Vooper

I'm surprised and fascinated by the response that is evoked from 'players' both in and outside of Second Life when they come across some genre- or canon-breaking avatar (a cat-person vampire in a star-trek uniform for example).

I attended one of the poster sessions and found the material presented there made some very good points in comparing Second Life, Facebook and MMORPGs. One of the strengths of Second Life that many of the students agreed on was the ability of 'players' in SL to be able to have full control of how their avatars look.

Hi Anda,

Please contact me in SL next time you log in (SL name: Vooper Werribee) there are a bunch of people slowly building up some great sci fi Roleplaying content that as an EVE online players you might really love - but you'd have to be lucky to find it through the SL search function! You might also want to take a peek at this wepbage to get an idea of what is going on in SL regarding Sci Fi Roleplay http://splintered-rock.ning.com/

SL has a lot of people in it who have dabbled in MMORPGs but which for one reason or another found that they were not quite what they wanted and also found that SL has given them the opportunity to build something that is. So if you want to see what the next generation of MMORPGs might be like you'll probably find hints of that on SL.

And to address the Tateru's article (rather than shamelessly plug my own work :D), as a midbie content creator I don't really care what Linden Lab do, so long as they keep the grid up and running! They have already given me the tools to build and program content that is valuable to others - I don't really need anything else from them! If they could do anything else for me ... well, it would be to do somethign that attracts more new users to SL and improves the profile of the platform :)

Carefully covers 'empty' label on Vespene Gas Canister and tries to sell it to Derek K.

Second Life may suck as a game ... but as a platform for DEVELOPING games on it has a lot of advantages

Many of the MMO backgrounds suggested here are certainly being used as 'roleplay environments' in SecondLife. The roleplay environments have more or less the elements that you expect from an MMO - most have PvP combat, some have PvE, mob spawns, level based/class based xp system etc...

The ones that I know are active and that have been mentioned above:

Babylon 5
Dune
Firefly
Mechwarrior

and of course 'Gor' is huge (although not mentioned in previous replies)