Those of you who knew me in-world as Vincent Shore may have noticed my absence from the metaverse as of late; and some of you who know me as the developer of Squawk, the social network integration tool for Second Life, may have questioned why I decided to sell my project. I thought now would be a good time to go over my reasoning behind my departure, if only to straighten the thoughts in my own mind.
For those unfamiliar with the platform, Second Life is an Internet-connected 3D virtual world. You might think of it like a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft, minus the game. Second Life is a world where you exist as a infinitely customizable avatar, where the citizens of the world set the rules (for the most part) and define the shape the world takes. You can build anything your imagination can conceive by using primitives or molding it’s shape in an external 3D program and importing it, and then you can give it “life” by scripting it’s invisible intelligence. Users can then give away these creations, or even sell them for Linden Dollars; the inworld currency that can be traded back and forth for real cash using PayPal.
Take Squawk, for example. Squawk is a tool that allows you to take presencing platforms like Twitter and Jaiku, along with social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia, and apply these tools to your virtual life. For example, let’s say you come across someone’s virtual shop where they sell a shirt you really like, and you want to share this find with your friends. From inworld, you could Twitter your find, which has a positional vector (or geocode, as I called it) attached to it. You Twitter friends see this update (and might even receive notification of your find on their cell phone, if they’re so inclined to get them), and can then login to Second Life themselves and visit that precise spot you marked.
Its ideas like this that has made Second Life a lovechild of the technologist community. So, it should come as no surprise that companies like IBM, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker and many others have taken a strong interest in Second Life as a platform for sales, marketing and indeed technological research.
However, as fascinating and exciting as Second Life is in concept and potential, the inherent sociological and technological flaws in the platform have also lead to an overwhelming rejection of the platform as a whole. Second Life’s society is almost entirely Anarchistic. Besides Linden’s involvement in matters of user harassment, real-world copyright infringement, and other breaches of their terms of service, the citizens of Second Life live without moral boundaries or ethical guidelines. The sexual deviants, the technologists, the entrepreneurs and the average citizens- each can expose and fulfill their desires, for better or worse, in this virtual world. As fascinating a social experiment as this may be, therein lies the greatest fault of Second Life, the reason why it will never gain a large user base. Technologists don’t want sexual deviants. Entrepreneurs don’t care about copyrights, besides their own misguided views of their own. Sexual deviants don’t want moral restrictions or ethical terms of use. Average citizens just want to build their goofy little homes, ignore the entrepreneurs’ sprawl of the landscape, and don’t want to pay land use fees.
Whether they knowingly do it or not, Second Life is a world competing for the love of a thousand different personalities’, each struggling to consume the hearts and minds of the populace. The sexual deviants want to turn SL into an enormous red light district, the average citizen wants a slightly less shitty Sims Online, the entrepreneurs want to get rich from a big ass 3D eBay, and the technologists just want everyone else to shut up so they can script in peace. On the surface everything seems OK in the world, but there are clearly sociological problems at the very foundation of the world, issues that have and will continue to bring Second Life further and further out of line with the interest of its citizens.
Perhaps more importantly, though, this mish-mash of ideologies, goals and ethics creates an enormous complex and unwelcoming setting for new users. Rarely does an hour go by when simply exploring the landscape of Second Life becomes a frustrating inundation of life-like nude skins, celebrity body shapes and realistic, fully functional genitals. Eventually you learn to block out the things you’re seeing in the world; to make yourself believe that the good of the whole outweighs the bad.
Eventually, however, I came to a realization. It’s not worth it. An exciting technology platform that can’t decide what it wants to be, and will never have the acceptance of the mass market precisely because of that, isn’t worth working on. No matter the genius the technologists expose in their works, it will always be overshadowed by the deviants pawning their realistic penises, the entrepreneurs trying shoving a eye-sore shop in every conceivable plot of land on the landscape, and the average citizen building pointless and horrifically ugly virtual homes next door to you.
However, neither Linden nor the community seem to see the problems with the platform that the rest of the world does. Linden is too busy adding pretty sky effects, inworld voice communication and trying to keep its aging infrastructure online to apparently concern themselves with fixing the sociological issues of their world. What’s fascinating is that Linden has openly admitted that they barely break even with Second Life, with much of their cash coming from the ridiculously expensive land hosting fees. Given the fact that it’s been online for three or so years now, it’s safe to say that Second Life as a technology has reached it’s peak audience. If this is truly the case, and the company is still breaking even, wouldn’t it make sense to want to broaden the appeal of your product? I hear that money stuff kind of comes in handy when you’re trying to grow a business.
Either Linden needs to make a tough decision, or the community does. Is Second Life going to be a research technology, a creative platform, a red light district or a 3D eBay. Until the world get’s its own vision of itself straight, there is no hope for it as a whole, and ultimately it will collapse under the weight of its own monumental mistakes.
I, for one, gave up. I don’t see Linden understanding the flaws of their design anytime soon, nor do I see the community changing for the better. Anarchy doesn’t work, in the real world of the virtual one, and a product without a clear vision or quality control will utterly fail to entice new users.
Tags: rants, technology
.
