The real world in SL is the replica of the RL Dublin...Today I logged into Second Life after a really rough long holiday weekend. Ordinarly, I suppose (if there is anything that's ordinary about SL), I'd be hugely busy with customers new and old and it would generally be good for sales. This weekend was no different -- if anything the promise of a long week off, far from driving people outdoors, seemed to make them come and try SL, and there were lots of new move-ins.
But meanwhile, with the old two steps forward, one step backward phenomenon, I dealt with the worst griefing and problems in the history of my own Second Life.
Friday, the grid was crashed -- most likely by the Plastic Duck gang, a W-HAT faction which I always point out is a faction that, like Arafat's faction, always refuses to renounce terrorism or recruitment of new members with extremist ideas like making wreckage attractive. The name of the griefer with a "Red Helix" self-replicating object that overloaded the servers was "Jew Stein".
Some people like FlipperPA grasped that there was something anti-Semitic about taking such a name in Passover Week. I don't know if he or others thought more deeply about this age-old problem, which is that the crash came on Good Friday, the date marked in the Passion story as the day Christ was crucified. Thus, the ancient anti-Semitic notion, discredited by tolerant religious leaders in all faiths now, that "the Jews are to blame for Christ's death" was reiterated in an avatar taking the name "Jew" so that everyone would instinctively, before they had a chance to think about it, "blame the Jew". Awful stuff. And typical of this faction which often takes names of a racist or anti-Semitic sort of association.
So business was of course off as the Lindens struggled to get the grid working again, and then I found the next day I was attacked yet again in one of my communities. Either one concerted group, or a happenstance severl, have been attacking my communities with fire prims, huge high-prim weapon caches, overloading the sim, bothering tenants by flying around and returning when banned, poking objects into the house, and a new one I saw at an event griefing, by an asswipe named Irvin Maltz -- taking a long attachment to his avatar, an eyeball on a stick, and using animation override I guess, parking himself on neighbouring land I couldn't ban him from, and poking that piece of his avatar into my house. Nice!
A real worlded project...a RL replica...but you still can't walk in and buy a newspaper. Who cares if avatars can't get newspapers in their hands? Let them go read third-party sites on the web...The worst was a horrible particle spewing attack of ugly porn from various objects thrown around -- and until I could get into debug/render/types/particles to turn the particles viewing off at least, I couldn't see what I was doing. A friend helped to solve the problem and we got rid of it, but not before 2 people moved out in disgust, thinking I was doing it to them because a group object was invaded.
I will continue to keep my groups open, I think the value of an open system is greater for convenience and what it means for the world than the losses that occasionally happen from its misuse. Still, it turned into a HUGE nuisance as more objects were found to be strewn around randomly, in enough places so that I had to methodically go through every single community to remove anything suspect. Lindens, completely preoccupied or exhausted from their larger grid attack, couldn't be of assistance.
Then, last night -- hours and hours of down time again while I can't log in -- and before that, no scripts working, no notecards opening, and angry customers clamoring. WHY IS YOUR LAND LAGGY???
I had to stay on many extra hours to solve all the problems, and for some, it just wasn't quick enough. What a turn-off for new people!
So I'm logging in and chatting with my friend, a clothes designer, and another friend, a content-creator, and they seem perplexed. They haven't experienced any difficulties. They were able to log on. They didn't notice anything. Yes, the grid was down for awhile, but so?
Reflection work done by building other prims below, flipped.And it dawned on me what a different Second Life they live in -- they live in the First World! Either they were one of the early creators, scripting or building or designing and the actual status and shape of the world isn't really of HUGE significance. The world is their canvas, like it says on the can. They scribble on it. Tear off a sheet. Put out a new one. Try this, make that, erase it, go to this sandbox, hang out here, hang out there. No need to settle. No need to worry how the world "looks" if it doesn't rez -- and it probably rezzes faster on a large, empty public sandbox or a private island they either got in the Games contest or were allowed to settle by wealthy friends or they bought themselves.
Once on the chosen SL place, they don't have to go out, they script or have their nose in a building, fussing and fussing with all those wonky tools to do stuff in SL. Flying? Lag? Videos not working? Music streams crapping out? Prim drift? Crashing of sims? Houses exploding on sim seams? These aren't part of their normal experience. They never see "grey ssquares" because...they never try to go anywhere. They're there -- more in their minds or their desktops in PSP than in SL; more on a private island or half out of SL completely in another window...
For a designer or scripter, if SL is down, what does it matter? They get more undistracted time in PSP or whatever other program they are using -- why really go inworld? SLexchange.com or SLboutique.com keep selling copies of their products endlessly...they only need a tiny space for a tiny cube to contain the items they sell. Why go in world, and get frustrated?
Or take the next generation of SL, the SIC if you will, the Superior Inner Core. These are people who might be old, and evolved into "RL Work in SL" or be new, and have just discovered SL and can write it off as a business/university/government expense account. Or they already own their own consulting or programming or design firms and this is just one of their projects for clients.
These people may have to step into SL a bit more, but chances are they'll be on a private island sim, or again, in another utility outside of SL, or in their RL clients' office. If the world doesn't work, it's an annoyance, but ultimately, the world is shelf paper, rolled out to be designed on, a platform -- and that means something you step on, and build a foundation on to scaffold up something *else* which is the main attraction. SL then is merely a media bells and whistle, or something groovy to ad on to an existing campaign -- and SL is only one of many stops on the Metaverse Highway as we know from reading Walker Spaight's Electric Sheep Company-funded blog.
Originally the term "first" and "second" and "third" worlds correlated roughly with Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The term evolved to signify different stages of development. In our 3-D world, nothing sequences in such linear fashion, and all three worlds are interpenetrated and no doubt there are even 4 or 16 worlds of sorts.
In the thirld world, then, of Second Life we have the people who actually have to live here. The poorest put up with the worst conditions -- the lag, the confusion, the hard slog. They try to have fun or try to work. Most succeed. They don't really push TOO hard tho if they're there to be entertained -- it's only their entertainers breaking their backs, pushing tiny prims beyond their endurance, staying up late, not billing their hours...
They don't parachute in like high-priced $500/day consultants living in $375/day hotel rooms with huge expense accounts parachuting into RL third-world disaster scenes or transitions to democracy or World Bank projects. They might have a long history of already living in the country but living at a completely different standard of living than the poorer natives by virtue of their skills or education, like Western missionaries or aid workers living among the African refugees.
The road ahead of us out of our Second Life, out of our world...Increasingly, I see a huge gulf widening between those people who are doing the "RL Work in SL Work" gig and those who run businesses what I would call "inworld" businesses in SL *on the terms of the world itself*.
Awhile ago I IM'd Philip Linden with my little epiphany that there's a world of difference between people who say they "use" Second Life -- the preferred groovy buzzword that people like Pathfinder get everyone to say to show they aren't really *in* the world even though they are *of* it -- and those who say they "live or work in SL".
You either live Second Life; or you have a Second Life or you *use* Second Life -- and all the ensuing circumstances that entails.
There's a tremendous amount of angst and controversy around this topic. The energy that someone like Jauani Wu puts into trying to discount someone like me as a "hobbyist" or a "dilettante" or the energy that Traxx Hathor would put into trying to discredit me as someone who couldn't make my business pay are likely in direct proportion to their own insecurities as virtual world builders who are in a neo-field in which they don't have the RL credentials -- yet, anyway -- that match the equivalent skill/job in real life.
But what is real life and what is a virtual world? There are all different ways they can overlap and cross and interpenetrate as I've just said.
There is now an elite corps in SL that are hugely smug about their accomplishments, hugely arrogant, and hugely unbearable. They constitute in part the Platform Party that Aimee Weber identified -- people who make things in the world and fool around with stores and clubs themselves, but also do Real World Gigs like build a planetarium or have a RL-related fashion show. (There's a kind of grey area involved in calling something that's an Internet site like Style Hive a "RL thing" as so distinct from the "virtual thing" of SL when the "RL thing" on the Internet itself is obviously already kinda virtual, being on the Internet lol.)
This elite corps prides themselves on knowing best, running the place, and putting others in their place. Dealing with them is always a chore. You think they'd be so far beyond us all now, unskilled peons that we are, that we wouldn't run into them anymore, yet they keep turning up. A fair organized by The Sojourner this week which I had thought was to be celebrating non-profit groups and work in SL suddenly fetched up with a "RL in SL Work" display by Kim Anubis, about whom I've written repeatedly here. Apparently, that was fine, because the intention of the fair wasn't to only celebrate non-profit groups, said the organizer, but to showcase...groups in general. But of course, not groups with names like Vampire Dyslexic Furry Lesbians, but groups that seem to fit that sort of leftie liberal NPRish SL shtick that we've all come to know...and hate...even if we are liberals ourselves, just because of the smugness and insularity involved. Groups that are all about vanity-showcasing people's 3-D resumes so they can get more jobs in the metaverse and squire around clients like Harvard University who haven't figure out yet that they don't really need to pay $15,000 to terraform and build up a sim.
In the economic and class wars of SL, it's clear that people who make their business in SL, who take in Lindens, and then use Lindens to either pay staff or buy supplies or invest in the world or cash out to pay tier or pay RL bills -- well, they are lesser beings. Fools that they are, they bother with Lindens and worry about the value instead of taking PayPal real-life dollars.
The REALLY important people -- most important to the Lindens, too! -- are the "RL Work in SL" gang. Important for developing the platform (although whenever I try to think *just what have they done for us lately*, and just how they actually develop the platform, I draw a blank, but that's probably because I'm not tekkie-wiki enough). AND important to show off as people "able to make a living in SL".
Of course, from deep within our world's perspective, a person on a RL Work in SL trip is merely somebody who has a kind of camp-chair set-up or a money-ball of a far grander sort! He sits in an office and his boss or his client pays the bills. He doesn't have to scamper around personally like an idiot trying to figure out how he will get this laggy, crashy, hard-to-learn *game* to yield income on its own terms, eating the dogfood. He doesn't have to think about traffic, or compelling content or copyright theft or land griefers or ugly builds appearing in the water.
Much of the time, he isn't even IN SL -- those times he is in it, he's on a cool and calm private island, far from the vicissitudes vexing the inworlder business person struggling with grief, lag, crash, theft, disputes and the eternal need, on the mainland, to "buy the view".
In a way, my divide identified here among the worlds is about private islands versus mainland, where it often plays out -- but not necessarily. It's also merely about levels and classes and access to skills, investment, and connections.
The world was once Second Life, when anyone could swim in it and the world itself could make them a professional. Now the world's fabric is basically ripped -- or to continue the analogy, the water is drained from the pond -- and this was said to be necessary to make it "compete" -- and only professionals will really be able to make money from it.
The 'make money in SL' articles -- very, very soon! -- are going to switch from breathless stories about Anshe, to stories about Electric Sheep and their herd. Anshe and her husband and staff, who work like dogs night and day doing the really hard slog of world-building inside the world itself (as distinct from model-building for clients in the outside world, or prototyping for the 3-D resume hanger known as Second Life) - they are going to likely recede from the stories.
In their place, will be stories about fabulous avatars of RL groovy geeks who build cities or live music venues or rock-band "mini-worlds" or university classrooms or other types of places for virtual reality -- and never have to have their tiny avatar hand ever touch a devalued, ridiculously low-cost Linden.
Here's one -- in response to the debate now about the removal of dwell, and how venues will survive. For our new denizen of the second world, Lindens and their rates don't even matter -- why bother?
Boliver Oddfellow
CEO Infinte Vision
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: The Rainforest
Posts: 230
Funny thing is there are many of us
myself included who do make a good living in SL and NEVER cash out a
single L. Why? I charge real world USD and get paid that way. Those of
us and there are a few who do Sl projects for Rl corps enhnce the Sl
experience and never cash out a single L.
As for camping chaird I do hope they leave, and yes the box office willbe used and hopefully by event producers smart enough to deliver content worth paying for
As for camping chaird I do hope they leave, and yes the box office willbe used and hopefully by event producers smart enough to deliver content worth paying for
__________________
Infinite Vision: Specialists in Virtual World Projects
*****
How nasty and arrogant! The concept that there are "many of us" who actually make RL dollarized incomes (where they have no expenses) are estimated often to be around 3,000 -- but we can't be sure if that number includes people who bill their hours, get pensions and insurance, and have paid vacations LOL. The number of people with THAT kind of "RL job in SL" are probably more like 300, if not 30 -- simply judging from the number of sims and the things on them.
But...Like it's a plus for the world that someone doesn't take in Lindens -- the currency of our realm -- and cash them out -- as the rest of the plebes have to? Like dollarization is a good thing?
Gah, this is awful stuff. We're just the server load test for people like this -- we're supposed to come to this fancy venue, be thrilled with all the um compelling content, and reward the fellow with at least traffic statistics? Or perhaps Lindens in a tip jar for a live musician? Or? What are we even *for*?
Like Lewis Nerd, who constantly assures us he's only in SL to "have fun" and "doesn't need dwell" and "doesn't care about content sales" and just builds out of the joy of his heart, Boliver is also free to have "fun" because he's getting paid by a client or a business expense account to do a job -- making something in a visual world -- but not one that he has to make work in any kind of internal world economy. It alreadys works in his external, real-world economy. Why bother worrying about it in the silly inworld terms which only look like a game to someone like Boliver? He only takes real dollars!
He might have rentals or musicians or have some other income-generating scheme -- but as he's telling us -- it's in real dollars, not chump change.
The rest of us toy-worlders, with vendors or rentomatics or accounts taking Lindens still -- we're the chumps!
And yet, how could it be different, the way the Lindens have made this experience? They aren't going to keep providing incentives, or payouts, or pogey of any kind -- they're done. They can't be spending money on this. They don't even care if you figure out how to script a Box Office device to charge tickets, like the Foundation for Rich Content, or make a HUD attachment to tip land owners $1 (as Yumi Muramaki has cleverly done) -- it's completely irrelevant to them building their 3.D web.
The more people like programmers, artists, designers, educations who use SL merely as a program/social software/platform to do their RL things they do anyway in meat-space or the Internet in general, the better! That raises the tone, makes it intellectually and artistically superior, and moves the Lindens farther down the road to glory, letting the Tringo and the sex-scorts and the camp-chairs recede in the distance as so much chaff in the wind.
Why make a world?
Infinite Vision: Specialists in Virtual World Projects
*****
How nasty and arrogant! The concept that there are "many of us" who actually make RL dollarized incomes (where they have no expenses) are estimated often to be around 3,000 -- but we can't be sure if that number includes people who bill their hours, get pensions and insurance, and have paid vacations LOL. The number of people with THAT kind of "RL job in SL" are probably more like 300, if not 30 -- simply judging from the number of sims and the things on them.
But...Like it's a plus for the world that someone doesn't take in Lindens -- the currency of our realm -- and cash them out -- as the rest of the plebes have to? Like dollarization is a good thing?
Gah, this is awful stuff. We're just the server load test for people like this -- we're supposed to come to this fancy venue, be thrilled with all the um compelling content, and reward the fellow with at least traffic statistics? Or perhaps Lindens in a tip jar for a live musician? Or? What are we even *for*?
Like Lewis Nerd, who constantly assures us he's only in SL to "have fun" and "doesn't need dwell" and "doesn't care about content sales" and just builds out of the joy of his heart, Boliver is also free to have "fun" because he's getting paid by a client or a business expense account to do a job -- making something in a visual world -- but not one that he has to make work in any kind of internal world economy. It alreadys works in his external, real-world economy. Why bother worrying about it in the silly inworld terms which only look like a game to someone like Boliver? He only takes real dollars!
He might have rentals or musicians or have some other income-generating scheme -- but as he's telling us -- it's in real dollars, not chump change.
The rest of us toy-worlders, with vendors or rentomatics or accounts taking Lindens still -- we're the chumps!
And yet, how could it be different, the way the Lindens have made this experience? They aren't going to keep providing incentives, or payouts, or pogey of any kind -- they're done. They can't be spending money on this. They don't even care if you figure out how to script a Box Office device to charge tickets, like the Foundation for Rich Content, or make a HUD attachment to tip land owners $1 (as Yumi Muramaki has cleverly done) -- it's completely irrelevant to them building their 3.D web.
The more people like programmers, artists, designers, educations who use SL merely as a program/social software/platform to do their RL things they do anyway in meat-space or the Internet in general, the better! That raises the tone, makes it intellectually and artistically superior, and moves the Lindens farther down the road to glory, letting the Tringo and the sex-scorts and the camp-chairs recede in the distance as so much chaff in the wind.
Why make a world?
You raise a lot of interesting points in this post.
I had a long discussion a little while back with someone who was pretty concerned that the wave of developers that use SL as a platform vs. inhabiting it as a virtual world would necessarily mean the death of the latter in due time. There were two reasons I gave him as to why I thought that scenario wouldn't come to pass, that instead the two philosophies would necessarily have to co-exist.
The first is, without the "SL the world", there is no talent pool for the developers. SL the world is addictive, full of potential and wonder for the new resident. With that time spent inworld, invariably residents learn the inworld tools of the trade - and often the outside apps (photoshop, poser, et al) as well. In that sense, SL the world functions as an extra boost for learning SL the platform - the rewards are much more personable, interactive, and instantly rewarding than, say, spending 8 hours a day in Photoshop. Without SL the world, there's little to draw new users to SL the platform. In fact, many unique aspects of SL the world contribute to the appeal of SL the platform - the real-time interactivity, collaboration, use of multimedia, and so on. Put simply, SL the platform needs SL the world to draw developers from. Without the world, the platform never would have existed.
The second reason I gave him was more of a personal hunch I have on my part, but nevertheless one I personally believe is true - that LL (read: Philip) is still dedicated to the creation of a virtual world. Personal vision, wild goose chase, whatever you want to call it - its the dream of the creator of SL, and I would be immensely suprised - and saddened - if I see in the future that SL the world is tossed aside as a failed experiment.
There might be a day coming where the split priorities of LL might necessitate the splitting of LL into two divisions - one for the world, and one for the platform. Each aspect demands different things. You pointed out the needs of the world very well - less lag, faster loading, more intuitive controls, a stronger and more varied economy that allows more than content creators to contribute and benefit. The platform's needs sometimes overlap with the world's, but they're generally along the lines of more flexible UI controls, better collaboration tools, more powerful (and less buggy) scripting choices - things that allow the platform to be modified by developers to best handle the individual needs of each client.
In order to address the needs of all - and each aspect is just as important as the other, its a symbiotic relationship that, if kept in balance, will encourage the growth and health of both - equal attention should be paid to the needs of both, without detriment to the other. Honestly, its a fine line to walk, but I've never understood why the world vs platform had to be an either/or proposition.
Posted by: Cory Edo | 04/19/2006 at 03:45 AM
>The first is, without the "SL the world", there is no talent pool for the developers.
You're forgetting the talent pool the Lindens first drew from -- "the rest of the Internet". It's infinite, and growing and more connected everyday. You and others who have been in the world building like to think it's a special arcane skill only you will control and get paid for -- but in fact it's not, really, and even very new people are coming and very rapidly mastering even these ridiculously and unnecessarily hard tools. As the first generation of Electric Sheep grazing on the platform and getting paid to be of the world but not in it, you might still glance backwards at it more -- but the next generations won't bother. Why should they? It's no fun -- not even as fun as Google Earth or MySpace or whatever thing is grabbing their other windows.
>In that sense, SL the world functions as an extra boost for learning SL the platform - the rewards are much more personable, interactive, and instantly rewarding than, say, spending 8 hours a day in Photoshop
Every 12-year-old kid now can download free copies of Photoshop and start throwing the hours at it needed to learn it. And ultimately, either the subsidized time of a kid, or the paid time of someone in a RL job able to be spotted while they learn this, is going to overtake SL's field of world-livers who were once dedicated to caring whether Louise is crapped up with an ugly mall, or whether the Lindens put in a sim next to Louise and ruin the end-of-world feel.
>Put simply, SL the platform needs SL the world to draw developers from. Without the world, the platform never would have existed.
Maybe for the first generation -- but they're past that now, and can roll up the sidewalks.
And, well...they just need a thin skein of yarn, not even the whole world. If it's just a world of thousands of Tringo players cybering and chatting as if they were merely on Yahoo, and not any kind of contiguous, coherent world, it's enough of a server load test for them, they don't actually have to get in and walk around in it. If it's griefed up and crapped up on the mainland, they have no objective need to fix it -- there's the islands, they grow, and that's where it's at. Yes, to be sure, some of them are still clinging to the One Grid All Holy Hail Grid mainland vision, but that will evaporate in the face of the harsh realities required to maintain it: staff, time, resources.
>I personally believe is true - that LL (read: Philip) is still dedicated to the creation of a virtual world. Personal vision, wild goose chase, whatever you want to call it - its the dream of the creator of SL, and I would be immensely suprised - and saddened - if I see in the future that SL the world is tossed aside as a failed experiment.
You know, I wish this were so, but my wishing it were so isn't going to make it so. Philip has to get paid. So does LL. No one is going to pay them to make a world. Perhaps some day in the future, people will pay the actual freight it costs to make and keep worlds going. Philip could pay *himself* to have a world becaue he wanted one that badly -- but he can't go on paying *himself* or even finding ten nice friends to keep paying for it -- it's not paying for itself in a grand way yet and it's not going to be able to mature and develop fast enough to be able to survive.
If there were 100 people or 1000 people like me willing to challenge everything and try to make a world anyway, even as amateurs, or world-based professionals who learned in the world, we might be able to carry it. But there aren't -- if anything people glory in their ability to NOT participate in the world and make that a feature of their resumes.
>There might be a day coming where the split priorities of LL might necessitate the splitting of LL into two divisions - one for the world, and one for the platform. Each aspect demands different things.
It *already* split, and this accounts for the widening digital divides within SL, and the class warfare (which the FIC is always trying to put its head in the sand about), and the differences between people for or against stipends or for or against telehubs and p2p, or pick an issue.
The world *itself* as distinct from a corporate culture needing a fan base and a sounding board to build their platform is just not compelling or necessary enough for them. I once had a young Linden tell me very matter-of-factly that the user-created content didn't help them sell the platform for the most part. They can sell the idea of "your world/your imagination" up to a point, but then the result built is so mediocre and amateurish that they have to constantly point the camera elsewhere, and front things like Javier Puff's video that shows people on water skis, etc. etc. They have to artificially seed Linden alts and oldbie pets into it occasionally to make the quality possible with the tools much more evident, as it is in other competing games where the content is made by professional game devs.
>In order to address the needs of all - and each aspect is just as important as the other, its a symbiotic relationship that, if kept in balance, will encourage the growth and health of both - equal attention should be paid to the needs of both, without detriment to the other. Honestly, its a fine line to walk, but I've never understood why the world vs platform had to be an either/or proposition.
The Lindens have no objective need to make a really robust and viable world because by making even a very thin one they can probably keep the illusion going a bit. There's enough churn that nobody lights long enough on the flower to wonder why the petals later fall off.
And while the Lindens themselves may be wise enough to get this balance right -- I think probably Philip personally thinks about it and tries to do it -- many of these people coming in either to make money off the world -- or more importantly, because they have more expense-account money -- to make money off the platform -- have no objective need to make a world because *their clients and customers aren't the people inside the world*.
Worlds can only come when there are demands for worlds. Harvard University doesn't need to fly or play Tringo. Wells Fargo doesn't need to go to live music concerts or get a new fabulous skin for itself. Somebody's 3-D Internet Start-up Client doesn't need to go to the Ivory Tower of Prims. These entities can just pay marketing departments or consultants to make a 3-D media thingie and move on if it doesn't work -- which it didn't for Wells Fargo. Even take the Dublin guyg (Ham Rambler, Boliver Oddfellow, et. al.). They might be dedicated at least to making a really rich-looking store-front -- they're evidently paid in dollars by "offshore clients" and have nothing pulling at them, no exigencies, to worry about how the inhabitants of THIS world pay him their little Linden dollars -- they need not be troubled as to whethery they have jobs within the world to generate those Lindens, whether the price of land is going up or down, whether their favourite club is going out of business do to the removal of dwell. It's all completely irrelevant to him.
I began to realize this last year, when some builders I worked with accepted PayPal because it was ridiculous for them to flush Lindens even through GOM and pay any kind of expense, even minor for them to cash out. If they kept them, what could they do with them? Upload a few more textures? The huge amount of Lindens I'd need to pay them would be like paying a local Belarusian in the local zaychiki (bunny rabits as they are known) requiriing huge stacks in a briefcast even just to go out to eat. Of course they'll take dollars, because dollars are what they need to survive in paying the next person who needs dollars, too.
Somebody IM'd me recently with their epiphany: we're not the customers, the venture capitalists are the customers. And I shaded that a bit by saying, well, some of us are pro-sumers that pay so much, like Anshe, that LL has to take them into account. Even Anshe can't compete against a Harvard that can drop $15,000 on a private island development or Somebody's 3.D Internet Start-up.
Basically, the server load testers can come and go -- there's always another guy to buy the island.
When that's not true at some point, when the guy who buys the island makes their elusive Holy Grail of "compelling content" (doesn't even matter what kind -- and that reveals the cynicism), then he can take a stand and make a world and they'll have trouble dislodging him due to the
"insect politics" involved in having to make their platform compete.
If the community of these second-worlders in SL, the SIC types who are coming in now with professional businesses to engage in the business of "navigating virtual reality" or "making virtual worlds" (plural...for this or that consumer/client need, not to make any kind of internal reality of The World) were in itself compelling enough for the people to need to socialize with each other, that might create one of those Western-style malls like they have in Dubai or Riyadh, where you sit and drink a latte and pretend the women don't have to wear veils.
The live-music scene, some of the poetry/writing/discussion events etc. might make up enough of a kind of college-town atmosphere that it would be a "world" for some people. Like, they'd hang out at _always Black library, catch the talk with Lawrence Loessig on Democracy Island, have a chat about virtual architecture at the Society for Virtual Architecture in Warmouth (shameless plug) -- and then may even rent a parcel in Brown and buy Ingrid's pre-fab or something and then actually fall in love and feel the need for a skin from Chip Midnight. It's hard to know if those sort of college-town people will stay the summer -- there aren't even good summer jobs in this pokey village.
Outside of that rarified Provincetown or West Village kind of atmosphere and the related BoHos in Paradise etc. where's the rest of the world? Who needs to make it? Only those with the most rigid totalitarian ideals, like Port Cos and Gor, and similar types of heavily themed and ritualized sims, will have the power to resist the roaring influx of Real Life.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/19/2006 at 09:57 AM
"You and others who have been in the world building like to think it's a special arcane skill only you will control and get paid for -- but in fact it's not, really, and even very new people are coming and very rapidly mastering even these ridiculously and unnecessarily hard tools."
I beg to differ with the first part of your statement, because the second is absolutely true and is recognized as such. There is a tremendous influx of new talent every day. I've worked on projects with people with relatively little time inworld who have innate talent and skill, and they're utilizing it. Any business that doesn't actively look for new talent is one destined to fail. I'm sorry, but the mindset that its a closed society simply isn't one that is subscribed to.
However, there's also aspects of using SL's building tools that simply come with time or training, especially when the build needs to be collaborative. Just like any other piece of design software, there are quirks, tricks and factors to consider that aren't immediately apparent without practice and time, no matter how talented you are.
"As the first generation of Electric Sheep grazing on the platform and getting paid to be of the world but not in it, you might still glance backwards at it more -- but the next generations won't bother. Why should they? It's no fun -- not even as fun as Google Earth or MySpace or whatever thing is grabbing their other windows."
I'd also have to refute that, simply based on the evidence I've seen working with clients. On each project for a RL organization that I've worked for, at least 50% of the people involved have taken it upon themselves to go into the world, explore, shop, buy land on the mainland for themselves, and generally immerse themselves in the world and culture of SL - not remain on their private island. On each project, the concept came about because there was someone in their organization that was already actively involved in SL the world - a legitimate resident - and saw the potential for using SL in their business for whatever means they devised. Theoretically, there's no need for these clients to become part of the world - they have access to their own private island and wouldn't ever have to leave - but they do. SL still arouses the same feelings of curiosity and excitement of exploration in these people as anyone who discovers SL from a Google search and decides to try it out.
"You know, I wish this were so, but my wishing it were so isn't going to make it so. Philip has to get paid. So does LL. No one is going to pay them to make a world."
Exactly why SL the world and SL the platform are a symbiotic relationship. As I stated above, I firmly believe that SL the world is still the hook, the main draw, of SL. Even when you bypass the world entirely, people go back to it out of choice and invest money into it. SL the platform is the money grabber. That's where you have the corporations who are willing to invest the money that will pay LL's paychecks, money that can be put back into SL the world, which functions as the draw for more corporations. To let either one suffer unnecessarily would result in detriment to both.
Posted by: Cory Edo | 04/19/2006 at 01:42 PM
You and others who have been in the world building like to think it's a special arcane skill only you will control and get paid for
I realize intellectually, you may claim to disagree with this. But it's not what you tell your clients at the Electric Sheep Company, I'll bet. There, you tell them that you are the sherpas to their gentleman explorer, that you know all the ropes.
I'm trying to think if I can disagree with my own statement if I posit a concept of social capital -- that knowing say, Lindens, or knowing who to call to get a really good workable lockable reasonably-priced door (Lee Ludd) -- all that wealth of knowledge about suppliers, relationships, prices, customers, etc. -- perhaps that *is* inworld-knowledge that is worthy and exportable to out-worlders.
In Russia, we'd call it working as a "fixer". So you can hire yourself out as fixers for a good while...until the society advances and lots of people then learn English and the foreigners flooding in don't need fixers anymore lol.
>Just like any other piece of design software, there are quirks, tricks and factors to consider that aren't immediately apparent without practice and time, no matter how talented you are.
Well, two things are likely to happen, or both. One, the Lindens, wishing to have an actual world-type place that has at least some stickability will make the building thingies easier and more intuitive for dummies -- and that will mean your arcane knowledge and built-up repetoire of quirks and tricks about how you "fake out the system" to think it is making a circle or whatever are suddenly obsolete, or just not in demand.
OR, the tools will stay at their complexity but the huge influx of people which will include all kinds of CAD type experts and RL architects with scads more experience than you and Jauani will just burn through this stuff, or program new stuff they sell to the Lindens, or whatever.
Take the Dublin build -- perhaps not especially remarkable as builds go (I incurred the undying wrath of Boliver by calling it 'boring' at a meeting at Mynci's) -- but very expert. It's no Orwood by Laukasorgas in its magic surrealism; it's no ambitious world-dreaming spire by Maxx Monde; it's no atmospheric Ravenglass Hall or Free Tibet by Foolish Frost. But it has that no-nonsense, business-like "realifism" look that will sell for some people. The builder, Ham Rambler, did what most people in SL don't attempt -- he tried circles, and going off at angles, and trying to do rounded edges. He tried to make the actual Dublin map on the XYZ grid, which is ambitious, as it goes against the grain to have stuff not in the easy squares.
He's had to cut corners, but they're no different than the ones that Aimee Weber cut in Midnight City in terms of having to reduce prims by making storefront textures rather than primified building faces.
And the next guy to come in and build London...or Moscow...or Peking...will do it 10 times better and their time will cost 10 times less than even Ham's.
>at least 50% of the people involved have taken it upon themselves to go into the world, explore, shop, buy land on the mainland for themselves, and generally immerse themselves in the world and culture of SL - not remain on their private island.
I'd have trouble judging whether that is true without being able to look at the client list and the projects. But take something like Democracy Island, where Hiro was the paid consultant/builder (not sure if this was booked as an ESC project). Those people never even logged in -- look at their log-in dates over time. The head of the project probably logged in 2ce, tops -- she's busy probably with a million other more compelling things. Those people are just your friends and pals anyway -- SNOOPYBrown didn't go buy land on the mainland and shop and buy anyting more than his pink sneakers -- and then you hired him anyway ROFL.
It's all good, but your notion that you are generating 50 percent world-visition and world-immersion with every ex-world project just can't be believed -- judging by looking at the actual world itself and these projects. Most hide themselves as invisible; or they lock down their private islands to all but a select few; or they may have them open, but then become more insular the minute they are griefed. None of them have any objective need for traffic.
I wish what you were saying was true -- but I don't see that it is.
>On each project, the concept came about because there was someone in their organization that was already actively involved in SL the world - a legitimate resident - and saw the potential for using SL in their business for whatever means they devised
This is just your group of friends, Cory. Come on -- anyone can see it. If you were able to parley some of their government grants or consultations or gigs here and there into a company -- more power to you! But you're my objective enemy as an exworlder trampling on my inworld fragile economy. You're like the World Bank putting in a stupid dam that the government gets most of the WB grant to line their pockets with, flooding my village, even as you hire my nephew as a fixer for 6 weeks so our family can eat for a year, before we have to sell our daughter into sex trafficking. Oops, I think it may be too late actually on the daughter.
I wish all the hypey sounding stuff you're writing is true. But you don't have to listen to me to hear a critique of it. Go on over to Clickable Culture.com Tony has a piece up about how all these blogsters, especially the girl blogsters, are complaining about how unfriendly, empty, boring, banal, and stupid, SL is. Of course, you and Ingrid and Barnes when you pal around Boardman say the same thing about all of SL...except your back yard where you have your sprinkler by Toast running and your gazebo by Forseti (when YOU make suburbia it's OK, and not kitsch, but an arch, hip and ironic statement; if Coco makes it and even calls it kitsch it's hopeless worldism; if I buy it and put it out I'm even more hopelessly uncool.
(In fact, Ingrid could make a prefab that would be cool as she made it; put it out in Brown and rent it and it would retain its coolness; but if I buy it and put it out and my tenant puts up *one bush the wrong way* we're not cool. Believe me, I know how this works!).
All these blogsters are cool Internet bloggering gamey people, with no doubt tekkie wiksterism credentials out the wazoo, and yet they yawned at SL and didn't stay. They didn't stay! There was NO WORLD!!!!! FOR THEM!!!!
(They'd have to create it; and to do that they'd have to not step on what's there, and that's hard.)
Cory, we all get how they have to be symbiotic. But instead of proving that the balance is really there, you're just trying to wish harder and argue harder. But it's not there.
After he killed off the GOM, and after he killed off small parcel buyers from the auctions in Lindens by going to this whole-sim auction stuff (which I oppose), I had this long and intense conversation with Philip Linden. It was a turning point for me in Second Life. He visited Neo-Realms I think because people were saying, "Go and see something that is really cool that residents made." (And an example of something people love, spend their time at, but isn't some impressive build like Dublin -- in fact it's the homey feeling of being at the old fishin' hole that makes it attractive and comfortable for people to stick at.)
The fishing happens to be across from my rentals -- well not happens, because it's been a symbiotic, if uneasy relationship, an example of two sets of people living on a sim more or less in harmony but without being that special questy gang of friends like you all are (I've read your blog about how you all only like to work with people you like, etc. -- and I reject that as juvenile and unrealistic -- life is about working with people you DO NOT like, in fact.)
And I was arguing and arguing and finally in exasperation, I said to Philip while he was fishing, "You don't really want to make a world!"
Because it seemed to me that if he couldn't let land find its real value, if he kept glutting the market with shelf paper, if he killed a really important indigenously-created micro-credit scheme of sorts (daytrading on GOM) and an offshore storage vault to overcome HIS minions' bannings; if he couldn't recognize the value of KEEPING GOM, then he wasn't serious about making a world! And I still feel that HIS world that he is making isn't ENOUGH of one, and perhaps it's because he's driven by exigencies we can't know about.
Of course, that was a hell of a thing for me to say to the great Philip Linden, a brainiac who of course made a big multi-million dollar world. I'm well aware of that. I have no choice to speak the truth as I see it, however.
His response was to say, in probably greater exasperation, "I'm trying as hard as I can!"
And I know he IS trying -- they all are I suppose in their own way (even the cynical/corrupt ones probably have some higher vision even if it only has them in the starring role).
But it is not working fast enough to save the mainland. Only really intensive state intervention now might save the mainland.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/19/2006 at 02:16 PM
>Even when you bypass the world entirely, people go back to it out of choice and invest money into it. SL the platform is the money grabber. That's where you have the corporations who are willing to invest the money that will pay LL's paychecks, money that can be put back into SL the world, which functions as the draw for more corporations. To let either one suffer unnecessarily would result in detriment to both.
There will have to be a tipping point on this, and they're not there yet.
There's too many skeptical gamester blogsters and RL media doing only doing very, very superficial stuff.
I'm waiting for that really thinky, definitive Harper's or Atlantic piece that will help swing the East Coast intellectuals into thinking that if they mess around in this virtual world stuff they will still be cool and ok. Because what you get are people like the Austrialian writing in the Murdoch paper who in the end, dumped SL and his avatar because he wasn't 'real' and because he couldn't be sure the girl he met in there wasn't a 300 pound trucker at the Hotel 6 off the interstate in Iowa. And his RL girlfriend's RL quirkly little smile, plus her perfume, was just BETTER.
Many people fall all over themselves to prove that they aren't gaming addicts, that they "have a life," that they aren't "stuck" in Second Life -- and it's a particularly vicious form of forums behaviour, where someone like your friend Maxx Monde can't feel ontologically *real* and *validated* unless he can accuse me of "starting on the box wine" and being a "stay-at home unkempt housewife" etc. Second Citizen is also filled with this type of insecure male juvenile antics (Your friend Jauani has a particularly bad case of this.)
Philip himself can sell the platform going out there in geekworld because he's cute. Bill Gates was able to sell Microsoft stuff NOT being cute, and being dull and geeky looking, but Philip *has* to be cute to sell this thing -- this is a historical imperative, and Mrs. Rosedale's son is not going to let us down in that department!
But...a lot of the rest of us are NOT cute. Well, you can hide me in the attic like your crazy aunt for only so long.
The stuff that makes the world a world is not GOOD ENOUGH to sell the platform -- it needs fake interventions. You've completely overlooked my points on this and sidestepped all the stuff the Lindens have had to do to make it "look pretty" in addition to having a very smart -- and cute --CEO.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/19/2006 at 02:53 PM
It's true that there are more RL organizations looking at SL as a platform for their new projects, but it is still a tough sell.
Example 1: The Wells Fargo project. Not a success story.
Example 2: Electric Sheep recently lost a bid to use SL for a project:
http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/chris/?p=15
Electric Sheep now also builds projects for other platforms.
I think the main issues are usability and the ability to build/do what you want. You often can't build what you want because it would require 10,000 prims and that's crazy... it would cost you 130 US$ per month to leave out and you wouldn't be able to have much else nearby. Even if you were willing to put up with that, there's no *prim efficient* way to import 3D models from programs like Maya. I'd love to teach in SL, but where is the chalkboard, please?
LL "started as a hardware company geared towards the research and development of haptics." (SL History Wiki) Second Life was an ad-hoc place to test that hardware. It was initially marketed as a game, because people understand games. Then SL got marketed as a world where ordinary folks could go to do cool things and maybe make a little money. Now it's "NOT a game" --- it's being marketed as a platform and we hear more and more about these education and research projects by RL organizations.
Compare that to the Croquet Project. The Croquet Project is being built *from the start* as a platform. They have a consortium of universities and companies giving support and advice.
If LL was intending for SL to be a platform, they should have gone to their potential customers and asked what they wanted before writing a line of code. Instead, they are trying to sell a former haptics teststand, former game, a world, as a platform.
As much as I love Second Life and Linden Lab, I wouldn't buy into their platform, at least not today. So there is still hope for The World, for now...
Posted by: Troy McLuhan | 04/19/2006 at 03:12 PM
Yes, Troy, and you've made clear *your* utter contempt for the world, by turning up your nose at the haptics/schmaptics problem, claiming you love SL and LL, but you only love it IF they make a platform where you can export stuff. You already have all kinds of stuff that makes prototypes and from those you can make RL stuff. Why do you need laggy, crashy, SL in the way of doing that? What would be the value-add, to have your avatar bobbing around, getting in the way, and have other people annoying you with IMs? see, that's how you look at it.
I'm still waiting for SL to be discovered by the right people. These will involve people ranging from marketing to those in political and social sciences, psychology, etc. -- not just hardware geeks but the humanities. They'll see that the social networks, the accelerated world-creating and accelerated and amplified feedback potentials are enormous and exciting.
All these really hard things that people try to do like Neualtenberg, if you had 100 sets of people doing them and trying them, would get far more fun, interesting, and work better.
But it's too unusable still for these kinds of people, and it's also too arrogant. My God, when I tried to go on the forums and say they should have a DESK POLICY (not a script deprecation) to get rid of the evil bounce script, I was lynch-mobbed, and the leader of the pack was the Purple Winged One who gets the cool gigs making planets, because she claimed that if I said the UI was just already too "busy" and couldn't/shouldn't absorb one more lesson/toggle/thingie (like an "anti-push slider") -- it must mean I had something wrong with me.
I've had to knock heads with these people WAY more than I've ever had to in RL with anything I can imagine, even the KGB, because of their insularity, provinciality, smugness, and therefore ignorance.
Like Barnesworth says, "ignorance is bliss, at someone else's expense." And he should know.
It would be one thing if they were clueless geeks. It would be another thing even if they were clueless AND arrogant geeks who got paid to keep it arcane. It would be even another thing if they were clueless AND arrogant AND insecure geeks who got paid and are worried the real people will take their place.
But they are clueless, smug, insecure AND hugely aggressive! So you REALLY have to try hard to get around them to get things going.
It is too early to tell quite yet. You're figuring that if Wells Fargo, a transportation and security company that had the faith of the people and then went into mortgages and began to lose the faith of the people, also didn't stick with it, that it's all crap. Well, maybe good riddance?
As for the ESC-apade you mention, I've been meaning to blog on that, and will. It's illustrative.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/19/2006 at 03:28 PM
Damn! I am blown away! This is exactly what I was thinking, and it is ALSO reading the post by Bolivar that made it all of a sudden come clear to me!
I will copy here what I posted on the SL forums earlier today. (I haven't read the other replies here yet, but I'm kind of short on time at the moment.)
Here it is:
---------
I never thought it would make camping chairs go away.
In fact the only way to make camping chairs go away is to outlaw them, which would be terrible, of course.
They exist because there is no way for new players to make money.
That is - guess what - an obvious problem/defect/oversight/gaping hole in SL, and has been since I got here.
Not everyone wants to learn to script and build or become a realtor, and not everyone wants to become an "escort."
So chairs aren't going anywhere.
Barbarra said, "The behavior of the people is determined by the setup of the economy, and this 'for profit' attitude is wrecking Second Life."
And you know, much as I love making and selling things (which is the main reason I'm here), I was just thinking a similar sentence myself, something like, "All this make real-life money philosophy is beginning to ruin SL."
I figure what the Lindens want in the long run, though, has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with regular people coming into SL to create and play and have a good time.
What they want is a "platform" where "professional" real-life companies (some of them consisting of SL residents, usually with ties to the Lindens and who sometimes ARE Lindens) who come in to create something that lots of people might want to want to run in on a basic account and look at (kind of like Wells Fargo) and maybe buy something and then maybe run off again, until another outside company has something here they want to check out.
Now if enough people still hang around to do their own thing and pay their premium and their tier, so much the better. But if some of these people go away, that's okay, too.
There are residents who knew this since long before I got here, and that is why they argue so strenously that this isn't a game, that people shouldn't have "welfare" (i.e., rewards for traffic, etc.), and all the rest of the mantra. It explains why all those people looked like such masochists to me. They weren't! They were really wanting this other thing for themselves, with little reward for regular players.
The greatest snobbery in SL comes from those people who have created an outside company, and who get real-life money for what they do (and big bucks, too), often by creating something for other outside companies. Of course, what they create with their real-life money may go over with the populace like a lead balloon, but so what. It was built and the money was made. (Democracy Island I think may be one such example.)
And that snobbery stems from the fact that that is all LL really cares about. They don't care about the most popular club, or people selling textures, or any such picayune thing as that. They care about residents forming impressive real-world companies to bring in other real-world companies and get blogged about all over the place.
The Lindens want this "classy" academic stuff, plus big real-world concerns (and ultimately the bucks from real-world companies like Wells Fargo). The rest of us are just a means to that end, and have always been. Where we have served our purpose, our benefits are cut. Somehow, I'm not sure how, this is related to the concern over the value of the Linden, as it affects those major players. It is not related to a concern about how much I, for instance, would make if I cashed out my Lindens.
So I think the Lindens and the residents involved in these kinds of things have this in mind. Not a platform for all the little Tom Dick and Harry's. Who they would prefer take their bling and clubs and slingo and garage sales somewhere else.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/19/2006 at 04:35 PM
"I realize intellectually, you may claim to disagree with this. But it's not what you tell your clients at the Electric Sheep Company, I'll bet. There, you tell them that you are the sherpas to their gentleman explorer, that you know all the ropes."
Not only would stating something like that to clients be patently untrue, its obviously untrue - look at the Developer's List (which is where a number of clients go to first to review their options when looking to hire a development team). ESC wasn't the first, and won't be the last developers in SL. And we certainly aren't suited to tackle every single project. We have strengths and weaknesses, like any other company, and successful application of those strengths is what makes a company successful overall. If there are other developers better suited to handle a specific project, we can either direct the client to them or we can subcontract out the work to other developers. Again, the mindset that you wish to subscribe to ESC simply isn't a good business mindset in any form.
"Well, two things are likely to happen, or both. One, the Lindens, wishing to have an actual world-type place that has at least some stickability will make the building thingies easier and more intuitive for dummies -- and that will mean your arcane knowledge and built-up repetoire of quirks and tricks about how you "fake out the system" to think it is making a circle or whatever are suddenly obsolete, or just not in demand.
OR, the tools will stay at their complexity but the huge influx of people which will include all kinds of CAD type experts and RL architects with scads more experience than you and Jauani will just burn through this stuff, or program new stuff they sell to the Lindens, or whatever."
Both scenarios have happened, and are happening. One of my strengths is in shadow baking on textures - with the new lighting system in 1.9, there's every possibility that that strength won't be as in demand as before. The key is to take strengths and modify them to take advantage of new features that may otherwise leave current strengths obsolete - a lesson quickly learned when working with technology. Things change so rapidly that continually learning and mastering the new aspects is mandatory.
The second scenario is already happening. I've recently worked with new residents that have extensive architectural and CAD experience, and as a result they were able to leap past months of inworld learning that others would normally need to get to their current level. They've done fantastic work. Bring these people on! Both competition and collaboration are natural aspects of any business arena. Even thinking about trying to maintain a monopoly on the development business in SL is ridiculously shortsighted and detrimental to the entire new industry.
"I'd have trouble judging whether that is true without being able to look at the client list and the projects."
A few of the ones I had in mind are still under NDA, so I can't name them, but there's situations like the BBC - the anchor went out, purchased his own land, explored SL on his own long before the BBC ever did their segment on SL. I've taken clients on shopping sprees at their request to show them the rest of the world - how to wear clothing, set up an AO, answered their questions about land, etc. For each client specifically associated with a project, there are probably at least 10 people that they've shown SL to, either via the project itself or "on the side" via personal friendships - these are the people that also take an interest in the world and take it upon themselves to immerse themselves within it.
"This is just your group of friends, Cory. Come on -- anyone can see it."
Wishing something was true does not make it so. We certainly do our share of proactive marketing of SL to potential clients, as any business should (who can afford to rest on their laurels and wait for work to walk in the door, no matter what profession you're in?) - but I can state with 100% truth that the projects I've been involved with to this point have started because a member of the client's organization discovered SL on their own and the kernal of the idea sprang from there. Are you saying I was friends with the BBC before they contacted us for the Newsnight project?
My point remains, that no matter how the client's organization discovers SL, the world aspect of it always comes into play. The social interaction is a cornerstone of both the world and the platform.
"But you're my objective enemy as an exworlder trampling on my inworld fragile economy."
OK, now we're getting somewhere. Can you explain further how development businesses that utilize SL as a platform have a detrimental effect on the SL world economy?
"I'm still waiting for SL to be discovered by the right people. These will involve people ranging from marketing to those in political and social sciences, psychology, etc. -- not just hardware geeks but the humanities. They'll see that the social networks, the accelerated world-creating and accelerated and amplified feedback potentials are enormous and exciting."
Then I think you'll be pleasantly surpised by a few projects that are currently in the works, specifically the NMC project which was recently discussed in the NYT.
Finally, a clarification:
"(I've read your blog about how you all only like to work with people you like, etc. -- and I reject that as juvenile and unrealistic -- life is about working with people you DO NOT like, in fact.)"
That was not my blog - it was Satchmo Prototype's. And I think you're purposefully misunderstanding the meaning behind the statement. No business purposefully hires people that they feel will be a poor fit for the company - especially for positions that require huge amounts of collaboration between employees, long hours, and extensive communication about intangible aspects of design. And even between the most in sync of people, miscommunications and disagreements can arise - which is why you look for people that can effectively communicate past differences with the larger goal in mind. Maintaining a pleasant work environment is a key factor in keeping employees happy to come to work, productive, and involved, which are fundamental to a successful organization - this is nothing that isn't practiced in almost every business.
Posted by: Cory Edo | 04/19/2006 at 04:36 PM
P.S. Can't tear myself away - what Cory says about possibly needing to create two worlds, one for the world and one for the platform.
That is similar to what Catherine Cotton has been calling for. And I never really wanted it before, but getting basically trampled over by changes to enhance those doing outside business on the platform (and spoken to abominably, like I was an idiot, by those who don't care about the world)has made me start to change my tune.
Now, with what Cory has added, I really think that may be the way to go. I think the Lindens could easily sustain and profit from these two such worlds.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/19/2006 at 04:40 PM
I will try to get to reading the rest of the comments later.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/19/2006 at 04:43 PM
I have no contempt for haptic interfaces; I was merely sketching the history of LL and SL. My point was that SL wasn't *started* as a platform, so it's difficult to retrofit it now.
For example, to be more viable as a platform, SL would have to support uploading 3D models from other programs like Maya or 3D Studio Max. There is no easy way to do that with SL as it stands today. (I know about Jeffrey Gomez's "3D Model Importer", but it generates a huge number of prims so it isn't really practical.)
Even if LL figured out how to add an "Upload 3D Model" option to the File menu (nontrivial), I wouldn't celebrate. Prim sculptors like Starax Statosky or Fallingwater Cellardoor would be ambushed by competition.
If SL had been designed as a platform from the start, LL would have realized that sticking to 3D model file standards would be necessary. But now the world is made of prims and it's too late to change that without causing huge problems, both technical and social.
While it may be impossible to make SL into a platform, it is already a fascinating world.
Posted by: Troy McLuhan | 04/19/2006 at 04:45 PM
"I think the Lindens could easily sustain and profit from these two such worlds."
More than that, it could conceivably increase profits for both aspects.
Right now, all development time is split between what will make the world a better place, and what will make the platform a better piece of software. Even taking the initial step of creating divisions in LL that concentrate solely and specifically on the world aspect or the platform aspect would be a more efficient use of manpower. Right now, they're doing two things at once under one umbrella, so neither is as good as it could be.
Seperating the world from the platform along the idea of seperate grids makes sense as well. Right now, forced inclusion of one in the other seems to be breeding resentment along both sides - developers wonder why they don't have more control over the workings of the platform, how to explain grid attacks to their clients, delicately explaining that right clicking that pink sex ball might not be a dignified maneuver for a CEO. SL world residents view with distrust the oncoming commercialization of their world, the percieved social reactions, etc. Both sides feel that LL spends too much time, money, and effort on one side to the detriment of the other.
I could see a time where visiting secondlife.com gives you the option to sign up as a resident of a virtual world - or, if you're looking for utilizing the SL platform as a development tool for RL businesses, non profits, etc., click here to visit The Second Life Platform Project (or what have you). Signing up as a resident would give you access to the world grid only. Signing up to use the SL Platform Project would require a fee - you're purchasing software to use, after all, or they might offer a time-based free trial - that allows you access to both the Platform Grid and the World Grid.
On the Platform Grid, LL could conceivably do away with the $L entirely - as Boliver pointed out, more development businesses prefer to work directly in RL currency. The Platform Grid would not affect the World Grid economy in any fashion. A Platform Grid account can visit the World Grid, but any $L that account has remains solely on the World Grid.
Thoughts? These are all off the top of my head, but the concept seems to answer a lot of ongoing questions and problems from both sides of the fence.
Posted by: Cory Edo | 04/19/2006 at 05:05 PM
This project hasn't been a world since 1.2 was released. The sanctioned introduction of US dollar exchange for lindens was a key indicator that LL's primary goal was to develop a 3D Internet-based business platform.
Every feature release since has been cleverly marketed as something to enhance the compelling social aspects of residential nirvana. Doesn't that sound nice when you read it out loud. It ranks right up there with the concept of LL perpetually pouring money down the bottomless residential hole.
Second Life has always been a beta testing development project with the added bonus of facilitating virtual population studies. We've taken a lot of abuse in the forums for insistently stating this simple, apparent truth. Still, I imagine there are still loads of people out there that'd rather just ignore it and party on with the idea that there really is a persistant world out there.
Posted by: Khamon | 04/19/2006 at 06:09 PM
My thoughts - though I was first thinking when I wrote about this today that in what you are referring to as a "world" grid would have as a rule that you can't (officially) sell Lindens.
Thinking about it now, though, I'm not so sure about that.
I was also thinking that those Lindens whose alts are busy running profit-making businesses in the game, while at the same time controlling the game as Lindens - a clear and outrageous conflict of interest - should have to have their own little businesses on the World Grid, where they couldn't turn their profits into rl money.
However, thinking about it now, maybe let's toss all those Lindens working their own businesses as secret alts into the Platform Grid as well.
I have some reservations about this plan, however. I can easily see the Platform Grid getting the lion's share of everything, and the World Grid sucking the hind teat. Kind of like it does now, only officially.
Plus the condension and brutish behavior that exists now might just take on a more epic scale, rather than diminishing.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/19/2006 at 06:49 PM
Let me try that first sentence again:
When I wrote about this earlier today, about Catherine Cotton's idea of two grids, was that one of them would have a rule that you can't (officially) sell Lindens.
(sorry, that sentence was just awfully confusing, and I couldn't go back and edit it.)
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/19/2006 at 06:52 PM
aw geeze. I still didn't write it right. NEVER MIND! lol
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/19/2006 at 06:52 PM
Re: >Not only would stating something like that to clients be patently untrue, its obviously untrue - look at the Developer's List (which is where a number of clients go to first to review their options when looking to hire a development team). ESC wasn't the first, and won't be the last developers in SL
Cory, my keyboard has Diet Coke all over it. You actually think that I believe this stuff about how heavyweight "RL companies" (if the Internet is RL -- well, it's more RL than SL) actually go and ponder the Developers' Directory, and say, hmm, I think we could use some wings, let's call Lilith?
I can't believe that for one second. Jobs are not gotten or given by anybody reading that directory. It's good that it exists; it might be something someone would study in the course of recruiting, but we all know that jobs are given through connections as much as they are found democratically or randomly and openly on a thing like Craig's List.
Hamlet or Tony blog about the Warner Brothers gig about the mini world for the rock band -- Aimee shows up, knowing that 99 percent of life, as Woody Allen explained it, is about showing up. So does Hiro, to let us know he's just "too busy" to do this important gig, being as how he's so important, but he'll think about who he could fix up with it. And so forth. Is there any doubht in your mind that those folks at Warner will go with Aimee and/or Hiro's friends? In fact, what was interesting about that exchange was that somebody with a fake nickname like Helpful Hal published the link to the Directory.
We'd all like to believe, like Coco, that this thing is really used. But it's not. And the proof is in the pudding of who gets the contracts. Do a study -- poll all those people listed, and ask about the jobs they go by being in it. I'll bet it will be like 0.01 percent.
>One of my strengths is in shadow baking on textures - with the new lighting system in 1.9,
Oh, damn, you just answered my question! I was peering at the liner notes on 1.9 and looking at it every which way and wondering to myself what the HELL is this all about? Why here? Why now? Why this? I cast a weather eye on it, knowing they had to be up to something -- they always are! and I noticed somebody (was in Hiro again?) roundly criticized it as creating a dark world with the lights all off (he's probably right) -- and now we know!
We just HAD to have lighting to come in ahead of EVERYTHING else needed because...you need to bake textures for your clients! Aimee, who loves baking, has to have it...you do...and...the other...17 people who bake for their high-end clients. *slaps forehead* Damn! Why am I so StUPID???
>I have no contempt for haptic interfaces; I was merely sketching the history of LL and SL. My point was that SL wasn't *started* as a platform, so it's difficult to retrofit it now.
Troy, you took this very literally -- I don't even know what haptic interfaces ARE. What I'm saying is that you set a demand on the Lindens, as Tony Walsh does, that they have to create exportable/importable features for high-end graphics artists/designers, and make a streaming Maya. Well...why? You already have Maya. And...what for? For whom? We who live in the world and work in the world on its terms don't objectively need you to expert and import things out of it.
Are we like Karl Marx saying that imports are evil in the 19th century because socialism can only be preserved in one country? No, we just don't see why we'd have to drop everything and warp the platform around *your need* to have clients to whom you export stuff to. It's opaque as a need -- it's not an obvious value for the world.
You say it's a fascinating world, but unless you can use it as an application for your clients, do you really care that much? You can't care. It's probably too clunk for you to use to have fun in, even.
Cory, I'm going to take a separate blog entry just about the ESC, just because I've long wanted to do this. There's so much of what you are saying that is self-serving, and impossible to check. We're supposed to just take it on faith that you sherpa in the gentlemen explorers and each of of these gentlemen then tells 10 friends, so gosh, the Lindens should reward you referral bonuses like they do the furries.
>Are you saying I was friends with the BBC before they contacted us for the Newsnight project?
I'm making a completely different point but I will make a separate blog entry and you can see it there.
What's sad about this BBC thing is that I thought this was something happening spontaneously, and your reaction to the BBC, and Jauani's, was some kind of citizens' response. Jauani, who I have on mute, even TP'd me into some session with the BBC where he was earnestly endeavoring to get me to spout out some protest because he thought there was something they were doing wrong. So it was just your client then, and just your shtick, not some world event.
And probably a lot of the most slickly packaged stuff, like all this Future Salon stuff, is really only just somebody getting paid. It's not really citizens in a world talking about their own urgent issues in their own right, it's just canned stuff designed to buff somebody's resume somewhere.
>The sanctioned introduction of US dollar exchange for lindens was a key indicator that LL's primary goal was to develop a 3D Internet-based business platform.
I disagree. I think it was a world, remained one past the dollar exchange, and is still one, though its fabric is torn.
The product this company makes and is celebrated for is a 3-D streaming world. To be credible, it has to have people living and working in it and having their own social and political and persona lives. It has that, but it's always being thrown off balance.
>Second Life has always been a beta testing development project with the added bonus of facilitating virtual population studies
Ok, Khamon, we got it. You know best, and you've become bitterly cynical and dispirited about the breaking of the promise of SL, in whatever way you saw it, and you feel some inner need to expose us who believe in a world or keep making a world as hopeless chumps who've been snookered into spending time and money on a chimera. Ok, der, it's clear, we get it.
But your disappointment is only in direct proportion to your own individual need to step on this world TOO, to compel the Lindens to calf it off into host-your-own-server with open-source or licensed software so you can teach students or do whatever you want to do in RL with it. You're no different than the ESC or the Dublin guy who wants to get paid in RL dollars to do RL stuff with this platform, and gets angry every time it behaves like a world, or the people in it take for a world.
> can easily see the Platform Grid getting the lion's share of everything, and the World Grid sucking the hind teat. Kind of like it does now, only officially.
Plus the condension and brutish behavior that exists now might just take on a more epic scale, rather than diminishing
Yes, World is definitely sucking hind tit now. But at other junctures it didn't and Platform sucked hind tit and got people like Khamon all pissed off.
I think the brutish thuggish behaviour exemplified by Hiro telling me he'd get me banned if I "out a Linden alt" who uses the Worldish stuff to get his Platformy stuff vaunted -- well, we already have that.
You're suggesting some kind of apartheid, "separate but equal" solution to the World/Platform divide.
That kind of stuff doesn't work, especially on the Internet. There will always be crossovers, underground railroads, black markets. So you might as well legalize it, and that's probably a good thing the Lindens did, even though it ruined Lindenor for the oldbie tekkies who wanted it to remain their sandbox, or some people who were lifers who wanted it to be like Tom Nook and Animal Crossing.
I'd have to go read Catherine's post to get the gist, but if you're saying have the free and wild West sort of area like Alphaville, where EA.com long since throws up their hands at people selling accounts and simoleons on ebay and stuffs all the contest boxes, and then have the "hard sandbox" area (sandbox in the TSO, not SL meaning of hardship) in Dragon's Cove...well...we all remember how Dragon's Cove was ruined within a week by cheaters and hackers and it was also just such a hard slog that it broke up friendships and romances and houses that had worked in the more easygoing arena of Alphaville.
I think if people want a world where the currency is intact, they can go and play TSO, and push for TSO to become 3-D.
I don't think you could get people to create stuff of their own and have them only take simoleons - you don't want to have only play money yourself for all the hard work you do making houses.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/19/2006 at 08:40 PM
>Seperating the world from the platform along the idea of seperate grids makes sense as well. Right now, forced inclusion of one in the other seems to be breeding resentment along both sides -
Well, it's funny that you are rooting for apartheid now -- when five minutes ago you were telling me about all this rich interaction *cough* all your clients were engaging in, leaping off their fixed-up, expensive private island and venturing out into the wilds of the mainland to have exciting adventures with skin purchases and wild vehicle rides and stuff.
Well...which is it? It's totally fake to say that any apartheid would be separate but equal. In fact, the world grid would be sucking hind tit again because the kewl groovy stuff the young 20-something males would be picking off the fun BLOTDD list to do at LL would include all the groovy Platform grid stuff that would advance their careers and make it all intellectually and politically and financially stimulating for THEM (and that's the main thing driving this railroad of course, fun for the staff -- it's hard to get good help, and if the way to keep them is to make sure they have fun stuff, worlding is not going to ring their chimes).
In fact, they give the world stuff to Robin, and other girls, because the boys don't want to do it, and it's a hard, thankless slog, involving working things like events filters or programs for newbie housing. Bleh. Who wants to work on that? Look how long Reuben Linden lasted doing that stuff, as fun as it can be. Even Pathfinder, who began well with all this worldism stuff like making explorers' packets and top-ten stuff and hanging around his Gothy home in Ambleside threw that all over to go hide in exotic thinky groups and hang out on closed edu-grid islands.
What is the face of Linden Lab to the world? It's a constant shuffle of 20-something telecommuter Lindens. That's all we have making the world now: Coffee Linden bedecked in his furry firefighter suit quenching prim fire attacks.
>On the Platform Grid, LL could conceivably do away with the $L entirely - as Boliver pointed out, more development businesses prefer to work directly in RL currency. The Platform Grid would not affect the World Grid economy in any fashion. A Platform Grid account can visit the World Grid, but any $L that account has remains solely on the World Grid.
This is an awful idea. As much as I hate having to suck hind tit and share p2pable grid space with Hiro Pendragon, I still remain dedicated to the One Holy Hail The Grid Oneness that Khamon talks about. It's because I'm for federalism in the face of Balkanization, and I'm not for bloodshed and war ultimately. Of course, it's a fool's errand.
Within seconds of implementing your idea, a black market would develop, or would be openly run by anshechung.com to completely overthrow this idea that the privileged, for-pay, dollar-earning world could be the only ones to get the prime share of Linden time/resources/connections and the lion's share of the deals to be had out there. I know I'd riot like hell if anyone pulled that on me and tried to shuffle me off to blingtard ghettoization. Hell, no. Everyone really living in the world would understand immediately that it was like creating townships in South Africa...that would get electricity for the 30 days it would take to sell it to parliament or something, and would then get shut off for the next 30 days. Hell, no.
It's funny how none of you think of Anshe in these discussions, as if there's just all us chumps making or renting houses to blingtards, and then there's you, having this fabulous career in your Internet start-ups -- but Anshe already went and made a world, and a world she is increasingly able to protect from Linden encroachment. She's making it with cheap Chinese labour, too, which is likely going to put some of you to shame.
I've long made this prediction that far from calfing into two grids as you imagine, something else will happen that will fracture the world. The Lindens will license the software and sell the blingtards' list to Sony or Ea.com to make Second World -- it will wind up looking like that wrong turn that guy took in Back to the Future where the bully becomes the mom's boyfriend and then the father (ugh!); they'll keep the edu grid for themselves and their fancy university projects; and then maybe license some of this host-your-own stuff to people ranging from Anshe to Khamon to Ham Rambler. It won't be open sourced, any more than Maya is open-sourced, it will be damn expensive, and you all can then fight with Sony for the server load test populations you need, with whatever gimmick you can think up.
The mainland will be chopped up for firewood.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/19/2006 at 08:52 PM
"We'd all like to believe, like Coco, that (the Developers Directory)is really used. But it's not. And the proof is in the pudding of who gets the contracts. Do a study -- poll all those people listed, and ask about the jobs they go by being in it. I'll bet it will be like 0.01 percent."
All the jobs that Tiny Seadog was contacted for by RL companies were a direct result of us being on the Developer's Directory. Again, I'm sorry if you don't want to believe it works, but it has in the past for us and I have no reason to believe it doesn't for others as well.
"We just HAD to have lighting to come in ahead of EVERYTHING else needed because...you need to bake textures for your clients! Aimee, who loves baking, has to have it...you do...and...the other...17 people who bake for their high-end clients. *slaps forehead* Damn! Why am I so StUPID???"
Possibly because you don't read the entirety of what someone posts before commenting. New lighting in 1.9 concieveably could cause shadow baking to become useless. Its not a boon to people who bake shadows, it makes them obsolete because now the system will create the realistic lighting and shadows for us, when before we needed to make them directly on the textures via Photoshop or Maya. If you'd like a fuller explaination of the process, I'd be happy to give one, but simply put, better lighting is better for everyone but people who bake shadows.
"So (the BBC) was just your client then, and just your shtick, not some world event."
I'm not sure which BBC event you're referring to. I'm referring to the Newsnight in SL broadcast, the animated segment in SL that was done to match the pre-recorded segment sent to us by the BBC. There was also an inworld meet with the anchor from the broadcast after the show was aired - that was done entirely by himself, his idea, his initiative. We had nothing to do with that aspect. I showed up because he invited me - he was genuinely interested in meeting residents.
"Within seconds of implementing your idea, a black market would develop, or would be openly run by anshechung.com to completely overthrow this idea that the privileged, for-pay, dollar-earning world could be the only ones to get the prime share of Linden time/resources/connections and the lion's share of the deals to be had out there."
Again, it was mostly a thought off the top of my head to try and figure out how to appease all the parties involved, split between the world and the platform. However I'm not sure what you mean by "black market" - black market in what?
If the platform has legs, and results in a more profitable business plan for LL, few could fault them if they decided to dismantle the world aspect. Again, personally, I don't see them doing that anytime in the future for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But past that - just what *is* the incentive for LL to continue with the nation building aspect?
"Cory, I'm going to take a separate blog entry just about the ESC, just because I've long wanted to do this. There's so much of what you are saying that is self-serving, and impossible to check. We're supposed to just take it on faith that you sherpa in the gentlemen explorers and each of of these gentlemen then tells 10 friends, so gosh, the Lindens should reward you referral bonuses like they do the furries."
I'd thank you not to put words in anyone's mouth. I've never, once, mentioned to any client (or anyone else for that matter) the aspect of referral bonuses.
You claim that there's no way to prove what I'm saying, that its self-serving, etc. However, through your posts on these topics, you seem determined to your own personal interpretation of how events *must* be occuring - even when someone who actually has experience in these events tells you otherwise. Its very easy to refute someone by saying that you just don't trust them, period - but that begs the question, who *would* you trust? Someone that tells you what you want to hear? You've already shown with the shadow texturing point that you don't care to read or learn more about what's being discussed - you seem to jump to the pre-conceieved conclusion you want to be true. What exactly does the burden of proof for Prokofy entail?
Posted by: Cory Edo | 04/20/2006 at 12:22 AM
"But past that - just what *is* the incentive for LL to continue with the nation building aspect?"
Well, I figure it's premium memberships paid monthly, tier, and an increasing number of subscriptions to (a) be around for all the other stuff you talk about, (b) make the numbers look good for investors, and (c) have a vibrant world full of people.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/20/2006 at 12:50 AM
"Well, I figure it's premium memberships paid monthly, tier, and an increasing number of subscriptions to (a) be around for all the other stuff you talk about, (b) make the numbers look good for investors, and (c) have a vibrant world full of people."
All very good and applicable points. I personally have a soft spot for C, but I think that's where a lot of the hesitance and worry on the part of those firmly in the world camp might come from. C is really following a dream, more than anything else, and we all know how tenuous dreams can be...it makes one nervous sometimes to feel so personally and emotionally invested (not to mention financially invested) in what's essentially a dream of someone else's, upon who's whim the dream exists or vanishes.
Posted by: Cory Edo | 04/20/2006 at 01:27 AM
>All the jobs that Tiny Seadog was contacted for by RL companies were a direct result of us being on the Developer's Directory. Again, I'm sorry if you don't want to believe it works, but it has in the past for us and I have no reason to believe it doesn't for others as well.
1. How many is that?
2. If this happened, and you got a lot of jobs, and then a lot of recognition under that name "Tiny Dog," then...why would you have to be subsumed by Electric Sheep Company
3. Does this happen for *anyone else besides you*?
I'm sorry if these questions seem harsh, Cory, but you sound very self-referential.
I read on the forums that people who bake were raving about 1.9 and its lighting. Maybe not everything that gets baked is shadows? I dunno. I realize it's all an arcane secret that we "technophobes" are not supposed to comprehend. But honestly, if it doesn't benefit baking, why are people raving about it and baking on the forums?
And...who IS it for then? It's STILL for creators of textures/content/movies. Not to make grey squares go away!!!!
So it's not like my point is obviated at all!
>so gosh, the Lindens should reward you referral bonuses like they do the furries."
I'd thank you not to put words in anyone's mouth. I've never, once, mentioned to any client (or anyone else for that matter) the aspect of referral bonuses.
Are you able to understand sarcasm? The word here that should trigger the sign that "HERE COMES SOME SARCASM" is the word "gosh".
Your getting all in high dudgeon about this is in direct proportion to your *not realizing* that there's no more referral bonuses whatsoever. They dried up ages ago. Jeska canned them. Due to some issue of griefing or gaming. They don't exist, and haven't for ages. So not to worry.
>You've already shown with the shadow texturing point that you don't care to read or learn more about what's being discussed - you seem to jump to the pre-conceieved conclusion you want to be true. What exactly does the burden of proof for Prokofy entail?
I'm not the one who wrote on the forums about bakings and the new lighting thing. I didn't make up this idea. I read it there. seems to me that either there is baking that will not be affected by these shadow thingies, or else the baking people concluded that it will only enhance their creations. Who the hell knows? Go and read the forums yourself.
It doesn't matter to me, Cory, whether the lighting in 1.9 benefits bakers or non-bakers.
What matters is that the lighting in 1.9 is meant for the 1st and 2nd worlds, and not the 3rd. It will light up my grey squares better, sure, yeah. Great!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/20/2006 at 02:06 AM
So what's the take-home from this conversation?
You seemed to concede that yes, there are different worlds within SL, or a world and a platform, with people on it with different needs/wants/visions.
You claimed to want to find a harmony between these needs, and you even say that your clients leave the sanitized platformy space you've got out for them and go muck around in the world even -- even 10 to one do word-of-mouth pass-ons.
Yet you're willing to then conceive of an idea of keeping two grids, one for shoppers and one for "developers". You imagine they can be sequestered.
You then get annoyed with me for questioning the developers' list == when everyone knows that's not really any place where real jobs flow in -- it's a token. And you can't really provide me with any hard facts of what happens to ALL the people on the list.
Next, you grow irritated that I'm exclaiming about the baking and 1.9. You start a literalist tekkie argument about shadow baking, and completely lose sight of my larger point, irrelevant to the technical details: that these Lindens already have apartheid. They already made the two grids. They already have the sequestering. You're on one side of the divide with your happy clients and your dollars, and you're getting a fancy new thingie to "enhance the value of SL" as Boliver puts it.
Meanwhile I'm shucking and jiving here with the damn grey squares, bracing myself for the crashes, lock-ups, and log-outs that will be coming with the next game patch and its features, which always mean move-outs for me.
All your claims about wanting a united and integrated world are empty, Cory, because at the end of the day, you'll furiously deny that anything in the client is really skewed toward content creators, when any cretin can see that there's no stuff in the next batch the does a goddamn thing for the mainland, and they damn grey squares are still there.
And yet I love the world more than you, because i'm not only willing to put up with the grey squares AND take Lindens for long hours of work, I don't show SL the back of my hand like Troy just because it can't export stuff to me to enhance my Internet start-up business.
Making these two populations of clients/customers coexist together like this is really cruel. In most games, the game devs are somewhere back stage outside the magic circle or behind the curtain. A few of them are out in front like Tigger. Here, not only do we have them intermingling with us, they run businesses, they DJ concerts, they model for certain businesses and hell, they could be the alts of the people right next door.
Yet we might as well live under apartheid. Certainly not to trivialize the meaning of that word, given that in SL, we're talking mainly about one set of privileged white folks dealing with another set of privileged white folks.
In short, I come away once again from this entire encounter with the tekkie wiki absolutely convinced that you have no authority, you cannot be allowed to run the world, and everything possible must be done to minimize your damage.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 04/20/2006 at 02:54 AM
OK, so to cut to the chase:
We have two options (actually we don't have any, but if we did get to decide these things, then we have two):
1. Live together
2. Have two grids
I am thinking that the having two grids would make life a whole lot nicer, because then one's business wouldn't be competing with Linden businesses (or getting outright GOM'ed by them), and we would know that the next guy's business over isn't secretly that of a Linden, and we wouldn't have all the regular guy's concerns always playing a distant second to the needs and views of Electric Sheep Company.
BUT
Then we would be officially sucking hind teat, and probably never get another thing that makes sense anyway, as all the devs would be working on the "real" grid, and we'd get what they make regardless of what we need. Still, there might be some advantages - some policy decisions might be different for the two grids.
The other disadvantage is everyone obviously on the World grid would be so very, very obviously in the ghetto that I think you are right; it would probably be worse.
Therefore I came up with this new motto:
Down with the Platform!
Up with the People!
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut | 04/21/2006 at 12:39 AM