Is Business Still A Game in SL?

Grief-build in SL.

I know it's fashionable to talk about "making RL money in SL" and "RL Work in SL" and there's even a Dutch film-maker to do a documentary on this fascinating subject.

You have only to peruse the running news ticker on SL's home page to see the plethora of studies about making a fortune in a virtual world.

Yet, each day we have to ask ourselves, even with all the improvements and more promised changes to come to group tools:  Is business still a game in Second Life?

I think in an immersive virtual world, you can often forget just how artificial it is (and fragile), even if it is the kind of synthetic world that Edward Castranova is rhapsodizing about in Synthetic Worlds:  The Business and Culture of Online Worlds. (I'm reading this now and finding that Castranova is often more persuasive as a psychologist of these worlds than as an economist, where he tends toward the liberal/left memes. His accounts of just how deeply satisfying human beings find it to make transactions, gather things and sell them and buy other things are fascinating, and you start to realize that human beings are simply hard-wired for commerce and competition, and all this stuff that he and other Internet gurus are still peddling about cooperation and communalism belong to the same kind of fantastic realms they cover).

I run a rentals business and I'd like to reflect about what is *still fake* about business in SL because people tend to gloss over these hardships and realities of virtuality and constantly over-compensate.

1. We are a game-patch economy, lurching from game-patch to game-patch.  In RL, the City Council or the Business Improvement District doesn't suddenly shut down traffic and block buildings from view on Times Square and 42nd Street for the day, and then reload them for you to use later. You don't sit it out in a cafe on 38th St because it's "Wednesday, and that's my world's maintenance day."  You don't suddenly become unable to move as you walk on 42nd Street, and mutter to yourself "damn update's laggy".

Solution:  more rolling patches that are under the radar and if necessary to take down the grid, do it at non-peak hours.

2. Updates break scripts.  In RL, the Xerox machine doesn't suddenly stop working completely just because you've decided to add new product lines or features to your business. If you move to a new office or add more features, you make sure that the basics work first -- ordering the DSL line in advance, making the move on a Sunday night, etc. 

Solution: (do Lindens do this?) Keep a list of most basic resident-created scripts for businesses and other projects. Have the really short "mission-critical list" then longer lists of "necessary" and "optimal" and work with residents to avoid or mitigate them -- not just pets like FIC big business, but anyone who submits a proposal to add their script to the mission-critical list.

3. Stipends flood the currency market. In RL, the government doesn't just endlessly issue pay packets to citizens for doing nothing. It can issue welfare of course, and business incentives. That's fine to do! No reason to summarily remove the $500 stipends from premium accounts as such, but something has to be done to soak up the excess Lindens that are all cashed out to make those premium accounts free.

Solution:  Stipends could be pegged to the actual cost of the US dollar. The $9.95 account should include a guaranteed $7.00 US stipend within it as a purchased product line, but then whatever is issued each week should be actually pegged to the LL/dollar exchange rate.

4. Dwell is gamed. In RL, I don't pass a tracker on my way into the Staples so that the government can pay the Staples owner $5.00 for every minute I spend in the store. My foot traffic into his store might not even correlate with his sales.

Solution:  tie dwell payments to frequency and/or amount of actual sales on the parcel, as defined by payments to a vendor, scripted object, or avatar by the visitor, not the owner. Then mall owners have incentive to make the kind of place their tenants can actually transact business in, rather than fool them into renting because camp chairs have created an inflated sense of sale potential. Of course, that still leaves the system gameable to camp chair kings, but since the Lindens are going to phase out dwell anyway, before it is destroyed, the fascinating study of what actually works for sales in SL must be conducted -- currently we have absolutely no feedback from the Lindens, even in aggregate, and businesses within SL aren't talking.

5. Advertising is discouraged and punished.  In RL, if I own property, I can put up a billboard, or I can take out a classified ad, or buy a radio spot for a huge variety of costs. I don't just get to pay the equivalent of a day's revenue for one big spot on Times Square, or relegate myself to being in some tiny neighbourhood shopper.

Solution:  the Lindens need to crack loose lots more advertising space, especially along Governor Linden roads and public areas like Welcome Areas. They need to completely revamp this ridiculous resident ad system with its clunky interface and create, say, large panels with 16 ads immediately visible, with very, very easy drag and drop instructions and interface, not the silly thing they have now that times out before you can even figure out the controls. They need to override the screeching of the forums nutters and figure out some tolerable places for roadside ads on their land that we can buy space on for Lindens, adding to money sinks.

6. Grief-builds are tolerated and even encouraged.  In RL, a man's home is his castle, but he doesn't get to put up a giant spinning purple tower spewing blood particles named "Hell Hotel" without hearing from the zoning board, the police, or even just a neighbourhood association.

Solution: Existing TOS about disturbance of the peace and affecting the enjoyment of SL simply must be used; the language is there and the discretionary power is there: use it. Concerns about user creativity, while valid, shouldn't be invoked to invalidate the SL experience of hundreds of other customers seeking a more stable house-holding environment. If the Lindens are that committed to the necessity of the world having large, spinning, purple boxes with blood spewing out of them, they need to pay for it themselves in subsidizing huge government projects or sandboxes where anything goes, and not impose it on their tier-payers.

Residents should meet the Lindens more than half way here by forming residential associations to file grievance complaints about builds that block movement, significantly lag sim performance, block the view, or extort or verbally harass -- if 10 people owning on 4 sims can collect the signatures for such a review process, the Lindens should put their money where their mouth is and simply move that griefer at their own expense to the government-subsidized sandbox area for his residence. Hey, it's a virtual world, and where you physically play with your Hell Hotel shouldn't matter, should it? Unless you were thinking to force a sale by putting it *right here*.

7. Communists flourish and are encouraged. The SL forums are filled with communists. I haven't seen so many communists in one place since I attended sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. And I mean real communists, not just fake red-under-the-bed-communists -- people who have a zealous utopian communard ideal and are prepared not only to stop commerce and business but hang business people from the lamp posts to achieve their ends. In RL, communist parties are in such tiny minorities in most places that they don't even rise to the level of a letter to the editor. Socialists, while they may be in power here and there in this or that little country, or this or that little Community Board in New York City, don't hobble every aspect of the economy.

Solution:  Have LL make a clear-cut, highly-visible, detailed mission statement on their website that spells out their values and visions for the economy. If they really mean to create a free land market as part of their company's business model and their vision of the world, say so. Put it in writing. That will empower business people merely to cut and paste from the vision thing every time a communist charter member with a free 4096 rears their head on the forums. Cut. Paste. Next.

8. The Anti-Commerce Lobby thrives although this is supposed to be a make-money world. In RL, kids, stay-at-home moms, college students, pensioners, disabled persons, wealthy utopians, and others with either fixed incomes, no income, or unlimited incomes are not only in the minority of any society, they don't enforce their views or their chosen life occupations on the overwhelming majority of the working population who seek income to be greater than expenses. A stay-at-home mom exchanging her labour hours for the greater value of raising a decent human being is a consumer of, say, groceries or disposable diapers, but she doesn't scream at the Gristedes and the Rite-Aid owners for selling her products. The college student gets Dad to pay for his $150 Nikes, he doesn't scream at Nike for making and selling sneakers. The pensioner is taking a well-deserved rest from his lifelong labours where the state extracted his social security funds, and plays chess all day, but doesn't scream at people who pay the taxes to keep the park open where he is sitting playing chess.

All of these people who don't themselves engage in the hustle and bustle of life's commerce don't ask the rest of the world to stop in its track to match their chosen lifestyle. They realize balance and symbiosis is needed, and they don't impose their needs on everybody else to the detriment of all.

Solution:  The Lindens need to create a Small Business Administration. This body would emphatically greet, promote, help, facilitate, and celebrate business. Business Linden would regularly announce advertising opportunities, new platform features facilitating commerce, contests, bid opportunities, etc. and be on hand to incentivize business by leveraging resident-run seminars, helping investors find project partners, etc. -- and thereby create a climate for the forums and the inworld presence that sends a signal that while many people would like SL to be part of their off-hours and entertainment, a good proportion of the people responsible for the Lindens' bottom line want something with far more traction that they wish to combine with their RL needs and aspirations. SL should be big enough to accommodate all these desires without overloading any one of them to the detriment of the world's health.

9. Media isn't Independent or Accessible to Buyers. In RL, I don't have to depend on buying a $90,000 New York Times ad just to advertise my yardsale or my translation services. There's a huge array of radio/Internet/local shopper/etc. advertising space and ordinary flyers on the bulletin board at the supermarket or book store. The media space in SL is not only virtually monopolize by the state of Linden Lab; it's poorly monopolized and limited to GULAG-like stentorian announcements about sims shutting down, with only a tiny audience for Linden Radio, about which most people don't know a thing because they never bother to read the forums or the website itself, since usually they come by friends drawing them to the sign-up page and their parcels inworld.

Solution: Permit, encourage, indeed foster the distribution of free media inworld and free up the forums rules.  Start consciously selling time on the state-run media, without fear or favour, on Linden Radio, in Welcome Areas, at townhall podcasts, etc. And don't charge extortionist rates -- currently the rate for a spot on the Linden's web page under "classifieds" is essentially $100 US or so for 7 days to get in the top 15 -- that's just way too costly at one level, and not costly enough given the eyeballage. Provide a much larger range for ordinary, paid advertising with easy interface and billing.

Ads and consumer advocacy also have virtually no room to grow in SL because of two hugely crippling features of the forums and the TOS. One is the deadly connection between forums expression and expulsion from the world -- this is absolutely wrong and must be terminated immediately -- no one should lose a business or property because of something they typed on a forums. Furthermore, the Lindens need to loosen up their punishment for criticism of business, especially by charter members and FIC/SIC, so that the necessary feedback required in a free society is available to bring about prosperity for all. Concerns about "libel" need to be balanced against the need for the free flow of information and ideas in a liberal economy.

10. Justice is much in demand and never supplied. When leftists and lunatics tackle the problem of resident clashes in SL, they always tackle it from the perspective of "dispute resolution" or "a better business bureau" (about which they often have the vaguest idea). This comes from the touchy-feely hippie commune stuff built into the group tools and imbibed in the Kool-Aid so that it comes out in the very textured grass of the world.

But what defrauded customers, bilked commissioners of builds, damaged property owners, etc. need is *justice* meted out by an impartial and fair due process -- they don't need to sit down and sing "Kumbayah" with grief-builders, fraudsters, copy-cat designers, unscrupulous architects, and shoddy pre-fab makers. That means if I can prove that I spent $100 US on a bunch of crappy prefabs that disintegrated upon rezzing and delinked, without any backup copy, the judge should be able to rule in my favour that the prefab creator should restore my copies. He'll have no power to enforce. But a court like this will have enormous rhetorical value in helping to establish the climate of consumer advocacy and care that is missing from the world right now by *publishing its verdicts*.

Solution: There's only one thing asked of the Lindens to make this consumer-oriented court have some effect: stop the prosecution of people who transfer or publish notecarded conversations. Currently, if a person copies a transcript of their conversation in IMs or inworld in chat, and another person takes it and sends it anywhere but to the official Abuse Report system, he can be prosecuted for "disclosure".

This is an absurd, authoritarian, and MMORPG-type of wizardry that has no valid correlary in the real world. While unauthorized tapings of phone calls may not be admissible in court, while copyright of a letter belongs to its author, presenting these materials merely to being the case and persuade a lawyer or prosecutor that there *is* a case is not grounds for punishment. The *inadmissibility* of evidence isn't cause for *prosecution* for supplying it.

If the Lindens can't see their way clear to dropping this clause, at least for inworld transactions (publishing on the forums might be another order of magnitude), they can at least do this: stipulate that ONLY conversations made in *private IMS* are subject to "non-disclosure* and that anything said in open room chat available in chat history is fair game for distribution. That means that people having interactions with store owners, builders, designers, clerks, etc. can capture their chat said openly in the world, not in IMs, and use them for bringing suit in court.

All of this and much more has to be tackled to get the game of business in SL to cease to be a game.

Comments

[Brace]

Excellent article Prokovy!
Well thought out and everything.

I'm with you on the whole business/commercial/advertizing deal.

Its been one of my pet peeves for awhile, and as I keep my eye and things, the situation has worsened.

My jaw just drops when I see this anti-business sentiment not only from residents but from certain staffers.

Either tell philly to shup talking about it every damn where or fix it so folks can do they thing.

Good lookin out, darlin. Gosh knows I'M tired of dealing with it.

[Squeedoo S.]

Noice one, dude.

I agree with everything but I don't really understand your stance on stipends. Could you explain this a little bit more please? Thank you.