Nice! How come my computer doesn’t display Second Life that good?
On 09.20.07 dusanwriter said:
Hmmm. Well I’m not entirely sure Kabalyero – can’t say it’s my skill as a photographer although having my sim on permanent sunset adds nice lighting. Mind you I also maximized all the settings and then find myself complaining about how slow things can be to rez, but when all my graphics settings are at high and my draw distance is 400 meters I’ve got no one but myself to blame.
They completely ignored OpenSim in all of that for some reason. Go figure.
On 09.22.07 dusanwriter said:
Yeah, go figure! Ignoring OpenSim is kind of like Microsoft trying desperately to ignore Linux.
A more charitable view might be that they’re trying to remain agnostic – if you mention OpenSim it’s like the Fed twitching his nose the wrong way when someone says “raise interest rates”. I’m more inclined to think they’re hoping to drive the standards however and are hoping that OpenSim will come a beggin’ and that early acknowledgement would put too much power in *gasp* the community.
On 09.22.07 dusanwriter said:
Geez didn’t you SEE the billboards I bought all over SL rotating and blinking and sending off strange particles, lagging all the residents for miles around announcing the new blog? I mean you do READ those floating billboards right?
Hmm. I reviewed that book, and I do see your point. It is sort of fluffy in some areas, but it was written for the mainstream… and probably wasn’t meant to be read analytically. As you mentioned, there is a basis in there which is tangible… and the marketing use of such worlds is also tangible. There are some concrete examples as I recall.
Always fun to read what others think of the same books. I got it as it just came out, and some things have changed since then. Perhaps I should reread it when I’m done reading this stack…
On 09.26.07 dusanwriter said:
Thanks Nobody and I’d better append my comments. Being in the marketing biz (shoot me, I know, but really I don’t make any crappy TV commercials or mail out junk) the book made some points that really struck home first from a business perspective: brands try to be about emotions, virtual worlds are emotional, but you can’t just drop brands into these worlds without respecting and understanding the emotional context into which they’re being grafted.
It also struck home because in spite of his rather loose ‘academic’ rationale, I think he was dead on – no matter how hard you try, the emotional reactions you can have in virtual worlds is powerful.
My overall comment wasn’t so much about the book as about a recent attempt to be ‘logical’ about spending time in a virtual space – keep the emotions in check and keep some distance. But all it ended up doing was disturbing social (and emotional) balances around me.
Which really just validates the point of the book – you can view virtual worlds as platforms for branding and business and fail, or you can respect them as environments in which emotions and community need to be respected and nurtured and you’ll probably do pretty well.
Which is a big plus in general for business and ‘consumers’ – virtual worlds demand a sort of honesty and integrity of “gut” and emotion that some corporations may have a tough time with, and as these spaces continue to grow us little avatars will be able to spot the clunkers more easily, because we’ll have the tools to see, touch, create, and feel.
Thanks Nobody!
On 09.26.07 BeauIndigo said:
Hmmm okay well this is the first time I have been able to get a close-up shot of you errr your avatar. So the lady had a camera or something? How does that work? Anyway…interesting avatar. What is that in your mouth? I can’t tell from the photo
Cool stuff. Interesting reading as well. I am caught up now.
You’re right – too many people are speculating on what Google is up to, and few people have a clue. If you get a chance to read ‘Search’ by John Battelle, it is worth it – it does give you some food for thought on what Google actually is.
As far as approaching the metaverse… if it is approached as a collaborative space, I think that might encompass everything else. The trouble is that the space itself is not very collaborative yet. It will get better, I’m sure.
With policy and Second Life – that is exactly what I think. All technologies being equal, the best policies will win.
On 09.27.07 dusanwriter said:
Thanks Nobody – check my latest post on my thoughts on collaborative space, a bit more personal than usual and of course there are business benefits to learning how to use collaborative space.
Yeah, I did read Search, great book.
I think I’ll move on to worrying about some other corporate giant though. Any siggestions?
[...] And for the sake of exploration, the Roadmap looked at four quadrants – all of which will come true and all of which have perils and potential. I commented on those quadrants and my interests in a previous blog. [...]
[...] era la volta di “My world” il progetto Serious Game di promosso da Google. ( vi linko Google/Second Life Merger and a Life of Speculation giusto perchè avanzava dei dubbi…) Mi domandavo: Ma perchè Google dovrebbe andare contro i [...]
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptImagine a virtual world built by Microsoft! At the Virtual World Conference, MS commented that by next year, we’d all know more about their interest in virtual worlds:. [Timing is] definitely a concern…But I think we’ve got a good … [...]
[...] Friday, October 12th, 2007 in Metaverse General Tags: browser, client, metaverse, universal Yesterday it was a new client from Electric sheep. [...]
[...] addition to the Electric Sheep viewer being launched to coincide with the CSI/Second Life combo (as previously blogged) here’s a nice looking little viewer in alpha version that allows you to enter the world for [...]
On 10.12.07 Bobby Offcourse said:
and to make things even cooler, I was able to succesfully log onto the grid (via that site) on my iPhone. The button to send messages didn’t pop up so I really couldn’t do much, but considering that the program is in alpha, that is totally possible to be fixed. I’m going to contact them and offer to test it for them.
[...] Business in Virtual Worlds, Second Life Tags: empty world, Second Life, traffic In follow-up to my posting about the tracking traffic on a sim using Jon Brouchard’s new script from his Reflexive [...]
[...] Writer follows up with additional thoughts HERE, and HERE. No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack [...]
[...] in Business in Virtual Worlds, Second Life Tags: legal, movable, Second Life, terms of service i recently wrote about the Movable viewer as a handy way of accessing SL without needing the client – use a Web browser to [...]
[...] Countdown to History? CSI in Second Life. Can 400+ sims be wrong? Wednesday sees a special episode of CSI New York called “Down the Rabbit Hole” in which the pursuit of a killer takes Gary Sinise into Second Life. [...]
On 10.23.07 dusanwriter said:
Search CSI in Map – but the sims were in lockdown, I assume until Wednesday at 10:00!
On 10.24.07 funkyregal said:
Can’t wait to see it, but as I’m in Ireland, I’ll probably have to wait a few years before it gets to me…lol But don’t tell me how it ends, that’ll only ruin the surprise.
On 10.25.07 Rai Fargis said:
it’s a cool idea, but do you really feel comfortable about entering your SL password on a third party website?
On 10.25.07 dusanwriter said:
No, not really – and this is an issue with a number of third party viewers and applications. Two emerging issues/approaches: one is, Linden is perhaps preparing to position itself as the backbone supplier of infrastructure. the deal with IBM on avatar portability, their open architecture working group, all tend to support the notion that Linden wants to provide the services of avatar identification, currency, age/identity verification and thus become the “home” to our virtual wallets and identitites.
Not too tricky to hack the system with an intelligent looking and/or branded “viewer” or chat app – throw a Coke or MTV logo in the bottom maybe, and use it to suck up passwords.
Issues of identity and verification I see as a tidal wave issue – there needs to be some consensus around these things, and perhaps a validation system much like e-Commerce sites have validation systems and labels (think eTrust for avatars and viewers). Linden seems to be positioning itself this way – taking care of your money, storing your personal avatar identity, and selling land – in the future, we won’t ONLY ask do you trust this viewer, but also do you trust this company to buy land from? Will it still be around 6 months from now? On systems where content isn’t portable (Metaplace, it seems) to other platforms, do you trust making “stuff” that can’t be protected offline?
Identity, trust, validation and verification – early Internet talk, really, remember when no one wanted to use their creit cards online because they didn’t “trust” it? (As if leaving a slip behind in a restaurant was more trustworthy). We’ll see how this plays out, because the driving issue is really standards around transparency, interoperability and identity.
[...] Dusan Writer comments on the potential for a “tipping point” as 400+ sims were brought online to handle the load. What if…that didn’t work? I was in-world and did not watch the show. Aside from a couple problems with assets not uploading for a brief period, the Grid thrummed on without a hitch while avatars bet on how long before the Grid would tear apart. It didn’t. The Second Life website went down for a bit, but the Grid, incredibly, worked well. Maxing at no more than 40k simultaneous users. [...]
On 10.25.07 prokofy said:
Wow, amazingly vivid argument — a picture does always save 1,000 words.
I was so glad you “got it” about the problem with the SEARCH and having to drill down. I don’t know why it should be so hard to persuade people.
The clues and crime scenes look as if they were made for 9-year-olds. They are terribly dumbed down, and contrast with the very breathless action-packed machinima that makes it look less lame.
I think the people who make TV perceive their viewers as stupid. And…that’s why they’ve lost them and their advertising eyeballs. And…that’s why you’ve gained them at your superb build in SL.
The question is what an old lumbering media dinosaur like CBS should do. Well, a different model might be to fund obtrusively sites like yours, and work an ad into the scenery itself, possible.
I’m actually shocked — so the place was created for 9-year-olds and I still didn’t get it? Only one hour after looking at the nice ‘clues’ on the ground I was told by someone that I need a HUD to play (but I couldn’t find it). Then I had some (apparently incorrect) information that the HUD would come automatically by the OnRez Viewer or that you needed the OnRez Viewer to play the game or, well, that you needed to join through the site, or…
In fact, allegedly, none of these are true, you can use the regular viewer, but… you have to start with a HUD!
Wow, 9-year-olds are getting pretty clever these days, and my age is showing… I thought I could help these people out somehow (and spent a few hours on their orientation areas), but… I have no clue what they’re supposed to be doing, and the layout of the OnRez viewer is sufficiently different to be able to give them some tips on the interface when they’re stuck! Also, never having seen the HUD, I can’t also explain to anyone how to use it. This was rather frustrating to me, so I simply hang around with friends and had some nice chats on completely CSI-unrelated buildings. Mind you, the overall buildings are *very* nice, even if they are of the “clean” variety…
On 10.26.07 Economic Mip said:
The Heads up display is called a “Toolbar” It is clearly marked on both of the Orientation island signs when you first start, but if you are having problems Gwen I will of course give you (and anyone else) a copy. Just please do not pay someone for them, as the user’s progress does not transfer with the device.
On 10.26.07 dusanwriter said:
Wonderful comments and thank you Economic for the offers of assistance. I must say, I did like the way that the HUD combined audio and text (and video? I can’t remember now to be honest). Hadn’t seen a multimedia use of a HUD before it was refreshing.
And thank you Prokovy. If I could take an ounce of credit for superb builds it wouldn’t be for the ones of which I took photos. And while we’re on the subject of 9-year olds, with them wandering around virtual Barbie worlds, and Club Penguin (4,000,000+ kiddies) I’d be very careful about any disparaging remarks about the intelligence of 9 year olds when it comes to virtual worlds.
Having said that, I am indebted for your comments and your own observations. Your concentric circles commentary really speaks to the beautiful thing about virtual worlds – the flow of content up and down, ‘old users’ sharing their content with new ones so that new mash-ups and concepts are freshly created.
On 10.26.07 kathleen said:
Another cool feature: the small map in the upper right has a globe icon in the lower right corner. Clicking on the globe icon pops up the full map/tp. I think that’s a brilliant update to the viewer – I hate always having to return to the bottom bar – it’s like always having to go back to the hallway in your house to get to any other room.
[...] Life Tags: law, magic circle, membrane, policy, property, virtual worlds A while back I wrote a lengthy piece on the concept of property, avatar rights to property, and what we mean when we, as users, get in a [...]
On 10.27.07 dusanwriter said:
Sure….I tend to agree, that really is a hot little feature. But I’m still on the side of ignoring the viewer until they fix the search function, which still strikes me as a deliberate attempt to confuse newbies and force them to shop through onRez.
I have been away from SL for a couple of weeks due to being on holiday in RL and have been following the whole CSI thing through blogs such as this one. My home in SL is in Toxia and I really appreciated the positive comments about Toxian City.
From my extensive wanderings in SL I have drawn the conclusion that over 90% of companies setting up a presence in SL don’t get it. All the best sims I have visited are small organically grown places started off by amateurs. Every time I have been to a big hyped “event” in SL its been a disappointment. Most companies treat SL residents as mindless drone consumers happy just to window shop and chat to one another about the wonderful products they are purchasing.
Sims such as Toxia which create a atmosphere and let the people in the sim actively join in with creating new parts of the architecture, role plays etc are some of the most highly visited non-sexual parts of the grid. Don’t forget Toxia has its shops too (admittedly for weapons and the like) and it relies on these shops for paying for its tier etc.
Of course a violent, dark sim peopled by cyborgs, vampires, demons and the like (on a good day) is not for everyone. People get shot in Toxia a lot, people are not nice to other people. That is what makes it _interesting_. The person who can create this sort of interactive community outside of places like Toxia or sex places will be the person who really cracks creating a commercial presence and community in SL that everyone wants to participate in rather that creating a virtual storefront with nothing behind it.
It will take a huge amount of effort to achieve. Ask Miss Wright or any of the other creators of Toxia but the rewards will be immense.
[...] and Rom Ireton. I think everyone has experienced this Second Life bug even the newbies that visited CSI:New York in-world got a taste of Ruth. [...]
[...] 2007, 9:48 pm Filed under: reflexive architecture Dusan Writer posted another very thoughtful entry on his blog (link) about Reflexive Architecture, which really got me thinking. I’m excited to see the concept [...]
I must say I absolutely loved your post. Had never heard about reflexive architecture, but I will certainly try to take up its issues more deeply. I specially think this paragraph is quite thought provoking:
“If virtual worlds feel real, have objects with real value, evoke real (and perhaps enhanced) emotional responses, and ALSO allow the creation of objects and environments that aren’t possible in the physical world – then as new objects and environments are created, maybe we’ll start to see things that change how we view ourselves, the culture we live in, and the world around us. If so, is it possible to invoke spiritual responses because we now have access to new and creative metaphors? This doesn’t replace the spiritual/creative response you might get from seeing the stars at night or an inspiring cathedral. But perhaps it extends our toolkit for invoking this response.”
For sure our constant connection with the internet has redefined what we consider space to be. On the one hand it allows us to understand that space is much more than the coordinates around which we move. Space is much more than a quantification of matter, it is a metaphor which allows us to inhabit the world. To be “in” a space is much more than being here or there; being in a space actually deploys a whole realm of understandings which we are sometimes not aware of. I think in this respect you would really enjoy reading this post of mine which shows how much is presupposed, for instance, in our use of maps:
However, I will end with a serious problem for our actually “living” within virtual space. The reality is that our bodies do not make part of it. Can a space which our bodies do not actually sense, feel and know, be called truly a human space? Or does this tendency, as you yourself foresee, actually make of technology so powerful that our contact with our own bodies and nature is even more jeopardized?
Andrés
On 11.01.07 dusanwriter said:
What a wonderful and thoughtful response Amelo.
Lost in my musings about the value of virtual worlds are musing about the danger. Castranova wrote eloquently about virtual ecomomies and articulated for me some of the dangers of virtual worlds – the Matrix being one possible end point. In a horror scenario, he paints a world where artificial intelligence is used to substitute for ourselves when we are not “in” a virtual world – when I’m out grocery shopping, I can train AI to take over my avatar. In his scenario, eventually these AIs can outlive us when we die. He paints a picture of the last man alive – humans are so immersed in virtual worlds they’ve forgotten the needs of their bodies, forgotten to have children because virtual children are more adoring and less trouble. As humans die off, their AI avatars take over – until those left don’t know if they’re interacting with real or atificial intelligence. As the human race dies off, the last don’t realize that there are fewer and fewer real humans, that most of their relationships are with virtual intelligences. Doom and gloom indeed.
He also paints a more optimistic picture.
I prefer to dwell on the optimistic primarily because I am an optimist, and also because there are enough people who either doubt the capacity for these ’spaces’ or who lack the imagination like the reflective architects of the world to see past the recognized archetypes.
Part of my point about virtual worlds is that there is the potential for the application of the lessons learned and archetypes discovered in these spaces to the ‘real world’. Part of my personal discovery is that I’m perhaps more interested in the ‘membrane’ and the crossing over of identities and ideas from synthetic worlds to the real than I am in the ability of synthetic worlds to fully immerse us. No doubt there will be enough people continuing to strive for virtual worlds that are SO immersive that individuals never want to leave (and in some case, why WOULD they?) I’d like to continue a dialogue about how we can properly integrate our virtual and real world activities.
As Castranova pointed out – there really is no difference. We can earn money in a virtual or a real world, spend time here or there, and there is only an artificial boundary that we define by the nature of the sensory input.
Having said that, as synthetic worlds become more immersive, become more compelling than the real world, this threatens to trigger a widespread migration to virtual worlds the consequences of which will be difficult to measure. The migration will range from large chunks of time amongst a wide swath of people, to nearly complete migrations where people are living and working in virtual spaces. The more that this migration occurs, the less “value” the physical body starts to have. The less value that is placed, perhaps on nature, on human touch.
But some would also argue that our current “physical” spaces are not so physical at all. Are manufactured environments, the experience ecomomy – are these THAT much different from virtual spaces? Retailers manufacture scents to make us buy more. They manufacture fake histories in their store design and signage. They manufacture our experiences towards “training” us to forget the instincts of our bodies and to buy what we don’t need.
So….I’m agreeing and disagreeing. I believe that the mind/body/spirit/environment balance is out of whack in the real world to begin with. I believe virtual worlds have the potential to trigger new emotional responses that, if directed properly, might help to reconfigure culture so that a new balance of mind/body/spirit is possible. I believe that the only thing that is non human about these spaces is the absence of blood and bones but that virtual spaces might actually enable us to step out from behind the inherited masks that our real bodies present to the world (by no choice of our own – gender, race, age) and to present new versions of ourselves that are spiritual, creative and emotional.
I also believe that we risk following a path into synthetic worlds that forever cuts us off from our bodies and perhaps from nature. That there are dangers, and that it is up to the early pathfinders, the artists and architects, and the thinkers like yourself, to remind us that there is more than one aspect of ourselves that we will need to integrate as we grow, expand, append, and explore in these new worlds.
On 11.02.07 prokofy said:
When this conversation surfaced at Metaversed, I asked pointedly: but we don’t have a taxonomy for the Internet, surely. That is, yeah, there’s gov, com, org. Or there’s e-commerce. Or there are portals. Or there are search sites or link farms or porn or intranets. Sure. But the content isn’t as analyzed as everybody seems to want to analyze VWs.
THIS — “a business need to quantify and measure the spaces” — seems to be driving the mad rush now. And frankly, that’s not compelling enough reason to rush to judgement, IMHO, just so somebody can sell widgets to better link the worlds. Oh, I realize they will do that *anyway* — but we should try to preserve the freedom of the spaces anyway, too.
In one way, deciding this or that world is “social” and this or that world isn’t social seems odd — all sites are social at some level — isn’t the stuff you are searching for in Google at times stuff that wants to be found?
Lagorama seems ok — except what if you use Second Life to make a game, or use it for an educational purpose — then it isn’t such a Lifesim.
You could judge them by whether or not they have RMT — and frankly, I look at every game/world and ask whether it has real estate. Because private property is part of the bulwark of player or resident freedom against game gods or coders — even if emulated, even if remaining proprietary. I realize this isn’t a very popular concept among leftoid geeks who hate private property. Look at Twinity, grudgingly giving out only apartments, and even Second Life, only rewarding the “value add” and never conceding that land is really stake.
One thing I really loathe is this constant Geek intrusion of “the lessons learned” of past iterations of the Web, 0.0 or 1.0 or 2.0. This or that thing is “Prodigy” or “Compuserve” and must die or will die anyway on its own. This or that thing is Geocities. This or that thing is “just like a MUD we had, really” etc. I find this terribly constrictive — it’s like a Vietnam Syndrome. Why must we be doomed to have this past and all the concommitant guru thinking around it inflicted on us at every new crossroads in the Metaverse? I’m glad you’re willing to think out of these boxes, Dusan.
It might just happen that walled gardens protect freedom more than open-sourced sandboxes filled with script kiddies that grief everybody and constrict freedom that way.
On 11.02.07 dusanwriter said:
I agree. I also loathe the ‘lessons learned’ mentality. Although I suppose my point with the definitions that seem to be surfacing about the Metaverse is to use the lessons learned from the past and try not to repeat them. The venture capitalists and the “script kiddies” who managed to throw a business plan together often used artificial definitions and taxonomies as window dressing to disguise that a) they had no actual business behind their so-called business models and b) they needed some sort of way to address the fact that there is no line item in a revenue projection to address the nature of a creative, chaotic, changing and ambiguous media.
Here’s how I imagine a pitch to a group of bankers or investors who know nothing about virtual worlds:
“We’re going to create branded entertainment products and aggregate social communities by creating a Web 3.0 space that leverages best in class talent incentivized with virtual currency. Investment in this opportunity is high risk but the risk:ratio return is high because we will establish best practices and aggregate eyeballs within the social/entertainment Web 3.0 space towards creating a portfolio of opportunities for future monetization.”
Here’s what it really means:
“3D stuff is really cool. We really have no idea where this is all headed. We want to take a gamble on creativity, passion, collaboration. We’re going to work with some Neko who hangs out at the Missing Mile and a Gorean Master who also runs an erotic strip club for furries. We figure we’ll throw a bunch of prims together, hope we don’t get griefed, make some cool stuff, and have some fun – and if we can do all that, a whole bunch of people will probably hang out, become friends, and our passion will spread, and some day that whole thing might make us some money or it might not, but we’ll probably survive, we’ll learn a thing or two, we’ll for sure end up with some possibly worthless real estate, a bunch of code, and some objects that we’re just as likely to give away as sell, and hey, maybe we’ll become better human beings by learning to work with each other in a different way, and to help people experience emotional, immersive evnironments in new ways.
These are certainly valid concerns. Let me try to briefly address them.
On walled gardens:
Yes, we are starting out with maintaining control over the servers. Why?
1) We want to have a one-click experience for ordinary people to be able to create a world.
2) We do need to establish enough of a network so that our eventual business model is viable.
You are conflating two separate things a little bit, though. We do not want to have *multiple networks* out there using slight variations on the same tech base. That feels like it defeats the point.
That’s a separate issue from whether we let servers run elsewhere. The system is architected for servers to run anywhere, and we still plan to move in that direction over time. And that is yet another separate issue from whether the servers themselves are open source (currently, no).
We do plan a server-side plug-in system, btw.
On cashing out:
Feel free to use the web services stuff that we offer as part of every world in order to interface with your own solution. A lot of folks won’t have that capability, which is why we offer our own solution. Yes, of course we want to take a cut if we offer the service — that is how we cover the costs of offering it.
The other benefit to offering the virtual currency is that it greatly simplifies transactions between users from different territories, who use different billing solutions, etc.
On legality of cash out:
The law on this is pretty clear. I am unsure why people get up in arms about this, except that perhaps a bad precedent was set by other services, permitting stuff that shouldn’t have been.
Who verifies the legality? Well, we’ll have to. YOU’LL have to. The government sure will.
On interoperability:
We intend to support as many common formats as we can. For 3d, we are more likely to start with interchange formats like COLLADA than with high-end proprietary formats though.
I think a key point here though is that unlike the iPod and your analogy of a locked platform, we are not pushing an asset format on you. Feel free to take stuff out — it will work elsewhere.
The bit that is hardest to move, certainly, would be scripts and data structures. After all, we added event-driven stuff to Lua. But at least it’s Lua, and therefore something you can move to elsewhere.
On ads:
Fair enough on the comment that it’s really “free things on the net that are offered by for-profit entities.” That is what we happen to be, a for-profit entity.
We haven’t settled yet on where and how we will use advertising. That said, yes, it costs money to bring the service to you, and if it’s free, then we have to recoup somehow. Ads is a way to do that.
On 11.02.07 dusanwriter said:
Raph:
Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I’m a real amateur in all this. So a lot of what this is just impressions and notions, as I said at the beginning of my post. Your deep expertise and attention to my thoughts was more than I expected.
Your leadership inspires great confidence that Metaplace will succeed, and my own hope that it will facilitate a “tipping point” for the 3D Web.
As I said, I LOVE Apple. I love my iPod. I love my iPhone. And I love these things because a company I respect and trust takes care to control the core technology and functionality, just as the community will come to respect Metaplace if it continues to communicate as efectively as it has to date, and if the technology is as elegant and simple as I’ve seen.
I hope that my tone was to point out that the 3D spaces that people create are going to be METAPLACE spaces, and that your current model is that you will not license the technology underlying these spaces, and that you will have a hand in the flow of commerce through this technology (although I’m pleased that you can choose other Web services, you’re still taking a cut).
I’d like to clarify – I do NOT have a problem with this.
But I think that there’s a disconnect between the business model for Metaplace and how it’s being positioned and interpreted by future users and the media.
If I were to summarize your “tag” in one phrase that keeps repeating its this: “3D spaces that work like the Web works”. And that’s fair enough. What I you’re saying is that when you go to make a Metaplace space you tools and protocols familiar to those used in developing Web sites and applications. These protocols will both be embedded within Metaplace and other needed protocols will be based on the concept of a very open system for moving, sharing, uploading and animating. By using image formats, for example, that are “Web ready” you are linking into current processes and protocols for image development. Even your scripting language will be based on Lua and thus fairly “transparent”. I’m further encouraged that this open system will include interoperability with 3D software such as Maya and 3DS.
This is exciting stuff. A GIANT leap forward. It will make world building easier. We will all be able to create games, houses, etc. It may very well help us to reach a tipping point – 3D worlds will become as common as Web pages.
But I also believe that your business model is structured so that you are “locking in users” (or at least making it very difficult to leave the platform). There will be benefits to users for being locked in: user-friendly tools, your reputation, the service you provide, etc. (and again, I have no problem with your business model, I’m simply pointing out what I believe is an unacknowledged truth in the public at large).
I believe that when people HEAR about Metaplace they sort of envision the “HTML of 3D Worlds” – a new, Web-friendly, open system that will put the tools of world building in the hands of all.
But there’s a difference here – you have invented a kind of HTML for 3D worlds, but it’s owned by a private company (Metaplace).
To truly “work like the Web” Metaplace would need to allow users freedom of choice to move their “3D Web sites” wherever they wish, to handle commercial transactions how they wish, etc.
Will Metaplace support portability of avatar identity? Will you have the ability to impose any controls over currency exchange? If I become unhappy with the support I’m getting for an online game that I developed on Metaplace and so want to move it to Second Life will I be able? If I develop a game that I want to deploy across multiple platforms how easy will that be? Or will it be like the old PC/Apple days – develop a game and an Apple version was a “nice to have” based on sales not a need to have.
Well, if I were your investors I’d sure hope the answer was on the side of a business model that didn’t “give away the store”.
You’re in business. You need to make money. And by letting your users in on the action, and if you develop great tools, and if you do a masterful job supporting and encouraging your community I’m optimistic that Metaplace will do what I hope it will – extend 3D development tools, help achieve a tipping point for synthetic worlds, and to move game/world building out of the hands of Sony and into the hands of users. (If anyone can do it it’s likely you, just be careful about too much pressure from your VC backers to “monetize” your community).
I believe that creativity is spiritual. Tools like Metaplace will help people share their aspirations, hopes, dreams, thoughts, ideas, stories, myths, and experiences (and, yeah, to create places where we can virtually kill each other but hey, that can have its own upsides). My preference is for open source everything but we don’t live in Eden – there are walls around our gardens for a reason, and one of them is to earn a living and to hopefully do it in a way that’s as authentic as possible.
There’s a business model behind Metaplace as you acknowledge, and I think it’s important to remain authentic and open about what the potential downsides and restrictions to this business model might be for the typical user.
Thanks, Raph, for hopefully helping to advance an agenda of making 3D worlds ubiquitous, easy to use, and easy to build. And to potential users, thanks for thinking about the pros and cons – easy-to-use tools and a shared community where you might get locked in (to a degree) to someone’s platform, or REALLY hard to use tools where it’s all yours but good luck maintaining it and getting anyone to show up.
P.S.
- Great to hear on server-side plug-ins, and I think I understood the distributed server architecture. I still stand by my Apple analogy (maybe not my iPod analogy though) that you’re controlling versions of the technology because it will not be open source. And thank GOD Apple keeps control of much of its core technology, it’s how they’ve maintained their singular focus on best-in-the-world user-centered design.
- I think I’m totally mystified on cashing out. Here’s my question – if I want to sell an object on e-Bay, why do I then need to further convert that transaction through a virtual currency, and then translate it back to dollars? If I sell a REAL thing on eBay, there are protocols in place for protecting the legality of that transaction.
I really don’t have a problem with putting safeguards into the flow of money and transactions, I just truly don’t understand why just because a world is virtual why it needs a separate virtual currency (other than for, as you say, simplicity when you may be looking at 100 currencies). Why are you saying that the protection is at the point of cashing out? I really think I’m just confused because the model seems to treat “virtual money” as illiquid UNTIL you cash it out, and I actually see it as money at the point it’s earned (whether in a virtual currency or not).
- On ads: I have a feeling you’ll approach these very carefully. You’ve seen enough examples in the world of gaming to know that a misplaced ad can just as easily turn a user AGAINST a brand.
- On interoperability – I hadn’t heard a clear answer on this before. Thanks for the clarification – it was as I had hoped and partly expected, so I’m glad you’re trying to create the level of portability you describe.
[...] now to check on the progress of the Missing Avatar case (I’ve read that Detective Taylor of CSI:New York is on the case, LOL!) to find the blog gone. What greeted me was a Wordpress Error page. Wow! When [...]
Seems like the currency thing is the big point of confusion…
OK, first example. You make a world, want to charge people for stuff. You don’t have any tech or connections or knowledge on how to do that. For you, you can use the Metaplace currency and script objects will do all the heavy lifting for you. Stuff can be listed on our marketplace, etc. We get a transaction fee.
Second example. You want to charge dollars directly. You use a script module that handles a web service bridge to Paypal or a third party that handles billing and transaction verification. Our cut = zero.
That said, odds are good (we hope) that you didn’t have to write this module — in fact, you may have gotten it from our marketplace! And if you did write it, you can also sell it via the marketplace. (Modules with autoinstall do have to go through the network, that’s how we autoinstall them for you). In those cases, we get a transaction fee.
But it might be an open source module, in which case you could have just copy/pasted the code for it. Our cut is zero again.
So you see, it really is intended as “if you use a service we offer, we take a cut, and if you don’t, we don’t.”
On 11.02.07 dusanwriter said:
Hmm. Well that strikes me as an open and fair system. I really get confused on this stuff, I suppose….so now I understand the “cut” part – and again i don’t intend to make it sound like I think you’re after some huge money grab here, we’re all in a transaction economy, micropayments add up and are generally more fair to individuals so I like, and you’re a business – sounds like a win/win model.
Will Metaplace ever control its currency (as Linden does, basically “printing” or retiring money (depends whose stats you read) to keep the Linden exchange rate artificially fixed to the USD?)
Hey – and by the way, thanks for paying attention to my rambings it’s an honour.
[...] geographies. Whether this business model could survive the much discussed possible development of a virtual overlay on Google Earth remains to be [...]
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity A few developments seem like natural shifts in the nature of virtual worlds and their economies but leave me perplexed about the future. I’m not an economist and don’t really know the first thing about it other than what I’ve picked up in bits and pieces with my initial framework provided by Edward Castranova who helped me to understand the reason for the biases, misunderstandings, and flaws in virtual world economies. [...]
TV Show Over? Obsess About It on the Web That same week, “CSI: NY” on CBS catapulted to No. 4 on the list, no doubt because a character, Mac Taylor, entered the virtual world Second Life to solve a crime.
Second Life and the ‘view of the child …
prokofy: Good points, which I think play right back into something I said on Lag-O-Rama…”This leads me to ponder two things:
1. When did we decide that we had to start classifying online games like championship dogs? “Ah, yes…that’s a sheephound, but it’s not of the Austrian Bluehair variety, so it’s inferior.”
2. Why does it freakin’ matter so much to so many people?”
People tend to spend time arguing about this type of thing, whether it’s relevant or not. Personally, I think VW’s should each be judged on their own merits, and not shoe-horned into some pre-existing category…if it’s designed well, it shouldn’t neatly fit into a category at all.
Also a good point regarding making a more traditional “game” within Second Life…there are several already present in SL, of course, but your point is taken. Of course, a television show that anyone would agree is a comedy still has moments of drama in it…there are no absolutes.
dusan: That may be the best pitch/translation I’ve ever seen. Awesome! By the way…does anyone else find it sadly humorous that the ones that preach the “lessons learned” philosophy are usually the ones that didn’t learn the correct lesson anyway?
On the one hand, the rush to create a taxonomy of virtual worlds seems to combine a desire to attach any world-building, platform-creating, 3D project with the right catch phrases so that investment money can come pouring in.
I met with someone yesterday who said he’s launching “The Facebook for healthcare…we’re going to do for healthcare on Web 2.0 what mySpace did for kids communities of interests.”
The meeting was booked for an hour. I left after 10 minutes. He’ll probably be a gazillionaire in 6 months but his Koolaid has a weird glowing look to it.
On the OTHER hand models are ways of representing reality to test out theories. The idea SHOULD be that a model can let us examine, explore, dissect, criticize and then improve upon our understanding of reality – with a model, its cheap to build and it doesn’t need to change reality but can create feedback loops WITH reality.
My point about these taxonomies is partly to remind people that they’re just models, partly to debunk business models against a repeat of the old Web portal/e-commerce/aggregate eyeball days, but also to ask whether we should be seeking alternative taxonomies.
Maybe look at them, Prokovy suggests, for whether they have ‘real estate’ and what models of property drive the spaces. Maybe for economics. What about categorizing the worlds for the ‘cascade’ of creative content? Or for the availability of collaborative creative toolsets? A lot of attention is given to the definition of these spaces based on their social tools and level of immersion (fantasy/game vs. mirror worlds/LifeSims). But if the 3D Web is a new platform for human creativity and a possibly powerful tool for social change and creativity, then why not create a taxonomy based on how flexible a platform is in allowing creative, collaborative development (either by the code and tools themselves, the ToS, or the intellectual property “rules”).
I’m not suggesting an alternative taxonomy but I’m also suggesting we not throw the idea of models out entirely. Each “world” WILL be judged on its own merits – basically, if anyone shows up or not.
A mental model is an explanation in someone’s thought process for how something works in the real world. It is a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition and decision-making. Once formed, mental models may replace carefully considered analysis as a means of conserving time and energy.
Considering Anshe’s brief background as an escort, the following sentence needs a pardon the pun: “Anshe Chung will immediately tend to suck off the buyers…”
[...] User Experience Mapping of Second Life: Academic Model The following is a map of the common user experience of Second Life posted as part of a serious dissertation on bringing users up to speed in Second Life. [...]
[...] The concept of creating a legal jurisdiction for virtual worlds isn’t new…the question remains whether a End User License Agreement (EULA) or Terms of Service (ToS) carries with it a legal framework for partly resolving legal disputes that are “real”. Linden recently revised its Terms of Service to deal with claims against itself. I covered this here. [...]
[...] architecture, which I’ve written about previously and is covered in detail at The Arch may open one doorway to strange loopiness. The idea that our [...]
On 11.09.07 paiskidd said:
Dusan, your surname is most appropriate, you are a deep thinker and a skilled writer. I am most flattered by your reference to my attempt to grapple and make sense of my SL explorations… you took the concepts I was talking about to a level of abstraction I could only point and grunt at from the muddy depths.
I think your writings here are of great value and interest to anyone contemplating the impact of virtual worlds, and I strongly encourage you to continue sharing your insights and findings with us here.
On 11.10.07 Denny Martynov said:
I’ll never forget our dear Dummie. Now that he’s disappear, we all feel his missing.
all the word would be useless, watching what Caleb did to remember him, so I want to remember him in all the times that he stayed with us, playing and enjoying our company.
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity [...]
On 11.10.07 Felixe Thorne said:
One that was always there for you, always had time for you, no matter what life dealt him.
The loss of Dummie leaves a gaping hole in the fiber of the second life kid community; and it truly could not have happened to a least deserving person.
Dummie was my lil raver, always partying with me shaking his butt lol wen i told him too. Sneaky out of bed to come hangout.
His personality resembled alot, he shone through quite a bit.
He was the most amazing, caring, fun loving person i got to know, each friend he made he has touched.
Now hes resting, and not hurting he has left his partner to an extend but caleb baby boi hes always gunna be in your heart!
heres a poem for dummie:
Dummies Roots xxxx
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
All we in one long caravan
Are journeying since the world began;
We know not whither, but we know
Time guideth at the front, and all must go.
Like as the wind upon the field
Bows every herb, and all must yield,
So we beneath Time’s passing breath
Bow each in turn, – why tears for birth or death?
This is for dummie a beloved partner, friend, and also a great dancer
With love angel
Wrote Sat 10th november 2007
Flo, Caleb and i are always here, hoping your watching down on us.
We miss you so much…
But we will always remember the fun we had together.
Love Angel <3
R.I.P MY LIL RAVER BOY!
big hug and kisses
Maybe you can sneak out of bed again to come party with us! amazing
On 11.10.07 Caleb Antwerp said:
Thank you for posting this. It has touched my heart to see people care.
Second Life…… is Real Life there is no line. and it Hurts
I say a little prayer for thee , with the angels is my D . I wish you were still here with me, Forever in my heart you’ll be. I love you Dummie.
I would also like to thak everyone for their support and understanding in this diffucult time for me. I whih it didnt have to be.
Bye Dummie
On 11.11.07 Gavin Little said:
I’ve been crying a lot, that’s for sure…I didn’t know Dummie so well, but then I see the people who knew him and their sadness and it sure touches me. I don’t know who says all this stuff about things being not real – loss is real, and the loss is all around, you can see it when in a small community, and my heart hurts. And my prayers go out to Caleb and everyone who knew Dummie so well. His spirit sure does live on.
[...] Reading academia is a lot like listening to venture capitalists and the people after their money. I previously offered an interpretation of: [...]
On 11.11.07 Wilfred Huet said:
Without a star and only the light post to keep me company My thoughts are with you. With silence around me and only my footsteps for company My thoughts are with you. As the cool winter breeze caresses my face My thoughts are with you. As tears well up in my eyes my thoughts are with you. Your body stayed but your soul went to heaven. I think of you and will always remember you Dummie, rest easy buddie.
Wilfred.
On 11.11.07 fl0cale said:
I knew Dummie from his first day on.
I remember it pretty well, ’cause it was some days after my RL birthday and he arrived at nemo with that newbie kids shape on. He was trying to get
into appearence and me and some others were trying to help him. As he said he was german I IMed him and he answered me that he was very glad to find a german boy around ’cause he didnt know anyone. I was the first german boy he was talkin to in SL. I gave him some other names of german boys so he wouldnt feel so alone like he felt that day. I dont know how it happened but i saw him cuddling with jesper the same day. He told me in IM that he had a crush on him (who could take that bad?). It was such a cute moment.
(Sorry if i am writing rubbish or weird things, i am crying writing this)
Dummie developed fast inside the community. He was ALWAYS nice, friendly and just a gentle boy ! I can’t think of a time where he wasnt !
Dummie was one of the boys i most admired in SL! This is why it’s hard for me to believe that he is gone now. Sometimes i wish everything would be a very bad joke and he would come back and i would forgive him, yes i would! Specially when i think about his last messages to me:
“Dummie Beck: Flo, do you have a sec. for me?
Fl0 Cale: uhm, not atm, sorry.
Dummie Beck: OK, i will try it later then ”
He never tried it later :_(
“You will never be forgotten,
we pledge to you today,
a hallowed place within our hearts,
is where you’ll always stay”
Thank You Dummie for the great time, my friend!
´It’s a blessing to keep memories of a good person`(Proverbs 10:7)
LOVE
flo
On 11.11.07 Waki Janus said:
Dummie was the sweetest loveliest kid. One of the best on SL. I first met him when I helped him settle into OBC and set up his bunk for him. He’s been a good friend and great fun boy and will be much missed by all us in Nat and Jay’s group.
My heartfelt sympathy to you Caleb.
Love you always Dummie.
Waki
On 11.11.07 vagen slade said:
awww gonna miss ya Dummie
Dummie was the friendlyest person you could meet. He always approached people and said hello. He warmed our hearts and made us happy.
He will be missed by all who knew him in sl.
Hope there is a sl for you in heaven Dummie.
Will luv you always, and will miss you heaps.
Vagen…
On 11.11.07 paiskidd said:
As the first rumors and bits of info started showing up, there was a sense of helpless blindness to know the situation of the person behind Dummie’s avatar.
This disconnect of anonymity of SL is coldly frightening enough when we consider what will we do if SL disappeared tomorrow and with it the connection to all our friends here.
Death of our loved ones confronts us all with a finality and helplessness of our corporeal status as temporary participants in the game of life. Dummie’s passing is so achingly compounded by both the realness and the unrealness of SL.
As I feel Flo’s pain as he contemplates the echo of the last words, I look around at those of us that are still here and try to better embrace the fullness of Now.
[...] was tipped off by reading Dusan’s blog of an SL event yesterday. In the above image you see myself and Robin attending a live simulcast [...]
On 11.11.07 Nathan Pollock said:
Just got an off line IM Email to comfirm the rumor was true, Dummie Beck will no longer be back as we know him in SL.
But Dummie, you will be in my friends list as long as I am in SL. You will never be forgotten.
I was fortunate enough to have meet Dummie with in his first days in SL at the Vortex. I could see he was the normal new Brown Haired AV. We exchanged contact and became chat mates. I was in the lucky position in being able to assist in setting up his smooth looking image. He accepted my offer for this with genuine thanks, that warmed my heart.
I remember him saying, I like talking with you Nathan, I can understand you.
See, Dummie could hardly speak English when he first came to SL. Little did he know how carefull I was in typing simple English to him with no slank so he could understand me. But WoW, with in months Dummie could converse in English so well. We recently joked about those early days of his in SL.
From our first meeting at the Vortex we continued to be Mates and Dummie Beck, became a member of the Nat & Jays family home.
Once again Dummie, you have no need to ever leave our home group.
It is people that make Life-Life. And Dummie U touched mine and made my life richer for knowing U. Gone but never forgotten. Thank U mate. Smiles.
On 11.11.07 DjTom Voom said:
I am so sorry for Dummie. Always knew him as happy and lovely boy.
And i am indeed sorry to have never knewn him more close and speak about his problems. But maybe he would had liked to have a second life without sorrows. But it shows us Second Life is more than a game. Nothing is like before here too, if u loose a friend , a love here.
So its fine to have more contact than in the second life. Maybe an email adress …
I am very sorry and feel with all persons who were close or closer than me with Dummie.
Dummie I miss you……
On 11.11.07 britney canning said:
hey my son dummie i will always always miss you.
You was the best son in the world.
you always help me out and was a loving little boy.
i will never forget you my darling dummie.
rest my little one mummy loves you loads.
love u baby
mummyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 11.11.07 tobytendaze said:
It’s been a very sad weekend and my heart goes out to Caleb and all those who called Dummie Beck a friend. Sadly, I did not really get to know him well though he seemed he and Caleb seldom missed one of my Vortex sets. Now, I’m not going to get that chance to get to know him and I regret it.
My message to Caleb; You’re not alone, there are many out there who care about you. Feel free to IM me anytime.
[...] It’s common knowledge know that Dummie Beck is the deceased. Dusan has written an excellent tribute that features many thoughtful comments from those who knew Dummie. I recommend you go read it and [...]
On 11.11.07 Kurtis Justin Corrigible said:
Like many of the others, I didn’t know him well. But I knew him well enough to be saddened, and to miss him.
I remember that at first, it felt awkward to say “Hi, Dummie”, like it was some sort of running joke. But he always responded cheerfully, or greeted me first. It didn’t take long to learn that there was a real personality behind the name, friendly, and fun, and caring. It was no longer an epithet, but rather the identity of someone who made our experiences delightful.
My heart goes out to those close to him, and I’m saddened by not being able to get to know him better.
On 11.12.07 Dj Tom Voom said:
I remember him from the days at the old Flos Beach, where Flo helped him with Second Life. He called me always ” Tom the Cat” .. He was such a nice and friendly character.. I am sad that i have now not the chance to see him again..:(
On 11.12.07 Lokirian Janus said:
I actually only met Dummie personally a handful of times, but i never heard a bad word said about him and was always impressed with his sense of decency and kindness.. A member of my own family passed away very recently irl.. and i took some solace from the following poem:
God’s Lent Child
“I’ll lend you for a little while
A child of mine,” God said
“for you to love the while he lives,
And mourn for when he’s dead.
It may be six or seven years
Or forty two or three.
But will you, till I call him back,
Take care of him for me?
He’ll bring his charms to gladden you
And – (should his stay be brief) –
You’ll have his lovely memories
As a solace for your grief.
I cannot promise he will stay,
Since all from earth returns;
But there are lessons taught below
I want this child to learn.
I’ve looked the whole world over
In my search for teachers true
And from the things that crowd life’s lane
I have chosen you.
Now will you give him all your love?
Not think the labor vain?
Nor hate me when I come to take
This Lent Child back again?”
“I fancied that I heard them say –
“Dear Lord, Thy will be done
For all the joys Thy Child will bring
The risk of grief we’ll run.
We will shelter him with tenderness,
We’ll love him while we may
And for the happiness we’ve known
Forever grateful stay.
But should Thy angel call for him,
Much sooner than we’ve planned,
We’ll brave the bitter grief that comes
And try to understand.”
On 11.12.07 Ruslan Laryukov said:
Dummie, wherever you are … we miss you, we love you, we pray for you, and we thank you for the sunshine, friendship and kindness that you shared with us.
Yeah, I hear you. I honestly am having serious doubts about whether Linden Lab can handle what they have created – or if they can jump the gap from what they made Second Life to what at least a few frustrated people see as the potential for the Second Life platform.
Linden Lab also seems very much leaned (and perhaps liened?) toward favoritism. That those who could be considered Linden Lab’s chosen few see no problem is not the issue. That is a serious no-brainer. What is the issue are the people who are not among the favored who are trying to do things.
Linden Lab created the gap. Linden Lab can fix it, if they so wish. Me? I’m waiting to see what else pops up on the radar. Surely *someone* can do better than this.
I often think he only has gone out,
And soon he will be home again!
The day is lovely! Oh, be not afraid!
He only has gone out for a long walk!
Indeed, he only has gone out,
And soon now will come home again!
Oh, do not be afraid, the day is lovely!
He only has gone out to yonder hills!
He only went ahead of us
And do not feel like comming home again!
We shall overtake him on yonder hills,
In the sunshine!
Lovely is the day on yonder hills!
[...] Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 in Metaverse General Tags: 3D, papervision, reflective architecture Fascinated by reflective architecture, I ran across the following which acts in a very similar way to the objects developed by Keystone Bouchard as I discussed here. [...]
On 11.16.07 Koffeekid Smalls said:
The passing of Dummie Beck was indeed a sad moment for so many of us who were touched and blessed with his kindness, humor and spirit. Dummie had a special gift, a talent for making those around him smile and laugh and he shared it with us all freely. He was a special boy with a special place in many peoples heart.
300 Days ago I was running around naked on Help Island, sending friendship offers to anyone who even said hello. I even remember rezzing a prim and taking it back in my inventory thinking they was only so many prims per person. I was alone (and naked) in a big old virtual world.
Now, I have wonderful friends, a family and found myself awestruck that I found real love with someone in Second Life. It sounds incredible when I tell people because it IS incredible. The limitations of Second Life only exist because we allow them to. Let your heart freely open up and take your friendships to the next level. Get to know the person behind that avatar, let them get to know you. Reach out and touch someone’s life, pick up the phone and call them, take a trip and visit them. Life is short and can end suddenly, once our trip around the sun is finished, there are no second chances.
Haha….well I hope you realize it was in good-natured fun.
By the way, I really do like your model – I’ve pulled it out on a number of occassions to explain to partners or clients the stumbling blocks that lie between those first experiences with SL and finding the sweet spot of creativity and purpose which is its potential.
Keep up the good work!
On 11.17.07 Waylon Blackthorne said:
He was a kind, gentle, very friends and warmhearted boy. Always there for his friends. Dummie always brightened up the day.
I never got to know him very well. and now I wish I had done but I’ll certainly miss him and it makes me sad that he’s gone.
My thoughts and sympathy go out to Caleb and all the people who knew him
We will all miss you so much, you are forever in our hearts
bye Dummie…
Waylon
On 11.19.07 Patrice Pizzicate said:
Dummie, i dont have any words for what i am feeling now. today i heard what happened. I am sad and shocked. Why you? its not fair. why are all the sweet and tender persons in this worlds taken away.
the only thing i can think about is, that you are needed in an other place to make it better. A place that very much needed you. And i know that you kindness and loving will make it better very soon.
i met you in a club as the son of husama and silva. and de brother of speedy. you were always very nice. we talked, had fun and laughed. I especially know how you made husama feel, a very good friend of mine. I am so thankfull of what you did for her.
You are a very tender and kind person and you will be missed among friends and family. If i see the sadness they have now they lost you, it is shown how important you are to them.
rest in peace , dear dummie.
wherever you are, i know you will be watching down on all of us with a big smile.
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity“He argues that a combination of using Artificial Intelligence (non-player characters) and control of the flow of objects into the world allows developers to control for MUDflation.” SITE: http://feeds.aigamedev.com/~r/GameAiNews/~3/179693276/18338914 [...]
On 11.19.07 Walt Faulds said:
Dummie – my first real good friend in SL.
We talked nights and nights about life and you helped me to restart my life in SL.
Thank you Dummie with love – in our hearts you’re still alive.
Walt
On 11.19.07 husama korobase said:
my dear dummie, you was my lovely son and silvas son in sl and i miss you so much , i know i cant write many it is so dificult that you are gone, i dont understand why you ….we miss you…we love you… and we will always do!!! you are in my heart …. and you stay always there i have make a place for you ….special for you …oww dummie i miss you ;-”"”( i cant never seen you again… and the hug what you give me on your way i will miss so much, my god dummie I MISS YOU ………… your mum Husama korobase …
On 11.19.07 BW Kamachi said:
Dummie, i don’t know you so wel
but you was the lovely son of my girlfriend
Rest in peace
We will miss you
BW Kamachi
On 11.19.07 Speedy Frog said:
Dear dummy, I still cannot believe it we will this for us never see again, I can only think to you to this how much fun we had and how much nonsense we have made. I will never forget you and always carry you in my hearts.
in Love Speedy
p.s.
Excuses my bad English, but I can not think correctly at the moment
On 11.20.07 markie Bleac said:
Dummie;
You were my first friend here on Second Life and I hope some day we will meet in Heaven when God calls me like he did you. You will be trully missed here and i klnw that we will all live again topgether in Heaven.
[...] strange and its end is filled with mysteries, shadows and the truest knowledge of our unknowing. Dummie Beck’s recent death and the feelings and responses it evoked has left me thinking, grieving (for someone I [...]
On 11.26.07 paiskidd said:
The question of avatar ownership tickles many threads to be tugged. I would hope that our use of virtual worlds leads us more to our humanity, and thus, to our sharing our being-ness with others across the spatial now. The evidence I have gathered, subjective as it is, tells me that my closest ones perceive me behind the veils and channels, and than another would only fool those not really human.
Not that I haven’t thought of other modes. When I began describing SL to those in meat-space I told them to imagine a soap opera that is immersive; where the characters are also the writers and the audience. In that thread of thinking, I then imagined a super-avatar, one for which a team of writers, fashion consultants, language coaches, designers, and others converged creativity and strategy to create an über-personality.
As I think of being human, I think of Grandfather in the movie Little Big Man, who referred only to certain members of his tribe as “human”. I speak of the possibility of SL, or anything else, helping us to evolve our humanity when I also feel we may have already surrendered it and rendered it to the genteel beast of post-industrial zombie-ism. How many of us can pass a Turing test of the soul? How do you know, a co-worker asked last week, that you are really interacting with actual people “in there”? If the three vehicles were able to complete the DARPA challenge, how hard could it be to make an avatar that passed for one with a human running it?
I have found myself in way of life where I have adapted this so-called modern life and mode of surviving, at least up partway up the ramp of Maslow’s needs, but I find myself isolated by a series of logical conclusions. SL has brought me into a new level of human interaction. Death is part of that. SL is not perfect, but it short-circuits some of the insulation our way of life has as side-effects. As I sat looking at my screen knowing that a couple thousand miles away, my beloved friend was sobbing as he grieved Dummie’s passing, I wanted nothing more than to hold that real person in my real arms. So far, that interaction seems irreplaceable by our technology.
On 11.27.07 Walt Faulds said:
Some weeks ago Dummie sent me an IM
“Walt, you may believe it or not, I feel like living in heaven with Caleb”!
I established a memory-stone beside our house with a link to this site.
Feel free to visit at slurl.com/secondlife/Pride%20Island/219/114/21
[...] invites comments. I’ve posted on this topic before. It’s still not clear how the currency value will be set and whether Metaplace itself will [...]
On 12.10.07 silva ayres said:
Hi my son , you will always be in my heart forever ,I love you so much ,and your mother love you 2.
I know you are looking at us and smiling.
You will always be my son and speedy love you 2 , your sister miss you a lot .we all miss you.
All those crazy nights and days playing and having fun will always be inside me forever.I miss you a lot dummie.
bye my son
The in world issues have ZERO to do with the CTO stepping down. If you had followed the various posts/blogs and read up a bit more It would be really obvious that there are obviously managment issues and Corey even stated that he and the CEO simply do not see eye to eye on priorities or the directions SL is going.
As reported on CNET, (http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9832840-52.html) Philip and Cory no longer saw eye-to-eye. For how long this was the case I have no idea, and certainly the most recent spate of problems with the Grid hardly led to the termination. I find it hard to imagine Philip pulling out his hair and screaming “My gawd! Our residents can’t teleport! That’s unacceptable! You’re fired!”
Whether the purported e-mail from Philip to staff is true, there is little difference between the e-mail:
“Cory and I have differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable.”
and the official release:
“Therefore, Cory and I are in agreement that our paths, at this point in time at least, lie in different directions.”
The bottom line is there’s a “T” in CTO, and the CTO needs to work with the CEO. Which vision is right and which skill set is best suited to taking SL into the next phase of its evolution will only become clear in time or if Linden can do a better job communicating a broader set of priorities other than platitudes and Windlight.
Cory leaving did not result in the grid failures of the past few months, but an overall lack of coherence, performance, and sufficient progress did. This leaves it in Philip’s hands to bring his team into alignment with whatever his vision is and hope that it’s the right one.
Having said all that I also agree with Kabalyero – TP and grid issues don’t particularly phase me. This is messy, evolving, prototyping, mucky (excuse the pun) fun. Linux had Linus and Linden had Cory under Philip’s direction. Messy is good. Messy is chaos and chaos is the friend of creation. But please please can I have my inventory back?
On 12.13.07 Jerome Wishbringer said:
I met Dummie when he First Came to Second Life. I was not Around Much But My Partner Nathan Pollock befriended him and Introduced him to me.
Nat went on to Help him find a new Av to fit his Personality and give him a makeover for his Appearance in Second Life. I had only a few encounters with Dummie and wish I could have gotten to Know him as well as all of those who he found and found him in Second Life.But he made an impression on me from the start. And because he was a friend to Nat and so many and Missed by so many Nathan, Vagen and I have placed a plaque in his honor on our land and HIM & I & US Commune and Locomotive. YOU are Not Forgotten Dummie.
HI Dummie
I am back from my hollidays it was verry nice had a good time only to short.:-) I was missing SL bud I am glad to be back so i can see all my friends again….
Thats what i was plant to wricht to all my friends! until i hear this sad sad news Dummie is gone what?? Dummie gone no longer on SL ?? cant be I dont believe that he was allways there ath the OBC dancing with us ore ath the Vortex he loved SL to be with his friends and partner Caleb. No MERL he is leaving SL and RL!! I am verry sad Dummie was a good friend a nice boy!! we talkd a lot we dance a lot we laugh a lot and even we cry together Dummie I will miss you verry much you where a wonderfull person to me and a fine friend I will miss you and hope iff there is a god he wil cover you like you dith to me and all your friends I love you DUMMIE and hope we meed in next live god bless you! hugs your MERLIE!!!
ich werde dich immer im härzen tragen Rühe im frieden
On 12.15.07 Idetrorce said:
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
On 12.16.07 paiskidd said:
I am nodding my head up and down, Dusan. I have yet to see very many examples of brands seeming to know how to make use of SL. A thesis I was getting as I read this seems to say that the big brands climbed in thinking a top down approach would bring avatars flocking to their site, when in reality a lot of the sustained energy of SL is a bottom-up participation.
I sat in a meeting of paleo-technologists and perked up when one presenter talked about SL. I was thinking, how is he going to relate SL with the topic of this meeting? In the end, he really couldn’t. He simply said, and I am paraphrasing, “I know something big is going on here, but I don’t know what it really is, but I know we should be a part of it”. So, ok, dogpile on the buzzword.
Every year the “Society for the German language” choses the “Word of the year” (or actually the wordS of the year). This year “Second Life” was on the top ten list for the first time and came in as 7th – the highest entry from the internet world.
[...] its (occassionally limited) technology is its ability to remind us of deeper meanings. I’ve written at length about the strange loop, and how virtuality circles back to reality. There is a rich vein [...]
[...] To that I proffer that the future might not be “professionally made games”. That people will turn to platforms that allow them to make games and games will go independant. Just as we have now have micro content boiling all over the video and audio realms courtesy of YouTube and podcasts, we may, no we will probably, see the same in the games industry. Dusan Writer, who owns a company that does work in advertising, strategy, marketing and design working mainly in healthcare, environmental issues, and training noted my outlook on VastPark, MetaPlace and Second Life in a blog entry. [...]
[...] I’ll suggest that anyone interested in the meta-issues of Second Life – especially the preoccupation with corporate co-opting of SL – take a look at this post. [...]
I’m also looking forward to trying out Metaplace. If it becomes a competition for Second Life then much better. Hopefully, Second Life will improve. Second Life needs a legitimate competitor right now.
[...] my amateur’s armchair, I’ve given my take before on the economies of virtual worlds, riffing off the work of Edward Castranova, including my [...]
[...] Dusan Writer touches on many things I agree with in her follow-up. One being Edward Castranova’s desire for protecting the magic circle. Users will define what the magic circle will be and in the not so near future, if they wish, they will be creating the entire magic circle.. When does the game begin and end? It varies from individual to individual. Like turn of the century Quake matches via TCP/IP…you were not the best until you mastered Ping flood protection, learned to send a string of out of band data against your foe on TCP port 139, coordinated via ICQ, kept up with the birth of the Stooge bot and a host of other challenges. The game demanded players improve their security skills or suffer. The game went far beyond the game’s own boundaries- yet people played and they still play. [...]
VastPark’s tool is clunky, Kabalyero – and why they mapped the keyboard the way they did I have no idea. Having said that, I’ve been having fun playing with it and pretending it’s like the first days of SL.
On 12.20.07 Etha Beck said:
..but sorry guys i dont understand i never meet Dummie i seen only some signs in his memory..but some rumors arrived to me are Dummie have only change his avatar’s name and he still life in sl is true or not?!? You are sure he is really dead in rl ..becouse is not possible to joke about it, if is a joke is a really stupid thing..plz help to me to understand who are right??
very good thoughts,,
alas, and not surprising it is exactly what NOT was done or is being done in the 3d media world of today..now known as by the “virtual worlds-avatar” pr meme.
Remember, it wasnt any single “social 2.0-eyeball driven advertisier paid for” platform that created the more high production level 2d web boom in 1997, It was a “free”-aka stolen mac copies- SIMPLE, NO SERVER, NO giving over your IP rights or need approval by , driven software tool/application called “Flash” that allowed a higher production level to come to the web, thus attracting those who create and sell such services to it…and then those who would want to utilize it.
As long as “3d web media” is caught in social. web2.0 blog memes and VC based get rich quick on “service” platform type thinking, it will only be another failure for the medium for those who could use it for their own reasons.
SL reached and now has peaked “interest” by mass media makers due to its “chaos” of tools for creation….just like flash had, but SL failed to allow others to TRULY create their OWN PROPERTY, and now will provide the template for many failures being built today, due to the “service” mentaility of being another google, not another macromedia…. that is required today for bloggers and thus “money interests” to offer any support.
People make things with TOOLS… NOT Services…
an old lesson, one not learned, and one that will be sadley repeated for those who really want to use 3d realtime media to create in and with.
c3
On 12.21.07 Doctor Rodenberger said:
Thanks for your post on our factory! The idea is actually motivated by a old video on telematic production created by the filmmaker Alex Rivera called Cybraceros. http://www.invisibleamerica.com/whycybraceros.shtml
And yes, we are interested in issues of labor exploitation in the global game industry, gold farming, Madam Chung and her sweatshop and the increasing overlap of leisure and labor incurred by hand held devices and the cultural production of play!
[...] thinking about the strange loop and recursion, I’ve written before about the fact that there are both constructivist and deconstructivist pathways to [...]
I would just like to point out (in the nicest possible way of course) that there’s a big difference between data collection and data analysis (and a lot of demand for the latter).
I think you have wonderfully resumed the experience of disorientation and later, either discouragement or exhilaration when one discovers Second Life to be less a game than a new world. I hope your advice is heard.
One thing I have difficulties finding myself in is the Augmentationists vs. Immersionists debate. With all due respect for Gwyneth Lewellyn’s categorization, I find both mixed instead of distinct. My SL activities are based on RL interests and behaviour (though going far beyond what I am willing to put into practice IRL) ; but immersion in the social and virtual space where I have the opportunity to live them, and the communities therein, including abiding to rules and practices making little sense from a RL viewpoint, is the key to the whole experience. I’d say both augmentation and immersion melt into a hybrid, one probably balanced differently form person to person, rather than that they are two separate approaches to the new world.
What better times are there to live in than interesting ones ? A century and half after the end of the age of discovery, a decade and half after the proclaimed end of history itself, we are suprised to find ourselves discovering and shaping a new world. A virgin one at that.
Always wish for interesting times, don’t you think ?
Rhata:
I couldn’t agree more – there are rarely dichotomies, in real or virtual worlds. I make the point about selecting your avatar name because of this very blurring. I think the point that Gwyneth makes that I support is that of initial INTENT, and then how that intent is projected to others (through groups, appearance, and where time is spent). Over time, a user’s experience in a virtual world shifts and blurs – the “strange loop” where immersion can lead to shifts in how we perceive the real, or how the augmentation of the real leads to immersion in environments and emotional landscapes we didn’t anticipate.
It’s useful to recognize that we probably lie on the continuum somewhere between the intent to immersion or augmentation. If my intention tends towards immersion, I can be highly offended by someone who asks questions about my real life. If I’m there because I’m augmenting RL interests, then I’m very likely to share e-mails, Facebook profiles, and other information about myself.
There’s no question the two blur. Using these categories are nice reminders in our interactions with others that their intent may not be the same as our own, and in particular this might be useful to a newcomer to synthetic worlds.
For myself, I’m with you – immersion gave way to augmentation gave way to different touch-points of immersion, and who can tell the difference anymore.
But the virtual and real aren’t that much different – I can be immersed in reading a book or going to a movie, and my life is always augmented by my actions and thoughts. Increasingly, these distinctions won’t need to be articulated they’ll be as second-nature (pardon the pun) as our real lives. I wouldn’t label myself a realist vs. an escapist, I’m both.
Arriving in SL, newcomers might find the labels useful to help focus their journey, although they’ll probably discover that however narrow they wish their focus to be, that there’s such a wealth of experiences that they’ll end up breaking through the boundaries of the intent because it will just be too interesting not to.
Now….if they’d add one of those pyramids that hover above your character in The Sims that turns from red to green as your happiness grows and shows little symbols in place of actually having to talk, they’d clean up selling to nightclubs.
On 01.04.08 Everest Piek said:
hey dummie…
didnt see that there was a possibility to leave comments. i hope ure good wherever ure now. we had pretty much fun and it was a hard smash when i heard u died…three smashes in a row, in what seemed only 2 weeks. that was too much.
i would remember to phoenix ripley and hart streeter too.
they were pretty good friends and i hope they all are watching us from above
Everest
On 01.05.08 BeauIndigo said:
I love the art
When Joey comes up I want you to show him your world that you have built. I have been trying to explain some of it…but it is better shown than told. You are so far ahead of the game. I know about 1% of what this entails!!! lol It is all evolving so rapidly. One wonders what the world will be like in 10 years…5 years?
Hi Dusan,
We made a video to show what is possible today in Microsoft VE using the Shape modeling application from 3DVIA. http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!10172.entry
Combining custom built house models with the Microsoft VE terrain and cityscapes has some pretty interesting possibilities. [Of course, it would help a lot to have some trees ]
thanks for your informative post. I did not know about the Microsoft ESP inititative.
– Rodd
Really nice work…in many ways I think 3DVIA is the stealth candidate for VW development, mainly because its focus is more corporate and everyone loves to talk about Google. Thanks for the post Rodd.
nice. but all these issues where the same over a year ago when “SL or nothing” was the VR worlds mantra.;) by those paying for the “discovery” of vr worlds and 3d media as a platform wrapper.
Thanks for sharing these great ideas. I’m bookmarking this for future reference. Some of these I already do, so the point resonated most strongly with me. Keep feeding the creativity.
I am currently on holiday so, for this reason, I’ve nothing better to do than surf the web for shopping, lie around and update my blog. Well, more or less anyway.
Doug C
On 01.10.08 BeauIndigo said:
I once thought, as a child, that there must be an end to space. That when I looked above and saw the stars that beyond those stars there was a wall. Once you hit that wall you have come to the end of space.
I now realize, as an adult, that if there was a wall then that would mean there would have to be something on the other side of that wall. Thus, there was no end to space. There was no wall.
I watch this report and realize, as a child, that once again I am looking into space but realize this time that there will be no wall at the end of this space.
[...] Darüber hinaus werden interessante visuelle Charts wie z.B, das “Virtual Universe Landscape” von Fred Cavazza hervorgehoben. Alles in allem eine gute Quelle zur Kategorisierung von Online-Welten. [via Dusan Writer’s Metaverse] [...]
[...] I’ve also written that on a platform where the economy is not meant to be artificially constrained by the code (value inputs and outputs are not controlled or constrained by the platform owner as they are in MMORPGs, because they avoid artificially stimulating or depressing the economy through economic sinks (such as NPC vendors) and other gaming mechanisms) then it’s important that the currency be dependable. In the case of the Linden, the exchange rate is being artificially maintained by the Lindens, and although this isn’t a bad thing, the lack of detailed information on how thee exchange rate is maintained means that there is an invisible economic metric being hidden in the value of private island sales. I asked whether Metaplace would follow a similar approach to controlling the exchange rate of the Metabuck: Metabucks…and the Linden [...]
[...] and Dusan Writer discussed Edward Castronova’s contentions regarding the Magic Circle here and here. So, the concept is alive and well and discussed frequently in the serious gaming community. There [...]
[...] on the Grid-bank situation. It’s a touch opaque at times unless you give it a careful read, but it’s quite worthwhile. In summary, though, he reiterates the primary objections to the existence of unregulated [...]
[...] by observers as diverse as Benjamin Duranske, Prokofy Neva, Nobody Fugazi, Tateru Nino and Dusan Writer; dissenters have been few and in between, easily dismissed as either obvious lobbyists (for [...]
From: Virtually Blind Commentary: Top Five Virtual Law Analysis Fumbles Quote from the site – As virtual worlds continue suffering through legal growing pains, both mainstream press and the blogosphere are covering virtual law more often. There are a n…
On 01.14.08 marc said:
does it really matter if they hit that high? the average user for SL only stays on for roughly 12-15 minutes (I believe thats monthly, but ill have to go look it up again)
very interesting post! We think it is the 3D Social Web that is emerging. Immersive and inter-connected to existing web. In fact the Avatar will be the interface to all of it, from your PC, VoIP, TV and Mobile. Let’s see when the new pointing devices start to really roll-out.
Nonetheless, we are excited about future, but also think that Content will be king, just like when browser wars cleared and then content was the main event.
On 01.14.08 wayneporter said:
compare that to avg. stick time for a web session or web page…
Concurrency is hardly the objective of SL, and I’ve argued before that the most interesting ’stuff’ happening in SL is in the fields of academia, architecture, and corporate collaboration. It’s the 80/20 rule really – the greatest value being derived from SL may well be happening from the 160,000 of the 850,000 ‘regular’ users. Concurrency is one little dial on the dashboard and leads to the question of why it might be happening – as Wagner pointed out, positive press coverage in places like MSNBC.com which doesn’t treat Second Life as a novelty but rather a fact of the business landscape.
I also agree with Wayne. I’m no expert on Web site metrics but outside of social sites I’d guess that if an average Web site was able to say it had 24,000,000 user hours logged against it in the course of a month it would leave someone drooling.
I’m also no expert at reading the Second Life statistics tea leaves. I do know that numbers like the recent improvements to grid stability, increased island sales, and increased user hours when combined with a concurrency record are nice ticks in the right direction. I’m also of the mind that some of the most interesting stuff that will arise from SL will be the result of cross-platform projects that include time spent on blogs, Web sites, and in-world projects. SLoodle, for example, which allows development of courseware integrating in-world learning with the Moodle course platform.
A recent post that the US Department of Defense is using SL to train diplomats within a wider training program also suggests that there would be time “outside” SL that might easily be a lost metric – SL as an integral part of a Web-based toolkit of content is not reflected in user/hours or concurrency stats but may in fact have a deeper value in the long run.
That is, you don’t have to be IN world to be creating value for SL – and for many gaming platforms, they work hard to preclude out-of-world trading and other activities.
And I’m not sure what the latest stats are…(and I have loved Warcraft)…but for all the complaints about sim limits, I believe SL has long exceeded the total population that Warcraft can support on a given realm. 60,000 concurrent users on a realm of Warcraft would mean instant log-in failures – and that’s WITH the content taking 3 hours to load onto your own PC rather than being hosted, along with several billion user-generated items, by the platform provider.
Agreed Rightasrain! But not just the 3D social Web but the 3D Wiki world – collaborative, social, project teams coming together and then going their own way, education in your hand rather than a classroom, augmented reality, and all the attendant possible negatives of the above.
On the one hand, I wish that SL was a broad consumer platform and had delivered on the promise of a flood of new CSI-enticed users who were then led to explorations outside of the traditional expectations of a “game” platform. But really, the most interesting work in SL has been that it has created a collaborative, creative and dare I say craftsman culture – and the early pioneers are now being followed by quality companies and institutions who are thoughtful and not motivated by how many “hits” they get.
Rezzable is a shining example, to my mind, of building a community of practice – prototyping concepts of experience, interaction, but more than anything bringing skilled craftspeople together towards creating the shared capability of working together in a space where the traditional corporate models will have a hard time finding traction.
The argument that we’ve moved beyond information into the conceptual age has its pairing in the idea that while content is king, content will be nothing without the ability to shape its CONTEXT especially in environments where notions of context, identity, and value are still being shaped. Today’s brilliant thinkers and creators, today’s Rezzables, have been joined by the academics and corporate visionaries who will then continue to translate these prototypes into new models for how we create, distribute, and attribute value to content.
We are working on some new concepts focused more on unlocking creative energy in the more engaged SL builders. I hope this will be a step forward on user generate quality content…and not just tons more prim trash! Stay tuned and look forward to your comments!
I’m so glad you see the creepiness in Castronova’s definitely creepy arguments. It’s so necessary for more and more critics of this sole voice on the scene to come forward and challenge a lot of the really nasty consequences of this elitist ideology privileging game gods without checks and balances.
I frankly think we need to yell long and hard about economists-turned-ludologists who think games and worlds are a great way to tap into reptile-brain impulses in human beings and addict them to behaviours in games and worlds run by artificial intelligences that are in fact merely the tools of coders with oppressive and even totalitarian views. He’s far too supportive of these sorts of scenarios, and wants to take the medieval law of MMORGPs and push it into real life — where it was banished centuries ago with what we like to call “The Enlightenment”.
Marshall McLuhan said education would need to change due to the awesome impact of technology, or rather, traditional education was ineffective and would be chasing uneducable kids — but that was 40 years ago. The question isn’t to report on this anymore but to do something about it, and do something demonstrably effective, other than make some silly politically-correct “serious game”.
Ted’s idea was to have people get jobs the way they get quests, with little NPCs showing up to offer them jobs in real life if they could accomplish certain tasks. My God, as you say, who will do all this indulging of all these entitlement-happy freaks created by virtuality?!
I was so thrilled the first time I heard Castronova speak and take virtual economies seriously, speak of the naturally, say in 2004 that the only thing odd about his topic “virtual stock exchanges” was that in 20 years, the adjective “virtual” wouldn’t be tacked on; it would be just the way all stock exchanges were. And yet…now they are crumbling in Second Life as a victim of policy, not law, and fear of regulation, not the chasing of virtual worlds by real-life law enforcers, which he fears — and I guess he imagines he can create a realm strong enough to evade.
Castronova is also far too welded to game-games, not the games of worlds, or open-ended virtual 3-d platforms like Second Life. He just hasn’t had enough experience with it. It’s like…too much real life.
I think you have to be more than queasy about totalitarian wannabee game gods with experts like Castronova serving them — you have to be standing up and fighting.
I don’t want the values of MMORPGs — sychophantic fanboyz, toadying resmods and wizards, arrogant game devs, dismissive “code-as-law” and “information-wants-to-be-free” criminality to start holding sway over real life — and the culture already does in many areas.
What I do have to wonder about is the premise that such large portions of populations will “escape to virtual worlds” that there will be no one to run the factories and keep the electricity turned on. The reality is that as much as these games and worlds have booming populations, they also don’t have “everybody” like the Internet. Or they don’t have them 24/7. Or they don’t have them such that people all quit their day jobs and sit at home all day levelling up. In part because they are worlds that don’t really capture people’s imagination or effort, as they are those droning and dreary skill=grinding and war-fighting games that Ted loves.
And another important point: I think we can’t look at artificial intelligence as some kind of abstraction, some kind of “technology”. Artificial intelligence is a manifestation of an elitist movement in society that has the power to code, and code power over all in their realm. AI is an extension of rule, not something separate from it. It’s character isn’t ’science’; it’s nature is cultural and political. This is often overlooked, as people imagine AIs will only be helpful librarians at your elbow, and not bots blocking you from accessing content or expelling you from groups, which is what happens in Second Life. AIs don’t acquire purity because they are automatic; they are creatures of the coding elite, and it is shaped by a culture that is making you queasy.
I think what’s important about Castronova’s two books, which are indeed seminal in this field, is that they indicate serious study and the creation of a system of thought about virtuality. Now we need 100 other thoughts and systems and schools to spring up, too, so that this “early adapter” doesn’t hold sway without challenge. There’s no reason why we all have to live like orcs in WoW or avatars keeping our mouths shut in Linden townhalls.
It’s only because of the newness of this field that it is so bereft of any critical challenge to Castronova. So I have felt I had to make a special effort to criticize him very hard. I find him frankly unconvincing as an economist of virtuality if he dismisses SL so glibly. It’s appalling. I guess it’s too real or too complex for him.
>While the real world concert is taking place, participants in the virtual concert hall might be remixing songs on the fly, mashing the experience so that it is no longer a stand-alone event, but rather the source for a veritable flood of user-generated content.
Dusan, let’s just catch our breaths here for a moment.
I’m a big Second Lifer as you know. And real lifer, too! But the mash-ups are just not convincing.
I’d like for once for people to actually report on what people actually do with these mash-up thingies, rather than just get ecstatic about the idea of them. OK, we got it, it’s cool, people can look in a window and see avatars in a virtual world. Get the screen big enough, it’s a blast. They stare at the screen, then turn away and deal with people in real life. There’s some interaction, but…are they really doing all that fabulous user generating of content? Or are they just consuming in a more fractured manner?
People readily adapt to immersive virtuality and live in it as if it is real, in a very simple way, and the lower the level of education, they easier they do this, without thumb-sucking about reflexivity.
The architecture needs to have a comfort level that avatars can really live in, and not just gaze at, as art. The camera angles have to be good!
I don’t believe in these four truths, as the source of illusion isn’t greed, but hope. I also think there isn’t anything terribly fascinating or insightful about tracking avatars around on a sim, they’re like people, only a little clunkier until the technology gets better.
Virtuality and artificial intelligence are human artifacts, and bear all the markings of any human tool.
[...] This is an interesting pick-up from Castranova’s idea of an Exodus to Virtual Worlds, which I posted about last week. Castranova’s argument is that the “real world” had better learn about virtual [...]
Thanks Big A…will be worth exploring City Pixel. Looks like a social engine site…seems to be popping up a fair bit, leveraging the Facebook/social Web idea into virtual worlds. How does City Pixel work as a venue for education, corporate collaboration, simulation or explorations of new creative forms and visual rhetoric? (Save me a trip please! Or at least point in the direction of where I can find these things once I get there?)
[...] avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not [...]
[...] avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not [...]
[...] avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not [...]
Of course your post is on target as usual. While I am sure that Windlight + Havoc4 will raise the bar for online virtual worlds, issue still is attracting/converting new users.
We are going to try to do something here, but it would sure go a lot further if LL had a matching marketing program–ala intel inside.
LL is making some little effort here now with their new “Showcase” http://secondlife.com/showcase/. But not sure that gonna do too much. They would do a lot better with an email campaign to the 12 million people who signed up!
Simple things are too hard to deal with now. Simple example…it takes a ton of time to enter an Event. We all know events are key, but it takes 5 minutes to do something now…and no integration back out from Events to something like Google calendar or even RSS feed. While SL is a very open platform…events are trapped.
But LL is also trapped, they are still dazzled by virtual real estate and missing the point that residents–especially new residents–want to do fun stuff. They want to explore the virtual world and they want to meet people. And it’s not only about sex.
[...] there is this installation I just read about on Dusan Writer’s blog (link). Amazing!!! I haven’t seen this in-world yet, but will let you know what I [...]
A perfectly made point. If I’d dare to nitpick, I would however state that I find it pointless to hope for the Lindens to augment the beginner’s experience — simply because I suspect that SL’s burgeoning society has outgrown any concept they might have had of it long ago.
Their failure on elementary governance and customer support, the disastrous Teen Grid and the horrid orientation experience are just cases in point that His Majesty King Philip, for all his benign intentions, is sitting pretty far away on his throne, only very remotely aware what all those pesky colonists in the New World are up to…
By the way, one of the Colonists has come up with a nifty software bridge between the in-world event calendars and the widely accepted ICS format. Head over to the esteemed Ms Ordinal Malaprop’s box of tricks at http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/contents/ to grab the URLs.
I certainly hope Prokofy is wrong, and the virtual interface is more than just a clunky version of real life. yick!
Those who believe their avatar is a human being will always see the differences between the real and the virtual as a stumbling block on the path toward seamless replication of real life. But, those who can get beyond mere physical replication might begin to see those differences as opportunities.
If you could fly in real life, as easily as you can walk, wouldn’t you do it? If your body had an invisible camera you could place anywhere without moving your body, wouldn’t you use it? But, more importantly, wouldn’t you expect your built environment to evolve accordingly? If architects could easily program bricks or walls to be more intelligent and respond to our presence, wouldn’t we take advantage of that feature? Wouldn’t a new kind of architecture evolve, based on those new characteristics?
All we’re doing is designing within context. The context, in this case, happens to be a bit different than physical reality. I think its actually irresponsible to ignore that context and go on placating the lowest common denominator and mindlessly replicating physical reality – just because its easier, or more ‘comfortable’ in the short term. I appreciate traditional design and appropriate applications of physical replication in Second Life as much as anyone, but I also believe we’re all on a collective learning curve, and that there is enough room in the vast grid of Second Life for a few people to try out their ideas, and for others to write out their thoughts and observations about that work. There is nothing wrong with that.
But I really don’t think its appropriate to chase down and argue against those who try to understand or explore these new opportunities, calling them out as thumb-suckers. Granted, innovation isn’t for everyone – especially those who feel threatened by it, or don’t understand it, or don’t like it. That dichotomy is as old as time. But if anyone is sucking their thumbs – wouldn’t it be those who fear innovation, and go around demanding status quo?
Just a quick word on alts.
I use an alt to seperate the “normal” me who is pretty out there as far as identity profiling from a character for a specific setting. The example being that I created the alt account of Degan Blackadder sepcifically to be a villain in a fantasy RP setting. Why? Because honestly could you really believe a villain named Mace Maverick? >=)
Thanks Keystone. We’re having fun with the scripts by the way, can’t wait to show you some of the results.
In the meantime, please take note regarding thumb sucking, as I fear being pulled into a wider debate. I have nothing wrong with thumb sucking, and in fact some of my best friends are thumb suckers. Kind thanks.
This is a great post, Dusan, I’m glad to see people writing posts as long as mine, but here’s my immediate response:
“I am large; I contain simultitudes.” per Walt Whitman.
Seriously, this fear of alts, and hatred of changeable and mutating identities may go back very far and deeply to the folklore of all cultures, but let’s not be too precious here.
We seriously need an avatar rights movement to break free of coders, or at least to pit one set of more enlightened coders against the other more endarkened ones who are indeed recreating the Gulag Archiplego literatally and figuratively.
If I have a real-life enterprise for which I need the augmentation or tool of virtuality, I can easily get together in real life in person, by registered mail, by telephone, by email, by whatever, without having to burden the anonymous avatar realm with my needs. The needs are engendered by reality; they can be satisfied in reality without devising elaborate coders’ schemes to tie identity.
All your efforts to make alts come to naught if the coders have ways of tracking your IP, your log-on locations, various other identifying features of your “footprint” that they can process at fantastic speeds to block you everywhere. And that in turn can be used to block your purchases, rentals, sales, etc. in virtuality and truly hobble your expression and even your survival.
I always find it humorous that the technolibertarians are the first to make themselves anonymous, to use anonymizers, to be concerned about anyone tracking them, but then they whole-heartedly embrace — as a class — the most aggressive data-scraping that takes away the privacy of others.
Nick Yee does not understand Second Life; his research is faulty. He’s the guy who could claim that avatars have gazes, and that he can track their genders in this fashion. They don’t have gazes in SL. I’ve challenged him a number of times, but he’s one of those celebrities at Stanford that about whom it’s impossible to get anybody to do the most basic challenge.
I totally repudiate the reductionism and Darwinism implied in Yee’s concept that your avatar’s shape or height or whatever will change your behaviour. This is just old rewarmed Marxism (”the material affects consciouness”), or facile Myspacism, I don’t know which is worse. There are quite short and stout and ugly avatars all over the place, but they can command immense respect and authority — sometimes merely by having the last name “Linden”. An avatar can look like a jailbird, but if he has the last name “Millionsofus,” he’s golden. I’m sorry, but Nick is spouting facile nonsense, drawn from games, and not even a very deep take on games.
I’m glad you’ve marked the concept of “tribal” morality here, because that’s exactly what prevails in SL. Of course, there is very real grounds for fear of the changeable in SL, especially the gender-bending, because there is a small and persistent class of people — especially males — in online communities who delight in tormenting females by pretending to be female and lesbian and partnering with them, or finding real-life males and pretending they are females in RL — and causing a lot of emotional harm (and there are even a few females who crossgender and mislead others about their real lives, too, though it is less common).
This pain in communities has been so great that it has spawned a great deal of the thinking around avatar anonymity — there is nothing people fear and loathe more than the idea that the wrong gender is pairing with them.
Obviously I think people should be free to transgender, but I think they have crossed a moral boundary when they do not let a potential romantic (or even business) partner know their real gender, given how much this still means in the real world.
I’m not buying the concept of “therapy” if “therapeutic” means “I get to make an alt and grief others with harassment.”
There is a quotation from Ayn Rand, whom I normally dislike (I am definitely not a follower of her elitist and callous belief system), that makes sense to me:
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand
However, I like to couple this saying with another quotation:
“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” Pope John Paul II
I think you need a more subtle understanding of what it means to be “educated”. It’s not literally about the number of grades you completed in school. It’s about what level of sophistication you have in reflecting upon yourself in an environment, in taking a meta-level take.
The average joe with a high school education or some community college or trade school happily immerses in SL and finds a partner, a sex bed, a home, and goes happily at it. More intelligent, thoughtful, reflective types will write on their profiles that they aren’t available for such casual liasons; and they laughingly tell you that they’d never do anything so ridiculous as cavort on the pose balls. So I’m literally talking about the mediated architecture of sex furniture here, Dusan, if you will — where my point becomes graphic.
The ultra sophisticated will usually tell you that they “don’t need land to have fun” or “don’t understand why people have houses” or “why they have roofs when it’s not raining,” etc. etc. Ok, we got it, guys. Now dig deeper. So I’m glad you *are* digging deeper.
Ian Bogost isn’t really a persuasive reference for me, not to make a pun of it. I find his appallingly politically-correct game narrative a total bore, and frankly oppressive. The one on the fat Americans oppressing the rest of the starving world that he put out recently was especially atrocious. His art of persuasive is more of an orthodox ideological sect, that lock-steps you into coming to the same politically-correct views. These aren’t games; they aren’t even homilies; they are re-education camps. I loathe that.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse The Place of Alts in Virtual Worlds and Second Life: Possession or Expression Quote from the site – Is having an ‘alt’ in Second Life a moral failing? Where does “Your [...]
Keystone, the minute you can stop making your living from Second Life, you will have a more sanguine view of all this. Until then, sure, you can dine out on the sheer aesthetics of it all.
Thumb-sucking isn’t about being infantile; the term “a thumbsucker” is newspaper newsroom jargon for “a long piece in which someone has a deep thought”. That’s all. You need not read into it some terrible dramatic commentary.
I find it fascistic that Keystone is now kow-towing to the Mau-Mauers and insisting that we aestheticize — or else! Or else we are *gasp* playing to the lowest common denominator!
As a rental agent, I can only *serve* my customers. And what they want is versimilitude, a comfort level for avatars, a certain kind of aesthetic, that will hardly be the politically-correct aesthetic that Keystone, as a professional architect would want, especially one trying to carve out some sort of whole neo-geo field with all this.
Keystone, what’s awful about what you write is that you imagine that if I serve the pedestrian customers’ need for low-brow builds and prefab architecture and date destinations, that I’m oppressing you with some imagined majority. But in Second Life, that is sheer and utter bullshit, because anyone can buy an island, and do what the hell they want on their island or continent –as you have done — and never fly around and see the tacky McMansions and Goth Castles of Second Life if they don’t wish to harm their eyeballs.
Nobody is stopping you from your “few ideas”. And your few ideas are…what? Recreating the Capitol Building of the US Congress *exactly as it is in real life*? Hello?
This stateement is truly beneath you, Keystone, as you know perfectly well that I give these issues a great deal of thought and do a great deal of reading on the subject:
“Granted, innovation isn’t for everyone – especially those who feel threatened by it, or don’t understand it, or don’t like it. That dichotomy is as old as time. But if anyone is sucking their thumbs – wouldn’t it be those who fear innovation, and go around demanding status quo?”
I don’t feel threatened by innovation — please cut the bullshit. What I *will* do is call innovation that is just as tacky and facile and reiterative as any kid’s fractal art exactly what it is. I don’t see that plains of blinking lights or geometric sculptures are even good art, let alone architecture. THAT is the debate. Frankly, it’s a debate I had about the winners of that contest — and I was surprised and pleased to see that Lordfly, whom surely you can respect as “one of your own,” even if a junior variety, had the exact same problems with: pretentiousness, overmathematical solutions, showy discomfort in the name of edginess, etc.
Nobody is demanding the Status Quo, Keystone, give it a break (um, Capitol Hill, anyone?!). I’m challenging pretentiousness, and facile crap, that’s all.
For example, this sort of hortatory lecture, from an anti-consumerist, pastoral, anti-capitalist sort of leftist ideology:
“to deconstruct visual media so that we understand how advertising, for example, uses images to persuade us to buy things we don’t need, or go places we don’t need to see, so too does it become incumbent on us to explore how virtual worlds and the objects within them can create a new rhetorical language the purpose of which is not to just make it easier to get into a shop or to maximize camera angles, but to persuade for other purposes as well.”
Um, why? Why do we have to ‘deconstruct” an ad and find this political evil underneath? Couldn’t we just interpret it as a company with a brand, that we may or may not click through, may or may not enjoy? Must we always play the victim of the leftwing view of the world, suppressed by evil corporations pinning us down with ads? couldn’t we just *like to shop* ???
Some new sort of virtual architecture inspires. It doesn’t have to have medieval or Cape Cod or quaint versimilitude to be comfortable; it can question cliches. There are great architects in SL who soar, who use the tools to the maximum, who create interesting spaces. But so often, even these very good ones, are making sculptural monuments to their own fanciful notion of themselves as being edgy, and it becomes very unpleasant after awhile to actually try to live in these artifacts.
It’s funny how, completely independently of Rezzable, using much less sophisticated tools (snapshots on my homegrown newsletter for my sims) I came up with the same conclusion today on my own blog: we are churning way too many sign-ups with far too little numbers retaining (we all knew that)– but worse, we are losing rapidly even those who retain, not logging on again after 60 days.
I know 10 games that I’ve tried and never gotten off the orientation island or first frames — WoW, Twinity, Guild Wars, Eve Online among many. Why? Because they were too hard too learn, not satisfying enough in their activities, too limited, or too complicated, too hot, or too cold. That’s life in the Metaverse.
But SL shouldn’t be like a hard first-person shooter game — it should be fun like Facebook and easy like Yahoo — at least, that’s what many people coming to it hope from it.
Like others, it took me 2 tries to get on SL and stay, and the second time was a very slow curve up about five months before I really got it to work for me.
A really big problem I’m seeing now in SL is vast hordes of newbies who don’t have money and don’t have direction, worse than ever. The intelligentsia of the various countries whose geeks have gotten into SL, and whose handful of creatives have gotten in, aren’t bringing in the rest of the educated classes. Only consumer-oriented people are coming, but they aren’t educated consumers, i.e. sophisticated in knowing what they can get out of a virtual world.
Second Life needs to be a leisure activity before it can become a labour activity, and for far too many people, SL is work — even camping and plucking money trees is like skill-grinding work, with little reward. People with disposable income and disposable time need to feel a huge rush, and a huge payoff from SL quickly and really get engaged — and they don’t. They need to feel they have social potential they don’t have in RL, or intellectual potential they don’t have in RL, and somehow SL is failing to give this to them rapidly enough.
Unlike Himoff, I don’t imagine some other competitor, even with an inferior platform, will take over from those who disengaged from SL because those people either went to Myspace or WoW or the mall — or back to listening to NPR or reading Slate. Until the thinking people in many countries are inspired to understand this SL simulation will be very valuable for real life prototyping, it will not succeed.
You’re absolutely right that grid stability means nothing. We froze and crashed on the Sims — that didn’t drive us to SL. What drove us to SL is that the most creative people among us got tired of the tools’ limitations and migrated, and we followed them. And then more ordinary consumer types followed simply because the world where they were seemed to have people lacking in interest.
Education is being touted as the next big thing, but it can only become that if it truly breaks down tradition and makes real schools without walls. If I can pay some low fee and take a real class. If I can actually full-fledged degree online with interactivity in SL. If I can audit a professor or have a round-table with other thinkers that really matters — if the university can really behave like the university, and not a Sears catalogue of purchases I make to credential me for my first job as so often it is in RL nowadays.
Lindens already worry far too much about newbies, Dusan. That’s the whole reason why they are so hobbled. They infantalize and therefore cripple newbies, sequestering them on islands and smothering them with Mentors. There is only one cure for this: opening up advertising to businesses and nonprofits. When people can find their interest cohorts, whether they be book clubs or dance clubs, through boards they can click on and teleport to, we will clear some of this hurdle. We need to find ways to make “home stays” which are the most important factor in absorbing any influx of migrants in any world — the people who can take on a newbie and mentor him not according to the company’s script, but by his own set of interests among his cohorts.
What’s happening now is the Lindens are farming out the care and feeding of newbies to their friends in various special corporations, and also letting their FIC-y mentors run the hubs. They should close down all the orientation stations as most of the content is not used or understood, and rework the entire thing as really a big party, a social gathering, a vivid, interactive search come alive, with tableaus, so to speak, displays, demonstrations, portals, ads for people to pick their interests and go to them — not as set-piece tutorials but with people.
The resident-made infohub concept should be expanded in lieu of these re-education labour camps on OIs that force avatars to learn to fly or drive vehicles when they could care less about driving, especially in a world with such rough sim crossings. Vehicle driving is one of the most minority activities in SL, and inflicting that on the newcomer is really torture.
Imagine, I’ve been in SL for 3 years, I made an alt, and couldn’t get off the damn OI myself because the system had grabbed me, hog-tied me, and put me on a track I couldn’t get out of to learn to fly at some sort of aviation tower that I couldn’t even find. Bleh. I finally picked my way through to the “get off the island” kiosk — which should be 16 m2 from the landing point, not located across and obstacle course!
I totally agree that the Lindens need to dump their fixation on early adapters and even mid-adapters. But…They’ve been obsessed about newbies as creatures that need to be swaddled and taught to script and build and drive laggy vehicles and dream of Havoc 4, however (a function of their orientation to early adapters).
We need to pry their hands off all this and find ways for various businesses, nonprofits, venues of various sorts to take the newbies with their affinities, and for the masses who can’t pick an affinity, to have a greater party-like socializing experience which they can then opt to leave to learn if they like, intead of forcing people to learn in a bootcamp before they socialize.
And when I say “party,” I don’t mean dance poles. I mean the wine and cheese party at your college after a poetry reading.
Virtual real estate satisfies a lot of people — it is the engine of SL’s growth, such as it is, to this date, whether any tekkie wants to admit it or not, or whether any “date destination” like the Rezzable sims wants to admit it or not. And virtual sex matters to a lot of people, and that’s fine.
But it’s not enough, because people need to make friends and make connections, and not only romantic ones. They can do this when there are more event hosts.
Event hosting is a thankless, impoverishing job. Those of us who have taken on this job know that it is an uphill struggle, and that even when the Lindens paid you, or even when the Sheep pays you, it is a slog, and it’s hard to expect it to be anything else. A lot of the success of Second Life has hinged upon the willingness of primarily female residents being willing to host people and hold their hands through orientation experiences. There is no substitute for the enormous amount of manpower needed for this job, the labour intensity, the diversity, the more sophisticated tools needed (better groups, more groups, less buggy groups).
People don’t like to just go and gaze passively at fabulous builds that leave them in awe, but have no place for them. They can sometimes have more fun on something simpler, and interactive, but more social.
The Showcase is a welcome development just because the Lindens are finally moving away from only feting scripters and their favourite designers and showing more diversity like live music or education or interesting venues. But they need to enable the community to constantly expand and refresh these pages, and currently, they are hostage to a funnelling through a few Lindens.
>LL is making some little effort here now with their new “Showcase” http://secondlife.com/showcase/. But not sure that gonna do too much. They would do a lot better with an email campaign to the 12 million people who signed up!
Says Himoff, whose Rezzable sims are *featured* in this Showcase (!). I think it’s too much to ask the Lindens also to email 12 million people for you. I think you need to do your own advertising in the audiences that you think could enjoy these sims.
Dusan, great post, very thought provoking and a lot to go on. Worth going back to read again, and dip into all the other references to.
Then I’ll work out perhaps what I should feel about my alt, as I have Heleno for work, and an alt not for work. Not that my alt gets up to anything outrageous but its an easier way to separate work and home. Funnily enough, it seems easier in the real world to do that.
Some people know both my identities, but they are people that I chose to share that with. Its not meant for any form of deception, and more for personal exploration whilst not limiting my virtual experiences for fear of jeopardising real life.
[...] Place of Alts in Second Life There is a really fascinating, and challenging, piece on Dusan Writer’s Metaverse blog today about the rights and wrongs, good and bad things, about having an alternative avatar in Second [...]
Your own experiences cannot be denied. Your thoughts cannot be denied, your perspective cannot be denied. This you know. Prokofy Neva vacillates according to what her mood is and she is never kind except to those she adores (how few they are). She rarely has an original thought and likes to tear into the thoughts of others who dare look at things differently.
Keep looking, observing and writing. What you do has value – if this were not true, Prokofy Neva wouldn’t be trying to tear you down.
I find it humorous that the Dispeptic Penguin has to stalk me here to a debate about aesthetics. I’m not the one who titled a post after some individual whose perfectly-normal comments about over-pontificating about art in SL were seized by Dusan and put into a whole blog post title. My word, such drama lol.
I don’t deny Dusan’s experiences, but I’m merely eager to affirm my own, so that we don’t get smothered under the horridly politically-correct aesthetics of the hour that we suffer under in real life.
I hardly think I’m a vacillater; I don’t play Second Life stock markets like Nobody.
Dusan writes snarkily, that I supposedly think SL is “nothing much more than a domain for human activity, with all the implied utilitarian needs such as good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market, I can’t help wondering whether my attention span is too limited for immersive virtuality and that maybe I should switch back to lower-realm pursuits like Warcraft”
Uhmmm “a domain for human activity” is a very, very large canvas. What, there is something inhuman, or something ethereal about ourselves online? But I take the human being to be an ensouled body, I don’t create any sort of Manichean dissection between the meat-world typist and the meta-world consciousness invested in the avatar — they are integrated, and on a continuum.
Perhaps Dusan really does feel it differently, and that’s fine, but that’s hardly a reason to accuse me of attempting to dumb down SL to utilitarian needs for cybersex in suburban box houses.
Good governance, good camera angles, and a robust real estate market may seem like horribly mundane, tasteless, even philistine goals, but they are merely the substrate for the higher things in life to which Dusan aspires.
I don’t understand why we need to be *bludgeoned* by art or *sliced to ribbons* by architecture. Can’t we go on a sim, have an aesthetic experience like holding hands and singing and listening and watching Dizzy Banjo’s thingie, or the Twitter fountain, or whatever, and then *go home to our Frank Lloyd Wright prefabs on our landscaped sims?* I mean, must we live the life of a Bohemian, or even a starving artist living out of a trashcan with the hobos in Calletta, in order to appreciate art?
I don’t *substitute* good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market (which drives the SL economy, like it or not, or I wouldn’t care; if it were widgets, I’d care about widgets but it’s not widgets) for art. I say “and this, too”. I say “and don’t impose the harshness of your cerebral aesthetic on my simulation”. And that’s more than fine. I’m allowed to do that and not be hopelessly cast down to the cheap seats with the hot buttery popcorn because in real life, I can appreciate art in museums; I can take part in artistic mashups and happenings and installations, but then I can *go home*.
And I don’t see why I can’t *go home* in a virtual world. In fact, as it happens, I don’t have a home. I’m actually one of those people who doesn’t feel any burning need for my flying avian avatar to have a human-like home with a roof over its head.
But I appreciate the creature needs of others who *do* want the roof. I think my thoughts here in fact are rather original. Dusan is joining the throngs of aesthetes who always take the edgy noveau thing and become enraptured by the sheer non-normalcy of it — Keystone, too, is entranced with spinning lights and prims — shiny!. I appreciate it but I don’t wish to be stampeded by it, just as they don’t wish to be stampeded by things they don’t have a comfort level with.
He takes the view that alts are primarily possessions…extensions in some limited way of who we are, but more within the context of our investment of time and attention in each of these alts. He proposes this doesn’t do anything to change that it’s still “all me” just different parts of me with different roles.
I propose that this would be true except that the code actually constrains our abilities to choose the manner in which these different roles can be expressed, which picks up on Prok’s points (more about after a good sleep )
If we view and describe avatars as possessions or ‘extensions’ of ourselves, as game worlds do in which their function is first the accomplishments of goals (no matter how slowly or with how much socializing you attain those goals) then we’re missing a larger question which is whether the code and the ‘policy authorities’ (platform owners but ALSO those in the world with us) are constricting our abilities to control our expression, and thus setting us up to buy into a morality without even realizing it’s being sold to us.
>The reality is that our bodies do not make part of it. Can a space which our bodies do not actually sense, feel and know, be called truly a human space
I realize you would like to be more metaphysical about this, but you can also look at it more practically. Your senses see a space rendered — and your senses actually do sense the space by sight and sound, and to a minor extent, touch (via the mouse). If something comes right at you, you might wince. If there is a loud noise, you might jump. So you are in a space, reacting, and being immersed, you have construed it, or constructed a working map of it, so to speak. I don’t see that this is all that different from coming into a real life room and taking in the space and navigating your way around it.
What a stunning coupling of quotations Prok, capturing in a few lines what would take me another novel to try to sum up. A few comments of my own in response if you’ll indulge me.
First, I don’t have any particular opinion about Yee’s research. I’m not very good at evaluating methodologies and so on, but intuitively some of his findings strike me as a little off the wall. His idea that people react spatially in SL like they do in RL is an example – he seems to claim that with people we don’t know, we tend not to look at them, staring away at other things, sort of denoting shyness and self-protection. I won’t dig into his methodology, but what I do know is that with AOs and different choices for where you hover your camera and perspective the idea of “look at” as a mechanism for measuring what we pay attention to is an odd one.
However, I will say that in game environments it does feel like it makes sense that our choice of avatars affects how we’re able to relate to others. Think of it like being in school and picking members of a team – I’m more likely to grab a human warrior than the gnome warrior, even if they have comparable skills…somehow a tall buff human commands more attention than the gnome, unless you start overlaying reputation (consider it a blinded trial). Therefore, if others react to us differently because of our avatars, then it seems to make some intuitive sense that we’d start to act differently too (or at least those of us who pick up on social cues because of insecurities or other reasons).
Not to bring Castranova into things, but he made the interesting observation that one of the appeals of gaming platforms is that everyone starts out at the bottom. In fact, social convention in games tends to discourage helping out the newbie other than peripherally, and certainly not in a way that would threaten equality of opportunity. The idea of everyone having the same starting point is preserved through social constructions and the code. Thus, the idea that buying a level 40 character in WoW is against many user’s ‘moral code’ because it bypasses equality of opportunity.
I’d argue that your choice of AV impacts the social dynamic you have with other people, but doesn’t negate your ability to command respect, Linden behind your name or not. Some people may dislike furrys, for example, but that doesn’t mean that a furry can’t be as revered as a human male, it just makes the path through the ‘lower levels’ different.
This on its own is a rich vein for study or reflection. When IBM joined the Linux community it was a newbie like everyone else, picking up the grunt code work, participating, and trying the best it could to shelve its corporate paternal instincts. You come to the game with bad hair and one of 8 pre-defined shapes – what you do with it is your own business, but we all start off in roughly the same place.
I think this speaks to a wider question, which is how reputation is established, which then brings us back to issues of identity, trust and anonymity. Mark Bell recently asked whether object camping was affecting the economy – kind of an odd question, I thought, as if gifts as part of camping were something new.
But I also think he missed the broader point, which is that I’d guess that the “real economy” is a mere sliver of the transactional economy. 10%? 5%? Giving gifts, sending someone a script, giving someone a vehicle – this is probably where most of the real ‘value’ in SL takes place and I’ve argued that we should look at SL like we’d look at open source or Wikipedia – economic value isn’t measured in those instances of value creation by how many ads are sold but rather how much content is created and shared.
In SL, the real estate market is a significant measure of growth or stagnation, and I don’t argue against its importance, but I’d also argue that there are invisible economies (or ones that aren’t measured) namely in the ‘out of world’ transactions and those in world where no Lindens change hands (the gift economy, which contributes to relationships, status, and the net value of the objects that have been created whether sold or not).
Which circles me back to the point that so long as we look ONLY at value creation as forms of possession, the longer we’ll be open to potentially being victimized by the code. It’s not just a question about whether assuming an alt is ‘deceptive’ to others, but it’s that the code first denies a wider range of choice, because while SL is an open world, our tools for construction of trust, transparency, and freedom from tracking by the platform owner have limitations. Second, and for whatever reasons, a tribal morality increasingly governs virtual worlds which is either a worrisome trend or an indication that perhaps we’re striving for a pre-rational way of engaging with society (intriguingly on a platform that by virtue of being code is completely rational even if not rationally constructed at times).
When I hear discussions of alts, they seem to revolve around “I needed an alt in order to be able to go somewhere/participate in something/etc” that I can’t do with my main, or “I need an alt because I want a personal and a business presence”.
The first seems to reaffirm the sense of a tribal morality, with people getting upset because someone is running off from their usual social circles under an alt identity…social pressure to “stay with the family”. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but SL is constructed mainly on the premise of a territorial morality. In a world that’s supposed to be about ‘your world, your imagination’ it seems a radical notion to put pressure on someone not to have 5 girlfriends or to be a Gor in the morning and a mom at night so long as they don’t directly intrude on others.
What I fear, however, is that people get lost in parsing personal dynamics and end up spending all their time talking about time and balance, and not enough time wondering whether the platform itself, through the restrictions built into the code, the lack of ability to assure privacy from code/IP/log and log-in information from the platform owners, and the inability to choose our level of information participation through identity toggles or other means is facilitating a social morality where groups in SL tend to ban together and discourage what is the promise of the platform – maximum choice, maximum protection from intrusion, and the ability to be anything and go anywhere without restriction or fear.
Thanks for the stimulating thoughts. In the interests of full disclosure, I did intend to sound snarky but it was really meant in a respectful way. And I mean that in the sense that I was hoping to draw attention to the continuum of meaning that we can draw from architecture in SL, and reflective architecture in particular.
In my original post, I made the point that a lot of building design in SL is crap. Doors on stores, closed roofs where maybe we don’t need one (a mall, for example), and “bad camera” highlight that at its most basic level there’s still lots of room for talent and effort in creating buildings we can live in. Also in the interests of full disclosure I’m an amateur builder myself – I make those houses that people *go home* to.
So it strikes me as odd that I’d be painted as having merely an interest in shiny prims, although I realize that in my post this is how I may have portrayed myself. Look – the stuff I make is all labeled “beach house” and “loft” and “prefab” and the ads include things like “menu-driven bed included”. Really, it’s not particularly good, but then I’m not an architect or a designer, I just like moving prims around. I make it because I like the idea of people being able to go home at night to something that maybe feels right for them, they have a roof over their head, they can click a button and the windows black out – good, practical, let’s live our SL lives well kind of stuff.
So on one end of the spectrum is the Neva Thumb Sucking test – and take that as a tribute: are we looking at buildings and architecture and drooling over it because it’s shiny looking or moves in neat ways, i.e. are we thumb sucking, or are we looking at whether we can live in it, be practical, and ‘get good camera’. Prok – goodness knows you have a wider range than just one end of this spectrum, but my deeper point about reflective architecture isn’t that the other end of the spectrum is art, but rather that it may be a conceptual form rather than a aesthetic one.
Maybe that’s my projection onto forms that are really nothing more than fancy math, ‘art for art’s sake’, or designed for the aesthetes. But I’m proposing that reflective architecture may be an early indicator not of its use as a form for building design, but rather its use in conceptual and procedural mapping.
Bogost is one of the driest, most irritating reads I’ve had in a long time, but I was still struck by his idea that 3D spaces may be a new rhetorical vehicle, adding to verbal and visual rhetoric. Agreed, we can create a “room” in RL that does neat stuff, attend artistic mash-ups, but it’s very difficult to pull off procedural exhibits in the real world…they tend to end up on kiosks or computer screens, don’t they?
(I also think this is why for all our talk about immersive virtuality that things will really start getting interesting when we see more and more augmented reality and the ability to integrate real and virtual spaces).
To give a corny, simple example of reflective architecture. In Project Bluegrass by IBM you’re assigned a “hut” (let’s face it, a crappy digital version of an office cubicle). Depending how much work you have on your plate, the grass around your hut is either short, or long. If it’s long and weedy, other people can see that you’re jammed up, if it’s short people can see that maybe you can take on more work.
Now, there’s no question this visual indication of work load can be accomplished in a lot of different ways. But as reflective architecture is starting to show us, 3D forms offer different approaches to how we can participate by presenting it in a space that’s constructed like we’re used to – namely 3D.
Here’s what I imagine: reflective architecture (and I would LOVE to insert the word “information” there, because I am NOT talking about building design) leads to a better understanding of how our avatar presence can be reacted to by information objects – objects that have their own procedural commands, which may imply its own procedural rhetoric.
This understanding leads to someone thinking about reflective (information) architecture as something that could apply, say, to generating cloud tags of the Second Life geography. These cloud tags are sim wide, 3D conceptual maps – intuitive, and responsive.
Users come and the cloud tag has words like Education, Sex, Scripting, Real Estate, Community – and as the user approaches the terms of interest, the cloud tag responds, and the words splice out, changing to REFLECT the user’s interest (indicated by their movement through the space). The user can click on one of the tag items and be teleported to, say, Midian City, or Caledon, or NASA.
Just one example – cloud tags, semantic Webs, project tasks, collaborative 3D Wikis…that’s what I mean by reflective architecture as being an eye-opener, not on whether it improves how we relate to “buildings”.
So if reflective architecture commands our ability to project future conceptual architectures, then I’d also say that in its current uses as a form of art it doesn’t merely entertain, but also highlights that it may be an indication of new forms of persuasion, and that from this vantage we should use it as a way to begin a discussion about whether immersive virtuality actually is a new persuasive media, or whether all of this is merely thumb-sucking.
Prok, your point is well taken that there’s no particular divide between meat world and meta world. And yeah, there’s enough ivory tower types deconstructing media as it is – frankly, I generally know when I’m being manipulated by media, and do so with consent sometimes when it’s done well (hello, Apple!) and don’t need a scholarly journal to tell me that.
I spend a lot of time telling people not IN virtual worlds that it’s the SAME thing – tell them not to think of it as somewhere else, or a different domain, or having different symbols or meanings.
On the other hand, I think that virtual worlds add a dimension (sorry) to the Web in the sense that they’re media where code allows us to interact with objects, and that in the hands of knowledgeable and talented creators, these objects can persuade us in ways that a TV ad can’t.
I may not want to LIVE in reflective architecture because it wouldn’t pass the thumb-sucking test. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to look at it, because when I do I start to visualize new ways of presenting and interacting with information, the ability for this to be persuasive, and the potential that it won’t lead to a top selling beach house but it may be the source of new tools for conceptualization and information manipulation.
[...] virtual world literacy facilitating freedom, or quasi-religious indoctrination? On the heels of my previous post about alts, and the insightful commentary that followed from others, I ran across an intriguing [...]
[...] & Alts Add Dusan Writer has an excellent essay on alts in Second Life and I am reminded that I promised someone an essay on identity some time ago and [...]
Thanks so much for linking us to your response and thoughts. We couldn’t agree more that there is a need for bringing to surface the awareness that communication technology – like any other – is an extension of the choices we make. In particular there is no de-fault ethical setting encoded in virtual worlds. However – we do feel that the political imagination of emerging virtual generations will continue to make the most of the rhetoric of freedom of expression, creativity and friendship that circulates in that universe. This will, in turn, shape the direction of evolving technologies. The touchstone for this will of course always be that point of awareness. No escaping that. (By the way – we have never had a complaint so far about the the symbolic airoots background in our design. However thanks for your input!)
[...] Sculpt Tool/Lathe for Second Life January 27, 2008 — dusanwriter I recently touched on Archipelis as a possible option for creating sculpts for Second Life. For Second Life [...]
I’m glad I came across your blog and look forward to following your other thoughts and work. Must be my eyes – the text/background just made it a tough read…age, or too many hours in virtual spaces perhaps.
I know that my post sounded a bit gloomy but I think that since I’ve started to write this blog a few months ago I’ve been, and remain, optimistic about the opportunities for this technology. In fact, the previous sub-title of the blog was virtual worlds, creativity, and spirituality.
I agree that there are no default ethical ’settings’ to virtual worlds, but by virtue of being built they each have within them preconditions that may influence our ability to behave and to influence our ethical framework.
The issue of privacy, for example…on one platform, a surveillance society and on another anonymity to the exclusion of the ability to achieve identity trust. Either end of the spectrum colors our ability to make choices and I’m arguing that individuals (not ethicists, just ordinary ‘users’) begin to behave in specific virtual worlds within certain ethical frameworks because the platforms are built to encourage it.
On the one hand a lack of guarantees by platform owners that they’ll delete chat logs between users and on the other hand the New Yorker article this week (I don’t read or watch the news so I’m sure it isn’t newsworthy) of the girl who killed herself because a “boy” on mySpace harassed her. Anonymity allowed her next door neighbor to disguise herself as a boy.
In both cases, the coding of the platform leaves a different range of choices.
I am in complete agreement with your sentiment about “the political imagination of emerging virtual generations”. It’s not the emerging generations I’m worried about, frankly. It’s the political, corporate and societies who will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and expression takes precedence over control.
Interesting times as they say, and I am optimistic because of the power these technologies bring towards furthering creativity and global friendships, and pessimistic that the response to change by the current ’stakeholders’ won’t bring with it new unforeseen risks to our liberty.
(Hey, anyone have a writ from the record companies I can post?)
[...] voice communications. My issue with a light client and Web-based interfaces to SL (see my post on Movable) is – well, you may not be in world but your avatar is, and tends to stand there slack-jawed or [...]
Oh yes – no denying there is a whole nest of vested interests stalking the virtual world and making the most of what it can control. There is a flatness to the commercial exploitation of the culture of friendship (technological controls and the whole format of Facebook for example) – and all the other issues you list. There is not enough narrativizing to produce a counter-discourse. Not enough mythologies. We can’t depend entirely on the goodwill of the emerging generation either. There is a huge need to be proactive. Airoots will soon launch an inter-active cyber-novel dealing with some of these issues. Can you suggest any links of other narrative-based, creative critiques that may help us?
Wow….mythology….stay tuned, post to follow on that very topic. None jump to mind but I’ll check my delicious links – there’s stuff on there I have forget I tagged. And keep us posted on the cyber-novel sounds wonderful.
On 01.27.08 Duder Pahute said:
I research synthetic environments on a nearly daily basis, and I just had to say that this is one of the most exciting developments I’ve seen – to say there are huge possbilities here would be an understatement. Thanks to Dusan for bringing it to our attention.
Nice work.
I appreciate your attempt to get at some of the complexities involved in virtual worlds and I think it’s crucial that we try hard to not split VW/RW into distinct (or semi-distinct) boundaries that encourage value judgments and hierarchy-making. But I think this notion of “freedom” that’s being worried and debated is a difficult word and space to grapple with, especially on the terms presented above. Does anyone really believe that there is anywhere to “opt out” to? Where would that be? I’m not suggesting that we’re inhabiting a totalizing 1984 universe–but I find it confusing and at times silly that people still believe that utopias are to be found in cyberspace. If they are, they’re momentary, provisional, and perpetually prey to colonization. Power is always on the move and we really can see this explicitly in cyberspace. Most of all I’m troubled by this distinction between our “business” identities and our “private” identities. This notion of a “private” self is as historically constructed as Anderson’s “imagined” communities and carries similar sets of contradictions, pleasures, disappointments, and abuses. I appreciate any and all efforts to keep the internet “free,” but I also believe we need to discard any notions of fixed destinations and “outsides.” Why do we have to leave anyhow? Why not attempt to transform the “inside”?
I should have mentioned that what I found most troubling/confusing in the above posts was this sentence:
“It’s the political, corporate and societies who will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and expression takes precedence over control.”
Do you really believe that expression can be extracted from control and vice versa? Are they opposites/contraries?
Thanks for your insightful reply….I’ve opened up these notions mostly because I’m at the “know what I don’t know” stage…and as I’ve amply demonstrated, that usually means I’m not very coherent.
It’s my feeling that in virtual worlds, and in particular the growing availability of “open” worlds (like SL and as opposed to MMORPG), concepts of privacy and identity are often debated at a superficial level.
The reason this and my original posts were about alts was to highlight that we’re making value judgments about how we use our time and present ourselves in virtual worlds without thinking or articulating that these decisions are already constrained by the technology, the code, and the platform owners. Once we sign off on the TOS and the EULA, we are co-creating our in world presence with the platforms themselves, and by doing so accept but don’t always articulate that the restrictions on our choice have implications.
People talk about alts and use ideas like “different alts for different tasks” “business versus personal” and “needing some time for myself” and while all of these reasons can be perfectly valid, I stand by the idea that we only need to resort to these reasons because the code and the platform have constrained choice.
I’m sorry, but I work enough as it is, and I’d like the ability to turn off any work-related IMs after 9, say. But I can’t. So, it starts to look more and more attractive to have a separate avatar for the purposes of managing vendors and all the attendant IMs. This is as true in WoW as it is in SL – characters who act as banks, for example, help bypass the code which makes travel to markets a time investment, and act as sorting zones for group loot distribution.
But I’m trying very hard not confuse the issue here of identity with avatar expression. I’m making the argument that many are creating seemingly different versions of their ‘avatar identities’ in virtual worlds, which isn’t the same as saying that we HAVE different identities. They are doing so sometimes because the code leads them that way.
I am in full agreement and have argued in this blog on several occasions that there’s no split between real and virtual. Different expressions of our identity are parts of the whole, it’s just that the tools are different. Just as I might speak differently as a learner than a teacher, I might express myself in different ways in a virtual world through different presentations of my avatar and the spaces I interact with. However, my point about the separation of business/personal was again to highlight that the code leads us to behave in a way where it’s an incentive to start “splitting” our personas.
I’ve also argued previously that while it’s nice to think we’re fully integrated human beings, I’m not sure that the therapy business would be as successful as it is if it wasn’t for individual’s feelings that there’s “parts of themselves missing” or “things about themselves they need to explore”.
Your comment on the private self is interesting, however, and I’d like to understand that more, but whether it’s true or not that there’s no such thing as the private self, I can’t help thinking that people might confuse the desire for privacy with the need for a private self. The private self may be historically constructed…and if that’s true, then maybe my comments about the growing prevalence of a tribal morality in virtual worlds might also be a return to cultural norms in which social identity and identification dissolves the idea of the private?
I have a large number of friends who maintain separate online IDs….and not just for virtual worlds, but for mailing lists, Web-based forms, mySpace, etc. Whether their “private selves” are really illusions or not, I can’t say, these are all just intuitive ideas really…and the craving for protected private identity in an increasingly transparent and monitored world seems to be gaining rather than waning.
They would LIKE the ability to opt out of spaces within virtual worlds. I’m not saying opt out of worlds, but different spaces will have different levels of needs for what kind of information is collected, shared, and what levels of controls we have over our expression of ourselves and the information we share. I’m not arguing for an opt out/opt in for virtual worlds, but rather for the idea that it’s transparency rather than freedom that’s the end goal.
I may decide to attend a class in a virtual space, and when I sign up for the class I’d like to know whether I’m being graded, tracked, and whether my comments are being recorded. I may decide to attend a concert in a virtual space and I’d like to know the same thing. Transparency gives me the freedom to choose whether to participate and how – my decision is my own, but I don’t need to opt out and go “someplace else” – you’re right, there’s no “outside”, but there are rooms on the inside whose doors I may choose not to open.
Eben Moglen put it quite nicely when he said there should be two rules for virtual spaces:
One: Avatars ought to exist independent of any individual social contract put forward by any particular space. And two: Social contracts ought to be available in a machine readable form which allows the avatar projection intelligence to know exactly what the rules are and to allow you set effective guidelines about I don’t go to spaces where people don’t treat me in ways that I consider to be crucial in my treatment.
Finally…I take your point. Expression and control can not be extracted from each other. So I amend…
“It’s not the emerging generations I worry about. It’s the political, corporate and social groups (who have until now largely controlled the outlets of expression) that will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and our right to have control over expression takes precedence over leaving it to others.”
Thanks for the lengthy and intelligent reply here, Dusan. I should admit right off the bat that I’m not much of a VW adept (by choice, I think) but I do own a computer and do use this computer for purposes where the RW elides with the VW (Myspace, Facebook, blogs, etc). But I have an ambivalent investment in most of these apps and typically integrate my RW identities as much as possible in to the VW ones (To illustrate your/my point about the difficulty in delineating a clear boundary line between VW/RW: What does one do with a Myspace profile that pretty accurately reflects the RW self, but at the same time, doesn’t?). The long and short of it: I have no serious investment in deliberate roleplaying within a controlled virtual environment. That being said, I am fascinated by subject-formation, especially within the context of this overarching public/private duality we tend to operate through. And I’m just now beginning to explore how subjectivity is built, remade, and often (to my disappointment) reinforced in VWs (the little I’ve seen of SL seems to simply reflect predictable RW lifestyles, though I have a feeling some deeper digging may complicate this observation–at least I hope so).
Your points about the limited terms of identity play are well-taken. If one goes into a VW with the hopes of articulating, exploring, and perhaps even embodying a multitude of identities or continuums along one vast identity path, one would be well-equipped in recognizing that one’s options are partially pre-determined by the world context entered (i.e. the program/app itself). This reinforces my point about freedom. Freedom is a useful formula if we’re constantly re-defining it. Constantly. If we leave off with half-baked feelgood rallying cries about the wide open future and re-configured hierarchies, emotions, relationships, etc. without recognizing how contradicted these things are from the getgo, I’m betting that the future will eventually look a lot like the present–and the past (I see parallels in the passionate rallying around Obama’s presidential run right now).
As for the public/private divide– again, your point about wanting a self at least tentatively free from the methodical eyes of the corporate/governmental realm makes absolute sense. However, as a somewhat inchoate closing suggestion–wouldn’t it be nice to begin to transform the business/official world so that the personal might operate and express itself more “freely” there? Utopic, I know. I know.
Yes, it would be nice. And utopic, perhaps….but at some point when I stumbled down whatever rabbit hole I’ve found myself in (and it’s as much about stuff in the ‘real’ as anywhere, but I won’t bore you with my personal life) I found myself adopting the following as a utopic vision for myself, although know I’ll never reach paradise:
We must become ignorant
Of all we’ve been taught,
And be, instead, bewildered.
Run from what’s profitable and comfortable
If you drink those liqueurs, you’ll spill
The spring waters of your real life.
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning
Long enough, from now
On, I’ll live mad.
[...] open up its servers over the coming quarters towards “multiple grids by 2009″ (see my previous post) is driven at all by the accompanying mad rush of developers in all corners to open source other [...]
all true, good to see some lessons learned about 3d worlds and media… as well as some now ready to ask for reality, not fantasy from these tool and “service” providers. welcome;)_
BTW- we launched multiple PODBALL fileds this week, as well as a full RPG infocenter for the Starbase C3 world within SL. Over the last year weve slowly grown a totally original sci fi mmo community within SL based on our 2d/3d website of the same for many years.
So theres original stuff to do and to sponsor in SL for companies of all sizes. And maybe Linden and those who toss dollars at vr worlds will realize this is the only economy they have that can help pay for their services or tools. The future and past of immersive 3d rt has always been community entertainment or edutainment thats created by those who make content for end viewsers- not “pundits” , sounds alot like the Television/ cable and broadcast model ? Dont it.:)
c3
[...] rush to open up its servers over the coming quarters towards “multiple grids by 2009″ (see my previous post) is driven at all by the accompanying mad rush of developers in all corners to open source other [...]
Oooh, good stuff, Dusan! Costume balls, indeed. I don’t think that’s the issue. Second Life, or for that matter any virtual world – in the present or future – is and will be what we make of it.
Want to get real? There are already companies that will recreate your Real Self into an avatar. We use our voices. There is a section in our profiles where we can state as much information about Real Selves as we like. Universities and museums are recreating their hallowed buildings and campuses… but all this is on a very plastic level. What about virtual worlds as a tool? Distance learning, realtime global collaboration, using the grid as a blueprint for architecture and design and all sorts of platforms for progress that directly impact our Real Life.
Mostly, I believe this individual has not had even a glimmer of understanding of the psychological effect that being handed an inexpensive yet Super Powerful tool for creativity will have on global productivity.
There will always be naysayers and luddites, but I think this person’s concerns are pretty lame. For me, the real nail-bitters of moving into a 3D Internet are the CO2 consequences to the environment of all those servers, the social and anthropological consequences of people working in isolation (as social as virtual worlds are, you cannot smell a rose or shake hands), and then there’s the addiction factor… knowing when to stop… and stepping_away_from_the _computer, to run out and get some exercise and roses in your cheeks.
The next few years are going to be very interesting, aren’t they?
I couldn’t agree more Bettina…and just want to add that ignoring Second Life as a window for what to come also ignores its growing integration with the Web itself, and cross-over with the “real”.
Augmented reality, embedded Web objects in virtual environments (whether Croquet, or SL this spring, or Metaplace in April), and mixed reality events will just add to the soup. The metaverse is fast coming, (has arrived and is expanding) and those who want to chat in IRC about the coming plague of “costume-ball based worlds” will wake up one day to wonder why people found some things easier, more intuitive, and more engaging in the metaverse than they do on the “flat” Web.
The collaborative Web came courtesy of Wikipedia. The social Web comes courtesy of Facebook and its predecessors and followers. Open source arrived with Linux. And 3D environments will be an alternative bridge across these concepts, societies, maps, tools – call them what you will.
And it will bring with it intuitive ways to view and interact with information (reams and reams of it), powerful vehicles for self-expression (see my earlier post on the emotive avatar article in Harvard Business Review) and collaborative work environments where we can “see” a project/corporation/vision – hierarchy gone, feminine corporation arrives, the role of the craftsperson celebrated.
And, um…well, not sure where that leaves IRC.
And finally…one of the greatest challenges, I think, for the early pioneers of these spaces is to articulate that the virtual does not replace the real, and to help translate the recursiveness of virtual worlds in a way that betters us as individuals and societies and yes, that includes roses in your cheeks.
[...] of the civil liberties discussion in Second Life with Philip Linden, in which all my lengthy posts here and here on alts, tribal morality, and whether our ability to make choices is really as open as we [...]
On 02.01.08 Caleb Antwerp said:
you may pay your respects at Landmark:
Memories cemetery park — BOCH , ( 3 , 123 , 21 )
or you can search it in your second life search.
On 02.01.08 Kris Spade said:
In loving memory of Dummie Beck. You will never be forgotten. You touched so many hearts in SL, and let us all realize how short life can really be. Since your passing I’ve grown to cherish every moment I get to spend with my friends in SL — you allowed us all to realize that SL is not just a video game, or a glorified chat program, but another extension of life where friendship and love flourish. You will be missed.
per you point on bringing in different target markets by integrating 3DS and Maya: Having been part of the architectural community (RL Architects in SL, Studio Wikitecture) for a number of years now, i can say without hesitation if seamless import/export functionality were incorporated, there would be a huge influx of this demographic into SL. If i was given a dime for every time someone asked me if they could import their models, I’d be able to create my own virtual world.
Agreed Ryan. The limitation of course is that as soon as true interoperability is provided, the instant the in world economy is thrown out of whack. How could the current houses, prefabs, offices, and furniture market survive if you could easily import objects created with the more advanced tools, fully textured and baked, not to mention warehouses of current objects from the poser/blender/daz3D communities flooding into SL?
The current work-arounds at least place a time premium on converting objects that already exist, or require creating objects from scratch using SL plug-ins, thus maintaining the economy.
One idea, that I’ve voiced elsewhere, is that when they open up the architecture maybe they include this interoperability which private servers/islands can toggle on and off, much as the Grid will have different client and perhaps physics versions running as well. Current land and economies would thus be protected but architects and designers would be able to set up their own areas in which to accomplish what you’re talking about, which is to tap into the more sophisticated tool sets available out of world, and thus be able to more rapidly prototype.
Other grids and platforms are taking this weakness of SL’s and turning it to their advantage – being able to import Google SketchUp, or OBJ files, etc., but their economies are being structured in an entirely different way, often not based on in world exchanges but rather full integration into the “Web” (Scenecaster being a good example of this).
None of which negates my point – bridging can become a valuable service, and Linden should facilitate a step-by-step approach which maybe isn’t true interoperability, which places a time investment on importing objects so as not to undermine the economy, and which trains groups like architects on how to maximize the platform and not solely leave it in the hands of The Arch and others.
Other grids will be set up for the purposes of architectural walk-throughs for RL clients. But they’re unlikely to offer the sophisticated scripting and economic environment of SL.
For every future project different virtual worlds will compete for revenue and attention. SL needs to do a better job explaining what it IS good for, (collaboration, exploration, research, but maybe NOT full architectural prototyping in the short term just as it’s not a game engine either) and then facilitate the ability for users to maximize those particular features and benefits.
[...] Second Life Users Have Too Much Time On Their Hands: Philip Rosedale Quote from the site – Philip Rosedale tells Der Spiegel online that “The early users of Second [...]
Once there is real interoperability, who would want to turn it off? Would you want to make your web page such that the user couldn’t click on another link while on the page?
I see the bigger question being one of intellectual property protection. In some sense, the genie is already out of the bottle, but reputable virtual world providers will have to provide some kind of protection against blatant rip-off.
In the end, I believe interoperability is about logging into your preferred avatar provider, and then navigating through a shared, interconnected world, using that avatar. This allows different VW providers to provide different price points on the cost/value chain, similar to how e-mail servers serve different users in different ways.
Hopefully we can find some way to avoid spam, though :-/
if you have a look in the forums you will find that windlight is available to openlife grid users there is a login for it there
and i can say that there are some places ive seen there that look better then the pics you have shown here of secondlife.ill place a link to the part of the blog here. http://www.openlifegrid.com/Forums/Messages.aspx?ThreadID=201 have fun i hope to see you round the openlife some time p.s (its best to set draw distance to 512)
ciao i hope you take another look
Jon, what is your basis for assuming that people want and need to have interoperability mean that their avatars can walk between worlds? Many people don’t have a problem keeping multiple avatars in multiple games and worlds. They like it that way, in fact.
Everything important about interoperability is about intellectual property. And because no one has a good way to protect it, that’s why interoperability isn’t needed in the burning way that you imagine.
Dusan, I realize, too, that this dream of Maya and working offline and all the rest is held by a tiny handful of geeks. But most people using SL don’t care. Eventually, if SL doesn’t supply this, some other platform like Multiverse will — and what of it? It won’t speak to the needs of the majority of users, who need creation of content not to be the property of a specialized few using complex utilities like Maya, but need it to be user-friendly and available to all on a continuum of ability.
More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.
There is nothing wrong with being a walled garden; people enjoy the protection and *the civility* of walled gardens.
[...] State University 3D Models from Still Photos » This Summary is from an article posted at Dusan Writer’s Metaverse on Sunday, February 03, 2008 [...]
I will take another look! In fact, I have, and intend to keep up my visits. Sorry if I implied that it wasn’t worth a visit. Reality was I loved it….it was laggy, but yes, might have been my draw distance, might have been on with too many others, and I imagine over time it can only get even better.
My comment about it being like pre-banner Mainland is the ultimate compliment!
(I wasn’t aware of Windlight, thanks for the tip!)
External programs are becoming cheaper, more accessible, and as a result are generating huge libraries of beautiful, “user-generated” content.
These programs are no longer just confined to hugely expensive platforms like Maya and 3DS. It’s not just architects who are creating buildings, it’s someone at home creating the perfect cottage, or the most stunning bicycle. Because these objects are increasingly portable between programs, and because they’re spawning amateur/”user-generated” content, then at some point users will be attracted to the idea of porting those pieces of content to virtual worlds, and in some cases already can.
It’s not the specialized few who will have the deepest long-term interest in interoperability, it’s the non-specialized many. I may not be the best builder in SL, but I have fun with it, and then I hit a wall…I want to sculpt, I’d love to properly render lights in the build, or I want to create a custom animation. What happens (or happened to me) is I cross out from SL to try to build on what I’ve learned and discover a whole other world out there of software, different ways to build, and different ways to express myself. But I can’t bring most of it back….and so, some day, I find a platform that WILL allow that and maybe I go there instead.
Yes, I do believe that the “pros” will find their own homes with true interoperability so they can throw together 3D walk-throughs of a building design in a virtual world. I also believe that this capacity should be built into SL….because they’re not the only ones who would like to see their work on other platform brought into a virtual world.
IF SL doesn’t do it, someone else will…and that someone else won’t be creating interoperability to satisfy a few architects, they’ll be doing it to tap into an ever-growing community of SketchUp, Daz3D, Poser and other artists who are doing it for the sheer joy of it – kind of like what SL has been.
I’d like to protect the garden. I’d like to make sure that if SL expands its reach into other creative communities that it doesn’t do so at the expense of the economy (in objects, time, real estate, etc).
My issue with the walled garden isn’t that the garden shouldn’t be walled, it’s that its boundaries shouldn’t remain static. The issue of interoperability is a question about whether to shift the garden’s boundaries and cultivate new soil.
I’m not sure my idea of ‘walls within walls’ works, it’s just an idea.
What I am sure of is that Second Life does not have a lock on content that’s “user friendly and available to all”. This is the very premise, for example, of Metaplace and will be the premise of platforms to follow, none of which is worrying particularly about the architects, but *are* worried about being able to tap into the widest available tool sets being used by the ‘non-professional creators’.
As Prok says:
“More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.”
Now…replace “more sophisticated tool sets” with “Second Life” and that’s the argument I’m making:
“Second Life is all right in its way, but if it can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? And in Second Life, the Taj Mahal that sits there like a postcard isn’t even perfectly rendered.”
[...] about Second Life from…Google? February 5, 2008 — dusanwriter Linden Labs is worried that the competition may have learned from its mistakes. In the meantime, it’s by way of [...]
Prok’s comments are business as usual – same hatred towards geeks and hackers, growing on soil of own software creation impotence and feeling insecure in world where everyone and his dog can pull the carpet from under his presumably almighty all-things-shall-be-Proks-way-or-go-off. Prok, please, get a life, stop whining – you can’t stop change in software world. Just get used to it – resistance is futile, all your bases belong to us
I’ve been pondering the import/export problem. I think that there may be a way to do this with LSL… I need time to toy with it, but the general idea is that a script can tell the dimensions of a prim, as well as the textures on it.
the trouble will be… (1) scripts won’t be able to be sent, (2) texture UUIDs might be considered a bypass of the inworld permissions system (see http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/889 ).
Then, (3) – converting abscissa,ordinal and azimuth plus dimensions to a format another application can read. I haven’t looked into this… I’d expect someone has a CSV format, but… with all the proprietary data formats out there, it is hard to say. Still… it could be a base for rezzing stuff on an OpenSim simulator.
The question is whether or not it is as efficient as hacking a client bot to do the same. But then we get into bypassing the de facto DRM, which can be very problematic from a legal standpoint.
It has a plug-in for Maya which includes a little side bar with standard SL prims. You can texture them using textures from the SL library and as I understand it, if you can figure out how to work the script within Maya you can also load additional textures of your own and just code in the UUIDs. You then rez a ‘build prim’ in SL which rezzes the full build (as many prims as included, up to a full sim’s worth they say) including the textures and placements.
Now, it’s wonderful, but it’s Maya specific. I assume the other work-arounds are program specific such as a work-around I saw for importing Google SketchUps.
I wonder whether what’s needed is a bridge to Collada? Seems to me most game engines and so on have a Collada import function.
If you could build a bridge from SL to Collada, then you’d have a bridge from Collada to most third party applications. You’ll always run into the texture UUID issue, but I’ve been working with someone to see if there isn’t an automated way to upload textures and then collect the UUIDs.
I know with sculpts that they recommend loading your sculpts directly to the library rather than through the “upload texture” feature, so seems to me there’s a way to connect to the database outside the viewer.
Complex problem! And as I say, this isn’t my area, just sharing a few of the tools I’ve run across and little bits and pieces.
I believe you’re right, Dusan. And as far as Prok’s comment – well, no, they haven’t… but they have been providing services for a streaming 3-D interactive world for as long as they existed – enough so for Microsoft to try to eat Yahoo. You could argue it isn’t the same, and likely you will, but you’ll note Linden Lab implemented… Google Search. Not rocket science to connect the dots.
Naw, Prok is right Taran. There’s nothing to learn from a company that hasn’t launched a streaming 3-D interactive world so I retract my recommendation.
Linden doesn’t need to learn about managing large, complex, systems that require diabolically clever engineering and strategies in order to both serve the globe and millions of concurrent users and terrabytes of data yet avoid lag and crashes.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to move beyond a mentality of being a virtual world ISP from Google, which moved beyond the mentality of being a search appliance to think more creatively about what business it was in and develop business models that have upended traditional advertising.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to sandbox new features, roll them out effectively, modify them based on user feedback, kill the ones that don’t work, and yet do it in a way that doesn’t add new bugs, user adoption issues, or create instability in its main grid, er, brand.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to create a work environment that’s the envy of half the planet, that attracts some of the brightest talent, and that retains its top staff or, when it loses its top technical talent, doesn’t create a firestorm of concern or bad press.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to effectively manage expectations for future performance, whether financial or service-specific, thus earning increased value for its shareholders and users in spite of flying in the face of conventional wisdom on needing “spin” and lots of chest thumping about Windlight, er, Google docs.
Linden has nothing to learn from a company that has proven itself effective at doing community outreach, partnering, research, publishing, advocating, and communicating even when it is entering business domains where it clearly intends to upend entire industries.
Linden has nothing to learn from a company that started as a few guys and some code and grew to become a synonym with simple and effective user experiences, a verb, and a bunch of zeros.
Linden has nothing to learn from Google because Prok’s right, they haven’t built a streaming 3-D interactive world.
[...] sat forgotten in the back room of the blog. Now I submit it to you for your approval: a link to a machinima called Noob. If you enjoy it, come on back and let me know; I got a few giggles from [...]
Well, this game was made in havok1, and will works better in havok1, in havok four however, the marbles run so much smoother, and you don’t get a random ‘bounce’ from time to time, but with the immaturity of havok4 at the moment, it has some bugs, but is still very playable, sculptis still have a spherical bounding box (Linden Labs will not have mesh for collision, because they do not wanna load the images for the sculpits server-side), but with havok4 however, I can add alot more moving things, with alot more players with less lag…
[...] innovation about far more than just making money? (Would training and rehearsal count? What about collaboration, recruitment, developer relations, [...]
Wonderful stuff Moy! We’re running some simulations using Havok4 as well…nothing half as fancy, really just toying with some scripts and seeing what the physics engine does deep down inside. And absolutely on lag – almost impossible to crash a sim but we’ve done it! hehe
wildcat days of the 1980s? lol
check out the chase /capitalone/ bank of amercia credit card interest and fee scams of “lowering rates” as they raise them that was just on the ABC nightly news tonight.
but really any of you university folks realize yet that the “made in china” VR logo is the end of your western pulpits to pundit from?
all vr activities will be the equal to watching “american idol” 3 times a week, and all governments relegated to who feeds the slop and cleans up the poop from under the “batteries” of humans plugged into the creative machine of fantasy thats basically the TV to Walmart connection of today, but all played out as pixels vs flesh..
the reality of the virtual…promoted by the ignorance of the new. encouraged by the myth of the victim
Thanks Liv for the comment….and apologies for the note format of my comments which were done live on site. So a few additional bullets to put Dave’s comments in context:
- He was making the points that a bank is solely defined as such because of the regulations that allow its existence
- Therefore, unregulated institutions in SL were never banks in the first place
- Which is unfortunate, because it would have been interesting to see whether the social setting would have ended up self-regulating.
- BECAUSE, as he pointed out, let’s face it, even the real world has proven that regulation doesn’t make a bank a necessarily honest institution, and their use of loopholes such as in the wildcat days are proof of that, recently with sub-prime, and even loopholes around checking accounts.
Finally, I won’t comment on university folks. Some of them are very interesting, passionate, and committed to finding social good from virtual worlds. There was a great deal of discussion, for example, about whether virtual environments are useful for people who are disabled, who have mental disorders, etc. Social phobias, aspergers, demonstrations of schizophrenia for the purposes of creating empathy amongst healthcare professionals were a few of the topics they touched on as far as the real life benefits of virtual worlds.
It’s also interesting that you bring up the entertainment paradigm, because the mixed reality part of the conference included attendance by the CEO of Kaneva who is creating a “light version” of what you describe – he painted a picture of virtual worlds as being constant sources of entertainment, with links to TV shows, in world games and contests. However, when he was asked “what happens when people get bored of being entertained” his response was basically “we’ll entertain them MORE”…the extension of which is the more apocalyptic version that you lay out.
One of the things that continues to strike me, as it did today with the academics, was a carelessness around definitions of the metaverse. Virtual worlds continue to be painted as “places”. And while virtual spaces can often look like places, it’s a narrow definition of persistent, simulated computer environments in which multiple people can participate. When viewed from that broader context, metaverse applications of the future will include a range of utilities, applications, communities, and tools that augment reality, mirror it, and are escaped to from it.
Very intelligent discussions around the privacy and control issues that arise, including corporate control and, as you pointed out, the unseen power of Asia and China with their massive virtual communities, may well become the leading issues around trust, identity and privacy in the years ahead. These issues apply equally to Web 2.0.
I have no idea what you mean by “encouraged by the myth of the victim” or “promoted by the ignorance of the new”…I fear my brief notes made it sound like the participants were ignorant to the peril of virtual worlds, which they clearly were not.
And to add one final point of clarification, I am not a “university folk”, I never graduated, and never will. For me, and this isn’t true for everyone, life was a sufficient academy.
“Regulation” of a financial firm is not what makes something a “bank.” Back in the early days of the United States there were many many unregulated institutions, especially in the “Frontier States” which called themselves and were considered banks. SL is in a state a lot like the USA was several hundred years ago. Unfortunately, SL is now becoming more and more regulated and mundane, and is becoming more and more like our real lives in most western countries. Pretty soon we’ll all need a virtual world to escape from our current virtual worlds…
[...] others with a vision, enable them with tools, and make them feel engaged in a… source: Learning about Second Life from…Google?, Dusan Writer’s [...]
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse 50,000L Bug/Insect Making Competition Quote from the site – I’m looking for bugs. Insects, spiders, creepy crawlys, little flying [...]
On 02.16.08 Nick H. said:
I love ManagedQ. It gives you such an awesome sense of the search results.
I downloaded the toolbar and have converted all my searches over to the Q. They’re definitely the future. I highly recommend everybody try them out.
Let’s hope they break up the Google monopoly.
On 02.17.08 Tami said:
ManagedQ is awesome. Their UI is def. addictive. Google has been the same for 8 years so I’m ready for the change. Also, the NLP/search within search feature on the left (”executive summaries”) is really helping me to get to core of my search faster. It’s worth checking out.
As I pointed out on the CIO web site I don’t get this. I see two distinct activities: simulation and virtual worlds. I understand that the technology that drives Second Life or World of Warcraft could be adopted to create virtual spaces for business interactions. What I don’t get is the point. The calling card for Second Life is that you can be whoever you want to be. Since its your “second” life I would assume most people don’t choose to be themselves. So what is the point in a business context? That I can enter a virtual world and tell my boss what I really think of him/her?
I play WOW and its great fun but I don’t see how interacting with my business associates in playland rather than realland would be an advantage.
Liv, we humans will always need to consume. Or do you wish to go back to having to own a piece of land and trade sheep for potatoes waiting for the next famine to happen?
And Dusan, I love your idea, and hereby I rase the paw to play one of the noobs! (Can I be avatar one, pretty please? I don’t think I feel comfortable with to much lines!)
On 02.19.08 kari said:
I love the user-friendly interface. ManagedQ has really taken search up a notch and the NLP is very sopishticated. I’m definately converting.
I love it as well. It’s still a bit unclear from the reviews and the blog itself what the engine is that’s driving the results. I’m under the impression that it adds a layer to the Google search results…adding the interface, pictures, and ability to then further refine your search.
I tested a few searches and most of them seem to return the same (or nearly the same) search results as Google itself. Maybe it then also stores user click-throughs and ‘management’ of results and then refines future searches based on that, but my distinct impression is that it currently uses Google as the source of returning results.
Really good question and if I had the single magic bullet answer perhaps I’d either be wealthy or watching wealthy people and wishing I had implemented my great idea.
However, I can only share a few experiences and observations from my own real life experiences using VWs:
1) Many participants in SL are not hiding behind a veil – especially in the education and business community. Therefore, participants in business collaboration or education are not hiding behind a veil of anonymity.
2) For dispersed teams, virtual worlds can offer the benefits of conference calls, Web conferences, Skype, etc. but with the added benefit of presence. I’m not just supporting SL here, but have been astounded what a difference it makes holding meetings in Qwak or SL as compared to conference calls, Web casts, etc.
You really do have a sense of being ‘present’ with others, and the tools allow you to rapidly pull up documents, presentations and other materials which others can then mark up, append, or supplement with their own materials.
3) Aside from overcoming the distance that collaboration often leads to (after all, true collaboration would say that the world is a potential partner), 3D spaces also provide a different way to contextualize, view, discuss, and change artefacts that represent concepts, projects, process, or work flow. While the technology is still in a somewhat early stages, projects like the architecture WIKI and in particular the early demos of Project Bluegrass from IBM clearly show that there is something very different about using a 3D space for certain types of activities.
Already, businesses benefit from things like contextual voting, prototyping, and team building.
Imagine a complex project where decision points can branch and time/cost/quality considerations need to be mulled over, or commented on in an asynchronous way, or by a dispersed team. This can be done in what I SOMETIMES find to be a more intuitive way in a 3D space, as compared for example to a complex 2D Gantt chart.
4) Engagement. You enjoy WOW. People enjoy games. Business is serious stuff – but why? It’s increasingly being proposed that virtual worlds and game environments could be a new model for work. For example, the National Academy of Science is working with the Institute for the Future on a “Massively Multiplayer Science” initiative called the X2 Project which will act as a platform for scientific collaboration. It is a Warcraft for science geeks, who will use a virtual world platform to stimulate opinion, form collaborations, and solve problems.
I’m not sure what industry you’re in, but virtual worlds offer one way in which ideas, people, concepts and collaborations can be encouraged outside a company’s walls. While Web 2.0 social networking concepts are driving innovations like a “Facebook for the CIA”, virtual worlds are another toolkit that helps companies to create new ways to engage.
In some ways I think you answered your own question – spaces like Second Life “could be adopted…for business”. It’s not a *could be* question. Second Life IS being used by businesses, ranging from Sun and IBM to architects in Texas to urban planners in Brooklyn to NASA. The reasons are many and like any technology should suit the business need and strategy rather than be adopted as is.
As economists and others have pointed out, the sooner we toss the idea that virtual worlds are somewhere “different” the faster we’ll come to grips with the fact that in many ways they offer an addition to real life process just like a phone does or e-mail, and perhaps over time a far more compelling one at that.
Virtual worlds as they are today are labs for a future in which the metaverse will be everywhere. Companies who want to understand the future can do so. Others who prefer to wait can do so as well, but I’d propose that its at their own risk.
For some people, Second Life is that – an escape, a place to play, an immersion experience where they can be what they want to be.
But for a growing number of users Second Life is an EXTENSION to their real lives, they are transparent with identity, and they are there because they’re working, collaborating, creating new models for sharing concepts and ideas, forging partnerships, identifying talent, or holding virtual meetings in place of real ones when time or cost are a consideration.
Some are also there because they are reaping the benefits of an intelligent creative community that has perhaps learned more about collaboration in its few short years than Wikipedia which, really, is one application for many participants, while SL represents as many applications as there are participants. And those reaping the benefits and insights today – well, I guess each one of them will have the chance to understand the potential of a technology that is fast becoming ubiquitous or hold on until later and catch up when others have forged ahead.
Look at my grandparents after all. They just got e-mail, and they’ve survived OK without it until now.
To answer your specific question directly I have been in the computer business since it was called “tabulating” > DP > EDP> IT > ???? and IBM was called “International Business Machines” (Of course if you only needed domestic business machines you could use one of the “bunch” companies)
Perhaps after 40 years of hype of the “next great thing” I find myself reticent when the media hype seems to exceed the delivered benefit. To your specific points:
Yes, a three dimensional universe can be more familiar than a two dimensional universe as long as the set up times and costs don’t eat up all of the benefit of the familiarity.
Almost everything else you cite is really not a function of the “virtual world” but rather better applied technology. A spreadsheet is better technology than a piece of paper. A spreadsheet that can be shared is a better technology than one that can not. A shared spreadsheet where the people using it are aware of if the other people in the room are paying attention is most likely a better idea than one that doesn’t have the same feedback.
To your point “4″ business is serious stuff because the outcome of the game is serious – can you afford food, housing, clothing, stuff like that.
I do find all this fascinating and will of course be doing my best to experience as much of the emerging technology as possible. But an interesting aside to the WOW environment – the relationships may start in WOW but the serious relationships (business connections, friendship, etc.) quickly are moved out into the real world.
I was curious about your background mainly to see if I could think up some examples of the use of 3D spaces. You might find the following article interesting, especially its reference to 3D virtual machines:
I think you’re right to be reticent. Work by groups like Clever Zebra and others make it increasingly easy to jump into virtual worlds without costing thousand in set-up costs and time. Learning curves continue to be an issue, to my mind, although you can get rolling in Qwak in about 20 minutes, even for users with no experience in game or 3D environments, but the range of things you can do is more limited than the far more open ended Second Life.
And you’re right! And you hit on one of my main points about 3D worlds – I really think they’re being misinterpreted as something different. Some day we won’t call them worlds anymore. Worlds imply they’re a place to go with their own rules and cultures. In many ways current 3D environments are worlds, but it’s a limiting view. The sooner people who are looking for business solutions realize that 3D environments are simply technologies, the sooner we’ll find intelligent people like yourself striving to work out technical efficiencies, smooth out the process flow, etc.
I’ve heard the term “Meshverse”. I like the term because it implies 3D spaces enmeshed with “real life”, 2D Web sites, cell phones, and meat space.
There will still be people who want to use virtual platforms for immersion. To play games. To escape. But as you’ve pointed out and as I’ve written on before, there’s a “loop” in which the virtual bleeds into the real very quickly no matter how hard you try to keep up the walls around the garden, preserve the magic circle, etc.
I don’t begrudge immersion. I’ve immersed myself. But there’s a lot to be said for starting to think of 3D spaces simply as another technology and to then start thinking about where that technology best applies for specific business purposes or for self expression. In the future, I see Wikis and project Intranets with spreadsheets, project files, and little 3D Web spaces that you can pop into and out of which are there for specific purposes – meeting rooms for presence, prototyping rooms, conceptual mapping, and consensus building are examples.
And yes, I agree business is serious stuff, it puts food on the table. But some businesses, like my own, which are in the creative industries, DO look for fun as part of our work environment, and games, exploration and play are as much a part of work as chunking numbers in Excel.
Which brings us into a new domain, that of serious games, and whether 3D environments are an extension of that (they are). I was speaking with a friend the other day who got a job in retail at a pharmacy. His training included a shelf stocking game and he described it as a) a great way to learn b) an intuitive way to understand the problems with managing shelf space restrictions and prioritizing and c) fun.
Finally, a footnote, which is that anyone who’s in business needs to be aware of the full spectrum of technologies available to help solve business problems. You can specialize in virtual worlds, perhaps, but you shouldn’t exclude awareness of other technologies. Just as you’re reticent, I think anyone in business should proceed with caution on any technology that seems to promise to cure what ails you – technology is no substitute for sound strategy. and I get just as much value out of telling clients “don’t do this, it isn’t for you’ as from encouraging risk and innovation.
Interesting ideas about object perm’s and limitations. I was thinking about this too the other day but only got as far as wishing for second-user perm’s. I occasionally get asked if I’ll sell an item full-perms but have to decline since i know that one forgetful user can render the item virtually worthless.
It might not work for prims, but for things like scripts or anim’s it might be very useful to be able to sell them with both first and second user perm’s set. The 1st-user gets a full perms version so they can be included in their objects and then sold on. Then, as the finished item is sold to another resident, the more limited 2nd-user perms would automatically kick-in and would prevent further unlimited distribution.
It would just make automatic something thoughtful builders should already be doing, keeping the value in the builder’s object and in the original creator’s.
Same basic idea as yours but slightly more ‘builder-friendly’. In an ideal world we’d have ALL these options…
Yes, that sounds like a great approach. Simpler and serves some more immediate and wider uses. An overall rethink of the IP/perm system seems to be long overdue, IMHO.
I think I saw a script around somewhere that you could drop into objects and would kill them if the user name had changed X times – not sure if I’m imagining that?
Oh – and forget about perms in passing stuff along, I have enough trouble finding out which of the 200 prims in my build holds the one no transfer script that’s preventing me from changing the perms! Can’t they have a nested hierarchy view of objects so that I can see what’s embedded in what? Or is that hidden somewhere beneath their Dazzling interface that I haven’t found yet?
A nested hierarchical view? Very nice idea, Wiki that one immediately!
..and it reminds me of another wishlist item of mine – hierarchical linking. When you join object-A to object-B you get linkset-C. Now join linkset-C to object-D and then unlink them again and instead of stepping back to linkset-C and object-D, you get 3 unlinked objects – not helping!
I think i first used hierarchical linking in Bryce and it was most useful, it can’t be that difficult to implement surely?
Well, either stuff is easy to implement and they’re making it seem complicated, it’s hard to implement and they’re making a big deal about how it’s complicated, or it’s complicated if they implement it because the rest of us will find it too easy. Your guess is as good as mine.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse Second Life on 3G Phones Quote from the site – On the heels of the test client on iPhones comes this beta test of Second [...]
[...] should focus on more relevant and perhaps interesting events like Second Life hitting G3 Phones, concepts of cross reality synchronization, the new viewer but I find myself drawn back to [...]
Go visit Mindies.org (Metaverse Independent Developers). There are a lot of emerging tools in terms of content pipelines between worlds, including Second Life to Multiverse pipelines. It takes everything through Collada as the middleware layer. There is a video of it in action at:
Thanks for the post Dixie – read this on Vint’s blog I think? Really wonderful and intriguing and Collada is the way to go. Can you reverse engineer it so it goes the other way?
I am a full-time child avatar. I am and always have been emphatically against having <18 people on the main grid for reasons that need no further explanation. Before December I had a few lines in my 1st life profile citing the TOS and threatening to report underage residents I would come across. In December a two cases EXACTLY as you describe entered my purview. Now, I cannot in good conscience turn someone in for “underage”. Without a way to appeal, and with such poor (read, “zero”) review and investigation policies, and the extent of the sensitive personal documentation that must be provided to a third party to clear one’s name for this thing, the threat of wrongly punishing the innocent is simply too great. I removed this blanket statement from my profile. In the current state of affairs would never submit an AR against someone for “Underage” even if they admitted it in open chat. (I would however avoid them and ban them from my land.)
Difficult decisions and it sounds like you’ve taken a very reasoned ethical approach. What I still don’t understand is why a way to appeal is even necessary – the person being accused of being underage wasn’t, they had age verified through Linden’s service, so in order to prove their age they now have to – what? Fax in the same information they provided through the supposedly stellar age verification system?
You do point to another issue, which is the reporting system itself, how the wrongly innocent are punished and, if wrongly punished the accuser does not face a consequence. There are no options for speedy arbitration. As more and more people are able to ascribe real economic consequences to their ability to be in SL, it strikes me as dangerous that Linden can stop access based on what could prove to be false accusations.
If that happened to me and my inability to access SL meant that I was unable to demo the grid to a potential client or couldn’t take care of in world business, I’d be seriously looking at copying my sims and moving them to another platform (and hey, that’s easier and easier to do these days).
[...] Metaverse discusses the absurdity of Linden Lab’s age verification policy in his post, Linden’s Age Verification Hypocrisy. While Writer is mostly criticizing the 3rd-party solution LL began to Beta-test in December 2007, [...]
hehe yeah i saw your main point. The hypocrisy you pointed out did cause me to giggle a bit. sorry i left the *giggle* out of my responses. There was a similar observation made at Massively in late December. Aristotle’s age verification not good enough for LL? Thanks for refreshing the intertubes about this important issue.
-Adz
Well, I think the way they quietly dropped further implementation when it turned out the AV system did not work for most of the world (that is, outside of the US) made it amply clear that this was little more than a half baked PR / corporate butt protection exercise. As to the AR system, it reeks of incompetence, wilfulness, and sometimes misuse of power — but that is another matter entirely…
Well, nice looks will get you a lot of interest, but that is all you will get — you nailed that down in your last paragraph . By the way, isn’t there some name for the law that says that the more « realistic » things get, the more the human mind focuses son spotting what is off ? I seem to remember having read something like that once…
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse Over-Hyped Blue Mars Still Raises Benchmark for Second Life Quote from the site – In 2008 it’s a virtual world a day, most of them for kids, but some [...]
« I really need to stop calling them worlds, because one of my main points is that 3D spaces aren’t separate places from real world applications and business, they’re simply a different, enabling, and supplementing technology to the real and the 2D ».
This might be true for applications and business, but saying this is all there is amounts to cutting out a large chunk out of the virtual space. To many of their residents they are indeed worlds ; linked and interpenetrating to the atomic (to a degree), but still worlds. I’m no business consultant, but I daresay application developers and business execs will fare better keeping that in mind than trying to see them as a kind of pervasive interactive 3D video conferencing system.
I don’t disagree with you Rheta. I think a new terminology is needed. There are virtual worlds, which I see as immersive environments with their own cultures and artefacts; there are 3D spaces, such as Qwak, which is technically a virtual world platform but is really just ‘rooms’; and then there’s what I’ll call the Meshverse, the interlinking of 3D and 2D spaces which will be the next major wave of development; oh, and finally augmented worlds – virtual world overlays of the real.
It is really nuts. I age verified as soon as I could to avoid exactly those problems of some griefing idiot AR’ing me with all the follow up trouble of such an action. LL always shoots first and asks questions later, and I was hoping to avoid that. I almost couldn’t believe when I read that their own AV system isn’t enough for them!
The only thing that makes me feel a bit more secure is, that their AV via the 3rd party didn’t work for me anyways, so I verified my age manually, sending them a copy of my ID card. With this being stored inside their OWN system I have a tiny bit of hope that I’m safe. But who knows? We are talking about LL…
The way it is handled now, underage ARs are the ultimate griefing tool.
On 02.24.08 Ruslan Laryukov said:
I already posted to the blog of the affected person. Here’s a slightly modified version:
False UA reporting is a particularly nasty form of anti-kid harassment. What really galls me is that LL just takes the false UA report at face value, suspends without warning (generally right before the weekend), and then takes its jolly good time un-suspending. LL provides no info about your false accuser, and presumably, take no action against the harassers.
That this account was already age verified is really the icing on the cake.
How should LL change?
First of all, take their heads out of the sand. I understand their paranoia about RL underagers getting into SL, and places where they shouldn’t be … but LL should realize that certain nasty people are gaming LL’s paranoia. This is (in many known cases) clearly serious *harassment*, not to mention a waste of LL’s time and resources.
If LL receives an UA report, it should (1) if age verification has been completed, assume the UA report is false unless there is some compelling reason to believe otherwise; (2) as a rule, provide a notice with (say) one week to provide age verification *before* suspending; and (3) investigate people who file (say) three or more UA reports which prove to be false.
In this case, LL suspended the account without warning, then took almost a week to unfreeze it. In another case I remember, it took LL about two weeks to unfreeze the person *after* he faxed his driver’s license and stuff.
It is worth adding that where the person has an SL business (as was the case here), the griefer also causes economic loss.
p.s. Btw, the age verification system sucks. I couldn’t get it to auto-verify against my driver’s license, passport, or social security number – and I am even a U.S. citizen well over 18. I hate to think how it works (or doesn’t work) for other countries.
[...] But it’s the interplay of the “real” with the virtual that is the richest source for the possibilities of change. If we purely think of virtual worlds as separate, we’re ignoring the fact that they are NOT walled gardens. They may have walls – platforms like World of Warcraft erect as many barriers between the game environment and external realities and economies as possible. But there are always chinks in those walls – either cracks or with entire chunks missing. Commerce will always find a way to cross over where there’s money to be made. Intellectual property will always find a way to be disseminated as widely as it needs to be, no matter how much copy protection we try to employ. But more important still, the selves that people bring to virtual spaces are not turned off when they log off. It may seem like there’s a separation between avatar and controller, but they’re part of each other, living in a strange loop. [...]
[...] realistic worlds like the coming Blue Mars, and continual improvements like Windlight and Havok, not only make these spaces more compelling, [...]
[...] of this feeds wider discussions and discoveries about the role and rights of the avatar, alts, identity, trust, and [...]
On 02.24.08 G L said:
I am part of the load
Not rightly balanced
I drop off in the grass,
like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.
For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time and space
and cross
this waiting room.
I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.
WOW! Dusan! I just have no words… I’m speachless.
This is an AMAZING article. Full of insights and observations that will be helpful to everybody… Thank you so very much…
Please accept my deepest respect. Regards.
P.S. As to the ending, my mother in law said once:”I have graduated from the adulthood.” hehe. I recall her words every now and then while thinking about SL and what WE, the people, are doing there.
What are the dangers to this new technology? I wonder what the level of addiction will be to this type of interface. Like regular video games and Internet-enabled computers, there have been well documented studies of addiction regarding these technologies. I think things are just going to become that much more immersive and that much more addictive.
From: play Sony impressed by Home Quote from the site – Of course, the Sony Director could be somewhat biased, although he draws viable comparisons with Second Life, which is apparently inferior because it needs to cater for too many system specificati…
[...] of the news pieces focuses on a demonstration of the Emotiv headset, which we’ve written about before. The piece describes a demonstration at the 2008 Game Developers Conference of a future that is [...]
I’m glad someone else writes articles as long as I do.
When people tell you they are leaving Second Life, they often don’t really leave. They lurk on forums, they read blogs, they come back on alts, and that’s all part of the cycle. Sometimes people really leave cold but then they merely go to some other game or to Facebook.
Castronova’s concept of the exodus is interesting, but unfortunately, he’s so mired in games and ludology that he can’t understand the more subtle complexities happening with open-ended worlds.
I remember a discussion about addiction on the forums once, and one geeky tekkie sort who scripted and made a living of sorts off his products sold in SL and then later consulting for companies basically sneered: “is a carpenter addicted to his hammer?”
He was trying to make it seem — trying to convince himself likely above all — that SL was merely a tool, a platform, something like me using Microsoft Word to do translation work (nobody would say “You’re addicted to Microsoft Word”).
But of course, we all know that’s silly as people really are addicted, not applying their talents in more lucrative ways, disrupting even their real lives and ceasing to care for their spouses or kids or themselves, there are piles of stories about this. I’m strangely unmoved by them, and I’m going to think some more about why, and write about it, but it has to do not only with the idea that games or worlds crack people along fault lines that they already had before they came to them, or with the idea that this sort of addiction at least doesn’t lead to road deaths from DWI, but I have to think more about it.
I think the compelling nature isn’t even so much visualization. I’ve been in worlds or on spaces in SL that have nothing particularly compelling or beautiful about them, but people will stay in them for days on end. I think what it’s more about is choice and control. They give people those two features they simply lack in real life: choice and control.
You still aren’t getting it about thumb-sucking. This isn’t a reference to children’s habits, infantalism, or uselessness about the art itself. It’s about articles that ponder things piously because pious pondered is what is needed for some reason. It’s a newspaper term, and editors will consciously plan around certain events that they “need you to do a thumb-sucker,” i.e. somebody has to write a thinky piece on what something means. The idea is that a ponderous type would be staring into the difference sort of biting his thumb.
Here’s how Slate magazine defines it, but they say it is derogative, it isn’t always:
“Thumbsucker: A usually derogatory reference to story that ponders a bit of news and doesn’t introduce any.” http://www.slate.com/id/1003564/
(this has a good list of such slang terms btw)
I’m going to challenge your bashing of Anshe as some sort of crass mass market taste purveyor. Oh, how intellectuals must always prove that they loathe mass markets and mass culture! It’s humorous to me that you celebrate Rezzable as some antithesis, but Rezzable has more mass culture and mass taste that you could shake a stick at, what with little green martians and tropical beaches and urban-distressed canneries and all the rest. These are all hackneyed cliches.
Anshe actually puts a lot of effort into terraforming her hundreds of sims individually. You should fly around and look at them. Anshe herself personally is one of the best terraformers of SL, possibly THE best after the old Linden content team like Eric. Of course she has staff, and she has another problem: customers that wish to flatten the hell out of any sim she does produce nicely (most people can’t seem to get it through their heads that they don’t need to make a flat board to place a house, they can just place the house, then iron out the earth later.
The furniture made is actually pretty good looking. It beats by a long shot some of the “individually-crafted” mass-taste knock-offs of “modern” furniture which everyone imagines is “unique” but looks like Ikea or even Sears.
You would benefit from a thorough reading of “Bozos in Paradise,” Dusan.
When I was reading about google wanting to store medical records, I couldn’t help reaching for my tin-foil hat. Putting the paranoia aside, perhaps it is indeed a way to streamline an aspect of the medical industry to help improve service and reduce costs.. the old “cheaper, better, faster” mantra. As to google ads, I had just read this note that claims that google is not, at least for now, using them. (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/the-goldmine-in-ads-that-arent-on-google-health)
I am also reminded of a presentation I saw a month or so ago about using cell phones as sensors… they can already track us easily, listen to the world around us, how about, the talking head suggested, the phone sense our breath or other indicators it could monitor to provide data or early warning to health care.
We could have a few pints at the pub and our phone tells us when we are reaching our limit for driving or talking to our boss, we return home and do a 3D tour of our body to check the effect drinking on an empty stomach has had on our brain…
On 02.29.08 Dannynice Kidd said:
I heard from my bro DJTom that Dunnie died.
The time Dummie died i was in hospital and i could not write this then.
I hate my bad Memory whenn i think back to Dummy.
I know i liked him and we had im sometime.
I was really in shock when Tom told me he died.
I cried a lot.
Why is this World so damn hard??
We all shall miss Dummie a lot, thats for sure.
Bye sweet Dummie, sleep well Friend, never more pain and sorrwow. I will think off you.
I wonder whether I should take the thumb sucking controversy to Wikipedia and let the masses sort it out, but tracing back I still feel my initial impression of how Prok used the term is closer to the Slate definition, which is how I meant it in this context. That being said, I cede the definition to wiser minds but now appropriate it for future use of my own, just because I think it’s such a great visual.
The Dusan definition: thumb sucking is the process of looking at something and finding meaning where there isn’t any. A thumb sucker is someone who ascribes some deeper truth to “shiny prims” when there’s usually no deeper truth than they’re shiny and they spin around a lot.
Thumb suckers standing around wondering about all the meteors wiping out the dinosaurs on Rezzable and believe it’s some sort of symbol of changing eras and a commentary on the impermanence of the build when in reality they had too many prims in the way of their next project.
Second, I didn’t mean to imply that Anshe Chung produces anything less than great content, and I’m fairly sure I didn’t say anything about the work itself in my post, but I can understand that in the wider context it may have seemed like a criticism.
I have no opinion, and it’s probably an object by object thing, personal tastes, whatever – I’ve seen 10L builds by Anshe and her team (a little bashed up looking little house, if I remember) that had character, great textures, and unique features. It looked as good as many of the Tiki Huts and beach houses (including my own) crafted lovingly by hand. My point wasn’t about the output, it was about the process of production. And let’s face it, a craftsperson who never thinks about creating greater efficiencies for themselves isn’t learning, and a mass producer who never thinks about aesthetics and quality won’t last long in a demanding, changing and taste-conscious virtual world. So I really didn’t mean to sound like I was disparaging the result, I was instead pointing to the tension between traditional notions of mass produced, factory line, “one size fits all” production and the (somewhat over-hyped) prosumer movement.
And as an aside, I lived on an Anshe sim way back when and one of the reasons I moved there was because it WAS beautifully terraformed, a lot of thought had gone into the relations of parcels to each other and to the overall configuration of public and private spaces, and the SYSTEM for renting was smooth and painless.
OK, I’m off to check out progress on the new Public Works.
=)
On 03.06.08 lookingforlifeshumor said:
This is a really interesting concept! Thank you for sharing.
On 03.07.08 Beau Dodson said:
Hey there
Nice find! I tried it with my photos – pretty cool!
[...] Curious to think about and see how people are using glow, and how they will use Web objects, to change the richness of environments. Otherwise, we all wait for Blue Mars. [...]
It’s really difficult to use Glow effectively until Linden add script commands for it, it’s very frustrating that they haven’t yet. Hopefully it’ll happen soon, it’s a great feature to have – even if a lot of people will turn it up full making their builds look like a journey into the core of the Sun! We’re not always the subtlest, SL builders…
The new web-based content is frustrating too since it’s been added as an adjunct to the existing parcel media settings – meaning it’s not much good yet, you can’t rely on it to deliver the same experience for all visitors. Plus, if your visitor doesn’t switch on Media for your land they’ll see nothing at all.
Still, fun to come, once these things get sorted out!
Agreed Eris…and Linden has promised HTML on a prim this spring, so I’ll hold them to it, at least on Beta.
And anything to do with land, parcel and media settings leaves me paranoid since the day I had an entire sim returned to me when I subdivided a small parcel not realizing the larger on would then exceed its prim allowance….not even connected to media settings, I know, but either an indication of my total ignorance or how complicated some of the features are. (A little warning box would be nice .. “Are you REALLY sure you wanna do this? Think about it). Not to mention I’m too lazy to update Quicktime so I still don’t see or hear anything.
Finally, I agree on Glow…but go check out King Rezzable for its appropriate use (at least in the forest environment, the star burst one left me flat).
Kapor Enterprises, as in Mitch Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3 fame, president of the Mozilla Foundation, and a member of the board of Linden Lab (as well as one of its funding partners)?
There was coverage of an interview with Mitch where he talked about it also reading expression and translating it through to that of your SL avatar. If only I could remember where I read it.
[...] 3D cameras that will initiate a new tipping point for virtual worlds, according to Mitch Kapor. I recently reported on this development, linking over to an employee’s blog post where he stated the [...]
This is really cool. Looking forward to see the demos. Btw is it using IR, like the Wii? Will it work as well for folks who are sitting? Does it track hand gestures for movement etc…? A few hints…will be enough
There’s an element of this in demo clips for some Logitech webcams, eg:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=r7Gn2TyEyHw – begins with facial attachments (eyepatch, monocle, etc), then moves into complete replacement avatars. Unfortunately, the guy doesn’t move around too much, but the facetracking can still be seen. The software manages reasonably well with tracking lips and eyebrows, too, though sometimes seems to give people something of a tic. None the less impressive for that, though!
Yes, thanks for that. There’s an interesting discussion over at Croquet about some of this as well so it seems like there’s growing work on the interface devices. Emotiv is getting a lot of play and there was another device out of Germany that worked off brain waves as well. Should be an interesting year for the, um, controllers.
3D cameras sound as a nice thing. Though “augmented reality” and some of the expectations are actually a bad and clumsy idea, nice, simple to use and affordable mocap hardware could improve the world and our communication. We’ll see how development of both hardware and the interface will go. After all, it’s all about what we want to achieve.
[...] Dusan Writer suggests that the wiki adoption patterns and strategies on Wikipatterns.com can also be applied to virtual worlds: Wiki Patterns for example, offers a toolkit for companies and communities looking to optimize the use of Wikis. But this toolkit sounds suitable as a “best practices toolkit” for Second Life. [...]
First off, thank you for the link and the mention, I’m glad you enjoyed the article!
In all of the entries that I read on the topic, I saw no evidence of cooperation between Linden and creators. In fact, I saw additional roadblocks in the form of a mailed-in DMCA and stonewalling.
While I grant that, as a company, they have many other issues to contend with, there are simple steps that they could take to make the process less painful without raising cost or providing much additional distraction.
I wouldn’t say it shows outright disdain for the creators in second life, but it certainly shows a lack of willingness to take any action, no matter how small and no matter how much it might help…
I think i’ve boiled it down to 3 main options, now trying to decide which is (most) true…
A/ Linden don’t know what to do and have no real vision for Second Life’s future. This one seems more plausible when you learn they originally planned to make (or commission) all the content themselves. Instead they switched to user-generated content – it was a good call, it took off, it wasn’t what they’d planned, now they’re lost.
B/ Linden don’t want to do anything. Also very convincing, seems to be the company’s culture: ignore it and it’ll go away. They’re right, if they ignore the issue of content protection it WILL all go away – all the builders, designers, graphic artists, musicians, DJ’s etc. We’ll all just go away.
C/ Linden only do anything in order to protect their profitability. Very convincing! Especially when you realise how important Premium members are to growing the SL economy and then notice that their numbers are falling. Suddenly ad-farms have to go and we’re getting mainland beautification via the Public Works projects. Not a coincidence. This is probably the leverage residents need to exploit. Make Linden see what harm stolen content (or the lack of new content) does to the economy and their profitability and suddenly we might see some action…
After reading Wagner Au’s book (intriguing until he became a “virtual world consultant” and then I thought he got a little thin), I was left with a sort of impression that SL and the residents are pretty much a whacked out, nutty group of people with a few empowering stories and odd gender-bending relationships. Not to say it’s not a great read, but it has me wondering whether it isn’t in some ways representative of Linden’s attitude towards its residents. Yeah, they loved having Anshe on the cover of Business Week, but even now they’re disavowing any of the work of real world companies who tried to take a crack at Second Life over the past year only to decamp in frustration. Basically, their line has been “SL isn’t ready for that kinda prime time”.
So let’s extend this – if Rosedale really is represented accurately by Wagner, then he’s an idealist, still dreaming about SL as a sort of “Be Bop” Burning Man (I posted on this today). The common refrain is “we’ll make a great platform and gee, won’t it be awesome to see what our nutty community comes up with once we do.”
I’m all for Be Bop. I’m all for Mirrored Flourishing (they tend to love stories of welfare moms who make good or someone who make better cars than Chrysler in their basement). But Linden’s attitude seems to be “look, this is a parade, a giddy carnival of fun and passion, and we’re not going to intrude with any sort of big business, old school, capitalist mentality, although sure, we wanna stay in business, but our ethos rules man, peace out.”
So, where they stand: let’s make sure everyone can fully express themselves, and one way to do that is to open up the grid. We need to anyways because although all these other platforms don’t have our hip, cool, surfer, laid-back ethos (combined with our deep love of code, cuz God’s in there man) they’re starting to circle around our little world, and wouldn’t it be awesome if people could hold their own little Burning Man’s by having their own servers.
But if that happens, they risk all these little private islands disconnecting from the Main Grid, so they start cleaning up the mainland. The future is in letting everyone host a parade, not in shopkeeping anyways, because after all, with 10,000 jeans already on the market, the bottom will fall out anyways, which isn’t such a bad thing because it will let everyone get back to their be-boppy roots.
What’s more important is not to upset the core ethic, which is to make sure our giddy users have access to the deepest tools possible for creating fun “stuff” (P.S. the in world economy was an add-on anyways, done in dire times as a way of saving Linden Labs, so it’s not like they ever really had their heart in it). And in doing so, we’ll make sure that we keep the space open for all the educators and collaborators who are our real future anyways – schools learning new ways to spread new models of education (we can teach the world!), and businesses who upend their business models once they see the magic of be bop reality.
I’ve argued before, however, that Linden needs a good dose of re-visioning. And in so doing create a more compelling strategy than “Our job is to create technology, it’s up to the users to decide what to do with it.” They seem to think that they’re creating a platform for liberation and social change, but don’t seem to realize that they’re acting more and more like an Internet Service Provider and in the commodification of their platform are thus attracting people who care about performance, intellectual property protection, tracking, privacy, and security.
Linden’s singular focus on providing tools to users towards enabling a shared creative “Burning Life” has blinded them to the fact that they’ve actually positioned themselves as nothing more than a server farm, with a bottom-line focus on island sales (thus the new “low prim sims”), with the dreamy hope that they’re the frontier of the age of virtual worlds (I’ve read that they play parlor games at LL trying to guess whether they’re the Compuserve, Mosaic, or Netscape of their time) and that their vision is so powerful that all those old nagging worries about content theft will go away once we all wake up and see that there’s a glorious new world that awaits.
There is. And it’s called the Internet. And the competition for the attention and talent of DJs, texture artists, modelers and others has an increasing number of options.
Linden needs to re-evaluate what the future looks like because the future includes people who can work anywhere, from anywhere, in any virtual world. And yes, there will always be room for the libertarian carnival, but like Burning Man it might only come once a year because who can take a lifetime of that, and it will get torn down once its done.
I can agree with the basic principle that Linden needs to do some serious re-envisioning of their product. One of the impressions that I’ve gotten as I’ve read Linden’s own sites and replies is that they don’t seem to understand what they want to be as a company or what they want SL to be as a product.
They’ve got some neat technology, many users who enjoy it and they need to find a way to make it cohesive and profitable. Not easy.
I think part of the reason people like me don’t “get” SL isn’t because we dislike virtual worlds, but because we don’t understand what the purpose of it is. One can hardly blame us when you look at the mixed messages Linden sends.
This seems to translate directly into how Linden handles these content issues. They say they take content theft issues seriously but don’t offer any meaningful solutions or even attempts at solutions. Part of it likely is the profitability issue and the fact there is no money to be made by removing infringing works. Some of it though is that they don’t know if or how this issue fits in with their future plans.
If they knew, for certain, they were going to be a company that was going to profit almost solely off of the exchange of virtual goods, they would likely do something to lock it down better. But they don’t want to invest in locks if, in a few months, the business model changes to something where content theft doesn’t matter.
You can’t invest in a future that you don’t know anything about.
[...] been covered three times by Reuters, as well as being mentioned by Nobody Fugazi, Massively, Dusan Writer, and practically every other Second Life related blog that I subscribe to (and several that I [...]
Ironic this, it struck me a some time ago that if this was a listed company the shareholders would be on the brink of voting him off the board. I give him credit and respect for his self-realisation and for doing the right thing (IMHO).
My worry? He hires a fall-guy. He hires Torley in a suit. Someone who talks the same talk and walks the same walk and takes the daggers when nothing changes, leaving Philip wound-free and ‘visioneering’.
My hope? He hires someone with ears for the residents, eyes for the future and who is able, even enjoys, kicking some ass…at least for a little while.
This could get very interesting or very depressing.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse Plagiarism Today Weighs in on IP Theft in Second Life Quote from the site – A good overview from a neutral outside observer on the copybot issue in [...]
The timing of this whole discussion has certainly taken on new meaning with the announcement of Philip taking on the role fo Chair of LL in order to find a replacement as CEO.
The post picks up a comment by that smiley virtual world watcher Robert Bloomfield:
“Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets. The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy. First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom. Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office. Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.”
[...] happens when we try to port our old ideas and paradigms into the new space. Last time I checked, CSI New York was relegated to a few lonely and disheartened looking [...]
And 100% of online users of MMORPGs pretend to be magic-using elves or cantina aliens flashing telekinetic death-grips, so what exactly have these bumbling bureaucrats of banality discovered? That people in alternate realities create alternate selves?
[...] transparency and trust, with the latter being considered one of the key drivers on the Net. As I previously posted, there were some insightful comments from John Clippinger, who [...]
Hey anonymous-not – can you point me to an export utility from SL to Maya? As I mention in the post, you can currently build and render in Maya and import into SL but that’s not always a help to SL-only developers. So if you’re aware of an export to Maya pipeline I would LOVE to hear about it.
As far as whether you like the look or feel I suppose it will be interesting to see what people do with their imagination. I suppose people might only see a glass stuck on a bar where others see opportunities and allow their creative juices to lift off of what is clearly supposed to be a demo. I imagine multiple renders of the same scene at different times of the day, with the textures being swappable based on a detect sun parameter. Aside from a cocktail lounge I’ll place my faith in the residents of SL to explore the possibilities.
As far as ‘dead and haunted’ I’d refer you to my earlier post on the subject and in particular the following:
- In RL, how often is a social group of friends (or even strangers for that matter) available to satisfy our whim to be entertained or ’social’? Social activities don’t happen because we want them to, they take a circle of friends, a network of shared plans, an understanding of each other’s patterns and preferences. Same is true for SL.
Not sure what your experiences have been in SL, or RL for that matter, I can just share my own perspective.
Today I have added a couple alternative registration portals to the catalog. I believe this completes the list of available last names, unless there are other registration portals like CSI:NY or GossipGirl I don’t know about. These portals have exclusive last names. Never fear! my new feature indexes those last names too! More last names are available now than there ever have been… it is a shocking number: 1,809 , all told.
The rapid development of 3D interfaces is always a pleasure to look at. Makes me feel confident Virtual Worlds are on the right track
I like the little gaming innovation concerning the mixing of dimensions smoothly (as posted here). At the bottom of that article is another list of 3D interfacing with data, some hardware side – that really show the value of a third Dimension.
I’m sure you’ve seen it but I posted today on a grab bag of things but really really really check out the TED presentation of Photosynth….and stick around for the last minute or so where it all comes together in one organic, communally created virtual environment….it is breath taking.
first and foremost let me say I am sorry, truly and deeply sorry, if anything I wrote has hurt you. It was not in my intent to ever do so, though I can see how I have brought this down on me by focusing on one of your lines of thinking instead of your thinking as a whole. Will you accept my apologies ?
I don’t know if splitting hairs will mellow the blow, but I would like to stress I did not « group [you] with the augmentationists » — I picked up on some of your recent arguments to prototype two opinions one could lump in with these pseudo-camps, but only to make my point that to me, this particular debate is as irrelevant as it is silly, and that (as far as I can tell with my modest abilities) the camps do not in fact exist as they are perceived. You cannot be a citizen of Second Life without immersing yourself into it (hence the tourist analogy for those who refuse to do so), and there would be no point whatsoever in doing so if it was not augmenting our RL somehow.
You Can Be an Augmented Immersionist indeed. We all are both, however hard some of us cling to old banners and labels.
Speaking of feelings on last time : you just took you revenge, by writing the post I wish I had been able to write next. But I’m grateful you did, because you have done it so much better than I would ever been able to. Thank you.
[...] Dusan Writer has done so tonight, and he has done even better, carrying the thought much further than I would ever have been able to : But when I look at Second Life I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, and I don’t see an e-commerce engine (although to some degree it is all of these) – I see the possibilities for stories. And in these possibilities I am attracted to how Second Life may be a new camp fire around which we weary hunters gather, scratching pictures in the sand with our primitive tools and telling each other of the days we’ve had, and the adventures ahead. [...]
Awww Rheta hahaha. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound so tragic. Call it a rhetorical flourish, I suppose, to make the point that in a world where we struggle for labels like immersion and augmentation to describe how we react to the experience of virtual worlds, we all come to realize that we struggle within the blurry lines between. Your post was an inspiration to me, Rheta, so no apologies required.
Ah well, you have no idea how relieved I am to hear as much — laugh all you want . And did I say what an utterly amazing, brilliant post this is ? If I inspired you to this, be it only a little, I am very glad.
A lovely post (an’ thanks to Rheta for pointing at it, and for being an important part of the discussion!).
One thing that struck me while reading this is that yes SL is all about stories, and in fact storytelling may well be the killer app of SL and the other VMs worthy of the name; and that while we’re thinking that we should also think that RL is all about stories, and in fact storytelling is for many ( some / most / all?) of us the killer app for RL. We do lots of stuff just to pay tier, so to speak, but the rest of the time? We’re there sitting around the campfire…
On 03.22.08 Beau Dodson said:
We live on a world that is but a tiny speck in the vast universe. So small that it couldn’t even be viewed with a microscope if you were to compare the size to that in which we live.
I believe that Second Life (and others) are in their first second of life – if that. What we see today will not be what we see tomorrow. Trying to place it in a box, trying to define it, trying to make it somehow “fit” in our lives – will never work.
The reason it will never work is because it is a work in progress. What may be today will not be tomorrow. There is room for every culture, every explorer, every creation of artwork within its limitless space. Unlike our planet, where boundaries already exist, there will be no boundaries in the worlds that you are creating.
Why do we feel the need to define something? Why do we need to have “camps” of people that somehow believe they “get it” and others don’t? Is this not what has brought our “real” world into chaos?
Perhaps some things in life don’t need to be defined but rather experienced.
This world will evolve beyond our definitions. No matter how hard we try to imagine what it will become, we will fall short.
I really enjoyed this post, I wish more writings, more blogs were of this depth and literary on sl – beautiful to read, from the thinking to the texture of the words. I am going to keep a copy of this in my archive. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this post, I wish more writings, more blogs were of this depth and humanly warm on sl – beautiful to read, from the thinking to the texture of the words. I am going to keep a copy of this in my archive. Thank you.
[...] Kevin Kelly, courtesy of Dusan Writer : « In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, [...]
On 03.24.08 paiskidd said:
Hey Dusan, I think we have only just started to turn the rich soil in the garden of thoughts that PKD provides in his speach. As I saw what aspect that you commented upon, then was also re-skimming it and mentally holding it next to our Metaverse context, I then heard an echo of some of Laurie Anderson’s spoken lyric from a cut named “Born, Never Asked”, that says, “It was a large room, full of people. All kinds, and they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free, and they were all asking themselves the same question. What is behind that curtain?”
She may have been thinking of a different line of allegory than us finding our human-ness in virtual dimensions, but when I press it up against PKD’s one sentence definition, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” and then thread it to why we fragment ourselves out of meatspace to find ourselves again in a metaverse, our eternal braid may look less made up of strange loops when we hold it up to the right kind of light.
PKD also has a tangent saying, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.” I think it is interesting that one one part of ourselves that is literal in SL is our text chat. The mechanism is important, i think as well, and although voice chat exists, I am sure it not simply another way of doing the same thing. The way we communicate with text provides a pace and exchange that causes us to pare down our expressions to short, concise sentences, then wait for a response, then reply… things can happen in that process that don’t happen in other kinds of communication. The first time I met a SL friend in RL, I found conversation seemed way too fast for me to assimilate and respond. I was used to the cadence and parsing of chat with this person.
Of course, this is not the aspect that PKD was talking about, he was saying that with fiction, authors are basing part of their words on truth and part as fiction, but the consumer of fiction is not given that information, so we are in a dangerous situation of “fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur.”
If any of us are seeking Truth, or to find our better expression of Being, or a better way to be Human; does our explorations of ourselves in the Metaverse help or hinder the apsects of our current other pseudo-realities?
That is interesting for in-world communication. I cannot imagine somebody using crappy SL voice for machinima, though. If you need it to sound at least decent, you have to over-dub.
Great post and great point about storytelling.
I’d like to try my luck answering Beau why do we need definitions, even when they turn into camps and even when we are aware that they cannot put the world into a box. We need them because we try to understand and depict the world we are in. We try to tell the story, and we need definitions (whether they are words, images, prims or even music) to do that. there is nothing wrong with that, as long as we are aware that they will change, just as the world changes. And world is changing not only by itself but with our storytelling and our definitions. There is a trap and danger, but if we are aware it is an adventure worth taking. It is not words that turned the world into chaos. Words made the world out of chaos. And they are transforming it in each turn. It0’s up to us if that’s going to be for good or for bad.
Well put Dandellion. Although I also take Beau’s point that we can spend so much time assessing and naming and trying to define that we forget to just experience.
I agree. If we stick in naming and defining without experiencing, we’re dead. Nothing is more dangerous to philosophy than trying to think without living.
@ Pais – I’ve come to believe that virtuality is no different than other realities, it just uses different tools of expression, tools which, perhaps, tap into some richer vein of storytelling and experience, particularly because it IS immersive, and therefore ‘feels real’, and because in that place which feels real the rules and “words” that we have at our disposal are different. I feel somewhat like we’re at the dawn of perspective in painting – imagine how it must have felt to become suddenly aware, through the canvas, that there was a whole range within our visual language we had been blind to, and what it was like to experience that for the first time. It caused schisms in beliefs and argument, but there is no argument that it was as if we had a blind spot that was suddenly revealed.
More to your point, however, I’m not sure it’s just the pace of chat and typing that creates a little electric change in perspective. It’s the combination of it with the visual environment. As you know, there’s nothing I hate worse than sitting and talking with someone in SL (oops, better check the branding guidelines, I meant “in virtual world of Second Life (R)”) and not facing them….it’s just text chat, but that’s combined with a visual vocabulary as well. As the range of avatar expression increases (lip synching for those with voice, 3D cameras that can detect facial expression and movement, etc) it will be interesting to see how the range of language (text plus expression plus presence plus the ability to co-create using prims, embedded HTML, etc.) the range of stories, their depth or texture, might increase as well.
I’m glad that you called it ‘pseudo-realities’ however – because I’m not convinced that there’s anything *different* about the ’strange loop’ that occurs within a virtual environment…it’s more that we don’t afford ourselves as many opportunities for it to occur. How many of us are part of a writer’s workshop? Or travel to strange places that shake our sense of location or culture or belief? Or participate in meditation retreats? All things where we, in a sense, fragment part of ourselves from our habitual meat space.
Finally, while virtual worlds are powerful environments for storytelling, your quote of Laurie, a cut that I well love, reminds me of another quote:
“Sometimes I have the feeling that we’re in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He’s sure to open the door again for it’s a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.”
ESC is not totally throwing in the towel, no. I think that there are some situations where SL can be compelling. But yes, we think there can be compelling, immersive uses of Flash & papervision to offer virtual world experiences to a much bigger audience than has the computing requirements and fortitude for SL. I am sure there will still be marketing efforts to the SL community as mark of broader campaigns.
The dynamics are very different for community members and content creators. It is in their interests that SL provide a certain level of feature stability (don’t break my stuff!) and preserve the economy. There are not really a lot of places to go that offer such an economy — OpenSim, which lacks a permissions system, would totally remake the economy.
My perception is that Linden Lab has chosen their existing community (and opening their arms to collaboration/education experimentation) rather than risk too much pushing to be an open platform. It certainly protects their cash flow, which is understandable. But it slows down and reduces their chances of being the next big thing. But they are not out of the running. Time will tell!
IMO, most of us still have this early-adopter mentality which seems to assume that the two biggest draws, the killer app’s, of SL are first, the ability to create within it and make your own virtual place and second to mess around with the code that drives it, for fair means or foul. We’ve been driven this far by creatives and codeheads – they’ve achieved amazing things and could continue to do so but there’s something important that’s missing – the audience.
I suspect that many of the 95% of new-users who don’t stay were expecting Facebook 2 or MySpace Plus but instead found themselves dropped into Maya for Beginners. I would never want to see the creative side of SL in any way limited – just the opposite, for me it IS the biggest draw – but I think we have to recognise the mainstream user will (mostly) only come for the fun and not the work of virtual worlds.
Thanks Giff and Eris. I think I was being, um, dramatic.
Any talk of interoperability and relationships with 3d party developers (publishing some sort of forward-looking plan that developers can, well, PLAN against would be a nice start) and you end up sounding like you mean that the “walled garden” needs to come down. As I say in my profile, our focus is on vertical integration across platforms – not because different platforms need to integrate with each other, so much, but rather because when you go to create an experience you want to bring the right tools at the right time to the right person.
This might be a quick Papervision experience, a mini-game (Metaplace anyone?), a VIR-Tools environment, or an immersive sim. Within this range of experiences and then the communities around them, there is a role for a place like Second Life in facilitating game economies, avatar representation, and shared/co-created environments. Their protection of their brand, I believe, is an important part of protecting a “good housekeeping seal of approval” on the experience that they provide.
But they’d better make sure that the much protected seal of approval is sealing something of which we approve.
As you pointed out Giff, the platform doesn’t support its full promise, which is what I mean by ‘throwing in the towel’. The full experience, as initially envisioned (I imagine) by the CSI build, was meant to be mostly in-world (with Web and media outlets as the point of attraction). But SL can’t ‘bear the load’ of these kinds of concepts – full immersion, branded, cross-platform. Which is fine – SL wasn’t ready yet, as the Lindens then said (in retrospect).
So where does that leave us? Well, I won’t contribute to the stability discussion…but rather the discussion of experiences. And because Linden isn’t in the content creation business, they need to rely on others to do that part for them. And as the options increase, they need to realize that it’s Pro/Am time: if they don’t attract the right mix of pros and combine them with the vibrant community of amateur creators (many of whom are trying to BECOME pro), then they’ll lose both to other platforms.
And pros expect certain things. They don’t need source code but they need pipelines. They need to know that if they’re creating an experience that they can build it once and then place the same ‘objects’ within SL, and inside PaperVision, and maybe in a Vir-Tools demo room or an True Space gallery.
Lacking clear direction and poor developer relations, (I’m still waiting on replies to 3 e-mails through “The Grid”) they then put salt on the wounds of the “Amateur” part of the equation, sending little tremors and shocks, lacking a clear explanation of whether their crackdown on branding is an “Intel Inside” strategy, “Due Dilligence” ahead of a sale, simple house cleaning, or a well thought out desire to “brand” the future open architecture project.
As far as Maya for beginners, have a look at 3DVIA shape, sometime, for what a real Maya for beginners looks like – and frankly, in my early days of SL I would have welcomed an application like it – as user friendly as you can possibly get for a newbie to 3D modeling. They should do a deal with those guys and have an optional external building program!
So where does it leave us – they haven’t attracted the “Pros”. They’ve upset the amateurs (again). And they’re protecting a logo which has less and less value as a brand, because its associated with a lack of clarity (hey! Why just settle on one logo! Maybe if we have 3 or 4 we’ll confuse people and they’ll stop associating us with flying genitalia!), and their “fanzines” have been pretty much given 90 days to comply or … or what? They’ll shut down the people who are tirelessly advocating and promoting SL and who, ironically, don’t even work for Linden Labs.
I never believed I could have a Second Life. So maybe Fitzgerald’s adage isn’t true…”There are no second acts, but in Second Life’s case we’ll hope this isn’t true.”
On 03.27.08 ichabod Antfarm said:
Dusan,
I second the “creepy”. The tech is fine and wonderful and all that but the result is disturbing. I would rather look like an animated cartoon than an animated corpse. If this is the future then it’s shoe in the machine time for me, I am afraid to say.
Dusan – Thank you for your kind words about 3DVIA Shape…you’ve got exactly the right idea – it’s an attempt to expand the accesibilty for creating 3D content.
Also, very intereting times in the metaverse for SL and many of the other worlds. We’re looking to expand the software and our 3D modeling community to support virtual worlds more effectively. I would love to get your thoughts on how we could help. Drop me an email when you get a chance.
Hahaha yeah….mind you, they have some pretty cute cartoon versions as well, you should check them out. But for sure…..creeepy….and maybe at home in Blue Mars.
On 03.27.08 Teddy said:
Well played! Sometimes you have to barrel around and reach the profound in order to find what is “as simple as that”… With this in mind, I’ve come across a website that does just that! http://www.pixellogo.com
On 03.27.08 Name Revolution said:
The name issue in SL has bugged me from the time of initial registration. Forcing a name upon me as an adult violates my feelings, it should not be.
So eventually I did become increasingly unhappy with the selected family name, being reminded of it every time I logged in. I sort of became fixated on that, and it started to seriously dampen my enthusiasm whenever I was inworld, I could not fully let my personality stream into the avatar who has a name that was only semi-chosen by me.
Another thing I became increasingly anal about was the self title “senator” by the Lindens. Hum. Senators are usually voted into office, but the Lindens are effectually feudalistic lords. I think calling themselves Emperor or Duke or King would have been even more apt, since that would have been so over the top that it could have been sold as satire. But “senator” hypnotizes people into adding democratic symbols mentally when really SL is anything but a democracy. For example, I ran into a guy who had a region and a house on the beach, only to wake up next day, log in, and discover that the Lindens had piled another sim right in front, so where his oceanview used to be, was now a grassy hill. This is someone who bought that region. His only option was to adapt…
Then I discovered other Grids where I could, as it should be, decide my own name and I have been in these Grids since. It’s lonely at times, yes, but choosing my own name is worth that.
Besides, I’m just too untech to fiddle with settings until my cheap Nvidia card and Celeron CPU would generate an acceptable SL experience. It’s so hacked off and jumpy, if I want to make a left turn I end up 300 degree off track. I don’t have that problem in other Grids.
That’s the head of the nail. It’s not about the technical challenges LL face, those will just have to be dealt with, that’s a given. It’s actually about what people do when they get here (into SL) and i think the way forward is to adopt a more web-like model.
When you sign up for MySpace you’re not handed a book of html and a text editor to go write your own website – you’re given check-boxes to check and text-fields to fill with some details of yourself – all of which add up to your presence on MySpace.
Your equivalent presence in SL is your avatar. The first user experience in SL should be creating that avatar presence, then moving it out into the wider SL world then, at a later date if you want, you should be introduced to building and creating within SL. The point isn’t to make the 3D creation tools in SL more user-friendly (altho we need that too!) it’s to realise that many (possibly even most) people arriving in SL don’t particularly want to use them! They want a virtual world presence and the opportunity to explore, socialise and have fun within it – why aren’t we giving them that?
It struck me earlier that this concept is about to be put to a very good test – Sony’s Home on the PS3 is, rumoured at least, about to open for Public Beta in April. Their concept is very like this – a virtual presence with little or no creation tools – and it’ll be fascinating to see if it captures the imagination of PS3 users. Be very interesting to see what Sony have come up with after about 3 years development too…
Thanks for the comment N.R…..care to share which Grids you prefer? With the latest fiasco around brand use, might be time to dig a little deeper than my earlier cursory tours.
On 03.27.08 Name Revolution said:
Oh, sure.
Basically I went pretty much through the grid-list on the opensimulator site, some very small standalone-single-region “grids” like “Metropolis”, or the French one (with no one but me in it at the time) and some larger ones, “large” in relation to opensimulator grids. Of course, compared to the sheer might of SL, at least in terms of busy avatars, all other grids are still very small.
which is run by an and in Australia/n. This is a very sympathetic project and much has been done in terms of stability and functionality. Opensimulator-Grids are still a bit rough around the edges but nothing which would cause gray hair. It’s not a Windows 98 situation or anything that drastic. At the moment, it’s mostly just the pioneer builders busy being creative, but things are picking up and more and more Second Lifers are coming in to have a peek, not without derogatory remarks of course.
OpenLifeGrid only sells regions, membership is free, you can’t however hook up your standalone to their grid.
, these guys are Americans, and the owners of the grid are busy right now to build stuff, I’ve seen streets today and other interesting things. Don’t be scared away by the incredibly ugly, very NON-2.0 front webpage which will make you puke, and by the fact that the loginuri is hidden behind initial registration. It’s definitely worth checking out this one as well. What they offer seems to be a combination and/or of selling regions and also allowing you to hook up your standalone to their grid, but I haven’t looked deep enough into it what variation, that is mainly because I’m not a builder or region owner, I just wander around and bless unsuspecting strangers with my sweet personality.
I checked it out yesterday and this is the one where I will most likely end up because here you can hook up your standalone server for no charge. (Donations are welcome, I presume, nevertheless.) I’m not sure how this one is connected directly to the sweet people of Opensimulator, there seems to be a connection but I haven’t figured out yet how and who. But I’ve already made a friend who offered me to just build stuff on his regions. Wow. I like to build houses, and I do have a newly discovered architectural talent, but being unemployed means I cannot afford to buy a region, not even in OpenLifeGrid which is considerably cheaper than SecondLife.
I do crash a lot in OSGrid, some regions run different simulators, some regions are just badly configured, but the price is right so I’m not complaining. OSGrid is more anarchistic than the others, please add the positive meaning of anarchistic here. Essentially this is hackers (again positive meaning please), freaks (..), fiddlers and aspiring techies throwing their home-brewn standalone server-regions into the grid. Very eclectic and I really hope they will work out the stability issues, which of course is more difficult inside a sack of cats.
To do justice to the small ones, please allow me to mention both Metropolis, a single region “grid” intended for speakers of German, but to be looked into by everyone, and a French Grid with some pretty interesting terraforming.
To make gridhopping easy, I’m going to advise something I would normally not, which is to just use the same password and avatar name for all the other grids, not necessarily your SL one though. This way you can create shortcuts on your desktop and mark the “remember password” in your SL client. This way, going into a different grid becomes like going to a different webpage, all that differs is the loginuri.
Users of Linux such as myself and who are too lazy to create launchers, can basically just keep a textfile with the different loginuris and just open a console and copypaste the command for the client, with the route of which folder the client lives and the loginuri.
“lucy” would be replaced by the name you are using. Your path to which folder you’ve saved the Second Life client of course may differ from mine…
Once you’ve figured out which grids you plan to visit regularly, you can then go ahead and create launchers on the desktop.
If you’re using a bizarr operating system like Microsoft Windows, you’d just copypaste your launcher for SL and change the loginuri in the new launcher.
(second sending, delete this if first did arrive)
On 03.27.08 Name Revolution said:
What do you mean with “latest fiasco around brand use”, sorry, I just stumpled on your blog yesterday.
On 03.27.08 Name Revolution said:
My -very- long post didn’t get published, I have a copy, let me know here if you need me to send it to you in an alternative way. (Too long perhaps?)
On 03.27.08 paiskidd said:
Hahaha.
I was also thinking the logo was Virtually Meaningless
No, it’s OK …. with all the links and so on the system thought it might be spam. Have now approved.
Thanks for a wonderful post. I’ve checked out a few of those and have also become very enamored with RealXtend. Set up my own local grid in less than 15 minutes and started fiddling around – amazing. No one there, because it was just, well, me, but I might toss it up on our servers as well and invite some friends.
I’m going to link your comment from the home page, I think it’s worth a wider audience.
As far as the branding thing…well, long story and I’m too exhausted to talk about it anymore…gave too many column inches to it already. But the easiest way to follow what happened is to read the SL blog, and the bloggers’ blog…
[...] Dusan Writer is strongly in the anti-policy camp: Linden Labs sent out a Trojan horse into the community – a spiffy (and useless) new logo, perhaps thinking bloggers, content creators, educators and businesses wouldn’t notice the fine print which many are speculating is all prelude to an IPO. [...]
[...] Dusan Writer notes a teacher using Second Life to teach class: According to Dr. Gerard Lucas, “Second Life allows us to look at issues like identity, identity building, gender, sexuality and race. It brings all these ideas to the forefront in a way that students can engag…” [...]
[...] of rules for residents and other people on the use of the company’s trademarks earlier this week. Much-lauded by numerous blogs, Linden Lab’s move highlights the company’s strong commitment to its [...]
On 03.30.08 jukiascreations said:
This sounds really good. I really love the photographs. Are those photos from the Sims 3?
Hello, my name is Jukia, I am a Simmer and creator for Sims downloads that other Simmers can download and put in their game. I create things like new objects and such. So far I haven’t really moved on to the Sims 2.
This new Sims game sounds wonderful, I am just afraid whether it is going to be too big for my computer (aghem laptop). The Sims 2 game tends to skip and lag and the load time is too long. What do you think?
From the perspective as an interloper looking to goof around, my attitude was I was amazed that SL worked as well as it did and took downtime and problems with a grain of salt.
Last week, I was getting little nagging surveys on login starting off with “…in your opinion, is SL getting better or worse lately? Why?…” and I didn’t answer, since I wasn’t sure if all I had was unhelpful and uninformed gripes. When I finally started formalizing my complaints, the survey nagger disappeared.
When I think about people that are trying to actually conduct business with SL, or create in-world events, or schedule meetings with friends, or otherwise actually *use* SL… then I see how infuriating downtime can be.
Sometimes one must mention the silly to be taken somewhat seriously. Know what I mean, or mean what I know? That comment was one of many that I made to the journalist who did that interview. I had no idea she would choose to spotlight that particular comment, nor could I have predicted that you would focus on it as well. Thanks nonetheless for the write-up. I am also of the opinion that educational efforts in SL need more (positive) coverage. And just fyi, that particular event was theme-based (invasion of pirates), and was part of a series of free experimental language learning/teaching activities in SL. According to participant feedback, it was one of our most enjoyable and memorable language learning/teaching events.
Silly?
*Second Life offers us the ability to explore new approaches to learning and teaching. Let us not let worries about “silly” get in the way of well-intended efforts. Let us explore the possibilities…and have fun doing so!
Thanks for the follow-up Kip! I’m with you on silly, and on education in SL in general. Keep us posted!
On 04.01.08 paiskidd said:
Pais looks up after diving into photosynth and flying around, leans back, gets a 10K km stare, and strokes his chin…..
It looks like they are creating some derived geometries of camera and target position, but I am not sure how robust that is. They may be relying more on stitching together the photos to pull things into a topological framework.
The reason I am thinking this is I am wondering how to map things to real world coordinates. Maybe if a frame work were augmented with something like LIDAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar) deployed a bit like google street view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_street_view) so that the textures from images are mapped on a real-world 3D coordinate framework, we’d have the basis for being able to really create an immersive virtual map of our spaces. A tricky bit will be to deal with the temporal nature of time, since it may be troublesome to see the same seen stitched together, with trees fully leafed in summer, the other with snow drifts.
Taking a different tack… I was looking at the artist’s studio collection in photosynth and was thinking if I could “see” stuff in Second Life like that, it might even be worth going to the various galleries and museums (or even stores). Pais gets tired of waiting for things to rez around him.
Gosh Pais I wish I were as technical as you. But it strikes me that what’s happened here is that the people taking the photos themselves are the ones tagging that the image is what they say it is. Interesting in the TED demo that he shows how one photo was actually a photo of a photo! Talk about crowd sourcing content!
While I imagine that it would be good to get accurate measures of location based on some sort of computer cross-match to geographies, I also wonder whether that doesn’t end up getting solved in the long run by the photographers themselves. Based on how they put this together, they’ve been able to create a 3D object out of different photos taken at different times and have been able to compute the exact location of each camera in reference to that object. Doesn’t it just take one of those photographers to also tag the photo with a GPS position?
So, for example, while its Google, synch Photosynth up to something like their GPI synch application:
You bring up the intriguing idea that the photos themselves can stitch together an actual “textured build”. On that front, start to wonder whether you don’t end up with a mash-up somewhere down the road:
- For an advanced version of a “build” use something like Stanford’s 3D camera: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/march19/camera%20-031908.html
- Map the underlying skeleton of the building using something like Photosynth (which also gives you a deep source of information artefacts)
- Combine the two and import into 3DVIA, Sketch-Up, etc for some more “polished” work
- Probably script some stuff in here while we’re at it, using I’m sure LSL
- Load it up to a Google street view type of thing.
It’s the combination of technology with user-generated inputs that’s so interesting. After all, you can spend 100 years running around with a 3D camera or creating an algorithm to assess geo-positions, or you can count on people out there taking photos anyways and let them tag it with a geosynch iPhone for example.
its very “styley” in interface and interactions… but the utility beyond “photo album” style of map- i dont see.
The sence of place is marred by the static nature of the still photography. one feels no sence of the imediate, which is part immersion.
Even after adding avatars as the mediating interface, the app, like papervision( 2d flash) limited “fully 3d ” navigation at a constant presentation level, feels more presentational than confrontational. with is a key factor for in scene immersion psychologically.
i think it’ll just end up another tech demo for the portfolio.
BTW- the whole 3D MAP- mirror world meme— way overblown. Consider it the VIDEO phone circa ATT 1970.:)
Sure Larry – and I don’t think Photosynth is meant to be anything more than a presentation interface for photographic artefacts. At least, they’re not advertising it as such. All these tools and geotags and mapping of 3D models from photos and so on seem to be gaining traction which, when combined with 3D modeling using Sketch-Up and so on does make it seem like new types of representation of data where geo-position is important are arriving.
The work out of London for city planning and urban issues is a great practical use for this stuff, avatars or not, and is really compelling to look at if not necessarily participate in.
I’ve written elsewhere (who knows which post it was, I don’t tag very well) that my interest is NOT in augmented reality or mirror worlds. I’m far more interested in immersive environments. I’m also of the opinion that we can find clues for how these immersive environments will evolve by looking at what other tools and visual languages are evolving in related fields.
I DO think Photosynth, or at least the idea of photographic artefacts layered over 3D spaces, when combined with some of the other technologies that are evolving, does suggest that the mirror world will be far richer than a 3D version of a bunch of buildings, that it will have layers of data far different than how we think of information on “flat” Web pages, and that as these forms of visualization expand and improve and eventually add avatars that we’ll be opening up a new language for conceptualizing space and content.
My interest, however, as I say, is in extrapolating to immersive worlds, because its there that the deep sense of presence and, as you say, confrontation, not only allows us to access these deeper models for information display, but to combine those with avatar expression, identity, immersion, and emotion – and that it is THIS combination that will open the door to a paradigm shift that hopefully won’t go the way of the Video phone (which, by the way, CISCO is making every attempt to resurrect hehe).
It’s become so hard not to be cynical – “…steps to improve our copyright claim process…” sounds horribly like “you’ll be able to email DMCA reports instead of faxing them to us!” but doesn’t sound like they’re actually going to implement measures to reduce content-theft, decrease the time it takes to act on reports or actually remove any offending content (rather than just the vendors selling it).
Couple of additional questions:
Is it true that there were plans to move enforcement of the inworld permissions system from the client to the server ahead of open-sourcing the client code?
If so, why was the client open-sourced before this was implemented?
If this had been done would we still have as much content theft, assuming (perhaps incorrectly?) that it would have then been more difficult to hack around the permissions system?
What part, if any, did Cory Ondrejka play in these decisions?
What part, if any, did Philip Rosedale play in these decisions?
OK, maybe not the most compelling conspiracy theory but interesting suppositions anyway…
Yeah, Eris. It’s kinda sad, I find myself spending way too much time wondering what’s WRONG with them instead of what’s right, which is such a shame. Such creative people in SL, or is that inSL, and half their energies seem to go to trying to read the tea leaves of bad decisions, opaque communications, an impenetrable JIRA, poor outreach to potential and current partners (including the in world community), vague policy implementations or over-wrought ones, changes that are announced with much fanfare and then quietly dropped (age verification), etc.
Thank goodness Torley is being left alone to put out great tutorials and Sidewinder seems to be cut from the Google rather than the Linden cloth.
I’m goin to New York – maybe there’s someone down at the conference with some new cool toy to play around with, because fiddling with legal/TOS changes isn’t so much fun.
On 04.02.08 TomasG said:
It’s possible that they may have a problem with using the TOS to ban someone over the branding issue.
If they did ban someone using the TOS and the person they banned had the where with all to sue, there is case law that has declared the TOS is a “contract of adhesion” at least as far as it concerned the arbitration clause, the same might hold true in such a case.
(Jeez, did that sentence make any sense?)
Perhaps, they have already opened that Pandora’s Box.
Simulation games have always appealed to me, but I dream of seeing them go so much further in the ultimate gaming mash up someday. Imagine a platform similar to Second Life, or The Sims. The foundation of it is controlling your avatar/character, inhabi…
On 04.02.08 Alberik said:
I doubt that a lawyer advised them to incorporate the IP claims into the TOS. IP claims run against the whole world. TOS claims run against parties to the contract.
One problem is the contract of adhesion issue. The other is that by using the TOS in this way they may be abandoning or abridging their intellectual property claim against he whole world in favour of a contract claim that runs only against those party to the TOS.
As lawyers, the Lindens make great software engineers. As public relations people, the Lindens make great software engineers.
On 04.03.08 TomasG said:
I would question that they are great software engineers, based on their performance in that arena. Or at least on the performance of the product that they release on the world.
Threatening trademark transgressors with a ‘permaban’ is understandable on one level – really, what else have they got?
The most frustrating thing is that, while they waste time and effort on this trademark nonsense, user-content continues to get ripped off and resold inworld and they’ve barely even commented on that. So implicitly, protecting Linden trademarks is far more important than protecting the creative output of residents? That’s a PR gesture that only needs one middle finger…
On the positive side – totally agree about Sidewinder. At least someone within Linden understands how to manage a project AND the customer perception of that project, Sidewinder truly shines in this context. Torley is too uhm, saccharin for me, but he’s hard to dislike…
well teh video phone has been around now for a decade- as the webam… the main ” problem” solved was timeshifting — removing the issue of getting a video phonecall when in the shower…. althought the most prolific use for the one to one vid cam call has become again attached to nudity…lol
anyhow– attaching deep data to 3d has again been the goal for over a decade… X3D is 3d plus XML — specifically designed as the major extention of the earlier VRML language for this reason….
its success or failure though has been political and financial, now more than ever as the 3rd web3d bubble rages on and masses of newbies reinvent web3d wheels for fame and vc glory:)
every flash site is now a virtual world, and everything 3d is now avatars…..- this demo thankfully excluded- which is why i dont see it as a future of the metaverse interface, but only , and it seem we agree, as a single presentation interface that may or may not offer any real power vs many others that will be shown.
On 04.03.08 paiskidd said:
I think it is interesting that Nortel took a look at SL. I think their angle is more how to create a pull for their own technology and services than to make use of virtual worlds for their corporate machinations, but I could be misreading.
I don’t think that the kind of event he describes – a virtual auditorium filled with people in a lecture mode for presentation – is a great strength of SL. The talks (that were probably similar to the Nortel event) I went to last weekend in SL were not a great experience, other than the ability to ask questions (via chat). Thus, there was interactivity and immediacy as a plus, but lag/slow-rez as a minus. (for instance, none of the slides were visible until half way through because of slow-rezzing).
I do teleconferences, video teleconferences, webcasts, ‘live meeting’, and so forth constantly. I also have to travel for meetings, and regret the time, cost, and carbonfoot print of jetting to meetings. We could really use better ways to meet that don’t require travel, but I can’t say that being an avatar at a meeting will help. I was hopeful to gain insight as to how this may have been attempted in this Nortel experiment, but am not seeing it yet. Still looking…
* Pais now begins to meditate using the mantra: “use the right tool for the task” *
Interesting here in New York Pais that a few of the big “sell points” of some of the technologies is the interface with other communication channels. Looked at one platform where you are in a virtual space and can make a phone call – a little cell phone pops open, you dial the number, and it connects you from within the world by phone. Similarly, you can TAKE a call from within the world.
The other issue is that until SL includes proper document sharing and porting in of external content, like PowerPoint pages etc. a proper collaborative space is tricky. Rivers Run Red has done a little app that uses a Web work-around and HTML on a prim I believe, which also gets us a little closer.
I talked to Glen at the SL booth about HTML on a prim and this very issue of bringing in content, and while he made some nice murmurs about it, I’m under the impression that its proven to be a tougher nut to crack than they may have initially thought (and hey, there’s been a project kicking around for years now, check the JIRA or is it the WIKI). Security holes and the challenge, as Glen said, of landing in a sim and having 200 prims floating around with Web pages is a danger. He made the interesting point however that what they’re looking at is having TEXTURES load the pages.
The combination of seamless voice properly integrated with phones, a light client, and the ability to pull documents, PPT, whatever into the space starts to make it feel like what companies want – a 3D version of a Web meeting.
I’m sort of fascinated, as you know, with the “stuff” beyond that, which is acclimatizing companies to start thinking about projects, collaboration, ideas and concepts in 3D itself rather than just thinking of 3D worlds as a stand-in and slightly clunkier version than a meat space session, whether we’re saving the planet or not (and even on this topic, there’s debate of course).
So, in the short term – some improved technologies, especially integrating with voice and phone, other platforms that may do virtual meetings a lot better than SL, with SL sort of limping along patching some stuff on top, but holding on, in my opinion, to its deeper potential as a creative, conceptual space that won’t just change how we have meetings, but how we think about what we usually talk about or learn at those meetings.
[...] IBM’s “gated” SL communities Posted on April 3, 2008 by Morris Vig IBM announced that they will be hosting private sims on the SL grid, but on their servers in their server farms. Personally, I couldn’t care less. Let the business-types mingle amongst themselves, which is somewhat in line with what Dusan Writer says. [...]
I have an ad-blocker running in my web-browser so that i never have to see click-able ad’s which i’ll never click on.
So i won’t need an ad-blocker in SL? I’ll just learn to avoid all ad-embedded furniture. I’ll also learn to avoid the crowds of anonymous penniless noobs desperately clicking on sky-high piles of free furniture.
Haha that’s what I said to them Eris, asking whether it isn’t just a glorified sort of camping. They claim they’ve built something in that, I suppose, limits how many clicks or something. Although really, it seems like it’s so hackable and ridiculous. Surely they’re smart enough to realize that sims will start piling up clickable junk – kind of like camping piles but in this case someone else pays!
Great article, Dusan. The fun I had reading it made up for the frustration I shared in your description of what appears to be a dysfunctional family called “Linden”.
If it makes you feel any better Pais, at least the IBM guys are fun to hang with….like little kids, cooing and gushing and sometimes burping on your shirt, holding up little rattles or teddy bears to you with this kind of wonder at their offering (and the ability to even be able to offer it).
For all the talk about Big Blue and hiding sims behind their magic wall, the people themselves are truly hobby-like in their enthusiasm, which doesn’t mean that they don’t plan to make money at it (they were quite frank about it, in fact, in a totally transparent and almost delightful way, kind of like, well, kids who get a second dessert) just that they’re a lot more peppy and invigorated than the others.
Hmm. This is turning into a post of its own I think. I always feel like people view IBM with suspicion and I’ve never understood why. “Corporate campers” I think Prok calls them. I’d better double check my analysis – maybe they’re more Stepford than I realize. In the meantime, gotta clean that drool off my shoulder and call it a conference.
Remotely monitoring conversations within Second Life is against the TOS, so perhaps there’s something that could be done with this, but my understanding is that they are going to try to find landlords or owners who will allow these signs and objects to be deployed inworld in SL.
So the first thing to do is to ban Ancient Shriner, the avatar associated with this awful scheme that is going to scrape data from people without their knowing and consent, from all appearances, and tape their conversations for “buzz words. You can do that much as a sign of protest. And also it makes sense to refrain from buying ad space or deploying the signs on your land.
Ancient Shriner is already defacing Second Life everywhere with huge, ugly ad towers with taunting textures about “land fascists” who protest against the signs, and ads for cheapy Internet sites and gadgets that aren’t even inworld businesses. He didn’t put the land to sale, so technically you can’t make the new ad policy the Lindens have “stick”. Still, since he claims he is willing to take down some of these towers or minimize them or have only one per sim (he said all three things to me but none of them are true — all the signs are still in place), he should be asked to do it.
Likely nothing less than a class action suit against these people in RL would work and that has its complications.
Interesting interpretation of what was being said. Unfortunatly one key element of the entire Slippcat program was forgotten or ignored – one that is probably an essential element of Slippcat – “Empowered Engagement” A buzzword yes, but alos a philosophical change in advertising.
WIth the Slippcat system – all control is put in the hands of the user. The user (consumer) has no obligation to click on an object. They are not being forced to stare at ugly billboards, noisy television sets or any other form of push advertising. With Slippcat the user can choose to pull information from an object – and even then they can choose what degree of information they want from an object.
As for content developers hating us – perhaps those who compete with us in making branded items without the permission of the brand owners – but the developers who are building one of a kind unique items, the ones who are creating innovative, eye catching designs that break from the norm – we not only do not compete with them but applaud them.
These virtual worlds open the door for so much creativity, so much experimentation that the best always stands out – and who knows – perhaps soon that degree of excellence may well result in real life recognition – beyond a pat on the back and a hearty well done, but into a design contract with a real life company.
Instead of using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway, we can really draw them into everyday lives by using them as extentions of our lives – making virtual worlds as indespensable as e-mail.
Sorry but this Slippcat nonsense has made me laugh more then anything else SL-related in months, good since it was all getting a bit serious and depressing.
It won’t work. You cannot gather marketing information worth a damn from anonymous users or from users who go to extraordinary creative lengths to maintain an alternative identity for themselves. You’d be counting clicks for no reason whatsoever except that someone might pay you to count them – except they won’t, no-one with a marketing budget of any value is that dumb.
Advertising at its best can be an extraordinarily creative form of communication. This is not advertising, it’s spam dressed as furniture. Trying to justify spam with buzz-words, promises of new frontiers or any other marketing bull-doodoo is just silly. Who do you think will want that new couch which repeatedly offers to make your penis larger…unless, of course, it actually can?
Why would a big-name retailer pay you to pay users to click furniture to get paid? What are you delivering to the retailer except empty clicks? There is a model for this that just might work (it’s one i prepared earlier: http://nautilina.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/never-out-of-stock/ ), it’s called “Selling People Stuff They Want to Buy” (excuse the jargon) and it’s quite successful sometimes because apparently the end-user gives YOU money and not the other way around. I know it’s radical, a philosophical change you might say, but think about it…
A utopian hideaway? So far, that seems to be what a lot of people want – do you think everyone stands around wishing the advertising would hurry up and get here? It’s really a bit pathetic if this is all we can come up with – apply click-thru advertising to virtual worlds…sigh…
There are ways to advertise and market in virtual worlds, the Greenies build is maybe the most obvious example to date – but of course to achieve that high standard you actually need to have some original ideas and talent, the two things apparently missing from Slippcat.
A click-thru ad (or its equivalent) now referred to as “Empowered Engagement” is really very funny. If a career in virtual spam falls thru’ then maybe try stand-up comedy? Maybe we could be a double act…
Antony, I applaud your recognition of in world content developers. Your idea of finally somehow making that bridge between the virtual and the real (with a virtual couch being the first step in hitting the highway to IKEA) is intriguing, if you can pull it off (but better watch out for all those slap happy utopians!)
But look, and in all fairness, I miss a lot. Ask anyone.
I’m usually the last one to understand a joke. People say stuff and I just sort of stare blankly, I have this delayed reaction thing going on.
And to top it off there was a lot of terminology at the conference that left me baffled so obviously I’m not the most trustworthy interpreter of what was said. (Can you forward some definitions for me please for: monetizing the space, measuring engagement, and intentional transparency?)
So help me out here, because I wonder how my “interesting interpretation” (very kind of you to find it interesting) missed a key element, or which elements I’m reading into all of this that are erroneous?
You say that I missed “Empowered Engagement”. By which you say it’s a revolution in advertising – push, not pull. Consumer choice! Levels of engagement, based on their own desires and needs and preferences.
So just fill me in a little more on that part first. Because how is that MORE choice than, say a banner ad? And if I’m watching TV (I have a remote, so it’s not so hard to choose to engage and disengage with that really either), and one of those ads comes on advertising Chia Pets don’t I have a choice to call it? Or to visit their Web site and order it?
Oh, or say I’m walking down the street, and I pass a store, and there’s a display in the window about a sale but it doesn’t give a lot of detail, just says “Sale”, don’t I have a choice whether to walk into the store to find out more? And once I’m in the store don’t I have a choice to buy?
And P.S. – if you’ve ever seen a line-up outside of A&F then you’ll know that there’s something very, um, engaging to the people who shop there, so you can’t claim that it’s lacking that.
Just fill in the blanks for me, because at each step in any of those chains – banner ad, 1-800 number, retail store – I have the choice as a consumer to more deeply engage with the brand experience. In what way does Slippcat differ from that again?
So then that second thing. If this is all pull and no push, is information EVER gathered on consumers/avatars without their choice or explicit permission? Do you use the avatar “look at” coordinates to track eyeballs on a sign for example? Do you gather any “buzz words” from the public chat on what was said in the vicinity of a sign or item? Do you ever link back to a user ID number? Do users who have been tracked get flagged that they’ve been tracked? Is there an opt-in/opt-out process for collecting this data? Do you share this data on request with anyone from whom it has been collected?
Because if there’s data being collected, even without it being connected to an avatar’s name, then there’s *some* stuff that’s *NOT* pull isn’t there? You’re collecting stuff from people and it’s not because they are ‘empowered and engaged’ it’s because they’re standing NEAR something.
And if they happen to be cuddling on their couch at home and mention a few buzz words in the vicinity, well…I suppose those buzz words might be engaging to some people, and others kind of like being looked at and listened to, but others maybe not so much.
It’s sort of interesting timing, because there was an editorial in the New York Times today about how Web companies are keeping a lot more data than they let on. I’m sure you read it, but a few little clips:
“(Technology companies) are spying on you. …(They’re) record(ing) the sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter into search engines – information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. …
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting’.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting…The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment – guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure – at a time when most were concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies…(and) have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.”
And finally, I’m going to leave it to others to comment on how we should stop using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway. I’ve been mistaken for an augmentationist so I don’t have a lot of street cred in that respect (although I beg to differ and feel I immerse with the best of them).
But I will say that virtual worlds do offer us a form of utopia, because they allow us to imagine different futures, and to explore the possibilities of living, thinking, working and playing within different conceptual models, including the one where advertisers aren’t measuring every click and move, and my furniture doesn’t hand out Lindens like coins stuck between the cushions to every friend who pops by for tea.
@ Eris – geez thanks…now I have to get an MBA to understand this new “Selling People Stuff They Want to Buy” idea (which book was that in? I suspect Tom Peters but maybe it hasn’t hit the shelves yet??)
Haven’t you HEARD Eris? The future is free! Says so in Wired! The inventors of the Long Tail! (I have only BEGUN to debunk!
Anyways, I trust the MTV lady, who made the very valid point that we’re suckers for buying stuff because it helps to make us feel SPECIAL. And we all wanna feel special. And I don’t want to feel like I have to hide the furniture or plead with friends not to click it in order to cover for the fact that my pad is decked out with freebies that spit out payola.
I really wish that line worked though:
“Hey, come over to my place and experience the FUTURE of advertising. Yeah! Just click on my couch, and you’re glimpsing the next Google, baby.”
Somehow I see a lot of eye-rolling going on in addition to comments like “Oh, you finally got that thing to WORK did you” or “It’s not one of those Xcite compatible deals is it?”
(Um, not me, I mean people LIKE me would have friends like that).
OK, I’m off to come up with the NEW NEW future of advertising. I’ve been mulling around this idea about how you could get a LOT of attention if you interrupted events, like the Super Bowl, say, with branded messages. Forget push and pull, how about trap and slap! Just need a virtual world application – what about commercially sponsored SexGen beds that bleat out a little jingle at critical moments?
Oh Dusan… I came over at your call to read this, and now all I want to do is get into a really hot shower, scrub myself until I’m raw, find a way to scrub my brain until all memories of this… Slippcat… are gone, curl up under my duvet and never, ever wake up again to face a world containing people like that. This is beyond frightening an disgusting both.
I know I’m being tracked down and measured every time I pay my shopping in a supermarket. They analyse the things I buy, they know my patterns, they send me coupon codes for discounts on “just the products” I buy more often. I know this goes on all the time.
I also know that Google scans my Gmail account every day. Besides eliminating spam (for which I’m thankful!), they create a profile for me, and now target ads better, about things I’m potentially interested in. I even give them permission to do so — I’m usually logged in on Google Accounts when googling in, well, Google. So I know that the list of links I get as results is different from yours. Our tastes differ, and I get “targetted marketing” for it. For Google, I’m just an account — an email address — but they can tell their advertisers what exactly I like to see on the Internet.
The same happens with eBay and Amazon. They know what I like, what I search, and dynamically profile me, and present me the things I usually buy online.
I also know that Twitter has just one purpose — getting better tracking data. They have no other business model. They don’t sell ads (most people use Twitter-compatible thingies to tweet, and never bother to look at the site anyway, so ads are pretty worthless on their site anyway). They don’t sell “upgrade packages” (”now increase the number of characters you can tweet to your friends to 750 per message!”). No — all they do is scan what I type, link it to my email address, and sell the profile to online advertisers.
This goes on with practically everything I do on the Internet, and has been going on for quite some time. Sure, they might not know my real name and my real address — but they know, every time I log in “somewhere” on the Internet, what my tastes are. I’m tracked and profiled. I’m part of several marketing databases. I get targetted spamming. I can’t avoid it — unless, of course, I delete all my accounts and start from scratch (and even so, I’d be quickly tracked again).
Except on Second Life.
Now, well, the market opportunity is just too great to avoid. Sure, you can’t know what information an “avatar name” cointains — Linden Lab protects your real name. But — really?
All you need it to have sensors sending media parcel URLs to your avatar — that are no media parcel URLs at all, but links to external web servers which can easily check on your IP address. Combine that to a different database where you are, say, logged in with your Google Account or Yahoo ID, and it’s quite likely marketeers will be able to find a match. Run this for a while, and you, as a marketeer, will be pretty good at finding out avatar’s IP addresses (which will give you an approximate location) and their email addresses (from anywhere on eBay, Amazon, Google, or Yahoo).
So if I start buying a lot of shoes in SL, I might suddenly find out that Amazon starts displaying fashion books on the top of my searches, and DVDs like “The Devil Wears Prada”. eBay will automatically send me updates for shoes found for sale there. Yahoo and Google will suddenly display ads for Dolce & Gabbanna shoes. I might not relate the two things for a while, but… isn’t it something that marketeers would just love to have?
The technology is there. I don’t think we’re going to be able to avoid that — specially in Second Life, where it is so easy to do integration with external servers — like we can’t avoid to be tracked every time we visit a search engine or an online shopping guide. I wouldn’t call that “stupid” or “ridiculous” or “silly” or a “waste of money”. Marketeers know that their profiling data is not 100% accurate: I might one day search for virtual worlds, the next day on the current fashion in eye shadow colours, then the latest news from Apple, and finally do a random search for a Bible quote. What will the profiler be able to get out of this data? Will they present me ads for nice, discreet Macs in my favourite colour, that can be personally engraved with messages like “God Is Love”? Very likely, not. Tracking doesn’t work like that, and you require a bit more profile data to get a more accurate picture. Even if I’m no way near to look like a 20-something years old redhead in RL — and 99% of what I might buy in SL will never affect my decisions of what I can buy in RL — that is not an issue. Tracking software can still get some preferences out of my SL experience. They might be able to pick out my favourite colours. They might be able to figure out that I’m a “quick shopper” — spending more time looking at clothes than actually wearing them. They might see that I’m keen on following advice from fashion blogs — ie. I might be logged on WordPress, watch a fashionista blog, and then immediately go in-world, every time my favourite fashion advisor in SL puts up a picture of something in purple or beige. It doesn’t mean that I’m likely to buy mini-skirts in SL. But it can help marketing profilers to understand that I tend to buy beige or purple things.
So… do I like the idea that I’m being constantly tracked? Certainly not. Can I do anything about it? Probably not — we’ve lost that war on the Web, we will lose it on virtual worlds as well. Does it seriously hurt my privacy? Well, it’s a difficult question to answer. If it’s opt-in, it’s ok; if it provides at least an opt-out feature, it’s acceptable. If I can’t avoid it (the most likely case), it’s different — but I might not be able to do anything about it.
As to the virtual worlds suddenly targetting kids and teens… well… I have my thoughts about it. Teens are a market since they have money to spend and are easily persuaded/convinced (curiously enough, in my country, recently legislation was passed to limit certain ads specifically targeted to children, since they cannot understand the difference between “truth” an an “ad”). However, I always wondered why marketeers are so keen on the teen market — their money, even if easily spent, is limited by their parents’ budget. On the other hand, the 40+ market is so much more interesting: most people will have a stable life and enough money to spend — far more than the average teenager. They are, however, much more careful buyers. Interestingly enough, the small game developers (the ones selling millions of games with a low budget, but highly addictive, and charging US$10-20 with an easy download) are curiously aggressively targeting the female gamers, who have been seriously neglected by the first person shooters and other action-destruction games out there. Strange that this market goes unexplored in virtual worlds — when in Second Life it’s clear that the content for female avatars still surpasses what’s available for the male ones, both in quantity, quality, and even cost. Well, that’s what you get on a sales-driven economy — content designers in SL create what is sellable, not what marketeers think will sell!
My surprise is not that so many different “virtual worlds for kids” are popping up. They know that teenagers have very short attention spans, and will hop crazily across all these new options — while they get bored with SL after a few minutes (see how small the Teen Grid is, when compared to the Adult Grid). Whereas Second Life tends to have much older people around — who stay around for years, and are constantly consuming content and very well willing to pay for it.
I still find it ironic, Gwyn, that the New York Time chimed in on this issue today, giving some intriguing examples of how all this tracking ALSO plays out, in addition to the D&G shoe ads:
“The information, however, gets…a lot more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (”Hmm…I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”)
There is..no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS. It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it).”
Now, in Second Life we have the veil of anonymity. HOWEVER, Van Zyl is imploring us:
“Instead of using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway, we can really draw them into everyday lives by using them as extentions of our lives – making virtual worlds as indespensable as e-mail.”
So, here’s the thing…first time you click that couch, and then decide to go to that Web site where more information about the couch is available, well…you’re now part of the big old Internet data stream, and suddenly all your in-world purchases and clicks can theoretically be connected to your very real world identity.
The FTC is calling for self regulation. That’s fine. But its also been suggested that a “do-not-track” list be established for those who prefer to opt out. Clear standards for opting in. Guidance as to what information is collected, what the rules should be about selling it and sharing it, and what the rights of the person being tracked are in the same regard.
I’m all for metrics. Companies have a right to measure the success of their spend. But I also want the right to opt out, to know when I’m in a space where I AM being measured (much as you KNOW when you’re using Google), and have access to clear privacy and data collection policies of the companies doing the collecting.
As for the content developers, I hope they all take heart in his hope that the excellent product they create “may well result in real life recognition – beyond a pat on the back and a hearty well done, but into a design contract with a real life company”.
Finally, I don’t mean to imply, if I did, that any of what Slippcat is doing is a waste of money for the advertisers. It’s a nice little business model. I think if they take a great deal of care in the coming months to reach out to the content creators they might even get some product more deeply placed into the market than just a bunch of banners and kiosks and freebies, and even if they don’t it will take a very long time before anyone cares that they’re being measured except for a small circle of people who think too much, or get confused too easily (like me), and who, now that you mention it, really really needs a new pair of shoes.
Dusan, I definitely agree with you that I’m not too keen on having anyone to know when I click, for instance, by mistake, on an ad that leads to a porn website, an online casino, one that sells illegal drugs, or a paedophilia data haven — and suddenly having all bells ringing on some police station near my home. I think there have to be limits somewhere to our privacy, but I’m rather pessimistic — privacy is becoming one of the more elusive things to have these days. One day our only “opt-out” option will be to turn the computer off and disconnect it from the ‘net if we wish to make sure that nobody is doing all sorts of silly correlations with the random browsing on the Web.
At some stage we could still claim that nobody could do those correlations fast enough, with the terabytes and terabytes of data out there. Now Google stores 6 billion websites — in memory! — and can locate millions of links in less than a fifth of a second.
There’s one thing Slippcat and the other meta-scavengers seems to be missing in all their plans to “monetize the space”. We, the residents, have the same build tools they do – and in some less-reputable cases, better tools. If they introduce spam-furniture or some other unwelcome marketing device then how long before some copybot-wielding resident strips that functionality out of the object and makes it available everywhere in neutered form? My guess would be about 20 minutes and altho i’d condemn any other content theft within SL i think i’d be cheering that one on – hypocritical i know!
I’m not against advertising or marketing within SL, just make it good advertising. I think it’s like the difference between the junk mail that lands on your doormat and the IKEA (or any other furniture retailer’s) catalogue you picked up in-store. They’re both advertising but one is welcome, giving you information you want, while the other is unsolicited, probably badly targeted and wasteful of resources. If advertisers and marketeers can provide compelling and engaging advertising within virtual worlds then great, but virtual equivalents of junk mail or will fail every time.
This nonsense just won’t work in SL – altho it might in other virtual worlds, particularly (sadly) the ones populated by kids. Maybe one of the most unique things about SL is the fact that its population is so uniquely armed to defend itself from these kind of (potentially unwelcome) incursions?
On 04.07.08 Corcosman Voom said:
“it seems like it’s so hackable”
Perhaps we can expect a continual parade of Clickbots collecting their limit of lindens then instantly coming back with a new identity. The humans may get squeezed completely off the grid.
And the Lab will have huge numbers of new signups to point to – “More than eight billion new accounts in the last 90 days!”
And as a follow-up comment, I’m stuck with a whack of sims at the old price. It’s a major chunk of change, sure. And I understand why people might feel like they’ve had the wind knocked out of their sails. I suppose I feel lucky, was about to order 4 more, so I seemed to have timed my hesitation OK. Unfortunately for some, real estate in SL isn’t so much as an investment as space upon which to develop assets and services. I haven’t thought through the economics of SL deeply enough to know whether this is a bad thing, just have the feeling it’s an inevitable one.
On 04.08.08 HoobeeyuHoobinoo said:
We need to organize some virtual civil disobedience, form a players’ union.
I should call myself lucky because all land but 6144sqm on my SIMs is sold – the decrease in SIM value doesn’t hit me but parcel owners. I already got my initial investment back – and now really praise myself that from start on I gave buyers a much lower monthly cost to pay than renters, encouraging them to buy and not rent.
It all points to OpenCroquet. This is a open source virtual world api and engine, which can run incorporate external content, and operate point-to-point or client-server. I don’t understand why it is not catching on faster than it seems to be. http://opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
What a GREAT article… you really captured my feelings of the last 4 months in a way I’ve been looking to word them, but I guess I won’t need to now
Yes the ‘metaverse’ is still being developed, no its not ready for mainstream, yes a lot of empty promises are being made, no it won’t be ready tomorrow, yes it will take time to find application to create a valuable contribution to everyday life by individual projects, no there is nothing wrong with the commerce taking place – just don’t conclude a failure of the platform because they fail to address their audiences, yes its time to look further then just Second Life, no you won’t create critical mass just because you tell ‘the masses’ to rush in.
Croquet rocks. There’s so much heart and effort going into it, the tutorials being put up are wonderful, it’s a really shining community of developers. And the architecture is genius. Unfortunately, and I think it’s recognized by the developers themselves, its coming across as by academics for academics, other than the work of Qwak which does the stuff you say but doesn’t have avatar expression. It DOES have integration of external elements…HTML, documents, PPT, video, worlds within worlds, etc. But somehow the resistance point by the developers to figure out whether/how/if it should be montetized at all might be hampering buy-in by the larger corporations (for now, anyways).
If Qwak was joined by another, sort of a Red Hat Linux kind of thing and if the development community could come up with a plan to attract more talent, I think Croquet has legs…it’s brilliant. Especially for things like 3D visualization, and more advanced applications, and now with Blender being patched in there’s some very cool stuff happening. (Can someone explain how Cobalt fits in though? And I mean that as a total newbie question).
Plus, Croquet is scaleable, and the P2P thing is genius.
Great platform. And advocacy towards academia, which is fine, because companies will catch on sooner or later. Rumour is that Cisco might buy out Qwak, maybe that will give it the boost it needs.
This is an interesting one, been back and forth over it. Ultimately more people owning more land in SL has to be a good thing, so from that viewpoint it’s great.
I have to welcome it from a selfish standpoint too, i’ve been dithering about buying my first island for 2 years – i think this just swayed the decision slightly! Life Lesson: be more patient, sometimes it pays.
On the downside, I can’t escape the feeling Linden just did to land-dealers what they do to ripped-off content-creators every other day. Still, maybe it’s all to the common good?
I think a more significant announcement and one that goes hand in hand with the price drop is the change with regard to openspace sims. Get 4 times the land area now 512x 512 meters & the same number of prims, 15000 for the same dollar as an old small sim. Why would you want to be on a crowded Mainland sim and have to rez all that shit. By distributing content over 4 times the area, you get less lag.
@jeanricard: It will be interesting to see if they change the price for the open space SIMs too. They just made them a fair deal a few weeks ago, if they want them to stay a fair deal, they have to lower them to 250 USD too. I’m really waiting for the next blog post about that, Jack announced one for maybe even today.
On 04.09.08 James Morgan said:
@jeanricard…As I understand it, when you buy an Open Space sim, the processor that it is tied to may not be on the same server as your other sims. Meaning that you may get unlucky enough to have one sim linked with 3 others that have a bunch of laggy scripts and drags the processor speed (and your sim) down with it.
Personally, I think when you buy land in SL to rent out or flip, then you are speculating. And there are risks so you should be prepared for them. Anyone who goes into speculative activities without the thought that they may lose their shirts is extremely naive.
I have a feeling, although I’m not sure (too lazy to look it up, it’s gray and rainy and it leaves me thoughtful but unproductive) that if you buy 4 Open Space sims they put them on the same server.
But one of the things I’m curious about is if the sims are spread across 4 “regions” does each region support 40 avatars? Or does it support 10/region. (Or whatever the number is, can’t remember the max per region, and I realize it adjusts for other things).
If each Open Space region supports 40, it would mean that one server could support 160 users and 15,000 prims. If an Open Space region only support 1/4 of the user limit, is 10 sufficient, or does the entire server itself support 40? In which case, if you’re sharing an Open Space region with someone else on the same server, what if they reach the 40 limit? Are you left locked out of your empty Open Space region because it’s “full”?
Daniel – maybe you can clarify, I think you know more about this than some of us!
On 04.10.08 sachamagne said:
I think it’s kinda freaking that pple want rely they RL life income based on a GAME. SL is a game after all!
I’m still astonished when pple take SL business that seriously. How pple can pretend to “invest” Real money in a world that could be switch off in less than a minut ( sudo init 0) ?
Investment means Cash and Benefits. Do you know any REAL market that could only bring benefits ? Their is always a looser for a winner…
I’m not a landlord, just a brat that have fun with few sims I owns. I knew it will be a loss the minut I order them and I don’t intend to make any profit renting them too. For my daily living I got a Real Job !
Linden made a good move with the cost reduction. The ticket will lure pple to buy new sims that will give LL more montly revenue !
I have very mixed feelings about both the price reduction and the clarification with that small “peace offering” to those who bought within the last few days.
For fun and self users the price drop is great. For land business it might be a killer, especially reading some comments like “How cool, I now will buy a SIM/a pack of SIMs and start a land business.” – they only see the purchase price and not the monthly costs that are the real killer. Land business isn’t an automatic gold mine. I see lots of new estate land showing up – but where are all the new folks who have to rent/buy on those new SIMs to cover the monthly costs for the estate owner? In german we have a saying “zuviele Häuptlinge – zuwenig Indianer —- too many chiefs, too little indians”. Competition, that already is hard in the land business, will get worse. Some will even offer below cost rents/tiers to keep the monthly loss by empty land as low as possible. Within a couple of months quite a few of the over optimistic new landlords will realize that it doesn’t work out, they will give up, might even abandon their SIMs just to not having to pay next months 295 USD. This will not only be bad for them, but for their parcel renters/owners too, who will be left with nothing when LL reclaims the SIMs.
There is quite a bit of gloating about the bad big real estate companies who sell/rent out estate land. Well, folks, with competition going up and rents/tiers going down: will they still be able to offer great public freebies for their renters/parcel owners, like free parks, landscaping and so on? When they have to lower their rents/tiers, they might have to take away those benefits and just sell/rent out 100 percent of their land to make months end.
Now to the peace offering to recent buyers. I’m especially upset about the more or less non-existing offer for those who bought open space SIMs after the recent policy change in march. LL dragged hundreds of people into buying them at 415 USD within a single month – and now they lower the price to 250 with offering a reparation for only a fraction of them who bought within the last few days. Yes, concierge says “you can give them back if you gout them in the last 30 days, we won’t even take the usual 100 USD restocking fee, then you can buy again at the lower price” – but honestly: I put so many hours of work into my private new one, I would be nuts to give it up and do all the work again to get 165 USD back. LL hopes that many think that way and just swallow the pill. There would be such an easy solution: just give all those, who bought after the policy change (and often only BECAUSE of that policy change) another 2 months with out the 75 USD monthly fee. Why this stupid chaos of “give back, get your money back, buy new”? Heck, even if they would only offer a single month without fee it would be a great sign of respect for those who put lots of real money into LL. (Especially with the performance bug for open space SIMs introduced with H4 that made them not really usuable for 10 or more days now and only will be cleaned up with the next server software update.)
Oh well. Looking back at how LL made decisions during my time here I have to say: business as usual.
Danny
On 04.10.08 icha said:
“How pple can pretend to “invest” Real money in a world that could be switch off in less than a minut ( sudo init 0) ?” Yes, I wonder about this too. Why, for example, does Microsoft want to buy Yahoo? Don’t they realize it can be switched off in less than a minute? It scares me to death to put my money in the bank for the very same reason. I always ask the teller about the “less than a minute” factor and they reassure me that it isn’t in the bank’s interest to arbitrarily shut down their computers even if it were to take less than a second (pull plug from wall)! I am glad that I am not the only one who feels this way. I was starting to feel like an isolated, paranoid basement dweller.
I wonder why they’re only thinking about selling “real-life items.”
Imagine if “Billboards of Edmonton, Inc.” only let you advertise things not sold in Edmonton!
On 04.10.08 sachamagne said:
Real banks are protected by laws, at least in my country.
I remembered the “.com” phenomen when everybody should have been billionair within a day. We know how it end.
My company I work for recently bought a competitor. Most of the pple their complain their “stock options” worth nothing and wasn’t included in the deal… Actually they want to sue the new comp to claim compensation… funny…
Is it written somewhere that stock-options are real money ?
I doubt so… So is SL, a Game
I was sorta just making fun rather than trying to make a substantive point. I concede that running a business in SL is much riskier than depositing your cash in a bank because SL’s invisible hand is often the mailed fist of Linden Lab. However, the “SL is just a GAME” meme gets under my skin because people use it as though it’s understood and agreed that “Just Games” have no value outside of consumerist notions of “fun”.
I don’t like to compartmentalize my psyche in the manner the “just a game” crowd thinks is the only and “healthy” way to organize our reality. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I did try to buy a candy bar with Monopoly money when I was a kid. Perhaps my confusion started then.
Maybe Linden should put the ‘The Love Machine’ on the web so we can all click on it – altho’ it might need a ‘Kelis Button’ (”I hate you so much right now!”) fitted on it too?
With all my respect to you, I don’t quite understand your point, Dusan. Let me list some topics you were discussing in this article with a short comment.
1. THERE IS NO TECHNOLOGY and CAN NEVER BE that would protect content in a way you are asking for. In order to be rendered on your screen ALL objects and images MUST be decoded inside your viewer no matter what encryption or anything would be used. Even if LL wouldn’t open the source code of their viewer it would be reverse-engineered by someone, ‘patched’ and those ‘patches’ would be selling in the same way as they sell ‘decoders’ to the videogame boxes (if I remember the statistics right about 70% of UK gamers use them). THERE IS NO SUCH THING as ‘copy-protection’ in digital world and will never be. That’s the REALITY (for more than 2 decades). Why LL is to blame personally for this FACT? I don’t quite get it, sorry.
2. IMHO, land is not an ‘idea’, it’s a METAPHOR. You and many people (some of the 13 million, maybe even the majority) feel comfortable with this METAPHOR… how about the rest 6 something billion people on this planet? Are you sure they like it as much as you do? And it’s not quite true by the way… it’s not the ‘land’ that counts in SL, it’s SPACE and the ability to build or buy something, place it there (in that space you own) and ‘OWN’ it. So, the psychologically important is the ’sense of ownership’ in SPACE/items and their persistense (you log off but you know that IT’S ALL THERE). This sense of ownership doesn’t depend on price. So, basically, the END USERS, who don’t create, they just build a composition of objects and environment… they don’t give a s…t about ‘price’, oh! no! they do, they want it to be FREE as everything else on the Internet pretty much IS (didn’t you notice?).
3. As to the ‘economy’ argument… did you EVER consider to balance the real expences ABSOLUTELY necessary to build a CIVILIZED business in VW with a customer support, fast response, personnel talking to people in a civilized way and the amount of money that it MAY make? The examples of content and services built in SL so far don’t impress me, sorry, they are all built on a principle: “My clients SWALLOW what I do ‘as it is’, I can not and will not do anything else, it would be too expensive”. Hence the abandoned vendors, IM me, I will log-in in no more than a couple of hours… Is it a ‘business’? Nope. It’s a PATCH, or ‘lemonade stand’ if you liked that mepaphor more. There’s no sufficient DEMAND for products and services to build a CIVILIZED business, I’m telling you. Some people had a DREAM, that as soon as the ‘mass customer’ will come to SL there WILL be enough demand – it hasn’t happened so far, maybe it will, but I think that the main obstacle were technical limitations (maximum number of avatars in the sim in the first place).
So… really… what’s your point, Dusan? You want to suggest an alternative program supported by numbers? I mean REAL program. Please do it ASAP.
I don’t believe content can be protected, which doesn’t mean people can’t try, I just don’t think I’m going to be getting into the IP business any time soon.
Space/land…same thing, not sure what you mean? I call it an idea, you call it metaphor, I call it land you call it space.
I’m not sure which “economy argument” you’re referring to? You sound as if you’re referring to a discussion of how real world companies can make money in SL? I’m referring to the fact that for all the discussion about servers and open source and all those copiable objects that the only real economy that matters is the marketplace for ideas.
And as far as I can tell, I wasn’t offering any prescriptives, either for Linden Labs, businesses, coders or others. It’s just me with my spaghetti plate of thoughts, so I’m afraid that for this post I have nothing to offer as far as alternatives.
It’s just my little window into the issues of the day in SL, by virtue of which it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I don’t give a lot of guidance on where it’s going, and it’s time for me to crash now, so we’ll have to pick this up in the morning.
I found this to be an interesting article (although I’m not sure all your ‘future’ predictions are dead on target… ).
Virtual Worlds (and our one especially) are indeed more about creativity and ideas than any first life world will ever be. It’s easy to have luxury here, so there’s no point in gaining as much (virtual) wealth as you can. Land is (fairly) cheap, so there’s no much status to achieve by owning a lot. It’s the ideas and how you execute it that count. I’m am bound to be more impressed by someone who can build, script, animate, … than by someone who has 50k L$ on his balance to spend.
PS. Microsoft pontificating on what the Metaverse should be, which is a mirror world, but hopefully shinier with a proprietary operating system. => LMPAO! Lovely sentence. =)
My apologies, Dusan if the question about your personal suggestions sounded ‘aggressive’ or something, but it’s just about time to abandon thea Wicked Witch of the Second Life style FOREVER and start talking POSITIVELY, you know?
What would you suggest as a reasonable program for SL (and other VW) development? How should they proceede in your opinion?
Also, you came up with a brilliant words once: “a platform for story-telling”. That’s a great achievement, I can tell you. Now, here’s a couple of questions in this regard:
1. WHO will be telling stories?
2. WHAT kind of a stories that might be?
Prompt: Success stories of a “How I made my first million in Second Life” kind are not an option, it’s OVER.
Awwww what a nice way to wake up, reading your replies.
And yeah, I was a bit cranky Alex. I’m sooooo tired of all the crashy coding copyright moaning (not that a great deal of it isn’t justified), and I’m sorry if I sounded aggressive back or contributed to it, the whole point of my piece was to try to express what I see as the dominant moods and themes (or MY dominant moods and themes) which distracts (me at least) from the real discoveries to be had.
I’m trying to make the point that “Linden is making itself irrelevant” because we spend too much time worrying about Linden and not enough time trailing Bettina around the grid to see what tales people are telling.
My story box post is how I feel on good days, but also that the tensions produced in virtual worlds are a source of deep creativity and change.
Morning, Dusan.
Yes, I agree with you when you are talking about ‘tensions’, but… Who said it will be without them? That’s the whole point – this is a NEW THING, it is DIFFERENT (because of the highly immersive nature of the experience). Immersiveness means two things (and you can’t get one without another):
1. People get involved much more
2. If disappointed they will get frustrated MUCH MORE.
See what I mean?
Now, here’s my humble opinion: we (the people) need to LEARN how to use this thing WISELY. This in it’s turn requires us to think, discuss the possible solutions in a positive manner, make decisions (personal and as a community), ACT UPON.
What’s the main obstacle right now? Again, IMHO, the obstacle is the ANONYMITY. ‘Ideas’ are fine, but the ability to ACT upon ideas is closely related to the real life standing, abilities and resources. People who want to ’stay avatars’ – are NOT the type of ‘community’ that will ACT as a whole, see what I mean?
Also, as I said above, there’s not enough DEMAND for a grass-root growth of businesses YET. We all need to proliferate the idea of OPPORTUNITIES, available in VWs, not scare people to death with the negative experiences we all had at least once in a while.
Also, it’s high time for us all to realize that SL as many other things before is just another USEFUL TOOL for the humanity, no more, but no less! Well… it’s a powerful tool I must addmit… which only means that we all need to use it WISELY.
Personaly, I just don’t read posts on the multiple blogs I read every day apparently NOT leading to a consensus or a development of one. It’s always pretty much obvious whether a person wants to ‘change the life to better’ if you will or just to pore an ocean of personal dissatisfaction on the poor reader’s head.
So, maybe you explore the issue of anonymity and it’s consequences some day? I think – THAT is the main root of the frustrations you were talking about.
Regards.
[...] Content is Copiable, Land is Free, Long Live the Creators – Interesting pondering over Virtual Worlds by Dusan Writer. Although I don’t agree with all of her future predictions, imho, she points out some real issues and possibilities. [...]
On 04.14.08 janedoe2008 said:
EDITA KAYE, THE “SKINNY PILL FOR KIDS,” AND THE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS
There is a certain species of entrepreneur that capitalizes on the human desire for overnight solutions to intractable problems. Throughout human history, they have lurked in the shadows of the marketplace, eager to regale consumers with news of their miracle cures. In their haste to turn a profit, they often overlook minor details such as the product’s effectiveness and safety.
One might hope that our scientifically saturated era would be immune to bogus pitches, but the opposite is true. Sadly, exaggerated marketing appeals are common in the computer industry. Indeed, they seem to thrive when emerging technologies are dimly understood by the general population.
The myth of expertise camouflages holes in the huckster’s pitch, and problems remain hidden until the contract is signed and the check is cashed.
A few highly publicized scams and failures can cripple a young industry before it even has a chance to get off the ground. As an entrepreneur who cares deeply about the future of virtual worlds, I was surprised to stumble across this hyperbolic “get rich quick” rhetoric in an advertisement for Edita Kaye’s book Virtual Worlds: The Next Big Thing. My curiosity sparked, I turned to Google. Here I found a long entrepreneurial road littered with controversial products such as The Skinny Pill for Kids.”
The promotional blurb for Edita Kaye’s book breathlessly encourages readers to “Reinvent yourself. Start a business. Find a friend. Make a fortune…all this and more waits for you in virtual worlds. Join the tens of millions of virtual residents around the world who have already discovered this whole new metaverse. Everyone from kids, to corporations is going virtual!”
A self-described “Internet entrepreneur,” Edita Kaye recently emerged on the virtual world landscape as the editor of an on-line publication called iVinnie.Com. Composed almost entirely of hyperlinks to stories found in other publications, Kaye’s web site bills itself as “the number ONE virtual world news network.” But this is not Kaye’s only project. She is also the founder of the Association of Virtual Worlds (AVW). Created earlier this year, the mission of the AVW “is to serve those companies and individuals who are dedicated to the advancement of this multi-billion dollar global industry and reach out to those who have not yet found virtual worlds.” Since the beginning of the year, the organization has pumped out countless press releases, declared August 20th to be “Virtual World Day,” and launched a remarkable member-get-member campaign that has swelled the entity to more than 1,100 members.
Edita Kaye’s profile page on the AVW site describes her as the award-winning author of 16 books. Her list of publications includes Fountain of Youth: The Anti-Aging Weight Loss Program, The Skinny Pill, The Skinny Rules, and Cooking Skinny With Edita.
The rapid growth of the Association for Virtual Worlds is particularly impressive since it has been less than six years since the organization’s founder was defending her Skinny Pill for Kids on such television programs as The Today Show and Connie Chung Tonight. It has been less than five years since she incurred the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for marketing potentially dangerous nutritional supplements.
Beginning in 2000, Kaye used her promotional savvy and web expertise to market a series of weight loss supplements with names such as Skinny Pill A.M., Skinny Pill P.M., and Skinny Carbs. In 2002, she targeted her Skinny Pill for Kids at overweight youngsters, arguing that the supplement was “the FIRST thermic and herbal formula ever developed for weight loss for children 6 to 12″ and announced that it had “been created to help our children win their battle with fat.”
Such claims set off red flags, and nutritional experts soon chimed in with concerns that the pill’s ingredients (including the diuretics juniper berry and uva ursi) posed genuine risks for liver toxicity and kidney damage in children (Hopkins, 2004). On December 8, 2002, Kaye appeared on Connie Chung Tonight, defending her product against nutritional experts who characterized the supplement as “junk science.”
“The same foods that made you fat are going to make you skinny,” explained Kaye. “All you need is to have a watch to be able to tell time. In the morning, have an orange. At night, have some peanut butter. Take some of these supplements.” (CNN Transcript, 2002).
Other experts viewed things differently. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce initiated an investigation a few months later, and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations conducted a hearing on dietary supplements in June 2004. In this hearing, Keith Nayoob, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Certified Nutritionist at the Albert Einstein Medical Center testified that the information on Kaye’s site was “scientifically baseless, blatantly exploitative, and potentially very harmful to children.”
The FTC agreed with Nayoob. In a complaint filed against Kaye’s company (Fountain of Youth LLC) in a US District Court, the FTC argued that the “defendants’ law violations have injured consumers throughout the United States” and “defendants have been unjustly enriched as a result of their unlawful practices.” In Feburary 2004, a settlement with the FTC prohibited Kaye from “making any weight-loss or health benefit claims for the Skinny Pills and similar products” in the absence of “competent and reliable scientific evidence to support such claims.” The settlement included a $6 million judgment, which was suspended due to the defendants’ inability to pay.
To anyone who has worked in sales or marketing, aspects of this story may spark a twinge of recognition. Whether writing a research grant or selling a product, there is a very human temptation to puff one’s claims by stretching the limits of language.
Edita Kaye has done a remarkable job of bringing people together in a very short time. In the interests of the community that she hopes to serve, it is crucial that she shy away from the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterized her past marketing efforts.
In all sectors, is essential that virtual world proponents take great care when evangelizing the technology. This is a technology that many people view as sexist, violent, and potentially addictive. Explaining the power of virtual worlds to our colleagues and clients is a full time job in itself. The last thing we need is the additional burden of explaining away snake oil diet scams.
Let’s try to get it right this time.
On 04.14.08 dougg said:
Interesting slide show about 3d worlds online.
We saw it before in 1996, then again in 2001.
Good to see it’s still around;)
Expensive I’ll bet.
On 04.14.08 David K. said:
janedoe – I worked with Edita Kaye briefly in 2007 on her virtual worlds products, including iVinnie and the AVW. Most of my negative experiences with her were personal problems…personality conflicts and such that don’t merit any public airing.
One relevant point I can offer, however, is that Edita Kaye has never set foot into one of these virtual worlds, at least not in any fashion that was more than glancing. She does not feel it is relevant to her role in the business. This was always a huge sticking point for me: If your entire business model revolves around virtual worlds, should you not at least be familiar with a few of the hundreds that are popping up? Take it for what it’s worth, but a person who creates an association for virtual worlds, and who is writing a book on the subject should be, in my opinion, interested in them. Also for what it’s worth, the last time I spoke with her early this year, the book was still non-existent, other than the cover and the blurb.
It should also be noted that on iVinnie.com, they are classifying such things as Facebook and MySpace as virtual worlds. At best, grouping social networks in with virtual worlds is a stretch. I think more likely it’s an attempt to capitalize on a very lucrative segment of Web 2.0. at a time when the buzz about virtual worlds is dying off amid technical issues and two years under-delivering on their high expectations. Good for them if they make it profitable, but personally it makes me think they don’t know their own subject-matter.
The whole experience for me was a rough one. I don’t wish any ill will towards Edita Kaye or her business ventures in virtual worlds. She has several fine people working with her who I appreciate and respect. But I would seriously caution anyone to do their own investigating before jumping head first into business relationships with this particular venture.
I am the Executive Director of the Association of Virtual Worlds. In other words, I helped Edita found the Association and now I lead and run it (and live and breathe it.) To learn about my years practicing law, advising global corporations on HR matters, and leading global IT functions for a Fortune 200 company, please take a look at http://www.linkedin.com/in/delchoness.
Since I started exploring virtual worlds, I have been cited as one of the most knowledgeable legal experts in virtual worlds, quoted in Forrester Research reports, interviewed, and asked to speak to large audiences about virtual worlds. That all said, the Association of Virtual Worlds is not about any single person. It is about its membership, its content, and its mission.
Edita Kaye is very engaged in virtual worlds study and follows developments religiously. In starting the Association she had a vision for a platform agnostic organization of people passionate about virtual worlds, with its own virtual headquarters for them to meet in and learn together. And that vision is coming true. In less than two months, the Association grown to nearly 1,300 members from or intrigued by virtual worlds of all shapes and sizes. The Association has announced its first title, The Virtual Corporation, a serious book on how virtual worlds technologies will impact the traditional corporate functions. The Association will be launching its virtual headquarters later this year. There are more developments to come for the benefit of the industry, but perhaps more importantly, that will deliver a compelling and thoughtful message about virtual worlds to a sometimes skeptical public.
By the way, in my extensive dealings with Edita, I have found her to be a highly compassionate and intelligent person with integrity.
I understand that people can say whatever they like in a public blog, and I absolutely treasure that right, but we need to focus on what’s happening in the here and now: a member focused organization, producing excellent discussions, and more to come, without any significant interference from any sort of hierarchy. Any questions, please contact me.
Im so glad to have run across this entry on Virtually Blind. I must say that the dialogue has completely provoked this response. I didn’t intend to respond….but here goes…I really thought that the idea reference was interesting. I must agree that for me the idea was about a new space to create and new opportunity to contribute and to be of service to other contributors. I am in the IP business; Director of the Virtual Intellectual Property Organization and practicing IP attorney. I was so glad to find such a large community of artists and inventors creating in virtual worlds and must admit I was pretty disappointed that, after centuries of international negotiation resulting in a nearly coordinated system of intellectual property rights recognition, their struggle continues and they must fight for their right to be recognized, protected and paid. Participating in creation of any sort is brave, priceless and deserves reward and recognition. As far as effective digital rights management, I am uncertain of its form but I have no doubt that we will see it happen. I, in the meantime, will use all the resources and tools at my disposal to assist content creators in their efforts to enforce and protect their intellectual property rights. Perhaps THE idea is that we’re all a little closer now than before and that its a little easier meet and share our ideas with each other. Why then now, of all times, be exclusive? Only IP, only open source; now more than ever we should be able to address the complexity of circumstances and allow situations to direct their own response. Let those who open source do so, support those who seek their enforcement, in other words, the VIPO way (much like the way of the Jedi… only stronger:)mtfbwy).
I wish they’d bring us in off the streets — right in world — and have focus groups there, where, oh, they could save travel and refreshment money and stuff…
I can only see this A/B testing as a positive development. For months now Linden have behaved like they hadn’t got a clue what they were doing – now they’ve officially confirmed this.
Hahaha. Yay! And roam the grid with no worries or cares!
On 04.16.08 LaDolche said:
Linden is on the ball and following correct testing procedures for a product of this magnitude. HCI and Usability are essentail for this product to be a success. Those that endlessly whine about Linden’s faults are hardly experienced at this type of testing procedure. AND, in most cases, really hardly familiar with the true usages of SL as a current medium, and certainly as a medium of the future.
What they are doing in this testing is dead on. Tests need to continue non-stop for the entire duration of the product. Linden needs to support the future viability of this product and not just cater to the old timers with nothing better to do. As more and more researchers and corporations look at the application for more serious use, the HCI issues are huge for mass deployment.
Oh, if you immediately do not know what HCI above means, then you are not qualified to respond to this post…and I rest my case.
Cool stuff. My mirror neurons were pulsing. I need to be careful, I hear if one breaks a neural mirror it can be seven multiverse dimensions of bad luck…
Nice! How come my computer doesn’t display Second Life that good?
Hmmm. Well I’m not entirely sure Kabalyero – can’t say it’s my skill as a photographer although having my sim on permanent sunset adds nice lighting.
Mind you I also maximized all the settings and then find myself complaining about how slow things can be to rez, but when all my graphics settings are at high and my draw distance is 400 meters I’ve got no one but myself to blame.
[...] This is in follow-up to the recent economic analysis which I commented on here. [...]
[...] I continue to map out my own impressions of the Metaverse Roadmap it’s interesting to think of the implications of [...]
you’re in trouble for not informing me that you had a blog.
They completely ignored OpenSim in all of that for some reason. Go figure.
Yeah, go figure! Ignoring OpenSim is kind of like Microsoft trying desperately to ignore Linux.
A more charitable view might be that they’re trying to remain agnostic – if you mention OpenSim it’s like the Fed twitching his nose the wrong way when someone says “raise interest rates”. I’m more inclined to think they’re hoping to drive the standards however and are hoping that OpenSim will come a beggin’ and that early acknowledgement would put too much power in *gasp* the community.
Geez didn’t you SEE the billboards I bought all over SL rotating and blinking and sending off strange particles, lagging all the residents for miles around announcing the new blog? I mean you do READ those floating billboards right?
(Otherwise tries to imagine trouble).
Hmm. I reviewed that book, and I do see your point. It is sort of fluffy in some areas, but it was written for the mainstream… and probably wasn’t meant to be read analytically. As you mentioned, there is a basis in there which is tangible… and the marketing use of such worlds is also tangible. There are some concrete examples as I recall.
Always fun to read what others think of the same books. I got it as it just came out, and some things have changed since then. Perhaps I should reread it when I’m done reading this stack…
Thanks Nobody and I’d better append my comments. Being in the marketing biz (shoot me, I know, but really I don’t make any crappy TV commercials or mail out junk) the book made some points that really struck home first from a business perspective: brands try to be about emotions, virtual worlds are emotional, but you can’t just drop brands into these worlds without respecting and understanding the emotional context into which they’re being grafted.
It also struck home because in spite of his rather loose ‘academic’ rationale, I think he was dead on – no matter how hard you try, the emotional reactions you can have in virtual worlds is powerful.
My overall comment wasn’t so much about the book as about a recent attempt to be ‘logical’ about spending time in a virtual space – keep the emotions in check and keep some distance. But all it ended up doing was disturbing social (and emotional) balances around me.
Which really just validates the point of the book – you can view virtual worlds as platforms for branding and business and fail, or you can respect them as environments in which emotions and community need to be respected and nurtured and you’ll probably do pretty well.
Which is a big plus in general for business and ‘consumers’ – virtual worlds demand a sort of honesty and integrity of “gut” and emotion that some corporations may have a tough time with, and as these spaces continue to grow us little avatars will be able to spot the clunkers more easily, because we’ll have the tools to see, touch, create, and feel.
Thanks Nobody!
Hmmm okay well this is the first time I have been able to get a close-up shot of you errr your avatar. So the lady had a camera or something? How does that work?
Anyway…interesting avatar. What is that in your mouth? I can’t tell from the photo 
Cool stuff. Interesting reading as well. I am caught up now.
Err. Thanks for the compliments… O.o
You’re right – too many people are speculating on what Google is up to, and few people have a clue. If you get a chance to read ‘Search’ by John Battelle, it is worth it – it does give you some food for thought on what Google actually is.
As far as approaching the metaverse… if it is approached as a collaborative space, I think that might encompass everything else. The trouble is that the space itself is not very collaborative yet. It will get better, I’m sure.
With policy and Second Life – that is exactly what I think. All technologies being equal, the best policies will win.
Thanks Nobody – check my latest post on my thoughts on collaborative space, a bit more personal than usual and of course there are business benefits to learning how to use collaborative space.
Yeah, I did read Search, great book.
I think I’ll move on to worrying about some other corporate giant though. Any siggestions?
[...] And for the sake of exploration, the Roadmap looked at four quadrants – all of which will come true and all of which have perils and potential. I commented on those quadrants and my interests in a previous blog. [...]
[...] era la volta di “My world” il progetto Serious Game di promosso da Google. ( vi linko Google/Second Life Merger and a Life of Speculation giusto perchè avanzava dei dubbi…) Mi domandavo: Ma perchè Google dovrebbe andare contro i [...]
[...] Per my previous comment on the PARC research of WoW, the idea of “communities” may be the wrong way to look at [...]
[...] Original post by dusanwriter [...]
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptImagine a virtual world built by Microsoft! At the Virtual World Conference, MS commented that by next year, we’d all know more about their interest in virtual worlds:. [Timing is] definitely a concern…But I think we’ve got a good … [...]
[...] Friday, October 12th, 2007 in Metaverse General Tags: browser, client, metaverse, universal Yesterday it was a new client from Electric sheep. [...]
[...] addition to the Electric Sheep viewer being launched to coincide with the CSI/Second Life combo (as previously blogged) here’s a nice looking little viewer in alpha version that allows you to enter the world for [...]
and to make things even cooler, I was able to succesfully log onto the grid (via that site) on my iPhone. The button to send messages didn’t pop up so I really couldn’t do much, but considering that the program is in alpha, that is totally possible to be fixed. I’m going to contact them and offer to test it for them.
[...] read more [...]
This is amazing. Will check back here often to see what else we can learn. Thanks for the inspiration.
Team Wicanders
[...] I recently wrote about Jon Brouchard’s use of virtual architecture. [...]
[...] Business in Virtual Worlds, Second Life Tags: empty world, Second Life, traffic In follow-up to my posting about the tracking traffic on a sim using Jon Brouchard’s new script from his Reflexive [...]
[...] Writer follows up with additional thoughts HERE, and HERE. No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack [...]
[...] in Business in Virtual Worlds, Second Life Tags: legal, movable, Second Life, terms of service i recently wrote about the Movable viewer as a handy way of accessing SL without needing the client – use a Web browser to [...]
Oooh! Got any slurls for a quick Teleport? If not then I’ll just search in-world.
[...] Countdown to History? CSI in Second Life. Can 400+ sims be wrong? Wednesday sees a special episode of CSI New York called “Down the Rabbit Hole” in which the pursuit of a killer takes Gary Sinise into Second Life. [...]
Search CSI in Map – but the sims were in lockdown, I assume until Wednesday at 10:00!
Can’t wait to see it, but as I’m in Ireland, I’ll probably have to wait a few years before it gets to me…lol But don’t tell me how it ends, that’ll only ruin the surprise.
it’s a cool idea, but do you really feel comfortable about entering your SL password on a third party website?
No, not really – and this is an issue with a number of third party viewers and applications. Two emerging issues/approaches: one is, Linden is perhaps preparing to position itself as the backbone supplier of infrastructure. the deal with IBM on avatar portability, their open architecture working group, all tend to support the notion that Linden wants to provide the services of avatar identification, currency, age/identity verification and thus become the “home” to our virtual wallets and identitites.
Not too tricky to hack the system with an intelligent looking and/or branded “viewer” or chat app – throw a Coke or MTV logo in the bottom maybe, and use it to suck up passwords.
Issues of identity and verification I see as a tidal wave issue – there needs to be some consensus around these things, and perhaps a validation system much like e-Commerce sites have validation systems and labels (think eTrust for avatars and viewers). Linden seems to be positioning itself this way – taking care of your money, storing your personal avatar identity, and selling land – in the future, we won’t ONLY ask do you trust this viewer, but also do you trust this company to buy land from? Will it still be around 6 months from now? On systems where content isn’t portable (Metaplace, it seems) to other platforms, do you trust making “stuff” that can’t be protected offline?
Identity, trust, validation and verification – early Internet talk, really, remember when no one wanted to use their creit cards online because they didn’t “trust” it? (As if leaving a slip behind in a restaurant was more trustworthy). We’ll see how this plays out, because the driving issue is really standards around transparency, interoperability and identity.
[...] Dusan Writer comments on the potential for a “tipping point” as 400+ sims were brought online to handle the load. What if…that didn’t work? I was in-world and did not watch the show. Aside from a couple problems with assets not uploading for a brief period, the Grid thrummed on without a hitch while avatars bet on how long before the Grid would tear apart. It didn’t. The Second Life website went down for a bit, but the Grid, incredibly, worked well. Maxing at no more than 40k simultaneous users. [...]
Wow, amazingly vivid argument — a picture does always save 1,000 words.
I was so glad you “got it” about the problem with the SEARCH and having to drill down. I don’t know why it should be so hard to persuade people.
The clues and crime scenes look as if they were made for 9-year-olds. They are terribly dumbed down, and contrast with the very breathless action-packed machinima that makes it look less lame.
I think the people who make TV perceive their viewers as stupid. And…that’s why they’ve lost them and their advertising eyeballs. And…that’s why you’ve gained them at your superb build in SL.
The question is what an old lumbering media dinosaur like CBS should do. Well, a different model might be to fund obtrusively sites like yours, and work an ad into the scenery itself, possible.
I’m actually shocked — so the place was created for 9-year-olds and I still didn’t get it? Only one hour after looking at the nice ‘clues’ on the ground I was told by someone that I need a HUD to play (but I couldn’t find it). Then I had some (apparently incorrect) information that the HUD would come automatically by the OnRez Viewer or that you needed the OnRez Viewer to play the game or, well, that you needed to join through the site, or…
In fact, allegedly, none of these are true, you can use the regular viewer, but… you have to start with a HUD!
Wow, 9-year-olds are getting pretty clever these days, and my age is showing… I thought I could help these people out somehow (and spent a few hours on their orientation areas), but… I have no clue what they’re supposed to be doing, and the layout of the OnRez viewer is sufficiently different to be able to give them some tips on the interface when they’re stuck! Also, never having seen the HUD, I can’t also explain to anyone how to use it. This was rather frustrating to me, so I simply hang around with friends and had some nice chats on completely CSI-unrelated buildings. Mind you, the overall buildings are *very* nice, even if they are of the “clean” variety…
The Heads up display is called a “Toolbar” It is clearly marked on both of the Orientation island signs when you first start, but if you are having problems Gwen I will of course give you (and anyone else) a copy. Just please do not pay someone for them, as the user’s progress does not transfer with the device.
Wonderful comments and thank you Economic for the offers of assistance. I must say, I did like the way that the HUD combined audio and text (and video? I can’t remember now to be honest). Hadn’t seen a multimedia use of a HUD before it was refreshing.
And thank you Prokovy. If I could take an ounce of credit for superb builds it wouldn’t be for the ones of which I took photos. And while we’re on the subject of 9-year olds, with them wandering around virtual Barbie worlds, and Club Penguin (4,000,000+ kiddies) I’d be very careful about any disparaging remarks about the intelligence of 9 year olds when it comes to virtual worlds.
Having said that, I am indebted for your comments and your own observations. Your concentric circles commentary really speaks to the beautiful thing about virtual worlds – the flow of content up and down, ‘old users’ sharing their content with new ones so that new mash-ups and concepts are freshly created.
Another cool feature: the small map in the upper right has a globe icon in the lower right corner. Clicking on the globe icon pops up the full map/tp. I think that’s a brilliant update to the viewer – I hate always having to return to the bottom bar – it’s like always having to go back to the hallway in your house to get to any other room.
[...] Life Tags: law, magic circle, membrane, policy, property, virtual worlds A while back I wrote a lengthy piece on the concept of property, avatar rights to property, and what we mean when we, as users, get in a [...]
Sure….I tend to agree, that really is a hot little feature. But I’m still on the side of ignoring the viewer until they fix the search function, which still strikes me as a deliberate attempt to confuse newbies and force them to shop through onRez.
Think Linden will swap the “best of”?
I have been away from SL for a couple of weeks due to being on holiday in RL and have been following the whole CSI thing through blogs such as this one. My home in SL is in Toxia and I really appreciated the positive comments about Toxian City.
From my extensive wanderings in SL I have drawn the conclusion that over 90% of companies setting up a presence in SL don’t get it. All the best sims I have visited are small organically grown places started off by amateurs. Every time I have been to a big hyped “event” in SL its been a disappointment. Most companies treat SL residents as mindless drone consumers happy just to window shop and chat to one another about the wonderful products they are purchasing.
Sims such as Toxia which create a atmosphere and let the people in the sim actively join in with creating new parts of the architecture, role plays etc are some of the most highly visited non-sexual parts of the grid. Don’t forget Toxia has its shops too (admittedly for weapons and the like) and it relies on these shops for paying for its tier etc.
Of course a violent, dark sim peopled by cyborgs, vampires, demons and the like (on a good day) is not for everyone. People get shot in Toxia a lot, people are not nice to other people. That is what makes it _interesting_. The person who can create this sort of interactive community outside of places like Toxia or sex places will be the person who really cracks creating a commercial presence and community in SL that everyone wants to participate in rather that creating a virtual storefront with nothing behind it.
It will take a huge amount of effort to achieve. Ask Miss Wright or any of the other creators of Toxia but the rewards will be immense.
[...] New York in SL – The Grid Lives, Long Live the Grid thegrid October 25th. 2007, 1:01am Marc Gunther wrote an interesting post today [...]
[...] and Rom Ireton. I think everyone has experienced this Second Life bug even the newbies that visited CSI:New York in-world got a taste of Ruth. [...]
[...] 2007, 9:48 pm Filed under: reflexive architecture Dusan Writer posted another very thoughtful entry on his blog (link) about Reflexive Architecture, which really got me thinking. I’m excited to see the concept [...]
I must say I absolutely loved your post. Had never heard about reflexive architecture, but I will certainly try to take up its issues more deeply. I specially think this paragraph is quite thought provoking:
“If virtual worlds feel real, have objects with real value, evoke real (and perhaps enhanced) emotional responses, and ALSO allow the creation of objects and environments that aren’t possible in the physical world – then as new objects and environments are created, maybe we’ll start to see things that change how we view ourselves, the culture we live in, and the world around us. If so, is it possible to invoke spiritual responses because we now have access to new and creative metaphors? This doesn’t replace the spiritual/creative response you might get from seeing the stars at night or an inspiring cathedral. But perhaps it extends our toolkit for invoking this response.”
For sure our constant connection with the internet has redefined what we consider space to be. On the one hand it allows us to understand that space is much more than the coordinates around which we move. Space is much more than a quantification of matter, it is a metaphor which allows us to inhabit the world. To be “in” a space is much more than being here or there; being in a space actually deploys a whole realm of understandings which we are sometimes not aware of. I think in this respect you would really enjoy reading this post of mine which shows how much is presupposed, for instance, in our use of maps:
http://amelo14.wordpress.com/2005/06/17/reflections-on-space-western-architecture-and-911/
However, I will end with a serious problem for our actually “living” within virtual space. The reality is that our bodies do not make part of it. Can a space which our bodies do not actually sense, feel and know, be called truly a human space? Or does this tendency, as you yourself foresee, actually make of technology so powerful that our contact with our own bodies and nature is even more jeopardized?
Andrés
What a wonderful and thoughtful response Amelo.
Lost in my musings about the value of virtual worlds are musing about the danger. Castranova wrote eloquently about virtual ecomomies and articulated for me some of the dangers of virtual worlds – the Matrix being one possible end point. In a horror scenario, he paints a world where artificial intelligence is used to substitute for ourselves when we are not “in” a virtual world – when I’m out grocery shopping, I can train AI to take over my avatar. In his scenario, eventually these AIs can outlive us when we die. He paints a picture of the last man alive – humans are so immersed in virtual worlds they’ve forgotten the needs of their bodies, forgotten to have children because virtual children are more adoring and less trouble. As humans die off, their AI avatars take over – until those left don’t know if they’re interacting with real or atificial intelligence. As the human race dies off, the last don’t realize that there are fewer and fewer real humans, that most of their relationships are with virtual intelligences. Doom and gloom indeed.
He also paints a more optimistic picture.
I prefer to dwell on the optimistic primarily because I am an optimist, and also because there are enough people who either doubt the capacity for these ’spaces’ or who lack the imagination like the reflective architects of the world to see past the recognized archetypes.
Part of my point about virtual worlds is that there is the potential for the application of the lessons learned and archetypes discovered in these spaces to the ‘real world’. Part of my personal discovery is that I’m perhaps more interested in the ‘membrane’ and the crossing over of identities and ideas from synthetic worlds to the real than I am in the ability of synthetic worlds to fully immerse us. No doubt there will be enough people continuing to strive for virtual worlds that are SO immersive that individuals never want to leave (and in some case, why WOULD they?) I’d like to continue a dialogue about how we can properly integrate our virtual and real world activities.
As Castranova pointed out – there really is no difference. We can earn money in a virtual or a real world, spend time here or there, and there is only an artificial boundary that we define by the nature of the sensory input.
Having said that, as synthetic worlds become more immersive, become more compelling than the real world, this threatens to trigger a widespread migration to virtual worlds the consequences of which will be difficult to measure. The migration will range from large chunks of time amongst a wide swath of people, to nearly complete migrations where people are living and working in virtual spaces. The more that this migration occurs, the less “value” the physical body starts to have. The less value that is placed, perhaps on nature, on human touch.
But some would also argue that our current “physical” spaces are not so physical at all. Are manufactured environments, the experience ecomomy – are these THAT much different from virtual spaces? Retailers manufacture scents to make us buy more. They manufacture fake histories in their store design and signage. They manufacture our experiences towards “training” us to forget the instincts of our bodies and to buy what we don’t need.
So….I’m agreeing and disagreeing. I believe that the mind/body/spirit/environment balance is out of whack in the real world to begin with. I believe virtual worlds have the potential to trigger new emotional responses that, if directed properly, might help to reconfigure culture so that a new balance of mind/body/spirit is possible. I believe that the only thing that is non human about these spaces is the absence of blood and bones but that virtual spaces might actually enable us to step out from behind the inherited masks that our real bodies present to the world (by no choice of our own – gender, race, age) and to present new versions of ourselves that are spiritual, creative and emotional.
I also believe that we risk following a path into synthetic worlds that forever cuts us off from our bodies and perhaps from nature. That there are dangers, and that it is up to the early pathfinders, the artists and architects, and the thinkers like yourself, to remind us that there is more than one aspect of ourselves that we will need to integrate as we grow, expand, append, and explore in these new worlds.
When this conversation surfaced at Metaversed, I asked pointedly: but we don’t have a taxonomy for the Internet, surely. That is, yeah, there’s gov, com, org. Or there’s e-commerce. Or there are portals. Or there are search sites or link farms or porn or intranets. Sure. But the content isn’t as analyzed as everybody seems to want to analyze VWs.
THIS — “a business need to quantify and measure the spaces” — seems to be driving the mad rush now. And frankly, that’s not compelling enough reason to rush to judgement, IMHO, just so somebody can sell widgets to better link the worlds. Oh, I realize they will do that *anyway* — but we should try to preserve the freedom of the spaces anyway, too.
In one way, deciding this or that world is “social” and this or that world isn’t social seems odd — all sites are social at some level — isn’t the stuff you are searching for in Google at times stuff that wants to be found?
Lagorama seems ok — except what if you use Second Life to make a game, or use it for an educational purpose — then it isn’t such a Lifesim.
You could judge them by whether or not they have RMT — and frankly, I look at every game/world and ask whether it has real estate. Because private property is part of the bulwark of player or resident freedom against game gods or coders — even if emulated, even if remaining proprietary. I realize this isn’t a very popular concept among leftoid geeks who hate private property. Look at Twinity, grudgingly giving out only apartments, and even Second Life, only rewarding the “value add” and never conceding that land is really stake.
One thing I really loathe is this constant Geek intrusion of “the lessons learned” of past iterations of the Web, 0.0 or 1.0 or 2.0. This or that thing is “Prodigy” or “Compuserve” and must die or will die anyway on its own. This or that thing is Geocities. This or that thing is “just like a MUD we had, really” etc. I find this terribly constrictive — it’s like a Vietnam Syndrome. Why must we be doomed to have this past and all the concommitant guru thinking around it inflicted on us at every new crossroads in the Metaverse? I’m glad you’re willing to think out of these boxes, Dusan.
It might just happen that walled gardens protect freedom more than open-sourced sandboxes filled with script kiddies that grief everybody and constrict freedom that way.
I agree. I also loathe the ‘lessons learned’ mentality. Although I suppose my point with the definitions that seem to be surfacing about the Metaverse is to use the lessons learned from the past and try not to repeat them. The venture capitalists and the “script kiddies” who managed to throw a business plan together often used artificial definitions and taxonomies as window dressing to disguise that a) they had no actual business behind their so-called business models and b) they needed some sort of way to address the fact that there is no line item in a revenue projection to address the nature of a creative, chaotic, changing and ambiguous media.
Here’s how I imagine a pitch to a group of bankers or investors who know nothing about virtual worlds:
“We’re going to create branded entertainment products and aggregate social communities by creating a Web 3.0 space that leverages best in class talent incentivized with virtual currency. Investment in this opportunity is high risk but the risk:ratio return is high because we will establish best practices and aggregate eyeballs within the social/entertainment Web 3.0 space towards creating a portfolio of opportunities for future monetization.”
Here’s what it really means:
“3D stuff is really cool. We really have no idea where this is all headed. We want to take a gamble on creativity, passion, collaboration. We’re going to work with some Neko who hangs out at the Missing Mile and a Gorean Master who also runs an erotic strip club for furries. We figure we’ll throw a bunch of prims together, hope we don’t get griefed, make some cool stuff, and have some fun – and if we can do all that, a whole bunch of people will probably hang out, become friends, and our passion will spread, and some day that whole thing might make us some money or it might not, but we’ll probably survive, we’ll learn a thing or two, we’ll for sure end up with some possibly worthless real estate, a bunch of code, and some objects that we’re just as likely to give away as sell, and hey, maybe we’ll become better human beings by learning to work with each other in a different way, and to help people experience emotional, immersive evnironments in new ways.
Wanna come along for the ride?”
These are certainly valid concerns. Let me try to briefly address them.
On walled gardens:
Yes, we are starting out with maintaining control over the servers. Why?
1) We want to have a one-click experience for ordinary people to be able to create a world.
2) We do need to establish enough of a network so that our eventual business model is viable.
You are conflating two separate things a little bit, though. We do not want to have *multiple networks* out there using slight variations on the same tech base. That feels like it defeats the point.
That’s a separate issue from whether we let servers run elsewhere. The system is architected for servers to run anywhere, and we still plan to move in that direction over time. And that is yet another separate issue from whether the servers themselves are open source (currently, no).
We do plan a server-side plug-in system, btw.
On cashing out:
Feel free to use the web services stuff that we offer as part of every world in order to interface with your own solution. A lot of folks won’t have that capability, which is why we offer our own solution. Yes, of course we want to take a cut if we offer the service — that is how we cover the costs of offering it.
The other benefit to offering the virtual currency is that it greatly simplifies transactions between users from different territories, who use different billing solutions, etc.
On legality of cash out:
The law on this is pretty clear. I am unsure why people get up in arms about this, except that perhaps a bad precedent was set by other services, permitting stuff that shouldn’t have been.
Who verifies the legality? Well, we’ll have to. YOU’LL have to. The government sure will.
On interoperability:
We intend to support as many common formats as we can. For 3d, we are more likely to start with interchange formats like COLLADA than with high-end proprietary formats though.
I think a key point here though is that unlike the iPod and your analogy of a locked platform, we are not pushing an asset format on you. Feel free to take stuff out — it will work elsewhere.
The bit that is hardest to move, certainly, would be scripts and data structures. After all, we added event-driven stuff to Lua. But at least it’s Lua, and therefore something you can move to elsewhere.
On ads:
Fair enough on the comment that it’s really “free things on the net that are offered by for-profit entities.” That is what we happen to be, a for-profit entity.
We haven’t settled yet on where and how we will use advertising. That said, yes, it costs money to bring the service to you, and if it’s free, then we have to recoup somehow. Ads is a way to do that.
Raph:
Thanks for such a thoughtful response. I’m a real amateur in all this. So a lot of what this is just impressions and notions, as I said at the beginning of my post. Your deep expertise and attention to my thoughts was more than I expected.
Your leadership inspires great confidence that Metaplace will succeed, and my own hope that it will facilitate a “tipping point” for the 3D Web.
As I said, I LOVE Apple. I love my iPod. I love my iPhone. And I love these things because a company I respect and trust takes care to control the core technology and functionality, just as the community will come to respect Metaplace if it continues to communicate as efectively as it has to date, and if the technology is as elegant and simple as I’ve seen.
I hope that my tone was to point out that the 3D spaces that people create are going to be METAPLACE spaces, and that your current model is that you will not license the technology underlying these spaces, and that you will have a hand in the flow of commerce through this technology (although I’m pleased that you can choose other Web services, you’re still taking a cut).
I’d like to clarify – I do NOT have a problem with this.
But I think that there’s a disconnect between the business model for Metaplace and how it’s being positioned and interpreted by future users and the media.
If I were to summarize your “tag” in one phrase that keeps repeating its this: “3D spaces that work like the Web works”. And that’s fair enough. What I you’re saying is that when you go to make a Metaplace space you tools and protocols familiar to those used in developing Web sites and applications. These protocols will both be embedded within Metaplace and other needed protocols will be based on the concept of a very open system for moving, sharing, uploading and animating. By using image formats, for example, that are “Web ready” you are linking into current processes and protocols for image development. Even your scripting language will be based on Lua and thus fairly “transparent”. I’m further encouraged that this open system will include interoperability with 3D software such as Maya and 3DS.
This is exciting stuff. A GIANT leap forward. It will make world building easier. We will all be able to create games, houses, etc. It may very well help us to reach a tipping point – 3D worlds will become as common as Web pages.
But I also believe that your business model is structured so that you are “locking in users” (or at least making it very difficult to leave the platform). There will be benefits to users for being locked in: user-friendly tools, your reputation, the service you provide, etc. (and again, I have no problem with your business model, I’m simply pointing out what I believe is an unacknowledged truth in the public at large).
I believe that when people HEAR about Metaplace they sort of envision the “HTML of 3D Worlds” – a new, Web-friendly, open system that will put the tools of world building in the hands of all.
But there’s a difference here – you have invented a kind of HTML for 3D worlds, but it’s owned by a private company (Metaplace).
To truly “work like the Web” Metaplace would need to allow users freedom of choice to move their “3D Web sites” wherever they wish, to handle commercial transactions how they wish, etc.
Will Metaplace support portability of avatar identity? Will you have the ability to impose any controls over currency exchange? If I become unhappy with the support I’m getting for an online game that I developed on Metaplace and so want to move it to Second Life will I be able? If I develop a game that I want to deploy across multiple platforms how easy will that be? Or will it be like the old PC/Apple days – develop a game and an Apple version was a “nice to have” based on sales not a need to have.
Well, if I were your investors I’d sure hope the answer was on the side of a business model that didn’t “give away the store”.
You’re in business. You need to make money. And by letting your users in on the action, and if you develop great tools, and if you do a masterful job supporting and encouraging your community I’m optimistic that Metaplace will do what I hope it will – extend 3D development tools, help achieve a tipping point for synthetic worlds, and to move game/world building out of the hands of Sony and into the hands of users. (If anyone can do it it’s likely you, just be careful about too much pressure from your VC backers to “monetize” your community).
I believe that creativity is spiritual. Tools like Metaplace will help people share their aspirations, hopes, dreams, thoughts, ideas, stories, myths, and experiences (and, yeah, to create places where we can virtually kill each other but hey, that can have its own upsides). My preference is for open source everything but we don’t live in Eden – there are walls around our gardens for a reason, and one of them is to earn a living and to hopefully do it in a way that’s as authentic as possible.
There’s a business model behind Metaplace as you acknowledge, and I think it’s important to remain authentic and open about what the potential downsides and restrictions to this business model might be for the typical user.
Thanks, Raph, for hopefully helping to advance an agenda of making 3D worlds ubiquitous, easy to use, and easy to build. And to potential users, thanks for thinking about the pros and cons – easy-to-use tools and a shared community where you might get locked in (to a degree) to someone’s platform, or REALLY hard to use tools where it’s all yours but good luck maintaining it and getting anyone to show up.
P.S.
- Great to hear on server-side plug-ins, and I think I understood the distributed server architecture. I still stand by my Apple analogy (maybe not my iPod analogy though) that you’re controlling versions of the technology because it will not be open source. And thank GOD Apple keeps control of much of its core technology, it’s how they’ve maintained their singular focus on best-in-the-world user-centered design.
- I think I’m totally mystified on cashing out. Here’s my question – if I want to sell an object on e-Bay, why do I then need to further convert that transaction through a virtual currency, and then translate it back to dollars? If I sell a REAL thing on eBay, there are protocols in place for protecting the legality of that transaction.
I really don’t have a problem with putting safeguards into the flow of money and transactions, I just truly don’t understand why just because a world is virtual why it needs a separate virtual currency (other than for, as you say, simplicity when you may be looking at 100 currencies). Why are you saying that the protection is at the point of cashing out? I really think I’m just confused because the model seems to treat “virtual money” as illiquid UNTIL you cash it out, and I actually see it as money at the point it’s earned (whether in a virtual currency or not).
- On ads: I have a feeling you’ll approach these very carefully. You’ve seen enough examples in the world of gaming to know that a misplaced ad can just as easily turn a user AGAINST a brand.
- On interoperability – I hadn’t heard a clear answer on this before. Thanks for the clarification – it was as I had hoped and partly expected, so I’m glad you’re trying to create the level of portability you describe.
[...] now to check on the progress of the Missing Avatar case (I’ve read that Detective Taylor of CSI:New York is on the case, LOL!) to find the blog gone. What greeted me was a Wordpress Error page. Wow! When [...]
Seems like the currency thing is the big point of confusion…
OK, first example. You make a world, want to charge people for stuff. You don’t have any tech or connections or knowledge on how to do that. For you, you can use the Metaplace currency and script objects will do all the heavy lifting for you. Stuff can be listed on our marketplace, etc. We get a transaction fee.
Second example. You want to charge dollars directly. You use a script module that handles a web service bridge to Paypal or a third party that handles billing and transaction verification. Our cut = zero.
That said, odds are good (we hope) that you didn’t have to write this module — in fact, you may have gotten it from our marketplace! And if you did write it, you can also sell it via the marketplace. (Modules with autoinstall do have to go through the network, that’s how we autoinstall them for you). In those cases, we get a transaction fee.
But it might be an open source module, in which case you could have just copy/pasted the code for it. Our cut is zero again.
So you see, it really is intended as “if you use a service we offer, we take a cut, and if you don’t, we don’t.”
Hmm. Well that strikes me as an open and fair system. I really get confused on this stuff, I suppose….so now I understand the “cut” part – and again i don’t intend to make it sound like I think you’re after some huge money grab here, we’re all in a transaction economy, micropayments add up and are generally more fair to individuals so I like, and you’re a business – sounds like a win/win model.
Will Metaplace ever control its currency (as Linden does, basically “printing” or retiring money (depends whose stats you read) to keep the Linden exchange rate artificially fixed to the USD?)
Hey – and by the way, thanks for paying attention to my rambings it’s an honour.
[...] posted this past week in reply to my comments on Metaplace, Raph Koster points out that the economy of [...]
[...] geographies. Whether this business model could survive the much discussed possible development of a virtual overlay on Google Earth remains to be [...]
i like that and i hope you will be writing more in the future because i m following you
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity A few developments seem like natural shifts in the nature of virtual worlds and their economies but leave me perplexed about the future. I’m not an economist and don’t really know the first thing about it other than what I’ve picked up in bits and pieces with my initial framework provided by Edward Castranova who helped me to understand the reason for the biases, misunderstandings, and flaws in virtual world economies. [...]
Second Life News for November 4, 2007
TV Show Over? Obsess About It on the Web That same week, “CSI: NY” on CBS catapulted to No. 4 on the list, no doubt because a character, Mac Taylor, entered the virtual world Second Life to solve a crime.
Second Life and the ‘view of the child …
prokofy: Good points, which I think play right back into something I said on Lag-O-Rama…”This leads me to ponder two things:
1. When did we decide that we had to start classifying online games like championship dogs? “Ah, yes…that’s a sheephound, but it’s not of the Austrian Bluehair variety, so it’s inferior.”
2. Why does it freakin’ matter so much to so many people?”
People tend to spend time arguing about this type of thing, whether it’s relevant or not. Personally, I think VW’s should each be judged on their own merits, and not shoe-horned into some pre-existing category…if it’s designed well, it shouldn’t neatly fit into a category at all.
Also a good point regarding making a more traditional “game” within Second Life…there are several already present in SL, of course, but your point is taken. Of course, a television show that anyone would agree is a comedy still has moments of drama in it…there are no absolutes.
dusan: That may be the best pitch/translation I’ve ever seen. Awesome! By the way…does anyone else find it sadly humorous that the ones that preach the “lessons learned” philosophy are usually the ones that didn’t learn the correct lesson anyway?
On the one hand, the rush to create a taxonomy of virtual worlds seems to combine a desire to attach any world-building, platform-creating, 3D project with the right catch phrases so that investment money can come pouring in.
I met with someone yesterday who said he’s launching “The Facebook for healthcare…we’re going to do for healthcare on Web 2.0 what mySpace did for kids communities of interests.”
The meeting was booked for an hour. I left after 10 minutes. He’ll probably be a gazillionaire in 6 months but his Koolaid has a weird glowing look to it.
On the OTHER hand models are ways of representing reality to test out theories. The idea SHOULD be that a model can let us examine, explore, dissect, criticize and then improve upon our understanding of reality – with a model, its cheap to build and it doesn’t need to change reality but can create feedback loops WITH reality.
My point about these taxonomies is partly to remind people that they’re just models, partly to debunk business models against a repeat of the old Web portal/e-commerce/aggregate eyeball days, but also to ask whether we should be seeking alternative taxonomies.
Maybe look at them, Prokovy suggests, for whether they have ‘real estate’ and what models of property drive the spaces. Maybe for economics. What about categorizing the worlds for the ‘cascade’ of creative content? Or for the availability of collaborative creative toolsets? A lot of attention is given to the definition of these spaces based on their social tools and level of immersion (fantasy/game vs. mirror worlds/LifeSims). But if the 3D Web is a new platform for human creativity and a possibly powerful tool for social change and creativity, then why not create a taxonomy based on how flexible a platform is in allowing creative, collaborative development (either by the code and tools themselves, the ToS, or the intellectual property “rules”).
I’m not suggesting an alternative taxonomy but I’m also suggesting we not throw the idea of models out entirely. Each “world” WILL be judged on its own merits – basically, if anyone shows up or not.
Until then, a helpful quote from our collaborative friends at Wikipedia on the definition of models:
A mental model is an explanation in someone’s thought process for how something works in the real world. It is a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition and decision-making. Once formed, mental models may replace carefully considered analysis as a means of conserving time and energy.
(emphasis added)
[...] is a really fascinating blog posting about virtual economies, membranes, convergence, etc. It’s a really great posting, definitely [...]
[...] You can read the full story here [...]
Considering Anshe’s brief background as an escort, the following sentence needs a pardon the pun: “Anshe Chung will immediately tend to suck off the buyers…”
[...] User Experience Mapping of Second Life: Academic Model The following is a map of the common user experience of Second Life posted as part of a serious dissertation on bringing users up to speed in Second Life. [...]
Haha oh dear….
Thanks.
you see, the modernist in me loves the cheap mass-produced concept. but i get your point about how you get more out of it if you build it yourself.
[...] The concept of creating a legal jurisdiction for virtual worlds isn’t new…the question remains whether a End User License Agreement (EULA) or Terms of Service (ToS) carries with it a legal framework for partly resolving legal disputes that are “real”. Linden recently revised its Terms of Service to deal with claims against itself. I covered this here. [...]
[...] recently argued that the setting of social policy via the EULA and ToS could become a component in determining how [...]
[...] architecture, which I’ve written about previously and is covered in detail at The Arch may open one doorway to strange loopiness. The idea that our [...]
Dusan, your surname is most appropriate, you are a deep thinker and a skilled writer. I am most flattered by your reference to my attempt to grapple and make sense of my SL explorations… you took the concepts I was talking about to a level of abstraction I could only point and grunt at from the muddy depths.
I think your writings here are of great value and interest to anyone contemplating the impact of virtual worlds, and I strongly encourage you to continue sharing your insights and findings with us here.
I’ll never forget our dear Dummie. Now that he’s disappear, we all feel his missing.
all the word would be useless, watching what Caleb did to remember him, so I want to remember him in all the times that he stayed with us, playing and enjoying our company.
Bye Dummie.
You’ll ever be alive in our hearts.
Denny.
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity [...]
One that was always there for you, always had time for you, no matter what life dealt him.
The loss of Dummie leaves a gaping hole in the fiber of the second life kid community; and it truly could not have happened to a least deserving person.
Our love for you will never fade Dummie.
~Felixe
Well i dont even know where to begin…
Dummie was my lil raver, always partying with me shaking his butt lol wen i told him too. Sneaky out of bed to come hangout.
His personality resembled alot, he shone through quite a bit.
He was the most amazing, caring, fun loving person i got to know, each friend he made he has touched.
Now hes resting, and not hurting he has left his partner to an extend but caleb baby boi hes always gunna be in your heart!
heres a poem for dummie:
Dummies Roots xxxx
Time is the root of all this earth;
These creatures, who from Time had birth,
Within his bosom at the end
Shall sleep; Time hath nor enemy nor friend.
All we in one long caravan
Are journeying since the world began;
We know not whither, but we know
Time guideth at the front, and all must go.
Like as the wind upon the field
Bows every herb, and all must yield,
So we beneath Time’s passing breath
Bow each in turn, – why tears for birth or death?
This is for dummie a beloved partner, friend, and also a great dancer
With love angel
Wrote Sat 10th november 2007
Flo, Caleb and i are always here, hoping your watching down on us.
We miss you so much…
But we will always remember the fun we had together.
Love Angel <3
R.I.P MY LIL RAVER BOY!
big hug and kisses
Maybe you can sneak out of bed again to come party with us! amazing
Thank you for posting this. It has touched my heart to see people care.
Second Life…… is Real Life there is no line. and it Hurts
I say a little prayer for thee , with the angels is my D . I wish you were still here with me, Forever in my heart you’ll be. I love you Dummie.
I would also like to thak everyone for their support and understanding in this diffucult time for me. I whih it didnt have to be.
Bye Dummie
I’ve been crying a lot, that’s for sure…I didn’t know Dummie so well, but then I see the people who knew him and their sadness and it sure touches me. I don’t know who says all this stuff about things being not real – loss is real, and the loss is all around, you can see it when in a small community, and my heart hurts. And my prayers go out to Caleb and everyone who knew Dummie so well. His spirit sure does live on.
[...] Reading academia is a lot like listening to venture capitalists and the people after their money. I previously offered an interpretation of: [...]
Without a star and only the light post to keep me company My thoughts are with you. With silence around me and only my footsteps for company My thoughts are with you. As the cool winter breeze caresses my face My thoughts are with you. As tears well up in my eyes my thoughts are with you. Your body stayed but your soul went to heaven. I think of you and will always remember you Dummie, rest easy buddie.
Wilfred.
I knew Dummie from his first day on.
I remember it pretty well, ’cause it was some days after my RL birthday and he arrived at nemo with that newbie kids shape on. He was trying to get
into appearence and me and some others were trying to help him. As he said he was german I IMed him and he answered me that he was very glad to find a german boy around ’cause he didnt know anyone. I was the first german boy he was talkin to in SL. I gave him some other names of german boys so he wouldnt feel so alone like he felt that day. I dont know how it happened but i saw him cuddling with jesper the same day. He told me in IM that he had a crush on him (who could take that bad?). It was such a cute moment.
(Sorry if i am writing rubbish or weird things, i am crying writing this)
Dummie developed fast inside the community. He was ALWAYS nice, friendly and just a gentle boy ! I can’t think of a time where he wasnt !
Dummie was one of the boys i most admired in SL! This is why it’s hard for me to believe that he is gone now. Sometimes i wish everything would be a very bad joke and he would come back and i would forgive him, yes i would! Specially when i think about his last messages to me:
“Dummie Beck: Flo, do you have a sec. for me?
”
Fl0 Cale: uhm, not atm, sorry.
Dummie Beck: OK, i will try it later then
He never tried it later :_(
“You will never be forgotten,
we pledge to you today,
a hallowed place within our hearts,
is where you’ll always stay”
Thank You Dummie for the great time, my friend!
´It’s a blessing to keep memories of a good person`(Proverbs 10:7)
LOVE
flo
Dummie was the sweetest loveliest kid. One of the best on SL. I first met him when I helped him settle into OBC and set up his bunk for him. He’s been a good friend and great fun boy and will be much missed by all us in Nat and Jay’s group.
My heartfelt sympathy to you Caleb.
Love you always Dummie.
Waki
awww gonna miss ya Dummie
Dummie was the friendlyest person you could meet. He always approached people and said hello. He warmed our hearts and made us happy.
He will be missed by all who knew him in sl.
Hope there is a sl for you in heaven Dummie.
Will luv you always, and will miss you heaps.
Vagen…
As the first rumors and bits of info started showing up, there was a sense of helpless blindness to know the situation of the person behind Dummie’s avatar.
This disconnect of anonymity of SL is coldly frightening enough when we consider what will we do if SL disappeared tomorrow and with it the connection to all our friends here.
Death of our loved ones confronts us all with a finality and helplessness of our corporeal status as temporary participants in the game of life. Dummie’s passing is so achingly compounded by both the realness and the unrealness of SL.
As I feel Flo’s pain as he contemplates the echo of the last words, I look around at those of us that are still here and try to better embrace the fullness of Now.
[...] was tipped off by reading Dusan’s blog of an SL event yesterday. In the above image you see myself and Robin attending a live simulcast [...]
Just got an off line IM Email to comfirm the rumor was true, Dummie Beck will no longer be back as we know him in SL.
But Dummie, you will be in my friends list as long as I am in SL. You will never be forgotten.
I was fortunate enough to have meet Dummie with in his first days in SL at the Vortex. I could see he was the normal new Brown Haired AV. We exchanged contact and became chat mates. I was in the lucky position in being able to assist in setting up his smooth looking image. He accepted my offer for this with genuine thanks, that warmed my heart.
I remember him saying, I like talking with you Nathan, I can understand you.
See, Dummie could hardly speak English when he first came to SL. Little did he know how carefull I was in typing simple English to him with no slank so he could understand me. But WoW, with in months Dummie could converse in English so well. We recently joked about those early days of his in SL.
From our first meeting at the Vortex we continued to be Mates and Dummie Beck, became a member of the Nat & Jays family home.
Once again Dummie, you have no need to ever leave our home group.
It is people that make Life-Life. And Dummie U touched mine and made my life richer for knowing U. Gone but never forgotten. Thank U mate. Smiles.
I am so sorry for Dummie. Always knew him as happy and lovely boy.
And i am indeed sorry to have never knewn him more close and speak about his problems. But maybe he would had liked to have a second life without sorrows. But it shows us Second Life is more than a game. Nothing is like before here too, if u loose a friend , a love here.
So its fine to have more contact than in the second life. Maybe an email adress …
I am very sorry and feel with all persons who were close or closer than me with Dummie.
Dummie I miss you……
hey my son dummie i will always always miss you.
You was the best son in the world.
you always help me out and was a loving little boy.
i will never forget you my darling dummie.
rest my little one mummy loves you loads.
love u baby
mummyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It’s been a very sad weekend and my heart goes out to Caleb and all those who called Dummie Beck a friend. Sadly, I did not really get to know him well though he seemed he and Caleb seldom missed one of my Vortex sets. Now, I’m not going to get that chance to get to know him and I regret it.
My message to Caleb; You’re not alone, there are many out there who care about you. Feel free to IM me anytime.
Toby Tendaze
[...] It’s common knowledge know that Dummie Beck is the deceased. Dusan has written an excellent tribute that features many thoughtful comments from those who knew Dummie. I recommend you go read it and [...]
Like many of the others, I didn’t know him well. But I knew him well enough to be saddened, and to miss him.
I remember that at first, it felt awkward to say “Hi, Dummie”, like it was some sort of running joke. But he always responded cheerfully, or greeted me first. It didn’t take long to learn that there was a real personality behind the name, friendly, and fun, and caring. It was no longer an epithet, but rather the identity of someone who made our experiences delightful.
My heart goes out to those close to him, and I’m saddened by not being able to get to know him better.
I remember him from the days at the old Flos Beach, where Flo helped him with Second Life. He called me always ” Tom the Cat” .. He was such a nice and friendly character.. I am sad that i have now not the chance to see him again..:(
I actually only met Dummie personally a handful of times, but i never heard a bad word said about him and was always impressed with his sense of decency and kindness.. A member of my own family passed away very recently irl.. and i took some solace from the following poem:
God’s Lent Child
“I’ll lend you for a little while
A child of mine,” God said
“for you to love the while he lives,
And mourn for when he’s dead.
It may be six or seven years
Or forty two or three.
But will you, till I call him back,
Take care of him for me?
He’ll bring his charms to gladden you
And – (should his stay be brief) –
You’ll have his lovely memories
As a solace for your grief.
I cannot promise he will stay,
Since all from earth returns;
But there are lessons taught below
I want this child to learn.
I’ve looked the whole world over
In my search for teachers true
And from the things that crowd life’s lane
I have chosen you.
Now will you give him all your love?
Not think the labor vain?
Nor hate me when I come to take
This Lent Child back again?”
“I fancied that I heard them say –
“Dear Lord, Thy will be done
For all the joys Thy Child will bring
The risk of grief we’ll run.
We will shelter him with tenderness,
We’ll love him while we may
And for the happiness we’ve known
Forever grateful stay.
But should Thy angel call for him,
Much sooner than we’ve planned,
We’ll brave the bitter grief that comes
And try to understand.”
Dummie, wherever you are … we miss you, we love you, we pray for you, and we thank you for the sunshine, friendship and kindness that you shared with us.
Yeah, I hear you. I honestly am having serious doubts about whether Linden Lab can handle what they have created – or if they can jump the gap from what they made Second Life to what at least a few frustrated people see as the potential for the Second Life platform.
Linden Lab also seems very much leaned (and perhaps liened?) toward favoritism. That those who could be considered Linden Lab’s chosen few see no problem is not the issue. That is a serious no-brainer. What is the issue are the people who are not among the favored who are trying to do things.
Linden Lab created the gap. Linden Lab can fix it, if they so wish. Me? I’m waiting to see what else pops up on the radar. Surely *someone* can do better than this.
I often think he only has gone out,
And soon he will be home again!
The day is lovely! Oh, be not afraid!
He only has gone out for a long walk!
Indeed, he only has gone out,
And soon now will come home again!
Oh, do not be afraid, the day is lovely!
He only has gone out to yonder hills!
He only went ahead of us
And do not feel like comming home again!
We shall overtake him on yonder hills,
In the sunshine!
Lovely is the day on yonder hills!
F.Rückert
…. bye Dummie
/me nods
[...] Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 in Metaverse General Tags: 3D, papervision, reflective architecture Fascinated by reflective architecture, I ran across the following which acts in a very similar way to the objects developed by Keystone Bouchard as I discussed here. [...]
The passing of Dummie Beck was indeed a sad moment for so many of us who were touched and blessed with his kindness, humor and spirit. Dummie had a special gift, a talent for making those around him smile and laugh and he shared it with us all freely. He was a special boy with a special place in many peoples heart.
300 Days ago I was running around naked on Help Island, sending friendship offers to anyone who even said hello. I even remember rezzing a prim and taking it back in my inventory thinking they was only so many prims per person. I was alone (and naked) in a big old virtual world.
Now, I have wonderful friends, a family and found myself awestruck that I found real love with someone in Second Life. It sounds incredible when I tell people because it IS incredible. The limitations of Second Life only exist because we allow them to. Let your heart freely open up and take your friendships to the next level. Get to know the person behind that avatar, let them get to know you. Reach out and touch someone’s life, pick up the phone and call them, take a trip and visit them. Life is short and can end suddenly, once our trip around the sun is finished, there are no second chances.
This is fantastic. i think your model is closer to the Sl experiecne than mine!
Some nice photographs and artwork.
Haha….well I hope you realize it was in good-natured fun.
By the way, I really do like your model – I’ve pulled it out on a number of occassions to explain to partners or clients the stumbling blocks that lie between those first experiences with SL and finding the sweet spot of creativity and purpose which is its potential.
Keep up the good work!
He was a kind, gentle, very friends and warmhearted boy. Always there for his friends. Dummie always brightened up the day.
I never got to know him very well. and now I wish I had done but I’ll certainly miss him and it makes me sad that he’s gone.
My thoughts and sympathy go out to Caleb and all the people who knew him
We will all miss you so much, you are forever in our hearts
bye Dummie…
Waylon
Dummie, i dont have any words for what i am feeling now. today i heard what happened. I am sad and shocked. Why you? its not fair. why are all the sweet and tender persons in this worlds taken away.
the only thing i can think about is, that you are needed in an other place to make it better. A place that very much needed you. And i know that you kindness and loving will make it better very soon.
i met you in a club as the son of husama and silva. and de brother of speedy. you were always very nice. we talked, had fun and laughed. I especially know how you made husama feel, a very good friend of mine. I am so thankfull of what you did for her.
You are a very tender and kind person and you will be missed among friends and family. If i see the sadness they have now they lost you, it is shown how important you are to them.
rest in peace , dear dummie.
wherever you are, i know you will be watching down on all of us with a big smile.
we will miss you
Patrice
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity [...]
[...] Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane: Metaplace, Second Life, Twinity“He argues that a combination of using Artificial Intelligence (non-player characters) and control of the flow of objects into the world allows developers to control for MUDflation.” SITE: http://feeds.aigamedev.com/~r/GameAiNews/~3/179693276/18338914 [...]
Dummie – my first real good friend in SL.
We talked nights and nights about life and you helped me to restart my life in SL.
Thank you Dummie with love – in our hearts you’re still alive.
Walt
my dear dummie, you was my lovely son and silvas son in sl and i miss you so much , i know i cant write many it is so dificult that you are gone, i dont understand why you ….we miss you…we love you… and we will always do!!! you are in my heart …. and you stay always there i have make a place for you ….special for you …oww dummie i miss you ;-”"”( i cant never seen you again… and the hug what you give me on your way i will miss so much, my god dummie I MISS YOU ………… your mum Husama korobase …
Dummie, i don’t know you so wel
but you was the lovely son of my girlfriend
Rest in peace
We will miss you
BW Kamachi
Dear dummy, I still cannot believe it we will this for us never see again, I can only think to you to this how much fun we had and how much nonsense we have made. I will never forget you and always carry you in my hearts.
in Love Speedy
p.s.
Excuses my bad English, but I can not think correctly at the moment
Dummie;
You were my first friend here on Second Life and I hope some day we will meet in Heaven when God calls me like he did you. You will be trully missed here and i klnw that we will all live again topgether in Heaven.
Miss you Markie
[...] strange and its end is filled with mysteries, shadows and the truest knowledge of our unknowing. Dummie Beck’s recent death and the feelings and responses it evoked has left me thinking, grieving (for someone I [...]
The question of avatar ownership tickles many threads to be tugged. I would hope that our use of virtual worlds leads us more to our humanity, and thus, to our sharing our being-ness with others across the spatial now. The evidence I have gathered, subjective as it is, tells me that my closest ones perceive me behind the veils and channels, and than another would only fool those not really human.
Not that I haven’t thought of other modes. When I began describing SL to those in meat-space I told them to imagine a soap opera that is immersive; where the characters are also the writers and the audience. In that thread of thinking, I then imagined a super-avatar, one for which a team of writers, fashion consultants, language coaches, designers, and others converged creativity and strategy to create an über-personality.
As I think of being human, I think of Grandfather in the movie Little Big Man, who referred only to certain members of his tribe as “human”. I speak of the possibility of SL, or anything else, helping us to evolve our humanity when I also feel we may have already surrendered it and rendered it to the genteel beast of post-industrial zombie-ism. How many of us can pass a Turing test of the soul? How do you know, a co-worker asked last week, that you are really interacting with actual people “in there”? If the three vehicles were able to complete the DARPA challenge, how hard could it be to make an avatar that passed for one with a human running it?
I have found myself in way of life where I have adapted this so-called modern life and mode of surviving, at least up partway up the ramp of Maslow’s needs, but I find myself isolated by a series of logical conclusions. SL has brought me into a new level of human interaction. Death is part of that. SL is not perfect, but it short-circuits some of the insulation our way of life has as side-effects. As I sat looking at my screen knowing that a couple thousand miles away, my beloved friend was sobbing as he grieved Dummie’s passing, I wanted nothing more than to hold that real person in my real arms. So far, that interaction seems irreplaceable by our technology.
Some weeks ago Dummie sent me an IM
“Walt, you may believe it or not, I feel like living in heaven with Caleb”!
I established a memory-stone beside our house with a link to this site.
Feel free to visit at slurl.com/secondlife/Pride%20Island/219/114/21
Walt
Knock yourself out fellas:
[...] invites comments. I’ve posted on this topic before. It’s still not clear how the currency value will be set and whether Metaplace itself will [...]
Hi my son , you will always be in my heart forever ,I love you so much ,and your mother love you 2.
I know you are looking at us and smiling.
You will always be my son and speedy love you 2 , your sister miss you a lot .we all miss you.
All those crazy nights and days playing and having fun will always be inside me forever.I miss you a lot dummie.
bye my son
with love your father silva ayres
The in world issues have ZERO to do with the CTO stepping down. If you had followed the various posts/blogs and read up a bit more It would be really obvious that there are obviously managment issues and Corey even stated that he and the CEO simply do not see eye to eye on priorities or the directions SL is going.
The problems with SL has nothing to do with it. It’s already a part of Second Life. Without problems, it wouldn’t be SL.
As reported on CNET, (http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9832840-52.html) Philip and Cory no longer saw eye-to-eye. For how long this was the case I have no idea, and certainly the most recent spate of problems with the Grid hardly led to the termination. I find it hard to imagine Philip pulling out his hair and screaming “My gawd! Our residents can’t teleport! That’s unacceptable! You’re fired!”
Whether the purported e-mail from Philip to staff is true, there is little difference between the e-mail:
“Cory and I have differences in how we think Linden should be run, differences that in the past few months have become irreconcilable.”
and the official release:
“Therefore, Cory and I are in agreement that our paths, at this point in time at least, lie in different directions.”
The bottom line is there’s a “T” in CTO, and the CTO needs to work with the CEO. Which vision is right and which skill set is best suited to taking SL into the next phase of its evolution will only become clear in time or if Linden can do a better job communicating a broader set of priorities other than platitudes and Windlight.
Cory leaving did not result in the grid failures of the past few months, but an overall lack of coherence, performance, and sufficient progress did. This leaves it in Philip’s hands to bring his team into alignment with whatever his vision is and hope that it’s the right one.
Having said all that I also agree with Kabalyero – TP and grid issues don’t particularly phase me. This is messy, evolving, prototyping, mucky (excuse the pun) fun. Linux had Linus and Linden had Cory under Philip’s direction. Messy is good. Messy is chaos and chaos is the friend of creation. But please please can I have my inventory back?
I met Dummie when he First Came to Second Life. I was not Around Much But My Partner Nathan Pollock befriended him and Introduced him to me.
Nat went on to Help him find a new Av to fit his Personality and give him a makeover for his Appearance in Second Life. I had only a few encounters with Dummie and wish I could have gotten to Know him as well as all of those who he found and found him in Second Life.But he made an impression on me from the start. And because he was a friend to Nat and so many and Missed by so many Nathan, Vagen and I have placed a plaque in his honor on our land and HIM & I & US Commune and Locomotive. YOU are Not Forgotten Dummie.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse [...]
No Comments
HI Dummie
I am back from my hollidays it was verry nice had a good time only to short.:-) I was missing SL bud I am glad to be back so i can see all my friends again….
Thats what i was plant to wricht to all my friends! until i hear this sad sad news Dummie is gone what?? Dummie gone no longer on SL ?? cant be I dont believe that he was allways there ath the OBC dancing with us ore ath the Vortex he loved SL to be with his friends and partner Caleb. No MERL he is leaving SL and RL!! I am verry sad Dummie was a good friend a nice boy!! we talkd a lot we dance a lot we laugh a lot and even we cry together Dummie I will miss you verry much you where a wonderfull person to me and a fine friend I will miss you and hope iff there is a god he wil cover you like you dith to me and all your friends I love you DUMMIE and hope we meed in next live god bless you! hugs your MERLIE!!!
ich werde dich immer im härzen tragen Rühe im frieden
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
I am nodding my head up and down, Dusan. I have yet to see very many examples of brands seeming to know how to make use of SL. A thesis I was getting as I read this seems to say that the big brands climbed in thinking a top down approach would bring avatars flocking to their site, when in reality a lot of the sustained energy of SL is a bottom-up participation.
I sat in a meeting of paleo-technologists and perked up when one presenter talked about SL. I was thinking, how is he going to relate SL with the topic of this meeting? In the end, he really couldn’t. He simply said, and I am paraphrasing, “I know something big is going on here, but I don’t know what it really is, but I know we should be a part of it”. So, ok, dogpile on the buzzword.
Every year the “Society for the German language” choses the “Word of the year” (or actually the wordS of the year). This year “Second Life” was on the top ten list for the first time and came in as 7th – the highest entry from the internet world.
[...] its (occassionally limited) technology is its ability to remind us of deeper meanings. I’ve written at length about the strange loop, and how virtuality circles back to reality. There is a rich vein [...]
[...] To that I proffer that the future might not be “professionally made games”. That people will turn to platforms that allow them to make games and games will go independant. Just as we have now have micro content boiling all over the video and audio realms courtesy of YouTube and podcasts, we may, no we will probably, see the same in the games industry. Dusan Writer, who owns a company that does work in advertising, strategy, marketing and design working mainly in healthcare, environmental issues, and training noted my outlook on VastPark, MetaPlace and Second Life in a blog entry. [...]
[...] I’ll suggest that anyone interested in the meta-issues of Second Life – especially the preoccupation with corporate co-opting of SL – take a look at this post. [...]
I’m also looking forward to trying out Metaplace. If it becomes a competition for Second Life then much better. Hopefully, Second Life will improve. Second Life needs a legitimate competitor right now.
I’m having a hard time using Vastparks Create tool!
Just shows that I’m no 3D modeller. 
[...] my amateur’s armchair, I’ve given my take before on the economies of virtual worlds, riffing off the work of Edward Castranova, including my [...]
[...] Dusan Writer touches on many things I agree with in her follow-up. One being Edward Castranova’s desire for protecting the magic circle. Users will define what the magic circle will be and in the not so near future, if they wish, they will be creating the entire magic circle.. When does the game begin and end? It varies from individual to individual. Like turn of the century Quake matches via TCP/IP…you were not the best until you mastered Ping flood protection, learned to send a string of out of band data against your foe on TCP port 139, coordinated via ICQ, kept up with the birth of the Stooge bot and a host of other challenges. The game demanded players improve their security skills or suffer. The game went far beyond the game’s own boundaries- yet people played and they still play. [...]
VastPark’s tool is clunky, Kabalyero – and why they mapped the keyboard the way they did I have no idea. Having said that, I’ve been having fun playing with it and pretending it’s like the first days of SL.
..but sorry guys i dont understand i never meet Dummie i seen only some signs in his memory..but some rumors arrived to me are Dummie have only change his avatar’s name and he still life in sl is true or not?!? You are sure he is really dead in rl ..becouse is not possible to joke about it, if is a joke is a really stupid thing..plz help to me to understand who are right??
Etha -
There was an excellent post on this topic on Gemini’s blog. Check:
http://vortexblog.geminienfield.com/2007/11/19/farewell-dummie/
very good thoughts,,
alas, and not surprising it is exactly what NOT was done or is being done in the 3d media world of today..now known as by the “virtual worlds-avatar” pr meme.
Remember, it wasnt any single “social 2.0-eyeball driven advertisier paid for” platform that created the more high production level 2d web boom in 1997, It was a “free”-aka stolen mac copies- SIMPLE, NO SERVER, NO giving over your IP rights or need approval by , driven software tool/application called “Flash” that allowed a higher production level to come to the web, thus attracting those who create and sell such services to it…and then those who would want to utilize it.
As long as “3d web media” is caught in social. web2.0 blog memes and VC based get rich quick on “service” platform type thinking, it will only be another failure for the medium for those who could use it for their own reasons.
SL reached and now has peaked “interest” by mass media makers due to its “chaos” of tools for creation….just like flash had, but SL failed to allow others to TRULY create their OWN PROPERTY, and now will provide the template for many failures being built today, due to the “service” mentaility of being another google, not another macromedia…. that is required today for bloggers and thus “money interests” to offer any support.
People make things with TOOLS… NOT Services…
an old lesson, one not learned, and one that will be sadley repeated for those who really want to use 3d realtime media to create in and with.
c3
Thanks for your post on our factory! The idea is actually motivated by a old video on telematic production created by the filmmaker Alex Rivera called Cybraceros. http://www.invisibleamerica.com/whycybraceros.shtml
And yes, we are interested in issues of labor exploitation in the global game industry, gold farming, Madam Chung and her sweatshop and the increasing overlap of leisure and labor incurred by hand held devices and the cultural production of play!
[...] thinking about the strange loop and recursion, I’ve written before about the fact that there are both constructivist and deconstructivist pathways to [...]
Hi Susan. Thanks for the story.
I would just like to point out (in the nicest possible way of course) that there’s a big difference between data collection and data analysis (and a lot of demand for the latter).
Happy new year.
Nic
Agreed.
I was hoping to know what the analysis was!
Very nice post, Thanks!
Dear Dusan,
I think you have wonderfully resumed the experience of disorientation and later, either discouragement or exhilaration when one discovers Second Life to be less a game than a new world. I hope your advice is heard.
One thing I have difficulties finding myself in is the Augmentationists vs. Immersionists debate. With all due respect for Gwyneth Lewellyn’s categorization, I find both mixed instead of distinct. My SL activities are based on RL interests and behaviour (though going far beyond what I am willing to put into practice IRL) ; but immersion in the social and virtual space where I have the opportunity to live them, and the communities therein, including abiding to rules and practices making little sense from a RL viewpoint, is the key to the whole experience. I’d say both augmentation and immersion melt into a hybrid, one probably balanced differently form person to person, rather than that they are two separate approaches to the new world.
What better times are there to live in than interesting ones ? A century and half after the end of the age of discovery, a decade and half after the proclaimed end of history itself, we are suprised to find ourselves discovering and shaping a new world. A virgin one at that.
Always wish for interesting times, don’t you think ?
Rhata:
I couldn’t agree more – there are rarely dichotomies, in real or virtual worlds. I make the point about selecting your avatar name because of this very blurring. I think the point that Gwyneth makes that I support is that of initial INTENT, and then how that intent is projected to others (through groups, appearance, and where time is spent). Over time, a user’s experience in a virtual world shifts and blurs – the “strange loop” where immersion can lead to shifts in how we perceive the real, or how the augmentation of the real leads to immersion in environments and emotional landscapes we didn’t anticipate.
It’s useful to recognize that we probably lie on the continuum somewhere between the intent to immersion or augmentation. If my intention tends towards immersion, I can be highly offended by someone who asks questions about my real life. If I’m there because I’m augmenting RL interests, then I’m very likely to share e-mails, Facebook profiles, and other information about myself.
There’s no question the two blur. Using these categories are nice reminders in our interactions with others that their intent may not be the same as our own, and in particular this might be useful to a newcomer to synthetic worlds.
For myself, I’m with you – immersion gave way to augmentation gave way to different touch-points of immersion, and who can tell the difference anymore.
But the virtual and real aren’t that much different – I can be immersed in reading a book or going to a movie, and my life is always augmented by my actions and thoughts. Increasingly, these distinctions won’t need to be articulated they’ll be as second-nature (pardon the pun) as our real lives. I wouldn’t label myself a realist vs. an escapist, I’m both.
Arriving in SL, newcomers might find the labels useful to help focus their journey, although they’ll probably discover that however narrow they wish their focus to be, that there’s such a wealth of experiences that they’ll end up breaking through the boundaries of the intent because it will just be too interesting not to.
Hehe, yeah, this was cool. I think the pictures are from Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, last summer ^_^
Now….if they’d add one of those pyramids that hover above your character in The Sims that turns from red to green as your happiness grows and shows little symbols in place of actually having to talk, they’d clean up selling to nightclubs.
hey dummie…
didnt see that there was a possibility to leave comments. i hope ure good wherever ure now. we had pretty much fun and it was a hard smash when i heard u died…three smashes in a row, in what seemed only 2 weeks. that was too much.
i would remember to phoenix ripley and hart streeter too.
they were pretty good friends and i hope they all are watching us from above
Everest
I love the art
When Joey comes up I want you to show him your world that you have built. I have been trying to explain some of it…but it is better shown than told.
You are so far ahead of the game. I know about 1% of what this entails!!! lol It is all evolving so rapidly. One wonders what the world will be like in 10 years…5 years?
Hi Dusan,
]
We made a video to show what is possible today in Microsoft VE using the Shape modeling application from 3DVIA.
http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!10172.entry
Combining custom built house models with the Microsoft VE terrain and cityscapes has some pretty interesting possibilities. [Of course, it would help a lot to have some trees
thanks for your informative post. I did not know about the Microsoft ESP inititative.
– Rodd
Really nice work…in many ways I think 3DVIA is the stealth candidate for VW development, mainly because its focus is more corporate and everyone loves to talk about Google. Thanks for the post Rodd.
nice. but all these issues where the same over a year ago when “SL or nothing” was the VR worlds mantra.;) by those paying for the “discovery” of vr worlds and 3d media as a platform wrapper.
happy vr -ing
cube3
[...] Follow-up Post Search for Meaning Posted in Metaverse General, Second Life Experience. Tags: dummie beck, Second Life. [...]
Thanks for sharing these great ideas. I’m bookmarking this for future reference. Some of these I already do, so the point resonated most strongly with me. Keep feeding the creativity.
I am currently on holiday so, for this reason, I’ve nothing better to do than surf the web for shopping, lie around and update my blog. Well, more or less anyway.
Doug C
I once thought, as a child, that there must be an end to space. That when I looked above and saw the stars that beyond those stars there was a wall. Once you hit that wall you have come to the end of space.
I now realize, as an adult, that if there was a wall then that would mean there would have to be something on the other side of that wall. Thus, there was no end to space. There was no wall.
I watch this report and realize, as a child, that once again I am looking into space but realize this time that there will be no wall at the end of this space.
[...] Darüber hinaus werden interessante visuelle Charts wie z.B, das “Virtual Universe Landscape” von Fred Cavazza hervorgehoben. Alles in allem eine gute Quelle zur Kategorisierung von Online-Welten. [via Dusan Writer’s Metaverse] [...]
[...] I’ve written about economics and the dissolving membrane previously: Changes to Virtual Economies and the Dissolving Membrane. [...]
[...] I’ve also written that on a platform where the economy is not meant to be artificially constrained by the code (value inputs and outputs are not controlled or constrained by the platform owner as they are in MMORPGs, because they avoid artificially stimulating or depressing the economy through economic sinks (such as NPC vendors) and other gaming mechanisms) then it’s important that the currency be dependable. In the case of the Linden, the exchange rate is being artificially maintained by the Lindens, and although this isn’t a bad thing, the lack of detailed information on how thee exchange rate is maintained means that there is an invisible economic metric being hidden in the value of private island sales. I asked whether Metaplace would follow a similar approach to controlling the exchange rate of the Metabuck: Metabucks…and the Linden [...]
[...] and Dusan Writer discussed Edward Castronova’s contentions regarding the Magic Circle here and here. So, the concept is alive and well and discussed frequently in the serious gaming community. There [...]
[...] on the Grid-bank situation. It’s a touch opaque at times unless you give it a careful read, but it’s quite worthwhile. In summary, though, he reiterates the primary objections to the existence of unregulated [...]
[...] by observers as diverse as Benjamin Duranske, Prokofy Neva, Nobody Fugazi, Tateru Nino and Dusan Writer; dissenters have been few and in between, easily dismissed as either obvious lobbyists (for [...]
Wagner James saw more than 61000
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/01/peak-second-lif.html
Second Life News for January 14, 2008
From: Virtually Blind Commentary: Top Five Virtual Law Analysis Fumbles Quote from the site – As virtual worlds continue suffering through legal growing pains, both mainstream press and the blogosphere are covering virtual law more often. There are a n…
does it really matter if they hit that high? the average user for SL only stays on for roughly 12-15 minutes (I believe thats monthly, but ill have to go look it up again)
very interesting post! We think it is the 3D Social Web that is emerging. Immersive and inter-connected to existing web. In fact the Avatar will be the interface to all of it, from your PC, VoIP, TV and Mobile. Let’s see when the new pointing devices start to really roll-out.
But issues at the moment with SL. Growth is hard to see even looking back at 2007 and 2008 looks weaker. Some recent data:
http://rezzable.com/blog/2008/uncategorized/2006-vs-2007-second-life-data/
Nonetheless, we are excited about future, but also think that Content will be king, just like when browser wars cleared and then content was the main event.
compare that to avg. stick time for a web session or web page…
Concurrency is hardly the objective of SL, and I’ve argued before that the most interesting ’stuff’ happening in SL is in the fields of academia, architecture, and corporate collaboration. It’s the 80/20 rule really – the greatest value being derived from SL may well be happening from the 160,000 of the 850,000 ‘regular’ users. Concurrency is one little dial on the dashboard and leads to the question of why it might be happening – as Wagner pointed out, positive press coverage in places like MSNBC.com which doesn’t treat Second Life as a novelty but rather a fact of the business landscape.
I also agree with Wayne. I’m no expert on Web site metrics but outside of social sites I’d guess that if an average Web site was able to say it had 24,000,000 user hours logged against it in the course of a month it would leave someone drooling.
I’m also no expert at reading the Second Life statistics tea leaves. I do know that numbers like the recent improvements to grid stability, increased island sales, and increased user hours when combined with a concurrency record are nice ticks in the right direction. I’m also of the mind that some of the most interesting stuff that will arise from SL will be the result of cross-platform projects that include time spent on blogs, Web sites, and in-world projects. SLoodle, for example, which allows development of courseware integrating in-world learning with the Moodle course platform.
A recent post that the US Department of Defense is using SL to train diplomats within a wider training program also suggests that there would be time “outside” SL that might easily be a lost metric – SL as an integral part of a Web-based toolkit of content is not reflected in user/hours or concurrency stats but may in fact have a deeper value in the long run.
That is, you don’t have to be IN world to be creating value for SL – and for many gaming platforms, they work hard to preclude out-of-world trading and other activities.
And I’m not sure what the latest stats are…(and I have loved Warcraft)…but for all the complaints about sim limits, I believe SL has long exceeded the total population that Warcraft can support on a given realm.
60,000 concurrent users on a realm of Warcraft would mean instant log-in failures – and that’s WITH the content taking 3 hours to load onto your own PC rather than being hosted, along with several billion user-generated items, by the platform provider.
Just a thought.
Agreed Rightasrain! But not just the 3D social Web but the 3D Wiki world – collaborative, social, project teams coming together and then going their own way, education in your hand rather than a classroom, augmented reality, and all the attendant possible negatives of the above.
On the one hand, I wish that SL was a broad consumer platform and had delivered on the promise of a flood of new CSI-enticed users who were then led to explorations outside of the traditional expectations of a “game” platform. But really, the most interesting work in SL has been that it has created a collaborative, creative and dare I say craftsman culture – and the early pioneers are now being followed by quality companies and institutions who are thoughtful and not motivated by how many “hits” they get.
Rezzable is a shining example, to my mind, of building a community of practice – prototyping concepts of experience, interaction, but more than anything bringing skilled craftspeople together towards creating the shared capability of working together in a space where the traditional corporate models will have a hard time finding traction.
The argument that we’ve moved beyond information into the conceptual age has its pairing in the idea that while content is king, content will be nothing without the ability to shape its CONTEXT especially in environments where notions of context, identity, and value are still being shaped. Today’s brilliant thinkers and creators, today’s Rezzables, have been joined by the academics and corporate visionaries who will then continue to translate these prototypes into new models for how we create, distribute, and attribute value to content.
/me grabs ticket to the main event.
Rodd….you might want to check out the new tree engine…
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/dryad-010908.html
great ideas there!
We are working on some new concepts focused more on unlocking creative energy in the more engaged SL builders. I hope this will be a step forward on user generate quality content…and not just tons more prim trash! Stay tuned and look forward to your comments!
I’m so glad you see the creepiness in Castronova’s definitely creepy arguments. It’s so necessary for more and more critics of this sole voice on the scene to come forward and challenge a lot of the really nasty consequences of this elitist ideology privileging game gods without checks and balances.
I really took him to task here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/11/troll-at-the-br.html
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/11/ted-castranova.html
I frankly think we need to yell long and hard about economists-turned-ludologists who think games and worlds are a great way to tap into reptile-brain impulses in human beings and addict them to behaviours in games and worlds run by artificial intelligences that are in fact merely the tools of coders with oppressive and even totalitarian views. He’s far too supportive of these sorts of scenarios, and wants to take the medieval law of MMORGPs and push it into real life — where it was banished centuries ago with what we like to call “The Enlightenment”.
Marshall McLuhan said education would need to change due to the awesome impact of technology, or rather, traditional education was ineffective and would be chasing uneducable kids — but that was 40 years ago. The question isn’t to report on this anymore but to do something about it, and do something demonstrably effective, other than make some silly politically-correct “serious game”.
Ted’s idea was to have people get jobs the way they get quests, with little NPCs showing up to offer them jobs in real life if they could accomplish certain tasks. My God, as you say, who will do all this indulging of all these entitlement-happy freaks created by virtuality?!
I was so thrilled the first time I heard Castronova speak and take virtual economies seriously, speak of the naturally, say in 2004 that the only thing odd about his topic “virtual stock exchanges” was that in 20 years, the adjective “virtual” wouldn’t be tacked on; it would be just the way all stock exchanges were. And yet…now they are crumbling in Second Life as a victim of policy, not law, and fear of regulation, not the chasing of virtual worlds by real-life law enforcers, which he fears — and I guess he imagines he can create a realm strong enough to evade.
Castronova is also far too welded to game-games, not the games of worlds, or open-ended virtual 3-d platforms like Second Life. He just hasn’t had enough experience with it. It’s like…too much real life.
I think you have to be more than queasy about totalitarian wannabee game gods with experts like Castronova serving them — you have to be standing up and fighting.
I don’t want the values of MMORPGs — sychophantic fanboyz, toadying resmods and wizards, arrogant game devs, dismissive “code-as-law” and “information-wants-to-be-free” criminality to start holding sway over real life — and the culture already does in many areas.
What I do have to wonder about is the premise that such large portions of populations will “escape to virtual worlds” that there will be no one to run the factories and keep the electricity turned on. The reality is that as much as these games and worlds have booming populations, they also don’t have “everybody” like the Internet. Or they don’t have them 24/7. Or they don’t have them such that people all quit their day jobs and sit at home all day levelling up. In part because they are worlds that don’t really capture people’s imagination or effort, as they are those droning and dreary skill=grinding and war-fighting games that Ted loves.
And another important point: I think we can’t look at artificial intelligence as some kind of abstraction, some kind of “technology”. Artificial intelligence is a manifestation of an elitist movement in society that has the power to code, and code power over all in their realm. AI is an extension of rule, not something separate from it. It’s character isn’t ’science’; it’s nature is cultural and political. This is often overlooked, as people imagine AIs will only be helpful librarians at your elbow, and not bots blocking you from accessing content or expelling you from groups, which is what happens in Second Life. AIs don’t acquire purity because they are automatic; they are creatures of the coding elite, and it is shaped by a culture that is making you queasy.
I think what’s important about Castronova’s two books, which are indeed seminal in this field, is that they indicate serious study and the creation of a system of thought about virtuality. Now we need 100 other thoughts and systems and schools to spring up, too, so that this “early adapter” doesn’t hold sway without challenge. There’s no reason why we all have to live like orcs in WoW or avatars keeping our mouths shut in Linden townhalls.
It’s only because of the newness of this field that it is so bereft of any critical challenge to Castronova. So I have felt I had to make a special effort to criticize him very hard. I find him frankly unconvincing as an economist of virtuality if he dismisses SL so glibly. It’s appalling. I guess it’s too real or too complex for him.
>While the real world concert is taking place, participants in the virtual concert hall might be remixing songs on the fly, mashing the experience so that it is no longer a stand-alone event, but rather the source for a veritable flood of user-generated content.
Dusan, let’s just catch our breaths here for a moment.
I’m a big Second Lifer as you know. And real lifer, too! But the mash-ups are just not convincing.
I’d like for once for people to actually report on what people actually do with these mash-up thingies, rather than just get ecstatic about the idea of them. OK, we got it, it’s cool, people can look in a window and see avatars in a virtual world. Get the screen big enough, it’s a blast. They stare at the screen, then turn away and deal with people in real life. There’s some interaction, but…are they really doing all that fabulous user generating of content? Or are they just consuming in a more fractured manner?
People readily adapt to immersive virtuality and live in it as if it is real, in a very simple way, and the lower the level of education, they easier they do this, without thumb-sucking about reflexivity.
The architecture needs to have a comfort level that avatars can really live in, and not just gaze at, as art. The camera angles have to be good!
I don’t believe in these four truths, as the source of illusion isn’t greed, but hope. I also think there isn’t anything terribly fascinating or insightful about tracking avatars around on a sim, they’re like people, only a little clunkier until the technology gets better.
Virtuality and artificial intelligence are human artifacts, and bear all the markings of any human tool.
It is a member of the site.
[...] This is an interesting pick-up from Castranova’s idea of an Exodus to Virtual Worlds, which I posted about last week. Castranova’s argument is that the “real world” had better learn about virtual [...]
Good read! I actually prefer http://www.citypixel.com/ to SL and WoW.
Thanks Big A…will be worth exploring City Pixel. Looks like a social engine site…seems to be popping up a fair bit, leveraging the Facebook/social Web idea into virtual worlds. How does City Pixel work as a venue for education, corporate collaboration, simulation or explorations of new creative forms and visual rhetoric? (Save me a trip please! Or at least point in the direction of where I can find these things once I get there?)
Thanks for the post.
[...] avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not [...]
[...] avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not [...]
[...] avatar’s experience than buildings that give good camera, in Prokofy Neva’s view, who recently outed me as part of the thumb-sucking set who have perhaps spent too much time ‘gazing’ and not [...]
Of course your post is on target as usual. While I am sure that Windlight + Havoc4 will raise the bar for online virtual worlds, issue still is attracting/converting new users.
We are going to try to do something here, but it would sure go a lot further if LL had a matching marketing program–ala intel inside.
LL is making some little effort here now with their new “Showcase” http://secondlife.com/showcase/. But not sure that gonna do too much. They would do a lot better with an email campaign to the 12 million people who signed up!
Simple things are too hard to deal with now. Simple example…it takes a ton of time to enter an Event. We all know events are key, but it takes 5 minutes to do something now…and no integration back out from Events to something like Google calendar or even RSS feed. While SL is a very open platform…events are trapped.
But LL is also trapped, they are still dazzled by virtual real estate and missing the point that residents–especially new residents–want to do fun stuff. They want to explore the virtual world and they want to meet people. And it’s not only about sex.
[...] there is this installation I just read about on Dusan Writer’s blog (link). Amazing!!! I haven’t seen this in-world yet, but will let you know what I [...]
Aw, now that picture must be worth another peck on the cheek. Just to make for a little blush to compliment the happy picture.
A perfectly made point. If I’d dare to nitpick, I would however state that I find it pointless to hope for the Lindens to augment the beginner’s experience — simply because I suspect that SL’s burgeoning society has outgrown any concept they might have had of it long ago.
Their failure on elementary governance and customer support, the disastrous Teen Grid and the horrid orientation experience are just cases in point that His Majesty King Philip, for all his benign intentions, is sitting pretty far away on his throne, only very remotely aware what all those pesky colonists in the New World are up to…
By the way, one of the Colonists has come up with a nifty software bridge between the in-world event calendars and the widely accepted ICS format. Head over to the esteemed Ms Ordinal Malaprop’s box of tricks at http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/contents/ to grab the URLs.
I certainly hope Prokofy is wrong, and the virtual interface is more than just a clunky version of real life. yick!
Those who believe their avatar is a human being will always see the differences between the real and the virtual as a stumbling block on the path toward seamless replication of real life. But, those who can get beyond mere physical replication might begin to see those differences as opportunities.
If you could fly in real life, as easily as you can walk, wouldn’t you do it? If your body had an invisible camera you could place anywhere without moving your body, wouldn’t you use it? But, more importantly, wouldn’t you expect your built environment to evolve accordingly? If architects could easily program bricks or walls to be more intelligent and respond to our presence, wouldn’t we take advantage of that feature? Wouldn’t a new kind of architecture evolve, based on those new characteristics?
All we’re doing is designing within context. The context, in this case, happens to be a bit different than physical reality. I think its actually irresponsible to ignore that context and go on placating the lowest common denominator and mindlessly replicating physical reality – just because its easier, or more ‘comfortable’ in the short term. I appreciate traditional design and appropriate applications of physical replication in Second Life as much as anyone, but I also believe we’re all on a collective learning curve, and that there is enough room in the vast grid of Second Life for a few people to try out their ideas, and for others to write out their thoughts and observations about that work. There is nothing wrong with that.
But I really don’t think its appropriate to chase down and argue against those who try to understand or explore these new opportunities, calling them out as thumb-suckers. Granted, innovation isn’t for everyone – especially those who feel threatened by it, or don’t understand it, or don’t like it. That dichotomy is as old as time. But if anyone is sucking their thumbs – wouldn’t it be those who fear innovation, and go around demanding status quo?
[...] and Identity I’ve written at length about the our personal relationships to our avatars, and what I prefer to call the “strange [...]
Just a quick word on alts.
I use an alt to seperate the “normal” me who is pretty out there as far as identity profiling from a character for a specific setting. The example being that I created the alt account of Degan Blackadder sepcifically to be a villain in a fantasy RP setting. Why? Because honestly could you really believe a villain named Mace Maverick? >=)
Haha. Good point.
How about heading over to Twinity where you’re stuck with *gasp* your REAL NAME! What kind of virtual world is THAT?
Thanks Keystone. We’re having fun with the scripts by the way, can’t wait to show you some of the results.
In the meantime, please take note regarding thumb sucking, as I fear being pulled into a wider debate. I have nothing wrong with thumb sucking, and in fact some of my best friends are thumb suckers. Kind thanks.
This is a great post, Dusan, I’m glad to see people writing posts as long as mine, but here’s my immediate response:
“I am large; I contain simultitudes.” per Walt Whitman.
Seriously, this fear of alts, and hatred of changeable and mutating identities may go back very far and deeply to the folklore of all cultures, but let’s not be too precious here.
We seriously need an avatar rights movement to break free of coders, or at least to pit one set of more enlightened coders against the other more endarkened ones who are indeed recreating the Gulag Archiplego literatally and figuratively.
If I have a real-life enterprise for which I need the augmentation or tool of virtuality, I can easily get together in real life in person, by registered mail, by telephone, by email, by whatever, without having to burden the anonymous avatar realm with my needs. The needs are engendered by reality; they can be satisfied in reality without devising elaborate coders’ schemes to tie identity.
All your efforts to make alts come to naught if the coders have ways of tracking your IP, your log-on locations, various other identifying features of your “footprint” that they can process at fantastic speeds to block you everywhere. And that in turn can be used to block your purchases, rentals, sales, etc. in virtuality and truly hobble your expression and even your survival.
I always find it humorous that the technolibertarians are the first to make themselves anonymous, to use anonymizers, to be concerned about anyone tracking them, but then they whole-heartedly embrace — as a class — the most aggressive data-scraping that takes away the privacy of others.
Nick Yee does not understand Second Life; his research is faulty. He’s the guy who could claim that avatars have gazes, and that he can track their genders in this fashion. They don’t have gazes in SL. I’ve challenged him a number of times, but he’s one of those celebrities at Stanford that about whom it’s impossible to get anybody to do the most basic challenge.
I totally repudiate the reductionism and Darwinism implied in Yee’s concept that your avatar’s shape or height or whatever will change your behaviour. This is just old rewarmed Marxism (”the material affects consciouness”), or facile Myspacism, I don’t know which is worse. There are quite short and stout and ugly avatars all over the place, but they can command immense respect and authority — sometimes merely by having the last name “Linden”. An avatar can look like a jailbird, but if he has the last name “Millionsofus,” he’s golden. I’m sorry, but Nick is spouting facile nonsense, drawn from games, and not even a very deep take on games.
I’m glad you’ve marked the concept of “tribal” morality here, because that’s exactly what prevails in SL. Of course, there is very real grounds for fear of the changeable in SL, especially the gender-bending, because there is a small and persistent class of people — especially males — in online communities who delight in tormenting females by pretending to be female and lesbian and partnering with them, or finding real-life males and pretending they are females in RL — and causing a lot of emotional harm (and there are even a few females who crossgender and mislead others about their real lives, too, though it is less common).
This pain in communities has been so great that it has spawned a great deal of the thinking around avatar anonymity — there is nothing people fear and loathe more than the idea that the wrong gender is pairing with them.
Obviously I think people should be free to transgender, but I think they have crossed a moral boundary when they do not let a potential romantic (or even business) partner know their real gender, given how much this still means in the real world.
I’m not buying the concept of “therapy” if “therapeutic” means “I get to make an alt and grief others with harassment.”
There is a quotation from Ayn Rand, whom I normally dislike (I am definitely not a follower of her elitist and callous belief system), that makes sense to me:
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. Ayn Rand
However, I like to couple this saying with another quotation:
“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” Pope John Paul II
I think you need a more subtle understanding of what it means to be “educated”. It’s not literally about the number of grades you completed in school. It’s about what level of sophistication you have in reflecting upon yourself in an environment, in taking a meta-level take.
The average joe with a high school education or some community college or trade school happily immerses in SL and finds a partner, a sex bed, a home, and goes happily at it. More intelligent, thoughtful, reflective types will write on their profiles that they aren’t available for such casual liasons; and they laughingly tell you that they’d never do anything so ridiculous as cavort on the pose balls. So I’m literally talking about the mediated architecture of sex furniture here, Dusan, if you will — where my point becomes graphic.
The ultra sophisticated will usually tell you that they “don’t need land to have fun” or “don’t understand why people have houses” or “why they have roofs when it’s not raining,” etc. etc. Ok, we got it, guys. Now dig deeper. So I’m glad you *are* digging deeper.
Ian Bogost isn’t really a persuasive reference for me, not to make a pun of it. I find his appallingly politically-correct game narrative a total bore, and frankly oppressive. The one on the fat Americans oppressing the rest of the starving world that he put out recently was especially atrocious. His art of persuasive is more of an orthodox ideological sect, that lock-steps you into coming to the same politically-correct views. These aren’t games; they aren’t even homilies; they are re-education camps. I loathe that.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse The Place of Alts in Virtual Worlds and Second Life: Possession or Expression Quote from the site – Is having an ‘alt’ in Second Life a moral failing? Where does “Your [...]
Keystone, the minute you can stop making your living from Second Life, you will have a more sanguine view of all this. Until then, sure, you can dine out on the sheer aesthetics of it all.
Thumb-sucking isn’t about being infantile; the term “a thumbsucker” is newspaper newsroom jargon for “a long piece in which someone has a deep thought”. That’s all. You need not read into it some terrible dramatic commentary.
I find it fascistic that Keystone is now kow-towing to the Mau-Mauers and insisting that we aestheticize — or else! Or else we are *gasp* playing to the lowest common denominator!
As a rental agent, I can only *serve* my customers. And what they want is versimilitude, a comfort level for avatars, a certain kind of aesthetic, that will hardly be the politically-correct aesthetic that Keystone, as a professional architect would want, especially one trying to carve out some sort of whole neo-geo field with all this.
Keystone, what’s awful about what you write is that you imagine that if I serve the pedestrian customers’ need for low-brow builds and prefab architecture and date destinations, that I’m oppressing you with some imagined majority. But in Second Life, that is sheer and utter bullshit, because anyone can buy an island, and do what the hell they want on their island or continent –as you have done — and never fly around and see the tacky McMansions and Goth Castles of Second Life if they don’t wish to harm their eyeballs.
Nobody is stopping you from your “few ideas”. And your few ideas are…what? Recreating the Capitol Building of the US Congress *exactly as it is in real life*? Hello?
This stateement is truly beneath you, Keystone, as you know perfectly well that I give these issues a great deal of thought and do a great deal of reading on the subject:
“Granted, innovation isn’t for everyone – especially those who feel threatened by it, or don’t understand it, or don’t like it. That dichotomy is as old as time. But if anyone is sucking their thumbs – wouldn’t it be those who fear innovation, and go around demanding status quo?”
I don’t feel threatened by innovation — please cut the bullshit. What I *will* do is call innovation that is just as tacky and facile and reiterative as any kid’s fractal art exactly what it is. I don’t see that plains of blinking lights or geometric sculptures are even good art, let alone architecture. THAT is the debate. Frankly, it’s a debate I had about the winners of that contest — and I was surprised and pleased to see that Lordfly, whom surely you can respect as “one of your own,” even if a junior variety, had the exact same problems with: pretentiousness, overmathematical solutions, showy discomfort in the name of edginess, etc.
Nobody is demanding the Status Quo, Keystone, give it a break (um, Capitol Hill, anyone?!). I’m challenging pretentiousness, and facile crap, that’s all.
For example, this sort of hortatory lecture, from an anti-consumerist, pastoral, anti-capitalist sort of leftist ideology:
“to deconstruct visual media so that we understand how advertising, for example, uses images to persuade us to buy things we don’t need, or go places we don’t need to see, so too does it become incumbent on us to explore how virtual worlds and the objects within them can create a new rhetorical language the purpose of which is not to just make it easier to get into a shop or to maximize camera angles, but to persuade for other purposes as well.”
Um, why? Why do we have to ‘deconstruct” an ad and find this political evil underneath? Couldn’t we just interpret it as a company with a brand, that we may or may not click through, may or may not enjoy? Must we always play the victim of the leftwing view of the world, suppressed by evil corporations pinning us down with ads? couldn’t we just *like to shop* ???
Some new sort of virtual architecture inspires. It doesn’t have to have medieval or Cape Cod or quaint versimilitude to be comfortable; it can question cliches. There are great architects in SL who soar, who use the tools to the maximum, who create interesting spaces. But so often, even these very good ones, are making sculptural monuments to their own fanciful notion of themselves as being edgy, and it becomes very unpleasant after awhile to actually try to live in these artifacts.
It’s funny how, completely independently of Rezzable, using much less sophisticated tools (snapshots on my homegrown newsletter for my sims) I came up with the same conclusion today on my own blog: we are churning way too many sign-ups with far too little numbers retaining (we all knew that)– but worse, we are losing rapidly even those who retain, not logging on again after 60 days.
I know 10 games that I’ve tried and never gotten off the orientation island or first frames — WoW, Twinity, Guild Wars, Eve Online among many. Why? Because they were too hard too learn, not satisfying enough in their activities, too limited, or too complicated, too hot, or too cold. That’s life in the Metaverse.
But SL shouldn’t be like a hard first-person shooter game — it should be fun like Facebook and easy like Yahoo — at least, that’s what many people coming to it hope from it.
Like others, it took me 2 tries to get on SL and stay, and the second time was a very slow curve up about five months before I really got it to work for me.
A really big problem I’m seeing now in SL is vast hordes of newbies who don’t have money and don’t have direction, worse than ever. The intelligentsia of the various countries whose geeks have gotten into SL, and whose handful of creatives have gotten in, aren’t bringing in the rest of the educated classes. Only consumer-oriented people are coming, but they aren’t educated consumers, i.e. sophisticated in knowing what they can get out of a virtual world.
Second Life needs to be a leisure activity before it can become a labour activity, and for far too many people, SL is work — even camping and plucking money trees is like skill-grinding work, with little reward. People with disposable income and disposable time need to feel a huge rush, and a huge payoff from SL quickly and really get engaged — and they don’t. They need to feel they have social potential they don’t have in RL, or intellectual potential they don’t have in RL, and somehow SL is failing to give this to them rapidly enough.
Unlike Himoff, I don’t imagine some other competitor, even with an inferior platform, will take over from those who disengaged from SL because those people either went to Myspace or WoW or the mall — or back to listening to NPR or reading Slate. Until the thinking people in many countries are inspired to understand this SL simulation will be very valuable for real life prototyping, it will not succeed.
You’re absolutely right that grid stability means nothing. We froze and crashed on the Sims — that didn’t drive us to SL. What drove us to SL is that the most creative people among us got tired of the tools’ limitations and migrated, and we followed them. And then more ordinary consumer types followed simply because the world where they were seemed to have people lacking in interest.
Education is being touted as the next big thing, but it can only become that if it truly breaks down tradition and makes real schools without walls. If I can pay some low fee and take a real class. If I can actually full-fledged degree online with interactivity in SL. If I can audit a professor or have a round-table with other thinkers that really matters — if the university can really behave like the university, and not a Sears catalogue of purchases I make to credential me for my first job as so often it is in RL nowadays.
Lindens already worry far too much about newbies, Dusan. That’s the whole reason why they are so hobbled. They infantalize and therefore cripple newbies, sequestering them on islands and smothering them with Mentors. There is only one cure for this: opening up advertising to businesses and nonprofits. When people can find their interest cohorts, whether they be book clubs or dance clubs, through boards they can click on and teleport to, we will clear some of this hurdle. We need to find ways to make “home stays” which are the most important factor in absorbing any influx of migrants in any world — the people who can take on a newbie and mentor him not according to the company’s script, but by his own set of interests among his cohorts.
What’s happening now is the Lindens are farming out the care and feeding of newbies to their friends in various special corporations, and also letting their FIC-y mentors run the hubs. They should close down all the orientation stations as most of the content is not used or understood, and rework the entire thing as really a big party, a social gathering, a vivid, interactive search come alive, with tableaus, so to speak, displays, demonstrations, portals, ads for people to pick their interests and go to them — not as set-piece tutorials but with people.
The resident-made infohub concept should be expanded in lieu of these re-education labour camps on OIs that force avatars to learn to fly or drive vehicles when they could care less about driving, especially in a world with such rough sim crossings. Vehicle driving is one of the most minority activities in SL, and inflicting that on the newcomer is really torture.
Imagine, I’ve been in SL for 3 years, I made an alt, and couldn’t get off the damn OI myself because the system had grabbed me, hog-tied me, and put me on a track I couldn’t get out of to learn to fly at some sort of aviation tower that I couldn’t even find. Bleh. I finally picked my way through to the “get off the island” kiosk — which should be 16 m2 from the landing point, not located across and obstacle course!
I totally agree that the Lindens need to dump their fixation on early adapters and even mid-adapters. But…They’ve been obsessed about newbies as creatures that need to be swaddled and taught to script and build and drive laggy vehicles and dream of Havoc 4, however (a function of their orientation to early adapters).
We need to pry their hands off all this and find ways for various businesses, nonprofits, venues of various sorts to take the newbies with their affinities, and for the masses who can’t pick an affinity, to have a greater party-like socializing experience which they can then opt to leave to learn if they like, intead of forcing people to learn in a bootcamp before they socialize.
And when I say “party,” I don’t mean dance poles. I mean the wine and cheese party at your college after a poetry reading.
Virtual real estate satisfies a lot of people — it is the engine of SL’s growth, such as it is, to this date, whether any tekkie wants to admit it or not, or whether any “date destination” like the Rezzable sims wants to admit it or not. And virtual sex matters to a lot of people, and that’s fine.
But it’s not enough, because people need to make friends and make connections, and not only romantic ones. They can do this when there are more event hosts.
Event hosting is a thankless, impoverishing job. Those of us who have taken on this job know that it is an uphill struggle, and that even when the Lindens paid you, or even when the Sheep pays you, it is a slog, and it’s hard to expect it to be anything else. A lot of the success of Second Life has hinged upon the willingness of primarily female residents being willing to host people and hold their hands through orientation experiences. There is no substitute for the enormous amount of manpower needed for this job, the labour intensity, the diversity, the more sophisticated tools needed (better groups, more groups, less buggy groups).
People don’t like to just go and gaze passively at fabulous builds that leave them in awe, but have no place for them. They can sometimes have more fun on something simpler, and interactive, but more social.
The Showcase is a welcome development just because the Lindens are finally moving away from only feting scripters and their favourite designers and showing more diversity like live music or education or interesting venues. But they need to enable the community to constantly expand and refresh these pages, and currently, they are hostage to a funnelling through a few Lindens.
>LL is making some little effort here now with their new “Showcase” http://secondlife.com/showcase/. But not sure that gonna do too much. They would do a lot better with an email campaign to the 12 million people who signed up!
Says Himoff, whose Rezzable sims are *featured* in this Showcase (!). I think it’s too much to ask the Lindens also to email 12 million people for you. I think you need to do your own advertising in the audiences that you think could enjoy these sims.
Dusan, great post, very thought provoking and a lot to go on. Worth going back to read again, and dip into all the other references to.
Then I’ll work out perhaps what I should feel about my alt, as I have Heleno for work, and an alt not for work. Not that my alt gets up to anything outrageous but its an easier way to separate work and home. Funnily enough, it seems easier in the real world to do that.
Some people know both my identities, but they are people that I chose to share that with. Its not meant for any form of deception, and more for personal exploration whilst not limiting my virtual experiences for fear of jeopardising real life.
Great debate to have!
[...] Place of Alts in Second Life There is a really fascinating, and challenging, piece on Dusan Writer’s Metaverse blog today about the rights and wrongs, good and bad things, about having an alternative avatar in Second [...]
Good trail of thought, and good original post.
What do you care what Prokofy Neva thinks?
Your own experiences cannot be denied. Your thoughts cannot be denied, your perspective cannot be denied. This you know. Prokofy Neva vacillates according to what her mood is and she is never kind except to those she adores (how few they are). She rarely has an original thought and likes to tear into the thoughts of others who dare look at things differently.
Keep looking, observing and writing. What you do has value – if this were not true, Prokofy Neva wouldn’t be trying to tear you down.
I find it humorous that the Dispeptic Penguin has to stalk me here to a debate about aesthetics. I’m not the one who titled a post after some individual whose perfectly-normal comments about over-pontificating about art in SL were seized by Dusan and put into a whole blog post title. My word, such drama lol.
I don’t deny Dusan’s experiences, but I’m merely eager to affirm my own, so that we don’t get smothered under the horridly politically-correct aesthetics of the hour that we suffer under in real life.
I hardly think I’m a vacillater; I don’t play Second Life stock markets like Nobody.
Dusan writes snarkily, that I supposedly think SL is “nothing much more than a domain for human activity, with all the implied utilitarian needs such as good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market, I can’t help wondering whether my attention span is too limited for immersive virtuality and that maybe I should switch back to lower-realm pursuits like Warcraft”
Uhmmm “a domain for human activity” is a very, very large canvas. What, there is something inhuman, or something ethereal about ourselves online? But I take the human being to be an ensouled body, I don’t create any sort of Manichean dissection between the meat-world typist and the meta-world consciousness invested in the avatar — they are integrated, and on a continuum.
Perhaps Dusan really does feel it differently, and that’s fine, but that’s hardly a reason to accuse me of attempting to dumb down SL to utilitarian needs for cybersex in suburban box houses.
Good governance, good camera angles, and a robust real estate market may seem like horribly mundane, tasteless, even philistine goals, but they are merely the substrate for the higher things in life to which Dusan aspires.
I don’t understand why we need to be *bludgeoned* by art or *sliced to ribbons* by architecture. Can’t we go on a sim, have an aesthetic experience like holding hands and singing and listening and watching Dizzy Banjo’s thingie, or the Twitter fountain, or whatever, and then *go home to our Frank Lloyd Wright prefabs on our landscaped sims?* I mean, must we live the life of a Bohemian, or even a starving artist living out of a trashcan with the hobos in Calletta, in order to appreciate art?
I don’t *substitute* good camera angles, good governance, and a robust real estate market (which drives the SL economy, like it or not, or I wouldn’t care; if it were widgets, I’d care about widgets but it’s not widgets) for art. I say “and this, too”. I say “and don’t impose the harshness of your cerebral aesthetic on my simulation”. And that’s more than fine. I’m allowed to do that and not be hopelessly cast down to the cheap seats with the hot buttery popcorn because in real life, I can appreciate art in museums; I can take part in artistic mashups and happenings and installations, but then I can *go home*.
And I don’t see why I can’t *go home* in a virtual world. In fact, as it happens, I don’t have a home. I’m actually one of those people who doesn’t feel any burning need for my flying avian avatar to have a human-like home with a roof over its head.
But I appreciate the creature needs of others who *do* want the roof. I think my thoughts here in fact are rather original. Dusan is joining the throngs of aesthetes who always take the edgy noveau thing and become enraptured by the sheer non-normalcy of it — Keystone, too, is entranced with spinning lights and prims — shiny!. I appreciate it but I don’t wish to be stampeded by it, just as they don’t wish to be stampeded by things they don’t have a comfort level with.
Nexeus Fatale has an interesting view on alts…commented over on his blog. http://www.nexeusfatale.com/journal/managing-your-%e2%80%9calt%e2%80%9d/#comment-7637
He takes the view that alts are primarily possessions…extensions in some limited way of who we are, but more within the context of our investment of time and attention in each of these alts. He proposes this doesn’t do anything to change that it’s still “all me” just different parts of me with different roles.
I propose that this would be true except that the code actually constrains our abilities to choose the manner in which these different roles can be expressed, which picks up on Prok’s points (more about after a good sleep
)
If we view and describe avatars as possessions or ‘extensions’ of ourselves, as game worlds do in which their function is first the accomplishments of goals (no matter how slowly or with how much socializing you attain those goals) then we’re missing a larger question which is whether the code and the ‘policy authorities’ (platform owners but ALSO those in the world with us) are constricting our abilities to control our expression, and thus setting us up to buy into a morality without even realizing it’s being sold to us.
>The reality is that our bodies do not make part of it. Can a space which our bodies do not actually sense, feel and know, be called truly a human space
I realize you would like to be more metaphysical about this, but you can also look at it more practically. Your senses see a space rendered — and your senses actually do sense the space by sight and sound, and to a minor extent, touch (via the mouse). If something comes right at you, you might wince. If there is a loud noise, you might jump. So you are in a space, reacting, and being immersed, you have construed it, or constructed a working map of it, so to speak. I don’t see that this is all that different from coming into a real life room and taking in the space and navigating your way around it.
What a stunning coupling of quotations Prok, capturing in a few lines what would take me another novel to try to sum up. A few comments of my own in response if you’ll indulge me.
First, I don’t have any particular opinion about Yee’s research. I’m not very good at evaluating methodologies and so on, but intuitively some of his findings strike me as a little off the wall. His idea that people react spatially in SL like they do in RL is an example – he seems to claim that with people we don’t know, we tend not to look at them, staring away at other things, sort of denoting shyness and self-protection. I won’t dig into his methodology, but what I do know is that with AOs and different choices for where you hover your camera and perspective the idea of “look at” as a mechanism for measuring what we pay attention to is an odd one.
However, I will say that in game environments it does feel like it makes sense that our choice of avatars affects how we’re able to relate to others. Think of it like being in school and picking members of a team – I’m more likely to grab a human warrior than the gnome warrior, even if they have comparable skills…somehow a tall buff human commands more attention than the gnome, unless you start overlaying reputation (consider it a blinded trial). Therefore, if others react to us differently because of our avatars, then it seems to make some intuitive sense that we’d start to act differently too (or at least those of us who pick up on social cues because of insecurities or other reasons).
Not to bring Castranova into things, but he made the interesting observation that one of the appeals of gaming platforms is that everyone starts out at the bottom. In fact, social convention in games tends to discourage helping out the newbie other than peripherally, and certainly not in a way that would threaten equality of opportunity. The idea of everyone having the same starting point is preserved through social constructions and the code. Thus, the idea that buying a level 40 character in WoW is against many user’s ‘moral code’ because it bypasses equality of opportunity.
I’d argue that your choice of AV impacts the social dynamic you have with other people, but doesn’t negate your ability to command respect, Linden behind your name or not. Some people may dislike furrys, for example, but that doesn’t mean that a furry can’t be as revered as a human male, it just makes the path through the ‘lower levels’ different.
This on its own is a rich vein for study or reflection. When IBM joined the Linux community it was a newbie like everyone else, picking up the grunt code work, participating, and trying the best it could to shelve its corporate paternal instincts. You come to the game with bad hair and one of 8 pre-defined shapes – what you do with it is your own business, but we all start off in roughly the same place.
I think this speaks to a wider question, which is how reputation is established, which then brings us back to issues of identity, trust and anonymity. Mark Bell recently asked whether object camping was affecting the economy – kind of an odd question, I thought, as if gifts as part of camping were something new.
But I also think he missed the broader point, which is that I’d guess that the “real economy” is a mere sliver of the transactional economy. 10%? 5%? Giving gifts, sending someone a script, giving someone a vehicle – this is probably where most of the real ‘value’ in SL takes place and I’ve argued that we should look at SL like we’d look at open source or Wikipedia – economic value isn’t measured in those instances of value creation by how many ads are sold but rather how much content is created and shared.
In SL, the real estate market is a significant measure of growth or stagnation, and I don’t argue against its importance, but I’d also argue that there are invisible economies (or ones that aren’t measured) namely in the ‘out of world’ transactions and those in world where no Lindens change hands (the gift economy, which contributes to relationships, status, and the net value of the objects that have been created whether sold or not).
Which circles me back to the point that so long as we look ONLY at value creation as forms of possession, the longer we’ll be open to potentially being victimized by the code. It’s not just a question about whether assuming an alt is ‘deceptive’ to others, but it’s that the code first denies a wider range of choice, because while SL is an open world, our tools for construction of trust, transparency, and freedom from tracking by the platform owner have limitations. Second, and for whatever reasons, a tribal morality increasingly governs virtual worlds which is either a worrisome trend or an indication that perhaps we’re striving for a pre-rational way of engaging with society (intriguingly on a platform that by virtue of being code is completely rational even if not rationally constructed at times).
When I hear discussions of alts, they seem to revolve around “I needed an alt in order to be able to go somewhere/participate in something/etc” that I can’t do with my main, or “I need an alt because I want a personal and a business presence”.
The first seems to reaffirm the sense of a tribal morality, with people getting upset because someone is running off from their usual social circles under an alt identity…social pressure to “stay with the family”. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but SL is constructed mainly on the premise of a territorial morality. In a world that’s supposed to be about ‘your world, your imagination’ it seems a radical notion to put pressure on someone not to have 5 girlfriends or to be a Gor in the morning and a mom at night so long as they don’t directly intrude on others.
What I fear, however, is that people get lost in parsing personal dynamics and end up spending all their time talking about time and balance, and not enough time wondering whether the platform itself, through the restrictions built into the code, the lack of ability to assure privacy from code/IP/log and log-in information from the platform owners, and the inability to choose our level of information participation through identity toggles or other means is facilitating a social morality where groups in SL tend to ban together and discourage what is the promise of the platform – maximum choice, maximum protection from intrusion, and the ability to be anything and go anywhere without restriction or fear.
Thanks for the stimulating thoughts. In the interests of full disclosure, I did intend to sound snarky but it was really meant in a respectful way. And I mean that in the sense that I was hoping to draw attention to the continuum of meaning that we can draw from architecture in SL, and reflective architecture in particular.
In my original post, I made the point that a lot of building design in SL is crap. Doors on stores, closed roofs where maybe we don’t need one (a mall, for example), and “bad camera” highlight that at its most basic level there’s still lots of room for talent and effort in creating buildings we can live in. Also in the interests of full disclosure I’m an amateur builder myself – I make those houses that people *go home* to.
So it strikes me as odd that I’d be painted as having merely an interest in shiny prims, although I realize that in my post this is how I may have portrayed myself. Look – the stuff I make is all labeled “beach house” and “loft” and “prefab” and the ads include things like “menu-driven bed included”. Really, it’s not particularly good, but then I’m not an architect or a designer, I just like moving prims around. I make it because I like the idea of people being able to go home at night to something that maybe feels right for them, they have a roof over their head, they can click a button and the windows black out – good, practical, let’s live our SL lives well kind of stuff.
So on one end of the spectrum is the Neva Thumb Sucking test – and take that as a tribute: are we looking at buildings and architecture and drooling over it because it’s shiny looking or moves in neat ways, i.e. are we thumb sucking, or are we looking at whether we can live in it, be practical, and ‘get good camera’. Prok – goodness knows you have a wider range than just one end of this spectrum, but my deeper point about reflective architecture isn’t that the other end of the spectrum is art, but rather that it may be a conceptual form rather than a aesthetic one.
Maybe that’s my projection onto forms that are really nothing more than fancy math, ‘art for art’s sake’, or designed for the aesthetes. But I’m proposing that reflective architecture may be an early indicator not of its use as a form for building design, but rather its use in conceptual and procedural mapping.
Bogost is one of the driest, most irritating reads I’ve had in a long time, but I was still struck by his idea that 3D spaces may be a new rhetorical vehicle, adding to verbal and visual rhetoric. Agreed, we can create a “room” in RL that does neat stuff, attend artistic mash-ups, but it’s very difficult to pull off procedural exhibits in the real world…they tend to end up on kiosks or computer screens, don’t they?
(I also think this is why for all our talk about immersive virtuality that things will really start getting interesting when we see more and more augmented reality and the ability to integrate real and virtual spaces).
To give a corny, simple example of reflective architecture. In Project Bluegrass by IBM you’re assigned a “hut” (let’s face it, a crappy digital version of an office cubicle). Depending how much work you have on your plate, the grass around your hut is either short, or long. If it’s long and weedy, other people can see that you’re jammed up, if it’s short people can see that maybe you can take on more work.
Now, there’s no question this visual indication of work load can be accomplished in a lot of different ways. But as reflective architecture is starting to show us, 3D forms offer different approaches to how we can participate by presenting it in a space that’s constructed like we’re used to – namely 3D.
Here’s what I imagine: reflective architecture (and I would LOVE to insert the word “information” there, because I am NOT talking about building design) leads to a better understanding of how our avatar presence can be reacted to by information objects – objects that have their own procedural commands, which may imply its own procedural rhetoric.
This understanding leads to someone thinking about reflective (information) architecture as something that could apply, say, to generating cloud tags of the Second Life geography. These cloud tags are sim wide, 3D conceptual maps – intuitive, and responsive.
Users come and the cloud tag has words like Education, Sex, Scripting, Real Estate, Community – and as the user approaches the terms of interest, the cloud tag responds, and the words splice out, changing to REFLECT the user’s interest (indicated by their movement through the space). The user can click on one of the tag items and be teleported to, say, Midian City, or Caledon, or NASA.
Just one example – cloud tags, semantic Webs, project tasks, collaborative 3D Wikis…that’s what I mean by reflective architecture as being an eye-opener, not on whether it improves how we relate to “buildings”.
So if reflective architecture commands our ability to project future conceptual architectures, then I’d also say that in its current uses as a form of art it doesn’t merely entertain, but also highlights that it may be an indication of new forms of persuasion, and that from this vantage we should use it as a way to begin a discussion about whether immersive virtuality actually is a new persuasive media, or whether all of this is merely thumb-sucking.
Prok, your point is well taken that there’s no particular divide between meat world and meta world. And yeah, there’s enough ivory tower types deconstructing media as it is – frankly, I generally know when I’m being manipulated by media, and do so with consent sometimes when it’s done well (hello, Apple!) and don’t need a scholarly journal to tell me that.
I spend a lot of time telling people not IN virtual worlds that it’s the SAME thing – tell them not to think of it as somewhere else, or a different domain, or having different symbols or meanings.
On the other hand, I think that virtual worlds add a dimension (sorry) to the Web in the sense that they’re media where code allows us to interact with objects, and that in the hands of knowledgeable and talented creators, these objects can persuade us in ways that a TV ad can’t.
I may not want to LIVE in reflective architecture because it wouldn’t pass the thumb-sucking test. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to look at it, because when I do I start to visualize new ways of presenting and interacting with information, the ability for this to be persuasive, and the potential that it won’t lead to a top selling beach house but it may be the source of new tools for conceptualization and information manipulation.
[...] Writer, ‘IBM on the Importance of Second Life Integration‘, Dusan Writer’s Metaverse. Accessed 19th January 2008. [...]
[...] virtual world literacy facilitating freedom, or quasi-religious indoctrination? On the heels of my previous post about alts, and the insightful commentary that followed from others, I ran across an intriguing [...]
[...] & Alts Add Dusan Writer has an excellent essay on alts in Second Life and I am reminded that I promised someone an essay on identity some time ago and [...]
Thanks so much for linking us to your response and thoughts. We couldn’t agree more that there is a need for bringing to surface the awareness that communication technology – like any other – is an extension of the choices we make. In particular there is no de-fault ethical setting encoded in virtual worlds. However – we do feel that the political imagination of emerging virtual generations will continue to make the most of the rhetoric of freedom of expression, creativity and friendship that circulates in that universe. This will, in turn, shape the direction of evolving technologies. The touchstone for this will of course always be that point of awareness. No escaping that. (By the way – we have never had a complaint so far about the the symbolic airoots background in our design. However thanks for your input!)
[...] Sculpt Tool/Lathe for Second Life January 27, 2008 — dusanwriter I recently touched on Archipelis as a possible option for creating sculpts for Second Life. For Second Life [...]
I’m glad I came across your blog and look forward to following your other thoughts and work. Must be my eyes – the text/background just made it a tough read…age, or too many hours in virtual spaces perhaps.
I know that my post sounded a bit gloomy but I think that since I’ve started to write this blog a few months ago I’ve been, and remain, optimistic about the opportunities for this technology. In fact, the previous sub-title of the blog was virtual worlds, creativity, and spirituality.
I agree that there are no default ethical ’settings’ to virtual worlds, but by virtue of being built they each have within them preconditions that may influence our ability to behave and to influence our ethical framework.
The issue of privacy, for example…on one platform, a surveillance society and on another anonymity to the exclusion of the ability to achieve identity trust. Either end of the spectrum colors our ability to make choices and I’m arguing that individuals (not ethicists, just ordinary ‘users’) begin to behave in specific virtual worlds within certain ethical frameworks because the platforms are built to encourage it.
On the one hand a lack of guarantees by platform owners that they’ll delete chat logs between users and on the other hand the New Yorker article this week (I don’t read or watch the news so I’m sure it isn’t newsworthy) of the girl who killed herself because a “boy” on mySpace harassed her. Anonymity allowed her next door neighbor to disguise herself as a boy.
In both cases, the coding of the platform leaves a different range of choices.
I am in complete agreement with your sentiment about “the political imagination of emerging virtual generations”. It’s not the emerging generations I’m worried about, frankly. It’s the political, corporate and societies who will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and expression takes precedence over control.
Interesting times as they say, and I am optimistic because of the power these technologies bring towards furthering creativity and global friendships, and pessimistic that the response to change by the current ’stakeholders’ won’t bring with it new unforeseen risks to our liberty.
(Hey, anyone have a writ from the record companies I can post?)
[...] voice communications. My issue with a light client and Web-based interfaces to SL (see my post on Movable) is – well, you may not be in world but your avatar is, and tends to stand there slack-jawed or [...]
[...] Original post by Dusan Writer’s Metaverse [...]
Oh yes – no denying there is a whole nest of vested interests stalking the virtual world and making the most of what it can control. There is a flatness to the commercial exploitation of the culture of friendship (technological controls and the whole format of Facebook for example) – and all the other issues you list. There is not enough narrativizing to produce a counter-discourse. Not enough mythologies. We can’t depend entirely on the goodwill of the emerging generation either. There is a huge need to be proactive. Airoots will soon launch an inter-active cyber-novel dealing with some of these issues. Can you suggest any links of other narrative-based, creative critiques that may help us?
Wow….mythology….stay tuned, post to follow on that very topic. None jump to mind but I’ll check my delicious links
– there’s stuff on there I have forget I tagged. And keep us posted on the cyber-novel sounds wonderful.
I research synthetic environments on a nearly daily basis, and I just had to say that this is one of the most exciting developments I’ve seen – to say there are huge possbilities here would be an understatement. Thanks to Dusan for bringing it to our attention.
Nice work.
I appreciate your attempt to get at some of the complexities involved in virtual worlds and I think it’s crucial that we try hard to not split VW/RW into distinct (or semi-distinct) boundaries that encourage value judgments and hierarchy-making. But I think this notion of “freedom” that’s being worried and debated is a difficult word and space to grapple with, especially on the terms presented above. Does anyone really believe that there is anywhere to “opt out” to? Where would that be? I’m not suggesting that we’re inhabiting a totalizing 1984 universe–but I find it confusing and at times silly that people still believe that utopias are to be found in cyberspace. If they are, they’re momentary, provisional, and perpetually prey to colonization. Power is always on the move and we really can see this explicitly in cyberspace. Most of all I’m troubled by this distinction between our “business” identities and our “private” identities. This notion of a “private” self is as historically constructed as Anderson’s “imagined” communities and carries similar sets of contradictions, pleasures, disappointments, and abuses. I appreciate any and all efforts to keep the internet “free,” but I also believe we need to discard any notions of fixed destinations and “outsides.” Why do we have to leave anyhow? Why not attempt to transform the “inside”?
I should have mentioned that what I found most troubling/confusing in the above posts was this sentence:
“It’s the political, corporate and societies who will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and expression takes precedence over control.”
Do you really believe that expression can be extracted from control and vice versa? Are they opposites/contraries?
Curious…
Eric:
Thanks for your insightful reply….I’ve opened up these notions mostly because I’m at the “know what I don’t know” stage…and as I’ve amply demonstrated, that usually means I’m not very coherent.
It’s my feeling that in virtual worlds, and in particular the growing availability of “open” worlds (like SL and as opposed to MMORPG), concepts of privacy and identity are often debated at a superficial level.
The reason this and my original posts were about alts was to highlight that we’re making value judgments about how we use our time and present ourselves in virtual worlds without thinking or articulating that these decisions are already constrained by the technology, the code, and the platform owners. Once we sign off on the TOS and the EULA, we are co-creating our in world presence with the platforms themselves, and by doing so accept but don’t always articulate that the restrictions on our choice have implications.
People talk about alts and use ideas like “different alts for different tasks” “business versus personal” and “needing some time for myself” and while all of these reasons can be perfectly valid, I stand by the idea that we only need to resort to these reasons because the code and the platform have constrained choice.
I’m sorry, but I work enough as it is, and I’d like the ability to turn off any work-related IMs after 9, say. But I can’t. So, it starts to look more and more attractive to have a separate avatar for the purposes of managing vendors and all the attendant IMs. This is as true in WoW as it is in SL – characters who act as banks, for example, help bypass the code which makes travel to markets a time investment, and act as sorting zones for group loot distribution.
But I’m trying very hard not confuse the issue here of identity with avatar expression. I’m making the argument that many are creating seemingly different versions of their ‘avatar identities’ in virtual worlds, which isn’t the same as saying that we HAVE different identities. They are doing so sometimes because the code leads them that way.
I am in full agreement and have argued in this blog on several occasions that there’s no split between real and virtual. Different expressions of our identity are parts of the whole, it’s just that the tools are different. Just as I might speak differently as a learner than a teacher, I might express myself in different ways in a virtual world through different presentations of my avatar and the spaces I interact with. However, my point about the separation of business/personal was again to highlight that the code leads us to behave in a way where it’s an incentive to start “splitting” our personas.
I’ve also argued previously that while it’s nice to think we’re fully integrated human beings, I’m not sure that the therapy business would be as successful as it is if it wasn’t for individual’s feelings that there’s “parts of themselves missing” or “things about themselves they need to explore”.
Your comment on the private self is interesting, however, and I’d like to understand that more, but whether it’s true or not that there’s no such thing as the private self, I can’t help thinking that people might confuse the desire for privacy with the need for a private self. The private self may be historically constructed…and if that’s true, then maybe my comments about the growing prevalence of a tribal morality in virtual worlds might also be a return to cultural norms in which social identity and identification dissolves the idea of the private?
I have a large number of friends who maintain separate online IDs….and not just for virtual worlds, but for mailing lists, Web-based forms, mySpace, etc. Whether their “private selves” are really illusions or not, I can’t say, these are all just intuitive ideas really…and the craving for protected private identity in an increasingly transparent and monitored world seems to be gaining rather than waning.
They would LIKE the ability to opt out of spaces within virtual worlds. I’m not saying opt out of worlds, but different spaces will have different levels of needs for what kind of information is collected, shared, and what levels of controls we have over our expression of ourselves and the information we share. I’m not arguing for an opt out/opt in for virtual worlds, but rather for the idea that it’s transparency rather than freedom that’s the end goal.
I may decide to attend a class in a virtual space, and when I sign up for the class I’d like to know whether I’m being graded, tracked, and whether my comments are being recorded. I may decide to attend a concert in a virtual space and I’d like to know the same thing. Transparency gives me the freedom to choose whether to participate and how – my decision is my own, but I don’t need to opt out and go “someplace else” – you’re right, there’s no “outside”, but there are rooms on the inside whose doors I may choose not to open.
Eben Moglen put it quite nicely when he said there should be two rules for virtual spaces:
One: Avatars ought to exist independent of any individual social contract put forward by any particular space. And two: Social contracts ought to be available in a machine readable form which allows the avatar projection intelligence to know exactly what the rules are and to allow you set effective guidelines about I don’t go to spaces where people don’t treat me in ways that I consider to be crucial in my treatment.
Finally…I take your point. Expression and control can not be extracted from each other. So I amend…
“It’s not the emerging generations I worry about. It’s the political, corporate and social groups (who have until now largely controlled the outlets of expression) that will be upending in their wake, a new age of collaborative creation in which hierarchies dissolve or reconfigure, and our right to have control over expression takes precedence over leaving it to others.”
Thanks for the lengthy and intelligent reply here, Dusan. I should admit right off the bat that I’m not much of a VW adept (by choice, I think) but I do own a computer and do use this computer for purposes where the RW elides with the VW (Myspace, Facebook, blogs, etc). But I have an ambivalent investment in most of these apps and typically integrate my RW identities as much as possible in to the VW ones (To illustrate your/my point about the difficulty in delineating a clear boundary line between VW/RW: What does one do with a Myspace profile that pretty accurately reflects the RW self, but at the same time, doesn’t?). The long and short of it: I have no serious investment in deliberate roleplaying within a controlled virtual environment. That being said, I am fascinated by subject-formation, especially within the context of this overarching public/private duality we tend to operate through. And I’m just now beginning to explore how subjectivity is built, remade, and often (to my disappointment) reinforced in VWs (the little I’ve seen of SL seems to simply reflect predictable RW lifestyles, though I have a feeling some deeper digging may complicate this observation–at least I hope so).
Your points about the limited terms of identity play are well-taken. If one goes into a VW with the hopes of articulating, exploring, and perhaps even embodying a multitude of identities or continuums along one vast identity path, one would be well-equipped in recognizing that one’s options are partially pre-determined by the world context entered (i.e. the program/app itself). This reinforces my point about freedom. Freedom is a useful formula if we’re constantly re-defining it. Constantly. If we leave off with half-baked feelgood rallying cries about the wide open future and re-configured hierarchies, emotions, relationships, etc. without recognizing how contradicted these things are from the getgo, I’m betting that the future will eventually look a lot like the present–and the past (I see parallels in the passionate rallying around Obama’s presidential run right now).
As for the public/private divide– again, your point about wanting a self at least tentatively free from the methodical eyes of the corporate/governmental realm makes absolute sense. However, as a somewhat inchoate closing suggestion–wouldn’t it be nice to begin to transform the business/official world so that the personal might operate and express itself more “freely” there? Utopic, I know. I know.
Yes, it would be nice. And utopic, perhaps….but at some point when I stumbled down whatever rabbit hole I’ve found myself in (and it’s as much about stuff in the ‘real’ as anywhere, but I won’t bore you with my personal life) I found myself adopting the following as a utopic vision for myself, although know I’ll never reach paradise:
We must become ignorant
Of all we’ve been taught,
And be, instead, bewildered.
Run from what’s profitable and comfortable
If you drink those liqueurs, you’ll spill
The spring waters of your real life.
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
I have tried prudent planning
Long enough, from now
On, I’ll live mad.
-Rumi
[...] open up its servers over the coming quarters towards “multiple grids by 2009″ (see my previous post) is driven at all by the accompanying mad rush of developers in all corners to open source other [...]
all true, good to see some lessons learned about 3d worlds and media… as well as some now ready to ask for reality, not fantasy from these tool and “service” providers. welcome;)_
BTW- we launched multiple PODBALL fileds this week, as well as a full RPG infocenter for the Starbase C3 world within SL. Over the last year weve slowly grown a totally original sci fi mmo community within SL based on our 2d/3d website of the same for many years.
So theres original stuff to do and to sponsor in SL for companies of all sizes. And maybe Linden and those who toss dollars at vr worlds will realize this is the only economy they have that can help pay for their services or tools. The future and past of immersive 3d rt has always been community entertainment or edutainment thats created by those who make content for end viewsers- not “pundits”
, sounds alot like the Television/ cable and broadcast model ? Dont it.:)
c3
[...] reflection on this is provided here: “[…]I wonder if Linden’s mad rush to open up its servers over the coming quarters [...]
[...] rush to open up its servers over the coming quarters towards “multiple grids by 2009″ (see my previous post) is driven at all by the accompanying mad rush of developers in all corners to open source other [...]
Oooh, good stuff, Dusan! Costume balls, indeed. I don’t think that’s the issue. Second Life, or for that matter any virtual world – in the present or future – is and will be what we make of it.
Want to get real? There are already companies that will recreate your Real Self into an avatar. We use our voices. There is a section in our profiles where we can state as much information about Real Selves as we like. Universities and museums are recreating their hallowed buildings and campuses… but all this is on a very plastic level. What about virtual worlds as a tool? Distance learning, realtime global collaboration, using the grid as a blueprint for architecture and design and all sorts of platforms for progress that directly impact our Real Life.
Mostly, I believe this individual has not had even a glimmer of understanding of the psychological effect that being handed an inexpensive yet Super Powerful tool for creativity will have on global productivity.
There will always be naysayers and luddites, but I think this person’s concerns are pretty lame. For me, the real nail-bitters of moving into a 3D Internet are the CO2 consequences to the environment of all those servers, the social and anthropological consequences of people working in isolation (as social as virtual worlds are, you cannot smell a rose or shake hands), and then there’s the addiction factor… knowing when to stop… and stepping_away_from_the _computer, to run out and get some exercise and roses in your cheeks.
The next few years are going to be very interesting, aren’t they?
Holy Moly!
/me nods.
I couldn’t agree more Bettina…and just want to add that ignoring Second Life as a window for what to come also ignores its growing integration with the Web itself, and cross-over with the “real”.
Augmented reality, embedded Web objects in virtual environments (whether Croquet, or SL this spring, or Metaplace in April), and mixed reality events will just add to the soup. The metaverse is fast coming, (has arrived and is expanding) and those who want to chat in IRC about the coming plague of “costume-ball based worlds” will wake up one day to wonder why people found some things easier, more intuitive, and more engaging in the metaverse than they do on the “flat” Web.
The collaborative Web came courtesy of Wikipedia. The social Web comes courtesy of Facebook and its predecessors and followers. Open source arrived with Linux. And 3D environments will be an alternative bridge across these concepts, societies, maps, tools – call them what you will.
And it will bring with it intuitive ways to view and interact with information (reams and reams of it), powerful vehicles for self-expression (see my earlier post on the emotive avatar article in Harvard Business Review) and collaborative work environments where we can “see” a project/corporation/vision – hierarchy gone, feminine corporation arrives, the role of the craftsperson celebrated.
And, um…well, not sure where that leaves IRC.
And finally…one of the greatest challenges, I think, for the early pioneers of these spaces is to articulate that the virtual does not replace the real, and to help translate the recursiveness of virtual worlds in a way that betters us as individuals and societies and yes, that includes roses in your cheeks.
[...] of the civil liberties discussion in Second Life with Philip Linden, in which all my lengthy posts here and here on alts, tribal morality, and whether our ability to make choices is really as open as we [...]
you may pay your respects at Landmark:
Memories cemetery park — BOCH , ( 3 , 123 , 21 )
or you can search it in your second life search.
In loving memory of Dummie Beck. You will never be forgotten. You touched so many hearts in SL, and let us all realize how short life can really be. Since your passing I’ve grown to cherish every moment I get to spend with my friends in SL — you allowed us all to realize that SL is not just a video game, or a glorified chat program, but another extension of life where friendship and love flourish. You will be missed.
per you point on bringing in different target markets by integrating 3DS and Maya: Having been part of the architectural community (RL Architects in SL, Studio Wikitecture) for a number of years now, i can say without hesitation if seamless import/export functionality were incorporated, there would be a huge influx of this demographic into SL. If i was given a dime for every time someone asked me if they could import their models, I’d be able to create my own virtual world.
Agreed Ryan. The limitation of course is that as soon as true interoperability is provided, the instant the in world economy is thrown out of whack. How could the current houses, prefabs, offices, and furniture market survive if you could easily import objects created with the more advanced tools, fully textured and baked, not to mention warehouses of current objects from the poser/blender/daz3D communities flooding into SL?
The current work-arounds at least place a time premium on converting objects that already exist, or require creating objects from scratch using SL plug-ins, thus maintaining the economy.
One idea, that I’ve voiced elsewhere, is that when they open up the architecture maybe they include this interoperability which private servers/islands can toggle on and off, much as the Grid will have different client and perhaps physics versions running as well. Current land and economies would thus be protected but architects and designers would be able to set up their own areas in which to accomplish what you’re talking about, which is to tap into the more sophisticated tool sets available out of world, and thus be able to more rapidly prototype.
Other grids and platforms are taking this weakness of SL’s and turning it to their advantage – being able to import Google SketchUp, or OBJ files, etc., but their economies are being structured in an entirely different way, often not based on in world exchanges but rather full integration into the “Web” (Scenecaster being a good example of this).
None of which negates my point – bridging can become a valuable service, and Linden should facilitate a step-by-step approach which maybe isn’t true interoperability, which places a time investment on importing objects so as not to undermine the economy, and which trains groups like architects on how to maximize the platform and not solely leave it in the hands of The Arch and others.
Other grids will be set up for the purposes of architectural walk-throughs for RL clients. But they’re unlikely to offer the sophisticated scripting and economic environment of SL.
For every future project different virtual worlds will compete for revenue and attention. SL needs to do a better job explaining what it IS good for, (collaboration, exploration, research, but maybe NOT full architectural prototyping in the short term just as it’s not a game engine either) and then facilitate the ability for users to maximize those particular features and benefits.
[...] Second Life Users Have Too Much Time On Their Hands: Philip Rosedale Quote from the site – Philip Rosedale tells Der Spiegel online that “The early users of Second [...]
[...] a recent exchange on this blog, we dealt with the ‘Prokofy Neva Thumb-Sucking Test’ which I’ll [...]
Once there is real interoperability, who would want to turn it off? Would you want to make your web page such that the user couldn’t click on another link while on the page?
I see the bigger question being one of intellectual property protection. In some sense, the genie is already out of the bottle, but reputable virtual world providers will have to provide some kind of protection against blatant rip-off.
In the end, I believe interoperability is about logging into your preferred avatar provider, and then navigating through a shared, interconnected world, using that avatar. This allows different VW providers to provide different price points on the cost/value chain, similar to how e-mail servers serve different users in different ways.
Hopefully we can find some way to avoid spam, though :-/
if you have a look in the forums you will find that windlight is available to openlife grid users there is a login for it there
and i can say that there are some places ive seen there that look better then the pics you have shown here of secondlife.ill place a link to the part of the blog here.
http://www.openlifegrid.com/Forums/Messages.aspx?ThreadID=201 have fun i hope to see you round the openlife some time p.s (its best to set draw distance to 512)
ciao i hope you take another look
Jon, what is your basis for assuming that people want and need to have interoperability mean that their avatars can walk between worlds? Many people don’t have a problem keeping multiple avatars in multiple games and worlds. They like it that way, in fact.
Everything important about interoperability is about intellectual property. And because no one has a good way to protect it, that’s why interoperability isn’t needed in the burning way that you imagine.
Dusan, I realize, too, that this dream of Maya and working offline and all the rest is held by a tiny handful of geeks. But most people using SL don’t care. Eventually, if SL doesn’t supply this, some other platform like Multiverse will — and what of it? It won’t speak to the needs of the majority of users, who need creation of content not to be the property of a specialized few using complex utilities like Maya, but need it to be user-friendly and available to all on a continuum of ability.
More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.
There is nothing wrong with being a walled garden; people enjoy the protection and *the civility* of walled gardens.
[...] State University 3D Models from Still Photos » This Summary is from an article posted at Dusan Writer’s Metaverse on Sunday, February 03, 2008 [...]
Redeye -
I will take another look! In fact, I have, and intend to keep up my visits. Sorry if I implied that it wasn’t worth a visit. Reality was I loved it….it was laggy, but yes, might have been my draw distance, might have been on with too many others, and I imagine over time it can only get even better.
My comment about it being like pre-banner Mainland is the ultimate compliment!
(I wasn’t aware of Windlight, thanks for the tip!)
External programs are becoming cheaper, more accessible, and as a result are generating huge libraries of beautiful, “user-generated” content.
These programs are no longer just confined to hugely expensive platforms like Maya and 3DS. It’s not just architects who are creating buildings, it’s someone at home creating the perfect cottage, or the most stunning bicycle. Because these objects are increasingly portable between programs, and because they’re spawning amateur/”user-generated” content, then at some point users will be attracted to the idea of porting those pieces of content to virtual worlds, and in some cases already can.
It’s not the specialized few who will have the deepest long-term interest in interoperability, it’s the non-specialized many. I may not be the best builder in SL, but I have fun with it, and then I hit a wall…I want to sculpt, I’d love to properly render lights in the build, or I want to create a custom animation. What happens (or happened to me) is I cross out from SL to try to build on what I’ve learned and discover a whole other world out there of software, different ways to build, and different ways to express myself. But I can’t bring most of it back….and so, some day, I find a platform that WILL allow that and maybe I go there instead.
Yes, I do believe that the “pros” will find their own homes with true interoperability so they can throw together 3D walk-throughs of a building design in a virtual world. I also believe that this capacity should be built into SL….because they’re not the only ones who would like to see their work on other platform brought into a virtual world.
IF SL doesn’t do it, someone else will…and that someone else won’t be creating interoperability to satisfy a few architects, they’ll be doing it to tap into an ever-growing community of SketchUp, Daz3D, Poser and other artists who are doing it for the sheer joy of it – kind of like what SL has been.
I’d like to protect the garden. I’d like to make sure that if SL expands its reach into other creative communities that it doesn’t do so at the expense of the economy (in objects, time, real estate, etc).
My issue with the walled garden isn’t that the garden shouldn’t be walled, it’s that its boundaries shouldn’t remain static. The issue of interoperability is a question about whether to shift the garden’s boundaries and cultivate new soil.
I’m not sure my idea of ‘walls within walls’ works, it’s just an idea.
What I am sure of is that Second Life does not have a lock on content that’s “user friendly and available to all”. This is the very premise, for example, of Metaplace and will be the premise of platforms to follow, none of which is worrying particularly about the architects, but *are* worried about being able to tap into the widest available tool sets being used by the ‘non-professional creators’.
As Prok says:
“More sophisticated tool sets are alright in their way, but if they can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? A perfectly rendered Taj Mahal just sits there like a postcard.”
Now…replace “more sophisticated tool sets” with “Second Life” and that’s the argument I’m making:
“Second Life is all right in its way, but if it can’t interact with the rest of the world, what good is it? And in Second Life, the Taj Mahal that sits there like a postcard isn’t even perfectly rendered.”
[...] bookmarks tagged collaboration IBM’s Project Bluegrass: Using 3D Space to Facil… saved by 12 others starscreams bookmarked on 02/04/08 | [...]
[...] about Second Life from…Google? February 5, 2008 — dusanwriter Linden Labs is worried that the competition may have learned from its mistakes. In the meantime, it’s by way of [...]
Prok’s comments are business as usual – same hatred towards geeks and hackers, growing on soil of own software creation impotence and feeling insecure in world where everyone and his dog can pull the carpet from under his presumably almighty all-things-shall-be-Proks-way-or-go-off. Prok, please, get a life, stop whining – you can’t stop change in software world. Just get used to it – resistance is futile, all your bases belong to us
Um, did Google actually make a streaming 3-D interactive world?
I’ve been pondering the import/export problem. I think that there may be a way to do this with LSL… I need time to toy with it, but the general idea is that a script can tell the dimensions of a prim, as well as the textures on it.
the trouble will be… (1) scripts won’t be able to be sent, (2) texture UUIDs might be considered a bypass of the inworld permissions system (see http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/889 ).
Then, (3) – converting abscissa,ordinal and azimuth plus dimensions to a format another application can read. I haven’t looked into this… I’d expect someone has a CSV format, but… with all the proprietary data formats out there, it is hard to say. Still… it could be a base for rezzing stuff on an OpenSim simulator.
The question is whether or not it is as efficient as hacking a client bot to do the same. But then we get into bypassing the de facto DRM, which can be very problematic from a legal standpoint.
Taran:
The technicalities are a bit out of my league. Er, not a bit…a lot. What you’re describing sounds a lot like what SimTools did with Maya.
http://www.simtools.jp/sltk/en/index.php
It has a plug-in for Maya which includes a little side bar with standard SL prims. You can texture them using textures from the SL library and as I understand it, if you can figure out how to work the script within Maya you can also load additional textures of your own and just code in the UUIDs. You then rez a ‘build prim’ in SL which rezzes the full build (as many prims as included, up to a full sim’s worth they say) including the textures and placements.
Now, it’s wonderful, but it’s Maya specific. I assume the other work-arounds are program specific such as a work-around I saw for importing Google SketchUps.
I wonder whether what’s needed is a bridge to Collada? Seems to me most game engines and so on have a Collada import function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA
If you could build a bridge from SL to Collada, then you’d have a bridge from Collada to most third party applications. You’ll always run into the texture UUID issue, but I’ve been working with someone to see if there isn’t an automated way to upload textures and then collect the UUIDs.
I know with sculpts that they recommend loading your sculpts directly to the library rather than through the “upload texture” feature, so seems to me there’s a way to connect to the database outside the viewer.
Complex problem! And as I say, this isn’t my area, just sharing a few of the tools I’ve run across and little bits and pieces.
Thanks for the post Taran!
[...] posted about Bluegrass previously, including some snaps of the [...]
I believe you’re right, Dusan. And as far as Prok’s comment – well, no, they haven’t… but they have been providing services for a streaming 3-D interactive world for as long as they existed – enough so for Microsoft to try to eat Yahoo. You could argue it isn’t the same, and likely you will, but you’ll note Linden Lab implemented… Google Search. Not rocket science to connect the dots.
Good post, Dusan.
Naw, Prok is right Taran. There’s nothing to learn from a company that hasn’t launched a streaming 3-D interactive world so I retract my recommendation.
Linden doesn’t need to learn about managing large, complex, systems that require diabolically clever engineering and strategies in order to both serve the globe and millions of concurrent users and terrabytes of data yet avoid lag and crashes.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to move beyond a mentality of being a virtual world ISP from Google, which moved beyond the mentality of being a search appliance to think more creatively about what business it was in and develop business models that have upended traditional advertising.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to sandbox new features, roll them out effectively, modify them based on user feedback, kill the ones that don’t work, and yet do it in a way that doesn’t add new bugs, user adoption issues, or create instability in its main grid, er, brand.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to create a work environment that’s the envy of half the planet, that attracts some of the brightest talent, and that retains its top staff or, when it loses its top technical talent, doesn’t create a firestorm of concern or bad press.
Linden has nothing to learn about how to effectively manage expectations for future performance, whether financial or service-specific, thus earning increased value for its shareholders and users in spite of flying in the face of conventional wisdom on needing “spin” and lots of chest thumping about Windlight, er, Google docs.
Linden has nothing to learn from a company that has proven itself effective at doing community outreach, partnering, research, publishing, advocating, and communicating even when it is entering business domains where it clearly intends to upend entire industries.
Linden has nothing to learn from a company that started as a few guys and some code and grew to become a synonym with simple and effective user experiences, a verb, and a bunch of zeros.
Linden has nothing to learn from Google because Prok’s right, they haven’t built a streaming 3-D interactive world.
They’ve just transformed the real one.
[...] sat forgotten in the back room of the blog. Now I submit it to you for your approval: a link to a machinima called Noob. If you enjoy it, come on back and let me know; I got a few giggles from [...]
Well, this game was made in havok1, and will works better in havok1, in havok four however, the marbles run so much smoother, and you don’t get a random ‘bounce’ from time to time, but with the immaturity of havok4 at the moment, it has some bugs, but is still very playable, sculptis still have a spherical bounding box (Linden Labs will not have mesh for collision, because they do not wanna load the images for the sculpits server-side), but with havok4 however, I can add alot more moving things, with alot more players with less lag…
-Moy Loon
[...] innovation about far more than just making money? (Would training and rehearsal count? What about collaboration, recruitment, developer relations, [...]
Wonderful stuff Moy! We’re running some simulations using Havok4 as well…nothing half as fancy, really just toying with some scripts and seeing what the physics engine does deep down inside. And absolutely on lag – almost impossible to crash a sim but we’ve done it! hehe
wildcat days of the 1980s? lol
check out the chase /capitalone/ bank of amercia credit card interest and fee scams of “lowering rates” as they raise them that was just on the ABC nightly news tonight.
but really any of you university folks realize yet that the “made in china” VR logo is the end of your western pulpits to pundit from?
all vr activities will be the equal to watching “american idol” 3 times a week, and all governments relegated to who feeds the slop and cleans up the poop from under the “batteries” of humans plugged into the creative machine of fantasy thats basically the TV to Walmart connection of today, but all played out as pixels vs flesh..
the reality of the virtual…promoted by the ignorance of the new. encouraged by the myth of the victim
Thanks Liv for the comment….and apologies for the note format of my comments which were done live on site. So a few additional bullets to put Dave’s comments in context:
- He was making the points that a bank is solely defined as such because of the regulations that allow its existence
- Therefore, unregulated institutions in SL were never banks in the first place
- Which is unfortunate, because it would have been interesting to see whether the social setting would have ended up self-regulating.
- BECAUSE, as he pointed out, let’s face it, even the real world has proven that regulation doesn’t make a bank a necessarily honest institution, and their use of loopholes such as in the wildcat days are proof of that, recently with sub-prime, and even loopholes around checking accounts.
Finally, I won’t comment on university folks. Some of them are very interesting, passionate, and committed to finding social good from virtual worlds. There was a great deal of discussion, for example, about whether virtual environments are useful for people who are disabled, who have mental disorders, etc. Social phobias, aspergers, demonstrations of schizophrenia for the purposes of creating empathy amongst healthcare professionals were a few of the topics they touched on as far as the real life benefits of virtual worlds.
It’s also interesting that you bring up the entertainment paradigm, because the mixed reality part of the conference included attendance by the CEO of Kaneva who is creating a “light version” of what you describe – he painted a picture of virtual worlds as being constant sources of entertainment, with links to TV shows, in world games and contests. However, when he was asked “what happens when people get bored of being entertained” his response was basically “we’ll entertain them MORE”…the extension of which is the more apocalyptic version that you lay out.
One of the things that continues to strike me, as it did today with the academics, was a carelessness around definitions of the metaverse. Virtual worlds continue to be painted as “places”. And while virtual spaces can often look like places, it’s a narrow definition of persistent, simulated computer environments in which multiple people can participate. When viewed from that broader context, metaverse applications of the future will include a range of utilities, applications, communities, and tools that augment reality, mirror it, and are escaped to from it.
Very intelligent discussions around the privacy and control issues that arise, including corporate control and, as you pointed out, the unseen power of Asia and China with their massive virtual communities, may well become the leading issues around trust, identity and privacy in the years ahead. These issues apply equally to Web 2.0.
I have no idea what you mean by “encouraged by the myth of the victim” or “promoted by the ignorance of the new”…I fear my brief notes made it sound like the participants were ignorant to the peril of virtual worlds, which they clearly were not.
And to add one final point of clarification, I am not a “university folk”, I never graduated, and never will. For me, and this isn’t true for everyone, life was a sufficient academy.
hahhaha awesome.
“Regulation” of a financial firm is not what makes something a “bank.” Back in the early days of the United States there were many many unregulated institutions, especially in the “Frontier States” which called themselves and were considered banks. SL is in a state a lot like the USA was several hundred years ago. Unfortunately, SL is now becoming more and more regulated and mundane, and is becoming more and more like our real lives in most western countries. Pretty soon we’ll all need a virtual world to escape from our current virtual worlds…
[...] Tags: second life — Piri Latte @ 12:17 pm The first place I’d seen the IBM ad was at http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/ibms-making-money-ad-virtual-worlds-arriving/. Haha, cute, [...]
we dont make….
we consume….
sheep
[...] others with a vision, enable them with tools, and make them feel engaged in a… source: Learning about Second Life from…Google?, Dusan Writer’s [...]
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse [...]
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse 50,000L Bug/Insect Making Competition Quote from the site – I’m looking for bugs. Insects, spiders, creepy crawlys, little flying [...]
I love ManagedQ. It gives you such an awesome sense of the search results.
I downloaded the toolbar and have converted all my searches over to the Q. They’re definitely the future. I highly recommend everybody try them out.
Let’s hope they break up the Google monopoly.
ManagedQ is awesome. Their UI is def. addictive. Google has been the same for 8 years so I’m ready for the change. Also, the NLP/search within search feature on the left (”executive summaries”) is really helping me to get to core of my search faster. It’s worth checking out.
As I pointed out on the CIO web site I don’t get this. I see two distinct activities: simulation and virtual worlds. I understand that the technology that drives Second Life or World of Warcraft could be adopted to create virtual spaces for business interactions. What I don’t get is the point. The calling card for Second Life is that you can be whoever you want to be. Since its your “second” life I would assume most people don’t choose to be themselves. So what is the point in a business context? That I can enter a virtual world and tell my boss what I really think of him/her?
I play WOW and its great fun but I don’t see how interacting with my business associates in playland rather than realland would be an advantage.
Can you enlighten me?
Liv, we humans will always need to consume. Or do you wish to go back to having to own a piece of land and trade sheep for potatoes waiting for the next famine to happen?
And Dusan, I love your idea, and hereby I rase the paw to play one of the noobs!
(Can I be avatar one, pretty please? I don’t think I feel comfortable with to much lines!)
I love the user-friendly interface. ManagedQ has really taken search up a notch and the NLP is very sopishticated. I’m definately converting.
You’re on Vint! We’ll get the crew set and mash something together. Man the cannons! And the cameras.
I love it as well. It’s still a bit unclear from the reviews and the blog itself what the engine is that’s driving the results. I’m under the impression that it adds a layer to the Google search results…adding the interface, pictures, and ability to then further refine your search.
I tested a few searches and most of them seem to return the same (or nearly the same) search results as Google itself. Maybe it then also stores user click-throughs and ‘management’ of results and then refines future searches based on that, but my distinct impression is that it currently uses Google as the source of returning results.
Roger:
Really good question and if I had the single magic bullet answer perhaps I’d either be wealthy or watching wealthy people and wishing I had implemented my great idea.
However, I can only share a few experiences and observations from my own real life experiences using VWs:
1) Many participants in SL are not hiding behind a veil – especially in the education and business community. Therefore, participants in business collaboration or education are not hiding behind a veil of anonymity.
2) For dispersed teams, virtual worlds can offer the benefits of conference calls, Web conferences, Skype, etc. but with the added benefit of presence. I’m not just supporting SL here, but have been astounded what a difference it makes holding meetings in Qwak or SL as compared to conference calls, Web casts, etc.
You really do have a sense of being ‘present’ with others, and the tools allow you to rapidly pull up documents, presentations and other materials which others can then mark up, append, or supplement with their own materials.
3) Aside from overcoming the distance that collaboration often leads to (after all, true collaboration would say that the world is a potential partner), 3D spaces also provide a different way to contextualize, view, discuss, and change artefacts that represent concepts, projects, process, or work flow. While the technology is still in a somewhat early stages, projects like the architecture WIKI and in particular the early demos of Project Bluegrass from IBM clearly show that there is something very different about using a 3D space for certain types of activities.
Already, businesses benefit from things like contextual voting, prototyping, and team building.
Imagine a complex project where decision points can branch and time/cost/quality considerations need to be mulled over, or commented on in an asynchronous way, or by a dispersed team. This can be done in what I SOMETIMES find to be a more intuitive way in a 3D space, as compared for example to a complex 2D Gantt chart.
4) Engagement. You enjoy WOW. People enjoy games. Business is serious stuff – but why? It’s increasingly being proposed that virtual worlds and game environments could be a new model for work. For example, the National Academy of Science is working with the Institute for the Future on a “Massively Multiplayer Science” initiative called the X2 Project which will act as a platform for scientific collaboration. It is a Warcraft for science geeks, who will use a virtual world platform to stimulate opinion, form collaborations, and solve problems.
I’m not sure what industry you’re in, but virtual worlds offer one way in which ideas, people, concepts and collaborations can be encouraged outside a company’s walls. While Web 2.0 social networking concepts are driving innovations like a “Facebook for the CIA”, virtual worlds are another toolkit that helps companies to create new ways to engage.
In some ways I think you answered your own question – spaces like Second Life “could be adopted…for business”. It’s not a *could be* question. Second Life IS being used by businesses, ranging from Sun and IBM to architects in Texas to urban planners in Brooklyn to NASA. The reasons are many and like any technology should suit the business need and strategy rather than be adopted as is.
As economists and others have pointed out, the sooner we toss the idea that virtual worlds are somewhere “different” the faster we’ll come to grips with the fact that in many ways they offer an addition to real life process just like a phone does or e-mail, and perhaps over time a far more compelling one at that.
Virtual worlds as they are today are labs for a future in which the metaverse will be everywhere. Companies who want to understand the future can do so. Others who prefer to wait can do so as well, but I’d propose that its at their own risk.
For some people, Second Life is that – an escape, a place to play, an immersion experience where they can be what they want to be.
But for a growing number of users Second Life is an EXTENSION to their real lives, they are transparent with identity, and they are there because they’re working, collaborating, creating new models for sharing concepts and ideas, forging partnerships, identifying talent, or holding virtual meetings in place of real ones when time or cost are a consideration.
Some are also there because they are reaping the benefits of an intelligent creative community that has perhaps learned more about collaboration in its few short years than Wikipedia which, really, is one application for many participants, while SL represents as many applications as there are participants. And those reaping the benefits and insights today – well, I guess each one of them will have the chance to understand the potential of a technology that is fast becoming ubiquitous or hold on until later and catch up when others have forged ahead.
Look at my grandparents after all. They just got e-mail, and they’ve survived OK without it until now.
To answer your specific question directly I have been in the computer business since it was called “tabulating” > DP > EDP> IT > ???? and IBM was called “International Business Machines” (Of course if you only needed domestic business machines you could use one of the “bunch” companies)
Perhaps after 40 years of hype of the “next great thing” I find myself reticent when the media hype seems to exceed the delivered benefit. To your specific points:
Yes, a three dimensional universe can be more familiar than a two dimensional universe as long as the set up times and costs don’t eat up all of the benefit of the familiarity.
Almost everything else you cite is really not a function of the “virtual world” but rather better applied technology. A spreadsheet is better technology than a piece of paper. A spreadsheet that can be shared is a better technology than one that can not. A shared spreadsheet where the people using it are aware of if the other people in the room are paying attention is most likely a better idea than one that doesn’t have the same feedback.
To your point “4″ business is serious stuff because the outcome of the game is serious – can you afford food, housing, clothing, stuff like that.
I do find all this fascinating and will of course be doing my best to experience as much of the emerging technology as possible. But an interesting aside to the WOW environment – the relationships may start in WOW but the serious relationships (business connections, friendship, etc.) quickly are moved out into the real world.
Ah, the joy of living in interesting times.
Roger Jones
http://www.rjjconsulting.com
http://rjjconsulting.blogspot.com
I was curious about your background mainly to see if I could think up some examples of the use of 3D spaces. You might find the following article interesting, especially its reference to 3D virtual machines:
http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/01/28/the-archeology-and-future-of-software-design-meeting-grady-booch/
I think you’re right to be reticent. Work by groups like Clever Zebra and others make it increasingly easy to jump into virtual worlds without costing thousand in set-up costs and time. Learning curves continue to be an issue, to my mind, although you can get rolling in Qwak in about 20 minutes, even for users with no experience in game or 3D environments, but the range of things you can do is more limited than the far more open ended Second Life.
And you’re right! And you hit on one of my main points about 3D worlds – I really think they’re being misinterpreted as something different. Some day we won’t call them worlds anymore. Worlds imply they’re a place to go with their own rules and cultures. In many ways current 3D environments are worlds, but it’s a limiting view. The sooner people who are looking for business solutions realize that 3D environments are simply technologies, the sooner we’ll find intelligent people like yourself striving to work out technical efficiencies, smooth out the process flow, etc.
I’ve heard the term “Meshverse”. I like the term because it implies 3D spaces enmeshed with “real life”, 2D Web sites, cell phones, and meat space.
There will still be people who want to use virtual platforms for immersion. To play games. To escape. But as you’ve pointed out and as I’ve written on before, there’s a “loop” in which the virtual bleeds into the real very quickly no matter how hard you try to keep up the walls around the garden, preserve the magic circle, etc.
I don’t begrudge immersion. I’ve immersed myself. But there’s a lot to be said for starting to think of 3D spaces simply as another technology and to then start thinking about where that technology best applies for specific business purposes or for self expression. In the future, I see Wikis and project Intranets with spreadsheets, project files, and little 3D Web spaces that you can pop into and out of which are there for specific purposes – meeting rooms for presence, prototyping rooms, conceptual mapping, and consensus building are examples.
And yes, I agree business is serious stuff, it puts food on the table. But some businesses, like my own, which are in the creative industries, DO look for fun as part of our work environment, and games, exploration and play are as much a part of work as chunking numbers in Excel.
Which brings us into a new domain, that of serious games, and whether 3D environments are an extension of that (they are). I was speaking with a friend the other day who got a job in retail at a pharmacy. His training included a shelf stocking game and he described it as a) a great way to learn b) an intuitive way to understand the problems with managing shelf space restrictions and prioritizing and c) fun.
Finally, a footnote, which is that anyone who’s in business needs to be aware of the full spectrum of technologies available to help solve business problems. You can specialize in virtual worlds, perhaps, but you shouldn’t exclude awareness of other technologies. Just as you’re reticent, I think anyone in business should proceed with caution on any technology that seems to promise to cure what ails you – technology is no substitute for sound strategy. and I get just as much value out of telling clients “don’t do this, it isn’t for you’ as from encouraging risk and innovation.
hello
[...] Making Competition Update February 20, 2008 — dusanwriter The deadline looms for my bug-making competition, and the response has been [...]
I’ve posted an update and comments on IP issues here:
http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/50000l-bug-making-competition-update/
Interesting ideas about object perm’s and limitations. I was thinking about this too the other day but only got as far as wishing for second-user perm’s. I occasionally get asked if I’ll sell an item full-perms but have to decline since i know that one forgetful user can render the item virtually worthless.
It might not work for prims, but for things like scripts or anim’s it might be very useful to be able to sell them with both first and second user perm’s set. The 1st-user gets a full perms version so they can be included in their objects and then sold on. Then, as the finished item is sold to another resident, the more limited 2nd-user perms would automatically kick-in and would prevent further unlimited distribution.
It would just make automatic something thoughtful builders should already be doing, keeping the value in the builder’s object and in the original creator’s.
Same basic idea as yours but slightly more ‘builder-friendly’. In an ideal world we’d have ALL these options…
Yes, that sounds like a great approach. Simpler and serves some more immediate and wider uses. An overall rethink of the IP/perm system seems to be long overdue, IMHO.
I think I saw a script around somewhere that you could drop into objects and would kill them if the user name had changed X times – not sure if I’m imagining that?
Oh – and forget about perms in passing stuff along, I have enough trouble finding out which of the 200 prims in my build holds the one no transfer script that’s preventing me from changing the perms! Can’t they have a nested hierarchy view of objects so that I can see what’s embedded in what? Or is that hidden somewhere beneath their Dazzling interface that I haven’t found yet?
A nested hierarchical view? Very nice idea, Wiki that one immediately!
..and it reminds me of another wishlist item of mine – hierarchical linking. When you join object-A to object-B you get linkset-C. Now join linkset-C to object-D and then unlink them again and instead of stepping back to linkset-C and object-D, you get 3 unlinked objects – not helping!
I think i first used hierarchical linking in Bryce and it was most useful, it can’t be that difficult to implement surely?
Well, either stuff is easy to implement and they’re making it seem complicated, it’s hard to implement and they’re making a big deal about how it’s complicated, or it’s complicated if they implement it because the rest of us will find it too easy. Your guess is as good as mine.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse Second Life on 3G Phones Quote from the site – On the heels of the test client on iPhones comes this beta test of Second [...]
[...] should focus on more relevant and perhaps interesting events like Second Life hitting G3 Phones, concepts of cross reality synchronization, the new viewer but I find myself drawn back to [...]
Go visit Mindies.org (Metaverse Independent Developers). There are a lot of emerging tools in terms of content pipelines between worlds, including Second Life to Multiverse pipelines. It takes everything through Collada as the middleware layer. There is a video of it in action at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TETMEkBteS0
Thanks for the post Dixie – read this on Vint’s blog I think? Really wonderful and intriguing and Collada is the way to go. Can you reverse engineer it so it goes the other way?
I am a full-time child avatar. I am and always have been emphatically against having <18 people on the main grid for reasons that need no further explanation. Before December I had a few lines in my 1st life profile citing the TOS and threatening to report underage residents I would come across. In December a two cases EXACTLY as you describe entered my purview. Now, I cannot in good conscience turn someone in for “underage”. Without a way to appeal, and with such poor (read, “zero”) review and investigation policies, and the extent of the sensitive personal documentation that must be provided to a third party to clear one’s name for this thing, the threat of wrongly punishing the innocent is simply too great. I removed this blanket statement from my profile. In the current state of affairs would never submit an AR against someone for “Underage” even if they admitted it in open chat. (I would however avoid them and ban them from my land.)
Adz:
Difficult decisions and it sounds like you’ve taken a very reasoned ethical approach. What I still don’t understand is why a way to appeal is even necessary – the person being accused of being underage wasn’t, they had age verified through Linden’s service, so in order to prove their age they now have to – what? Fax in the same information they provided through the supposedly stellar age verification system?
You do point to another issue, which is the reporting system itself, how the wrongly innocent are punished and, if wrongly punished the accuser does not face a consequence. There are no options for speedy arbitration. As more and more people are able to ascribe real economic consequences to their ability to be in SL, it strikes me as dangerous that Linden can stop access based on what could prove to be false accusations.
If that happened to me and my inability to access SL meant that I was unable to demo the grid to a potential client or couldn’t take care of in world business, I’d be seriously looking at copying my sims and moving them to another platform (and hey, that’s easier and easier to do these days).
[...] now we have Fix8, Emotiv, and no doubt many others. Posted in Business in Virtual Worlds, Virtual worlds. Tags: 3D [...]
[...] Metaverse discusses the absurdity of Linden Lab’s age verification policy in his post, Linden’s Age Verification Hypocrisy. While Writer is mostly criticizing the 3rd-party solution LL began to Beta-test in December 2007, [...]
hehe yeah i saw your main point. The hypocrisy you pointed out did cause me to giggle a bit. sorry i left the *giggle* out of my responses.
There was a similar observation made at Massively in late December. Aristotle’s age verification not good enough for LL? Thanks for refreshing the intertubes about this important issue.
-Adz
Ahhhh thanks for the link to Massively. Had missed that one, and they make the same point only more concisely. Which is my cue to giggle.
Well, I think the way they quietly dropped further implementation when it turned out the AV system did not work for most of the world (that is, outside of the US) made it amply clear that this was little more than a half baked PR / corporate butt protection exercise. As to the AR system, it reeks of incompetence, wilfulness, and sometimes misuse of power — but that is another matter entirely…
Well, nice looks will get you a lot of interest, but that is all you will get — you nailed that down in your last paragraph
. By the way, isn’t there some name for the law that says that the more « realistic » things get, the more the human mind focuses son spotting what is off ? I seem to remember having read something like that once…
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse Over-Hyped Blue Mars Still Raises Benchmark for Second Life Quote from the site – In 2008 it’s a virtual world a day, most of them for kids, but some [...]
« I really need to stop calling them worlds, because one of my main points is that 3D spaces aren’t separate places from real world applications and business, they’re simply a different, enabling, and supplementing technology to the real and the 2D ».
This might be true for applications and business, but saying this is all there is amounts to cutting out a large chunk out of the virtual space. To many of their residents they are indeed worlds ; linked and interpenetrating to the atomic (to a degree), but still worlds. I’m no business consultant, but I daresay application developers and business execs will fare better keeping that in mind than trying to see them as a kind of pervasive interactive 3D video conferencing system.
[...] 23, 2008 Commented on http://dusanwriter.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/virtual-worlds-and-business/ « Virtual Worlds and Business « Dusan Writer’s Metaverse ». I need a term for that : VW [...]
I don’t disagree with you Rheta. I think a new terminology is needed. There are virtual worlds, which I see as immersive environments with their own cultures and artefacts; there are 3D spaces, such as Qwak, which is technically a virtual world platform but is really just ‘rooms’; and then there’s what I’ll call the Meshverse, the interlinking of 3D and 2D spaces which will be the next major wave of development; oh, and finally augmented worlds – virtual world overlays of the real.
It is really nuts. I age verified as soon as I could to avoid exactly those problems of some griefing idiot AR’ing me with all the follow up trouble of such an action. LL always shoots first and asks questions later, and I was hoping to avoid that. I almost couldn’t believe when I read that their own AV system isn’t enough for them!
The only thing that makes me feel a bit more secure is, that their AV via the 3rd party didn’t work for me anyways, so I verified my age manually, sending them a copy of my ID card. With this being stored inside their OWN system I have a tiny bit of hope that I’m safe. But who knows? We are talking about LL…
The way it is handled now, underage ARs are the ultimate griefing tool.
I already posted to the blog of the affected person. Here’s a slightly modified version:
False UA reporting is a particularly nasty form of anti-kid harassment. What really galls me is that LL just takes the false UA report at face value, suspends without warning (generally right before the weekend), and then takes its jolly good time un-suspending. LL provides no info about your false accuser, and presumably, take no action against the harassers.
That this account was already age verified is really the icing on the cake.
How should LL change?
First of all, take their heads out of the sand. I understand their paranoia about RL underagers getting into SL, and places where they shouldn’t be … but LL should realize that certain nasty people are gaming LL’s paranoia. This is (in many known cases) clearly serious *harassment*, not to mention a waste of LL’s time and resources.
If LL receives an UA report, it should (1) if age verification has been completed, assume the UA report is false unless there is some compelling reason to believe otherwise; (2) as a rule, provide a notice with (say) one week to provide age verification *before* suspending; and (3) investigate people who file (say) three or more UA reports which prove to be false.
In this case, LL suspended the account without warning, then took almost a week to unfreeze it. In another case I remember, it took LL about two weeks to unfreeze the person *after* he faxed his driver’s license and stuff.
It is worth adding that where the person has an SL business (as was the case here), the griefer also causes economic loss.
p.s. Btw, the age verification system sucks. I couldn’t get it to auto-verify against my driver’s license, passport, or social security number – and I am even a U.S. citizen well over 18. I hate to think how it works (or doesn’t work) for other countries.
*grrrrr*
[...] interface systems, including Emotiv, in which user’s brain waves are read to determine the level of emotional stimulation, will [...]
[...] But it’s the interplay of the “real” with the virtual that is the richest source for the possibilities of change. If we purely think of virtual worlds as separate, we’re ignoring the fact that they are NOT walled gardens. They may have walls – platforms like World of Warcraft erect as many barriers between the game environment and external realities and economies as possible. But there are always chinks in those walls – either cracks or with entire chunks missing. Commerce will always find a way to cross over where there’s money to be made. Intellectual property will always find a way to be disseminated as widely as it needs to be, no matter how much copy protection we try to employ. But more important still, the selves that people bring to virtual spaces are not turned off when they log off. It may seem like there’s a separation between avatar and controller, but they’re part of each other, living in a strange loop. [...]
[...] realistic worlds like the coming Blue Mars, and continual improvements like Windlight and Havok, not only make these spaces more compelling, [...]
[...] of this feeds wider discussions and discoveries about the role and rights of the avatar, alts, identity, trust, and [...]
I am part of the load
Not rightly balanced
I drop off in the grass,
like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.
For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time and space
and cross
this waiting room.
I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.
Rumi, ‘We Are Three’
WOW! Dusan! I just have no words… I’m speachless.
This is an AMAZING article. Full of insights and observations that will be helpful to everybody… Thank you so very much…
Please accept my deepest respect. Regards.
P.S. As to the ending, my mother in law said once:”I have graduated from the adulthood.” hehe. I recall her words every now and then while thinking about SL and what WE, the people, are doing there.
What are the dangers to this new technology? I wonder what the level of addiction will be to this type of interface. Like regular video games and Internet-enabled computers, there have been well documented studies of addiction regarding these technologies. I think things are just going to become that much more immersive and that much more addictive.
Second Life News for February 26, 2008
From: play Sony impressed by Home Quote from the site – Of course, the Sony Director could be somewhat biased, although he draws viable comparisons with Second Life, which is apparently inferior because it needs to cater for too many system specificati…
[...] of the news pieces focuses on a demonstration of the Emotiv headset, which we’ve written about before. The piece describes a demonstration at the 2008 Game Developers Conference of a future that is [...]
I’m glad to see Jaron’s still in the picture. There’s still some juice left in that rasta boy.
I’m glad someone else writes articles as long as I do.
When people tell you they are leaving Second Life, they often don’t really leave. They lurk on forums, they read blogs, they come back on alts, and that’s all part of the cycle. Sometimes people really leave cold but then they merely go to some other game or to Facebook.
Castronova’s concept of the exodus is interesting, but unfortunately, he’s so mired in games and ludology that he can’t understand the more subtle complexities happening with open-ended worlds.
I remember a discussion about addiction on the forums once, and one geeky tekkie sort who scripted and made a living of sorts off his products sold in SL and then later consulting for companies basically sneered: “is a carpenter addicted to his hammer?”
He was trying to make it seem — trying to convince himself likely above all — that SL was merely a tool, a platform, something like me using Microsoft Word to do translation work (nobody would say “You’re addicted to Microsoft Word”).
But of course, we all know that’s silly as people really are addicted, not applying their talents in more lucrative ways, disrupting even their real lives and ceasing to care for their spouses or kids or themselves, there are piles of stories about this. I’m strangely unmoved by them, and I’m going to think some more about why, and write about it, but it has to do not only with the idea that games or worlds crack people along fault lines that they already had before they came to them, or with the idea that this sort of addiction at least doesn’t lead to road deaths from DWI, but I have to think more about it.
I think the compelling nature isn’t even so much visualization. I’ve been in worlds or on spaces in SL that have nothing particularly compelling or beautiful about them, but people will stay in them for days on end. I think what it’s more about is choice and control. They give people those two features they simply lack in real life: choice and control.
You still aren’t getting it about thumb-sucking. This isn’t a reference to children’s habits, infantalism, or uselessness about the art itself. It’s about articles that ponder things piously because pious pondered is what is needed for some reason. It’s a newspaper term, and editors will consciously plan around certain events that they “need you to do a thumb-sucker,” i.e. somebody has to write a thinky piece on what something means. The idea is that a ponderous type would be staring into the difference sort of biting his thumb.
Here’s how Slate magazine defines it, but they say it is derogative, it isn’t always:
“Thumbsucker: A usually derogatory reference to story that ponders a bit of news and doesn’t introduce any.”
http://www.slate.com/id/1003564/
(this has a good list of such slang terms btw)
I’m going to challenge your bashing of Anshe as some sort of crass mass market taste purveyor. Oh, how intellectuals must always prove that they loathe mass markets and mass culture! It’s humorous to me that you celebrate Rezzable as some antithesis, but Rezzable has more mass culture and mass taste that you could shake a stick at, what with little green martians and tropical beaches and urban-distressed canneries and all the rest. These are all hackneyed cliches.
Anshe actually puts a lot of effort into terraforming her hundreds of sims individually. You should fly around and look at them. Anshe herself personally is one of the best terraformers of SL, possibly THE best after the old Linden content team like Eric. Of course she has staff, and she has another problem: customers that wish to flatten the hell out of any sim she does produce nicely (most people can’t seem to get it through their heads that they don’t need to make a flat board to place a house, they can just place the house, then iron out the earth later.
The furniture made is actually pretty good looking. It beats by a long shot some of the “individually-crafted” mass-taste knock-offs of “modern” furniture which everyone imagines is “unique” but looks like Ikea or even Sears.
You would benefit from a thorough reading of “Bozos in Paradise,” Dusan.
Interesting points. Though Wonderland was meant FIRST for groupware and lately has educators interested. But it is a SYNCHRONOUS platform.
[...] IBM is opening a healthcare sim in Second Life whose purpose is to provide a 3D demo of how its information systems facilitate [...]
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
When I was reading about google wanting to store medical records, I couldn’t help reaching for my tin-foil hat. Putting the paranoia aside, perhaps it is indeed a way to streamline an aspect of the medical industry to help improve service and reduce costs.. the old “cheaper, better, faster” mantra. As to google ads, I had just read this note that claims that google is not, at least for now, using them. (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/the-goldmine-in-ads-that-arent-on-google-health)
I am also reminded of a presentation I saw a month or so ago about using cell phones as sensors… they can already track us easily, listen to the world around us, how about, the talking head suggested, the phone sense our breath or other indicators it could monitor to provide data or early warning to health care.
We could have a few pints at the pub and our phone tells us when we are reaching our limit for driving or talking to our boss, we return home and do a 3D tour of our body to check the effect drinking on an empty stomach has had on our brain…
I heard from my bro DJTom that Dunnie died.
The time Dummie died i was in hospital and i could not write this then.
I hate my bad Memory whenn i think back to Dummy.
I know i liked him and we had im sometime.
I was really in shock when Tom told me he died.
I cried a lot.
Why is this World so damn hard??
We all shall miss Dummie a lot, thats for sure.
Bye sweet Dummie, sleep well Friend, never more pain and sorrwow. I will think off you.
Danny
Oddly, the screen shot of the Google health record seemed to be deactivated, but found some shots here:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-14-n43.html
Yeah there might be something in it. I have linked to you from a video package I have just produced. Hope you don’t mind. I enjoyed your read.
Thanks David. For those who don’t realize the link is from your name, here it is:
http://www.viewmagazine.tv/metaverseFutureweb.php
I wonder whether I should take the thumb sucking controversy to Wikipedia and let the masses sort it out, but tracing back I still feel my initial impression of how Prok used the term is closer to the Slate definition, which is how I meant it in this context. That being said, I cede the definition to wiser minds but now appropriate it for future use of my own, just because I think it’s such a great visual.
The Dusan definition: thumb sucking is the process of looking at something and finding meaning where there isn’t any. A thumb sucker is someone who ascribes some deeper truth to “shiny prims” when there’s usually no deeper truth than they’re shiny and they spin around a lot.
Thumb suckers standing around wondering about all the meteors wiping out the dinosaurs on Rezzable and believe it’s some sort of symbol of changing eras and a commentary on the impermanence of the build when in reality they had too many prims in the way of their next project.
Second, I didn’t mean to imply that Anshe Chung produces anything less than great content, and I’m fairly sure I didn’t say anything about the work itself in my post, but I can understand that in the wider context it may have seemed like a criticism.
I have no opinion, and it’s probably an object by object thing, personal tastes, whatever – I’ve seen 10L builds by Anshe and her team (a little bashed up looking little house, if I remember) that had character, great textures, and unique features. It looked as good as many of the Tiki Huts and beach houses (including my own) crafted lovingly by hand. My point wasn’t about the output, it was about the process of production. And let’s face it, a craftsperson who never thinks about creating greater efficiencies for themselves isn’t learning, and a mass producer who never thinks about aesthetics and quality won’t last long in a demanding, changing and taste-conscious virtual world. So I really didn’t mean to sound like I was disparaging the result, I was instead pointing to the tension between traditional notions of mass produced, factory line, “one size fits all” production and the (somewhat over-hyped) prosumer movement.
And as an aside, I lived on an Anshe sim way back when and one of the reasons I moved there was because it WAS beautifully terraformed, a lot of thought had gone into the relations of parcels to each other and to the overall configuration of public and private spaces, and the SYSTEM for renting was smooth and painless.
OK, I’m off to check out progress on the new Public Works.
=)
This is a really interesting concept! Thank you for sharing.
Hey there
Nice find! I tried it with my photos – pretty cool!
[...] Curious to think about and see how people are using glow, and how they will use Web objects, to change the richness of environments. Otherwise, we all wait for Blue Mars. [...]
It’s really difficult to use Glow effectively until Linden add script commands for it, it’s very frustrating that they haven’t yet. Hopefully it’ll happen soon, it’s a great feature to have – even if a lot of people will turn it up full making their builds look like a journey into the core of the Sun! We’re not always the subtlest, SL builders…
The new web-based content is frustrating too since it’s been added as an adjunct to the existing parcel media settings – meaning it’s not much good yet, you can’t rely on it to deliver the same experience for all visitors. Plus, if your visitor doesn’t switch on Media for your land they’ll see nothing at all.
Still, fun to come, once these things get sorted out!
Agreed Eris…and Linden has promised HTML on a prim this spring, so I’ll hold them to it, at least on Beta.
And anything to do with land, parcel and media settings leaves me paranoid since the day I had an entire sim returned to me when I subdivided a small parcel not realizing the larger on would then exceed its prim allowance….not even connected to media settings, I know, but either an indication of my total ignorance or how complicated some of the features are. (A little warning box would be nice .. “Are you REALLY sure you wanna do this? Think about it). Not to mention I’m too lazy to update Quicktime so I still don’t see or hear anything.
Finally, I agree on Glow…but go check out King Rezzable for its appropriate use (at least in the forest environment, the star burst one left me flat).
dusan, this is fantastic – random art, here I come!
Kapor Enterprises, as in Mitch Kapor of Lotus 1-2-3 fame, president of the Mozilla Foundation, and a member of the board of Linden Lab (as well as one of its funding partners)?
Mmmh. How very interesting!
There was coverage of an interview with Mitch where he talked about it also reading expression and translating it through to that of your SL avatar. If only I could remember where I read it.
[...] 3D cameras that will initiate a new tipping point for virtual worlds, according to Mitch Kapor. I recently reported on this development, linking over to an employee’s blog post where he stated the [...]
This is really cool. Looking forward to see the demos. Btw is it using IR, like the Wii? Will it work as well for folks who are sitting? Does it track hand gestures for movement etc…? A few hints…will be enough
Excellent article, Dusan. Thank you!
Check today’s postt, it includes links to coverage by CNET with a bit more detail.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=35468158048%40N01&q=IAAPA&m=text
Look for the GestPoint photos. Kapor’s late.
Been late for a while.
[...] Read more about this topic from the author here. [...]
There’s an element of this in demo clips for some Logitech webcams, eg:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=r7Gn2TyEyHw – begins with facial attachments (eyepatch, monocle, etc), then moves into complete replacement avatars. Unfortunately, the guy doesn’t move around too much, but the facetracking can still be seen. The software manages reasonably well with tracking lips and eyebrows, too, though sometimes seems to give people something of a tic. None the less impressive for that, though!
Yes, thanks for that. There’s an interesting discussion over at Croquet about some of this as well so it seems like there’s growing work on the interface devices. Emotiv is getting a lot of play and there was another device out of Germany that worked off brain waves as well. Should be an interesting year for the, um, controllers.
3D cameras sound as a nice thing. Though “augmented reality” and some of the expectations are actually a bad and clumsy idea, nice, simple to use and affordable mocap hardware could improve the world and our communication. We’ll see how development of both hardware and the interface will go. After all, it’s all about what we want to achieve.
[...] Dusan Writer suggests that the wiki adoption patterns and strategies on Wikipatterns.com can also be applied to virtual worlds: Wiki Patterns for example, offers a toolkit for companies and communities looking to optimize the use of Wikis. But this toolkit sounds suitable as a “best practices toolkit” for Second Life. [...]
First off, thank you for the link and the mention, I’m glad you enjoyed the article!
In all of the entries that I read on the topic, I saw no evidence of cooperation between Linden and creators. In fact, I saw additional roadblocks in the form of a mailed-in DMCA and stonewalling.
While I grant that, as a company, they have many other issues to contend with, there are simple steps that they could take to make the process less painful without raising cost or providing much additional distraction.
I wouldn’t say it shows outright disdain for the creators in second life, but it certainly shows a lack of willingness to take any action, no matter how small and no matter how much it might help…
[...] Dusan Writer, quoted above, provides a compelling look at the issues involved in MMORPG living. [...]
I think i’ve boiled it down to 3 main options, now trying to decide which is (most) true…
A/ Linden don’t know what to do and have no real vision for Second Life’s future. This one seems more plausible when you learn they originally planned to make (or commission) all the content themselves. Instead they switched to user-generated content – it was a good call, it took off, it wasn’t what they’d planned, now they’re lost.
B/ Linden don’t want to do anything. Also very convincing, seems to be the company’s culture: ignore it and it’ll go away. They’re right, if they ignore the issue of content protection it WILL all go away – all the builders, designers, graphic artists, musicians, DJ’s etc. We’ll all just go away.
C/ Linden only do anything in order to protect their profitability. Very convincing! Especially when you realise how important Premium members are to growing the SL economy and then notice that their numbers are falling. Suddenly ad-farms have to go and we’re getting mainland beautification via the Public Works projects. Not a coincidence. This is probably the leverage residents need to exploit. Make Linden see what harm stolen content (or the lack of new content) does to the economy and their profitability and suddenly we might see some action…
After reading Wagner Au’s book (intriguing until he became a “virtual world consultant” and then I thought he got a little thin), I was left with a sort of impression that SL and the residents are pretty much a whacked out, nutty group of people with a few empowering stories and odd gender-bending relationships. Not to say it’s not a great read, but it has me wondering whether it isn’t in some ways representative of Linden’s attitude towards its residents. Yeah, they loved having Anshe on the cover of Business Week, but even now they’re disavowing any of the work of real world companies who tried to take a crack at Second Life over the past year only to decamp in frustration. Basically, their line has been “SL isn’t ready for that kinda prime time”.
So let’s extend this – if Rosedale really is represented accurately by Wagner, then he’s an idealist, still dreaming about SL as a sort of “Be Bop” Burning Man (I posted on this today). The common refrain is “we’ll make a great platform and gee, won’t it be awesome to see what our nutty community comes up with once we do.”
I’m all for Be Bop. I’m all for Mirrored Flourishing (they tend to love stories of welfare moms who make good or someone who make better cars than Chrysler in their basement). But Linden’s attitude seems to be “look, this is a parade, a giddy carnival of fun and passion, and we’re not going to intrude with any sort of big business, old school, capitalist mentality, although sure, we wanna stay in business, but our ethos rules man, peace out.”
So, where they stand: let’s make sure everyone can fully express themselves, and one way to do that is to open up the grid. We need to anyways because although all these other platforms don’t have our hip, cool, surfer, laid-back ethos (combined with our deep love of code, cuz God’s in there man) they’re starting to circle around our little world, and wouldn’t it be awesome if people could hold their own little Burning Man’s by having their own servers.
But if that happens, they risk all these little private islands disconnecting from the Main Grid, so they start cleaning up the mainland. The future is in letting everyone host a parade, not in shopkeeping anyways, because after all, with 10,000 jeans already on the market, the bottom will fall out anyways, which isn’t such a bad thing because it will let everyone get back to their be-boppy roots.
What’s more important is not to upset the core ethic, which is to make sure our giddy users have access to the deepest tools possible for creating fun “stuff” (P.S. the in world economy was an add-on anyways, done in dire times as a way of saving Linden Labs, so it’s not like they ever really had their heart in it). And in doing so, we’ll make sure that we keep the space open for all the educators and collaborators who are our real future anyways – schools learning new ways to spread new models of education (we can teach the world!), and businesses who upend their business models once they see the magic of be bop reality.
I’ve argued before, however, that Linden needs a good dose of re-visioning. And in so doing create a more compelling strategy than “Our job is to create technology, it’s up to the users to decide what to do with it.” They seem to think that they’re creating a platform for liberation and social change, but don’t seem to realize that they’re acting more and more like an Internet Service Provider and in the commodification of their platform are thus attracting people who care about performance, intellectual property protection, tracking, privacy, and security.
Linden’s singular focus on providing tools to users towards enabling a shared creative “Burning Life” has blinded them to the fact that they’ve actually positioned themselves as nothing more than a server farm, with a bottom-line focus on island sales (thus the new “low prim sims”), with the dreamy hope that they’re the frontier of the age of virtual worlds (I’ve read that they play parlor games at LL trying to guess whether they’re the Compuserve, Mosaic, or Netscape of their time) and that their vision is so powerful that all those old nagging worries about content theft will go away once we all wake up and see that there’s a glorious new world that awaits.
There is. And it’s called the Internet. And the competition for the attention and talent of DJs, texture artists, modelers and others has an increasing number of options.
Linden needs to re-evaluate what the future looks like because the future includes people who can work anywhere, from anywhere, in any virtual world. And yes, there will always be room for the libertarian carnival, but like Burning Man it might only come once a year because who can take a lifetime of that, and it will get torn down once its done.
[...] wrote about tribal versus territorial morality and then ran across this quote from McLuhan:“Modern man – that’s us now [...]
Hmm, and having said all that, replacing Rosedale as CEO might go a long way towards accomplishing what we’re talking about.
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/03/14/exclusive-rosedale-to-step-down-as-linden-lab-ceo/
I can agree with the basic principle that Linden needs to do some serious re-envisioning of their product. One of the impressions that I’ve gotten as I’ve read Linden’s own sites and replies is that they don’t seem to understand what they want to be as a company or what they want SL to be as a product.
They’ve got some neat technology, many users who enjoy it and they need to find a way to make it cohesive and profitable. Not easy.
I think part of the reason people like me don’t “get” SL isn’t because we dislike virtual worlds, but because we don’t understand what the purpose of it is. One can hardly blame us when you look at the mixed messages Linden sends.
This seems to translate directly into how Linden handles these content issues. They say they take content theft issues seriously but don’t offer any meaningful solutions or even attempts at solutions. Part of it likely is the profitability issue and the fact there is no money to be made by removing infringing works. Some of it though is that they don’t know if or how this issue fits in with their future plans.
If they knew, for certain, they were going to be a company that was going to profit almost solely off of the exchange of virtual goods, they would likely do something to lock it down better. But they don’t want to invest in locks if, in a few months, the business model changes to something where content theft doesn’t matter.
You can’t invest in a future that you don’t know anything about.
I guess that’s the bottom line…
[...] been covered three times by Reuters, as well as being mentioned by Nobody Fugazi, Massively, Dusan Writer, and practically every other Second Life related blog that I subscribe to (and several that I [...]
Ironic this, it struck me a some time ago that if this was a listed company the shareholders would be on the brink of voting him off the board. I give him credit and respect for his self-realisation and for doing the right thing (IMHO).
My worry? He hires a fall-guy. He hires Torley in a suit. Someone who talks the same talk and walks the same walk and takes the daggers when nothing changes, leaving Philip wound-free and ‘visioneering’.
My hope? He hires someone with ears for the residents, eyes for the future and who is able, even enjoys, kicking some ass…at least for a little while.
This could get very interesting or very depressing.
[...] Dusan Writer’s Metaverse Plagiarism Today Weighs in on IP Theft in Second Life Quote from the site – A good overview from a neutral outside observer on the copybot issue in [...]
The timing of this whole discussion has certainly taken on new meaning with the announcement of Philip taking on the role fo Chair of LL in order to find a replacement as CEO.
I particularly liked Samurai Pickle’s take on it.
http://samuraipickle.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/philip-rosedale-stepping-down-as-ll-ceo/
The post picks up a comment by that smiley virtual world watcher Robert Bloomfield:
“Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets. The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy. First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom. Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office. Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.”
[...] happens when we try to port our old ideas and paradigms into the new space. Last time I checked, CSI New York was relegated to a few lonely and disheartened looking [...]
It is amazing how well-timed all of this is. Hopefully some of it will be taken to heart as they conduct their search…
Thank you for the shout out!
Your blog is very useful.
Please keep the great posts coming, I will keep on reading and commenting as time allows…
I’ll try to keep my blog up-to-date as well…
Thanks again.
[...] Rosedale Being Replaced as CEO: Dusan Writer [...]
And 100% of online users of MMORPGs pretend to be magic-using elves or cantina aliens flashing telekinetic death-grips, so what exactly have these bumbling bureaucrats of banality discovered? That people in alternate realities create alternate selves?
[...] transparency and trust, with the latter being considered one of the key drivers on the Net. As I previously posted, there were some insightful comments from John Clippinger, who [...]
What is this? Least-Common-Denominator World?
Gahhh they didn’t even put a decent video together. But imagine ad farms with REAL ads!
[...] Our contest follows up the successful insect competition. [...]
Cool!
No prim limits?
No prim limits. I love them too much to limit them.
Wow. That look really impressive.
thats kinda lol since you can do that in maya for ages.
the whole scene still looks static and you cant remove pre-rendered furnitures or the illusion is broken. (their shadows remain on the floors/walls.)
of course you can opt to render the building only, but then, placing not baked furns there would make them strike out of the environment.
nonetheless, these designs (like the glass stuck forever on the bar on the image above) help SL look even more dead and haunted than it actually is.
Hey anonymous-not – can you point me to an export utility from SL to Maya? As I mention in the post, you can currently build and render in Maya and import into SL but that’s not always a help to SL-only developers. So if you’re aware of an export to Maya pipeline I would LOVE to hear about it.
As far as whether you like the look or feel I suppose it will be interesting to see what people do with their imagination. I suppose people might only see a glass stuck on a bar where others see opportunities and allow their creative juices to lift off of what is clearly supposed to be a demo. I imagine multiple renders of the same scene at different times of the day, with the textures being swappable based on a detect sun parameter. Aside from a cocktail lounge I’ll place my faith in the residents of SL to explore the possibilities.
As far as ‘dead and haunted’ I’d refer you to my earlier post on the subject and in particular the following:
- In RL, how often is a social group of friends (or even strangers for that matter) available to satisfy our whim to be entertained or ’social’? Social activities don’t happen because we want them to, they take a circle of friends, a network of shared plans, an understanding of each other’s patterns and preferences. Same is true for SL.
Not sure what your experiences have been in SL, or RL for that matter, I can just share my own perspective.
Thanks Dusan!
Here is a direct link to the Join Now Page Catalog.
http://www.slnamewatch.com/botlog/last_avail_log.html
The link you have above is to the SLNameWatch.com home page.
Today I have added a couple alternative registration portals to the catalog. I believe this completes the list of available last names, unless there are other registration portals like CSI:NY or GossipGirl I don’t know about. These portals have exclusive last names. Never fear! my new feature indexes those last names too! More last names are available now than there ever have been… it is a shocking number: 1,809 , all told.
The rapid development of 3D interfaces is always a pleasure to look at. Makes me feel confident Virtual Worlds are on the right track
I like the little gaming innovation concerning the mixing of dimensions smoothly (as posted here). At the bottom of that article is another list of 3D interfacing with data, some hardware side – that really show the value of a third Dimension.
Ah yeah…saw that from our good friend Digado.
I’m sure you’ve seen it but I posted today on a grab bag of things but really really really check out the TED presentation of Photosynth….and stick around for the last minute or so where it all comes together in one organic, communally created virtual environment….it is breath taking.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Ah sorry Adz and thanks for correcting the link.
To summerize… a normal week in Second Life. hehe!
Um. Yeah. And still worth every frustrating second.
Dear Dusan,
first and foremost let me say I am sorry, truly and deeply sorry, if anything I wrote has hurt you. It was not in my intent to ever do so, though I can see how I have brought this down on me by focusing on one of your lines of thinking instead of your thinking as a whole. Will you accept my apologies ?
I don’t know if splitting hairs will mellow the blow, but I would like to stress I did not « group [you] with the augmentationists » — I picked up on some of your recent arguments to prototype two opinions one could lump in with these pseudo-camps, but only to make my point that to me, this particular debate is as irrelevant as it is silly, and that (as far as I can tell with my modest abilities) the camps do not in fact exist as they are perceived. You cannot be a citizen of Second Life without immersing yourself into it (hence the tourist analogy for those who refuse to do so), and there would be no point whatsoever in doing so if it was not augmenting our RL somehow.
You Can Be an Augmented Immersionist indeed. We all are both, however hard some of us cling to old banners and labels.
Speaking of feelings on last time : you just took you revenge, by writing the post I wish I had been able to write next. But I’m grateful you did, because you have done it so much better than I would ever been able to. Thank you.
[...] Dusan Writer has done so tonight, and he has done even better, carrying the thought much further than I would ever have been able to : But when I look at Second Life I don’t see a game, and I don’t see a role-playing environment, and I don’t see an e-commerce engine (although to some degree it is all of these) – I see the possibilities for stories. And in these possibilities I am attracted to how Second Life may be a new camp fire around which we weary hunters gather, scratching pictures in the sand with our primitive tools and telling each other of the days we’ve had, and the adventures ahead. [...]
Awww Rheta hahaha. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound so tragic.
Call it a rhetorical flourish, I suppose, to make the point that in a world where we struggle for labels like immersion and augmentation to describe how we react to the experience of virtual worlds, we all come to realize that we struggle within the blurry lines between. Your post was an inspiration to me, Rheta, so no apologies required.
Ah well, you have no idea how relieved I am to hear as much — laugh all you want
. And did I say what an utterly amazing, brilliant post this is ? If I inspired you to this, be it only a little, I am very glad.
A lovely post (an’ thanks to Rheta for pointing at it, and for being an important part of the discussion!).
One thing that struck me while reading this is that yes SL is all about stories, and in fact storytelling may well be the killer app of SL and the other VMs worthy of the name; and that while we’re thinking that we should also think that RL is all about stories, and in fact storytelling is for many ( some / most / all?) of us the killer app for RL. We do lots of stuff just to pay tier, so to speak, but the rest of the time? We’re there sitting around the campfire…
We live on a world that is but a tiny speck in the vast universe. So small that it couldn’t even be viewed with a microscope if you were to compare the size to that in which we live.
I believe that Second Life (and others) are in their first second of life – if that. What we see today will not be what we see tomorrow. Trying to place it in a box, trying to define it, trying to make it somehow “fit” in our lives – will never work.
The reason it will never work is because it is a work in progress. What may be today will not be tomorrow. There is room for every culture, every explorer, every creation of artwork within its limitless space. Unlike our planet, where boundaries already exist, there will be no boundaries in the worlds that you are creating.
Why do we feel the need to define something? Why do we need to have “camps” of people that somehow believe they “get it” and others don’t? Is this not what has brought our “real” world into chaos?
Perhaps some things in life don’t need to be defined but rather experienced.
This world will evolve beyond our definitions. No matter how hard we try to imagine what it will become, we will fall short.
I really enjoyed this post, I wish more writings, more blogs were of this depth and literary on sl – beautiful to read, from the thinking to the texture of the words. I am going to keep a copy of this in my archive. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this post, I wish more writings, more blogs were of this depth and humanly warm on sl – beautiful to read, from the thinking to the texture of the words. I am going to keep a copy of this in my archive. Thank you.
[...] Kevin Kelly, courtesy of Dusan Writer : « In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, [...]
Hey Dusan, I think we have only just started to turn the rich soil in the garden of thoughts that PKD provides in his speach. As I saw what aspect that you commented upon, then was also re-skimming it and mentally holding it next to our Metaverse context, I then heard an echo of some of Laurie Anderson’s spoken lyric from a cut named “Born, Never Asked”, that says, “It was a large room, full of people. All kinds, and they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free, and they were all asking themselves the same question. What is behind that curtain?”
She may have been thinking of a different line of allegory than us finding our human-ness in virtual dimensions, but when I press it up against PKD’s one sentence definition, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” and then thread it to why we fragment ourselves out of meatspace to find ourselves again in a metaverse, our eternal braid may look less made up of strange loops when we hold it up to the right kind of light.
PKD also has a tangent saying, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.” I think it is interesting that one one part of ourselves that is literal in SL is our text chat. The mechanism is important, i think as well, and although voice chat exists, I am sure it not simply another way of doing the same thing. The way we communicate with text provides a pace and exchange that causes us to pare down our expressions to short, concise sentences, then wait for a response, then reply… things can happen in that process that don’t happen in other kinds of communication. The first time I met a SL friend in RL, I found conversation seemed way too fast for me to assimilate and respond. I was used to the cadence and parsing of chat with this person.
Of course, this is not the aspect that PKD was talking about, he was saying that with fiction, authors are basing part of their words on truth and part as fiction, but the consumer of fiction is not given that information, so we are in a dangerous situation of “fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur.”
If any of us are seeking Truth, or to find our better expression of Being, or a better way to be Human; does our explorations of ourselves in the Metaverse help or hinder the apsects of our current other pseudo-realities?
That is interesting for in-world communication. I cannot imagine somebody using crappy SL voice for machinima, though. If you need it to sound at least decent, you have to over-dub.
Great post and great point about storytelling.
I’d like to try my luck answering Beau why do we need definitions, even when they turn into camps and even when we are aware that they cannot put the world into a box. We need them because we try to understand and depict the world we are in. We try to tell the story, and we need definitions (whether they are words, images, prims or even music) to do that. there is nothing wrong with that, as long as we are aware that they will change, just as the world changes. And world is changing not only by itself but with our storytelling and our definitions. There is a trap and danger, but if we are aware it is an adventure worth taking. It is not words that turned the world into chaos. Words made the world out of chaos. And they are transforming it in each turn. It0’s up to us if that’s going to be for good or for bad.
Well put Dandellion. Although I also take Beau’s point that we can spend so much time assessing and naming and trying to define that we forget to just experience.
Thanks for the wonderful comments.
I agree. If we stick in naming and defining without experiencing, we’re dead. Nothing is more dangerous to philosophy than trying to think without living.
@ Pais – I’ve come to believe that virtuality is no different than other realities, it just uses different tools of expression, tools which, perhaps, tap into some richer vein of storytelling and experience, particularly because it IS immersive, and therefore ‘feels real’, and because in that place which feels real the rules and “words” that we have at our disposal are different. I feel somewhat like we’re at the dawn of perspective in painting – imagine how it must have felt to become suddenly aware, through the canvas, that there was a whole range within our visual language we had been blind to, and what it was like to experience that for the first time. It caused schisms in beliefs and argument, but there is no argument that it was as if we had a blind spot that was suddenly revealed.
More to your point, however, I’m not sure it’s just the pace of chat and typing that creates a little electric change in perspective. It’s the combination of it with the visual environment. As you know, there’s nothing I hate worse than sitting and talking with someone in SL (oops, better check the branding guidelines, I meant “in virtual world of Second Life (R)”) and not facing them….it’s just text chat, but that’s combined with a visual vocabulary as well. As the range of avatar expression increases (lip synching for those with voice, 3D cameras that can detect facial expression and movement, etc) it will be interesting to see how the range of language (text plus expression plus presence plus the ability to co-create using prims, embedded HTML, etc.) the range of stories, their depth or texture, might increase as well.
I’m glad that you called it ‘pseudo-realities’ however – because I’m not convinced that there’s anything *different* about the ’strange loop’ that occurs within a virtual environment…it’s more that we don’t afford ourselves as many opportunities for it to occur. How many of us are part of a writer’s workshop? Or travel to strange places that shake our sense of location or culture or belief? Or participate in meditation retreats? All things where we, in a sense, fragment part of ourselves from our habitual meat space.
Finally, while virtual worlds are powerful environments for storytelling, your quote of Laurie, a cut that I well love, reminds me of another quote:
“Sometimes I have the feeling that we’re in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He’s sure to open the door again for it’s a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.”
how the heck do you get the (R) thing to work anyways
ALT + 0174 makes ®
ALT + 0153 makes ™
(this works for in-world chat too)
Haha thanks. *Fiddles*
~wOOt~ ~LOL~
btw, Thanks for the plug, but you cover more ground then I do most days. Great stuff.
JR
http://jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com/
&
http://jeanricard.tumblr.com/
Really good
[...] SampleVirtual World Addiction Joy of Rendering: 3DS, Second Life, and NeptuneLeaving Second LifeMy New Business CardsPapervision Flickr [...]
ESC is not totally throwing in the towel, no. I think that there are some situations where SL can be compelling. But yes, we think there can be compelling, immersive uses of Flash & papervision to offer virtual world experiences to a much bigger audience than has the computing requirements and fortitude for SL. I am sure there will still be marketing efforts to the SL community as mark of broader campaigns.
The dynamics are very different for community members and content creators. It is in their interests that SL provide a certain level of feature stability (don’t break my stuff!) and preserve the economy. There are not really a lot of places to go that offer such an economy — OpenSim, which lacks a permissions system, would totally remake the economy.
My perception is that Linden Lab has chosen their existing community (and opening their arms to collaboration/education experimentation) rather than risk too much pushing to be an open platform. It certainly protects their cash flow, which is understandable. But it slows down and reduces their chances of being the next big thing. But they are not out of the running. Time will tell!
IMO, most of us still have this early-adopter mentality which seems to assume that the two biggest draws, the killer app’s, of SL are first, the ability to create within it and make your own virtual place and second to mess around with the code that drives it, for fair means or foul. We’ve been driven this far by creatives and codeheads – they’ve achieved amazing things and could continue to do so but there’s something important that’s missing – the audience.
I suspect that many of the 95% of new-users who don’t stay were expecting Facebook 2 or MySpace Plus but instead found themselves dropped into Maya for Beginners. I would never want to see the creative side of SL in any way limited – just the opposite, for me it IS the biggest draw – but I think we have to recognise the mainstream user will (mostly) only come for the fun and not the work of virtual worlds.
Thanks Giff and Eris. I think I was being, um, dramatic.
Any talk of interoperability and relationships with 3d party developers (publishing some sort of forward-looking plan that developers can, well, PLAN against would be a nice start) and you end up sounding like you mean that the “walled garden” needs to come down. As I say in my profile, our focus is on vertical integration across platforms – not because different platforms need to integrate with each other, so much, but rather because when you go to create an experience you want to bring the right tools at the right time to the right person.
This might be a quick Papervision experience, a mini-game (Metaplace anyone?), a VIR-Tools environment, or an immersive sim. Within this range of experiences and then the communities around them, there is a role for a place like Second Life in facilitating game economies, avatar representation, and shared/co-created environments. Their protection of their brand, I believe, is an important part of protecting a “good housekeeping seal of approval” on the experience that they provide.
But they’d better make sure that the much protected seal of approval is sealing something of which we approve.
As you pointed out Giff, the platform doesn’t support its full promise, which is what I mean by ‘throwing in the towel’. The full experience, as initially envisioned (I imagine) by the CSI build, was meant to be mostly in-world (with Web and media outlets as the point of attraction). But SL can’t ‘bear the load’ of these kinds of concepts – full immersion, branded, cross-platform. Which is fine – SL wasn’t ready yet, as the Lindens then said (in retrospect).
So where does that leave us? Well, I won’t contribute to the stability discussion…but rather the discussion of experiences. And because Linden isn’t in the content creation business, they need to rely on others to do that part for them. And as the options increase, they need to realize that it’s Pro/Am time: if they don’t attract the right mix of pros and combine them with the vibrant community of amateur creators (many of whom are trying to BECOME pro), then they’ll lose both to other platforms.
And pros expect certain things. They don’t need source code but they need pipelines. They need to know that if they’re creating an experience that they can build it once and then place the same ‘objects’ within SL, and inside PaperVision, and maybe in a Vir-Tools demo room or an True Space gallery.
Lacking clear direction and poor developer relations, (I’m still waiting on replies to 3 e-mails through “The Grid”) they then put salt on the wounds of the “Amateur” part of the equation, sending little tremors and shocks, lacking a clear explanation of whether their crackdown on branding is an “Intel Inside” strategy, “Due Dilligence” ahead of a sale, simple house cleaning, or a well thought out desire to “brand” the future open architecture project.
As far as Maya for beginners, have a look at 3DVIA shape, sometime, for what a real Maya for beginners looks like – and frankly, in my early days of SL I would have welcomed an application like it – as user friendly as you can possibly get for a newbie to 3D modeling. They should do a deal with those guys and have an optional external building program!
So where does it leave us – they haven’t attracted the “Pros”. They’ve upset the amateurs (again). And they’re protecting a logo which has less and less value as a brand, because its associated with a lack of clarity (hey! Why just settle on one logo! Maybe if we have 3 or 4 we’ll confuse people and they’ll stop associating us with flying genitalia!), and their “fanzines” have been pretty much given 90 days to comply or … or what? They’ll shut down the people who are tirelessly advocating and promoting SL and who, ironically, don’t even work for Linden Labs.
I never believed I could have a Second Life. So maybe Fitzgerald’s adage isn’t true…”There are no second acts, but in Second Life’s case we’ll hope this isn’t true.”
Dusan,
I second the “creepy”. The tech is fine and wonderful and all that but the result is disturbing. I would rather look like an animated cartoon than an animated corpse. If this is the future then it’s shoe in the machine time for me, I am afraid to say.
Icha.
Dusan – Thank you for your kind words about 3DVIA Shape…you’ve got exactly the right idea – it’s an attempt to expand the accesibilty for creating 3D content.
Also, very intereting times in the metaverse for SL and many of the other worlds. We’re looking to expand the software and our 3D modeling community to support virtual worlds more effectively. I would love to get your thoughts on how we could help. Drop me an email when you get a chance.
(Wonders when a Linden last posted on a blog and fires up his e-mail).
Hahaha yeah….mind you, they have some pretty cute cartoon versions as well, you should check them out.
But for sure…..creeepy….and maybe at home in Blue Mars.
Well played! Sometimes you have to barrel around and reach the profound in order to find what is “as simple as that”… With this in mind, I’ve come across a website that does just that! http://www.pixellogo.com
The name issue in SL has bugged me from the time of initial registration. Forcing a name upon me as an adult violates my feelings, it should not be.
So eventually I did become increasingly unhappy with the selected family name, being reminded of it every time I logged in. I sort of became fixated on that, and it started to seriously dampen my enthusiasm whenever I was inworld, I could not fully let my personality stream into the avatar who has a name that was only semi-chosen by me.
Another thing I became increasingly anal about was the self title “senator” by the Lindens. Hum. Senators are usually voted into office, but the Lindens are effectually feudalistic lords. I think calling themselves Emperor or Duke or King would have been even more apt, since that would have been so over the top that it could have been sold as satire. But “senator” hypnotizes people into adding democratic symbols mentally when really SL is anything but a democracy. For example, I ran into a guy who had a region and a house on the beach, only to wake up next day, log in, and discover that the Lindens had piled another sim right in front, so where his oceanview used to be, was now a grassy hill. This is someone who bought that region. His only option was to adapt…
Then I discovered other Grids where I could, as it should be, decide my own name and I have been in these Grids since. It’s lonely at times, yes, but choosing my own name is worth that.
Besides, I’m just too untech to fiddle with settings until my cheap Nvidia card and Celeron CPU would generate an acceptable SL experience. It’s so hacked off and jumpy, if I want to make a left turn I end up 300 degree off track. I don’t have that problem in other Grids.
Ooops, I guess I snapped into ranting mode here.
“…the discussion of experiences…”
That’s the head of the nail. It’s not about the technical challenges LL face, those will just have to be dealt with, that’s a given. It’s actually about what people do when they get here (into SL) and i think the way forward is to adopt a more web-like model.
When you sign up for MySpace you’re not handed a book of html and a text editor to go write your own website – you’re given check-boxes to check and text-fields to fill with some details of yourself – all of which add up to your presence on MySpace.
Your equivalent presence in SL is your avatar. The first user experience in SL should be creating that avatar presence, then moving it out into the wider SL world then, at a later date if you want, you should be introduced to building and creating within SL. The point isn’t to make the 3D creation tools in SL more user-friendly (altho we need that too!) it’s to realise that many (possibly even most) people arriving in SL don’t particularly want to use them! They want a virtual world presence and the opportunity to explore, socialise and have fun within it – why aren’t we giving them that?
It struck me earlier that this concept is about to be put to a very good test – Sony’s Home on the PS3 is, rumoured at least, about to open for Public Beta in April. Their concept is very like this – a virtual presence with little or no creation tools – and it’ll be fascinating to see if it captures the imagination of PS3 users. Be very interesting to see what Sony have come up with after about 3 years development too…
Thanks for the comment N.R…..care to share which Grids you prefer? With the latest fiasco around brand use, might be time to dig a little deeper than my earlier cursory tours.
Oh, sure.
Basically I went pretty much through the grid-list on the opensimulator site, some very small standalone-single-region “grids” like “Metropolis”, or the French one (with no one but me in it at the time) and some larger ones, “large” in relation to opensimulator grids. Of course, compared to the sheer might of SL, at least in terms of busy avatars, all other grids are still very small.
There are two commercial ones, the biggest being
OpenLifeGrid ( -loginuri http://logingrid.net:8002 )
create Avatar here:
http://www.openlifegrid.com/Home/tabid/36/ctl/Register/Default.aspx?returnurl=/default.aspx
which is run by an and in Australia/n. This is a very sympathetic project and much has been done in terms of stability and functionality. Opensimulator-Grids are still a bit rough around the edges but nothing which would cause gray hair. It’s not a Windows 98 situation or anything that drastic. At the moment, it’s mostly just the pioneer builders busy being creative, but things are picking up and more and more Second Lifers are coming in to have a peek, not without derogatory remarks of course.
OpenLifeGrid only sells regions, membership is free, you can’t however hook up your standalone to their grid.
The second commercial one is called Central Grid ( -loginuri http://maingrid.centralgrid.com:8002 )
create account here:
http://members.centralgrid.com/membersignup.cfm
(avatar creation one step behind initial signup)
, these guys are Americans, and the owners of the grid are busy right now to build stuff, I’ve seen streets today and other interesting things. Don’t be scared away by the incredibly ugly, very NON-2.0 front webpage which will make you puke, and by the fact that the loginuri is hidden behind initial registration. It’s definitely worth checking out this one as well. What they offer seems to be a combination and/or of selling regions and also allowing you to hook up your standalone to their grid, but I haven’t looked deep enough into it what variation, that is mainly because I’m not a builder or region owner, I just wander around and bless unsuspecting strangers with my sweet personality.
The third one is an opensource Grid, aptly called
OSGrid ( -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002 )
http://www.osgrid.org/
Avatar: http://www.osgrid.org/index.php?page=create
I checked it out yesterday and this is the one where I will most likely end up because here you can hook up your standalone server for no charge. (Donations are welcome, I presume, nevertheless.) I’m not sure how this one is connected directly to the sweet people of Opensimulator, there seems to be a connection but I haven’t figured out yet how and who. But I’ve already made a friend who offered me to just build stuff on his regions. Wow. I like to build houses, and I do have a newly discovered architectural talent, but being unemployed means I cannot afford to buy a region, not even in OpenLifeGrid which is considerably cheaper than SecondLife.
I do crash a lot in OSGrid, some regions run different simulators, some regions are just badly configured, but the price is right so I’m not complaining. OSGrid is more anarchistic than the others, please add the positive meaning of anarchistic here. Essentially this is hackers (again positive meaning please), freaks (..), fiddlers and aspiring techies throwing their home-brewn standalone server-regions into the grid. Very eclectic and I really hope they will work out the stability issues, which of course is more difficult inside a sack of cats.
To do justice to the small ones, please allow me to mention both Metropolis, a single region “grid” intended for speakers of German, but to be looked into by everyone, and a French Grid with some pretty interesting terraforming.
Their info you can, as the others, find lower on the Gridlist from the opensimulator project right about here:
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/OpenSim:Grids
To make gridhopping easy, I’m going to advise something I would normally not, which is to just use the same password and avatar name for all the other grids, not necessarily your SL one though. This way you can create shortcuts on your desktop and mark the “remember password” in your SL client. This way, going into a different grid becomes like going to a different webpage, all that differs is the loginuri.
Users of Linux such as myself and who are too lazy to create launchers, can basically just keep a textfile with the different loginuris and just open a console and copypaste the command for the client, with the route of which folder the client lives and the loginuri.
For the OS Grid it would look like this:
/home/lucy/slclient/./secondlife -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002
“lucy” would be replaced by the name you are using. Your path to which folder you’ve saved the Second Life client of course may differ from mine…
Once you’ve figured out which grids you plan to visit regularly, you can then go ahead and create launchers on the desktop.
If you’re using a bizarr operating system like Microsoft Windows, you’d just copypaste your launcher for SL and change the loginuri in the new launcher.
(second sending, delete this if first did arrive)
What do you mean with “latest fiasco around brand use”, sorry, I just stumpled on your blog yesterday.
My -very- long post didn’t get published, I have a copy, let me know here if you need me to send it to you in an alternative way. (Too long perhaps?)
Hahaha.
I was also thinking the logo was Virtually Meaningless
No, it’s OK …. with all the links and so on the system thought it might be spam. Have now approved.
Thanks for a wonderful post. I’ve checked out a few of those and have also become very enamored with RealXtend. Set up my own local grid in less than 15 minutes and started fiddling around – amazing. No one there, because it was just, well, me, but I might toss it up on our servers as well and invite some friends.
I’m going to link your comment from the home page, I think it’s worth a wider audience.
As far as the branding thing…well, long story and I’m too exhausted to talk about it anymore…gave too many column inches to it already. But the easiest way to follow what happened is to read the SL blog, and the bloggers’ blog…
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/24/introducing-the-second-life-brand-center/
http://secondlifebloggers.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2021825%3ATopic%3A5068
[...] Dusan Writer is strongly in the anti-policy camp: Linden Labs sent out a Trojan horse into the community – a spiffy (and useless) new logo, perhaps thinking bloggers, content creators, educators and businesses wouldn’t notice the fine print which many are speculating is all prelude to an IPO. [...]
[...] Dusan Writer notes a teacher using Second Life to teach class: According to Dr. Gerard Lucas, “Second Life allows us to look at issues like identity, identity building, gender, sexuality and race. It brings all these ideas to the forefront in a way that students can engag…” [...]
[...] of rules for residents and other people on the use of the company’s trademarks earlier this week. Much-lauded by numerous blogs, Linden Lab’s move highlights the company’s strong commitment to its [...]
This sounds really good. I really love the photographs. Are those photos from the Sims 3?
Hello, my name is Jukia, I am a Simmer and creator for Sims downloads that other Simmers can download and put in their game. I create things like new objects and such. So far I haven’t really moved on to the Sims 2.
This new Sims game sounds wonderful, I am just afraid whether it is going to be too big for my computer (aghem laptop). The Sims 2 game tends to skip and lag and the load time is too long. What do you think?
The Cult of the Professional, always speaking for the amateur…
Maybe you need a new client. Or, maybe a world shouldn’t be judged just by how your clients see it for a PR campaign.
Still, I was bothered by the logo and its lame artwork, but you’ve helped me to understand what it resonates:
INSULT
INSOLENT
INSULIN
INSOLVENT
The SLLU open letter to the TOS is on http://www.slleftunity.com.
To type the (suddenly essential) trademark and copyright symbols on a Mac use these keyboard shortcuts.
® – ALT-R
© – ALT-G
™ – ALT-SHIFT-2
For Windows, more here – http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html#punc (but it would be quicker to buy a Mac!)
Hope that helps.
From the perspective as an interloper looking to goof around, my attitude was I was amazed that SL worked as well as it did and took downtime and problems with a grain of salt.
Last week, I was getting little nagging surveys on login starting off with “…in your opinion, is SL getting better or worse lately? Why?…” and I didn’t answer, since I wasn’t sure if all I had was unhelpful and uninformed gripes. When I finally started formalizing my complaints, the survey nagger disappeared.
When I think about people that are trying to actually conduct business with SL, or create in-world events, or schedule meetings with friends, or otherwise actually *use* SL… then I see how infuriating downtime can be.
Sometimes one must mention the silly to be taken somewhat seriously.
Know what I mean, or mean what I know? That comment was one of many that I made to the journalist who did that interview. I had no idea she would choose to spotlight that particular comment, nor could I have predicted that you would focus on it as well. 
Thanks nonetheless for the write-up. I am also of the opinion that educational efforts in SL need more (positive) coverage. And just fyi, that particular event was theme-based (invasion of pirates), and was part of a series of free experimental language learning/teaching activities in SL. According to participant feedback, it was one of our most enjoyable and memorable language learning/teaching events.
Silly?
*Second Life offers us the ability to explore new approaches to learning and teaching. Let us not let worries about “silly” get in the way of well-intended efforts.
Let us explore the possibilities…and have fun doing so! 
Thanks for the follow-up Kip! I’m with you on silly, and on education in SL in general. Keep us posted!
Pais looks up after diving into photosynth and flying around, leans back, gets a 10K km stare, and strokes his chin…..
It looks like they are creating some derived geometries of camera and target position, but I am not sure how robust that is. They may be relying more on stitching together the photos to pull things into a topological framework.
The reason I am thinking this is I am wondering how to map things to real world coordinates. Maybe if a frame work were augmented with something like LIDAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar) deployed a bit like google street view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_street_view) so that the textures from images are mapped on a real-world 3D coordinate framework, we’d have the basis for being able to really create an immersive virtual map of our spaces. A tricky bit will be to deal with the temporal nature of time, since it may be troublesome to see the same seen stitched together, with trees fully leafed in summer, the other with snow drifts.
Taking a different tack… I was looking at the artist’s studio collection in photosynth and was thinking if I could “see” stuff in Second Life like that, it might even be worth going to the various galleries and museums (or even stores). Pais gets tired of waiting for things to rez around him.
Gosh Pais I wish I were as technical as you. But it strikes me that what’s happened here is that the people taking the photos themselves are the ones tagging that the image is what they say it is. Interesting in the TED demo that he shows how one photo was actually a photo of a photo! Talk about crowd sourcing content!
While I imagine that it would be good to get accurate measures of location based on some sort of computer cross-match to geographies, I also wonder whether that doesn’t end up getting solved in the long run by the photographers themselves. Based on how they put this together, they’ve been able to create a 3D object out of different photos taken at different times and have been able to compute the exact location of each camera in reference to that object. Doesn’t it just take one of those photographers to also tag the photo with a GPS position?
So, for example, while its Google, synch Photosynth up to something like their GPI synch application:
http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/
You bring up the intriguing idea that the photos themselves can stitch together an actual “textured build”. On that front, start to wonder whether you don’t end up with a mash-up somewhere down the road:
- For an advanced version of a “build” use something like Stanford’s 3D camera:
LSL
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/march19/camera%20-031908.html
- Map the underlying skeleton of the building using something like Photosynth (which also gives you a deep source of information artefacts)
- Combine the two and import into 3DVIA, Sketch-Up, etc for some more “polished” work
- Probably script some stuff in here while we’re at it, using I’m sure
- Load it up to a Google street view type of thing.
It’s the combination of technology with user-generated inputs that’s so interesting. After all, you can spend 100 years running around with a 3D camera or creating an algorithm to assess geo-positions, or you can count on people out there taking photos anyways and let them tag it with a geosynch iPhone for example.
*head spins*
I gotta lie down I think.
oops… I meant “hippos” but used html brackets. Hmmmm… /me goes back to studying HTML 3.0
Geotagging from cell phones…
http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-geotag-photographs-from-nokia.html
Um….might wanna try one more time.
Oh, and one more app, just cuz I’m turning this page into a little bit of a personal bookmarking thing for future reference
(Excuse the self indulgence)
http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-earth-photooverlay-download-and_25.html
its very “styley” in interface and interactions… but the utility beyond “photo album” style of map- i dont see.
The sence of place is marred by the static nature of the still photography. one feels no sence of the imediate, which is part immersion.
Even after adding avatars as the mediating interface, the app, like papervision( 2d flash) limited “fully 3d ” navigation at a constant presentation level, feels more presentational than confrontational. with is a key factor for in scene immersion psychologically.
i think it’ll just end up another tech demo for the portfolio.
BTW- the whole 3D MAP- mirror world meme— way overblown. Consider it the VIDEO phone circa ATT 1970.:)
time will tell.
c3
Sure Larry – and I don’t think Photosynth is meant to be anything more than a presentation interface for photographic artefacts. At least, they’re not advertising it as such. All these tools and geotags and mapping of 3D models from photos and so on seem to be gaining traction which, when combined with 3D modeling using Sketch-Up and so on does make it seem like new types of representation of data where geo-position is important are arriving.
The work out of London for city planning and urban issues is a great practical use for this stuff, avatars or not, and is really compelling to look at if not necessarily participate in.
I’ve written elsewhere (who knows which post it was, I don’t tag very well) that my interest is NOT in augmented reality or mirror worlds. I’m far more interested in immersive environments. I’m also of the opinion that we can find clues for how these immersive environments will evolve by looking at what other tools and visual languages are evolving in related fields.
I DO think Photosynth, or at least the idea of photographic artefacts layered over 3D spaces, when combined with some of the other technologies that are evolving, does suggest that the mirror world will be far richer than a 3D version of a bunch of buildings, that it will have layers of data far different than how we think of information on “flat” Web pages, and that as these forms of visualization expand and improve and eventually add avatars that we’ll be opening up a new language for conceptualizing space and content.
My interest, however, as I say, is in extrapolating to immersive worlds, because its there that the deep sense of presence and, as you say, confrontation, not only allows us to access these deeper models for information display, but to combine those with avatar expression, identity, immersion, and emotion – and that it is THIS combination that will open the door to a paradigm shift that hopefully won’t go the way of the Video phone (which, by the way, CISCO is making every attempt to resurrect hehe).
It’s become so hard not to be cynical – “…steps to improve our copyright claim process…” sounds horribly like “you’ll be able to email DMCA reports instead of faxing them to us!” but doesn’t sound like they’re actually going to implement measures to reduce content-theft, decrease the time it takes to act on reports or actually remove any offending content (rather than just the vendors selling it).
Couple of additional questions:
Is it true that there were plans to move enforcement of the inworld permissions system from the client to the server ahead of open-sourcing the client code?
If so, why was the client open-sourced before this was implemented?
If this had been done would we still have as much content theft, assuming (perhaps incorrectly?) that it would have then been more difficult to hack around the permissions system?
What part, if any, did Cory Ondrejka play in these decisions?
What part, if any, did Philip Rosedale play in these decisions?
OK, maybe not the most compelling conspiracy theory but interesting suppositions anyway…
*sigh*
Yeah, Eris. It’s kinda sad, I find myself spending way too much time wondering what’s WRONG with them instead of what’s right, which is such a shame. Such creative people in SL, or is that inSL, and half their energies seem to go to trying to read the tea leaves of bad decisions, opaque communications, an impenetrable JIRA, poor outreach to potential and current partners (including the in world community), vague policy implementations or over-wrought ones, changes that are announced with much fanfare and then quietly dropped (age verification), etc.
Thank goodness Torley is being left alone to put out great tutorials and Sidewinder seems to be cut from the Google rather than the Linden cloth.
I’m goin to New York – maybe there’s someone down at the conference with some new cool toy to play around with, because fiddling with legal/TOS changes isn’t so much fun.
It’s possible that they may have a problem with using the TOS to ban someone over the branding issue.
If they did ban someone using the TOS and the person they banned had the where with all to sue, there is case law that has declared the TOS is a “contract of adhesion” at least as far as it concerned the arbitration clause, the same might hold true in such a case.
(Jeez, did that sentence make any sense?)
Perhaps, they have already opened that Pandora’s Box.
A Game To End All Games
Simulation games have always appealed to me, but I dream of seeing them go so much further in the ultimate gaming mash up someday. Imagine a platform similar to Second Life, or The Sims. The foundation of it is controlling your avatar/character, inhabi…
I doubt that a lawyer advised them to incorporate the IP claims into the TOS. IP claims run against the whole world. TOS claims run against parties to the contract.
One problem is the contract of adhesion issue. The other is that by using the TOS in this way they may be abandoning or abridging their intellectual property claim against he whole world in favour of a contract claim that runs only against those party to the TOS.
As lawyers, the Lindens make great software engineers. As public relations people, the Lindens make great software engineers.
I would question that they are great software engineers, based on their performance in that arena. Or at least on the performance of the product that they release on the world.
Threatening trademark transgressors with a ‘permaban’ is understandable on one level – really, what else have they got?
The most frustrating thing is that, while they waste time and effort on this trademark nonsense, user-content continues to get ripped off and resold inworld and they’ve barely even commented on that. So implicitly, protecting Linden trademarks is far more important than protecting the creative output of residents? That’s a PR gesture that only needs one middle finger…
On the positive side – totally agree about Sidewinder. At least someone within Linden understands how to manage a project AND the customer perception of that project, Sidewinder truly shines in this context. Torley is too uhm, saccharin for me, but he’s hard to dislike…
well teh video phone has been around now for a decade- as the webam… the main ” problem” solved was timeshifting — removing the issue of getting a video phonecall when in the shower…. althought the most prolific use for the one to one vid cam call has become again attached to nudity…lol
anyhow– attaching deep data to 3d has again been the goal for over a decade… X3D is 3d plus XML — specifically designed as the major extention of the earlier VRML language for this reason….
its success or failure though has been political and financial, now more than ever as the 3rd web3d bubble rages on and masses of newbies reinvent web3d wheels for fame and vc glory:)
every flash site is now a virtual world, and everything 3d is now avatars…..- this demo thankfully excluded- which is why i dont see it as a future of the metaverse interface, but only , and it seem we agree, as a single presentation interface that may or may not offer any real power vs many others that will be shown.
I think it is interesting that Nortel took a look at SL. I think their angle is more how to create a pull for their own technology and services than to make use of virtual worlds for their corporate machinations, but I could be misreading.
I don’t think that the kind of event he describes – a virtual auditorium filled with people in a lecture mode for presentation – is a great strength of SL. The talks (that were probably similar to the Nortel event) I went to last weekend in SL were not a great experience, other than the ability to ask questions (via chat). Thus, there was interactivity and immediacy as a plus, but lag/slow-rez as a minus. (for instance, none of the slides were visible until half way through because of slow-rezzing).
I do teleconferences, video teleconferences, webcasts, ‘live meeting’, and so forth constantly. I also have to travel for meetings, and regret the time, cost, and carbonfoot print of jetting to meetings. We could really use better ways to meet that don’t require travel, but I can’t say that being an avatar at a meeting will help. I was hopeful to gain insight as to how this may have been attempted in this Nortel experiment, but am not seeing it yet. Still looking…
* Pais now begins to meditate using the mantra: “use the right tool for the task” *
Interesting here in New York Pais that a few of the big “sell points” of some of the technologies is the interface with other communication channels. Looked at one platform where you are in a virtual space and can make a phone call – a little cell phone pops open, you dial the number, and it connects you from within the world by phone. Similarly, you can TAKE a call from within the world.
The other issue is that until SL includes proper document sharing and porting in of external content, like PowerPoint pages etc. a proper collaborative space is tricky. Rivers Run Red has done a little app that uses a Web work-around and HTML on a prim I believe, which also gets us a little closer.
I talked to Glen at the SL booth about HTML on a prim and this very issue of bringing in content, and while he made some nice murmurs about it, I’m under the impression that its proven to be a tougher nut to crack than they may have initially thought (and hey, there’s been a project kicking around for years now, check the JIRA or is it the WIKI). Security holes and the challenge, as Glen said, of landing in a sim and having 200 prims floating around with Web pages is a danger. He made the interesting point however that what they’re looking at is having TEXTURES load the pages.
The combination of seamless voice properly integrated with phones, a light client, and the ability to pull documents, PPT, whatever into the space starts to make it feel like what companies want – a 3D version of a Web meeting.
I’m sort of fascinated, as you know, with the “stuff” beyond that, which is acclimatizing companies to start thinking about projects, collaboration, ideas and concepts in 3D itself rather than just thinking of 3D worlds as a stand-in and slightly clunkier version than a meat space session, whether we’re saving the planet or not (and even on this topic, there’s debate of course).
So, in the short term – some improved technologies, especially integrating with voice and phone, other platforms that may do virtual meetings a lot better than SL, with SL sort of limping along patching some stuff on top, but holding on, in my opinion, to its deeper potential as a creative, conceptual space that won’t just change how we have meetings, but how we think about what we usually talk about or learn at those meetings.
[...] IBM’s “gated” SL communities Posted on April 3, 2008 by Morris Vig IBM announced that they will be hosting private sims on the SL grid, but on their servers in their server farms. Personally, I couldn’t care less. Let the business-types mingle amongst themselves, which is somewhat in line with what Dusan Writer says. [...]
I have an ad-blocker running in my web-browser so that i never have to see click-able ad’s which i’ll never click on.
So i won’t need an ad-blocker in SL? I’ll just learn to avoid all ad-embedded furniture. I’ll also learn to avoid the crowds of anonymous penniless noobs desperately clicking on sky-high piles of free furniture.
Slightly flawed plan perhaps?
Haha that’s what I said to them Eris, asking whether it isn’t just a glorified sort of camping. They claim they’ve built something in that, I suppose, limits how many clicks or something. Although really, it seems like it’s so hackable and ridiculous. Surely they’re smart enough to realize that sims will start piling up clickable junk – kind of like camping piles but in this case someone else pays!
fascinating.
your rss feed works fine.
I like the kids table too, they give you crayons so you can color on the table cloth
Not to be confused with crayon I assume, but possibly to be confused with crayon?
SLin
SLAV
SLAW
You’re kidding, right? April Fools was 3 days ago.
/me nods
But hey, it sounds so moronic and inept that it sounds feasible doesn’t it? What does that say? hehe
It honestly had me fooled.
((but Adz is pretty naive))
Great article, Dusan. The fun I had reading it made up for the frustration I shared in your description of what appears to be a dysfunctional family called “Linden”.
PS: I read your blog via RSS, no problemo.
If it makes you feel any better Pais, at least the IBM guys are fun to hang with….like little kids, cooing and gushing and sometimes burping on your shirt, holding up little rattles or teddy bears to you with this kind of wonder at their offering (and the ability to even be able to offer it).
For all the talk about Big Blue and hiding sims behind their magic wall, the people themselves are truly hobby-like in their enthusiasm, which doesn’t mean that they don’t plan to make money at it (they were quite frank about it, in fact, in a totally transparent and almost delightful way, kind of like, well, kids who get a second dessert) just that they’re a lot more peppy and invigorated than the others.
Hmm. This is turning into a post of its own I think. I always feel like people view IBM with suspicion and I’ve never understood why. “Corporate campers” I think Prok calls them. I’d better double check my analysis – maybe they’re more Stepford than I realize. In the meantime, gotta clean that drool off my shoulder and call it a conference.
Remotely monitoring conversations within Second Life is against the TOS, so perhaps there’s something that could be done with this, but my understanding is that they are going to try to find landlords or owners who will allow these signs and objects to be deployed inworld in SL.
So the first thing to do is to ban Ancient Shriner, the avatar associated with this awful scheme that is going to scrape data from people without their knowing and consent, from all appearances, and tape their conversations for “buzz words. You can do that much as a sign of protest. And also it makes sense to refrain from buying ad space or deploying the signs on your land.
Ancient Shriner is already defacing Second Life everywhere with huge, ugly ad towers with taunting textures about “land fascists” who protest against the signs, and ads for cheapy Internet sites and gadgets that aren’t even inworld businesses. He didn’t put the land to sale, so technically you can’t make the new ad policy the Lindens have “stick”. Still, since he claims he is willing to take down some of these towers or minimize them or have only one per sim (he said all three things to me but none of them are true — all the signs are still in place), he should be asked to do it.
Likely nothing less than a class action suit against these people in RL would work and that has its complications.
Interesting interpretation of what was being said. Unfortunatly one key element of the entire Slippcat program was forgotten or ignored – one that is probably an essential element of Slippcat – “Empowered Engagement” A buzzword yes, but alos a philosophical change in advertising.
WIth the Slippcat system – all control is put in the hands of the user. The user (consumer) has no obligation to click on an object. They are not being forced to stare at ugly billboards, noisy television sets or any other form of push advertising. With Slippcat the user can choose to pull information from an object – and even then they can choose what degree of information they want from an object.
As for content developers hating us – perhaps those who compete with us in making branded items without the permission of the brand owners – but the developers who are building one of a kind unique items, the ones who are creating innovative, eye catching designs that break from the norm – we not only do not compete with them but applaud them.
These virtual worlds open the door for so much creativity, so much experimentation that the best always stands out – and who knows – perhaps soon that degree of excellence may well result in real life recognition – beyond a pat on the back and a hearty well done, but into a design contract with a real life company.
Instead of using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway, we can really draw them into everyday lives by using them as extentions of our lives – making virtual worlds as indespensable as e-mail.
Sorry but this Slippcat nonsense has made me laugh more then anything else SL-related in months, good since it was all getting a bit serious and depressing.
It won’t work. You cannot gather marketing information worth a damn from anonymous users or from users who go to extraordinary creative lengths to maintain an alternative identity for themselves. You’d be counting clicks for no reason whatsoever except that someone might pay you to count them – except they won’t, no-one with a marketing budget of any value is that dumb.
Advertising at its best can be an extraordinarily creative form of communication. This is not advertising, it’s spam dressed as furniture. Trying to justify spam with buzz-words, promises of new frontiers or any other marketing bull-doodoo is just silly. Who do you think will want that new couch which repeatedly offers to make your penis larger…unless, of course, it actually can?
Why would a big-name retailer pay you to pay users to click furniture to get paid? What are you delivering to the retailer except empty clicks? There is a model for this that just might work (it’s one i prepared earlier: http://nautilina.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/never-out-of-stock/ ), it’s called “Selling People Stuff They Want to Buy” (excuse the jargon) and it’s quite successful sometimes because apparently the end-user gives YOU money and not the other way around. I know it’s radical, a philosophical change you might say, but think about it…
A utopian hideaway? So far, that seems to be what a lot of people want – do you think everyone stands around wishing the advertising would hurry up and get here? It’s really a bit pathetic if this is all we can come up with – apply click-thru advertising to virtual worlds…sigh…
There are ways to advertise and market in virtual worlds, the Greenies build is maybe the most obvious example to date – but of course to achieve that high standard you actually need to have some original ideas and talent, the two things apparently missing from Slippcat.
A click-thru ad (or its equivalent) now referred to as “Empowered Engagement” is really very funny. If a career in virtual spam falls thru’ then maybe try stand-up comedy? Maybe we could be a double act…
Antony, I applaud your recognition of in world content developers. Your idea of finally somehow making that bridge between the virtual and the real (with a virtual couch being the first step in hitting the highway to IKEA) is intriguing, if you can pull it off (but better watch out for all those slap happy utopians!)
But look, and in all fairness, I miss a lot. Ask anyone.
I’m usually the last one to understand a joke. People say stuff and I just sort of stare blankly, I have this delayed reaction thing going on.
And to top it off there was a lot of terminology at the conference that left me baffled so obviously I’m not the most trustworthy interpreter of what was said. (Can you forward some definitions for me please for: monetizing the space, measuring engagement, and intentional transparency?)
So help me out here, because I wonder how my “interesting interpretation” (very kind of you to find it interesting) missed a key element, or which elements I’m reading into all of this that are erroneous?
You say that I missed “Empowered Engagement”. By which you say it’s a revolution in advertising – push, not pull. Consumer choice! Levels of engagement, based on their own desires and needs and preferences.
So just fill me in a little more on that part first. Because how is that MORE choice than, say a banner ad? And if I’m watching TV (I have a remote, so it’s not so hard to choose to engage and disengage with that really either), and one of those ads comes on advertising Chia Pets don’t I have a choice to call it? Or to visit their Web site and order it?
Oh, or say I’m walking down the street, and I pass a store, and there’s a display in the window about a sale but it doesn’t give a lot of detail, just says “Sale”, don’t I have a choice whether to walk into the store to find out more? And once I’m in the store don’t I have a choice to buy?
And P.S. – if you’ve ever seen a line-up outside of A&F then you’ll know that there’s something very, um, engaging to the people who shop there, so you can’t claim that it’s lacking that.
Just fill in the blanks for me, because at each step in any of those chains – banner ad, 1-800 number, retail store – I have the choice as a consumer to more deeply engage with the brand experience. In what way does Slippcat differ from that again?
So then that second thing. If this is all pull and no push, is information EVER gathered on consumers/avatars without their choice or explicit permission? Do you use the avatar “look at” coordinates to track eyeballs on a sign for example? Do you gather any “buzz words” from the public chat on what was said in the vicinity of a sign or item? Do you ever link back to a user ID number? Do users who have been tracked get flagged that they’ve been tracked? Is there an opt-in/opt-out process for collecting this data? Do you share this data on request with anyone from whom it has been collected?
Because if there’s data being collected, even without it being connected to an avatar’s name, then there’s *some* stuff that’s *NOT* pull isn’t there? You’re collecting stuff from people and it’s not because they are ‘empowered and engaged’ it’s because they’re standing NEAR something.
And if they happen to be cuddling on their couch at home and mention a few buzz words in the vicinity, well…I suppose those buzz words might be engaging to some people, and others kind of like being looked at and listened to, but others maybe not so much.
It’s sort of interesting timing, because there was an editorial in the New York Times today about how Web companies are keeping a lot more data than they let on. I’m sure you read it, but a few little clips:
“(Technology companies) are spying on you. …(They’re) record(ing) the sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter into search engines – information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. …
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting’.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting…The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment – guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure – at a time when most were concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies…(and) have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.”
And finally, I’m going to leave it to others to comment on how we should stop using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway. I’ve been mistaken for an augmentationist so I don’t have a lot of street cred in that respect (although I beg to differ and feel I immerse with the best of them).
But I will say that virtual worlds do offer us a form of utopia, because they allow us to imagine different futures, and to explore the possibilities of living, thinking, working and playing within different conceptual models, including the one where advertisers aren’t measuring every click and move, and my furniture doesn’t hand out Lindens like coins stuck between the cushions to every friend who pops by for tea.
@ Eris – geez thanks…now I have to get an MBA to understand this new “Selling People Stuff They Want to Buy” idea (which book was that in? I suspect Tom Peters but maybe it hasn’t hit the shelves yet??)
Haven’t you HEARD Eris? The future is free! Says so in Wired! The inventors of the Long Tail! (I have only BEGUN to debunk!
Anyways, I trust the MTV lady, who made the very valid point that we’re suckers for buying stuff because it helps to make us feel SPECIAL. And we all wanna feel special. And I don’t want to feel like I have to hide the furniture or plead with friends not to click it in order to cover for the fact that my pad is decked out with freebies that spit out payola.
I really wish that line worked though:
“Hey, come over to my place and experience the FUTURE of advertising. Yeah! Just click on my couch, and you’re glimpsing the next Google, baby.”
Somehow I see a lot of eye-rolling going on in addition to comments like “Oh, you finally got that thing to WORK did you” or “It’s not one of those Xcite compatible deals is it?”
(Um, not me, I mean people LIKE me would have friends like that).
OK, I’m off to come up with the NEW NEW future of advertising. I’ve been mulling around this idea about how you could get a LOT of attention if you interrupted events, like the Super Bowl, say, with branded messages. Forget push and pull, how about trap and slap! Just need a virtual world application – what about commercially sponsored SexGen beds that bleat out a little jingle at critical moments?
Oh Dusan… I came over at your call to read this, and now all I want to do is get into a really hot shower, scrub myself until I’m raw, find a way to scrub my brain until all memories of this… Slippcat… are gone, curl up under my duvet and never, ever wake up again to face a world containing people like that. This is beyond frightening an disgusting both.
Jeez…
That is simply appalling… A free-market ‘1984′?… and thanks for reinforcing why I am so uncomfortable about teen worlds and big business.
Sorry… must go and puke now.
Well, I have mixed feelings here.
I know I’m being tracked down and measured every time I pay my shopping in a supermarket. They analyse the things I buy, they know my patterns, they send me coupon codes for discounts on “just the products” I buy more often. I know this goes on all the time.
I also know that Google scans my Gmail account every day. Besides eliminating spam (for which I’m thankful!), they create a profile for me, and now target ads better, about things I’m potentially interested in. I even give them permission to do so — I’m usually logged in on Google Accounts when googling in, well, Google. So I know that the list of links I get as results is different from yours. Our tastes differ, and I get “targetted marketing” for it. For Google, I’m just an account — an email address — but they can tell their advertisers what exactly I like to see on the Internet.
The same happens with eBay and Amazon. They know what I like, what I search, and dynamically profile me, and present me the things I usually buy online.
I also know that Twitter has just one purpose — getting better tracking data. They have no other business model. They don’t sell ads (most people use Twitter-compatible thingies to tweet, and never bother to look at the site anyway, so ads are pretty worthless on their site anyway). They don’t sell “upgrade packages” (”now increase the number of characters you can tweet to your friends to 750 per message!”). No — all they do is scan what I type, link it to my email address, and sell the profile to online advertisers.
This goes on with practically everything I do on the Internet, and has been going on for quite some time. Sure, they might not know my real name and my real address — but they know, every time I log in “somewhere” on the Internet, what my tastes are. I’m tracked and profiled. I’m part of several marketing databases. I get targetted spamming. I can’t avoid it — unless, of course, I delete all my accounts and start from scratch (and even so, I’d be quickly tracked again).
Except on Second Life.
Now, well, the market opportunity is just too great to avoid. Sure, you can’t know what information an “avatar name” cointains — Linden Lab protects your real name. But — really?
All you need it to have sensors sending media parcel URLs to your avatar — that are no media parcel URLs at all, but links to external web servers which can easily check on your IP address. Combine that to a different database where you are, say, logged in with your Google Account or Yahoo ID, and it’s quite likely marketeers will be able to find a match. Run this for a while, and you, as a marketeer, will be pretty good at finding out avatar’s IP addresses (which will give you an approximate location) and their email addresses (from anywhere on eBay, Amazon, Google, or Yahoo).
So if I start buying a lot of shoes in SL, I might suddenly find out that Amazon starts displaying fashion books on the top of my searches, and DVDs like “The Devil Wears Prada”. eBay will automatically send me updates for shoes found for sale there. Yahoo and Google will suddenly display ads for Dolce & Gabbanna shoes. I might not relate the two things for a while, but… isn’t it something that marketeers would just love to have?
The technology is there. I don’t think we’re going to be able to avoid that — specially in Second Life, where it is so easy to do integration with external servers — like we can’t avoid to be tracked every time we visit a search engine or an online shopping guide. I wouldn’t call that “stupid” or “ridiculous” or “silly” or a “waste of money”. Marketeers know that their profiling data is not 100% accurate: I might one day search for virtual worlds, the next day on the current fashion in eye shadow colours, then the latest news from Apple, and finally do a random search for a Bible quote. What will the profiler be able to get out of this data? Will they present me ads for nice, discreet Macs in my favourite colour, that can be personally engraved with messages like “God Is Love”? Very likely, not. Tracking doesn’t work like that, and you require a bit more profile data to get a more accurate picture. Even if I’m no way near to look like a 20-something years old redhead in RL — and 99% of what I might buy in SL will never affect my decisions of what I can buy in RL — that is not an issue. Tracking software can still get some preferences out of my SL experience. They might be able to pick out my favourite colours. They might be able to figure out that I’m a “quick shopper” — spending more time looking at clothes than actually wearing them. They might see that I’m keen on following advice from fashion blogs — ie. I might be logged on WordPress, watch a fashionista blog, and then immediately go in-world, every time my favourite fashion advisor in SL puts up a picture of something in purple or beige. It doesn’t mean that I’m likely to buy mini-skirts in SL. But it can help marketing profilers to understand that I tend to buy beige or purple things.
So… do I like the idea that I’m being constantly tracked? Certainly not. Can I do anything about it? Probably not — we’ve lost that war on the Web, we will lose it on virtual worlds as well. Does it seriously hurt my privacy? Well, it’s a difficult question to answer. If it’s opt-in, it’s ok; if it provides at least an opt-out feature, it’s acceptable. If I can’t avoid it (the most likely case), it’s different — but I might not be able to do anything about it.
As to the virtual worlds suddenly targetting kids and teens… well… I have my thoughts about it. Teens are a market since they have money to spend and are easily persuaded/convinced (curiously enough, in my country, recently legislation was passed to limit certain ads specifically targeted to children, since they cannot understand the difference between “truth” an an “ad”). However, I always wondered why marketeers are so keen on the teen market — their money, even if easily spent, is limited by their parents’ budget. On the other hand, the 40+ market is so much more interesting: most people will have a stable life and enough money to spend — far more than the average teenager. They are, however, much more careful buyers. Interestingly enough, the small game developers (the ones selling millions of games with a low budget, but highly addictive, and charging US$10-20 with an easy download) are curiously aggressively targeting the female gamers, who have been seriously neglected by the first person shooters and other action-destruction games out there. Strange that this market goes unexplored in virtual worlds — when in Second Life it’s clear that the content for female avatars still surpasses what’s available for the male ones, both in quantity, quality, and even cost. Well, that’s what you get on a sales-driven economy — content designers in SL create what is sellable, not what marketeers think will sell!
My surprise is not that so many different “virtual worlds for kids” are popping up. They know that teenagers have very short attention spans, and will hop crazily across all these new options — while they get bored with SL after a few minutes (see how small the Teen Grid is, when compared to the Adult Grid). Whereas Second Life tends to have much older people around — who stay around for years, and are constantly consuming content and very well willing to pay for it.
I still find it ironic, Gwyn, that the New York Time chimed in on this issue today, giving some intriguing examples of how all this tracking ALSO plays out, in addition to the D&G shoe ads:
“The information, however, gets…a lot more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (”Hmm…I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”)
There is..no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS. It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it).”
Now, in Second Life we have the veil of anonymity. HOWEVER, Van Zyl is imploring us:
“Instead of using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway, we can really draw them into everyday lives by using them as extentions of our lives – making virtual worlds as indespensable as e-mail.”
So, here’s the thing…first time you click that couch, and then decide to go to that Web site where more information about the couch is available, well…you’re now part of the big old Internet data stream, and suddenly all your in-world purchases and clicks can theoretically be connected to your very real world identity.
The FTC is calling for self regulation. That’s fine. But its also been suggested that a “do-not-track” list be established for those who prefer to opt out. Clear standards for opting in. Guidance as to what information is collected, what the rules should be about selling it and sharing it, and what the rights of the person being tracked are in the same regard.
I’m all for metrics. Companies have a right to measure the success of their spend. But I also want the right to opt out, to know when I’m in a space where I AM being measured (much as you KNOW when you’re using Google), and have access to clear privacy and data collection policies of the companies doing the collecting.
As for the content developers, I hope they all take heart in his hope that the excellent product they create “may well result in real life recognition – beyond a pat on the back and a hearty well done, but into a design contract with a real life company”.
Finally, I don’t mean to imply, if I did, that any of what Slippcat is doing is a waste of money for the advertisers. It’s a nice little business model. I think if they take a great deal of care in the coming months to reach out to the content creators they might even get some product more deeply placed into the market than just a bunch of banners and kiosks and freebies, and even if they don’t it will take a very long time before anyone cares that they’re being measured except for a small circle of people who think too much, or get confused too easily (like me), and who, now that you mention it, really really needs a new pair of shoes.
Dusan, I definitely agree with you that I’m not too keen on having anyone to know when I click, for instance, by mistake, on an ad that leads to a porn website, an online casino, one that sells illegal drugs, or a paedophilia data haven — and suddenly having all bells ringing on some police station near my home. I think there have to be limits somewhere to our privacy, but I’m rather pessimistic — privacy is becoming one of the more elusive things to have these days. One day our only “opt-out” option will be to turn the computer off and disconnect it from the ‘net if we wish to make sure that nobody is doing all sorts of silly correlations with the random browsing on the Web.
At some stage we could still claim that nobody could do those correlations fast enough, with the terabytes and terabytes of data out there. Now Google stores 6 billion websites — in memory! — and can locate millions of links in less than a fifth of a second.
This is scary.
/me nods sadly.
There’s one thing Slippcat and the other meta-scavengers seems to be missing in all their plans to “monetize the space”. We, the residents, have the same build tools they do – and in some less-reputable cases, better tools. If they introduce spam-furniture or some other unwelcome marketing device then how long before some copybot-wielding resident strips that functionality out of the object and makes it available everywhere in neutered form? My guess would be about 20 minutes and altho i’d condemn any other content theft within SL i think i’d be cheering that one on – hypocritical i know!
I’m not against advertising or marketing within SL, just make it good advertising. I think it’s like the difference between the junk mail that lands on your doormat and the IKEA (or any other furniture retailer’s) catalogue you picked up in-store. They’re both advertising but one is welcome, giving you information you want, while the other is unsolicited, probably badly targeted and wasteful of resources. If advertisers and marketeers can provide compelling and engaging advertising within virtual worlds then great, but virtual equivalents of junk mail or will fail every time.
This nonsense just won’t work in SL – altho it might in other virtual worlds, particularly (sadly) the ones populated by kids. Maybe one of the most unique things about SL is the fact that its population is so uniquely armed to defend itself from these kind of (potentially unwelcome) incursions?
“it seems like it’s so hackable”
Perhaps we can expect a continual parade of Clickbots collecting their limit of lindens then instantly coming back with a new identity. The humans may get squeezed completely off the grid.
And the Lab will have huge numbers of new signups to point to – “More than eight billion new accounts in the last 90 days!”
[...] April 7, 2008 in Games Based Learning, Learning, Play, Virtual WorldsTags: Barbie Girls, Handipoints (Handipointa found Via Dusan Writer) [...]
BoingBoing has a little behind-the-scenes video
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/02/bbtv-second-skin-and.html
And as a follow-up comment, I’m stuck with a whack of sims at the old price. It’s a major chunk of change, sure. And I understand why people might feel like they’ve had the wind knocked out of their sails. I suppose I feel lucky, was about to order 4 more, so I seemed to have timed my hesitation OK. Unfortunately for some, real estate in SL isn’t so much as an investment as space upon which to develop assets and services. I haven’t thought through the economics of SL deeply enough to know whether this is a bad thing, just have the feeling it’s an inevitable one.
We need to organize some virtual civil disobedience, form a players’ union.
I should call myself lucky because all land but 6144sqm on my SIMs is sold – the decrease in SIM value doesn’t hit me but parcel owners. I already got my initial investment back – and now really praise myself that from start on I gave buyers a much lower monthly cost to pay than renters, encouraging them to buy and not rent.
It all points to OpenCroquet. This is a open source virtual world api and engine, which can run incorporate external content, and operate point-to-point or client-server. I don’t understand why it is not catching on faster than it seems to be. http://opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
What a GREAT article… you really captured my feelings of the last 4 months in a way I’ve been looking to word them, but I guess I won’t need to now
Yes the ‘metaverse’ is still being developed, no its not ready for mainstream, yes a lot of empty promises are being made, no it won’t be ready tomorrow, yes it will take time to find application to create a valuable contribution to everyday life by individual projects, no there is nothing wrong with the commerce taking place – just don’t conclude a failure of the platform because they fail to address their audiences, yes its time to look further then just Second Life, no you won’t create critical mass just because you tell ‘the masses’ to rush in.
Croquet rocks. There’s so much heart and effort going into it, the tutorials being put up are wonderful, it’s a really shining community of developers. And the architecture is genius. Unfortunately, and I think it’s recognized by the developers themselves, its coming across as by academics for academics, other than the work of Qwak which does the stuff you say but doesn’t have avatar expression. It DOES have integration of external elements…HTML, documents, PPT, video, worlds within worlds, etc. But somehow the resistance point by the developers to figure out whether/how/if it should be montetized at all might be hampering buy-in by the larger corporations (for now, anyways).
If Qwak was joined by another, sort of a Red Hat Linux kind of thing and if the development community could come up with a plan to attract more talent, I think Croquet has legs…it’s brilliant. Especially for things like 3D visualization, and more advanced applications, and now with Blender being patched in there’s some very cool stuff happening. (Can someone explain how Cobalt fits in though? And I mean that as a total newbie question).
Plus, Croquet is scaleable, and the P2P thing is genius.
Great platform. And advocacy towards academia, which is fine, because companies will catch on sooner or later. Rumour is that Cisco might buy out Qwak, maybe that will give it the boost it needs.
This is an interesting one, been back and forth over it. Ultimately more people owning more land in SL has to be a good thing, so from that viewpoint it’s great.
I have to welcome it from a selfish standpoint too, i’ve been dithering about buying my first island for 2 years – i think this just swayed the decision slightly! Life Lesson: be more patient, sometimes it pays.
On the downside, I can’t escape the feeling Linden just did to land-dealers what they do to ripped-off content-creators every other day. Still, maybe it’s all to the common good?
I think a more significant announcement and one that goes hand in hand with the price drop is the change with regard to openspace sims. Get 4 times the land area now 512x 512 meters & the same number of prims, 15000 for the same dollar as an old small sim. Why would you want to be on a crowded Mainland sim and have to rez all that shit. By distributing content over 4 times the area, you get less lag.
@jeanricard: It will be interesting to see if they change the price for the open space SIMs too. They just made them a fair deal a few weeks ago, if they want them to stay a fair deal, they have to lower them to 250 USD too. I’m really waiting for the next blog post about that, Jack announced one for maybe even today.
@jeanricard…As I understand it, when you buy an Open Space sim, the processor that it is tied to may not be on the same server as your other sims. Meaning that you may get unlucky enough to have one sim linked with 3 others that have a bunch of laggy scripts and drags the processor speed (and your sim) down with it.
Personally, I think when you buy land in SL to rent out or flip, then you are speculating. And there are risks so you should be prepared for them. Anyone who goes into speculative activities without the thought that they may lose their shirts is extremely naive.
I have a feeling, although I’m not sure (too lazy to look it up, it’s gray and rainy and it leaves me thoughtful but unproductive) that if you buy 4 Open Space sims they put them on the same server.
But one of the things I’m curious about is if the sims are spread across 4 “regions” does each region support 40 avatars? Or does it support 10/region. (Or whatever the number is, can’t remember the max per region, and I realize it adjusts for other things).
If each Open Space region supports 40, it would mean that one server could support 160 users and 15,000 prims. If an Open Space region only support 1/4 of the user limit, is 10 sufficient, or does the entire server itself support 40? In which case, if you’re sharing an Open Space region with someone else on the same server, what if they reach the 40 limit? Are you left locked out of your empty Open Space region because it’s “full”?
Daniel – maybe you can clarify, I think you know more about this than some of us!
I think it’s kinda freaking that pple want rely they RL life income based on a GAME. SL is a game after all!
I’m still astonished when pple take SL business that seriously. How pple can pretend to “invest” Real money in a world that could be switch off in less than a minut ( sudo init 0) ?
Investment means Cash and Benefits. Do you know any REAL market that could only bring benefits ? Their is always a looser for a winner…
I’m not a landlord, just a brat that have fun with few sims I owns. I knew it will be a loss the minut I order them and I don’t intend to make any profit renting them too. For my daily living I got a Real Job !
Linden made a good move with the cost reduction. The ticket will lure pple to buy new sims that will give LL more montly revenue !
Go Linden Go !
Cunning ^^
Da FoxBoy
I have very mixed feelings about both the price reduction and the clarification with that small “peace offering” to those who bought within the last few days.
For fun and self users the price drop is great. For land business it might be a killer, especially reading some comments like “How cool, I now will buy a SIM/a pack of SIMs and start a land business.” – they only see the purchase price and not the monthly costs that are the real killer. Land business isn’t an automatic gold mine. I see lots of new estate land showing up – but where are all the new folks who have to rent/buy on those new SIMs to cover the monthly costs for the estate owner? In german we have a saying “zuviele Häuptlinge – zuwenig Indianer —- too many chiefs, too little indians”. Competition, that already is hard in the land business, will get worse. Some will even offer below cost rents/tiers to keep the monthly loss by empty land as low as possible. Within a couple of months quite a few of the over optimistic new landlords will realize that it doesn’t work out, they will give up, might even abandon their SIMs just to not having to pay next months 295 USD. This will not only be bad for them, but for their parcel renters/owners too, who will be left with nothing when LL reclaims the SIMs.
There is quite a bit of gloating about the bad big real estate companies who sell/rent out estate land. Well, folks, with competition going up and rents/tiers going down: will they still be able to offer great public freebies for their renters/parcel owners, like free parks, landscaping and so on? When they have to lower their rents/tiers, they might have to take away those benefits and just sell/rent out 100 percent of their land to make months end.
Now to the peace offering to recent buyers. I’m especially upset about the more or less non-existing offer for those who bought open space SIMs after the recent policy change in march. LL dragged hundreds of people into buying them at 415 USD within a single month – and now they lower the price to 250 with offering a reparation for only a fraction of them who bought within the last few days. Yes, concierge says “you can give them back if you gout them in the last 30 days, we won’t even take the usual 100 USD restocking fee, then you can buy again at the lower price” – but honestly: I put so many hours of work into my private new one, I would be nuts to give it up and do all the work again to get 165 USD back. LL hopes that many think that way and just swallow the pill. There would be such an easy solution: just give all those, who bought after the policy change (and often only BECAUSE of that policy change) another 2 months with out the 75 USD monthly fee. Why this stupid chaos of “give back, get your money back, buy new”? Heck, even if they would only offer a single month without fee it would be a great sign of respect for those who put lots of real money into LL. (Especially with the performance bug for open space SIMs introduced with H4 that made them not really usuable for 10 or more days now and only will be cleaned up with the next server software update.)
Oh well. Looking back at how LL made decisions during my time here I have to say: business as usual.
Danny
“How pple can pretend to “invest” Real money in a world that could be switch off in less than a minut ( sudo init 0) ?” Yes, I wonder about this too. Why, for example, does Microsoft want to buy Yahoo? Don’t they realize it can be switched off in less than a minute? It scares me to death to put my money in the bank for the very same reason. I always ask the teller about the “less than a minute” factor and they reassure me that it isn’t in the bank’s interest to arbitrarily shut down their computers even if it were to take less than a second (pull plug from wall)! I am glad that I am not the only one who feels this way. I was starting to feel like an isolated, paranoid basement dweller.
I wonder why they’re only thinking about selling “real-life items.”
Imagine if “Billboards of Edmonton, Inc.” only let you advertise things not sold in Edmonton!
Real banks are protected by laws, at least in my country.
I remembered the “.com” phenomen when everybody should have been billionair within a day. We know how it end.
My company I work for recently bought a competitor. Most of the pple their complain their “stock options” worth nothing and wasn’t included in the deal… Actually they want to sue the new comp to claim compensation… funny…
Is it written somewhere that stock-options are real money ?
I doubt so… So is SL, a Game
Sacha who try to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Look_on_the_Bright_Side_of_Life
sacha
sascha,
I was sorta just making fun rather than trying to make a substantive point. I concede that running a business in SL is much riskier than depositing your cash in a bank because SL’s invisible hand is often the mailed fist of Linden Lab. However, the “SL is just a GAME” meme gets under my skin because people use it as though it’s understood and agreed that “Just Games” have no value outside of consumerist notions of “fun”.
I don’t like to compartmentalize my psyche in the manner the “just a game” crowd thinks is the only and “healthy” way to organize our reality. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I did try to buy a candy bar with Monopoly money when I was a kid. Perhaps my confusion started then.
Icha
Hmmmm. And I would win at Monopoly by slipping a candy bar to someone in exchange for them not picking up Park Place when they had a chance.
I think of it as an early experiment in mixed reality.
Maybe Linden should put the ‘The Love Machine’ on the web so we can all click on it – altho’ it might need a ‘Kelis Button’ (”I hate you so much right now!”) fitted on it too?
With all my respect to you, I don’t quite understand your point, Dusan. Let me list some topics you were discussing in this article with a short comment.
1. THERE IS NO TECHNOLOGY and CAN NEVER BE that would protect content in a way you are asking for. In order to be rendered on your screen ALL objects and images MUST be decoded inside your viewer no matter what encryption or anything would be used. Even if LL wouldn’t open the source code of their viewer it would be reverse-engineered by someone, ‘patched’ and those ‘patches’ would be selling in the same way as they sell ‘decoders’ to the videogame boxes (if I remember the statistics right about 70% of UK gamers use them). THERE IS NO SUCH THING as ‘copy-protection’ in digital world and will never be. That’s the REALITY (for more than 2 decades). Why LL is to blame personally for this FACT? I don’t quite get it, sorry.
2. IMHO, land is not an ‘idea’, it’s a METAPHOR. You and many people (some of the 13 million, maybe even the majority) feel comfortable with this METAPHOR… how about the rest 6 something billion people on this planet? Are you sure they like it as much as you do? And it’s not quite true by the way… it’s not the ‘land’ that counts in SL, it’s SPACE and the ability to build or buy something, place it there (in that space you own) and ‘OWN’ it. So, the psychologically important is the ’sense of ownership’ in SPACE/items and their persistense (you log off but you know that IT’S ALL THERE). This sense of ownership doesn’t depend on price. So, basically, the END USERS, who don’t create, they just build a composition of objects and environment… they don’t give a s…t about ‘price’, oh! no! they do, they want it to be FREE as everything else on the Internet pretty much IS (didn’t you notice?).
3. As to the ‘economy’ argument… did you EVER consider to balance the real expences ABSOLUTELY necessary to build a CIVILIZED business in VW with a customer support, fast response, personnel talking to people in a civilized way and the amount of money that it MAY make? The examples of content and services built in SL so far don’t impress me, sorry, they are all built on a principle: “My clients SWALLOW what I do ‘as it is’, I can not and will not do anything else, it would be too expensive”. Hence the abandoned vendors, IM me, I will log-in in no more than a couple of hours… Is it a ‘business’? Nope. It’s a PATCH, or ‘lemonade stand’ if you liked that mepaphor more. There’s no sufficient DEMAND for products and services to build a CIVILIZED business, I’m telling you. Some people had a DREAM, that as soon as the ‘mass customer’ will come to SL there WILL be enough demand – it hasn’t happened so far, maybe it will, but I think that the main obstacle were technical limitations (maximum number of avatars in the sim in the first place).
So… really… what’s your point, Dusan? You want to suggest an alternative program supported by numbers? I mean REAL program. Please do it ASAP.
Alex -
I think you pretty much got my point.
I don’t believe content can be protected, which doesn’t mean people can’t try, I just don’t think I’m going to be getting into the IP business any time soon.
Space/land…same thing, not sure what you mean? I call it an idea, you call it metaphor, I call it land you call it space.
I’m not sure which “economy argument” you’re referring to? You sound as if you’re referring to a discussion of how real world companies can make money in SL? I’m referring to the fact that for all the discussion about servers and open source and all those copiable objects that the only real economy that matters is the marketplace for ideas.
And as far as I can tell, I wasn’t offering any prescriptives, either for Linden Labs, businesses, coders or others. It’s just me with my spaghetti plate of thoughts, so I’m afraid that for this post I have nothing to offer as far as alternatives.
It’s just my little window into the issues of the day in SL, by virtue of which it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I don’t give a lot of guidance on where it’s going, and it’s time for me to crash now, so we’ll have to pick this up in the morning.
I found this to be an interesting article (although I’m not sure all your ‘future’ predictions are dead on target…
).
Virtual Worlds (and our one especially) are indeed more about creativity and ideas than any first life world will ever be. It’s easy to have luxury here, so there’s no point in gaining as much (virtual) wealth as you can. Land is (fairly) cheap, so there’s no much status to achieve by owning a lot. It’s the ideas and how you execute it that count. I’m am bound to be more impressed by someone who can build, script, animate, … than by someone who has 50k L$ on his balance to spend.
Kind regards,
Vint
PS. Microsoft pontificating on what the Metaverse should be, which is a mirror world, but hopefully shinier with a proprietary operating system. => LMPAO! Lovely sentence. =)
My apologies, Dusan if the question about your personal suggestions sounded ‘aggressive’ or something, but it’s just about time to abandon thea Wicked Witch of the Second Life style FOREVER and start talking POSITIVELY, you know?
What would you suggest as a reasonable program for SL (and other VW) development? How should they proceede in your opinion?
Also, you came up with a brilliant words once: “a platform for story-telling”. That’s a great achievement, I can tell you. Now, here’s a couple of questions in this regard:
1. WHO will be telling stories?
2. WHAT kind of a stories that might be?
Prompt: Success stories of a “How I made my first million in Second Life” kind are not an option, it’s OVER.
Awwww what a nice way to wake up, reading your replies.
And yeah, I was a bit cranky Alex. I’m sooooo tired of all the crashy coding copyright moaning (not that a great deal of it isn’t justified), and I’m sorry if I sounded aggressive back or contributed to it, the whole point of my piece was to try to express what I see as the dominant moods and themes (or MY dominant moods and themes) which distracts (me at least) from the real discoveries to be had.
I’m trying to make the point that “Linden is making itself irrelevant” because we spend too much time worrying about Linden and not enough time trailing Bettina around the grid to see what tales people are telling.
My story box post is how I feel on good days, but also that the tensions produced in virtual worlds are a source of deep creativity and change.
Thank you for the replies. It means a lot to me.
Morning, Dusan.
Yes, I agree with you when you are talking about ‘tensions’, but… Who said it will be without them? That’s the whole point – this is a NEW THING, it is DIFFERENT (because of the highly immersive nature of the experience). Immersiveness means two things (and you can’t get one without another):
1. People get involved much more
2. If disappointed they will get frustrated MUCH MORE.
See what I mean?
Now, here’s my humble opinion: we (the people) need to LEARN how to use this thing WISELY. This in it’s turn requires us to think, discuss the possible solutions in a positive manner, make decisions (personal and as a community), ACT UPON.
What’s the main obstacle right now? Again, IMHO, the obstacle is the ANONYMITY. ‘Ideas’ are fine, but the ability to ACT upon ideas is closely related to the real life standing, abilities and resources. People who want to ’stay avatars’ – are NOT the type of ‘community’ that will ACT as a whole, see what I mean?
Also, as I said above, there’s not enough DEMAND for a grass-root growth of businesses YET. We all need to proliferate the idea of OPPORTUNITIES, available in VWs, not scare people to death with the negative experiences we all had at least once in a while.
Also, it’s high time for us all to realize that SL as many other things before is just another USEFUL TOOL for the humanity, no more, but no less! Well… it’s a powerful tool I must addmit… which only means that we all need to use it WISELY.
Personaly, I just don’t read posts on the multiple blogs I read every day apparently NOT leading to a consensus or a development of one. It’s always pretty much obvious whether a person wants to ‘change the life to better’ if you will or just to pore an ocean of personal dissatisfaction on the poor reader’s head.
So, maybe you explore the issue of anonymity and it’s consequences some day? I think – THAT is the main root of the frustrations you were talking about.
Regards.
Hmmm intriguing thoughts Alex and I have to say you set me up perfectly for a series I’m doing on that very topic.
Just a quick response, I’d like to answer you in more detail, but there’s a corner of the Grid that needs me, (I think).
[...] This post outlining some incredible developments that the RealXtend team are doing, as well as another web avatar-based interface… [...]
[...] This post on the economy of Second Life and how SL’s creative class soon will have plenty of options to choose from. [...]
[...] Content is copiable, land is free, long live the creators (tags: metaverse secondlife internet) [...]
[...] Content is Copiable, Land is Free, Long Live the Creators – Interesting pondering over Virtual Worlds by Dusan Writer. Although I don’t agree with all of her future predictions, imho, she points out some real issues and possibilities. [...]
EDITA KAYE, THE “SKINNY PILL FOR KIDS,” AND THE ASSOCIATION OF VIRTUAL WORLDS
There is a certain species of entrepreneur that capitalizes on the human desire for overnight solutions to intractable problems. Throughout human history, they have lurked in the shadows of the marketplace, eager to regale consumers with news of their miracle cures. In their haste to turn a profit, they often overlook minor details such as the product’s effectiveness and safety.
One might hope that our scientifically saturated era would be immune to bogus pitches, but the opposite is true. Sadly, exaggerated marketing appeals are common in the computer industry. Indeed, they seem to thrive when emerging technologies are dimly understood by the general population.
The myth of expertise camouflages holes in the huckster’s pitch, and problems remain hidden until the contract is signed and the check is cashed.
A few highly publicized scams and failures can cripple a young industry before it even has a chance to get off the ground. As an entrepreneur who cares deeply about the future of virtual worlds, I was surprised to stumble across this hyperbolic “get rich quick” rhetoric in an advertisement for Edita Kaye’s book Virtual Worlds: The Next Big Thing. My curiosity sparked, I turned to Google. Here I found a long entrepreneurial road littered with controversial products such as The Skinny Pill for Kids.”
The promotional blurb for Edita Kaye’s book breathlessly encourages readers to “Reinvent yourself. Start a business. Find a friend. Make a fortune…all this and more waits for you in virtual worlds. Join the tens of millions of virtual residents around the world who have already discovered this whole new metaverse. Everyone from kids, to corporations is going virtual!”
A self-described “Internet entrepreneur,” Edita Kaye recently emerged on the virtual world landscape as the editor of an on-line publication called iVinnie.Com. Composed almost entirely of hyperlinks to stories found in other publications, Kaye’s web site bills itself as “the number ONE virtual world news network.” But this is not Kaye’s only project. She is also the founder of the Association of Virtual Worlds (AVW). Created earlier this year, the mission of the AVW “is to serve those companies and individuals who are dedicated to the advancement of this multi-billion dollar global industry and reach out to those who have not yet found virtual worlds.” Since the beginning of the year, the organization has pumped out countless press releases, declared August 20th to be “Virtual World Day,” and launched a remarkable member-get-member campaign that has swelled the entity to more than 1,100 members.
Edita Kaye’s profile page on the AVW site describes her as the award-winning author of 16 books. Her list of publications includes Fountain of Youth: The Anti-Aging Weight Loss Program, The Skinny Pill, The Skinny Rules, and Cooking Skinny With Edita.
The rapid growth of the Association for Virtual Worlds is particularly impressive since it has been less than six years since the organization’s founder was defending her Skinny Pill for Kids on such television programs as The Today Show and Connie Chung Tonight. It has been less than five years since she incurred the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for marketing potentially dangerous nutritional supplements.
Beginning in 2000, Kaye used her promotional savvy and web expertise to market a series of weight loss supplements with names such as Skinny Pill A.M., Skinny Pill P.M., and Skinny Carbs. In 2002, she targeted her Skinny Pill for Kids at overweight youngsters, arguing that the supplement was “the FIRST thermic and herbal formula ever developed for weight loss for children 6 to 12″ and announced that it had “been created to help our children win their battle with fat.”
Such claims set off red flags, and nutritional experts soon chimed in with concerns that the pill’s ingredients (including the diuretics juniper berry and uva ursi) posed genuine risks for liver toxicity and kidney damage in children (Hopkins, 2004). On December 8, 2002, Kaye appeared on Connie Chung Tonight, defending her product against nutritional experts who characterized the supplement as “junk science.”
“The same foods that made you fat are going to make you skinny,” explained Kaye. “All you need is to have a watch to be able to tell time. In the morning, have an orange. At night, have some peanut butter. Take some of these supplements.” (CNN Transcript, 2002).
Other experts viewed things differently. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce initiated an investigation a few months later, and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations conducted a hearing on dietary supplements in June 2004. In this hearing, Keith Nayoob, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Certified Nutritionist at the Albert Einstein Medical Center testified that the information on Kaye’s site was “scientifically baseless, blatantly exploitative, and potentially very harmful to children.”
The FTC agreed with Nayoob. In a complaint filed against Kaye’s company (Fountain of Youth LLC) in a US District Court, the FTC argued that the “defendants’ law violations have injured consumers throughout the United States” and “defendants have been unjustly enriched as a result of their unlawful practices.” In Feburary 2004, a settlement with the FTC prohibited Kaye from “making any weight-loss or health benefit claims for the Skinny Pills and similar products” in the absence of “competent and reliable scientific evidence to support such claims.” The settlement included a $6 million judgment, which was suspended due to the defendants’ inability to pay.
To anyone who has worked in sales or marketing, aspects of this story may spark a twinge of recognition. Whether writing a research grant or selling a product, there is a very human temptation to puff one’s claims by stretching the limits of language.
Edita Kaye has done a remarkable job of bringing people together in a very short time. In the interests of the community that she hopes to serve, it is crucial that she shy away from the hyperbolic rhetoric that characterized her past marketing efforts.
In all sectors, is essential that virtual world proponents take great care when evangelizing the technology. This is a technology that many people view as sexist, violent, and potentially addictive. Explaining the power of virtual worlds to our colleagues and clients is a full time job in itself. The last thing we need is the additional burden of explaining away snake oil diet scams.
Let’s try to get it right this time.
Interesting slide show about 3d worlds online.
We saw it before in 1996, then again in 2001.
Good to see it’s still around;)
Expensive I’ll bet.
janedoe – I worked with Edita Kaye briefly in 2007 on her virtual worlds products, including iVinnie and the AVW. Most of my negative experiences with her were personal problems…personality conflicts and such that don’t merit any public airing.
One relevant point I can offer, however, is that Edita Kaye has never set foot into one of these virtual worlds, at least not in any fashion that was more than glancing. She does not feel it is relevant to her role in the business. This was always a huge sticking point for me: If your entire business model revolves around virtual worlds, should you not at least be familiar with a few of the hundreds that are popping up? Take it for what it’s worth, but a person who creates an association for virtual worlds, and who is writing a book on the subject should be, in my opinion, interested in them. Also for what it’s worth, the last time I spoke with her early this year, the book was still non-existent, other than the cover and the blurb.
It should also be noted that on iVinnie.com, they are classifying such things as Facebook and MySpace as virtual worlds. At best, grouping social networks in with virtual worlds is a stretch. I think more likely it’s an attempt to capitalize on a very lucrative segment of Web 2.0. at a time when the buzz about virtual worlds is dying off amid technical issues and two years under-delivering on their high expectations. Good for them if they make it profitable, but personally it makes me think they don’t know their own subject-matter.
The whole experience for me was a rough one. I don’t wish any ill will towards Edita Kaye or her business ventures in virtual worlds. She has several fine people working with her who I appreciate and respect. But I would seriously caution anyone to do their own investigating before jumping head first into business relationships with this particular venture.
hehe
Reusability is indeed a useful concept. 
LOL
I am the Executive Director of the Association of Virtual Worlds. In other words, I helped Edita found the Association and now I lead and run it (and live and breathe it.) To learn about my years practicing law, advising global corporations on HR matters, and leading global IT functions for a Fortune 200 company, please take a look at http://www.linkedin.com/in/delchoness.
Since I started exploring virtual worlds, I have been cited as one of the most knowledgeable legal experts in virtual worlds, quoted in Forrester Research reports, interviewed, and asked to speak to large audiences about virtual worlds. That all said, the Association of Virtual Worlds is not about any single person. It is about its membership, its content, and its mission.
Edita Kaye is very engaged in virtual worlds study and follows developments religiously. In starting the Association she had a vision for a platform agnostic organization of people passionate about virtual worlds, with its own virtual headquarters for them to meet in and learn together. And that vision is coming true. In less than two months, the Association grown to nearly 1,300 members from or intrigued by virtual worlds of all shapes and sizes. The Association has announced its first title, The Virtual Corporation, a serious book on how virtual worlds technologies will impact the traditional corporate functions. The Association will be launching its virtual headquarters later this year. There are more developments to come for the benefit of the industry, but perhaps more importantly, that will deliver a compelling and thoughtful message about virtual worlds to a sometimes skeptical public.
By the way, in my extensive dealings with Edita, I have found her to be a highly compassionate and intelligent person with integrity.
I understand that people can say whatever they like in a public blog, and I absolutely treasure that right, but we need to focus on what’s happening in the here and now: a member focused organization, producing excellent discussions, and more to come, without any significant interference from any sort of hierarchy. Any questions, please contact me.
Im so glad to have run across this entry on Virtually Blind. I must say that the dialogue has completely provoked this response. I didn’t intend to respond….but here goes…I really thought that the idea reference was interesting. I must agree that for me the idea was about a new space to create and new opportunity to contribute and to be of service to other contributors. I am in the IP business; Director of the Virtual Intellectual Property Organization and practicing IP attorney. I was so glad to find such a large community of artists and inventors creating in virtual worlds and must admit I was pretty disappointed that, after centuries of international negotiation resulting in a nearly coordinated system of intellectual property rights recognition, their struggle continues and they must fight for their right to be recognized, protected and paid. Participating in creation of any sort is brave, priceless and deserves reward and recognition. As far as effective digital rights management, I am uncertain of its form but I have no doubt that we will see it happen. I, in the meantime, will use all the resources and tools at my disposal to assist content creators in their efforts to enforce and protect their intellectual property rights. Perhaps THE idea is that we’re all a little closer now than before and that its a little easier meet and share our ideas with each other. Why then now, of all times, be exclusive? Only IP, only open source; now more than ever we should be able to address the complexity of circumstances and allow situations to direct their own response. Let those who open source do so, support those who seek their enforcement, in other words, the VIPO way (much like the way of the Jedi… only stronger:)mtfbwy).
I wish they’d bring us in off the streets — right in world — and have focus groups there, where, oh, they could save travel and refreshment money and stuff…
“by putting it on an angle like that it looks even better!”
Haha yes, the wonders of the third dimension! This 3D webs will be big I tell you!
Digado we’re on to something here there’s no question.
I can only see this A/B testing as a positive development. For months now Linden have behaved like they hadn’t got a clue what they were doing – now they’ve officially confirmed this.
We can all rest easy now.
Hahaha. Yay! And roam the grid with no worries or cares!
Linden is on the ball and following correct testing procedures for a product of this magnitude. HCI and Usability are essentail for this product to be a success. Those that endlessly whine about Linden’s faults are hardly experienced at this type of testing procedure. AND, in most cases, really hardly familiar with the true usages of SL as a current medium, and certainly as a medium of the future.
What they are doing in this testing is dead on. Tests need to continue non-stop for the entire duration of the product. Linden needs to support the future viability of this product and not just cater to the old timers with nothing better to do. As more and more researchers and corporations look at the application for more serious use, the HCI issues are huge for mass deployment.
Oh, if you immediately do not know what HCI above means, then you are not qualified to respond to this post…and I rest my case.
The last time I was taken off the streets, it involved candy and a white van.
I’d rather not dredge that memory up, thank you.
You should read the comments on the SL blog post, especially #85
OUCH
Wow. Geez that hurts.
Cool stuff. My mirror neurons were pulsing. I need to be careful, I hear if one breaks a neural mirror it can be seven multiverse dimensions of bad luck…
At last! Thanks, Dusan; I’m putting this up on Around the Grid now, and linking to you as the person to twig me to it.
[...] — AT LAST! (With thanks to Dusan Writer, who put me on to this while I was tag-surfing the WordPress.com [...]