Roleplaying Potter at Hogwarts

While browsing Paisley Beebe's Flickr Photostream I came acros this picture:

I couldn't find any more, so I went into Second Life to see if I could find Harry Potter and found the Hogwart Project Group. They've build several important decorums from the Potter series in Second Life (Two sims: Sunset Harbor and Phoenix Estates).

This first snapshot is of the Wizard's Alley:

The second snapshot is the Hogwarts school of Magic, and at the right bottom the Quidditch arena:

Finally, there's the Hogwarts express that traverses between the Hogwarts School of Magic and the Wizard's Alley.

A virtual world like Second Life is extremely suitable to do things which are not possible in Real Life, like playing Quidditch. I'd suggested this to a friend of mine a little over a year ago. He was very doubtfull. Off course, there are tons of Potter fans out there who'd love roleplaying the series. However, he was weary of copyright issues. The Potter series have been such a smashing success that it would probably be very hard to get Rowling's blessing to recreate the series in Second Life.

This build is certainly not an official build, but a very great hobby project. I don't think they've considered copyrights, but it's fun while its there.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sunset%20Harbor/128/168/27

Baseball hits SL

It's baseball time, big time as Major League Baseball finds it's hometurf in Second Life. Near the Electric Sheep Island you will find the sim inspirationally called 'Baseball' and is the virtual home to the Yankee Stadium. The NY Yankee's are the main course of this sim, but there's promo room for the Boston Socks and a few others.

Sport is something people can look forward to, enjoy. Everyone's got its favorite team or player, whichever sport you may like. Sports generate gazillions in merchandise. Sport is big business, and no wonder the focus on the Baseball sim lies on merchandise, T-shirts, trainingpants, tops, caps, hats 'n bats and gloves, as well as the hip bling bling medallions.

The stadium itself has a few chairs less than it real life counterpart to keep within server limits.

Leave base, touch air

I can't really see much added value for baseball to come to Second Life except for merchandise. Fans would like to wear their teams' colors even in virtual life. Why not take the game to another level, chance bats to broomsticks and organise a true Quidditch game.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series are immensely popular and its final episode, the Deathly Hallows just broke every thinkable sales record, so I won't get into explaining what Quidditch is, but Second Life is the platform in which you can break away from gravity and really can script broomsticks.

I know this would probably mean a huge copyright row(ling) if you'd just started building a Hogwarts courtyard with a Quidditch field, but it would surely look better than our gravity-bound real life attempts, such as this one by Reuters.