There is a special kind of idiot in SL who puts a giant green "lawn" board
part way up into the air to ruin the view for miles to have a flat board
for his McMansion, instead of building in harmony with the beautiful rocky
mainland island he has bought.
There is a special kind of idiot in SL who puts a giant green "lawn" board
part way up into the air to ruin the view for miles to have a flat board
for his McMansion, instead of building in harmony with the beautiful rocky
mainland island he has bought.
And they could, by allowing mainland communities to have sim captains
empowered to instantly return prims not belonging to groups and owners on
the sim. And not wait days -- weeks -- for Lindens to get to it on an abuse
report. They could also empower Concierge to deal with griefing, which they
refuse to do. They fear it's too much work. But this is how they lose
customers. It's how I lose them every day, which means they lose them too
because then I sell my land. The end.
If you ever wanted to see a stark exhibition of the sheer class warfare of the FIC and the sheer *assholery* of their coy pretense that Second Life is a game for everyone else -- their customers -- but a platform for them as vaunted creators -- look at this conversation with Lordfly, in response to my blog yesterday:
Josh Eikenberry Must is awfully strong. Game companies dont generally give people free stuff for sequels.
Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick It's not a game company but a virtual world platform, and usually in a game, you don't have players who provide the company's revenue with their purchase of hundreds of sims. Most Silicon Valley companies don't make their product obsolete THAT fast and step on their old, good-selling product for the sake of vapour ware they didn't make yet. That would be insane. They manage it better as Apple does. "Must" is exactly the stance to take with outrageous rip-off artists like the Lindens who are happy to take your money for their "development" then develop themselves right out from under you rendering you red mist.
Josh Eikenberry Linden lab has more games in its development portfolio than virtual worlds. They also own and operate a game storw. Im gonna call a duck a duck. They dont owe you anything. But feel free to sue them for imagined losses!
Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick Um, none of those titles do as well as Second Life, and none of them have produced as much revenue. If you and LL are so confident they can make it on these new exotic products with niche markets, then fine, try living just on that revenue. Oh, they can't, which is why they are making a new virtual world and trying to cling to the old one too. I think land owners don't owe anything to Linden Lab, either, with their attitude, and the attitude of their chosen FIC, like you. They all should down tools and walk out immediately tomorrow, which would force a mass exodus of all those island customers, too. That might get them to see why they need to figure out a 1:1 ratio of sim transfers or compensation. Pronto. In fact, if we had had more land baron solidarity and coherence in all these years, their showing some muscle as a class might have brought the effete creator's class who lives off their backs to stop their war on land barons, too. None of YOU would have any content sales business or services sales business if it weren't for the class of land barons willing to pay LL's bills all these years.
BTW I'm not in that category of people who needs to "sue LL for imagined losses" as I'm a tiny business by comparison to the big land barons and have only roughly 10-11 sims worth of land. But I raise this as a moral/political/economic issue that Linden Lab itself needs to solve properly before it becomes a lawsuit for some people. They've spent their lives being targeted by lawsuits, some of them mischievious and frivolous and they need to get out of the virtual world business if they don't take care of their customers properly.
They, like Lordfly, think "creators are customers" and not "customers are creators" should be their mantro. Great, dude. Try living for 30 days with the income you generate just from those content creators, and not the income generated by those in the land baron business buying sims who are willing to take care of your customers for you -- your REAL customers who are the ones BUYING all that vaunted creator-class content.
If it weren't for the willingness of the land baron class to provide homes and hold hands for customer service problems so that LL doesn't have to, there'd be no content sales market.
Cloud Party filled up with devs and designers instead of people like me because we couldn't even rez a cube, and the default houses were so ugly and stupid with such ridiculous camera angles and we couldn't modify them. The end.
Why should Linden Lab screw over this class of people that made their adventure possible all these years, truly? They need to do right by them. Game companies don't give "free stuff" for sequels perhaps, but then, games have $9.95 subscription costs for every single player, not 2/3 of the players riding free.
Game companies sell other merchandise like t-shirts and posters that Linden Lab wouldn't be able to sell in a user-generated world. Game companies have been known to send out coupons or free trial periods to lure customers into a new game.
The model is not "game" in a world where most of the people got an absolutely free ride, which they could use to even MAKE money -- someone like Lordfly could have a free account with payment on file and cash out all the cash he could earn with content creation, of which LL could only take a percentage cut -- and where a tiny segment of the population paid most of the taxes, essentially.
Lordfly is likely one of those morons who whines about the "1 percent" and "income distribution" while never admitting that the "1%" pays 40% of the tax revenue needed to give the rest free schools, roads and ObamaCare. The Lindens and the FIC need to understand where their socialism comes from.
The brand extension and new content TED gained by setting up a decentralized community would have cost millions of dollars to produce through traditional business means. Such a community can create value in many ways. Look at the benefits Apple reaped by opening app development to the crowd. By designing a tool kit that lowered the cost of development from $1 million to $10,000, the company harnessed the creativity of thousands of developers. Ask yourself what Apple’s business model would be without its diverse app store. When the security-software maker McAfee allowed volunteers known as “McAfee Maniacs” to offer customers answers to technical support questions, it cut overhead expenses by 5%. At Intuit, users of Mint, QuickBooks, and TurboTax serve as “live communities,” providing peer-to-peer advice for everything from special tax circumstances to competitive pay issues. To date they have answered more than 25 million questions—about 74% of all questions that have come in. “In one product line, this approach has slashed support costs by 35%,” says Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen, the chief innovation officer of Intuit. And then there’s the upside of having a community of superusers built around and invested in the Intuit platform, creating a competitive moat.
So you've all seen the story about how Linden Lab is going to pull the plug on Second Life, and build a shinier Third Life.
The good news: they are making this new, better world closed source, as they realize now all that hippie cult open-source stuff isn't good for business and scares away customers.
The bad news: Oz Linden, the main open-source cult guru, is going to be left behind as the care-taker of Legacy SL (as I'm calling it) with us content curmudgeons and Mainland rental agents. Watch the JIRA close again.
Ebbe Linden, the new CEO, says in the new world, "content creators will be king". Um, no thanks. I don't want to live in such a world. I want to be king of my castle, not a serf in somebody else's content GULAG -- content made outside of the world, which I can't change, and not even a box or a flower to be made by me, inworld.
Ciaran's post has a character very aptly named Bagman Linden, who seems to be coming in to do the Lindens' bag work for them now. Here's the lovely thing he says:
The comparison that resonates with me is between Second Life and EverQuest. Both are similarly aging products with similarly sized user bases. Both at the top of their market segment. Both had countless people trying to bump them off with little success. We know how the story ends with EverQuest.
Yeah, we know. Thanks.
(I've always found these people shockingly inhuman and chilling, like aliens).
Yes, I know, I know, they're not exactly going to close it right away; but the New Shiny will not be "backward compatible"-- that Silicon Valley term that implies you're the backward creature for spending all your money on a gadget that becomes obsolete within months as soon as the new iteration appears.
So let me cut right to the chase to what this means and what the Lindens should do to the "left behind" that will be "backward" and not "compatible" with the New Shiny: compensate them financially.
You Can't Take Sims With You
In this entire self-serving, obsequious, flattering, gag-reflex of a thread, you see a bunch of the FIC -- the Feted Inner Core who have always been privileged and cosseted and feted by the Lindens -- and this hasn't changed in ten years -- Embracing Change and the New or having minor panic attacks but basically thinking about how they can exploit new capacity for content creation, likely outside the platform, and import it into a new and better platform where they will no longer face competition from amateurs using in-world tools. Ah, heaven for them, eh?
Not a single one of them thinks of what this transition means to those who have spent thousands of dollars on sims -- or for that matter, thousands of dollars building inventories out of their products -- products they can't take with them now which have just devalued.
While a few people like the oligeanous Desmond Shang ask gingerly if there will be a land market, most of the people there never ask about what this means for land barons or even small mom-and-pop stands -- they loathe such people are they are a class that constitues a bulwark and a control over them as a tinier and nastier and more expendible creator class.
Here's the thing, to concentrate everybody's minds, please. What can you take with you to the next world? Textures. Meshes. What can't you take with you to the next world, even with copybot? *Your sim itself*. That sim you paid $1000 to set up and maybe more on the old auction or from other inworld sellers. THAT doesn't port. AT ALL.
The program simply wouldn't work -- the new world will have a different engine, different specs, etc.
So you will have a class of land barons with anywhere from 10 sims (like me) to 100 or 1000 sims (like Anshe and some of the top barons) who can't take their sims with them. They are holes in the Internet into which money was poured, but that bus don't float. They are not like AnneMarie Scourge-mobiles sailing across the Linden blue. They are a loss, pure and simple. A dead loss. If you paid for landscaping or a build on them, likely that can't port either or if it can, it doesn't matter because you still have the problem of having to buy NEW sims all over again. Or new....thingies. Whatever it is they will sell. Wedges of interactivity in the sky or a plane of virtuality with rabbit holes like the world-destroyer Pixeleen always wanted.
In a minute, I'll come back to Desmond's awful political position calling for no cost for land (i.e. no initial cost, no purchase price, only tier, I guess) which benefits themed elite community people with rich content like him and screws very diverse mass low-cost rental agents like me.
Yes, the Lindens Compensated Before
But let me first dwell on the reason why compensation is in order: precedent.
When the Lindens suddenly pulled the telehub system after they added point-to-point map teleporting, and destroyed the telehub mall businesses, land owners fought back because they had been screwed into continuing to bid large amounts on the land auction, not knowing their huge purchases would be worthless in 30 or 60 days.
So the Lindens decided to do the right thing and compensate all telehub land owners on a certain formula tied to date of purchase. To be sure, Anshe was allowed to cheat on her dates, but then they screwed Anshe by rolling out huge chunks of new white sandy waterfront that she was forced to buy to stay at the top of the market. In any event, either you opted for compensation, or you got to develop a hub area with the chunk of land yourself -- which is something I and a dozen others did with the Resident-Developed Hubs, a closed and long-ago chapter.
(As a side note I could say that due to the new Land Impact bugs, even though the content on my particular infohub was barely changed, somehow, out of nowhere, it was found to have hundreds of extra LIs, i.e. prims, and I had to remove half the build in order to satisfy Guy Linden's sudden fit about a customer being unable to bring a boat through the creek there -- something that would happen about once a year -- because the prims were ostensibly used up and the boat wouldn't rez on the remaining spare Linden land/water in the zim. One of the singularly devastating times of my SL having to pull that build. I couldn't put it back later.)
Then there was the grandfathering of the islands lower price before they raised the price for newer servers. At first, they were only going to let their FIC in on this deal so they could grab a bunch of low-cost sims before the price jacked up considerably. I was the one who published that story on the Herald, and then the Lindens were forced to provide a window of time for all of us to buy low-cost sims -- that was only fair.
There was the VAT tax debacle -- for a time, the Lindens ate the tax for their customers, then charged it -- many got furious at them and felt they should be compensated, but sorry, this was a case where if you voted for socialism in your country and high taxes, you couldn't force non-socialists in California to keep giving you low-cost sims by essentially removing VAT and giving you a price lower than everybody else had to pay who didn't get free health insurance - while you still got yours in your socialist country.
So the Lindens did compensate when they were clearly in the wrong but didn't when they had no moral or legal reason to. As with the educators. Apple doesn't sell special educational i-Phones at a discount or special educational low-cost laptops at a different cost than everyone else because you're a teacher. Your institution can sometimes arrange bulk purchases but then that's up to them to negotiate; as a class of people in society, you are not entitled to a lower cost, you are only entitled to no tax. But as an Internet good, the Lindens' sims didn't have tax for people outside VAT land anyway, so that wasn't the point.
There's absolutely no reason why the Lindens shouldn't offer a formula for compensation for land on mainland and islands. And also consider a compensation for content creators with certain sales levels who cannot move to the new world because they are prim-based.
Naturally, no company wants to have a compensation policy, but they must, and large land-owners should compel them to, as they are losing big.
What is the population of people who need to be compensated? It's small. Log-ons concurrently are something like 50,000, maybe 80,000. There can't be more than at the very most a million people, but it's probably much more like 300,000. Of these, the vast majority are either day-trippers or casual socializers with free accounts or single $9.95 type accounts, or perhaps a little $25 mainland parcel.
We know from Tyche (and I'd have to check her latest statistics) that there are only something like 30,000 sims in the world. So that does not mean 30,000 people, but probably something more like 5,000 or 10,000 people, I'd have to ask.
Let's say there are 10,000 people who are big or small land-owners and top-selling content-owners in prims, not mesh. Of these, a small number at the top own hundreds of sims (remember the old charts with only a handful of people making US $5000 a month, and hundreds making $1000 a month and then perhaps 20,000 making $100 a month in little businesses).
If you were to give each and every one of these people a one-time cash payment of $1000, that's $100,000, i.e. obviously some smaller percentage will have lots more and some lots less.
That's hardly a big price to pay for a multi-million dollar company for good will, good reputation, and g0od word-of-mouth advertising. A formula even of pennies on the dollar for the sims will ensure that a massive constituency doesn't become the force that abruptly ends the Lindens' actual (not imaginary) cash flow this year.
And end it they should if they don't get satisfaction on this.
Of course, there is always a problem of solidarity among landlords, I remember this when I used to be in various group meetings trying to get the Lindens to meet just basic demands of transparency and decency. Somebody always sucks up to get an inside deal, and of course, the Lindens split people to divide and conquer.
Like Zindra, Only Lots Bigger
Imagine Zindra, where some people were in with Blondin and some weren't, but the bottom line -- Zindra was a rough passage for many people, shaking some loose, harming others, not really making lots of money for still more. Even getting the 1:1 transfer of land we got for the Zindra transfer, most of us still lost money in down-time, confusion, and the dislike of some people to be in a heavy XXX adult environment, when before they were in a more mixed and moderate environment.
If the Lindens have sims in the new world, they could say, we will match you 1:1, or here's your cash-out rate if you want to leave us now.
Compensation or We Walk
Every single discussion about this with the Lindens and in the community has to open with this demand: compensation, compensation, compensation, and 1:1 transfers.
People shouldn't break ranks and suck up and look for insider deals but join ranks and fight. Otherwise, they should massively pull the plug *now* on their sims, just as the Lindens are massively pulling the plug on them. That will show the Lindens -- as the response to copybot did -- that their fantasies of living off taxation of content sales or subscription fees are truly illusory.
SHamlet always flogged the idea on his New World Notes that the Lindens should get away from the land model -- like most technocommunists/technolibertarians, he loathed land because land means private property and capitalism that means a bulwark against the power of coders and their hangers-on. But the Lindens couldn't leave that model.
I know as well as they do that this transfer isn't about technology. Technology isn't really THAT different and shiny today -- there will be many bumps and grinds and they could gamble the whole thing away foolishly.
What they're really doing is shaking loose the land model that keeps them having to keep printing and selling sims with a finite and shrinking customer base, and continuing to lose people because the costs are too high for amateur businesses.
What someone like Desmond is rubbing his hands with glee over is the notion that he, too, can get rid of the fixed cost of high Linden tier. With a themed community, he can either charge a membership fee or charge stores rents on his land that he can make as high as he want, or even keep at the same price as they were in Legacy SL even though his costs are much lower. Who wouldn't love that! Or hey, he might come down a tad because there may be higher taxes, i.e. higher fees for the marketplace or sales taxes on sales (that's how it might easily be done, inworld).
People who have non-theme, less cohesive, random, ever-changing customers though -- many islands and many mainland companies on the open market -- will not be able to charge subscription fees for membership in a community -- like country club dues -- or the same high rents in this market. With zero-cost sims, it could be a very, very crowded market indeed. Except, if high cost was meant originally to be a barrier to amateurs to flush up only professionals, it didn't work.
I'm not interested in organizing the landlord class now myself. I'm too busy in RL and I don't know a lot of the new ones nor do I have the same interests. But they better organize themselves if they value their pocketbooks and their "investment". They are about to be screwed over horrendously and I think they don't even know this yet. Of course, it's possible they already reached a private understanding, but I don't know.
MY PLANS TO STAY IN BUSINESS
Let me tell you of my own plans.
Even before this dreadful announcement, I was going to come inworld and set a lot of parcels to sale this weekend because of three disasters that happened to our family this year -- my son's serious accident and year-long recovery; the loss of my children's father's home in a fire, and my diagnosis with a rare autoimmune disease -- that simply means there isn't the time and money there once was to "play the game".
So now I'll likely tell people that if they want to buy the land they're renting, great, buy it for $1/meter, or continue renting, and then sell what isn't renting.
The good news is that you can do this with a lot less risk than the old days. Because land is rock-bottom low-cost -- .5/meter or less in many places even -- you can just move if you get a bad neighbour on land you abandon or sell to reduce tier. Before, I'd not only not break up contiguous parcels in a community, I'd "buy the view" on 4 sims in a corner to control the experience. Now, with land abandoned for the taking everywhere, one doesn't have to buy the view, one can go to a better view and buy that.
I want to keep some of my areas together anyway, but hopefully if I sell a parcel here or there someone good will come who appreciates a good neighbour.
What's interesting is that there are still Mainland land dealers -- I see a bunch are still buying. Why? Did they not get the news? Well, no, because the savvy ones know that turbulence is good for business. Lots of good bargains to be had, and lots of people dumping homestead rentals in fear and heading to buy Mainland. Could be a great time for the Mainland land flipper, in fact. And if he hates it, he can just dump his tier holding group and leave. When the music stops, there probably won't be a chair for everybody, but most people in the land business have combined it with rentals and content sales or live music -- something will turn up.
If you are a single person just living on a little plot, life has never been better, because you are free to leave for the mere cost of $1/meter or less somewhere else or -- a great time to rent so as not to get stuck even a month with extra tier bills! : )
It's amazing to me that I have customers for as long as 10 years, and brand-new customers who are newbies. It's amazing they still come even though due to those 3 disasters, my inworld time is limited severely every day -- no more hours of ranging around, getting ideas, making interesting things, now it's bang out tickets and go home.
I suspect there will be a big outflow as the news dawns on people, however -- they'll go to some place more secure like World of Warcraft or Minecraft that takes care of customers more, or to Facebook or Twitter. Twitter is my main virtual world now for work and my blogging. I've spent 120 very intensive days liveblogging the Ukrainian war, mainly with the help of Twitter and Google Maps and Panoramio, which has had extraordinary material from citizen journalists documenting tanks, shellings, kidnappings, etc. which all need to be translated and analyzed to try to provide an alternative to the Kremlin propaganda. This might change, if Russia pulls the plug on Twitter next week. All virtual worlds are subject to Linden-like behaviour, of course.
A Short Re-Cap
This is how Second Life has gone for me -- in the early years, I actually could make enough revenue to buy new land at a fairly low cost because I would take my time and shop and I had a system of a lot of parcels spread out I could sell any time and find new ones if problems arose -- sort of like the compartments in the Titanic.
I started the SL Public Land Preserve to be funded by the rentals business plus donations of tier and cash, and if the whole thing gave me a little revenue to pay some real-life bills, great. And it did. I expanded, then at some point abruptly contracted after a number of poor Linden decisions -- the crashing of the land auction with flat-price sims (remember that!), the terrible summer of losses for everyone, new continents without telehubs, then the scourge of the ad farms and Impeach Bush and hijacking of the view and degradation of value. I shrank my sims because the Lindens were not willing to put in simple rules -- it took them four years to do so! -- to protect people's investment, and allowed a handful of scummy ad micro-barons to hijack the few and extort buy-outs for years. Oh, and the griefers...
Extraordinary, vicious destructiveness which I never understood until actually thinking about it today: they were trying to find ways of destroying the land model. They wanted land to be just a frame. And they wanted to drive people off the Mainland to more expensive islands.
For various reasons, with extra real-life jobs, travel etc in recent years I reduced further because the population shrunk. So now I had to face the issue of the Land Preserve not paying for itself. I tried to get more donations, tried to trim it, tried to add more higher paying rentals. But tinkering endlessly with formulas and methods, which I used to love doing for hours on end, just wasn't as fun any more for a simple reason: I couldn't see much of the world. I spent probably a year or two in the gulch of the Viewer 1/Viewer 2 debacle where nothing rezzed right or looked good and was barely visible even to edit for customers.
When the fog cleared from that, I was pretty tempered and subdued in my desire to buy any land. I bought a few symbolic parcels on new continents but just to sort of keep in the market. I still loved either commissioning content with my ideas or making little things even in my amateur way and these sold a bit but couldn't cover costs.
Then when my son's accident occurred I was faced with having absolutely no time to come in world and do all the endless customer care, new customer recruitment and dancing around fixing houses and whatnot that I used to do to get the stuff rented. I could only come in and do customer service and that's it. It's incredible how much unpaid time you put into these things to get revenue that seems like something -- except your time isn't paid LOL.
This situation might have dragged out for awhile while I got less busy in RL, but not with this announcement. I was glad that a Linden I always liked, Reuben, happened to post the news about this from the dev group and Hamlet's blog on Facebook, and without a moment's thought, I came inworld and spent as many hours as I could before collapsing in fatigue setting everything I could to sale that could be set, for $1 or $2 or $3/meter.
I certainly plan to stay in business -- I've been in business 10 years! -- and will go down with the ship -- I was there for the famous GAME OVER sign at the Sims Online.
But I'm not going to spend a single minute more paying tier on land that isn't renting. On land that I used to keep sort of "in stock" because I had some dream for it. On land that was a past dream and needs too much to keep up. On land in the Preserve that just never gets any visitors because no one likes it as much as I do. It's all got to go.
I'm not sure I'll be on the boat to the next world. The migration from the Sims Online was rugged enough. There, I had made a stake -- my avatar, and my simoleons and my rares. I could sell these on ebay, and make a few hundred US dollars to buy my first SL sims.
There's nothing like that now I'd be able to do.
One really sad thing for me as far as Legacy SL goes is that I can't take any of the builds I commissioned various builders to do with me. That's because they have either left SL, died in real life, or are simply MIA -- so even if there is a copier and porter, they can't use it. Maybe I can find some of them, but I doubt they will want to bother with taking old prim builds of 10 years ago with prim drift -- because the new world won't have prims. Why bother even to figure out how to copybot them for some file that might or might not port even if somebody invents a converter. The textures are not the issue. I actually have some of the textures although not always the perms to them. But it's the builds, the feel of prims, the craftsmenship,
And more than that, it's the sense of place, and the contiguous, geographical world around the buildings with other people doing the same thing.
Definition of a Virtual World
I always gave Prokofy's definition of a virtual world:
1) A sense of place
2) Drama
That's all you need. Good graphics don't matter if you have those other two things and all the good graphics in the world will not compensate for the lack of those two.
We used to make very compelling worldlets and experiences in The Sims Online with very primtive 2-D interface and stock sets of content and no user content.
Lindens might think SL's secret sauce might be "creativity" or "the people" but it's also very much the sense of place.
The particular configuration of builds and sims and neighbours that you can't take with you.
For example, to me, the epitome of the Mainland experiment is when you have good neighbours that work out. When they are friendly and nice and make nice things. Or when you have neighbours you hate and who have been nasty to you on occasion, or who have no interest in you and keep your distance, but you get along to keep the view.
A good neighbour who doesn't wreck your view is worth his weight in gold. What possible compensation could you get for him in a new world where he might not come, or might no longer be next to your place? The particular configuration of Linden content is also at issue -- roads, bridges, builds like the Moth Temple. None of that is portable because it's mainly prims or sculpties and all Lindens will scorn taking the ruins of their left-behind world to the New Shiny.
Moth Temple
So something like the Moth Temple, where a group of us have literally spent thousands of dollars over the years in tier, builders' fee, content purchases, and time making experience for others like tutorials and games -- that's all burnt up into the ether. None of it can come, none of it can port. My tunic and Moth King staff that Osprey Therein made for me on those long-ago nights of the Moth Swarm -- they can't come. Because she died in real life. And copybotting her stuff wouldn't be the same for me -- not without the build, the sense of place, the nice neighbours I have on that sim. The feeling of a world.
Oh sure, you might be able to copybot it and perhaps make some imitation of it. But it's not the same. Perhaps if users bellow enough about the loss of the "Linden Look" to the mainland and plead for the Mainland to be conserved as a custom, maybe they will keep it as one estate among many or something. But it's unlikely.
The Lindens have always hated the Mainland. The Mainland is where all their mistakes and bad policies are grotesquely on display, forever. Those few Lindens who *do* like the Mainland like Michael Linden and the Moles -- will they come along to the new world? I have to wonder. It is not prim-based...
Are Virtual Worlds Going to be 'In' Now?
Now let me say something about virtual worlds in general. We've been in the virtual worlds winter; but I don't think it's now the spring. I don't think there is any boom coming, any room for a World of Warcraft phenomenon, and any hope that Ocular Rift will make some massive big thing happen.
None at all. Maybe incrementally a few more added to the generally low population of users. Because most people want to look at their tablets and even type; they don't want to be sucked into a world because they want control of their environment.
Don't forget what an awful bust Google Glass has been. Ask Robert Scoble, who was initially absolutlely thrilled with GG -- and now pans it mercilessly. The Glassholes never got any uptake by the masses, like i-Phones did. Ebbe Linden, be warned. Glassholes. Google Glass. It didn't catch on.
Virtualization is going to be more in fashion, but not virtual worlds. That is, with the Internet of Things, with sensors, with context signals, with tablets and phones, there will be more of a meta interface created that will be a "world" of sorts. Maybe first there will be more overlays of things that show up on phones. Maybe somebody not-Google will re-do the Glass without the Ass.
Or I might be able to sit with holograms of a friend from Russia or try on a 3D garment in my living room that is made out of light or something -- sooner than we think. People like their phones and Skype and Facebook. But they like them still "out there," not climbing into them and being "immersed." Not everybody avatarizes or immerses well. The disorientation and dizzyness of Ocular Rift might prove to be a real blockage to mass adaption.
After all, 3D movie glasses never became the norm, you know?
I think there will be miniaturized/virtualized worlds that are on a rolling basis made up of a meta layer from the Internet of Things -- my coffee pot or my referigerator or the cat's bowl or my driverless car or my work flow and music -- all needing to be managed in some visual space so I can see them all in one context. Plus my work groups or my parties or my travel -- all needing virtualized space to conceptualize and manipulate in a 3D visual interface.
I think things like groups and access and permissions will become hugely important on the Internet of Things and people will want spaces where they interact and plan and deploy that stuff. A simulated 3D office and home that manages all the interfaced/wired stuff might be someone's "world" that they then attach to someone else's "world" via Facebook. I think this is why Facebook and Yahoo have bought virtual world things. Not to make destinations, but to use the technically to build out their existing space.
But virtual worlds as a destination where they log-in and wait for things to rez and deal with griefers and try to find their friends and such -- that will still be only the acquired taste and technical ability of a small minority of the population and they will not scale.
What Philip is working on, with the haptic stuff and being able to move in real life and have the avatar move too seems to me more for use in real life in context of work conferencing or socializing or exploring various interfaces in the world than about a separate world destination as such.
Sharia Court is Pleased and Approves the New Shiny
Now, some comments on a thread at Sluniverse.com where I am banned, but where nevertheless the Sharia Court regulars wonder what my take is on this devastation. Even so, there was some dissent from the content-fascist ranks:
I listened to the meeting where Oz said the new world views the creator as the customer. I hope this includes the very amateur creator and in world tools. Watching high end creators rez a vendor board for an item made out of world on a very expensive 3d program does nothing to promote the magic of SL. Nan
Right. Oz is of course the worst with that sort of elitism -- nothing more elitist than the "democratic" and "open" open-source cultist, you know.
The customer isn't the creator. Creators make up less than 2% or at the most 10% of any group and they DO NOT PAY THE BILLS. They supposedly draw others who do, but that's a chimera. The reality is the customer is the customer. The customer is the creator, in fact. The customer buys a lot of props, but then wants to be able to edit and place them and also make his own stuff to fit in. It's the geographical contiguity, the sense of place, and his own role in it as a socializer, builder, etc. even if amateur that is important. People make the most stupid little boxes but they love them dearly. The vast majority of customers are not, as Nan put it, content to watch somebody else create, rez a board, and pay them into that board. They want participatory content they can resize, change, adapt, add to, etc. Even if they don't wind up editing mesh, they place it, and combine it with their own content which is the meta-content of chat, socializing, exploring, etc. THAT is the creative content of virtuality.
THAT has to drive the world, the economy and the governance. Creators with their nose in Blender out-world who socialize only out-world on Sluniverse.com don't care about governance and view issues and policies in-world so they really are an obstruction to liberalization and democratiztaion of worlds. They are like the aristocracy that got overthrown in certain countries from France to Russia -- and then what came in was worse, like Jacobins or Bolsheviks (griefers).
Building a world around the creator class is sheer, utter, stupid folly. It was done already, starting in 2007 and then when M came in as well. The original Lindens privileged *scripting* more than building, and the car talk of how sims and their technicalities would work. The look of the world and avatars was very secondary for those original coder pioneers. The mall store designers who came later were only something to be preyed on by the Lindens and the code class and to confuse and harass with policies like pulling the plug on the telehubs or charging for all freebies on the marketplace or whatever daft social engineering idea the coder class came up with to suppress the others from having a balance of power.
Power-Sharing
Speaking of power-sharing, that's what that whole qarl snarl is about, and the others, too. They want power-sharing. They want the Lindens to say, we will share the world creation with you as a class. We won't make you beholden to us, we will let you own your work if not your tools. For this to happen, not legal notions and changes and moves are needed, but political and philosophical ones. You can't fix by law what you haven't first fixed by a democratic social movement, and possibly even a revolution. The Lindens need to be compelled to share power. But no company wants to share power with their customers. The new world is also about making that very clear; it is the ultimate FICization of Second Life.
Some Comments on Sluniverse
SalStrange:
1. What is the main "default" avatar for the new world going to be based on, or will it be a whole new avatar system?
2. Is there any priority going into accommodating user privacy (online status, etc) or is the focus more on compelling people to interact?
3. Will private property ownership and personal space be a fundamental part of this new world and is realistic consumer-level pricing being considered as part of it?
4. Is there serious consideration going into ways to stop the constant flow of stolen content from taking over this new environment? (As it undermines quality creators and puts consumers at risk.).
5. Will the new project share SL's marketplace or have its own?
6. Is there any thought going into how to streamline the new user learning curve and/or how to make it less difficult for content creators to get their products out for sale?
7. Will content for the new project be based on the current permissions system (Modify/Copy/Transfer) or will it have other options for things like second generation ownership, etc?
8. Is the ability to stream music and accommodate other live performances still part of the intended environment?
Now we already know what the answer to these questions have to be: there has to be a tiny class of creators who are licensed/vetted/privileged to work with the Lindens as content creators --think of the privileged bunch who could build for newbie hubs and Linden homes and the library. Yes, you can secure your content, but give us a name and Social Security number and pay a fee.
Permissions will go away in the beautiful and brilliant way they are now conceived, in spite of the Lindens' own horrid technocommunism.
See the latest Mole content to understand -- make not transfer/copy/or edit and you solve all problems of a secondary nature. Sell, and goodbye. They can't edit mesh anyway. You don't want them re-selling it as you have to sell it.
Trinity Dejavu Will there be an economy ?
Linden Dollars ? in and out ?
Land ownership and sub letting ? Yes. Ebbe Linden
Well, that's a very brief answer, and not clear what it all means. Again, my bet is that the Lindens' chief goal is to shake loose the land-based dependency model, and shake loose geographical contiguity. Why port sim-seam headaches with you? Put people in pods, in clusters, in those portable things like they have in There where you take a whole scene out of your backpack then put it away, or so I understand it that way (I never tried it).
Land will not be "there" if you are not. No more asynchronous interactivity unless you pay for 24/7 presence like a big mall. Except, what mall? You will buy things on the Marketplace.
I couldn't agree more with the comments from Victor1st Mornington, who happens to be one of my tenants:
All you have done is held a gun to the current Second Life platform, the clock is ticking. It's obvious that the old SL will go into maintenance mode when this new shiny Second Life for the l33t kids gets launched.
Rebuild the Dr Who community, from scratch, in a closed environment, having to be tied to the viewers which Linden Lab itself makes?
What about places like New Babbage with it's 10 regions of history. You honestly expect folks to stay in the old Second Life when theres a new one being launched? You are sounding the death knell for a lot of very old communities in the current Second Life who simply will not spend the time, energy and most especially money in a new virtual world away from Second Life.
For places like New Babbage, this will eventually kill it in the current SL as the big mesh builders move into the new "grid" and the residents who wont be able to build, or dont want to spend MORE money simply leave the old SL because when the move happens the old SL will become a ghost town.
The fact that the way Linden Lab have implemented OpenGL 4.4 basically hobbles the engine to a disabled mish-mash of what it is capable of, and the fact that Linden Lab cant/wont/ fix it, and want to open a CLOSED world means only one thing... you want the next Virtual World from Second Life to be nothing more than a playground for the privileged few who will probably need the experience of Blender or 3DSMax to make new optimised buildings for the streamlined "next gen" engine you are using.
You say that this new virtual world will work on different platforms? That means the engine will have to scale down (for consoles and tablets) and up (for high end PC's). The ONLY way you can achieve that is a much more stricter optimisation protocol for mesh uploads, much more stricter rules for any new kind of scripting.
In other words you are slamming the door on the face of the communities which BUILT Second Life and handing it all over to a privileged group to create content.
Good luck with that...you are going to need it, because people like me simply wont go to a new "SL 2" and we'll bail on the original SL when it becomes a ghost town. __________________ Victor1st
To understand what the feel of the new world is like already -- and worlds are really about people at the end of the day, whatever the Shiny, look at the two who are absolutely gloating about screwing the old Legacy SL and moving to the new world: Chip Midnight and Latif Khalifa, two of my least favourite in SL -- smug, asshole content fascists or open source cultists -- both can be true -- who imagine SL as a giant Renaissance Faire with themselves the privileged Makers and the rest of us peasants who buy their goods then scuttle out of sight back into our hovels.
The Lindens and these people always HATED mass culture -- it irritates them and knocking it is a social bonding glue for them. No matter that they might actually make the shoddy mass culture thing like a skin or an accessory that those masses buy. They still want to sneer at blingers in humper bunkers, as Desmond calls homestead sims where people cybersex.
A particularly noxious personage on the Sluniverse.com is this one:
I am on board for a new SL that is not constrained by the need to cater to 5 year old computers. Maybe I'm just greedy and selfish but we've been bitching about how the avatar needs improvement, right? Well there really is no way to do it without breaking content. And if you're going to break content, go big and break the whole world and do it up right with modern technology. Crystalle
Remember that Linden who said our computers were "old enough to go to kindergarten" and he hated building for us? Well, fuck you. Most people get computers from Best Buy, not parts from New Egg.
Go big and break the whole world? Disruption is always something that happens to someone else, right? Well, with that attitude, I can only hope the big landowners will do some breaking, too. Perhaps, some humility might come from it from people who have been raging assholes to us for most of this ride, calling us misfits and griefing us on their alts.
This crowd is going to get a severe jolt as they find out the future will be about "virtualization but not worlds". They don't pay attention to Scoble or the others living in a different virtuality of phones and gadgets and sensors and apps and social media, not sterile destinations.
Virtual worlds will get skipped the way PCs get skipped by third-world countries that move directly to mobile phones.
