw") is still in Early Access on Steam. Or maybe it's alpha. I'm not sure there's a difference. On the website, developer StikiPixels defines Early Access as "the game is mostly stable but under heavy development", the exact phrase they were using for the alpha, when I first wrote about it back in 2018.

They're not kidding about the heavy development, either. In two years the "game", if game it is or ever was, has changed almost out of recognition.

When I first tried it I was quite excited, particularly for the building possibilties. I saw it as a potential replacement for Landmark or, conceivably, "the hipster Minecraft".

I was also eager to test the proposition that DAISY could educate me in art history and help me expand my tastes by leading me to new artists whose work I'd enjoy. She seemed to be quite capable of it. As I wrote at the time "Within a few minutes the artworks she was suggesting were beginning to pique my interest and stimulate my pleasure centers... After a dozen or so iterations... the problem was stopping myself from buying everything she put in front of me. I loved it all".

Sadly, that promise went largely unfulfilled. Each time I dropped in to see how the project was progressing I found it moving further from what I'd imagined it would become. Over time focus began to shift, away from what I'd seen as primarily an educative tool for dabblers in art history and towards an alternative means of self-expression and self-promotion for living artists.

I began to find DAISY less and less useful as she suggested contemporary artists in preference to old masters. It didn't seem as though she was learning my tastes, more like ignoring them.

As for building and decorating, even as the range of options and the quality of the tools improved, the possibilities shrank. Each account was limited to a single gallery. I made mine and was happy with it. I'd have liked to start again on another but to do that I'd have had to tear the old one down. 

I wasn't prepared to do that so that was the end of my adventure in architecture. What's the point of a building game that doesn't let you build?

Unsurprisingly, I haven't logged in much as the game's developed from there. In fact, Steam claims I've only ever played for 7.3 hours, which seems exceedingly low. I definitely haven't logged in for a long time. There didn't seem much point.

Not until today, that is, when DAISY's email arrived, bringing news of a couple of very significant changes. One of them opens fresh possibilities for exciting gameplay, the other makes me curious to see where the game is going next. 

Multiple galleries! That was the specific change I suggested in a recent feedback survey would be needed to get me back and playing once again. It's only two more slots but, as the email says, that's a 200% increase. More than enough to keep me amused for a few more hours. 

I'm not going to jump straight in and not only because you need to be level 20 to get the second gallery, 30 for the third. (I'm currently level 10). It's more that I find OWW suits the darker days. 

Putting a gallery together is a very enjoyable way to spend a wet Sunday afternoon. Right now, with the sun shining and the sky full blue it doesn't feel like quite the thing but when the rain comes maybe I'll start another project.

The other major development doesn't impact me directly but it's highly significant for the future of OWW: you can now upload your own art for a one time fee of $9.00. Per picture.

It seems a bit steep to me. The fee places the submission in DAISY's database and also on the Kultura website, where it remains for as long as the game and website persist, or so I assume from the assurance "Once your artwork is in, it’s in".

There doesn't seem to be any way of capitalizing on the investment directly, as yet. The FAQ mentions "sales" when making the point that no commission is charged but it seems to be a reference only to such sales as the artist and buyer may arrange outside of the game itself: "OWW is designed to drive traffic to social media and/or other sites. Many artists are contacted by fans (who discover them in OWW) over social media and in several cases, people bought artworks in the ‘real world’ "

The drive and direction seem clearer, at least. Occupy White Walls never seemed all that much like a game although it undoubtedly contains gamelike elements. For someone like me it's a toy and the addition of two more building slots makes it a much better toy than it was. The real thrust, though, is an ambitious assault on the established art market.

That's quite a manifesto. The various comparisons with Napster and Spotify that pop up elsewhere in the narrative make StikiPixels' ambition plain.

Whether there's a demand for such an open-access, global clearing house for artwork and, if there is, whether OWW is up to the job remains to be seen. Not being an artist I can afford to sit back and watch (although if I were an artist I think I'd still want to sit back and watch for a while before I started stumping up $9.00 a punt to test the market).

I'm just happy for the opportunity to build a couple more galleries. I'll see if I can't be a bit more forward-thinking this time, too. Last time I had no idea what I was building until I'd finished.

Before I can do that, though, I suppose I'll have to get leveling. I guess it is an MMO after all...

Complaints (It's My Department)

I've complained about this before but that's not going to stop me complaining about it again. For some very effable reasons (colder weather, daylight vanishing, people staying indoors) game developers always seem to start throwing freebies around and launching new product just when I find myself with the least time to enjoy it all.

This year it's even more ironic in that I spent the entire summer at home, free (at least when I wasn't hospitalized) to devote as much time as I wanted to playing video games and writing about them (not least because my medication made me extremely sensitive to sunlight so I had to stay indoors even when I was feeling pretty good).

And now I'm back at work so off they go again.

Astellia (which, as you will see if you follow the link (which is where you end up if you right-click the name in text and select "search google for "Astellia"" like I did) has possibly the most annoying landing screen since web site designers stopped using rinkydink music you couldn't switch off; almost as annoying, in fact, as this heavily over-parenthesized and scarcely readable sentence) just had a free weekend.

I only found out about it halfway through, too late to make time to take advantage of their generosity. There's a second chance to try out this new, supposedly oldish school MMORPG, without forking out for a "box" (that doesn't exist) or taking the we're-so-old-school-we-even-even-have-a-subscription option. That's next weekend, when I will almost certainly still not be able to find time to try it out.

Not that I was especially interested in Astellia anyway. As I mentioned somewhere once, it seems to instill apathy in all who've tried it. Still, I hate to miss out on an opportunity to post ill-informed snap judgments on new games based on blink-and-you'll-miss-it exposure to their charms, if any. Especially when it doesn't cost me anything.

Then there's The Outer Worlds, another game I never had the least interest in playing until loads of people started talking about it. I hate to be left out. Such a joiner, me.

It wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't that, apparently, you can play this brand new, high-profile, "exclusive" release for the princely sum of one dollar. That's if you join the beta for the XBox Game Pass for PC (I hope that's a working title. It's informative, sure, but it's hardly snappy, now, is it?) XBGPfPC, as no-one is calling it, has a confusing pricing structure. On full release it will run you $9.99 per month but you can get in for just $4.99 with the Introductory Offer Not sure if there are dates for either of those yet but you could be beta testing it right now for a buck. What's stopping you?

It's a pretty good deal even at the $4.99. There are some well-reviewed games in there. Now that I seem to be dabbling more in non-MMORPG titles there are several I wouldn't mind trying. It would have been great three months ago. Now?  Not sure I'd get round to using it.

Still, I might give them that dollar anyway. I probably ought to be able to get a blog post or three out of it, at least. That would be money well spent.

Finally, at least until the next Autumn Promo lands, there's an entire week of free flying in Star Citizen. Actually, more like free mining, given that's the tentpole feature of the new build. I did get as far as finding my login details and updating the client (an 8GB download) for this one.

I had a very surprisingly good time in the last Free Fly, back in the spring and I wouldn't mind another go. Unfortunately, while my details work fine and my account is still valid, my character has vanished into the void. I made a new character this evening and managed to get as far as finding my ship and launching into space but I was tabbing in and out so much, trying to refresh my memory on how to play the damn game, it crashed and I lost the will to carry on.

Maybe I'll get back to it before the hangar doors clang shut for another six months. Probably not.

And there we have it. Suddenly I have loads of ideas of things to do that will generate things to write about and I don't have the time to carry them through.

I would quite like to take another look at ArcheAge in its F2P version now that the Buy to Play version is making such a splash. There are supposed to be some quality of life improvements in Star Wars: The Old Republic that I really should check out. Anything that empties my overstuffed storage bays has to be worth a log-in. Occupy White Walls had another update. I always get a mild twinge of guilt when that happens and I let it pass...

No doubt there's more I've missed and more to come. Oh well, at least it gives me something to complain about.

What I'm Playing - And What I'm Not

I missed a day posting the day before yesterday, due to circumstances both foreseen and unforeseen. I had my second in-hospital chemo session, which only took up the morning, but then the car broke down on the way home. It stopped right on a busy junction and I had to get out and push it into a nearby car park. Not exactly what the doctor would have ordered.

With great good luck Mrs Bhagpuss managed to get it going - just about - and with even greater luck we were only about a quarter of a mile from the garage we usually use. Mrs Bhagpuss managed to limp it in and the mechanic diagnosed a shot clutch. It was set to take a couple of days to replace in the end they got it done a day early.

I felt somewhat out of it that day. My hands were affected and typing was a bit unpredictable, although it didn't stop me commenting on a bunch of blogs, so I decided to skip a day. It's not like we're in Blaugust after all.

Yesterday, when I was a couple of paragraphs into this post, we got the call to pick up the car. When I got back a couple of hours later I read the news about Daybreak and Amazon, which looked a lot more interesting than what I had planned (this post, so I'm really selling it.).

I thought I'd do a little "what I'm playing" number. I always consider these to be fillers although for many bloggers they seem to be much more like regular features. It might be useful for me, anyway, because some days I'm really not quite sure what I'm doing and everything seems to be even more random than usual.

The MMORPGs I'd consider myself to be actively playing this month:

Guild Wars 2
EverQuest II
Riders of Icarus
Secondhand Lands
Final Fantasy XIV

Games I thought I'd be playing but don't appear to be:

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Secret Worlds Legends
Black Desert Online

Games I keep telling myself I should be playing but never do:

Dragon Nest (the mobile version)
Villagers and Heroes (mobile and PC cross-platform)
Occupy White Walls
DCUO

Games that are nagging me to play them but which I am resisting:

World of Warcraft
Rift
Elder Scrolls Online
EverQuest

Anything not on one of those lists is probably out of luck, although FFXIV would have been nowhere near any of them a week ago and now look at it.

 Riders of Icarus

As far as time spent goes, Riders of Icarus is probably getting the most hours logged. It's the first game I fire up most days. I'm very keen to hit all 31 this month for the login rewards. They are without doubt the best I've seen anywhere.

This morning I got a Legendary mount, my first. The other login Legendary Familiar I got was a combat pet only, because you can't really ride around on the back of a maid. Actually, I wouldn't put anything past MMO devs but in this case they've restrained themselves.

The mount in question turns out to be an inflatable dolphin of the kind you see people drifting out to sea on at holiday resorts before being rescued by the coastguard, hopefully at considerable personal expense. At first I thought it was just a ground mount but then it occured to me it might float over water like a skimmer in GW2.

I happened to be in Divinity Shore, the fishing beach, so I tried that out and the dolphin, whose name is Black Dooly (might be its species, actually), promply poofed, dumping me in the water. I took it for a spin around the Hakanas Highlands and after a while I noticed it was floating in the air whenever I rode it over a drop.

Turns out not only is Black Dooly a flying mount, it has a huge ceiling of 1200 meters, making it by far my best performer, Vulkanus the dragon being a distant runner-up at 450 meters. I'm just beginning to hit the point where the game takes off - literally - so it couldn't have come at a better time.

The more I play Riders of Icarus, the more I like it. I'm wary of making it sound better than it is because it's very much what you probably expect it to be. It's currently the game I'm enjoying playing the most, though, so there will be more posts about it, at least until I inevitably stop playing suddenly with no explanation or comment and don't mention it again for months, if ever.

 Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has seen a resurgence of interest chez Bhagpuss almost entirely off the back of Dragon Bash. I like most of the activities the event has to offer, the achievements are largely achievable and there are some rewards I quite want.

I've finished the metas on one account and I'll get them both done on a second account before the event ends. I've ditched the third account for the duration to prevent burnout but I did log in the 4th, free to play, account to get a few AP there. I've particularly enjoyed the mount race (ironic, considering my well-documented loathing of mounts in GW2).

Dragon Bash ends next week but its immediate replacement is the very quick return of the World Boss Rush event. I really didn't do this event justice last time it was around but it's exactly the kind of thing I enjoy and this time there are significantly improved rewards, including tiered community targets, which should keep the whole fizzing.

I'm very happy to see that someone at ANet has finally recognized the importance of giving people plenty to do between Living World instalments. Shame it took them nearly seven years to work out what every other MMORPG seemed to understand from the get-go but better late than never.

EverQuest II

EverQuest II gets played most days. I have a ton of stuff to do there, not least finishing the Signature Questline from Chaos Descending, something I still seem to be subconsciously avoiding. I'm on the final step, too, but that step is, as they say, a doozy.

As has happened before, in commenting on one of Telwyn's posts about a bottleneck in EQ2 I did some research that told me stuff I didn't know. As a result I took another long look at my Berserker's gear and now I have some kind of plan on further improvements. That needs work.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might even go back to Test and pick up a couple of questlines I never finished - or I might start them on Live. That would be a project because one of them is sixty steps long and took me weeks the first time around.

Secondhand Lands

Secondhands Lands is my EQ substitute right now. I log in and grind some mobs to fill a quest quota. Now that I'm in areas where the creatures are aggressive I have to find a safe spot and pull singles carefully, which is something few games made after about 2006 require you to do. It's very satisfying.

I got a large number of hits to my original post on the game after Massively:OP gave me a lovely plug in the piece they did off the back of the tip I sent them. No comments though and I don't know if it's resulted in anyone actually downloading and playing the game. It was interesting to see the effect on numbers here from a main article on M:OP as compared to a mention on Syp's Global Chat column, which barely registers.

FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV came out of nowhere. Like Syp (him again) I had pretty much decided I would never play this again. I even commented to that effect on the post. I haven't even logged in for any of the recent free welcome back weeks. Then I read about the Trust system (Endgame Viable. whose post I entirely agree with, is just the latest to weigh in on the topic) and next thing I knew I was patched up, in and playing.

And enjoying it. As often turns out to be the case, I find the extended free trial version of an MMORPG more to my taste than the full game. cf World of Warcraft. I've been pottering around and leveling up. I'd like to get to the trial cap of 35 and then do a second job.

The Rest

Of the games I'm not playing, the one I really should get back to is SW:TOR. I had absolutely no intention of stopping but there's a specific reason why I'm not playing this month. TOR has a lot of voiceover. It's quite well-voiced and I like to listen to it.

But not while I'm listening to the Cricket World Cup on the radio. There's been a match virtually every day for the last six weeks and it quickly became too annoying to have to keep tabbing in and out to pause the commentary so I could hear the quest dialog. There's cricket all summer with the Ashes coming up so it might be the autumn before I get back to TOR.

SWL and BDO just fell off the radar after their events drew me in. I had plans for both but they faded. I've been watching the entire eight seasons of Monk on DVD in bed on my portable DVD player so I haven't even had the Kindle Fire on for weeks. That's put paid to both Dragon Nest and Villagers and Heroes. I did get as far as recovering my login details for the desktop version but I don't see any characters there so I'm going to have to start again and I can't be bothered right now.

Everything else is thoroughly on the back-burner. I'm undecided about WoW Classic but I imagine I'll resub for a month just to be there. Not expecting to hang around long.

I do have one new (to me) title downloaded and ready to start, Eternal Lands. It's an old game I thought I'd already tried but looking at the screenshots and some video, I don't recognize it at all so I imagine I'm confusing it with something else. I'm trying to resist starting it yet for obvious reasons but when I do there will be first impressions here.

That's where things stand. Next week it will probably all be different. Or tomorrow. Or this evening.

Who needs a schedule? Not me, apparently.

Modern Art Makes Me... : Occupy White Walls

The past few weeks on this blog have seen an unexpected lurch away from fantasy towards Science Fiction: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Citizen, City of Heroes. Superheroes are almost always SciFi even if they're almost never S.F. You may need to be a certain age...

Occupy White Walls isn't S.F. but it is. It's the "avatars". The wireframe models, with their masks for faces, evoke androids or robots. Especially, disturbingly, cybernauts or cybermen.

Then there's D.A.I.S.Y. . DAISY (and no, I am not going to punctuate her name every time, even though it is supposedly an acronym for Discover Art Intended Specifically for You, which sounds like a retrofit if ever I heard one) is an A.I. Not an NPC pretending; an actual, working Artificial Intelligence. You could argue that A.I.s are science fact these days, not science fiction, but I wouldn't.

Developers StikiPixels attempted to explain Daisy in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun last summer. Supposedly she "sees the art you “bought”, then tries to understand the piece by “looking at it” and comparing it to every other art piece you have liked to build a profile".

When OWW was in beta (possibly alpha) DAISY seemed to do just that but since contemporary artists have been allowed to submit works to the database I have to say she seems confused. When I went looking for new acquisitions this morning she seemed determined to push me towards images I found actively dislikeable.

According to the interview, this is supposed to represent neutrality or agnosticism: 

"This is actually one of the places the AI can shine, as opposed to a human curator – D.A.I.S.Y. is completely agnostic and only driven by what it thinks (and doubts) an individual player would like...Let’s say that the 9th work is a painting by an emerging artist, but the 10th artwork is a Van Gogh, a human curator will choose Van Gogh instead of the unknown artist because that’s human nature (we are obsessed with fame), but not D.A.I.S.Y."

Which is fine, except that Van Gogh is famous because of his talent. (Okay, and his tendency towards self-mutilation, I'll give you that). Emerging artists are, by definition, not yet fully formed. I'll wait 'til they're baked. Until then, feed me the good stuff, DAISY.

The reason I fired up OWW this morning (it's been a while since I last "played")  was the email I received telling me about a new, major update, Cambrian Explosion. The highlights include two new vendors in The Plaza (I didn't even know there was a Plaza), Portals, a way to get paid for inspiring other players, some really excellent camera options and a totally new tutorial.

This takes the game to version 3.0, which sounds quite high for still not being launched.  OWW remains in Early Access on Steam, where it has an enviable Very Positive rating. It comes from only around 330 reviews, though, and StikiPixels are concerned that word still isn't getting out.

That's why they've created the new "Love" page, which I found linked in the email. They're asking players to review the game on Steam and talk it up on social media (which they helpfully list as "Youtube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Imgur, 9gag, Instagram, Tumblr, hell you can even post it to MySpace!", which makes me wonder what Blogger, Wordpress and LiveJournal could have done to upset them). They'd also like everyone to

"Email, tweet, send a carrier pigeon to every single writer and streamer you know. It might be the difference between being written about or not. For OWW, as a small online indie game, word of mouth can make a huge difference."

This is me doing my bit. I don't know any streamers but I'm tipping MassivelyOP, although I'm sure they've already seen the press release. Still, nudge nudge, eh?

I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think OWW was an exciting project and a fun "game". There are things about it I'm not crazy about - the quality of the contemporary submissions for one, the awkwardness of the UI for another, the really terrible name they've lumbered themselves with - but there's nothing else like it and I'm certain a lot of people would get plenty out of OWW if only they knew it existed or took the time to give it a try. 

I logged in this morning just to take some screenshots and ended up extending my gallery, buying some more art and fiddling about for an hour and a half. The new free-floating camera option is fantastic for screenshots, or it would be if FRAPS didn't crash the game all the time. There is a warning about that and they do suggest an alternative but I just gritted my teeth and re-booted when it happened.

As I've said before, as a building game for people who can't build, it's ahead of most others I've tried. Coming back to my small gallery after several months I was surprised how coherent and convincing it looked (architecturaly that is - the curation not so much...). That's the opposite of what generally happens when I return to things I've built after a long layoff.

I am at the point where fiddling with what I've got is going to make it worse. I should work on the content not the infrastructure because right now it's just a bunch of random pictures slapped on some walls. I probably should start a new build somewhere else, with an actual plan, I guess.

I also ought to travel around and look at some other people's galleries. I have yet to try that and it's kind of the point of having the thing be an MMO rather than an offline toy. There is the perennial problem of building games, as exemplified in Landmark, where seeing how astoundingly talented other people are can be demotivating. Never really affects me that way, if I'm honest. I'm too solipsistic to feel threatened by my own shortcomings.

Anyway, I've checked in, seen something of the new build and done my bit to drum up interest. That's enough creativity for now. Back to the killing fields!

Pictures On My Wall: OWW

Occupy White Walls is open for business at last. It took a while. Demand so outran expectations the servers were "on fire" according to the Steam page. Not literally, I hope, although I did see that happen in an office where I worked, once.

Also open for business is my Gallery. I flung wide the doors (metaphorically - it doesn't actually have any doors yet) despite it currently looking disturbingly like the cloakroom facility in an upmarket hotel circa 1978. It's also hanging in a void but then they all do that.

It's a deeply inappropriate setting for the kind of artworks I seem compelled to purchase. The abstract expressionists don't look too out of place but the bleak scenes of rural ruin, the bright and blurry post-impressionists and the endless winter landscapes really need something warmer behind them than yards of shiny black marble.

It's a moot point at the moment, since I ran out of money after about ten minutes, having only managed to buy four artworks. For the record, they are

Silent Dawn  by Walter Launt Palmer (1919)
January: Cernay near Rambouillet  by Leon-Germain Pelouse (undated, mid-late 19c)
Rushing Brook  by John Singer Sargent (1904-1911)
Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version) by Paul Klee (1925)

All of those links go to the website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose archive is one of OWW's many sources. Copyright is always a contentious issue but according to Stanford University's guide on Copyright and Fair Use

"All works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. Works published after 1922, but before 1978 are protected for 95 years from the date of publication. If the work was created, but not published, before 1978, the copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years"

 I guess that means I'm safe to include one of the actual paintings. The Singer Sargent is the cheeriest.

I did once have a small brush with artistic copyright, when I was working in the marketing department of an insurance company back in the mid-80s. There was a period when the company I worked for was so out-of-touch with reality they let me write the copy and choose the artwork for advertisements in national magazines and I was so young and green that I chose to use a glorious Graham Sutherland painting (it might have been this one but he did a lot of vertiginous tunnels through trees) as the butt of some idiotic pun.

I've managed to wipe the details from my mind but I do remember how difficult it was to get the rights to use the image -and how expensive. Just as well the people I had to deal with didn't also want to know what the ad was about. That would have put the tin lid on it!

I noticed during my interactions with DAISY, the A.I. in charge of acquisitions, in OWW's alpha/beta that almost every picture I chose fell into a period bracketing roughly a century and a half, from the mid-19th to the late 20th. The sweet spot seemed to be around 1890 to 1930.

If for nothing else, I would recommend playing around with OWW to let DAISY illuminate your own latent aesthetic taste. You might not think you have strong preferences but she will show you that you do. And that they may not be what you expect.

On the basis of my short visit today, the current Free to Play version of Occupy White Walls has a lot more going for it than its indisputable educational value. The building aspect, as I've mentioned every time I've written about it, is every bit as compulsive as you could expect.

My main point of comparison is Landmark, compared with which OWW is very much easy mode. It's snap-together parts rather than making your bricks out of mud but that suits me very well. My issues with Landmark were never with knowing what to build; they were always with how to get the tools to behave. OWW's toolset has its eccentricities but it's orders of magnitude simpler than even the final, "simplified" version of the astonishingly abstruse controls the SOE team deemed appropriate for popular use.

In a n notable change fom alpha, the Early Release version of OWW makes a concerted effort to give the whole thing some credence as a "game". To that end there are now levels, which you get by adding to your stock of artworks. At Level 2 my character (or "Avatar" as the jargon of the game has it) needs to buy six more paintings to level up. Is that P2W? Who cares?

Gaining levels gives you access to different collections. Judging by what seems to be a reduced choice of building materials on offer I am guessing that applies to utilities as well as art. Either that or the design and construction aspect of the game has been neutered since alpha. That seems unlikely.

As well as leveling up you also now need to pay serious attention to earning money. In alpha I never came close to running out of cash but today I was down to my last $500 in minutes. You start with $10,000, which goes nowhere.

Fortunately there's an income stream you can access almost immediately. The tutorial explains that you need to open your Gallery to the public so they can come in and leave you tips. I would add "if they like what they see" but I'm not sure it matters. They were piling money on my desk before I even had the walls in, let alone any art for them to look at.

Players visiting other players' galleries, another thing the tutorial has you doing, is intended to be a big part of the game but to make money it's NPC visitors you need. They wander around, occasionally nodding sagely or clapping their hands, then they drop a few blue blocks on your desk and leave.

The blue blocks represent their donations. You pick them up, whereupon they turn into dollars in the bank. Your Gallery stays open for half an hour, after which you have to manually re-open it, so you can't just leave it open while you go to real-life work or sleep. Other players, however, can open it for you when they visit, which allows both for social networking and random acts of altruism.

As I said, so far I can't tell whether the amount of money donated relates to what you have on display but there's clearly room for some granularity there. I can imagine some involving gameplay relating to maximizing your income as well as some interesting moral conundrums over how far to compromise your artistic principles in favor of commercial success.

Most of OWW seems very well thought out and consistent but there's one design decision I can't fathom. When the imaginary visitors arrive and leave they fling paint all over your pristine walls.

It's part of a mechanic whereby each visitor teleports in, appearing as a multicolred globule, which then explodes. They do the same when they leave. It's dramatic, for sure, and visually arresting, but the connotations of visitors effectively vandalizing the installations make it seem ill-judged, to say the least.

That's just one minor flaw in a very promising project. For a free to play MMO in early access OWW has an enormous amount to offer. Looking forward I'd hope to see a great deal more customization for your avatar - clothes would be a start - as well the introduction of some of the plastic arts to the collections and more terrain options in the building files. It would be fantastic to have outdoor areas to landscape for a sculpture park, for example, or to be able to lay art trails through a forest.

And in the time it's taken me to write this post, my finances have recovered to the point where I have over $6,000 in the bank. Time to go spend my way to the next level.

Clothes, Friends, Photos: OWW, OLN

You know how it is. One day you're bemoaning the lack of non-combat MMOs then next thing two come along at once.

It would have been easy to miss them both. There's a lot going on this week. I'm struggling to stay on top of it all, EverQuest 2's Chaos Descending expansion and the big Rune and Sigil revamp in Guild Wars 2, which I still haven't had time to explore in any depth. I've already had to pass on Lord of the Rings Online's Legendary server. At least I don't have to worry about Fallout 76...

I'm even keeping a watchful eye on EverQuest for the pre-expansion "Fall Fun Bonuses". The first couple of weeks was double rare spawns and double faction bonuses. Pass. That round ended yesterday, though. As I write the next set hasn't been announced. If it's double xp then I'll have to make time somehow. Magician needs new shoes. Spells. Levels. All of that.

And then StikiPixels had to choose yesterday to commit. Art curation MMO Occupy White Walls has been hanging around outside Steam Early Access for weeks and now it's going in. I was more than willing to make time but as the screenshhot up top suggests, so was everyone else. So far I haven't managed to log in.

I only have myself to blame for getting caught in the stampede when the doors opened. I had a Steam Beta key for this one a weeks ago (alpha tester's privelige) but I couldn't work out how to redeem it.

Not that I tried all that hard. I already had my hands full of testing with the Unnamed Alpha. If that one was Live and had true persistence I'd be playing the skin off it right now. Anyway, I figured the open release for OWW would be just around the corner so I stood down from Early Acess to Early Access and here we are.

OWW is a very interesting MMO. I'm not sure whether it's an MMORPG. You certainly could use it as a venue or a vehicle for roleplaying. I'm sure many will. RP is entirely optional, though.

I'm not even sure it's a game. It didn't have many gamelike elements in alpha, not that I noticed. More a kind of mash-up of Landmark, Second Life and that one time my Director of Studies took us all round the Fitzwilliam Museum to explain how paintings work.

I think it has huge potential. As I said, only yesterday I was moaning about the lack of non-combat MMOs that don't revolve around farming and/or survival. Well, here's one. It has the look of something that could break out of its niche to find a larger audience, too. An audience composed at least in part of people who wouldn't self-identify as "gamers".

As a particularly brilliant comment on Steam put it, "If all those Lo-Fi Hip-Hop 24/7 Radios would be a game, this would be it". Yeah... no. Really.

If anyone's jonesing for Landmark I'd definitely recommend OWW as more than a palliative. I'd also draw the game to the attention of anyone who used to enjoy decorating in Rift or WildStar and is now, understandably or unavoidably, casting around for somewhere more stable.

Even if you don't feel you have the decorating chops, I'd still say give OWW a look. All you need is a passing interest in art and especially art history. It's accessible, involving, educational and slightly crazed.

I'd give it a few days, though. According to the forums "We're currently testing out a new patch to see if our fix works. But we are working hard on fixing it!" I've been trying to log in the whole time I've been writing this post and so far the only picture I've seen is the one on the loading screen. Which could be better, given it's an art game and all. That is theshop window, kinda. Or the lobby, at least. Just sayin'...

With some free time on my hands - time I would have spent on OWW - and with Steam already running, I thought I might as well take a quick glance at Otherland Next. That's how we're meant to call it now, the Tad Williams-inspired MMO that's spent much of its time on life support. Try to keep a straight face.

OLN, as I'm sure no-one is calling it, got a major patch - they're labelling it an expansion - this week and along with the new name comes a new game mode. It's described, enticingly, on the character creation screen as something suitable for people who like the social aspect of MMOs but who don't like the gameplay.

And on the face of it, that's not a bad idea. There's a sizeable demographic out there, people who use popular MMOs as a kind of glorified chatroom and if ever an I.P. was made for doing just that it has to be Otherland. That's literally why the characters in the original novel were online before things went horribly wrong and they found themselves "adventuring".

The problem Otherland has is this: if you want to socialize you need people to socialize with. Good luck finding them in OLN. I made a new character, took the Social option, spawned into Lambda Mall and spent fifteen minutes running around without seeing another player.

Which was probably just as well. The new mode skips the tutorial, and the tutorial is where you get your gear. I made a female character and when I logged her in she appeared in the middle of a shopping mall in her underwear. We've all had that dream, right?

I did check her inventory to see if she'd stashed a vest in there for emergencies. No luck. I decided I'd roleplay the whole thing as a tendency towarss exhuberant exhibitionism so she ran around taking selfies in front of suggestive signage for a while. You have to make your own entertainment when you're barred from questing and adventuring, especially when you're running around in your skimpies and there's not even anyone watching.

I may take my adventuring character (male, clothed) to look at the new content. We'll see. For now, though, I think it's back to the Elemental Planes.

Non-combat content's all very well but after a while you really feel like pulling the wings off a few mephins.

Keeping Myself Occupied : OWW

I am still playing Occupy White Walls. More accurately, I am still playing around with Occupy White Walls. Cautiously. It has that indefinable "just one more" factor that makes for addiction.

It's something I'm quite wary of. Landmark had it in spades and I imagine it's the reason Minecraft is the global success it is. There's something about construction kits...

Even as I was writing this, just tabbing back in to take another screenshot, I found myself buying more art, placing it, framing it and then buying lighting as well. I lost half an hour in a blink.

What happened to the metallic avatar I used to have?

OWW is a curious pastime. It's all about art but the tidal pull for me is the clicking together of pieces. Other building and decorating software I've used has required either a great deal of technical knowledge, considerable creative ability or, more commonly, both. This is much more forgiving.

For a start it comes with the aesthetic baked in. DAISY (now 35% faster and 50% more accurate, apparently) doesn't merely offer thousands upon thousands of artworks (including a fresh consignment of two thousand just in from Washington’s National Gallery of Art). She works with you to give your picks a coherency that will probably surprise you.

The building materials also come conveniently categorized by style - Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Industrial, Baroque and so on. You're on your own to make the right choice, but if you stick to a category or two it's fairly difficult to come up with the kind of clashing mish-mash that's all too easy in other building MMOs.

Never mind. Bought myself this fine brass job instead.

My own first gallery is surprisingly convincing as a space. Well, it surprises me. Considering I began by plonking things down to see how the controls worked and let everything happen from there, it does look oddly like somewhere you might imagine visiting.

It's also getting bigger. When I logged in today I saw a loading screen tip about the option to extend. I already had a staircase that went nowhere so I took the opportunity to build out from that into a small, upper annexe.

That led to my putting in a ceiling, meaning the whole gallery no longer ressembles some crazed alfresco dream thought up by Escher and Dali after a night on the absinthe.  With the ceiling came a floor and my gallery is now two storeys proud.

Surprisingly dark in here, isn't it? Especially given all these windows. I wonder if there's a day/night cycle?

I kept the view although there's nothing much to see except clouds and sky. I have more windows than walls. I wish there were some skylights. It got a little gloomy when I put the ceilings in, compared to the blue skies and sunlight I'd been used to, so I bought a lot of lights. With all the tiled floors the reflections are awesome. And blinding.

The decor is so powerful it doesn't really leave a lot of attention for the art. And so much of the art is...well, tiny. Miniscule. The pictures come in - presumably - the correct relative scale to their real-life versions and there doesn't seem to be an option to scale them. Most of mine look like postcards stuck to the walls.

There are also bugs. It's only alpha after all. I managed to make two of my small end-rooms upstairs inaccessible. I think it happened when I deleted some doors. Nothing seems to fix it but I can jump over the railing from the top of the stairs to get in if I really want to.

Think the tiles could maybe be a tad bit busy?

The controls are going to need some fine-tuning. It's clunky to have to delete things every time you place them incorrectly. And expensive. It would be a lot better to be able to move them properly before you place them and to be able to pick them up and re-position them without having to destroy and re-buy them.

Even so, for such early days there's a huge amount of playability. And playing is the goal here, it seems. A recentish interview at Rock, Paper, Shotgun implies that the finished product will very much be a game, not just an educational toy or a shop-window.

I do love me a little Mondrian. Goes with the flooring, too.

I hadn't realized until I read that interview that players will be able to upload their own art into the game. That does begin to make things sound disturbingly like some kind of unholy hybrid of Second Life and Deviant Art. When asked, repeatedly, about the software's possibilities as a marketplace and marketing tool for living artists, the StikiPixels representative was reassuringly definite:

We don’t want the game to become a marketplace at this stage. We want to be more of a game than Minecraft... We’re not in the business of selling art and we don’t want to take any commission from art sales. We’ll do what we’re best at, making games!

"More of a game than Minecraft" might be a bit of an ask. More of a game than Landmark, though? I think they're there already.

Picture This: Occupy White Walls

Not content with hooking me back up with an old addiction, yesterday my MMO dealer, Massively OP, turned me on to something new. Something different and strange.

I'd seen the name Occupy White Walls a couple of times before but it hadn't stuck. Some kind of gameified art project, wasn't it? In closed alpha, I think? The sort of thing you file away for future reference to look at when there's something there to see, then promptly forget about.

I would have left it at that but the latest MOP piece came with a video and for some reason I watched it. I can't say why but it was definitely a moment.

Although the video was made by someone highly skeptical about the project, by his own admission not at all part of OWW's target demographic, it nevertheless turns out to be a very effective piece of promotion for the game. It's a considered, informative, thoughtful overview, well worth seven minutes of your time.

It was certainly enough to send me on to the official website. I thought I'd take a look at the application process for the closed alpha for which, according to Massively, sign-ups were being taken.

Only Massively is wrong. Sign-ups aren't being taken because the closed alpha isn't closed. To quote the appropriately arch statement on the front page of the site itself:

OWW is almost ready to go public and shake up everything you thought you knew about the world of art ... and frogs. So now we are releasing the Alpha version of OWW to the selected few individuals who have the courage, the audacity, the vision … or who just clicked our Ad. Alpha means that the game is mostly stable but under heavy development.

So I downloaded and installed the thing, which took maybe ten minutes. Then I made an account and "played" it for a couple of hours.

It's definitely an alpha. There's not much of a warm-up. It throws you right in. The Tutorial is tricky to navigate and the controls seem to be fighting the UI at times - windows overlap a little, you have to back up and come around now and again - but it works more than well enough already to give a clear idea of the potential.

For an MMO player the initial impression is something like a mash-up of Landmark and The Secret World's Museum of the Occult. There's an extensive bank of building pieces - walls, floors, ceilings, stairways, pillars, lighting and so on - which you can place in a way that feels very similar to how it was in Landmark.

It felt so familiar I'd already built my first room before the Tutorial prompted me to open the interface. I messed around with that for a while, changing my wooden avatar for a scarier shattered  glass model, topped off with a fedora.

The part I really wanted to try out was DAISY, the AI that supposedly learns from your choices and suggests art you'd find to your taste. Fevir, who made the video above, was very impressed by DAISY, to the point that he found the experience unsettling. He's not wrong.

I spent about half an hour letting DAISY learn my preferences. Within a few minutes the artworks she was suggesting were beginning to pique my interest and stimulate my pleasure centers. I was hard-put to pick even one of the first nine, random pictures she suggested for my walls. I didn't really like any of them. After a dozen or so iterations, and by the time I decided I'd spent enough of my $100K seed money for a first run, the problem was stopping myself from buying everything she put in front of me. I loved it all.

Although some of the pictures I ended up buying are mostly by artists entirely unfamiliar to me, while others are by established favorites, and though they hail from different countries, schools and centuries (although the time period is actually quite tight), the final grid of my initial acquisitions shows an astonishing degree of coherency. It's quite a weird, discomfitting experience, having one's thoughts, tastes and feelings second-guessed in this way.

With my purchases made, I was intending to stop as it was getting late but in that oh-so-familiar Landmark fashion I thought I'd just pop a couple of pictures on the wall. Half an hour later I was still fiddling around, changing frames, trying to get a couple of lights to go just where I wanted them.

As I was futzing about my tiny, one-room gallery began to fill. As you place art, it attracts visitors. NPC visitors, that is, although players can visit each other's galleries and comment on the works, the layout, whatever they choose, as well.

The more NPCs visit your gallery, the more money your gallery makes. You need the money to buy art and furnishings and gallery space. That, I guess, is the "game" part of this MMORPG. No doubt that aspect will be fleshed out in time and I note that the EULA (which, yes, I did read) contains all  the usual caveats and commands related to gameplay that you'd find in a traditional MMO.

Whether or not Occupy White Walls eventually turns into some kind of fully-functioning game or not it very clearly has a shining future in the MMO building/decorating sub-genre. It absolutely has that hook that Landmark had. I'm not saying it has the potential to be the hipster Minecraft but it might.

For now, it's free and open and it's well worth a look if you have any interest in either building stuff or looking at art. I will be working on my gallery in those quiet moments when I don't feel like killing monsters. Plus I'm really curious to see what I can learn about my own tastes and preferences, with DAISY's help. I just worry about what she might be learning about me...