Slashdot Mirror
Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds?
An anonymous reader writes "Second Life appears to be suffering a bit of a backlash from its PR efforts. Matt Mihaly over at The Forge, newly-returned muckracker Peter Ludlow at the Second Life Herald and Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture have all recently taken Linden Labs to task for their non-stop, arguably deceitful, PR machine and frequent downtime. Further, over on Terranova a veritable cornucopia of long-time, experienced virtual world developers, including Raph Koster, Mike Sellers, Randy Farmer, the aforementioned Matt Mihaly, and Daniel James, have piled on, calling into question the fundamental utility of Second Life.
Does Second Life have real utility, or is it simply an endless exercise in unsubstantiated public relations? What do Slashdot readers think?"
You know, the thing about Second Life is that it has so much potential. It really does. Unless you've been in there, you're the creative sort and you've experienced the way it can allow you to build, share and interact with people online you'll have a hard time understanding what the big deal is. It's a wonderful toy and an interesting social construct. Do I believe that Second Life is really anything more than a toy? No, not really. It's fun to play around in for a while. For some people, it becomes quite literally a second life (I know it did for me) with social obligations, friends, events, and planned projects. Hell, I know how absorbing it can be and how detailed you can get, I (as Alan Beckett) won the 2005 Game Development contest with Jeffrey Gomez. That was where I really began to lose faith in Second Life for a variety of reasons. The technical limitations on Second Life are pretty nasty in some regards. Scripting can only go so far when your engine is struggling with the load of the basic client. Jeff had to work up a lot of work arounds in his script, created a lovely simple collision detection system, whipped up a random terrain generator, and allow for multiple users to participate on the same level at the same time. This is no small achievement within Second Life and what we built was most definately a game different and unique in and of itself. It was never perfect, though. We had to keep things as low "primcount" as possible (Prims are basic geometric shapes that make up all models. You build with them in Second Life.) to keep the game from choking outright, were constantly juggling what the sim itself could handle with what we wanted, and when all was said and done they released a patch that outright killed the game. Jeff just could not make it work again, the Lindens (those who act as administrative staff withing Second Life) talked of helping and never did and we had to badger them repeatedly before we ever even saw the promised reward money for the contest. Their staff are, in general, useless, unhelpful and irritating to deal with. Ask most long-time residents involved in the creative side of things and you'll generally find that the story is the same for any big project, assuming it ever even gets as far as completion. Second Life is a wonderful idea, but the client is aging, the staff are not helping, and the direction it's taking is an act of desperation to keep the whole raft afloat. I haven't logged on but once or twice in the past several months and haven't really felt the desire to, either. When someone creates a better alternative I'll move over there in a heartbeat, but for now, it's the best option we've got.
Yes, you may have to pay real money to get into SL (there are free accounts). However I argue that it does actually have worth.
Two points:
1) Lindens (currency in SL) can be converted to IRL currency. A small subset of the players that run shops and islands actually turn a RL profit every month. So, for these people there is a monetary worth.
2) Its a world where friendships can be made, creativity expressed and other forms of joy experienced. This can have value to people. Such value cannot be measured but that doesn't negate its worth to the people that appreciate it.
Yeah, how long have they been promising to update the engine now? It seems to have gotten to the point where the developers look at the engine and throw up their hands in despair. There have been some improvements, but they tend to be pretty incremental, although the change to the lighting system was a nice and sorely needed.
I read the internet for the articles.
I joined Active Worlds years ago -- 1998, God, has it really been that long? -- and I got a terrific feeling of community. There were teachers to help you learn to build, storytelling groups, role-players, assorted card/board game worlds. There were thousands of users online at any given time back then. And there was a good deal of academic interest in it, too. Heck, I joined up because a guy in the dorm I was living in then asked for my help in figuring out an Active Worlds assignment in one of his business classes.
And all was great. For about a year. Then the company screwed up and pissed off the majority of their most loyal fans, with inflated rhetoric, poorly realized promises about the program's capabilities, and (the killer) rapidly inflating the price for a "full citizenship." The idea of making "virtual malls" fell through. "3D Homepages" fell through. The academic interest dissolved once they figured out that the thing AW was best suited to teaching was AW itself.
These days, the Active Worlds community consists of a fairly small group of extraordinarily dedicated users hanging on despite years of neglect and outright abuse by the company. I'm one; most of the others can be found a SW City.
So far, I've seen nothing to convince me that Second Life isn't going to follow the same trajectory as Active Worlds: start small, spark buzz, build up a decent user base
Skins are big business in SL. All of them were created by players and uploaded.
I've even made my own in Adobe Photoshop, using the freely supplied templates, and using model pictures from the web.
Because of this ability to photoreference you will not find better looking avatars in any video game at this point in time (oct. 2006). Only 3d modelling software betters them.
"by it's true value (how to calculate that is beyond me)"
You know why you can't figure out how to calculate that? Because it's impossible. Nothing has inherent value. All value is decided by the buyer and seller.
Even in 'collusion' and 'monopoly', the value is set by the buyer and seller. You don't HAVE to buy gas for your car. You could find a closer job and just walk. Or take a bus. Or... Whatever.
Walmart is undercutting other pharmacies and selling at a loss to attract business to themselves. They aren't doing it just to be jerks. They're doing it to sell more of something else. It's called a 'loss leader'. I think it's a perfectly crappy idea, but it's quite common.
Don't get confused on value, though. Just because a person finds the drug 'worth' more to them than Walmart is selling it for doesn't mean anything. They are getting that money back another way. The value is still being set by the buyer and seller.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM