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The Creative Power of Second Life
Alice, over at Kotaku, has a post up looking at what Second Life means to the Web 2.0 crowd. Cory Ondrejka gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about what 2L is about, and dropped some interesting statistics on the audience. From the article: "Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here: Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week. That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. "
That's like a few WoWseconds. OMG!
He he! with all these in game terminals and AIM api being free, soon you will get "get larger" IMs and mails in game as well as in real life.
And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
And therefore it would only cost Linden Labs about $4m a year to produce work with more significant quality. It's kinda stupid to do this kind of analysis anyway. The whole point of Second Life is that it is different. Comparing Second Life with, oh, I don't know, WoW, is like comparing apples and oranges. You can like both, it's ok.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...the graphics in Second Life weren't oh-so-1995--and yeah, everyone is making stuff. Well, that's just great. Kind of like the last time I was at a county fair and realized the same thing...and not only didn't want any of it, but wanted to get as far away from it as humanly possible.
I went and downloaded the linux 'alpha' client, read about how wonderful Second Life was on the forums, read how an initial registration for a single new user account was free, and thought that was wonderful.
Then, on page 2 of the registration process, after having already picked out a name and given an email address I find out they need a credit card number for 'age verification'. That is, if you are in a country that they cant send a verifying SMS message to a mobile, as was my situation.
The only other industry I have seen 'free' accounts need age verification via CC for is porn. This is also notorious for its fraud and infiltration by organised criminal syndicates. Suffice it to say that it will be a cold day in hell before my CC details are given to this MMOG - like porn, the best can be had for free.
And thus the great Second Life experiment came to an end. Hmmph.
Places like The Forest, FurNation Worlds and Luskwood are brimming with user-created stuff. Not all of it is very good, but there's certainly a market for it - or at least a lot of people willing to create stuff in the hope that they can sell it.
...underestimating the taste of the American public -- PT Barnum
Either [mobile phones] are pre-pay, which are common amongst adults and minors, in which case there's no phone company records on the person
So how do you pay the bill without a card?
or they are contract, which will be paid by an adult regardless of whether an adult or minor uses it.
But if the adult willfully gives the phone to a minor, then the adult is responsible for everything that the minor does using the phone.
...the graphics in Second Life weren't oh-so-1995--
Thats harsh... Quake I didn't come out til 1997.
Secondly, the only online games by 1997 was Ultima Online, M59 and muds. I don't think they can compare at all in graphics.
If you said "oh-so-2000" then I'd agree.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You know the saying, and probably some variations thereof. "An infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriter will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare." My favorite is actually monkeys, shotguns, stopsigns, and the works of Shakespeare in Braille. But I digress..
As pointed out by others, a lot of this 'content' that LL didn't have to produce isn't all that great. It's amateur, not professionally developed 'content'. (Yes, the quote marks are indicating sarcasm, or that the word isn't the best choice.)
But more importantly, a lot (~99%) of all this created stuff all over the place is static. Nothing to interact with. Scenery. That hardly makes it count as content because there's nothing to do with it. So back to the original figure of hours of work put into creating stuff and dollars saved.. take just 1% of that, because only 1% of the monkeys in the sandbox are creating stuff anybody else would want to play with.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
Player-created content is great and it seems to be a good fit for Second Life. However, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea because I think it appeals to developers as a cost-cutting measure, not as a way of creating a dynamic world.
Imagine paying a monthly subscription fee and on top of that having to produce your own content to keep the game going. And I hate to say it but more often than not player content and mods are subpar.
What I'd like to see is a union of the two where the developers create the world and then players shape that world via their actions. Players can take positions of power, build cities, vie for influence all within the context of the game world. And every so often the developers inject external elements, be it a new threat or new allies or whatever to keep things interesting. What MMOs truly need isn't merely additional content, they need a dynamic world with evolving storylines.
Unfortunately, I think people find Second Life's model appealing because of what it means to the bottom line, not because of any potential it has for enhancing the gameplay experience.
... is that players LOVE to be enabled to create and share new content.
I read an article about the early days of the Internet. No one really predicted that if you give someone a web browser, and show them how to write HTML and create a page, that everyone would start producing stuff FOR FREE. In a world dominated by cable-companies selling TV channels, no one could have known that people were so willing to share information just for the sake of doing it. Yes, most of it were pages dedicated to their cats...
I believe (and hope), that games are moving in the right direction. Map editors (Wolf3d, DOOM, Quake, etc), mod-able games (CounterStrike), player made content (Neverwinter Nights, The Sims, Second Life, etc)... this is all a good, natural thing. Sure, a lot of it is crap, but it's FREE crap, and it's not ALL crap, and it kind of self-regulates.
So, if more game companies tap into that desire of players to be creative and create content, I think they're onto something. You grumpy folks who say "So, what, *I'm* supposed to write the game for them?" miss the point.
I mean, look at Slashdot, and how much "user created content" is on this site. Hell, 99% of the content here is commentary...
Doesn't this prove some sort of flaw in Marx's whole separation of labor theory? Maybe we should be talking about this! This is potentially huge!
A girl friend of mine puts in 1/2 those hours just by herself.
Obviously, thats not totally true. But she is, imho, to the point of addiction. Her entire schedule is dictated by what she will be doing in secondlife. She even cut back on working in RL by 1 day less (from 2) just so she had more time in game.
I'll admit, she does make about $1K USD every month from her creativity used within the game. Thats nice but her hourly rate has got to be way below minimum wage.
You could view it as recreation time. Only you get paid!