M Linden has been building up a story for Second Life and whether it’s a well planned strategy or whether he’s thinking this all up as he goes along, at least he’s trying to keep us abreast of his thought process, whether we agree with the details or not (which isn’t to deny that we need to get the details right, just to say that I have other things on my mind today).
So the story so far is a bit of a 3-step dance between M and Mitch and Philip who probably get together for lunch every now and then, but not the kind of lunch I have where you rush through it or bring it back to the office and wipe the mustard off your status reports, but the kind of lunch where you say to the waitress “take your time with the food, we’re going to be here a while” and ideally the place you’re eating is close to the beach or something so you can carry on the chat and doodle on the sand and maybe take a second at the end of it all to go “wow, that’s so Zen, the sea will wash our doodles away just like we’ll all be washed away eventually, though thank god for the Singularity, peace out see you Monday.”
The P/K/M Three-Step
In any case the three step goes something like this:
“I’m a visionary who sees stars in the code and it’s time for me to string out infinities by focusing on applications and other visiony stuff, so let me introduce M Linden,” says Philip.
“I love the residents, I love this world, cool stuff is happening here because there’s so much passion, and for now I’ll swim in that for a while and start pushing buttons on the Love Machine, but don’t worry, I know what the Grid needs.,” says M.
“This is all so exciting,” says Mitch, “The metaverse is growing up and people are learning and universities are coming and we’ll soon all be dipping and ducking in front of our 3D cameras, but look, if you’re one of those frontier types, just a warning, we’re welcoming a new era in and that changes things, but we really need collaboration and education and the future is dawning again, just without all you hippy types with too much time on your hands.”
And we close it all off, for now, with M reminding us that he really, really does know that Grid stability is important, and SL is really, really doing better than we think, and there’s some really really cool stuff going on, like government agencies trying to teach us about diseases, and Cigna teaching us that we should live healthier lives, and the British Computing Society teaching us how to be better teachers, and students learning stuff.
OK, so look – I like it so far, nothing wrong with it, but I posted previously:
“For all the buzzy joy of Philip and improving humanity, I’d like to hear a vision. I’d like to hear the “why”. I’d like to know why Second Life matters not in some fuzzy way like “collaboration and saving the ozone layer” or “education is cool””
What Do We Do At Night?
You know, I think the idea of life-long learning is great. I think the idea of collapsing geography so I can meet up with, um, folks in Korea or the UK or whatever – fantastic. I mean, I can also pick up the phone and call, I guess, but sure, there’s something nice about meeting in a room, seeing a representation of someone, rezzing a prim to explain a point, using voice chat to save on long distance, or ideally bringing up a Word doc like I can do in Qwak.
See, I stagnate and get frustrated when I’m not learning something new. It makes the day interesting. It helps me deal with my short attention span, because otherwise I’m nodding off in business meetings, or I’m secretly reading blogs at the office, or I’m thinking about taking a super long vacation or something. I’m blessed – I have work I love, I have days that are filled up mainly because there’s always something new to learn.
But the thing is, learning new stuff and roaming around the Cigna sim might make my day more interesting, but it rarely keeps me up past midnight. And that’s the thing: for all of the progress that Second Life is making in attracting 14 of 15 universities to the Grid, it’s all stuff for the day.
And I’m not going to guess what Philip and M and Mitch do at night – for all I know they’re on constant learning alert, and head home and watch PBS or read Kevin Kelly or hold little learning labs with their kids or whatever – no idea.
For some people, though, myself included, I can barely function during the day let alone at night with all this high octane learning and imagine if I were a teacher to boot – learning AND drafting lesson plans and picking up on new technologies and good lord, where’s the fun?
At night, for me anyways, I like to veg usually. Well, actually, what I REALLY like to do is veg with someone I love. And sure, it’s great to go take classes with your partner or whatever, but my point is that I don’t have the mental stamina to be in class every waking hour.
Maybe it’s my age because it shows a kind of bias for different media, but I grew up vegetating through two things: people and stories. And more often than not, the two were combined. Hanging out with friends and telling stories – OK, gossip maybe, or repeating other stories, like “did you see that episode where” or maybe even stories about ourselves, like “when I grow up I want to be a…” Or you sit and watch TV or go to a movie or watch a ballgame and you’re watching a story unfold and maybe you’re talking about it later with someone or maybe it goes in one ear and out the other.
And all these stories and all of this stuff where you’re with people, sometimes it leads to other stuff like love and sex and tragedy and family and raising kids. And you live for all that other stuff really, right? It’s about the emotional power of it all, with stories in between to keep us sane and to help us understand what it all means, and yeah, of course, you also spend time paying the bills, and doing the dishes, and taking the dog for a walk, but for me the bottom line is that it’s great to learn, and there can be drama and emotion during the day, but my question for the three wise men of the Lab is: that’s all fine, but what do we do at NIGHT?
So what strikes me is that for all the focus on the schools and collaboration and the health of the in-world economy, M Linden is forgetting that the passion he spotted in that first week at the Lab before he got distracted by the buttons on the Love Machine, was a combination of all those cool potentially killer apps and the power of Second Life to let people, well….to let people FEEL, and to chill out, and to a whole lot of NOTHING if that’s what they decide.
Lessons from Age of Conan for Second Life
I’ve called Second Life a Story Box. And by calling it that, I don’t just mean that it’s an immersive playground for being someone new, or falling in love, or whatever – because the power of stories IS the killer app, it’s just that the teachers and collaborators and brands haven’t quite figured out how to do that in SL yet.
In Connecting the Dots, Robert Bloomfield pointed out:
As Christian Renaud has said to me several times, why make virtual collaboration just as effective as face-to-face when we can make it so much better? What is the best way to conduct a virtual meeting? How can we use 3D visualization tools to communicate information in ways that flat screens can’t? How do we teach a class, or reach out to customers, better than with a classroom or a web survey?
I’d propose that there are lots of ways to do this, by drawing on the art of the impossible, for example, and also the art of narrative and storytelling.
But more than these things is the recognition that in addition to code the world is a world because, as Prok says, there’s drama – feelings, emotions, all of those things that are often more heightened at night than in the day.
Over on Gamasutra, an interview with David Cage points us in the direction of reconciling the two ’schools’ of game design: the sandbox and the rollercoaster, and in so doing, reminds me that Second Life has been positioned as the ultimate sandbox, perhaps at the expense of attracting the wider audience that wants to just hang out at night and not have to think too much.
Cage points out that the sandbox concept, when applied to the wider goal of engaging your ‘typical’ user, can succeed but can leave a lot to be desired:
(A sandbox says) “Look, there are tools. There are things. Maybe there will be friends. Maybe not. Do what you want.” There’s one possibility that these sandbox experiences are so fantastic because you’ve been extremely lucky. You know how to use the tool. You met people that were truly great, and you had something incredible to do.
But you know what? It’s also possible that it happens that you get bored and don’t cope with the people in the sandbox. You don’t like the tools, or you don’t know what to do with them, and you end up with a very poor experience.
I mean – if that doesn’t sound like the crap shoot of entering Second Life, then I don’t know what does. You enter and the tools, which you’re introduced to in the horrible mess of orientation island, either make sense or they don’t. But more importantly, you either meet the right kinds of people who make your experience compelling, or you don’t.
Cage proposes that the solution is to seek out emotional value:
“So in my mind, some of the very few kind of real sandboxes I know are with massively multiplayer games. When I say “kind of,” I don’t believe there are absolutely real sandboxes out there. It’s only a list of scripted things, but there are so many of them and you can play them in any order, you get the feeling that you’re in a sandbox. In fact, it’s really rare that you’re really in a sandbox. Most of the time, you’re in a scripted experience but it’s really heated.
I’ve played many MMOs these days, and most of the time, the experience is really poor, because you end up doing not very exciting things. I think the value of the experience is not on that. It’s really about building yourself – the vision of yourself, like, “Oh, I want to be a hero, because I’ve spent so much time at level 16. I’m so strong. Look at my weapons and my helmet.” These are the core mechanics these games are based on.
I think that’s fine for people when they need to build self esteem, and it’s a very important core complementing experience, but if you’re not into that, what’s the real narrative or emotional value? The value is not always there.”
Stories and Emotional Experiences
All of which leaves me with the notion that while the Lab focuses on the tools and the orientation experience and, perhaps, helping people to connect with each other (through search, or orientation groups or whatever) they could also leave some room in their business model for the emotional experience of the world.
And I have some thoughts on what that looks like, but primarily it would include social functions, and some better tools for scripting at a meta-level, but also, based on what’s there today, includes land, and the economy, and most important of all the way in which these things support content creators.
Because right now, it’s the folks who build all that stuff cramming the asset servers who are the storytellers, and they’re the folks who help facilitate emotional transactions or, to put it less geekily – they give us stuff to do at night.
If you cut the land out from under them, or you aren’t vigorous in the protection of IP, then you’re hanging the storytellers out to dry, and all you’ll be left with are a bunch of tools, a smattering of night classes, and a bunch of lonely looking teachers drafting lesson plans.
If you don’t pay attention to the community and the economy that helps to sustain that community, you end up not having anything to do in the daytime either, much less at night.
Members of Second Life’s Concierge Support group have in recent days been witness to members entering the chat literally crying because the economy has turned on them and they must abandon their land.
Mind you, this really has very little to do with the fact that the US economy is in a recession, it is simply poor judgment and execution on the part of Linden Lab. This poor judgment is backfiring with premium accounts and overall membership declining while Linden Lab grasps to assure that all is well by cooking the books on things like total square meters of its virtual world increasing. This trumped up statistic is meaningless given the fact that these numbers include openspace regions (which can sustain only 1/4th that of a full region that happens to have the same land mass)combined with huge swaths of mainland that remain unsold. Since Linden Lab can print up land at any time they could abuse the hell out of that statistic anytime they feel like it. Hey! Report due for Q3, flood the mainland so it appears that we’re growin’ dude.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. Stick your finger in the dike instead if fixing it.
But, why would something like this make someone cry? It is a game, a platform, just pixels, correct? I mean it doesn’t cost anything to enter Second Life and participate. Just cut your losses and hang out without the land you had to abandon. You can find someplace to mark as your home location. All your friends will still be there. It will be liberating. No more land fees to worry about! No more tenants asking you for help. Heck, you can do whatever you want now! Lord knows, if you need room to stretch out there are acres and acres of unsold land that you can just stand around on. Your world now depends upon your imagination even more because you can no longer build or run scripts on land that is set for sale. The sandboxes are too few and too full for you to rez anything. In fact just about anything that you want to do that will make Second Life rewarding and exciting for you now lives only in your imagination because you have no means to see them through to fruition.
Guess what? You could do the exact same thing, even if you didn’t have access to a computer at all. Just stand out in your front yard and maybe someone will pass by for you to chat with. You may even get creative and draw on the sidewalk with colored chalks.
You certainly aren’t going to buy any of that super cheap land in order to accomplish those things because you have already been violated and filled with mistrust. When land is part of the economy, you have no problem paying for land. It makes sense to you because it has a value based upon its location, good neighbors and support for your interests. It isn’t just a parcel pressed out and set for sale at a cheap price.
When we have depleted land and there is a need for expansion, certainly more land should be created. And that land will sell at a good fair price because at that point people will be looking to build out a community fueled by an economy that requires premium memberships in order to hold that land. If prices get out of hand, printing more land is certainly a way to offset that mania, but you do it in a prudent manner, you don’t just dump a continent. You aren’t doing anything to build your customer base that way. You are running them off in hopes of duping new residents into filling up all of that cheap land. What is it that you hope to engage these new residents with and retain them if you have run off the residents that are creating and building a world that will encourage new residents to participate?
Unlike Facebook, Second Life really is Social Networking. You must immerse yourself into the community and network to learn things and make things happen on a scale that is far more engaging than Facebook can even hope to offer.
Facebook is ludicrous. It is not Social Networking. There is absolutely nothing that you can accomplish on Facebook that you cannot accomplish with an Instant Messenger and e-mail running. I can send you really cheesy graphics of flowers, cakes and ice cream all day long in e-mail and pester you to look at it really fast and send something just as ugly back to me in instant message. How is that engaging me? How am I learning more about you and your interests on a passionate and meaningful level if all you are doing is sending me random bits of nonsense that was created by someone other than yourself? It doesn’t happen. The only reason YOU have Facebook is because it is free and someone you know also has it. The only thing you can really say for Facebook is that it is a glorified profile page.
Second Life will go right down the toilet if they want to turn it into Facebook and it becomes a platform where you just sign on and rez a few prims on your super cheap land that lets people know you like jazz but hate cauliflower and your favorite color is red.
Would that be any less boring or useless to you because it is three dimensional?
Dusan is right. It is the emotional transactions that make a virtual world and in fact, social networking engaging and rewarding. We want to see things that we have not imagined ourselves or see things that we have imagined presented in a way that we had not imagined. This is compelling. This fuels our own imaginations so that the world is enriched beyond a virtual space. We put these ideas to use in scenarios that benefit our health, education, our social interactions, the ways in which we express our humanity through the arts and the way we govern ourselves. Strangely enough, it seems like that is the frontier that has always engaged us “hippie types” and still seems to engage everyone on the planet. It is a frontier that should never cease to exist. It is the frontier that the educational facilities are looking to explore and they are vaulted for doing so. There is no reason to disenfranchise the rest of the community when our goals are the same.
With regard to M Linden’s initial awareness of the passion in Second Life, I will venture back to the Concierge Chat in Second Life. I have been a member of this group for a long time now and I have seen virulent passion for SL and its future. Residents were hopeful and encouraged by the directions that Second Life was taking because the welfare of the community was looked after. Oh yes, we had issues crop up that were hard to deal with and that hurt the economy but somehow they worked themselves into states that we dealt with on different levels although there was no real solution. Still the residents believed and stood fast for the Lindens who were also residents at one time and just as passionate about Second Life as they were. You could not ask for better support and encouragement from your customers. They stood ready to weather anything. They encouraged their friends and family to join. They were the very best form of advertisement that Linden Lab had going for them. They created things, they sold things, they raised money for charities, they enabled the disabled, they found new ways of teaching, they did well for themselves, their families and the people they loved and they got positive media coverage for doing so. It was not the media coverage of corporations coming into Second Life and leaving because they did not have the time or understanding to immerse themselves into the community only to leave in a huff and make negative statements about Second Life. M Linden never saw that! And I am very sad to say that if he were to enter that chat now, he would see a very ragged group that feels that all of the support and passion they had for Second Life is being ripped right out from under them. They still KNOW that this is a great idea. They still LOVE the very notion that there are endless possibilities. But the fact that they can no longer participate in this world that they built makes them cry. The fact that friends and colleagues that depended upon them to provide a safe and sane place for them to work on their projects have lost their land as well makes them cry. No one wants to disappoint anyone. No one wants to feel that kind of hurt and shame. No one that lent their industry and support to Linden Lab should have to feel that shame if Linden Lab is indeed a profitable company. After all, if the residents didn’t build an interesting world, no one would have taken notice in the first place. The fact that Linden Lab never leveraged the ravenous support of their customer base any more than they did is a mistake they can’t undo. Now the Concierge Chat seems filled with bitterness where there was such joy and hope. I have heard residents say that Lindens had behaved rudely to them. Now I cannot say whether this rudeness was reactionary or not, I simply don’t know. I have never had a Linden be rude to me. I absolutely value each and every one of the friendships and interactions that I have with those that I have met and know. Still.. it worries me.. I had never heard anyone say such a thing before and it comes on the tail of a few other stories that I heard about Lindens listening in on private conversations and seeking retributions with their alts. I cannot vouch for the validity of such things but when you hear them from people you have known and trusted for some time it just kind of turns your stomach. I don’t want those things to be true. No one does.
What happened to our community? Does anyone remember when the Lindens used to send out notices that there was a dance taking place or that Jeska and Bub were arranging an event or a contest? When who you were as a person and a creative, contributing entity to the community really meant something to the company? You know? I think I’d like to be part of a Social Network where people care about me and I am more than just a picture on a profile that you click to make a few cents for an ad company. That is what Social Networking is all about isn’t it?
Agreed. Lets not underestimate the value of socializing and sharing experiences, or even ‘doing nothing’ together. In a world where analysis and metrics and key performance indicators more often than not rule, it is the simple connectedness of people that bring meaning instead of measuring it. Yes, indeed, the telling of our stories…
Sure, orientation process needs to be better, but what is the draw to the virtual world? Flying and UGP (user generated porno)? LL made a lot of cover stories in 2007 with land speculation and lonely hearts stories–what is the message for 2009? Wondrous things from 18-20 universities? Seems a little vague to me. Also the “enterprise market” is pretty long stretch for an organization without service level agreements or a development roadmap.
SL non-land economy is stalled. There is a content glut and without noobs, all the paniced merchants are droppping their prices. This would actually make it a good buyers market if there were some new buyers in.
Land renters to Dirk’s point, better make sure they know if there landlord is going to keep their sims going. Could be that mid-month they find out that the sim is simple gone. Make sure you got copies of stuff out on the sim otherwise it could all just zap.
Seems like the complexity at LL has outstripped the management capability.
It seems one of the questions is what is the “life” of second life. Examples of this deliverable that provides the juice that makes SL compelling are things that I find easy to get agreement from people in SL, but when I try to explain to a friend or colleague that has never heard of SL, I find myself stymied. There’s no way I have tried comparing to Facebook, Myspace, Twine, Linkedin, IRC, and so forth. That is like comparing the sensations of sitting on a dead motorcycle to riding one full bore.
When I was reading Dusan trying to tilt the focus by saying what happens “at night”, I recall telling people that SL has replaced the passive alpha-wave inducing television with a much more interactive world. I have told people that for me, SL can be like a television soap opera or sit-com where I can be one of the character/writers. Not only am I able to see places, people, and stories beyond my living room, but I am able to interact and build a story together.