Lindens in the Content Business: Magellan's Latest Adventures

Tipped off from some FIC on the forums who follow the Magellan legend closely (and always seem to get early wind of this peripatetic Linden's latest travels), I headed out to the still-new Nautilus continent to see the Lindens' new builds.

With no full sims going on the auction for months, the Dept. of Public Work Lindens and their mole friends have lots of spare sims to play on. I was expecting from the forums post to find one or two sims with some builds, which they'd use to anchor a continent and give it a story, or perhaps make an infohub out of it (there is an infohum sim called Hyannisport that has lain fallow for months, apparently also slated for use someday).

To my surprise, I found something like 20 sims with an enormous ruins build -- the Citadel, the Temple, and miles of wall and fallen rock. As described, there is a giant bore, that has something to do with Magellan, with bottles of beer and slices of pizza strewn around. Apparently there is lots more, but I couldn't find it all, with my draw distance forcibly dumbed down to 64 due to incompatibility with Windlight.

The Lindens are definitely in the content business. I have no idea what they are going to do with this giant build spanning many sims. Make it an attraction in Showcase for newbies to visit? Hold events? Rent out the many tented Middle-Eastern looking buildings as stores like the Galleria or Busy Ben's?

In the old days, I would have been fascinated with this, followed it avidly, and bought land in or near the Linden legend builds (in fact that's what I did, with Aztecha Sky Temple built near Magellan's first crash, visible in Columbia, and land in Jubata near the Great Wall Temple and secret passageway; and of course the Moth Temple Infohub, where I just bought more abandoned land off the auction to add more wetlands and prims to Jessica's build there.)

And of course I'll fly around and poke around and enjoy studying it and reading about it, but now, there's a kind of undertow.

For one, taken just as a build, it isn't terribly A plus, with low head-banging ceilings, non-playable chess, and most frustratingly, not a single clickable thing. You can't *do* anything on these builds. You can't copy any of the stuff as a souvenir, or operate it, or interact with it. You can just gawk at it. That gets old, even if you are awed by the giant purple crystal -- you can't click and, oh, make it change colour or something...

But, sitting on an elaborate cream-coloured stone bench with scrolls made by Barnesworth or some other mole, I thought of the other undertow -- the Lindens making content in competition with us. If they make an exploring sort of venue, it competes with all those people like Rezzable or Lost Gardens or Magic of Oz trying to make their own exploring venues and try to get traffic, eyeballs, sales...If they start renting out space (and there isnt' any evidence that they will), they directly compete with struggling landlords.

There's also an essential injustice underlying all this -- the Lindens, on the mainland, get to put together 20 sims in a row, with no ad farms.

None of the rest of us get to do that.

Trying to put even two sims together is damn hard, because of the auction competition, where some people just bid against you out of spite. To put 20 of them together would be impossible, not even 4. Then...to do so without ugly builds, ad farms, extortion...impossible.

Somehow, this must all have a purpose, or the Lindens wouldn't pay the Moles $10/hour to build it.

The feeling flying around the large stone build with low parapets and flat pavement everywhere, with some large blocks knocked off, is like the scene in the Silver Chair, where the children go to the giants' castle and fall into the large holes making up letters spelling out UNDER ME...but before the realize this, they go up to the giants, who are napping and preparing for lunch...with the cookbook opened up to the recipe for human children...Delightful, fun, and then...oops...we gotta get out of here!

I'm someone who has just put a lot of effort into a build loosely tied to the Magellan legend, and I did so knowing that nothing can be expected in return, and that if we're lucky, some people will visit it after landing at the Linden infohub in Iris, and when I can finally get SL working on a new computer, I might be able to do all the tutorials I plan there.

But when you see the Lindens building content in some other opera like this, it's just...I can't even think of the word. Every time I fly over the juice bar -- yes, the JUICE bar!!! -- in Brownlee, I recall how JUST when I proposed to the Lindens that I would be happy to sponsor a build there, and even some kind of scripted barge or something to make use of all those seas, and replace that awful road (now reduced to a pier with a DANGER sign on it by Michael Linden)...within days, the juice bar was deployed, to put paid to the idea of any resident infohub being established in any way. Sigh.

Perhaps I'm not as cheerful as I might be coming off 3 days of SL not working for me at all. If I typed, the chat came out 30 or 60 seconds later or not at all. I kept crashing. My Linden dollars said LOADING. Everybody's pictures or groups said LOADING. I flew to sims -- and saw no builds on them. Obviously, the world was stalled somewhere in the networks, not streaming in. Belinda Linden tried to help, but it's not really something fixable. She gave me a tracer route map that shows you just where the connection of 16 or 30 hops from your house to Linden Lab breaks down. For me, it was somewhere before Dallas...I couldn't tell whether it was a Verizon problem or a Lab problem, but I noticed other people reporting the same symptoms on the forums. I rebooted and reconnected dozens of times, clearing cache, changing the bandwidth blah blah blah. Finally, inexplicably, the chat lag and loading issues were gone, but crashes continued sudden and unexpected, along with the typical freezes I get every time I did something out of the ordinary, like delete a script out of an object, or terraform a piece of land down.

I don't control my destiny...

Comments

[Dirk Talamasca]

Saw it the other day.. ZzzzZzzz

[Tammy Nowotny]

If Linden Labs want to pay my RL self $10/hr, I would gladly create a Mole alt and join the gang. I might have a hard time bringing myself to create stuff which isn't clickable. But I need a RL life job which pays more than $100/yr :-)

BTW, the Hyannisport sim is (unless I am mistaken) actually spelled "Hyannasport" and it was a sim they auctioned off last summer on the last new continent. This was back when I was still an active land speculator, and I considered bidding on the whole sim. It was an especially nice sim with a long and relatively unblockable coastline (not that one new sim is much better or worse than any another.)

One of the reasons I backed off is because its name was confusing. The RL place on Cape Code (where the Kennedys keep their sailboats) is Hyannisport. I was worried no one could ever find the place on the World Map.

I have a small shop on a nearby sim called Westerlay... whose name is also a slight misspelling of a picturesque New England coastal location (i.e., the town of Westerley, Rhode Island.)

[Prokofy Neva]

I'd have to look up the spelling, but in fact there really is a sim, I'm pretty sure it is spelled Hyannisport (maybe there are two) in which there is a Linden build with an infohub planned.

[Tammy Nowotny]

It is entirely possible that the Lindens have created two sims with homophonic and/or confusingly similar names. For example, there are two old mainland sims called "Specter" (as in Sen. Arlen Specter, where BTW I have another shop) and "Spectre" (as in the spectre of communism which is haunting Europe.) There is no "Spector" as in Phil Spector yet but maybe there will be one someday.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, what they are going to do is now announced: sell 1024 m2 double-prim plots. I wonder if these will get as expensive as Bay City.
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/20/new-city-area-discovered/#comments

[Economic Mip]

As expensive as Bay City? Probably at first, where people will be bidding up prices to insane levels. However, I really do not think these lots will sell for more than 25k Lindens each after the first batch of auctions, because they are releasing over a HUNDRED of these plots according to the blog.

[Tammy Nowotny]

BTW, I stand corrected: there is a Hyannisport sim currently but no Hyannasport with the extra "a". I think the Lindens spelled the sim's name wrong when they first created it and then they fixed it later.