Valuing Virtual Worlds

Library of Congress

As I contemplate the year of 2007, and especially some recent debates out there, on Terra Nova about "taking out the intellectual trash of Second Life" and on Resident Answers on the official forums, I have to come to the conclusion that people don't sufficiently value virtual worlds. And that's one of the main reasons they flounder.

The people making them have been too idealistic, utopianist, and socialistic (while being too mercenary in other respects) and haven't charged what they are worth even to cover their considerable costs. So people don't understand what they cost, and therefore are ignorant of the costs, or even deny or disparage them. This is in part due to real altruism, and part due to fake altruism on the part of the people making these worlds.

I've heard someone like Philip Rosedale talk about how he wants "Second Life to be for everybody" and how his company has a mission "to connect everybody," and a lot of their reasoning giving for things like mangling the Search or keeping the LindEx synthetically controlled like a socialist system is because of the poor newbies they imagine needing this subsidy. Or the maker of Gaia at VW07 talked about how unlike real life, virtual life enables everybody to come in on a level playing field, and by not having real-money trade (cashout), then you can ensure that people get rich "on the merits" and presumably don't "exploit" others. (That he imagines that people in real life don't get rich "on the merits" is one of the peskier things about trying to reason with these folks.)

That socialistic and idealistic game makers don't value their worlds or have some utopian notion about making them "for everybody" is understandable, but then what happens is their less idealistic (or more idealistic, depending on how you look at it) cohorts don't value their worlds. They take them at their word!

If Virtual Worlds were as expensive as a computer or even an I-Phone or a Blackberry, they'd get a lot more respect. Instead, they are priced even less than games: SL is $9.95 a month for a premium account, and World of Warcraft, played by 8 million people, is $15.95. There you go.

The Hoover Dam

On the Resident Answers, Gusher Castaignede is a classic geeky dude who has the skillz to play Second Life as it was intended to be played, with expertise in 3-D modelling even from some other game or world. And while Gusher Castaignede as a 30-something IT guy living in New England likely has more disposable income than I do in the real world (as a single parent working mainly in the non-profit or translation sector), he immediately somehow enters willingly into the suspension of belief required to make Second Life "a world" (even against his own geeky judgement and in spite of himself).

If he were going on vacation in real life, he would think nothing of dropping a few grand to go to Club Med in Mexico. No doubt he has an i-Phone or a Blackberry. I'll bet his car is something to see. A dinner in a nice restaurant and movie with a date once a month even might set him back in real life something like $200.

But when he gets to Second Life, even though he is at the threshold of a grand New World with startling graphics and even more amazing ability to collaborate and manipulate through the miracle of three-D streaming, he says, "Meh." Spending even $25 US to get himself a 4096 m2 where he could put a decent-sized house and decorate it on a white sandy beach somewhere doesn't thrill him. Starting some gadget or scripted thingie business even off his 512 from the $9.95 subscription doesn't grab him as a concept. The place is empty, cold. It holds nothing but sex clubs, and he doesn't feel like going to the work required to make more of it. He doesn't put anything near what he would put into a real-life equivalent -- he does the virtual equivalent of walking into a movie theater and buying only an over-priced box of Milk Duds for $1.25 and pronouncing the experience...a dud. He buys a $3.29 Taco Bell special and tells you...this is what eating out with your date is like. He gets the $25 Virgin Mobile telephone that keeps dunning you $5.03 all the time and whines that it stalls trying to text or bring up the Internet...In other words, he doesn't pay, because he doesn't value.

If the makers of Second Life had said that the entry to this fabulous world was $25 US a month -- if not $50 -- because it was very special and valuable and neat and had huge creative thrilling capacity, you can be sure that not only he would pay it, he'd be far more enthusiastic about it than going to Golden Compass this weekend and feeling smug with a lot of other geekoids that they'd scored one against evil Christianity lol.

Second Life is more Golden and has more Compass than Golden Compass because you can make your own fortune and make your own story in it. But...that doesn't have an awful lot of value for most people, evidently, unless marketers learn to package it better (and I'll bet you they'll figure out how to do this by the time Sony Home gets started).

But because in fact our Geek Dude of Resident Answers in fact is secretly an ardent utopianist himself, as all cynical secularists tend to be if you scratch them deeply enough, he begins to briskly plan what his Lost Horizon should be like, as eagerly as that guy who was laying all the sanitation and water pipes in the movie or book Lost Horizon lol, remember?

So...why don't the Lindens do this? Or that? Or the next thing? Why, they ought to make a public works system, oh, like Woodrow Wilson giving loans to farmers or Herbert Hoover making the Dam or FDR making the Public Works Administration in the 1930s and 1940s. I used to reach back for these memes myself years ago in Second Life, asking the Lindens why they didn't enable newbies to lay roads and plant trees, and pay them something, and such low-paid labour in Lindens would cost them less and make newbies feel wanted and give them some pocket money. Of course, at first the answer was the problem of land management.

But even after the group tools would make this highly feasible, as you could enable officers who could not eject and ban people or sell the land, but just plant and build on it, the Lindens rejected the idea as impractical because it's too administrative-top-heavy on their end. A $40,000 a year or more liaison with benefits or full-time office Linden would have to manage it, and they prefer to take thousands of volunteers and mentors and put them to work entirely for free (freebies have basically ruined the economy for everybody except the Lindens).

People sit around on their cracker barrels at their virtual General Store and chew their virtual tobacky and curse the sex trade, the camping industry, the bots, the evil land barons. But, all those things are what entrepreneurial people at the entry level of an economy anywhere do -- they sell sex, and cheap junk and real estate and put tacky ads in your face everywhere and then a bank on every corner. It's normal, and it's what you do in a socialist state where in fact the socialists who control things ostensibly on your behalf actually aren't doing you any favours because they are capping economic growth and suppressing profits for those who do manage to jump all the hurdles. There's no incentive.

Chip Midnight reveals a hand long visible in fact on the old forums when he instructs this Noob to understand the essence of Second Life: it is like a craft fair. Some people get to be the craftsmen, set up the Renaissance Fair, put out little baubles and bells and bonnets and stuff, but the other people have to come and buy it and drink the mulled cider and then go home. They can't complain while at the RenFair that there are no jobs for them.

Of course, that's a laughable creator-fascist Medieval Guild sort of take on SL that I always attacked (as did others) because it implies that only people who craft stuff get to be in the economy, and everybody else has to be poor and cadge sex dollars, lifting their peasant skirts behind the wagon wheels in order to be able to buy a bauble at the RenFair -- or else they have to be consumers and get their money from Inheritance, i.e. real life.

Many people think nothing of setting aside $200 or even $600 to enjoy Second Life to its fullest, the way they would a restaurant or movie or book or gadget in real life. Why go to a movie theater with greasy popcorn and rats in the aisles and eat a $50 microwaved frozen mass-produced lasagna when you can stay at home and put the $4.29 lasagna from Mrs. Stouffer's in your own microwave with no rats, and then the popcorn, and make and stage your own movie in Second Life? Isn't that worth $200? Many find that it is.

The biggest problem that Noob Castaignede has in valuation is his conception of tier fees as "server storage space". Saying that his regular life-experience of "server storage space" is like Second Life tier is like a woman saying that the closet where she stores her wedding dress is like 25 happy years of married life with her beloved husband and 3 kids and home. Or it's like saying it's like the garage where a man stores his skis, instead of his ski trips to Aspen. It's all the wrong metaphor or analogy. With Second Life, you don't just get server space, you get the access to a streaming, 3-D world with other people in it, and their content. If that's not compelling to you, I understand, but it's not your closet or your garage.

Now over to "taking out the intellectual trash". I'm glad Lisa Galarneau is back publishing at Terra Nova, which is horribly stodgy and stuffed with pompous dweebs talking about games half the time. Finally, even Terra Nova is upset by the insolent, snotty, and downright brutal expression of someone in their business -- a certain Malcolm King of Australia.

So she takes him down a peg, surely a public service for the Internet. But basically, the guy is only coming late to the trashing party already begun long ago by Clay Shirkey and others. Virtual worlds are stupid, low in culture, a fool's errand if you think you can make money in them, etc. Right, then! You don't value virtual worlds. And what about them could make you value them, except charging more for them and hinting at high-end content delights and social cachet within?

King has an interesting debate then, even showing off and citing Hume as well as his niece as authorities on reality and hallucination and such. Well, as Lisa puts it, you don't have a less authentic reaction to bad news by getting it over the telephone or email than you do in person, so the emotions are real, and therefore it seems credible to say all the human transactions are real. The resistance to this reality is something like the resistance to other new technologies, but with a Puritanical twist -- there's something somehow self-indulgent
and illicit about enjoying the virtual, instead of going and practicing lacrosse and chasing people around a lacrosse field in real life.

"The rise of virtual worlds is exciting for faddist academics. The fall of the humanities and the decline of post structuralism meant that some academics who once taught journalism or media studies, started writing articles on the “metaphysics of virtual worlds”, “eros in virtual worlds” and someone even had a crack at “ontology of virtual worlds” - but ended up in a mess of 3D object equations."

Well...kinda. Where are all those articles? There were one or two by Peter Ludlow, I think. But articles by others like Henry Jenkins, let's say, are more about the cultural and social phenomena of these worlds writ much larger than just some faddish faux-sounding term-laden jargonistic academic paper. If somebody has a paper out on "ontology of virtual worlds," good for them, but what's more operative, is that millions are already putting their actual ontology into games and virtual worlds and taking it for "normal" and "a part of their lives" and "themselves".

I'm not going to take on the defense of Second Life as an educational tool or even as a business proposition. I always say it's only possible to make money in Second Life if you don't bill your own hours or have the talents of builder/scripter/artist to begin with from real life -- and most of the educational stuff seems to be about digital arts themselves, not about anything else. That makes for a very self-referential and stuffy academic school that is well nigh insufferable. Malcom King thinks it makes only for entertainment, and we are "amusing ourselves to death" a la Neil Postman and making kids dumb and dumber from video games. Couldn't agree more. The question is whether you take this on in a meaningful from within the media itself -- and I think you have to. It's not a barren unthinking task.

There is still much of intellectual interest in SL. Take the JIRA for example, and the problems of how wikification of social media lead to totalitarianism. It's great that unlike the totalitarian experiments of the past, which are always getting started and always will be started, because people *like* being told what to do and are made uncomfortable about being free, you can see inside and even live inside this one relatively cost free -- that is, you can always log off and they haven't invaded every part of your real life -- yet! So there's time to identify it, debate it, and fight it, still!

I remember how people used to approach the telephone. If you're my age, you'll remember when some people had no phones at all in small villages, or they had party lines and had to wait respectfully in their multi-family dwellings made over from rich people's Victorian homes for their fellow tenant to get off the line.

Your own phone, which was a big, heavy, black, plastic serious looking thing with a big rotary dialer, was not to be trifled with. You might have had someone in your family like your grandfather or great aunt, who would pick up the phone fearfully, but with grim determination, positive that it was bad news, and shout into it, as if speaking to a foreigner, to say, your mother at the bus station. "Is that you? Are you all right? Where are you?" and get the absolute bare minimum of information needed -- the arrival time or the fact of arrival, and end the call immediately. In some localities you would pick up the phone and get a live operator who would know your business -- that would help keep it short, too.

I don't recall ever seeing any adult sitting at home gabbing on the phone -- I don't even think that's because it was expensive -- and long distance *was* expensive -- but because "it just wasn't done". I remember even as a teenager, if I had a longish conversation of 20 minutes with a friend I would have to hide somewhere and expect to be reprimanded. Today, people take a cell phone and sit on a public bus and dial up their loved ones and tell them not only are they on the bus but that they will be coming home in 5 minutes where they can tell them everything about their day in person, but, they start the story about their day anyway just because they can.

I can remember television being only black and white -- and also rationed. Nobody had a colour TV. Oh, there might be that one wealthy family in the village who would have everybody over to see Wizard of Oz with the coloured part of the film when they got to Emerald City, and have cider and popcorn. I can still remember how awed everyone was to see the green gates and golden path of Oz.

But at 8:30 pm promptly, the box turned off. I never got to see more than the opening song and credits of Branded with Chuck Connors, and remained in perpetual yearning my whole life but now he's dead of cigarette smoking anyway. After that, my parents might wash dishes and clean the house and make the lunches and set out the oatmeal to soak and then turn on Jack Paar or later Johnny Carson -- but if for some reason they fell asleep on the couch, the TV would turn to a test pattern -- there was no 24/7 TV. As a very young child, I recall having one half hour of Captain Kangaroo in the early morning, and then being whisked out doors in parkas and mufflers regardless of the weather, making snowmen and snow angles and snow cones with maple syrup until mittens were too frozen to move -- there were no 3 hour Barney marathons with videos watched over and over. Then, back at 4 to watch the Mousketeers and then sit in puzzlement through Huntley and Brinkley -- and the notion of having this black and white box on during the supper hour and hours of chores and homework was unthinkable.

In the same way, people will get more and more use to virtual worlds of one sort or another and never remember the days when their parents bundled them outside away from them.

Comments

[Crissa]

I pay $200/mo so people can come play in my virtual yard.

If only I knew how to make it more real for them...

...But I really don't mind people using it when I'm not there, or even when I am; that's the whole point of having a virtual world, that people can use it.

The how is entirely up to me.

But my payment to SL would barely cover a guild raid on Warcraft.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, it's interesting how this Resident Answers debate continues with the newb guy coming back and saying that he finds Unreal Tournament servers where he says he can invite his friends to review his art work and "study and play" to be far more cheap and fulfilling. Then, I guess he values it more.

But others would find that UT3 is merely some kind of MMORPG war game and find it totally lacking in any attraction if they aren't 3-D geeky artists.

So basically, his beef with SL is that it isn't a 3-D artists' world *for him* where he gets to play for nothing, or for cheap. Well, SL had that phase, but it's over now. If you weren't a beta tester or charter member or early FIC who got all these things for free or cheap or subsidies or incentives, you're SOL now. You now have to cross the barrier of competing with all those who got here first, and the cost may not be something you will spend because you don't *value* it.

Again, you value movies, cars, i-phones, vacations to Jamaica. You don't value tier in a streaming world. Of course, many of us do, because we aren't geeky 3-D artists, and having this stuff all put out here for us to still have the creative thrill of consuming and rearranging in a kind of secondary creative concentric circle is still thrilling. But it isn't for the newb geek.

Those who skip over this geeky entitlement and whining phase and imply put in their own investment and put their shoulder to the wheel often do get something out of it -- but not always, Look at Iron Perth, selling off his business and his sim (or perhaps, merely trying learn its true valuation in this volatile market).

Look at Pontiac, leaving SL. Yes, imagine! The poster child for incentivizing creative users in that 10 percent, and marketing their own brand -- leaving! Even with SL serving as a mere rounding error in their advertising budget, *they don't sufficiently value it*.

[Topher Zwiers (SL)]

"...and most of the educational stuff seems to be about digital arts themselves, not about anything else."

Not quite accurate. Take a look when you have the opportunity.
http://tinyurl.com/33mot4
http://tinyurl.com/35ewov

Enjoyed the post.
-Chris
SL: Topher Zwiers
http://www.muveforward.com

[Prokofy Neva]

I read about the medical simulation, but you know, while that's cool and I'm sure you get value out of it, my statement stands: most of what passes for education in Second Life is in fact people pumping up virtual world use itself, and the correlary, pumping up the neo-field of "digital arts" and making them into "a science". Sure, you can make it into a science. But...it has the feel of something rather precious and forced. It's like all the Derida Marxist lit crit stuff -- it's purpose mainly seems to train you to get a job...teaching it...to others who will then get a job...teaching it.

I find it all terribly self-referential.

I also wonder if you had to sensibly chose between SL as a medical simulator, and the closed customized systems like Forterra, if you wouldn't chose the latter.

[Aldo Stern]

Interesting discussion Prok. I think your reflections upon the limits and nature of the educational potential of SL sort of dovetails with some thinking I have been doing about a few of educational experiments I've witnessed during the course of the last year or so.

Generally speaking, in watching these experiments play out, we seem to see that what most of us have created so far as "educational" sims don't work terribly well as virtual classrooms or demonstration spaces.

It may simply be that so far, we have yet to hit upon the most effective ways to make spaces and builds in-world function as virtual classrooms, because we are still working from real world perspectives that constrict how we visualize using the tools of SL.

I suspect that it is proving to be true that if we are to understand the real potential of the grid for didactic communication, we need to look at it in ways that are completely new--and we're just not there yet.

I will say however, that we have learned some really interesting things about what does or does not transfer well into SL from the real world in terms of goals and practices associated with museum exhibits and immsersion environments. And most importantly, we have seen some truly intriguing informal educational processes going on. The real exciting stuff hasn't been coming out of classes and presentations given in the many virtual (yet still largely conventional) classrooms and exhibitry that many educatiors were hoping to see. The most successful learning experiments I have witnessed involved the loosely organized groups of self-directed adult learners, who are continually shifting and and re-aligning themselves in informal work and study groups that seek to provide the content for the experimental classrooms and virtual exhibits and immersion environments.

I have been fascinated by the way that these people from a wide variety of rl backgrounds and locations have been coming together in diverse places such as Renaissance Island and Deadwood/1876 to share ideas and information, divide up and take on research and "lab" tasks, and have come away with expanded perspectives and knowledge of topics they knew little or nothing about before.

It has reminded me--and again, I unfortunately have to draw upon rl models for a descriptive analogy, which just shows how stuck in the context of the flesh I am--of the learning that I saw taking place in the living history/reenacting movement of the 1980s-1990s. What I saw then was that "reenactments" and living history events themsleves had very distinct limits as a means of educating the public or tradtional student groups. However, the movement was built upon a cheerful riot of self-directed, informal learning activities carried out by loose associations of mixed professional and non-professional historians. Those people used their "hobby" as an opportunity for sharing wonderful experiences in experimental archaelolgy and carrying out research that often put to shame what many academic and museological institutions ever produced on similar subjects.

Ultimately, it may come down to the fact that the most useful experiments are not necesarily the ones in which you achieve the expected results.

[Prokofy Neva]

http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/5074/23941336