The adults are nodding seriously at the big table about monetizing virtual worlds, aggregating eyeballs, return on investment, and technology hurdles on the superhighway to the Metaverse, and I’m sitting at the little kids table trying to follow the conversation here at the Virtual Worlds conference, or whatever its called, in New York.

The Lindens Take Manhattan
I was about to ask Catherine Linden about the latest branding clarification, but she was barricaded behind a row of desks along with the other Lindens (kudos at least for a strong presence) and I’m pretty sure it was Prokofy Neva who was talking to her and I didn’t dare interrupt (*whispers - Prok, was that you? What did she say???), so I wandered over to see if I could grab a free pen or two at the other booths, some of which had nice couches, and pop, and cookies even (hey, I’m at the little kid’s table remember) and almost all of which seemed to invite people to linger, unlike the Linden booth which felt more like lining up at a car rental agency.

It was exciting for me to see the Lindens. Kind of like the feeling of when your uncle shows up for the family holidays - you know, that wacky one from California you love and adore so much, who does magic tricks and wears cool clothes, but who your parents keep whispering about and rolling their eyes behind and spend a lot of time grilling you about after he’s gone - “What did Uncle Larry say to you? Don’t believe it whatever it was”

Well, the Lindens were promoting a new brochure they’ve put out. Or maybe it’s an old one. About the Grid and business in Second Life. Basically madly sitting there and letting the questions come to them. They have that press release displayed as well, about companies finally being able to put their sims behind a firewall, on servers hosted by IBM, although when one avid passerby asked about it, when it would be available, and how much it would cost, the lucky Linden on the receiving end said “I really have no idea, you should ask IBM, it’s not my department.”

I nearly died laughing, sputtering cookie crumbs in all directions. Seeing as legal and PR don’t talk. And the age verification people and the abuse reporting people don’t talk. And the development teams are so modular you can have a massive difference in efficacy, from the stellar Sidewinder to the less-than-stellar crew looking after the asset servers, none of them really talking so much, and everyone looking a little worn out and defensive (no offense really, I mean this as support for a raise, or time off, or whatever you need to get re-energized and peppy).

Philip wandered by, wearing some kind of Neko collar kind of thing, not sure, and stood by the booth. Not IN it really. Just sort of by it, and chatted up the folks who came to shake his hand, but his eyes had that visionary thing going on, because he was sort of focused at some blurry spot on the distant horizon, thinking no doubt of the immortality that he hinted at in The Making of Second Life, either that or maybe he spotted a likely Presidential candidate across the room and was mentally calculating how many stock options he’d need to grant.

And speaking of “Making of”, I had the thrill of meeting one of my SL heroes, Hamlet (nee Linden) Au, or James Wagner Au to those in otherspace, who was so kind and shocked me by actually claiming to have read this blog, I’m just guessing that with a good RSS feed you can cover a lot of ground, but I can never get my RSS feed to work right, so I wouldn’t know. Anyone who managed to chronicle the changing, shifting tides of SL and yet maintain both his sanity AND impeccable grooming is a hero, and adding a brilliant, breezy joy ride of a book into the mix just adds to my appreciation of his good work (although I’ve got issues with some of the deeper conclusions, but I’ll leave that for another post).

Barbie’s Beauty and Why Second Life Needs to Get Out and Play
So here’s the thing, I figure, about this conference.

Most of the people here seem to want to make money. And if they don’t want to make money, someone’s paying them to make money for them - like the kids from Northrop Grumman who sat at my table during one of the workshops (well, they LOOK like kids, but then I’m also older than I was when I was younger, so who knows) who seem to be tasked with “finding solutions” but don’t seem to have any problems yet, so I suppose that’s a kind of code word for making money, or saving it at some point.

And so looking to make money (or in a few cases just collect it, like some of the micro-payment people) they naturally turn to Barbie for advice. Because kid’s worlds are big money. Lots of it. Buckets of it. (Although Sibley of Electric Sheep kind of threw a wrench in all that at the end of the day saying that all these kids worlds will eventually be free, and non-monetized, and be forced back to just selling toys again).

But here’s the thing about the Barbie story, which was compelling, on time, and had really cool slides, and it’s that these people KNOW their brand, they KNOW what Barbie is, and they KNOW their target audience, possible more, and more deeply than anyone can know a target audience. They know their target audience so well, in fact, that they launched the fastest growing virtual world out there. And what fascinated me about their story wasn’t just that they had taken the lessons of their target audience to create a virtual world that really seems to get the girls excited, and engaged, but that they have also thought a lot about the concept of PLAY, and the idea that Barbie is an experience and represents certain values and aspirations and specific forms of play.

Think about the terms they use for how Barbie is about play, and then think about how this might apply to a virtual world:
- Play through collectability.
- Play through concepts of nurturing
- Friendship and social play
- Play as aspiration
- Fashion and beauty and concepts of self

Barbie allows kids to play out their hopes and dreams, their aspirations for the future. The play pattern in this is creativity. Dress-up, and sharing that creativity in an environment where what you create is shared, and in the process of sharing creation, express and learn, reinforce and adjust. And in order to create an environment where all this can happen, deep thought into how the virtual space mirrors the real (the idea of how girls do “make-overs” at a slumber party mirrored in a virtual world, and one of the most-used features). Thoughts about transparency and trust, and how to bring the parents into the equation. And thoughts about usability and the learning curve.

More than anything, however, what struck me about virtual Barbie was that here was a world that was constructed not against the backdrop of a doll, but against a deep knowledge of what that doll means, and to WHOM. And it was less about what that audience wants to DO and more about what stuff means, and how it feels.

Manipulative of soft young minds? Maybe. We’re all getting manipulated here in one way or another, and in this day and age we tend to know we are, and give permission, sometimes like Barbie because the experience is safe, known, and clearly represents a set of values and promises, followed through from the doll stage to the virtual world stage and beyond.

The World that Never Sleeps
So I go to a few workshops, interesting, neat stuff. Lots of interests and perspectives. Meet some people making some cool technology, trying to fill out little gaps in the metaverse. Blue Mars is looking pretty hot. There’s a lot of concurrent Flash/3D world stuff going on.

But it’s odd - because there’s a lot of talk as well about what’s really, really needed for virtual worlds to work. Companies with warehouses of 3D models for sale (TurboSquid, Daz)….but it strikes me that while all the adults are over at the big table trying to figure out how to take a slice of your kid’s attention, or how to make virtual worlds more usable or friendly, there’s probably also about 50,000 people doing stuff in Second Life at the same time as the 1,100 or so who are here. And those folks in Second Life are doing stuff that is sometimes noticed, and more often not….little applications, approaches, code, architecture, immersion experiences, new slants on collaboration, vending systems, virtual branding exercises, social networks, event management….a lot of stuff that all those adults at the table are furiously scratching their heads trying to figure out.

Granted, Philip has his eyes on other prizes. Nirvana is tough to reach when the confused masses are always coming by to shake your hand after all. And granted there’s problems with the platform, and improvements that are needed - but the truth is, for all these people trying to decide how to carve up the big roast beef that is the Metaverse, there’s also a bunch of people who are doing it pretty much for free on their own, solving problems, working together, cobbling code around the gaps and missing features of what they’ve got. They’re making their own little customized pizzas while the other folks who, having sharpened their well-funded knives, find themselves muttering to each other “hmmm, I’m not sure it’s cooked enough, maybe we should put it back in the oven a while”.

I kind of like it at the kid’s table. Some days I may be more adult like, nodding sagely and pondering all those serious adult-type issues, but most days I kind of like it at the little table, it’s more fun, and you don’t have to worry about the table cloth getting dirty, after all its made of plastic.