Second Life has no Chinese port yet. Welcome to HipiHi, a China-produced and Chinese language version of Second Life.
There's been some buzz about it over at Second Life Insider, and at various blogs in Virtual China: LaoBai has written a post about it, and a Chinese blogger who reports heavily on Second Life was hired by them just recently.
Screenshots and a demo clip (where you can watch the female commentator's avatar change into a more provocative outfit as her first task, get it here) reveal a rather unoriginal take on Second Life, though their website claims that they will later provide Flash & cell phone interfaces to the virtual world.
They're still in private beta right now, so there is time yet for them to define themselves as merely more than a "Chinese Second Life."
They're hiring too, in Beijing, if you're interested.
This is going to be really interesting to watch once it's available. What will it tell us about Chinese design of virtual spaces, for instance? How will user-generated objects and interactions differ or be the same as the primarily non-mainland interactions in SL?
Posted by: Lyn | February 27, 2007 at 05:46 PM
A Form of a Second Life, too!
The students of Southern China Jimei University have intiated and launched a quite interesting new entertainment genre.
There is a weekly small story about a private detective who solves criminal cases in China. The Chinese readers can influence the adventure by voting.
Besides entertainment, the aim is to give a voice to the Chinese youth. For this purpose the story, background information and everything is published in real-time in English, too.
A pretty interesting Web 2.0 venture at: http://www.kremtrekker.com
Posted by: Mauri G Gronroos | February 28, 2007 at 01:58 AM
And other SL clones in China are on their way. Unfortunately, I suspect that all the same mistakes made with SL will be repeated once again.
Copying may be the sincerest form of flattery, but not necessarily the best business model. SL needs a lot of work (not in PR, though); I suspect that the same will be true for the SL clones in China.
I wonder if they'll also have negative white space on their pages? ;-)
Posted by: David Scott Lewis | February 28, 2007 at 10:35 AM
Copying seems inevitable, but it'll be interesting to see they do with it once they use a SL-clone as a starting point.
What kinds of SL mistakes are you referring to?
Posted by: Jason | February 28, 2007 at 11:23 AM
HiPiHi has a real chance both in the Chinese (and if thoroughly supported) the English market. Second Life has well-known serious problems, both in performance and host-company attitude. Millions of their "residents" no longer use the board and far less than 2% of their residents are paying customers. At this time, many are of the opinion that Second Life is a great idea, badly managed and with terrible performance (serious lag, continual database losses, etc).
This leaves the market wide-open for some serious competition, especially if they have the good sense to examine where Linden Lab went wrong and avoid making the same errors (over and over and over again).
Posted by: Wayfinder Wishbringer | April 11, 2007 at 01:04 PM
HiPiHi has a real chance both in the Chinese (and if thoroughly supported) the English market. Second Life has well-known serious problems, both in performance and host-company attitude. Millions of their "residents" no longer use the board and far less than 2% of their residents are paying customers. At this time, many are of the opinion that Second Life is a great idea, badly managed and with terrible performance (serious lag, continual database losses, etc).
This leaves the market wide-open for some serious competition, especially if they have the good sense to examine where Linden Lab went wrong and avoid making the same errors (over and over and over again).
Posted by: Wayfinder Wishbringer | April 11, 2007 at 01:04 PM
Hi,
I'm trying to run Hipihi under English language Windows XP.
I installed the Asian language pack, and have the Windows XP language bar showing Chinese PRC on the left and on the right. Hipihi makes it as far as the login screen, where I can enter my Hipihi name, but when I move into the password field, nothing happens when I press keys, no characters appear, no markers for hidden characters, no action at all occurs when I press keys while the cursor is in the password field.
Posted by: SuezanneC Baskerville | June 22, 2007 at 08:25 PM
Hey Sue, I'm not sure how to resolve your problem -- but from your blog, it looks likes you figured it out :)
Posted by: Jason | June 27, 2007 at 06:30 AM
Copying seems inevitable, but lets see what it has to add.
With support to other languages besides Chinese it could have a big market.
Posted by: frankc | August 28, 2007 at 07:21 AM