There’s a cultural revolution going on in Second Life facilitated by a shift in approach by Linden Lab. Whether you think this revolution will scare away its core community or build its appeal to a wider audience depends on how you parse the future. What’s certain is that Linden Lab is in the middle of a multi-year process which may end up being a textbook case of how to manage massive change in online communities.
I recently wrote that Linden Lab was “at war” – but the war was with itself as the cultural mindset and organizational practices that made Second Life what it was (and still to a large degree is) were replaced by a different approach, one that focuses on channels and products and revenue streams and user experiences. I suggested that this war within the Lab is a reflection of a wider dialog, one that tries to reconcile a faith in code with the natural irrationality of the very human users that interact with that code.
But the Lab is juggling more than just shifting from a coder culture to a service-oriented one. There are changes coming which might give us insight into the wider challenges facing enterprise, communities and individual creators and consumers, challenges related to our identities, the tools with which we share and create, and what it means to be a great brand in a universe where dispersion is more common than aggregation and attention is ephemeral and often fickle.
Features and Tools and Plug-Ins Oh My!
Mark Kingdon recently posted about what’s coming in 2010, and prefaced it by saying:
“Before I jump into this, a caveat is in order. Linden Lab is not a traditional software company. Historically, roadmaps were simply not part of the Lab’s DNA. This kind of project planning is new for the Lab.”
Now, aside from that being an understatement of first order magnitude, it’s also as clear an example of the deep cultural change that has happened at the Lab itself, with a shift from a sort of internally crowd-sourced methodology where people move from project to project based on a kind of hive mind floating, picking and choosing projects and features based on interest, community feedback, and the JIRA.
(Oh, and here’s a prediction for you: people will soon realize that the JIRA is primarily a bug triage system and look towards roadmap-type discussions and new forms of infrastructure for planning if they want platform enhancements considered, thus sapping it of its previous go-to power for advocating system change).
This shift towards a broader planning methodology based on strategic objectives, user goals and roadmaps was the framework from which the significant changes ahead arise, along with the cultural change already underway, but if you think eliminating freebies on XStreet was cataclysmic then hang tight or get out now, because the change to follow will rock the world. Among those changes:
- The new viewer has the potential to set off a firestorm, not because it works or doesn’t work, and not because it has landmarks or doesn’t, but because the community will interpret it as a signal of the ‘dumbing down’ of Second Life. The deeper implications of the viewer and its reordering of user functionality will leave many believing that, well, the world has just turned on its axis.
- I predicted that the viewer would be launched in conjunction with the MediaAPI. I found it odd how M just touched on this briefly but I think they’re holding their thunder. But the MediaAPI will not just be a way to put a Web page or YouTube video up in your new Second Life Home, it will be a game changer. I’m not talking about an enhancement or a nice new widget, I’m talking about something that will fundamentally and radically change what CONTENT means in Second Life. I have no idea what people are working on behind closed doors, but my mind boggles at what the MediaAPI will make possible.
- Mesh import will change how content is created. Prokofy and others have compared it more to sculptys and consider it, well, kind of an incremental addition to Second Life. I’m not of that opinion. Being able to develop scenes and mesh objects developed in third-party programs and import them into Second Life opens up a new ecosystem of content types, allows links to existing communities of content developers outside of Second Life, opens the door to a form of interim interoperability, and facilitates large-scale prototyping, architectural visualization, and other vertical applications.
- As I predicted, the Lab will add a new layer to the coding of content, with the addition of C# as a programming language. Now, I don’t get this stuff and my prediction was a wild guess, but this feels like it could have an impact comparable to mesh imports, bringing in a new ecosystem of coders.
One final “feature” change, and one that I’m not sure I understand yet, is M’s comment that we will see a new focus on opensource development. What kind of development I have no idea.
Governance and User Experiences
There is a grab bag of changes planned that will have an impact not so much on the tools or how the platform looks and performs, but might be considered governance issues. These relate primarily to the Lab’s stated goals of linking the Second Life experience into social media. I’m personally of the opinion that this “value proposition” sounds better to a venture capitalist than a resident or potential user although M is careful to call them “social tools”.
But linking avatar and real identities (optional or not) and the ability to then link to Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or whatever has me in mind of Facebook widgets.
But these changes to the user experience, whether the redesign of the Web site, future iPhone apps, or links across to real or other identity systems are based on a change in governance and philosophy which does NOT place avatar identity as a core value proposition of the platform. Whether this will be good or bad in the long term we’ll see – but if you see me in-world (or, for that matter, in the real world half the time lol) you’d better call me Dusan or I’ll unfriend you. 
Creative Tension
What’s interesting is that many of these transitional changes are reflective of larger challenges facing enterprise and life online. They seek to find the ‘sweet spot’ along spectrums of creative tension, primarily:
Engineering versus Design: Google is the epitome of an engineering-based company and Apple of a design-based one. Neither precludes the other – Google does do SOME design, but their main goal is to engineer product in a way that is efficient and effective. Apple on the other hand believes that efficient and effective isn’t sufficient to create engagement and to change behavior: design is needed to create metaphors for experience that have the potential to change entire industries.
Providing Space versus the Nanny State: Second Life in the early days was a free-wheeling often anarchic culture in which the ‘rules’ were as lightly enforced as possible. This is similar to the challenges enterprise faces in working with suppliers or customers in collaborative domains, or that a teacher faces with their students: either provide the tools and the “place” and let the community self-govern, or nudge, influence and govern behavior and, in essence, claim ownership of protecting the common good.
Curated Experiences versus Serendipity: With the flood of real-time information and social connections, there is an increasing belief that experiences need to be curated, that individuals will increasingly turn to brands or opinion leaders to help them make sense of what matters (and what doesn’t). This doesn’t remove serendipity or the power of the users to craft their own interpretations or their journeys through digital domains, but as brands focus on curated experiences new cultural reference points are created which are either embraced or resisted but which nonetheless make value claims for communities.
Walled Gardens versus Open Systems: It’s very rare that anything is one or the other. Even in open systems there are often barriers to the use of the tools based on skills or because cultural barriers prohibit fully open participation. Even Wikipedia shifted from being an entirely open system to being one with cultural norms, procedures and systems that closed off, to some degree, a fully open system. APIs and other approaches to technology management also allow solutions that fall somewhere on the spectrum between walled garden and open system.
I highlight these tensions because they fascinate me and seem to me like clear areas where the Lab has been turning the dials. These tweaks to its business model and philosophy are coupled with the broader business tensions and goals that arise from the degreee of emphasis on making money, protecting IP rights, and the approach to consumerism and individual monetization of effort.
These are significant changes and I can only hope that as they play out that the anthropologists or sociologists or whoever – the Tom Boellstorffs of the world, are watching and recording and will let us know what it all means at the level of culture and society, because otherwise while this might be a great Harvard Business School case study, the more profound significance to our lives online may be overlooked.
I hope that whatever social engineering is implemented to give Second Life more mass appeal will leave room for the creative anarchy of the current core culture, at least until OpenSim and other such solutions catch up.
Per Q mesh import will not be in the amazing never seen anywhere vaporware SL-too-ohh! viewer. And IF & when they do release mesh import there will still be limitations so it isn’t going to be all magical. Hopefully mesh will improve things over the melted plastic that is sculpties and things will look better but the trade-off will be more triangles and higher ktris/fr and all those low end computers LL tries to attract will have increasingly less satisfactory experiences. So maybe LL will have to define the grid as low/med/high “definition” and restrict low end computers to the ugly lego style build sims.
And if LL releases a viewer that instantly becomes known as Dumbo or Stupid Viewer then pretty much the only people using it will be Lindens. So they best make sure it isn’t all that dumbed down. Or I guess they can ban third party viewers and tell the open source community to go suck eggs. If they did I’m sure there would be a lot of job openings at LL for developers.
The media API? yeah great. Using Snowglobe all I see for video is 404 permission errors and the people at LL expect the internet to change the internet to support LL’s idea of what the mime type table should be as opposed to how well it worked before LL started applying their “special talent” to media.
So LL has miles and miles to go with the “media API”.
First time someone gets murdered because LL outed their identity will be a good wake up call for the idiots that think privacy is bad.
The reality is that all this “yadda yadda” is the way to build a real ecosystm. a metaverse platform of 3d to “colorize” the black and white current http://WWW…. but that LL is a single company, and as such cannot do it, and should not god forbid be promoted to do it. ( Google dreaming-China)
but they wont, because they cant. the real world is too big, and just because a few confuse CEO with GOD due to the PR tech/media companies hurl, they really arent.
Even the GODS of WALL STREET couldnt virtualize the real world to the point of control-profits-dreams- they wanted… and that was a 1980s proof.
Bonfire of the Vanities 2010.
i see loops, not revolutions.
AOL. NETSCAPE, YAHOO, GOOGLE…. and Linden Labs? well even if one was to believe the grouping… the first 3 on the list should offer more lessons for those who looked.
What CONTENT means..?– its what these companies dont make, but feel entitled to control. and that change is what creates the power too many bow down too in todays world. Add some Context and the illlusion crumbles.
freakin machines and coders… now WHY would the fck would i want the term “www” in my post to “automatically” become a hyperlink…”http:www” to nowhere?
Content? Context? and the new idiocracy of letting these caculators with legs “design” our realworld.:)
[...] Prokofy and others have compared it more to sculptys and consider it, well, kind of an incremental a… [...]
Cube, first, I’ve never said nor believed that Linden Lab would ‘own the metaverse’. The virtual worlds industry isn’t monolithic and while interoperability isn’t in the cards in the short term, there are enough tools and systems that ARE open that innovation is hardly stifled.
So this idea that somehow Linden Lab being a company with CEO Gods or whatever you insist on calling them is somehow the major barrier or some kind of rube’s game is perhaps your own area of focus but isn’t my own.
References to the 1980s are, um, fine, but there’s history BEFORE the 80s as well, and I prefer to think of the long arc of history to confining my view of the world to whatever Jaron Lanier had to say 10 years ago or last week. And in the long arc of history, innovations usually go from new heuristic with highly specialized tools and the specialists who know how to use them, to algorithmic systems where the tools are more widely available and built into the infrastructure of ‘daily living’.
To think that you can skip the phase where the heuristics are defined strikes me as both a rush to post-history and the ignoring of the history of innovation itself.
Just as the printing press was confined to a specialized guild class and mainly controlled by commercial and political interests before becoming more ubiquitous, so too have virtual worlds built a great deal of success and traction because the concept of the enterprise is to apply profit and loss towards the refinement of innovation. As these heuristics shift into becoming algorithms, we start to see a wider ecosystem of players and sub-innovations, and then the linking of those innovations through more widespread availability and transportability of the tools and content.
The frankly Marxist idea that control of content needs to somehow be within the commons because corporate control is either doomed to failure or a de facto immoral act isn’t proved out by history, either from the 80s, today or the 1800s.
Corporations however DO fail because of a lack of focus, a clear value proposition or hubris.
Sending everyone off to read Jarod is hardly going to change that outcome, but I’m pretty sure that studying Compuserve or AOL is high on the activity list at Linden Lab.
Ann: I’m not putting a timing on mesh imports. I’ve heard people say it will be released with the new viewer, but my own prediction is that we would hear about how mesh is handled when the new viewer comes out by way of some sort of road map or policy statement. My expectation is that mesh is still months away.
On your second point I disagree. Having just completed a tour of SL for new users, I can pretty much guarantee that they would flock to the new viewer in a heart beat. But if you believe that SL won’t attract new users, then you’re right: current residents and content creators will resist the new viewer and rightfully so – why ‘simplify’ your experience when you’ve learned all the really cool and complex stuff?
But I’m of the opinion that the user base will grow. At my talk the other day I said that we’d see a short term drop in concurrency (or have already experienced it) because SL residents will get fed up with the policy direction of the Lab, but that they will be replaced by an influx of new users who were waiting all along for an SL experience that they didn’t get a headache trying to learn and adapt to. I even put a line in the sand and said, I think, that after a down tick we’d start to see an influx of users and we’d be in the 150k concurrency range by summer and might be trending to 200k by fall. Aggressive prediction and time will bear it out.
I also disagree on the MediaAPI because I believe there’s more stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not being told about – the MediaAPI wiki page is notably quiet and it makes me suspect that the Lab is helping to nudge development along under NDA.
Finally, I’m deeply concerned about the impact of linking avatar to real identities. However, having studied the metaphors for ‘coming out’ and the comparison to online spaces, there’s some incredibly rich and useful social science research on how identity systems can facilitate safety and are comparable to the process of coming out.
Whether the Lab can achieve this or whether they talk to the same people I do about identity systems and gay identity I have no idea, but here’s hoping they do.
Botgirl – reading your posts is like reading my own thoughts, only far more clearly expressed, so yet again you’re echoing my own hope for creative anarchy – maybe even a whole archipelago of it.
marxist ideas about content control?
Mine? Jarons? what are you going on about?
i didnt name the posts “Second Life and the Cultural Revolution” now did i?
war?, oh my,
talk about hubris.;)
could be worse, could be about metaplace i guess.
I’m not sure why calling it a cultural revolution has anything to do with Marxism, but maybe I’m not well read enough.
Are you saying there isn’t a cultural re-engineering or that the Lab isn’t in conflict with itself as engineering is superceded by design? If so, then maybe I am hubristic, otherwise I’m just calling it like I see it.
M Linden didn’t mention mesh imports on his recent roadmap on the blog. Rather worrying..
Elevating a “emphemoral product and company like LLs SL” with a few k affluent westerners playing dolls or consultants) to having a “CULTURAL REVOLUTION”, and referencing MARX, and not seeing uh, 1970s CHINA, and its actual life affects almost one billion, is kinda odd to me.
but i didnt call anything marxist, you did. I juat said that people need to control and own the profit abiliies for their content… and that certainly isnt part of the web2.o, or linden ethos…and some of us could see this before others it seems.Maybe because to us,it wasnt anything new.
evidence- avatar banners without paying fox/,lightspeed- anyone care to comment? enough said there.
Im saying it dosnt matter what “love machine” team seesm to be winning this weeks brownie points at LL. The entire enterprise is a dumb design in its attempt to control 3d media, and those who will use it for commerce online.its web2.0.. and thus its already doomed when enough people see the emporers naked, and that now they by following them,are too…. the green mists are now lifting after the last few years of metaverese exhuberance that really wasnt about the media, but about the blogs about the media..
and its clear M- marketing, has began to “lead” LL, and that P- programming left–even after C-more programming.. had to leave as the first little needds for M reared their heads and realities 2 years ago….when “other than bloggers” took notice..:)
when you see a D – design linden let me know:) maybe then we can all make some money off this gamed private econosystem of a platform.
Per one of the Lindens, I forget which one, on the SLDEV mailing list, mesh will not be in Viewer 2.0. As for the “dumbing down”, what do you expect when people have done nothing but complain about how difficult SL is and what a huge learning curve it has, blah blah blah. I mean seriously. You want to talk difficult learning curves then check out Entropia or Blue Mars. As for the cultural shift within LL, well sooner or later the kids had to grow up. I have only two concerns with LL/SL – one, that the company remains viable so that two, I can get logged in! {:o) Everything else is debatable.
Here’s the “no mesh in SLV 2.0″ link in the SLDEV list:
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2010-January/016196.html
For you super techies with very long memories I’d like to point out Larry Ellison (CEO Oracle Now owner of MySQL) started pushing for network based computers back along about the time of Win 95 release. Interestingly Second Life sort of is the first close implementation of that in the form of everything is done in net space stored centrally and your computer is just a viewpoert to it all. Oh the irony all around. But none of the stanford/silicone valley types like to discuss these weird facts of life.
As for Mesh Q Linden simply posted to the SLDEV mailing list that mesh was not in the new viewer. Q said nothing else so there is nothing else to infer. As a matter of fact I hold the opinion it doesn’t ever need to be there other than to display mesh. Content creators will still need the power viewers for content creation. They do need to be broken into one for creators and one for just users without all the complicated controls. When people want to create they can learn the hard interface.
[...] Just as the printing press was confined to a specialized guild class and mainly controlled by commer… [...]
Yes, Cultural Revolution is exactly the word. The intellectuals must be banished to the countryside and glean corn on their blogs and perish.
The cooptation of the publisher of the chief critical muckraking newspaper is a piece of breath-taking cynicism on both their part’s. Shame on Mark Wallace but shame on Mark Kingdon. Then that the one art historian on staff, Blue Linden, together with this coopted journalist Wallace Linden would then preside over my permabanning again — well, yes, it’s a caricature of a RL communist “cultural revolution” for sure, and yet the effects and brutal power-mongering are real.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2010/01/managing-the-conversation-or-what-blue-linden-erases.html
You simply can’t get it about the mesh. A lot of socializing and interaction in SL comes about becaues people can build at an amateur level, or at least place around content that they can easily adjust in edit mode to resize, recolour, retexture, meld with other prims. I simply don’t think you realize the magnitude of how much the entire SL experience is now welded into this habit of building, even for people who can’t put two prims together, technically. It’s big. Very big. There are all kinds of young and old females and minorities and retired people who you never, ever hear from, who are not creators, who are not on the forums, who are not on the blogs, who build at the amateur level or decorate or modify and that is their great happiness in SL.
So mesh undermines that, like Windlight was crippling of the former simple lagfree beauties of the old world, but more than that, these “communities of content” you burble about are deracinated. They are not communities socializing within the world of SL. They don’t build for the world of socializing within it. They are merely arrogant consultants looking for a gig with their Blender Render Ender whatever, and these worlds are doormats, 3-d resume hangers that they don’t care about in any kind of deep way. That attitude is terribly corrosive to community and inherent coherence in SL — it’s the attitude we see come in with the corporate islands in 2007 in the solutions providers, and it’s why both those islands and their sherpas failed miserable. They didn’t integrate. They didn’t care. They didn’t put out a prim in an integrated way, but only in an exploitative way. It does matter, how you put out a prim.
These storehouses of 3-D content that you drool over are not all that. I saw this same fallacy play out in Metaplace. Yes there was Google sketchup and google warehouse. But the stuff looked like ass in SL. It didn’t fit. It didn’t fit not merely because you couldn’t scale it right; you couldn’t scale it right *because you were not the maker and edit of it*.
Being able to bring builds in and out of SL is that tekkie dream we’ve heard about ad nauseum since the world was born. And yet, those worlds that always had this don’t rise or fall because of this capacity. You’re going to find that as much as there will be all this rhapsodizing over mesh, like the sculpty vs. prim look debate, it will not be as pervasive as you imagine. People are passive, yes, and consumers and couch potatoes. But they want to be able to place a prim and have some control over it, and it sounds like they won’t over meshes in the same way. This entire matter could literally hang on a simple tiny interface that allows, say, resizing by a buyer that might elude the system for some arcane reason.
Bet you a dollar Zynga figures this out before LL does
Prok:
I do get it about mesh. In case I’m not being clear, I think that mesh is a significant part of the cultural revolution, a game changer, something that overturns 7 years of hard fought, sometimes lost but significant culture.
Mesh will change the economics, how content is created and sold, and will appeal to corporations and “pro builders”.
I personally don’t actually see the point. I prefer building in world. That’s what SL is ABOUT dammit. I am not DROOLING over content warehouses. And with all the vertex limits and other stuff with mesh it won’t be as clean an import in any case as, say, building a virtual world right on top of 3DS in the first place – if you want to walk around your scenes, build a ‘scene viewer’ right into Blender and invite friends in.
I can see using mesh components maybe like how you can buy sculpted pillars or windows or stairs, but building out sims loses the point of collaborative tools that are IN the world.
I really do hope you’re right about whether it becomes pervasive or not. I hope that prims continue to be the primary form of content creation. But if they become more pervasive then we’ll see the cultural, social and economic purpose of SL thrown on its head.
I really missed the connection to Wallace Linden being THAT Wallace. Good lord, his book on the Herald was, hmmm. I don’t have a word for it, although as a slice of history it was at least documentation. If the conversation gets controlled as you describe it sounds like the spectrum I talked about is definitely switching to the ‘nanny state’ side of things where moderators of the community have “claimed ownership of protecting the common good” as evidenced by adult-oriented content filters and moderation on the blog.
I, for one, hope that LL does not bring mesh into SL unless it is in addition to the existing inworld tools. My current experience attempting to learn to create in Blue Mars has taught me that I am no fan of the mesh process. It is cumbersome to say the least. And doubtful at this point I will ever “get” it. I miss not being able to create in my virtual environment. If LL were to replace the current tools with mesh then yes it would be a game changer for me. It would end my business in SL.
I think the key here, regarding mesh support, will be if it’s IN ADDITION TO existing building tools, rather than a replacement of them.
If mesh is an additional tool–just as sculpties were when they were introduced–this would be a huge improvement for SL.
Of course, none of this matters if LL can’t improve the first-hour (and second- and third) experience for new users. Hopefully the so-called 2.0 viewer will help with that anyway.
If there is a 2.0 viewer for visiting and another, more advanced viewer for building then new user orientation will become a little more problematic to deliver.
meshes, apis, first hrs..etc..
none of this will attract large media corporations or pro content developers…
they all make a “living ” off of content ownership and its value…
Why would SONY, FOX, ORANGE, AOL, or CBS come back?
HBO?…
whats changed.. ah.. 1.0 is now called 2.0-REVOLUTION!
well that should be enough….;)
Theyll hope that noone remebers the Unlicensed use of AVATAR banners FROM LL in 6 months.
and pay others like wallace and hamlet to keep calling it Sl 2.0 D in press releases and those media giants like AOl, CBS, HBO, ORange, SONY and FOX will all return to pay for maya built office buildings and empty islands of old music videos ?.
This all sound much better than them making flash games or AR trinkets and hireing there own bloggers to call them “virtual worlds” and to link them to facebook pages……..
They be back in SL with millions of new users because we moved some interface buttons around, and allowed for mass google warehouse ip import violations of content they most likely own….
well maybe thats exactly what will happen since in a year, all all failures and un tractionalble efforts will never have happened and everthing will be shiny and meta new again..
and toplisted on google and wikis.
Mesh support is more likely to appeal to outsiders that don’t really care for SL but enjoy 3D modeling in general. It’s an opportunity for them to make some cash on the side. But because of copybot I’m sure they’re gonna be quite tentative at first and will just dip a toe in (upload a single model) to test the waters. If they make money then they’ll upload more models.
A concern I have is whether llNet can deliver meshes fast enough. Mesh storage sizes are quite large, especially when you add things like normal maps. And in this day and age normal maps will be essential if LL wants to attract pro modelers. But it remains to be seen whether LL is going to support user created normal maps. The youtube mesh preview says not..
LL may have already decided that their network can’t handle meshes and so now they’re now waiting for their engineers to fix things. Mesh support may be fully coded and waiting..
For me it’s not so much mesh support in itself that is going to bring Second Life up to date, but rather it’s the animation that can eventually be added to meshes. It’ll mean no more silly things like animals with absurd looking prim legs.
But again, animation just adds further to the bandwidth requirements of meshes.
Maybe a streaming 3D world just isn’t suitable for mesh support?.
@342 or whatever your name is – the Lab has already coded mesh and it’s being tested now. As I understand it, it will include multiple textures but I’m not sure about normals – anyone know?
As well, it will translate mesh into a certain number of vertices…as I understand it, vertex limits is how they manage the network issues.
Textures will be moved into the cloud over time. This is already supported in Snowglobe and the SL Map function – so, object textures will eventually be pulled from external Web sources rather than the Lab’s asset servers. This could help reduce load times on the texture side of things although right now it doesn’t support progressive texture loading.
Finally, if they really are able to pull off what they say they’re working on, which is more intelligent caching of content, you can also reduce loads for sims you’ve been to before, and I understand that they’re trying to push the assets closer to the simulator.
For those outside SL, I’m not sure copybot is the big issue. They’re used to Turbosquid and things like that or Google Warehouse. This will be like an added revenue stream for those already selling in Content Paradise where you have the risk of purchased objects being swapped and sold anyways. At least in SL you’ve ported your stuff into something with a known IP and enforcement regime.
On animations – not sure, but really good question.
Cube – yup, history repeats itself, I suppose it’s just better to be on the right side of the next wave.
@ Frank and Tinsel – mesh will NOT replace existing tools, no worries on that score.
Selling content on sites like Turbosquid is a little different as they’re much more transparent. i.e everybody can see what everybody else is selling.
In Second Life we can sell items in world and so it’s possible for somebody who doesn’t actually hang out in SL (pro content creator) to be unaware that Jimmy333 Monkeynuts has been selling copies like hotcakes while the creator’s items listed on XStreet haven’t sold at all.
and yep, I’m aware of mesh compression techniques and I’m also aware of how sensitive 3D models can be to compression. Even the lightest compression methods can turn a 3D model and its normal maps into a fugly mess.
But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see..
Thanks the info though. It’s nice to know mesh support is done and that LL is considering other storage methods.
I, too, am deeply concerned about the consequences of LL facilitating linking avatar identities to real identities.
SL right now is a powerful tool for personal re-invention. Most avatars have nothing in their first life tab; they are born into SL with no personal history, no baggage of family or coworkers, but an adult’s life experience. What an opportunity to explore! What a chance to finally become that ‘nice guy’ you always thought you were, to remake your body image, to try to start a business without your family laughing at you! To meet people without them pitying your physical handicap! To lose yourself in a fantasy where you are beautiful, where $50 makes you rich!
This ability to lose one’s current self is what has lured residents away from their televisions into SL, night after night.
LL thinks our current SL culture can co-exist with members who are after a strictly augmentationist 3D experience, who will use SL to shop in 3D or play simultaneously in a 3D band with musicians all over the globe or who attend conferences. Where everyone may be beautiful but the really cool AVs look like their typists, where RL info is always on your linked *social network of choice* profile. They may be right.
But I think the current SL culture is a very delicate thing, and will evaporate when a flood of new RL-oriented residents begins to shun those who do not expose their RL identities. After all, those anonymous players could be anyone … they could be scam artists, sex criminals … I think any avatar that does not expose their RL identity will come to be regarded with suspicion.
So, all those anonymous avatars who have nothing particular to hide except that they wanted to escape themselves will quietly melt away, and SL will have lost the one thing that made people put down their remote controls.
And then, I suppose, LL employees will finally be comfortable within SL. LL’s executives may then have to accept a fire sale merger with Facebook or IBM, and they may never understand what went wrong.
soooooo much to digest.
There’s so many great thoughts/arguments/points of view.
I have been saying for quite some time, this is not a game, but a media.
staying tuned
Absolutely correct, Nika. Just read an assortment of random avatar profiles while inworld. What percentage reveal their RL identity, in any degree? Less than 1%? Most people in SL do NOT want their RL and SL integrated unless they choose to reveal that information to a few trusted friends. Even if LL makes this an option, it will become de facto mandatory through peer pressure from a generation of newbies raised to think uploading videos of their boel movements to YouTube is normal behavior. And what if hackers steal your credit card or bank account through SL’s Facebook/MySapce integration? What happens when the first member of a sexual minority is attacked, even murdered in RL after his/her avatar is outed in SL? Are these very real possibilities worth the pipedream of”social media integration”? How many of the Lindens can’t really grasp the idea that creative anarchy, personal anonymity, and remodeling identity is what attracted most of us to SL in the first place. Any plan that turns that around in favor of augmented social media is nothing short of a betrayal of the majority of the current residents of SL, aka LL’s current customer base, and will offer many of us no other option by to cancel our accounts. Is LL really ready for that event, could they survive it? I think it will in fact relegate LL to the ash heap of digital history, and be studied in business classes as a classic case of corporate failure through hubris.