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?"
The Spoiled Whore 3D Playset. Actually, I wouldn't say it's like Paris Hilton really, more like P.T. Barnum or that guy who sold deeds to land on the moon. You pay money for something that has no real actual worth.
Does Second Life have real utility
If by "utility" you mean does it provide enough enterainment to warrant thousands of people paying a monthly fee to engage in it, then the answer would be yes. If by utility you mean, "does it serve a bigger good", then I'd say, how many of the other MMORPG serve any more utility than what I first mentioned?
i really don't get the point right now. it's too early
the idea obviously is to spark a virtual world extension of reality, a common ground for people to engage in social exchange in groups
but what it requires to do this is wide adaptation, for a lot of people to think "second life" when it comes to doing these things online in social groups
and thus the pr machine: they are chasing that goal
it's the network problem: the telephone network is only important if there are a lot of telephones attached to it. q: how important is second life? a: how many people are using it?
so we shall see if second life reaches that critical mass, that spark, to become what it already pretends it is in its pr... or if some other online universe becomes that de facto standard of social group exchange online... or if the real world doesn't need a second life
because a lot of really cool ideas never pan out just because people don't find utility for them. second life could be such a high minded stab in the dark that goes nowhere. or i could be wrong and it will be bigger than google. who knows? i don't know, and i don't pretend to... but don't let second life pr tell you they do know, they don't know either
another avenue is that second life will try a few other things besides its much vaunted currency exchange. if it keeps fumbling around with a few ideas, it may suddenly hit that spark, and be something big, something big that was not what it was intended for, but something big nonetheless, if second life allows some experimentation with its reason for being
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh, yeah, I'm sure they'd pay Slashdot to run an article saying "Is Second Life actually useful at all?"
These objections seem to rest on three claims:
1) Second Life has over-stated its number of active users by counting every registered account as an active user.
2) Second Life suffers from reliability problems.
3) "... there is no actual utility in Second Life for anyone who isn't there for the sake of feeling as if they're on some sort of cutting edge (or who are among the 10 people or so who manage to make some decent money via the virtual world by selling custom dildos and virtual prostitution services." (Emphasis added.)
As for the first claim, big deal. So there are roughly a million "registered users" and roughly 10,000 users online at any given time. That's a difference of a hundred-fold. But it's not worth getting worked up about; it's just a standard PR tactic. See also: hard drive manufacturers whose advertised hard drive capacities are slightly higher than the actual capacity of the drive, due to counting a "Gigabyte" as 1,000 MB instead of 1,024 MB.
For the second, outages are pretty common in most services. This, too, is pretty much par for the course. Nothing to get worked up about.
The third objection is the most interesting, since the blogger seems to think that "actual utility" means "everybody makes money." Which is just silly. Second Life was never intended to make money for anyone but 1) the company, and 2) a small number of exceptionally diligent users, maybe, if they're lucky. Most of the users -- particularly the active ones -- seem to be more interested in using Second Life for social activities (e.g. chat), and building their own dream-environments, lovingly decked out with elaborate houses, swimming pools, trees, etc. That's a "utility" that has nothing to do with making money for yourself.
If the Rah Rah Second Life rhetoric irritates the blogger, there's a simple solution: stop reading it.
The whole reason for the existence of both is social networking. Making money is clearly a big deal for some SL users, but without other users to actually buy their virtual goods or rent space to build upon, the creators/sellers wouldn't have a market.
Personally, having been in SL off and on for over a year, I think it's a product with limited shelf-life. The developers have been promising big things, like better physics, rendering and interface tools for next to forever, but between community resistance to change and their own middling competencies (not to mention popular interactive items that depend on bugs and bad scripting to function), their efforts have dwindled to very basic bug-fixing and quality of life tweaks, while doggedly chasing after investment capital. Major changes risk forcing the users to re-learn or rebuild their projects, but at the same time other outfits are developing similar applications that leave SL in the virtual dust.
Second life (to me at least) just seems like another MUD/MUCK, only with a lot less creativity. Almost all the icons are made by a small group of people and you have to buy one (because most of us don't have that much artistic talent to make something that looks good), a lot of the actions you do are programs that you or someone else probably bought (because too many people don't want to learn another language, or programming).
I've watched people play with Second Life, and I see them always clicking on lots of actions, and clicking on lots of poses, etc etc etc. It seems to me that a large percentage of interaction and behavior in Second Life is made up of canned actions and behaviors. Which is to say: not very creative. Yes you have a pretty interface and we all know how a lot of people can't resist pretty pictures on a screen, but content-wise I think it tends to be pretty vapid.
Except of course for the people who make a lot of money off of it, (and I know more than one bringing home several hundred dollars of real cash per month from sales to the other users). To them I'm sure it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I guess from their point of view they're right. But I just don't find it to be very interesting or entertaining.
Yeah I have to vote for "unsubstantiated public relations".
Whenever I read any of the SL articles, I always have to wonder, have any of these people actually played the game?
Here is my experience from having tried it a few times:
1) I log in, there's a ton of people sitting around in crazy costumes chatting. Lots of typing sound effects. So far so good.
2) I try to find something cool. It took me a while before I figured out how to use the map, or bring up the list of popular destinations, but I can get that far now. By the way, the GUI moves like molasses. It's painful to use.
3) I warp in to a new area. At first I don't see anything but terrain. Gradually, distant shapes begin to stream in. I try to fly around as things are streaming in, but I keep hitting invisible walls. It takes about a minute of streaming before I can actually see the walls I'm running in to.
4) After about 2 minutes of waiting, the area finishes streaming in. 99% of the time, it's a store. And 90% of the time, it's specifically a clothing store, either selling a) clever t-shirts, or b) sexy female models.
5) Repeat at step 2
SL is great in concept, but right now the execution of that concept just isn't there. And I can forgive some stuff. I can forgive the fact that most of the user-created content is crap. But I can't get past the horribly slow GUI, and the horribly slow streaming of new content. They are show-stoppers for me.
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
There is a blowback from firing your guns before you're ready to start the race. Timing is everything when it comes to virality. That's why similar services may fail once, succeed over the top a second time, and barely limp by a third time. People won't go there, or won't stay there, if there's no "there" there. Sometimes this can have the effect of peeing in the pool: #2 can't hit because the rube base has been soured by #1.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
It's so cheap as to be free (I got a perma-account back when they were giving them away, dunno if they still do that)
It frequently doesn't work.
It's pretty farking ugly.
Constantly going down on just about everyone.
Meaningless, worthless except to narcissists.
Frequently seen in odd sexual practices.
No visible means of support; somehow able to make money despite not actually DOING anything, and doing that poorly, if you can believe it.
Doesn't like guys who play World War 2 Online.
I'd say that's a pretty solid YES.
-Styopa
As a fairly well-known Second Lifer, I think it's got plenty of good applications. The most obvious is clearly entertainment: the ability to attend live music acts several times a week now that I'm in my married 30s instead of my single 20s has a huge appeal to me
I have to point out you're not actually attending anything. You're sitting at home on your computer watching hyper-polygoned facimilies of people move around arhythmicly while an mp3 is streamed to you. You're no more "attending a concert" than "attending the World Series" when you watch on television. Or storming the beaches of Normandy when you're playing Medal of Honor. The experiences are completely different.
There's a real world where there are real experiences, and then there's the virtual world where the expereinces are a pale in every comparison. To conflate the two is either to be naive in the extreme, or to be disingenuous.
I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
People use SL for primarily three things now.
The first is socializing. People love logging into SL and chatting in a 3d environment. Why? It's expressive. Why do Slashdot users hang around in programming IRC rooms, or post on Slashdot? Community. Participation. Chatting. Whatever. SL users do that all the time. Except now they can have a visual interpretation to their words; humans are a visual creature, after all.
The second is creativity. I've run into so many creative people using SL as a creative release (myself included). If you have a creative drive of any sort, SL is a huge sink of that. Houses, motorcycles, characters, machinima, whatever.
The third, becoming more prevalent now, is moneymaking. People make money in SL in two ways: producing compelling content (avatars, clothing) and selling a boatload of it, or by doing promotional work for companies wanting to get their foot in the door (companies like Millions of Us and the Electric Sheep Company do this). The former is less lucrative than the latter, currently, but is also less likely to be affected by the obvious bubble this is causing.
In short, SL is what you make of it. Sex house? Sure. Creative playground? Yep. Marketing gimmick? You bet.
So's real life.
hookers and grits.
1) Free is good; isn't slashdot all about the open source movement, blah blah blah?
2) Working for me right now.
3) Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And, the world is made by amateurs, not professionals. Sturgeon's Law.
4) If people stopped grey-gooing the grid, this wouldn't be an issue.
5) All games and chatrooms are meaningless.
6) Because Lord knows, there aren't any deviant sexual people in real life...
7) The act of creating isn't doing anything? Awesome, I'll be sure to send that memo over to Da Vinci.
8) Because the contingent there were racist homophobes who shot their neighbors?
Sheesh.
hookers and grits.
>> it's too early
It's not too early to understand Second Life's implementation and to call it a disaster, because that is not changing. And it won't change. We've explained the problem to them repeatedly, to no avail.
I've been on Second Life a couple of years, and I still am, because the concept of Second Life is fantastic and I would love to see them succeed. But it won't, it can't possibly, because it's designed like a toy instead of for growth.
The problem is simple: SL's servers are mapped physically and logically into a static grid, where each server implements a fixed number of zones (called "sims"), usually just 1. This server does all the processing for everything in that zone (excluding database), and that includes all objects, all land-related storage, all scripting, and all handling of people in that zone.
Now early on in SL's life, some incompetent designer convinced the CEO that this is scalable, simply because you can extend the grid north-south and east-west as much as you like. Unfortunately, he or she failed to see that this is only scalable as long as all people and all objects stay in their home zones. Needless to say, that kills any prospects the world may have had stone dead. No crowds, no major sporting events, no well-populated pop concerts, no nothing beyond nightclub size, because 1 machine per zone (no matter how powerful) simply cannot scale that way.
Replacing each sim server by a cluster can't help, because SL zones can't be processed in a distributed manner. Huge multi-core SMP machines operating on a single server image might work, but then their entire business model of "one cheap machine per zone" would break down. And they can't put just a few big-iron machines in and restrict the large events to those zones, because anyone can hold an event on their own land, and that would discriminate between zones.
Another way of explaining the problem: processing people takes up most of a zone server's CPU in Second Life, but when people move from their home zone to another, the CPU power of their home zone does not follow them. So the server at an event is massively oversubscribed, while the one at home is now idle. It's inherently non-scalable for events and for objects that move between zones.
I've told their CEO and lots of other people there about this many times (and given them dynamically scalable solutions too), but it's bad news so the message is accepted politely and then ignored.
And yes, it *is* very bad news, because not only does it mean that Second Life has no future as it stands, it also means that there will be a revolution should they try to retrofix it. Because you see their business model is based on people paying for computing resources, and the economics of a dynamically allocated design are radically different. 400K+ landlords will suddenly find that their "investment" is now worthless, because land acreage is merely inactive storage in a dynamic architecture, and will cost almost nothing.
Which is almost certainly why Linden Labs haven't bitten the bullet and replaced their static design. It will be too painful. And now it may be too late.
Still, I wish them luck. The concept of Second Life has huge potential. It was just let down by a system architect who didn't understand scalability in a living virtual world, where people actually leave home and want to gather in events.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Actually, it's nothing like the World Wide Web, because it's proprietary and centralized.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz