Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds? 105
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?"
Well I'm no expert on Paris but... (Score:3, Funny)
Does Second Life have real utility, or is it simply an endless exercise in unsubstantiated public relations?
Yes
Or to give it its full name... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or to give it its full name... (Score:5, Insightful)
What does worth mean exactly?
Who gets to decide what has real worth?
Isn't it the case that the market decides what something is worth, and that you don't decide?
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You know why you can't figure out how to calculate that? Because it's impossible. Nothing has inherent value. All value is decided by the buyer and seller.
Even in 'collusion' and 'monopoly', the value is set by the buyer and seller. You don't HAVE to buy gas for your car. You could find a closer job and just walk. Or take a bus. Or... Whatever.
Walmart is undercutting other pharmacies and selling at a loss to attract business to themselves. Th
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Certainly there is a 'true value' for everything; it's the cost to produce it, both in actual outlay for supplies and in production time -- but measuring the value of production time can be slippery. This value is useful, however, only for the producer determining how many to make; the subsequent market value may bear no relationship to the true value
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Production cost certainly helps the seller decide what the 'value' is to them. It means absolutely nothing to the buyer. That's why you've "seen products that sold for prices that, given the production time, equated to no more than $1.00 per hour as a wage, far below the 'minimum wage' set by law." Intrinsic value doesn't truly exist. It
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But the value of Second Life is mighty rarified.
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Two points:
1) Lindens (currency in SL) can be converted to IRL currency. A small subset of the players that run shops and islands actually turn a RL profit every month. So, for these people there is a monetary worth.
2) Its a world where friendships can be made, creativity expressed and other forms of joy experienced. This can have value to people. Such value cannot be measured
Re:Or to give it its full name... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sour Grapes.... (Score:2)
2 cents,
QueenB.
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Which? (Score:2, Funny)
Don't you need a first life ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Don't you need a first life ... (Score:4, Funny)
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(a) can not understand how others might not do as well as them (or enjoy the types of interactions they enjoy)
(b) want those 'losers' visible and around so they have someone to be doing better then. After all, what good is your place in the social order if you do not have most people benieth you?
How much are they paying slashdot editors? (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:How much are they paying slashdot editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, we need to get back to why the Nintendo Wii will rock the house!
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Don't let Slashdot fool you -- the Xbox is evil too.
Utility? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Small nit to pick.. Second Life doesn't charge a monthly fee. You pay for "Linden Dollars" to spend on things in the game.
-matthew
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I believe my personal value judgement on that would be no.
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Check out a list of all the profitable businesses developing stuff for SL:
http://secondlife.com/developers/ [secondlife.com]
Now,
Well, in 2nd lifes defense (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well, in 2nd lifes defense (Score:5, Funny)
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We've seen the video. I think this statement is a point in favor of Second Life.
i've been on second life a few times (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:i've been on second life a few times (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, what it requires to do this is to have a decentralized system in which you run your own servers for your own properties, and no central server is required at all. Just like the WWW.
We all pictured this when the nice people at Epic were announcing that the Unreal engine was getting portals to other servers, but then it was degraded back to portals between chunks of map and it wasn't exciting any more.
VRML has links to other VRMLs but VRML is poop. I mean, what it does, it does okay, but it doesn't do nearly enough. What we need is something more like cube/sauerbrauten with inter-server portals. It would be okay if these were teleporters or something so that you couldn't look into the other server's map, which is a hard thing to do, unlike the teleporter thing which should be really, really easy! I mean, I'm not a good enough programmer to approach the project at all right now so I should probably just shut my piehole, but the games already tend to have teleporter entities so all that is needed is a little bit of code to check to see if servers are up when you get near or step on a portal, and then to tell your client to jump to another server/map if it is.
And, if you used sauerbraten, then you would get in-game editing; it would be the closest thing to a graphical MUD that we've had yet, since it would allow building.
The only other piece that we'd need to support this properly is user-uploadable player models/skins.
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I've even made my own in Adobe Photoshop, using the freely supplied templates, and using model pictures from the web.
Because of this ability to photoreference you will not find better looking avatars in any video game at this point in time (oct. 2006). Only 3d modelling software betters them.
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I don't think usage needs to be too high. It really depends on the scope of the world (size and features) vs. the number of people online at any given time. I mean, you could have a successful world with 100 users as long as they are not spread out too thinnly. Nobody wants to walk through Second Life and see a ghost town.
I was only on SL for a weekend.
Second Life is totally non-scalable (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Most people in SL buy land to have a place of their own, not to get into the land business. The vast majority of the population wouldn't mind at all if land suddenly got a lot cheaper.
The ones that would care would be a select very few, like Anshe Chung, for instance.
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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.
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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. Th
You mean... ? (Score:3, Funny)
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re: Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual... (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno, how easy is Second Life?
(The summary already states that it's ubiquitous, apparently useless and is subject to frequent downtime...)
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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
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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
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7) The act of creating isn't doing anything? Awesome, I'll be sure to send that memo over to Da Vinci.
Relativism, ahoy!
I'm not sure the it logically follows that "since DaVinci created masterpieces, that all acts of creation are therefore valuable"?
8) Because the contingent there were racist homophobes who shot their neighbors?
Funny, I thought it
Second Life has plenty of good uses (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I joined Active Worlds [activeworlds.com] years ago -- 1998, God, has it really been that long? -- and I got a terrific feeling of community. There were teachers to help you learn to build, storytelling groups, role-players, assorted card/board game worlds. There were thousands of users o
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"Live"??
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As for live music acts, yes, a lot of local musicians and bands from around the world actually perform live on Second Life. Sometimes it's just a feed from practice, other times a solo artist, but always a lot of fun.
I was in ActiveWorlds at the same time you were, and yes, it really did get screwed. Going through several iterations of ownership and basically never being updated really didn't help; SL is
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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 "
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SL occupies a space between TV and "actually being there". Of course it's not the same, but it lets this guy get closer to the real thing than he would otherwise. And he appreciates that. So what's the problem?
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Thoughts From a Former Frequent Second Lifer (Score:5, Informative)
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The scripting language, and the relative ease with
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Ho hum (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Does Myspace? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Such as?
Still ugly, buggy and unimpressive (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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You summed up my feelings quite nicely.
I haven't been frustrated by an online game since Anarchy Online. The performance is god-awful. Moving was a bear since it was done via keyboard and t
It's like a MUD, only without the creativity... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I pick unsubstantiated public relations (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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No (Score:4, Funny)
LK
I wasn't bagging on SL in particular... (Score:2, Interesting)
-Raph
hmm (Score:2)
I have to imagine that other online services must be a bit jealous, however; I mean, with WoW, you couldn't really make a press release out of activities in the game in the way you can with Second Life, because (using a recent example) companies aren't going to host a pr
Just thinking (Score:2)
Now, the first time I ever logged into Second Life, I ran around a lot, and tried to figure out what to do. After a while, I stumbled across various people (not NPCs) learning how to script, or testing something, or playing with things other people had scripted. Th
SL just beginning to show signs of real potential (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:SL just beginning to show signs of real potenti (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's nothing like the World Wide Web, because it's proprietary and centralized.
not Snow Crash yet... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
I think.... (Score:1)
*ducks*
Well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Scond Life? No Thanks! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I have to confess to mixed feelings now. I'd still quite like to take a look around, but the credit card episode doesn't really inspire confidence. I suppose the gripping hand is that I don't really have the time, in any case.
Still, kudos to them for cleaning up their act, at any rate.
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