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?"
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?
Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds?
I dunno, how easy is Second Life?
(The summary already states that it's ubiquitous, apparently useless and is subject to frequent downtime...)
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.
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.
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.
>> 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