Sociotown – First Look at a new Virtual World

Just got my beta invite to Sociotown, a new “Massive Multiplayer Online Game.” Unlike many of these virtual environments, Sociotown does not require a big client software download, but rather uses the fairly ubiquitous Shockwave player to run in the browser.

I’m going to play around with this a bit more, but here are some first impressions after about 15 minutes with this:

• The graphics are quite “cartoon-y” – they remind me a bit of the screencaps I’ve seen of Barbie Girls, actually
• There’s not a lot of avatar customization – I couldn’t even make my guy bald!
• When you first log in, they drop you in Sociotown Jail. A little weird…
• Everything (as near as I can tell) is operated by using the mouse. No shortcut keys, at least not that I’ve found.
• Everyone I met initially seemed to be a non-player character (i.e. controlled by the system, not another human.) This is different from Second Life and some of the virtual worlds I’ve tried.
• After stumbling around a bit, I found my “sponsor” (another NPC) who gave me a little advice.

That’s it so far. My first impression with Sociotown was frankly underwhelming, but I’ll play with it a bit more and post some more in-depth insights, probably this weekend.

Oh, and the system let me know that I will get beta invites to send to others “later”. Stay tuned!

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