The Creative Power of Second Life

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. "

Re:Creative my ass

[AdamTrace]

My friend and I both submitted our cards. I didn't have any problem, and doubt I'll see any fruadulent charges (or ANY charges).

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. :)

Of course, the furry fandom is all over that

[greenreaper]

Places like The Forest [wikicities.com], FurNation Worlds [wikicities.com] and Luskwood [wikicities.com] are brimming with user-created stuff. Not all of it is very good [luskwood.com], but there's certainly a market for it - or at least a lot of people willing to create stuff in the hope that they can sell it.

Re:Creative my ass

[QuantumG]

Sure you are. You're missing the most horrific example available today of what DRM on physical objects will be like in the not too distant future. I'd love to teach a class where I justify the right of creators to control how people use their creative works, then set the students loose in Second Life and see how long it takes them to come to the conclusion that being dominated by the arbitary whims of others is not a good thing.

Re:Creative my ass

[AlexMax2742]

I personally don't create things. An acquantince of mine got banned for making a 'fetus cannon' as a joke. Also, a good number of other acquantinces got banned over similarly silly shit. Apparently being offensive is all right as long as you're one of the 'accepted offensive' standards.

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 like there were eyes watching me everywhere I went.

For the uneducated, W-Hat is notorious for being greifers and unpleasent people to be around. Or at least that's the line you get when you visit SL.com forums. In reality, W-Hats are/were some of the most creative people I ever met, who got screwed over because a bunch of the pivital members got banned for "offensive content" that really amounts to nothing more harmful than the fetus cannon I was refering to earlier. Really, is pissing people off a crime?

Oh yeah, and one of our (then) newer guys made the very first greifsphere. He's banned, and he didn't bother coming back, get over it.

Oh, and maybe one of us shoved you and knocked you ten sims away at some time in the past, but honestly, you're just as likely to run into that with random assholes, and it's against W-Hat rules to be assholes to people anyway.