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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. "
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.
My friend and I both submitted our cards. I didn't have any problem, and doubt I'll see any fruadulent charges (or ANY charges).
:)
My friend, however, had his credit card company call him with a "suspicious charge". Apparently LL charges $1 to the card, and then credits it back (I guess to verify that it's a real card?!) Sounds kinda weird.
I don't have a problem with it, but obviously YMMV.
As for Second Life... I started it up just as a lark. I'm a coder, and I liked the idea of creating and scripting objects for fun. And it's been a lot of fun. I answered a couple want-ads, looking for scripters, and have actually gotten paid to create some casino games.
I'm not going to retire off it, but I don't remember making money or particularly using my brain (Fireball, Scorch, Scorch, Scorch, Frost Nova, repeat) in WoW... so it's been fun.
The furries, however... they scare me a little.
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.
The $1 thing seems to be done by Amazon as well, at least they did it with me. I was quite surprised at first, but came to the conclusion that it must be some kind of test, as it was refunded.
I don't know why the furries scare you though. Luskwood seems to be full of geeks, it's great.
Sure you are. You're missing the most horrific example available today of what DRM on physical objects will be like in the not too distant future. I'd love to teach a class where I justify the right of creators to control how people use their creative works, then set the students loose in Second Life and see how long it takes them to come to the conclusion that being dominated by the arbitary whims of others is not a good thing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The only speech that is limited is extremely intolerant hate speech (ie Nazi propaganda, racism, etc). SL has a lot of content that would go well beyond most people's acceptance threshold, and it is allowed to persist in the Mature regions without much incident.
However, I have a feeling this isn't the "work of art" you're talking about. I've seen this complaint time and time again.
Often people who register complaints like yours seem to think that "speech" or "art" includes using a scripted weapon designed to kick people several server regions away (sometimes causing them to have to re-log) or to flood the grid with "grey goo" self-replicating objects that overwhelm the servers so that everyone is effectively DDoSed.
I prefer to think of this kind of "performance art" as being an asshole griefer, myself, and I'll lay down bets that this is the kind of "work of art" you were performing when you got booted.
I might be a bit biased, because I was a member of the W-Hat group. I assume I still am, but last I checked the old land plot we used to own all of and build shit on is a shadow of what it once was, and since I felt like there were eyes watching me everywhere I went.
For the uneducated, W-Hat is notorious for being greifers and unpleasent people to be around. Or at least that's the line you get when you visit SL.com forums. In reality, W-Hats are/were some of the most creative people I ever met, who got screwed over because a bunch of the pivital members got banned for "offensive content" that really amounts to nothing more harmful than the fetus cannon I was refering to earlier. Really, is pissing people off a crime?
Oh yeah, and one of our (then) newer guys made the very first greifsphere. He's banned, and he didn't bother coming back, get over it.
Oh, and maybe one of us shoved you and knocked you ten sims away at some time in the past, but honestly, you're just as likely to run into that with random assholes, and it's against W-Hat rules to be assholes to people anyway.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Pissing people off isn't a crime, but your friend wasn't put in jail. Granted some people either have thin skins or what they consider offensive is strongly related to political correctness. Some people need to get a sense of humor. Second Life isn't life, it's an opt-in entertainment venue. But on the other hand:
Say you're a member of a club, one that has a physical building (health club, Elks club, whatever). You can do and say a lot of things inside that building. But not very many such places would let you paint graffiti on the walls, even if they could clean it off easily. Second Life doesn't want graffiti on their walls.
Also, Linden Labs is trying to make a profit. If you have a griefer (who pays one membership fee to be there) wandering around annoying people, and his/her actions cause two other people to quit or not buy in after a trial membership, Linden's net profits are reduced. Second Life isn't life, it's a business.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh