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?"
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. My real-life company also uses it to train our field technicians on the under-the-asphault workings of gas stations. For some reason, the community has a really cool feel to it, and I've made quite a few friends who have transitioned to become real-life friends, and mingle with my real life friend crowd. I don't understand the haters at Slashdot: I'm not a gamer, never have been, and Second Life is the only 3-D application I really use these days. Second Life is not a game, it's a far more complex application and network (everything is streamed), so comparisons to MMOGs that store 99% of the content on the hard drive and have professional content creators really isn't fair.
I never got a good feeling of community at Active Worlds, which Second Life has in spades. There's a huge academic community within Second Life as well who seem fairly convinced that the educational possibilities of Second Life are immense. When I first joined Second Life after reading about content creators retaining IP rights to their creations on Slashdot in 2003, I thought I'd check it out for the free one-week trial. Here I am three years later, running real-life conventions for Second Life enthusiasts with keynote speakers like Mitch Kapor! Try it, it might surprise you.
No matter how many times I've checked out SL it leaves the same impression: crap
Considering how powerful video cards and PCs have become it's unforgivable for a product like this to have such ugly graphics and such poor performance. The flexibility is really interesting but to what end? People blundering with choppy video about in an empty looking 3d world with as much visual depth as a Mario game?
Second Life is a test bed, that's it. It is far too crappy to be significant.
If people want something, by definition, it has value. If people don't, it could be made out of the rarest material in the universe and it still wouldn't have value. Nothing has an inherent value. And as long as people are willing to trade goods/services for a piece of virtual property, it has as much value as a piece of real property.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
in that TerraNova thread, but rather on the whole thought of the 3d Web. In fact, that's what most of the discussion was about, not SL in specific.
-Raph
Im currently working as Art Director/Builder on what from my knowledge is the most ambitious project on the Second Life platform to date. I have always been a huge skeptic when it comes to much of the hype about SL. It is just beginning to show signs of being what it promotes itself as.
Decentralized education and social networking are its two main potentials right now so far as sustainable business models are concerned. The platform is still clunkier than serious investors in its uses would prefer, but it continues to evolve. It is too early to say with any degree of certainty that it will or won't achieve its promise. There is no question however to those that are involved in pushing Second Life's application, that a virtual platform like Second Life will have a multitude of uses in education, simulation and social networking. Yes it is early for it, but I think SL is hanging on and pushing the concept to the masses to attempt to spur the development along. I have worried recently that Linden Lab risk expanding their user base to a level they can't handle serving, but I'd rather have too much business than not enough so long as it doesnt ruin the future prospects with bad impressions.
And so much of the press from Linden Lab, including the 3 articles a day posted on Slashdot, ignore one use of Second Life that is extremely profitable (as many businesses in SL are, Bubble 2.0 or not). SEX. Virtual sex may be the holy grail of pornography. Second Life is already a platform for it and projects for networked sexual I/O hardware devices are already in the working model stage.
So really, just like the early World Wide Web: Second Life is clunky but shows signs of real promise. It's rife with overinflated business hype. And it always has sex to keep it afloat.
As far as the comparison to Paris Hilton: no Second Life is not the slutty ho-bag of MMORPGs. Wait! maybe it is . . . *logs into SL*
I think the Paris Hilton analogy fits more with the current residents than with the game world itself... And yeah, the residents that I've seen have mainly been what PR has shown me. So that's probably not an accurate stereotype (ha!) for all SL players.
Second Life is an environment whose main purpose is social. It gives people a place to express their artistic creativity, and take advantage of freedoms that they can't find in their real lives. They take the concept of player created content to a whole new level, and that's impressive. Not only do they give the player the freedom to make what they want, they also provide incentive to, in the fact that they have IP rights over their creations and can sell them to other players.
I read somewhere that SL was inspired largely by Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. There, I can't fault them either. There are few books that would be better inspiration for an online world. There's still a wide gap though, both technological and societal, between Stephenson's concept and Second Life. The immersiveness is not quite there for me yet. I see it more as a hip hangout place for... those who fit nicely (and willingly) into stereotypical groups... to meet. I.E. MySpace 3D.
In addition to showing us a grand picture of the future of society, Stephenson also showed us many of the problems associated with such a world. This world too has its own share of misery. The very fact that we have to escape to another world to feel free... That says something. Those who try to escape from their problems are doomed to drag them along. And even as people escape to this new frontier, the corporations will follow them. We've already seen a couple big companies jump on the SL boat.
While in many ways this is new, it's also following a pattern. The pattern of any major frontier. Right now it's in the Wild West stage... once big businesses move in they're going to pull legistation with them, and it's going to get mucked down in beaurocratic non-sense.
So I'm waiting. I'm curious to see how this all works out, but I really don't see any personal advantage for me in joining SL right now. More time/effort/money dedication than an MMO, and essentially the same social exposure... No thanks guys, I'll pass. Good luck, I'll be keeping an eye out, but it's not for me right now.
So I went to register: first they want an email address; then they want the marketing data; then they want your credit card number. Not that they're ever going to charge it, you understand. They just want to hold it on their database where it gives them a warm and cozy feeling.
It's classic sleazeball technique. Get as much resalable data from the mark as possible, starting with the least intrusive, and working up to something that could actually be used to defraud. I don't trust them, based purely on their methodology.
Needless to say, I didn't sign up. The next great step forward in computer aided interactions can happen without me, thank you very much.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
You're right in that sense, a landlord is not just a property owner.
But given that acreage prices plummetting will have exactly the same effect on the ordinary single-property holders (they'll have to sell at a fraction of their purchase price too), it impacts on all land owners, not just the land barons.
While house owners are not businesses strictly speaking, they'll make a loss too.
Actually, each simulation/region is running on one CPU of a multi-cpu server box (of which most of their servers are now "Class IVs" which are quad-processor boxen). So you have four sims sharing everything else in a single server, but having a single CPU dedicated to each one.
As for the rest of SL, the concept is wonderful; the problem is they are trying to turn it into something silly which is not only unsupported by their core design, it goes against the whole point of being in SL. It's a social game. They want to turn it into a decentralized 3D web platform for the most superficial of interactions between people. The whole concept of "building a community" around a theme is being turned upside down and pretty much thrown out by their aim to mass-commercialize it.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Screw entertainment, Second Life makes it exceedingly easy to create elaborate 3D online multimedia projects, machinima, games, you name it. I've been developing large projects on it since the damn thing opened, and I now run a 12-person company that focuses exclusively on Second Life development. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people living off Second Life already. How's that for utility?
Check out a list of all the profitable businesses developing stuff for SL:
http://secondlife.com/developers/
Now, I know just about everyone there on that list, and I can assure you that we are all pretty busy. Heck, I'm not even *ON* that list and I have about 8 projects going and I'm hiring all the time. (know LSL? know PHP? send me your resume! we may need up to 40 mini-games done in three months, among other things)
SL includes a firefox-based web browser, and can fully integrate with web servers as it contains a scripting language that allows programmatic communications with the "outside world" through email, XMLRPC or even HTTP.
Think of it as an easy way to make web applications, except with fancifully interactive 3D graphics. If you think there are no practical applications for SL then surely you must think the same thing about the web. E-commerce, banking, casinos and puzzle games, or even full-scale commercial quality games. Those little flash games everyone plays now and then? You can now do the same in 3D, and people are loving it.