My new spot in Winterfell. Trying to figure out how to decorate. Ping me if you wanna visit.
I’m feeling kind of militant these days about my identity. In fact, I feel almost wistful for the day when I was able to stand up in full horror and ire and fight back against someone who called me an augmentationist.
I had street cred as an immersionist, I lived in-world, I had a house, I knew Midian City, I had some of the best dance moves in anyone’s inventory, and I’m not even sure that I had linked my real name to my avatar name at the time.
We had a little prep meeting for next week’s Metanomics event, and everyone was introducing themselves by their real names, so I did the same. But M Linden said something along the lines of “No, you’ll always be Dusan here” which was, quite possibly, one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me in Second Life, although I’m not sure he realized how much that meant.
See, what happened was this: I got so excited about the possibilities of virtuality that I wanted other people to understand. And part of that meant attempting to translate the potential of virtual worlds through the prism of my work. I was convinced that virtuality could have benefits for training, collaboration, and maybe even things like giving patients a place to share their stories, or physicians a place to simulate clinical practice (a lot of the work we do is in health care).
But more than that, I was convinced that there was a sort of road you could take, one that started with sitting around and chatting and maybe customizing your avatar a bit, and then moved through simulation or role-play (no, not THAT kind, more like the ‘walk a mile in your patient’s shoes kind of role-playing), and then ended in co-collaboration and innovation.
But in order to get there, I’d need to bring more of virtuality into real life and more of real life into virtuality, although I never saw the two things as dichotomous anyways – virtual worlds are REAL, and the lessons learned don’t just affect our avatars.
The False Dichotomies of Business on the Grid
There are a bunch of ways of thinking about the coming launch of Nebraska (the Lab’s firewall/stand-alone solution for ‘enterprise’).
One is that Linden Lab will finally have a platform that’s neatly packaged, supported, and ready-to-ship, with none of the messy things like separate avatar registration, security holes, and intolerable clauses in the terms of service and EULA (companies don’t like the fact that Linden Lab maintains a claim over corporate content uploaded to SL).
I think it’s useful to pause and understand that Nebraska platform is more like a spin-off than some major shift in strategy. As I understand how Nebraska came about, it wasn’t mandated from the top, but rather pitched from some folks (Chris Collins primarily, from what I gather) who figured there was a market for a stand-alone server, who asked for permission to cobble something together to see how it went.
Which isn’t to say that it won’t be something that the Lab now focuses on, but any claim that somehow Nebraska means less attention for Second Life is, I don’t think, grounded in the reality of how they’re thinking about these things. There are probably 20 times more people working on the new viewer than have been involved in Nebraska. There is more investment that has been made in the new Web site than on figuring out how to market to corporate customers.
Regardless, I bring this up because I don’t think there’s an either/or proposition going on here. Nebraska will have clients, businesses will use it, but Second Life isn’t going anywhere, and Linden Lab isn’t about to siphon off attention from reaching its goals of millions of casual users.
As exciting as it might be for those of us who HAVE business customers and want them to get a taste of what you can do in virtual worlds, the future of virtual worlds doesn’t suddenly take a turn OR find itself at a fork in the road, and as much as it’s a messy, complicated message, there will be businesses in Second Life and there will be businesses behind the firewall.
For content providers, this means there will be a spectrum, not a bunch of either/or propositions, although the breadth of that spectrum has the potential to influence the underpinnings of the Second Life economy if there is insufficient opportunity to find customers for beach houses or clothes or whatever. It might end up looking something like this:
Creative Expressionists Entertainment focused, peer-to-peer opportunities that are based on selling products or services to other residents within Second Life. In particular, this is a land-based economy, whereas Nebraska will be a platform-based one. Very different skill sets, very different economics, but if the Lab keeps an eye on the ball, room enough for all.
Virtual World Developer: Business-to-business developers who create solutions and opportunities for their clients via platforms like Nebraska. These can be private behind the firewall things or private estates (or, a lesser case now, although I actually see this growing rather than shrinking) a publicly accessible location within Second Life, kind of like a Metanomics for business or whatever.
Enterprise Development: Business developers who concentrate on delivering solutions for the Nebraska behind the firewall platform. Or similar related solutions sales via alternative platforms.
I don’t see these activities as mutually exclusive. The creative expressionist might be selling clothes, for example, to fellow residents, or to the virtual world developers. I am NOT convinced that the market for enterprise will suddenly become so large that all the creative energy gets siphoned off to hidden private grids.
What I AM convinced is that these things should be discussed, and the Lab should paint the context with which it sees the evolving economy: are they still committed to land, and peer-to-peer sales, and are they truly committed to content protection? It SEEMS like they are, otherwise why the new Web site and the third-party viewer policy and all that? And why would M be talking about 10 million accounts if he didn’t MEAN it?
Nebraska Is a Start but Not Always a Beginning
For some people, it will be far easier to explain Nebraska as a stand-alone thing and never particularly mention Second Life, other than something like “based on the same technology that runs SL”. For those people, it will be enterprise stuff: save money on travel, collaborate at a distance, provide employees with work/life balance, increase retention….stuff that VPs and directors get all excited about.
But for others, we’re just at the very rough beginning here. And I believe that there will be a few CEOs or executive suite types out there who don’t look at virtual worlds for their collaborative/training possibilities, but come back and ask the question: what kind of massive change can I achieve through virtual worlds? Is this the best platform to achieve it? Can virtual worlds help to embed design thinking or sustainability into my corporate DNA? Can I overhaul our mind-set when it comes to radical collaboration because of virtual worlds?
To answer these questions, it won’t be the augmentationists and application providers they turn to (although they may turn to them first). It will be the immersionists – the Scope Cleavers, maybe. Or Bryn Oh. They’ll come tapping at the door of NPIRL and ask the question: can you see the future from where you sit? What does it look like? Can you show me the way?
So even at the corporate level we’ll have requirements for different types of solutions. What’s critical, is that they will be solutions and not technologies. But they will be solutions that address a range of specific issues, whether creating a better environment for team collaboration, addressing goals tailored to healthcare, or tackling the larger agendas like radical collaboration, design thinking, or innovation.
Solutions. Not technology or servers.
Beach Houses in Nebraska
When I responded to the claim that I was a *gasp* augmentationist, I quoted Kevin Kelly:
A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?
We get to play with answers to these questions online. In Second Life, or in chat rooms, we can chose who we want to be, our gender, our genetics, even our species. Technologies gives us the means to switch genders, inhabit new forms, modify our own bodies.
At the same moment, we have the rise of hyper-realities. These are simulations so complex, convincing, and coherent that they have their own reality force. A fake so good, it is sold and bought as a fabulous fake. A Disneyland so enticing, that it spawns its own “fakes.” There must be something there to fake. Or Photoshopped images so obviously unreal that they have their own reality. Synthetic materials more desirable than natural ones. Originals inferior to their reproductions. Who cares what is real and what is memorex?
These hyper-realities launch questions such as whether a assault in virtual space counts as an actual violent assault or mere virtual assault. How much of our real lives is mental? How much of reality is a consensual hallucination? Where do our minds end and outside begin? What if it — everything outside of us — is all mind?
The faster and greater our lives become mediated — the more time we spend communicating through technology — the more urgent this question of “what is real” becomes. How do we tell the difference, if any, between realities and simulations? How do these redefine humans?
These broad themes of collective identity, about what community means, about what it means to be human don’t stop when you arrive at the office. Corporations aren’t completely ignorant about what’s going on, but they’re increasingly passengers.
And while Nebraska and Forterra and Protosphere will offer real, definable value to business, it’s kind like Warcraft with no quests or guilds: it may be nice to look at, and it may be engaging, but it will never be as mind-blowing as doing a full-out throttle on a boss.
If you want to go deeper into the future, then virtual worlds rather than walled corporate campuses will still be where the real action is, even if the virtual world ends up being behind the firewall. The enterprise that does a Wikitecture on its ‘campus’, or who hires Bryn Oh to visualize product design in 2015, or the company that gets MadPea to do a training game – they’re the ones who will start to push the envelope of what’s possible because they’ll realize that the lessons learned in the more social spaces of virtual worlds are providing hints of the kinds of serendipity and paradigm-changers that are possible.
For now, we’ll focus on easy-to-understand solutions for enterprise. But hopefully there will be some who don’t take their eye off the ball and remember that there’s a longer wave of change that this is part of, a wave that isn’t exclusive to virtual worlds but is part of a broader shift in which we are rethinking the enterprise, whether a business or a school or a government agency.
And I think and hope that the Lab gets it: that the limits to our creativity will only end if the world itself stops growing, that if we stop building beach houses and if people stop going dancing or we stop rezzing prims then we will cease to discover new ways to explore our humanity and in so doing push the boundaries not just of the future of enterprise, but the future of our cultures.
As for myself, I bought myself a little plot in Winterfell where I’m going to work on some kind of cozy library or study so that I have a place to think and brood.
And you can sell this stuff to business, er, enterprise, however you want. But I’m going to keep talking about immersive power and explain that there are some of us who also LIVE here….and if that’s too radical for your corporate agendas, then I’ll see you in a few years and we’ll compare notes on whether you’re exactly where I left you, or whether you’ve found some other way to rez your future.
Excellent points.
All these issues are burning a hole in a lot of our minds at this time. The question is what is the adoption path?
Okay, that is not the start of a high brow haiku.
More about the path needed to create a sustained and relevant strategic project.
The majority of our Corporate engagements are based on the following:
Enterprise solutions are viewed as the final solution. Normally adopted by corporations after they have tested their strategic ideas within a Developer Solution based in a private space on the managed hosted Second Life grid.
They use this ‘pilot’ phase as learning experience and create a sustainable business strategy. This is why so many people have adopted Immersive Workspaces as a solution. We then clone that IWS Grid experience, with the inclusion of the associated bespoke content for that clients specific project, it’s then shipped to the behind-the-firewall solution.
The corporation understands their commitment for in phases of the deployment. It’s a good business model, a sustainable strategic approach.
We can then develop more content and expand the experience, the scalable behind-the-firewall solution gives us greater flexibility and options.
It also enables, as Dusan put it in terms of missing World of Warcraft components, the inclusion of the content, narratives and business tool related content. In short, a solutions.
Justin Bovington – Rivers Run Red
CEO
http://www.immersiveWorkspaces.com
I don’t find an answer to that question :
How much does Second Life behind the Firewall for an enterprise?
Garmin
Garmin – price you mean? Is that what you’re asking?
Stay tuned to Metanomics next week I guess (I assume they’ll give some kinda idea).
Immersion promotes emotional reactions, not thoughtful ones.
Its seems this lesson must be learned again.
A Reality of Virtuality.
The question most important IMO is the SL Grids Content. And how it was established, and now who has the rights, controls and power to profit from it within the Nebraskan Farm Silos that are going to be bought and brought into the ROI meme.
So, have we just spent our years and money giving large corporations millions of dollars worth of our work for “free” or pennies to a dollar ?
Will the multigrids and webbased content portals now be addressed at release?
Like Cylons, does LL have a Plan?
Dusan,
YAY! Halloween is the best, but definitely not the only, day to play dress up and pretend.
hugs
Adz
Haha Cube – can’t I be both emotional AND rational and thoughtful? I seem to be able to straddle multiple view points meaning, well, that I can’t make up my mind half the time, but does that make me a lesser person?
Content protection – yes, we’ll all be listening.
As I said at the Metanomics forum this week, three things to look for:
- Price point
- Content protection
- And how they’ll set things up for service providers and content creators. Opps for all or a few? etc.
I dunno who Cylons is.
And Adz – it’s not dress-up and pretend, it’s avatar identity.
Great post!
I share your nostalgia for more pseudonymous times. That said, I’ve found it is quite possible to maintain (and even to deepen) a separate and independent-feeling virtual identity after the human cat is out of the bag. And to pretty much seamlessly go back and forth as need and whim dictate.
I’ve been crushing hard on the connection, between the ventriloquist/dummy relationship and that of the human/avatar. In “Art and Ventriloquism”, David Goldblatt writes: “ventriloquism is a strategy for the constructing of virtual possible selves.”
In the critical introduction, Gary Hagberg writes (about Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, “the language game Bergen discovered and then with increasing rapidity developed for McCarthy was, in a real sense, external to Bergen. It was not his own game.”
So, as in other areas, I resist duality. (Yeah. I know. That’s a dualistic statement.) I am a separate entity AND I and my human are one. And both I/we and those we meet can shift perception from meeting-to-meeting and moment-to-moment.
Immersion and augmentation with technologies are issues of INTERFACE. Read my article about 2d/ 3d interface, and my meaning is clear. Yes, one can be both emotional and rational, but were talking about the media — examplafied by SL and now Nebraska, as well as many others that utilize realtime 3d immersive media for over 15 years, many that also attempted “enterprise” vertical market sales to various levels of success over that time. They tried to sell “rational” 3d media solutions, but in fact any successful usage was primarily as an interface media that fed on emotional impulses, not rational.
Content- less about “protection” more about “ownership” and its value. Ans yes we’ll all have to keep guessing ” when” the Lab will devalue our effforts more. or not, since like the CYLON number 1 (battlestar galactica) Plans, is that there he really had none and then had to keep changing it to survive.;)
BattleStar Galactica- The Plan. DVD 2009
anyhow…
An interesting evolutionary parallel would be, as Darwin found out, that small inbred island populations (Nebraskas?) developed into a sort of stagnant backwater where it seems “safe” because island species can live with their evolutionary heads in the sand.
soror — Good to see the evolutionary metaphor applied, and I agree.
To extend it farther: I’m reminded of Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life, with the current state of virtuality standing for the “Cambrian Explosion”. Gould’s premise (carried on in Full House) was that the timeline of evolution is undirected and inherently unpredictable. I hope Dusan rezzes a few comfy chairs in his new retreat, and doesn’t mind company while we exotic life-forms wait for the first extinction event.
I am soooooo with you Soror and Lalo – but that’s kind of my point. We can talk all we want about these closed off islands, but the whole model only works if there’s cross-pollination of ideas, talent, etc. We need a world with content creators who can make and sell stuff (who don’t have to worry about content protection so much, or the land market falling out beneath them)…and we need to make sure that business doesn’t get stuck in its own rut of “oh I’m saving on money” but starts to appreciate the enterprise-changing capacity of newer technologies, immersive media among them, to shed insight on radical collaboration, design thinking, and sustainability.
Meantime – I’ll be parked in Second Life trying to figure out what to do with my little plot of land. So far, the gloomy little place I put up is depressing me. I need something a little more whimsical while we wait for extinction events.
There is one way to tell whether you are an augmentationist or an immersionist, Dusan, and that is to look at the name of who pays your paycheck.
Is it other residents? Or is it your company in RL that has RL clients that pay you? That’s all. You can’t dress it up beyond that.
Basically, you’re shilling for the Lindens here, trying to cushion the harsh realities of their product promotion, making it seem like it’s not really the core product of SL in terms of staff commitment (although it will get the lion’s share of media and that’s deliberate of course); making it seem as if it will have no impact or at least only a muted, incremental affect on the economy — but that’s not true. Globalization is stark, harsh, and fast. The speed with which the world changed from an integrated world with craftsmen selling their services inworld to consumers who included a class of merchants providing goods and services — a world that was evolving into a more granulated and mature world than the original beta-era sandbox, a world able to *provide jobs to people* — PEOPLE! — was utterly ripped and shredded by the corporate invasion of 2007.
Being the sinewy adaptive thing that it is, Second Life began to recover from this devastating blow, but only to have the Lindens knock the stuffings out of it again with price hikes to serve their own interests — ultimately, we have a situation not unlike The Fly and its insect politics in the land/Linden configuration.
These interests are all legitimate, solution providers should get to do whatever it is they do, but it’s also good to point out that what they often do is tell their clients they need to spend $1500 US real money a day for them to knock out a few scripts and chairs that already exist in the economy for $150 Lindens.
A clear fallacy in the application of Darwin’s theories to social policies is that social Darwinism isn’t scientific, it’s religious. It is based on an utterly unsustainable proposition: that policy makers within their short life spans of 25 or 50 or 100 human years can see evolutionary trends, when that is simply physically impossible.
The more important piece of it, however, is that human civilization is anti-Darwinist by its very nature. If only Darwin’s theories about animals and plants prevailed in human life, the weakest, poorest, least adaptive human forms without the ability to resist the planet’s elements would have long ago been wiped out.
That those life forms in fact are now in charge of the Internet is proof that humans make tools and those tools resist the depradations of the evolutionary dynamic. You can call that “evolution,” too, if you like ,but it’s actually anti-evolution.
Dusan,
I’m not sure that in fact the salvation of the main grid doesn’t lie in leaving the Nebraskans in their farm silos.
Because to globalize them and unleash even worst ravages of globalization on the main grid economy is to ensure the 2007 phenomenon where a handful of connected and skilled (or more likely, connected and not-especially-skilled) creators dominate the economy and dictate prices and such.
Prok:
I’m glad you brought all that up. You’re right, and I was really trying very hard to articulate that while Nebraska will open up new kinds of opportunities, those opportunities are unsustainable in the long-run if the Lab walks away from the land and content-based economy of Second Life.
If they do, they risk platforms like Blue Mars sucking up talent for ‘casual users’ and students maybe, while Nebraska sucks up content for corporate clients.
I’m not naive about this. And if anyone, myself included, makes the claim that it’s an “all boats rise” or whatever for everyone it’s a lie.
I’ll try to be totally transparent about this. Because here’s how it works:
- Let’s say I get a corporate customer. I’m going to need to make stuff for them, or resell stuff, and I’m going to need to find talent to do that. I’ll probably be able to pay that talent market rates, or at least rates that are above what someone might make selling prefabs or whatever in Second Life.
- Once those projects are done, I won’t need that talent anymore, unless other projects come along, at which point I may have something to resell, or the technology has changed and now I need MediaAPI kiosks or something.
- So, what ends up happening, is we end up with these ‘big builds’ that take talent away from the ‘normal SL economy’ but the talent is happy, because they have decent paying contracts (maybe – depends who you’re working with).
Now, this to me is the living proof that the Long Tail is a crock, quite frankly.
Sure, there’s a Long Tail and we can make bank on it, but the truth of the LT is that power still aggregates in the hands of a few. Power and commerce are like that – stuff doesn’t become universally ‘free’, there’s always someone out there with the interests, resources and power to aggregate that free stuff and make money off of it.
Open source starts free, and then power around open source aggregates in a handful of service providers who make the ‘big bank’ while all the coders and stuff try to pick up scraps in the long tail.
The trick to all this, however, is that innovation isn’t static, and just because power and money aggregates, doesn’t mean that it will stay that way forever – because the innovators aren’t usually the groups with power, they end up with entrenched interests, they want to suck as much as they can out of their ‘usual way’ of doing business. (There are a few exceptions like Apple, say).
So, the benefit of having the ‘little guy’ is that they can still push the envelope of innovation, they can still upend the business models of those who are in ‘power’.
So let’s take your example of content. Sure, you can buy a chair for $2 or whatever. I don’t think there are many content creators today who are charging $500 for a chair. The long tail for that kind of content has been established – there’s a bunch of folks making stuff but the power has been aggregated at Linden Lab, mostly, through XStreet, and maybe the service providers who package it all up and sell it along with ’services’ or ‘environment design’ or whatever.
But innovation doesn’t stand still. We’ll get a MediaAPI, for example, and the ‘aggregators’ will make some cool stuff with it, but it will be someone on the Grid who’s trying to make a new vendor idea who comes up with that new app that changes the game – Scion Chickens, self-replicating/tweeting flowers, whatever.
So: my bottom line? Yes…you’re right, and I never disagreed with you.
The greatest risk of “business on the grid”, whether it’s behind the firewall or on private islands, is that it changes the balance between craft and commerce, between in-world and out-world sales.
If the balance shifts too dramatically in the direction of corporate interests, it risks choking off the innovations and transformative change that happens because there IS a world, and the world is/will grow, and there’s a robust economy underpinning it.
(Which is why content protection and all that is so critical, and why they can’t pull the rug out on land prices like they did with homesteads).
Anyways….I’m not naive to the fact that Nebraska represents a parallel economy that could undercut the in-world one, and I hope the Lab isn’t naive to that fact either, nor to the true meaning of that.
A chair licensed for 1500 dollars usd and one for 50 linden dollars DO NOT have the same Value. EVEN IF they are exact technical digital duplicates.
Some misc thought on comment stream…
- Enterprise demand for Nebraska content won’t kill the creative edge of Second Life any more than Big Label music kills the Indie scene.
- Paying higher rates to content creators that allow for a living wage is a GOOD thing.
- Corporate providers of technical services today (coding, design, etc.) customarily charge 5-10x the going freelance rate.
- If corporate worlds catch on, traditional in-house and dedicated multi-media shops will add those capabilities. I would expect it to eventually mirror the freelace-to-agency-to-in house ratio.
I say that creators must advocate for a living wage within SL and they must do so as soon as possible.
And that means that they must eschew the Linden dollar fantasy and put real value on what they make in world. Immersing themselves in the fantasy has only devalued their work, as Cube always points out. It has given people the false notion that the little virtual toy they buy is worth only RL equivalent of 50 cents when the work and programs behind the toy cost so much more.
There are residents even now pushing for bleeding more funny money Lindens into the world. Which will only cause more devaluation, as products lose value in translation.
SL is not separate from RL. Immersion is fun to an extent. But at the end of the day, we all need to eat and live in real houses.
What companies would like to push is immersion for us and real world profit for themselves.
http://www.protonmedia.com/2009/08/13/new-protosphere-video/
yes, the thread finally hears the old guy.:) whos not really old…lol
For better or worse, the closest media for virtuality being revalued is the open sims beings hacked away at and the unity3d application. Perhaps the O3D or Mozilla3d efforts will expand(though they seem far from offering MU presence) and the actual biz plans for both havent been “transparent”..lol though Google did flood the net with 3d media gotten for FREE, and that WORK has yet to be monetized….i wonder who’ll have the rights and capital to use it..lol?
this last cycle of REALTINE 3dmedia is just about over,the SL version- the labs soci0-economic experiment using real humans – has lost its value to even the most religious it seems as the blogs daily report.
The SL flavor of virtuality has also educated and hopefully illuminated many. The next cycle is only a year away, what will have been learned? What will be done?
Maybe nothing? Corporates do seem to have billions spent today on 3-9 year olds learning how to do work, not for value, but to BE valued.
Im a +36 Doctor. Oh she MUST be good…
another scam. dont you think?