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.