The Creative Power of Second Life 50
Alice, over at Kotaku, has a post up looking at what Second Life means to the Web 2.0 crowd. Cory Ondrejka gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about what 2L is about, and dropped some interesting statistics on the audience. From the article: "Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here: Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week. That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. "
23,000 human hours??? (Score:1)
V1agra11111!11 (Score:4, Funny)
He he! with all these in game terminals and AIM api being free, soon you will get "get larger" IMs and mails in game as well as in real life.
Created a what now? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?
Re:Created a what now? (Score:1, Informative)
Conclusion: People are stupid.
Re:Created a what now? (Score:2)
Re:Created a what now? (Score:2)
Re:Created a what now? (Score:2)
99% of it is shit (Score:5, Insightful)
If only... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If only... (Score:1)
No one ever went broke... (Score:2)
Re:Umm... (Score:2)
Thats harsh... Quake I didn't come out til 1997.
Secondly, the only online games by 1997 was Ultima Online, M59 and muds. I don't think they can compare at all in graphics.
If you said "oh-so-2000" then I'd agree.
Creative my ass (Score:1, Insightful)
Then, on page 2 of the registration process, after having already picked out a name and given an email address I find out they need a credit card number for 'age verification'. That is, if you are in a country that they cant send a verifying SMS message to a mobile, as was my situation.
The only other in
Re:Creative my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
My friend, however, had his credit card company call him with a "suspicious charge". Apparently LL charges $1 to the card, and then credits it back (I guess to verify that it's a real card?!) Sounds kinda weird.
I don't have a problem with it, but obviously YMMV.
As for Second Life... I started it up just as a lark. I'm a coder, and I liked the idea of creating and scripting objects for fun. And it's been a lot of fun. I answered a couple want-ads, looking for scripters, and have actually gotten paid to create some casino games.
I'm not going to retire off it, but I don't remember making money or particularly using my brain (Fireball, Scorch, Scorch, Scorch, Frost Nova, repeat) in WoW... so it's been fun.
The furries, however... they scare me a little.
Re:Creative my ass (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know why the furries scare you though. Luskwood seems to be full of geeks, it's great.
Re:Creative my ass (Score:1)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:1)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:1)
Meh, I check it out. At least it's one of the few "MMO" (yes i'm aware it's not really a MMO, more like a 3D online chat thingy) that don't require you to make a "private server" just to have custom scripting possible. Though it makes me wonder if the freedom been too mu
Re:Creative my ass (Score:2)
Yes, there are malicious items, but in my experience, Linden Labs deals very swiftly with abusers. The client logs people who for instance push you, and allows to easily report abuse if it happens.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:1)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:1, Informative)
they can check the age from the phone company's records.
I don't see how, at least the way the system works in the UK. Either they are pre-pay, which are common amongst adults and minors, in which case there's no phone company records on the person; or they are contract, which will be paid by an adult regardless of whether an adult or minor uses it.
Paying for your phone (Score:1)
Either [mobile phones] are pre-pay, which are common amongst adults and minors, in which case there's no phone company records on the person
So how do you pay the bill without a card?
or they are contract, which will be paid by an adult regardless of whether an adult or minor uses it.
But if the adult willfully gives the phone to a minor, then the adult is responsible for everything that the minor does using the phone.
Re:Paying for your phone (Score:2)
Well, the way it's done here in the US is you go to the grocery store and buy a phone top-up card with cash. The card has a code on it, which you type into your phone to apply the credit to your account. Since it's a prepaid account, not a monthly plan, there is no "bill" - if your account balance drops to zero, your phone just stops working until you bring it back up.
With some prepaid phone companies (Virgin Mobile, at least) you don't even need to give your name.
Re:Paying for your phone (Score:2)
The old way of getting is to basically buy a bit of card with a secret number on it that'll add £x to your balance when you phone your operator and dial it in. The new way is that you get a card (magnetic stipe I think) lets retailers which display a "Top Up" logo directly credit your phone. Lloyds TSB now have an option
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:2)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:2, Informative)
However, I have a feeling this isn't the "work of art" you're talking about. I've seen this complaint time and time again.
Often people who register complaints like yours seem to think that "speech" or "art" includes using a scripted weapon designed
Re:Creative my ass (Score:3, Interesting)
I might be a bit biased, because I was a member of the W-Hat group. I assume I still am, but last I checked the old land plot we used to own all of and build shit on is a shadow of what it once was, and since I felt lik
Re:Creative my ass (Score:2, Insightful)
Say you're a member of a club, one that has a physical building (health club, Elks club, whatever). You can do and say a lot of things inside that building. But not very many such places wou
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Creative my ass (Score:2)
Right then. But how can they say that...say...furry porn should be tolerated while fetus cannons shouldn't? How can you say which one is more offensive than the other?
I think it's more o
Re: (Score:1)
Of course, the furry fandom is all over that (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course, the furry fandom is all over that (Score:1)
Re:Of course, the furry fandom is all over that (Score:1)
Monkeys and Typewriters (Score:1)
As pointed out by others, a lot of this 'content' that LL didn't have to produce isn't all that great. It's amateur, not professionally developed 'content'. (Yes, the quote marks are indicating sarcasm, or tha
Re:Monkeys and Typewriters (Score:1)
I agree, it's a huge world and probably 90% of it is pretty crappy.
I think it's more like 90/10 than 99/1 though, one thing about secondlife is that first impressions can easily be wrong. It's a huge world and it takes weeks to even see a small part of it. As a newb it's easy to mostly see the crappy parts.
That upper 10% is great, and I don't mean places listed on the "popular" list, those are mostly clubs with camping chairs (yes I thin
Overreliance on playermade content. (Score:2)
Imagine paying a monthly subscription fee and on top of that having to produce your own content to keep the game going. And I hate to say it but more often than not player content and mods are subpar.
What I'd like to see is a union of the two where the developers create
Re:Overreliance on playermade content. (Score:1)
Imagine paying a monthly subscription fee to your ISP and on top of that having to produce your own content to keep the WWW going. And I hate to say it but more often than not user content and pagers are subpar.
The POINT of all this... (Score:1)
I read an article about the early days of the Internet. No one really predicted that if you give someone a web browser, and show them how to write HTML and create a page, that everyone would start producing stuff FOR FREE. In a world dominated by cable-companies selling TV channels, no one could have known that people were so willing to share information just for the sake of doing it. Yes, most of it were pages dedicated to their cats
Marx was wrong? (Score:1)
the "man" hours invested (Score:1)
Obviously, thats not totally true. But she is, imho, to the point of addiction. Her entire schedule is dictated by what she will be doing in secondlife. She even cut back on working in RL by 1 day less (from 2) just so she had more time in game.
I'll admit, she does make about $1K USD every month from her creativity used within the game. Thats nice but her hourly rate has got to be way below minimum wage.
If you enjoy the work, does it matter? (Score:1)