Collateral Damage: Dusan Writer on Military Use of SL Enterprise

Location: VWER meeting

image courtesy of Lolly's photostream


Last week, our special guest Dusan Writer covered a great deal of territory in his interview with AJ Brooks. They spoke in voice, and we transcribed this to text chat.

Among his many topics, Dusan noted that when Linden Lab ended its Second Life Enterprise product, the US military was hit particularly hard. At least two dozen military groups were "heavily involved" with SL Enterprise, and suddenly they had a dead-end product on their hands for training.

This prompted a "risk averse" attitude toward virtual worlds in general, though now these military organizations are pursuing a mixed-bag of virtual-world solutions for training: 8-10 different platforms including OpenSim, Forterra Systems' Olive, and their remaining SL Enterprise servers.

Dusan implied strongly that Linden Lab missed a great opportunity by ending their Enterprise product as they did. Now heavyweights like Lockheed Martin have begun "using web GL to deliver VW in browser at a massive scale."

You can read the transcript of the entire meeting here.

This is NOT the Future

Location: Holding Sides, Laughing

Hamlet Au ran a reference to a New York Times piece about virtual meetings.  We've been talking a little about the concept in my current class, as we read Exodus to the Virtual World, by Edward Castronova.

Other than making me sing "The Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I saw little use in the graphic that accompanied a story about a groundbreaking (to the Times staff, anyhow) development.  We are a long way from selling that particular technology to any serious business.

There's also a drop-dead hilarious video of a "business meeting" with this clumsy technology.  I'm no graphics maven but I could not get through the demo without breaking down in gales of laughter. The avatars make Second Life's look wonderful.

Granted, as I noted over at New World Notes, using an avatar seems to spur more participation in a meeting than I have seen in teleconferences or Elluminate meetings. This merits formal study by academic psychologists: I have no idea why the avatar is more empowering than a teleconferencing window.

That said, I do prefer those technologies or Skype for small-group conferences, but they fail to enable really good work for large groups. In some cases, one may as well watch a television seminar with one or two active participants.

Second Life does pretty well for large-group meetings, but it suffers in professional circles from its rep for cybersex and nonhuman avatars. My colleagues not in virtual worlds, like many business folks and even many of my Millennial students, are wary--very wary--of identity shifting online.

For that crowd--and it's one I suspect to be the majority of potential conference users--to make the Castronova "exodus" they'll need something like the virtual meetings shown in the Times story.

But with necks.

Requiem for a Suit

Location: 5th and Oxford Main Store

With this week's conference, Virtual Worlds: Best Practices in Education looming, I felt an overwhelming need to look professional.

I like supporting Second Life's merchants, who have had a tough time during a real-world economic recession.  My hunt this year for a good suit was a short one, given my reading of the hilariously tongue-in-cheek fashion blog, Look at These F*ucking SLipsters.  The blog highlighted the Madison Avenue suits from a firm called 5th and Oxford.

Menswear is hard to find in Second Life, and it is harder to love. I don't want my avatar to be a tattooed love-boy fresh off his motorcycle. That's ludicrous. But a good suit? A suit that Don Draper might wear in Mad Men? Now you are talking.

Arriving at the store, I found every item reduced to 50 Linden Dollars. They are closing. I snapped up all three shades of the suit and an all-black outfit with turtleneck that might have been worn by Andy Warhol.  Shops in virtual world close for many reasons, but this is final: the items will vanish from the grid soon. What happened? I've asked the shop owner in-world and at her blog. Copybotting? Anger at Linden Lab? A new venue outside SL?


Come what may at the conference, my virtual self will have a good suit on thanks to 5th & Oxford. Sorry to see you go; I hardly got to know you. So gents, if you want a good suit, get over to the store now.

Born Too Early For Your Job?

Location: Richmond Island

As I took a last look at Richmond Island (today Linden Lab takes back the parcel) I also opened my reader to look at the SLED list.

A PhD candidate just posted to the list that she feels lost in the job market. Her research in the area of virtual worlds is not leading to the sort of career she'd like, as she reads over job listings:

Not one post has come by that has emphasized a knowledge/commitment to virtual worlds, simulations or gaming. I'm starting to almost see my dissertation as a hindrance to getting a job which hurts because I love the subject so much. Am I ahead of my time?

I've had this conversation with others working on VWs or writing dissertations. It does seem that we are using a technology that has not "taken off" yet.  I'd hate to see such bright folks become Blackboard (should be "bored") admins for some college when there are worlds out there to build.

Perhaps the revolution in virtual worlds with user-generated content (UGC) will come from the sorts of efforts John Lester discusses with Jeff Young, in a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Or perhaps the revolution will come from the private sector, when game designers move beyond casual 2D games with limited UGC to something more intriguing.

But it's very hard to wait for the future to arrive.

Confusion, Shock, Anger, then Plans by Educators in Second Life

Location: SLED e-list

At the SLED list I saw a pattern to the responses: shock, outrage, sadness, then planning. My own sense of betrayal and rage at Linden Lab was not atypical, but it reveals something about academics: we don't know or share the values of the corporate world.

Mom-And-Pop Values

Instead, we resemble the trust-and-handshake relationships of smaller businesses. My dad, a successful produce wholesaler, taught me, mixing coarse and wholesome adages as he often did, to "never screw your customer" and "always keep your word." While institutions of higher education compete for business, we do so with that sort of older-style (and I'd claim superior) ethos and a strong sense of community that does not consider profit to be the sole or final arbiter of value. I leave it up to better informed folks such as Dusan Writer and Tateru Nino to consider what Linden Lab may do in the months ahead about selling their company or at least seeking new investors.

Whatever the company's goals, Linden Lab's abrupt decision--by the standards of higher education--catches us in the middle of a fiscal year and in many cases, in the middle of grant-funded research. That is at least within the boundaries of what we know how to do. We can go back to those providing funds and ask for reallocation. And for those with existing projects that need to continue beyond the end of current contracts, combining efforts with other institutions can keep things going.

Helping Those Caught in the Headlights

More vexing to me are those who have made no Plan B, who really are not very skilled with the technologies of virtual worlds despite being talented teachers and researchers. Judging from the remarks on SLED and with colleagues in person, too many of us have done NO research on alternatives to SL, or we don't even know the current interface well enough to see what OpenSim grids might do differently if we make that move.

Now we find ourselves in a sea of new terms, alternative clients for visiting virtual worlds, and a universe of new grids. I've spent time in the past two days explaining to admins and colleagues, both on my campus and trickling in from e-mails, what third-party viewers ARE, what OpenSim is (typical line: "it's not a place, but a protocol for making places like SL"), how Hypergrid (which I'll soon try) works, and how inventory in SL works. Basic stuff, yes, but looking at the SLED list, I'm stunned by how common lack of basic knowledge can be.

I can understand why some folks will simply leave virtual worlds completely.

The tasks ahead are daunting. We pioneers don't get a lot of credit for this work, even though many of us believe this technology is going to change mainstream education. What to do?

Organizing and Sharing

First, join this wiki, from Lindy McKeown of The University of Southern Queensland, Australia and note how the changes are influencing your plans:

http://pricehike.wikispaces.com/

I doubt any lobbying will sway the Lab, though showing them how much money they will lose is a nice "up yours!" moment for us.

Second, if you know anything you can share about OpenSim worlds, start answering the many questions on lists such as SLED or EDUCAUSE Virtual Worlds. If you are sticking it out in SL, and need help with collaborations and consolidations, get on these e-lists and share.

In time we'll develop the sorts of networks that we had in SL and leverage existing connections, as we move onto other grids, as I plan to do, or we'll retrench and run leaner operations in SL.

Here Jokay Wollongong's example can guide us. She did both.

More on Jokay next week, when I cover her talk to educators at The Virtual World Education Roundtable.

Remaining Chipper, Determined, and Cunning

This is funny advice for grumpy me to give. But we will outlast one company who did not live by our mom-and-pop values.

At Montclair's soon-to-close Amphitheater, getting ready for the visit by Jokay Wollengong, I helped a faculty member new to SL figure out how to give notecards to students. Here is a teacher, on a doomed campus sim, carrying on bravely while discovering the wonder of teaching in a 3D immersive setting.

I kept a brave face but it was one of the few times I actually wanted to cry when using SL.

Let's stay brave, network, and to cop the title of the blog by John Lester (née Pathfinder Linden), "be cunning and full of tricks."

Second Life Costs: What a Sane Adult Might Say

Location: Saying "Goodbye to all that"

Dean: "I hear that prices went up in that Second World game you use."

Iggy: "Um, that's Second Life."

Dean (shuffles windows on his computer until invoice pops up): "So now we have to pay $300 monthly for a fake island?"

Iggy: "Well, it's renting server space."

Dean: "You pay $700 annually for that online scheduling system you use for over 2000 students each year, right?"

Iggy: "Yes, and we get instant phone support and technical trouble-shooting for the data on their servers."

Dean: "What does this Linden Labs company provide for our $3600?"

Iggy: "Not so much."

Dean: "So buy a server and talk to I.T. about support. On your three-year replacement cycle that's a lot cheaper. Get one of our in-house grants to attend a training class on running this OpenSim thing."

Iggy: "I like that idea."

Dean: "Say....you mean someone can be a dog in this Second World...Life thing?"

Iggy: "True."

Dean: "And what would a dog do in Second Life?"

Iggy: "What dogs do in real life, but talk and fly too."

Dean: "Get in touch with purchasing about that server."

It is best that we leave SL. Seriously. If we are going to seem serious to the world beyond we need to bid a fond goodbye to social users. We don't let y'all use our intranets or a lot of our Web 2.0 content. It's for the paying customers called "students" and our colleagues on the faculty and staff.

Goodbye and thanks for all the prims, LL.

Some Martian Musings: Why I'm Not Visiting Blue Mars Yet

Location: New World Notes

image: "Arcadia's Boneyard," from BlueMarsOnline's Photostream

What a drama-fest Hamlet Au's decision to start a Blue-Mars blog has caused, with one grump calling him a "traitor." Au is just looking out for his career. If Blue Mars is an up-and-coming virtual world, and the maker, Avatar Reality, is willing to pay him for his reports, he needs to be over there.

Disclaimer: Prim Perfect pays me to report on OpenSim and other non-SL grids, so I may be kinder to Hamlet than are some of his regular readers. As for Blue Mars, I'll just have to take a look. Eventually. There are a few concerns I have about it, and if they are correct, this virtual world will never be good for educators.

Cross Platform Failure:

I suspect other OSes will come to Blue Mars, and while I won't visit or recommend any world to colleagues until I can do so without Bootcamp on my Mac, I'm not as harsh about it as some Mac-users. Avatar Reality picked a Windows-only game engine for their own reasons (their CEO is a Microsoft alum, one; they wanted a certain level of graphics performance, two). I'd prefer a cloud-based service for my students, anyhow; we have high-speed access everywhere on campus, and the kids want to do their projects on portable devices, not desktop PCs.

No In-World Content Creation:

The lack of content made in-world by end users has been more a detriment to me than the lack of a native Mac client. But I want to look to be sure. Builds like Usher, for all its warts, began with a team on computers together in SL, making the simulation together. I've spent over 200 hours on the project, and at least 50 of them were collaborative in our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology with one or more students present.

I cannot imagine that sort of live building going on with me using a 3D tool, a student nearby using another to make objects, then having to log on to the world to see our work. As clumsy as it is in Second Life, building in-world has some amazing potential for collaboration, and collaboration trumps slick design for me every time.

My students shown here, for all their lack of building skills, stayed up until midnight with me to finish our builds in Fall 2008. They reported having a blast doing this, too.

Second Life and OpenSim permit amateurs in classes not dedicated to design to try their hand at building. That's a killer application of these platforms, and it would be impossible in Blue Mars.

Little Interest in Educators by Avatar Reality and Little Interest in Virtual Worlds by Evaluators:

Nowhere in the Avatar Reality's early materials did they court educators. Now I'm seeing a few nods to us in their FAQs. I'm pleased they have changed that.

Yet it appears, from the barriers to content creation alone, that Blue Mars is not going to be the platform for most of the educators I know, whose skill sets tend to be stretched even for prim-based work. Perhaps those of my colleagues at institutions with architecture, engineering, or large computer-science departments can find student assistants to make good content for Blue Mars. My local CS faculty grin about virtual worlds, and to be honest, the students think these worlds provide lame alternatives to gaming.

We faculty could hire Maya-skilled builders, or learn it, Sketchup, or Blender for builds in Blue Mars, if the interface is all that compelling. I may well begin learning Sketchup or Blender, even though the time required will be detrimental to professional development more readily accepted by my evaluators.

I'll see when Avatar Reality launches a Mac client or opens a cloud-based portal to their world. But like many colleagues, I'm not rewarded annually for learning new software unless it's directly related to teaching or scholarship. I can make the case just as well for having my students blog as for learning Maya, and the learning curve for blogging is infinitely shallower.

OpenSim as a Better Bet:

For now, and with grids like Reaction and Third Rock Grids courting educators, we could figure out how to host our simulations in OpenSim. We can keep meeting in SL and holding conferences there, given its proven ability to host events and conferences.

While the "Second Life" moniker has its own troubles, our colleagues and evaluators don't like the term "game" as it is, and that's how Avatar Reality markets its world.

So while I'm eager to see how stunning this SL competitor is, I don't think too many educators will be investing time or energy there. If you have experience in Blue Mars and an opinion on it for education, I'd love to know how it has gone for you.

From the Crypt, Old Tech Finds a New Groove

Location: Vinyl Crypt

Can a once-hip technology find a niche market and thrive? Just go to the record stores to find out. I did, and I think I've found a lesson for Second Life.

A Recent History of My Record Collection

Like most teens of the 70s, I amassed a huge stack of vinyl by the standards of the day--300+ disks. My older brother only bought 45s--in a way the MP3s of his day. I came of age, however, in the era of Album-oriented rock and FM stations before the horrors of modern commercial radio and their "drive time" morons with limited playlists and smaller minds. For all its "welcome back my friend to the show that never ends" excesses and triple albums, that era also featured amazing work and great cover art, from Pink Floyd and Brian Eno to The Ramones and X. I've Brian Eno's and David Byrne's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" in the first vinyl issue (the song "Qu'ran" was removed later, after objections by Muslims), plus two different CD versions. I'm that sort of geek about Eno.

My collection has dwindled to about 100 disks now, played from time to time. They are in good shape; I was so finicky (and poor) as a student that I'd play a new LP just long enough to tape it onto a cassette for the car. Now I find the warm sound of vinyl worthwhile for Floyd, Yes, Sabbath, Tull, or CCR. Most of my punk and electronica, ironically, came to me later on CD.

I'm no musical luddite: mostly I spin CDs or, ever more often, songs I've ripped from them onto the iPod / stereo connection or laptop. I believe I have purchased five songs from iTunes and have never downloaded a "shared" MP3 file. Why bother? The sound does not compare to what I get from a real stereo system, even when I connect the subwoofer and external speakers to the computer.

Before the revival came, I sold off records for a lot of money on eBay, in particular some near-perfect copies of "Dark Side of the Moon," with the trippy posters, and an import of Hasil Adkin's "Rock and Roll Tonight," with the world's only hillbilly tribute to decapitation, "No More Hot Dogs." My best-ever sale went to a rabid fan of the Richmond shock-metal band GWAR. I owned a rare EP of GWAR-predecessor Death Piggy's "Love/War," bought from the band's guitarist Russ Bahorsky when we worked for the same bookshop near VA Commonwealth University. Telling the poor eBayer that I actually have met Dave Brockie several times (my nephew worked for Slave Pit Inc., GWAR's production company) I felt stalked: the GWAR fan was ready to worship me and kept e-mailing long after he got his record, as if I'd send him some dirt where Brockie had walked. Such is the power of music.

I figured, at the time, that these lucky sales were mere flukes for collectors eager to get something not available on CD.

A Turntable Breaks and I Reenter an Old World

Now I'm convinced something more than a fad is upon us. When getting up to flip a Stones LP, I discovered that after only 25 years, my JVC L-E600 linear tracking turntable needed a new belt. I set out in search what I assumed to be an elusive rarity, a record-player repairman.

Then, suddenly, I was cast among the hipsters. Yes, you know them, in their skinny rolled-up jeans, pork-pie hats, and one-speed bikes. In their beards and irony, they might have been me, 30 years ago, except I looked more like "Nirvana meets Mad Max" back then.

These kids are what passes for urban Bohemia in the US today, and they are buying vinyl. Lots of vinyl.

So are old geezers my age, clones of Bettie Page, and Richmond's "trailer punks" who combine tattoos, PBR, anarchy, battered pickups, gun collections, and lots of piercings. A student who became one of our campus area coordinators owned over 10,000 LPs when he and his mountain of vinyl left campus for a PhD program.

In getting my turntable diagnosed, I paid not one but two visits to my favorite CD and DVD shop, Plan 9 Music. They have long had a "Vinyl Crypt," sited in the depths of a basement with an iron gate to seal it off and flames climbing the walls. The operative metaphor here was, before the vinyl revival, to descend into technological hell.

This snarky touch to the shop was a hip joke until, suddenly, the vinyl got more popular than the CDs and slowly, one rack at a time, records began to appear upstairs after an absence of many years. Prices began to climb, and Plan 9 stopped selling vinyl by the pound at an annual tent sale. Soon the shop began featuring used turntables, with a one-month warranty, and other stereo gear.

Making Money on Old Technology

I'm not much of a vinyl collector. I've purchased perhaps 10 LPs in twenty years (as compared to perhaps 80 CDs). Still, while seeing the cover of The Who's "Odds and Sods" in the Crypt, with its remarkably corny but lovable "Now I'm a Farmer" almost got my wallet out of my pocket.

While my JVC was sent off for repairs, a pristine Technics SLQ-200 turntable, the sort of direct-drive masterpiece that I wanted but could not afford in the 80s and early 90s, caught my eye. $80 later, I carried it home. Now I've got a spare turntable, and it sounds phenomenal. Ozzy and "Paranoid" await me, as does Led Zep's "Physical Graffiti."

So, Can Linden Lab Find a New Groove?

The remarkable thing about surviving record stores is how they retain older collectors while basing their growth on newcomers with credit to burn. Like vinyl not so long ago, Second Life lacks the luster it once did. But so did vintage systems like the Nintendo and Atari consoles before their comeback.

What if Linden Lab stopped trying to matter to the mainstream? What if it stopped trying to be cutting edge, technologically? What if the Lab figured out a way to identify its niche, as the vinyl dealers have done, and exploit it by providing a solid and dependable product?

There are some problems with this analogy, as was my earlier consideration of the hobby of building plastic models.

Linden Lab cannot trade on nostalgia, as have Atari and Nintendo. The Lab cannot play to a large group of people who link SL to their golden and misspent youth, as vinyl does for many of us. Of course, the hipsters buying vinyl now have no memory of its heyday. To them, the vintage equipment in Plan 9's Crypt might as well be from ancient Babylon. They may, at best, have glimpsed it in dusty corners of parents' attics.

When Hamlet Au and others call for mass adoption of SL by new users, I wonder if they miss another option: a large audience who would come back to SL under certain conditions. Has Linden Lab thought to use its database of former users to find out why they left and what it would take to get them back, perhaps to a Web-based product? Record collectors and model builders keep adding to their collections, a few dollars at a time. What can get SLers to put down enough money each month to pay the Linden bills fully? What "secret sauce" could keep these customers coming back, as they do to the Vinyl Crypt or to Squadron's hobby shop online?

Tenchi, you are reading this. Di, I wish you were. What would bring you two back as paying SLers?

I'll spin some records now and await your advice.

Second Life's Destination Guide: Why I Like This Buried Treasure

Location: Planning Virtual Travel

This began as an update to the previous post, until I discovered that Linden Lab has already done something I was about to recommend for retaining player...I mean resident...interest.

The clever and intuitive "destination guide" can be found, though after too many clicks, from a featured area at the bottom left of the log-on window. It's also there when one clicks on "world map," but that's not enough because in either case. The visitor must scroll to the very bottom of a few selected sites to get the big list.

The guide deserves greater play. Perhaps instead of the moon-eyed couple in Paris or the shopaholic in the little videos shown to all visitors, why not feature a different roleplaying group or cool location with each reload of the window, using machinima they prepare for the occasion? At the top of the page, I'd add "stuff to do."

Just as the model companies mentioned in my previous post sponsor contests and promote groups, Linden Lab could promote these key communities in SL. With a click the visitor could could discover the nature of the RP community, see some photos, read a few ground rules, and learn of places of interest in-world.

The problem would be how to feature something like Gor (not technically "adult") without raising a ruckus in the mainstream media that sporadically cover SL. I can see it now: "you too can become a slave girl!" I leave it up to Linden Lab to figure out a way to showcase roleplay without that particular problem. They already have "Sexy Islands" up there, as racy as I'd suspect they'll get.


The guide also features the UT system project as well as the ever-popular (or annoying, your choice) Bloodlines game.

The impression is of a large and diverse community. That should be front and center, not Ken and Barbie on the Eiffel Tower.

Two Ways to Play & Virtual Worlds

Location: Just Starting a New 1/72 Kit

Lately the blogs I follow have focused on ways to "save" Second Life. Tateru Nino riffed on Philip Rosedale's notion of "Fast, Easy, Fun" as the mantra for improving SL. I found a few lessons about retaining one's customer-base (albeit an aging one!) from my 40+ years building scale models.

So what does "fun" mean?

"Fun" comes in all forms. For online environments, the fun can be goal-oriented and rules-bound, as in games. It captures one of the two sorts of play academics talk about most often: the ludic. The latin word ludus fit both school and play, since schools were places where creative play prepared Roman youth for citizenship, war, and scholarly life.

On the other hand,the fun can be playful for its own sake, which often marks what happens in virtual worlds. Academics call that type of play, one that sparks improvisation and vision, paedeia.

There's a blurry line here, because a friend playing Lord of the Rings Online has greatly customized his avatar and often uses his in-world home for ad-hoc social gatherings unrelated to a current quest or battle. Likewise, areas of Second Life that emphasize roleplay can be very ordered and competitive.

A Lifelong Hobby

Virtual worlds with 3D content are young online environments. Their big challenge appears to be capturing and keeping customers. I got this reference, to a "two-year effect," care of Lalo Telling's blog. Do that many hobbies really hold a typical person's interest for only a year or so?

That's laughable to me, since many of the hobbyists I know have lifelong interests in restoring old cars, collecting farm equipment, or making organic gardens. In my case, it's a little of all of the above, plus building model kits and running face-to-face roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons.

Something about these activities holds the hobbyist a long time. Thus, virtual-world purveyors might think like Airfix, Tamiya, Revell, or Italieri, companies with a track record of immersing this customer and retaining his interest for so many years.

I've probably spent a good 1000 hours--more than 41 days of my life--making models since I first spilled glue all over a Jaguar E-Type, then sprayed enamel in my eyes on the night of the riots that followed Martin Luther King's murder. I recall that an actual doctor talked my mom over the phone, pro-bono, from the busy hospital as she rinsed my eyes out to the sound of glass breaking in the distance.

What a start to a hobby I never put away! I'll never win a contest, but my kits are good enough to "wow" non-modelers. In my undergraduate years the pastime became sporadic. In grad school I started building kits again, in part to forget the woes of living in a town I never loved, amid theory-spewing sycophants spouting Poststructuralist nonsense in the English department.

When I built a kit then, the banality of Bloomington, IN fell away. I was lost completely in a task, one requiring the type of focus that a Zen Master would recognize. Yet immersion in the task was only part of the fun for me.

Paideia & Ludus in 1/72 Scale

Modeling is rules-bound (fail to follow the instructions or mask before painting and you are usually doomed), so it predicates ludic play. Building models also involves the spontaneous and imaginative activities of paideia, when I scratch-build a part that the maker omitted, weather armor and ships so they look worn, and decide on modifications to capture a vehicle from my library of WW II books but not intended by the kit. This takes a type of artistic temperament to see analogues in real life and mix paints and apply materials that might include bits of actual mud or soot.

One key to keeping the kit-builder immersed in the hobby is the variety of subject. Experienced model-makers might have four P-51 Mustangs or Spitfires in the collection, but each of them is different. The range of subjects and challenges for a complex kit make the act of cementing polystyrene and painting it an ever-changing and often challenging task to one's mind and manual dexterity. I spent over two years, on and off, with a B-52D I figured I'd never see done. Now I'm ready for the next Mount Everest: a B-70 Valkyrie.

Beyond the craft of the kit itself lies the history of the subject. On my short-list of builds is the Airfix kit of the twin-engined Westland Whirlwind (one of the most graceful and least-known combat planes of the Second World War). Sadly, no Whirlwinds survived the scrap-metal drives of Postwar England, so when my kit of that subject gets done, I'll have created something that does not exist in nature.

Say, that should sound familiar to anyone who has spent enough time making, or marveling at, content in a virtual world.

Getting New Residents to Stay

Perhaps it's the lack of a ludic environment that leads newcomers to Second Life to say, so often, "so what do you DO here?" and then leave. If Linden Lab can focus on finding out what new users want in a virtual environment and then getting them immersed, they'll retain them for a while. Adding variety will retain them long-term.

The only problem of making the analogy to modeling or other "old-time" hobbies is that "old" bit. The irony is not lost on me that in many regards, model-making seems a dying hobby, unlikely to outlast Boomers and Xers again taking it up as they rediscover a few idle hours.

And so what? The companies can plan for another 30-40 years of sales and lay plans for whatever will attract a new generation, meanwhile. I probably spend $100 a year on models and supplies.

I'm guessing Linden Lab would just love that sort of assured revenue stream.

Update 8/3/10: I did some looking at Linden Lab's Destination Guide. See the next post for why I like it as a potential way to give SLers something to do in-world.

Businessweek Goes Back to SL

Location: Reflective State of Mind

All in all, it's not a bad treatment of what has happened since their famous 2006 cover story. That earlier piece (cover image shown) greatly contributed to the hype-and-bust cycle that we are still experiencing.

I might quibble with a few points, but some standout observations include:

• How the broken in-world search contributes to problems in growing SL
• How the clunky UI and orientation experiences deter new members.
• The mainland prices have tanked.
  
• That a cloud-based SL would prove better for most mainstream users; I agree.
• That the Lab seems to have bought into the inevitability of virtual worlds as "The Next Internet."

Much of Matt Robinson's story (click for full story) is devoted to interviewing the four individuals featured in 2006. It' s worth a look to show where we've come since then. For a change, mainstream media covered a virtual world with some care and attention to details.

Fake Money Crisis Averted!

Location: State of Relief

I'm pleased to report that my former employee, now SLebrity, Pappy Enoch, has stepped into the teeth of the financial storm.

Pappy's First Bank of Enoch Holler will provide the level of trust and security we've all come to expect from Enoch.

The Linden Dollar will never be the same again. Read more at the Alphaville Herald.

Linden Dollar Tanks, Recovers

Location: Watching the Virtual Exchange Rate

No matter how clearly Tateru Nino explains it, the voodoo economics of Linden Lab escape me.

I have been keeping an eye on LindenWatch at Twitter ever since the announcement by Linden Lab that the Linden Dollar had declined against government-issued currencies.

275L to the US Dollar has long been my benchmark for the currency. Yet early this morning, the rate rose to 444L. If you wanted to cash out some money under those circumstances, good luck.

That sort of whipsawing must stabilize if large landholders, like Melody who appeared on a panel with me recently at Treet TV's "Designing Worlds," are to keep paying their tiers to Linden Lab. These land barons pay in real-life currency into the Linden pot, and Melody admitted that her tier runs $20,000US a month.

Her renters, however, pay up in Lindens. This current-rate fluctuation--or is it a trend?--could make bigger mainstream news than the layoffs if the Linden Dollar does not stabilize. I don't know if the current return to 280L to the US Dollar is a temporary calm before a bigger storm.

What arcane formulas get employed to set the exchange rate? If there is even a hint of manipulation by the Lab, eager to increase their income, the law suits will come flying.

If you want a clear analysis of how the crisis relates to the iffy short-term future of immersive 3D worlds, sit down if you are really in love with SL, then read Roland Legrand's post at Mixed Realities.

At the Linden Memorial

Location: Graveyard

Thanks to a tip at New World Notes, I found CodeBastard Redgrave's memorial (direct teleport link) to the Linden Lab staff laid of yesterday.

My fellow malcontent, Pixeleen Mistral of The Alphaville Herald, was at the site too. She agreed with my assessment that it's time to back up any creations one has in SL, just in case. I'll have to get by the House of Usher soon.



Pix took off to write a story about the layoffs, but she noted that a group of Korean residents were paying homage to the Korean SL staffers, an entire team let go as the Lab focuses more narrowly on North American operations and integration with social networks.

For educators, the loss of Claudia Linden is a final straw. Now that she and Pathfinder have been fired, we have the proof we need to support our claims that the Lab has been ignoring us for a while. As CEO Mark Kingdon noted in his press release, the Lab will focus on its consumer business now.

I'm not optimistic about any of this, even though the idea of Web-based SL client would be indeed very appealing, if it did not gut our inventories and creations made with the older clients.

A resident named Ratatosk Independent was kind enough to get me a memorial armband. She granted permission to quote her. I think her comments are pretty apt for this moment.

Ratatosk Independent: My personal view is that the money hunger of the current board has blinded them for the fabulous opportunity for all man kind.

Ignatius Onomatopoeia: yeah--M is the hatchet man for a bigger agenda

Ratatosk Independent: They see short sighted profit as the ONLY objective when they COULD have been able to create history for how people interact.

Ratatosk Independent: And if it feels as if I was angry, you would be ABSOLUTELY correct. I am FURIOUS of what they do to OUR Second Life.

Ignatius Onomatopoeia: yeah, SL is special. I wonder if they dare to hold Burning Life this year?

Ratatosk Independent: The irony is that tomorrow, they are going to hold a SL jubilee.

Ratatosk Independent: How merry will THAT be?

Ratatosk Independent: And Burning LIfe? Fat chance. Where is the money in CULTURE when you CAN push PORN?


I often make fun of things I love. I love SL, even if the Lab has infuriated me at times. Right now, it's a grim moment. I sure don't want to be at any SL celebration. Let's hope the Lab has the remaining good sense to cancel whatever they planned for tomorrow.

Day of the Long Knives

Location: Uncertain

Tateru Nino's story about the Singapore layoffs should have tipped SLers off to bigger things to come.

I am particularly saddened that Claudia Linden (pictured above, center), the remaining advocate for educators at Linden Lab, was laid off. This close up was the first time I met her, Pathfinder Linden, and AJ Brooks, at a 2007 EDUCAUSE meeting.

I won't cover the details, given the good job of reporting that Hamlet Au has done today.

Hey, Mr. Kingdon! Think you can turn off the lights when you are the last Linden left in the building? Go buy Prokofy Neva a drink for me, k?

Standing Corrected About Linden Lab's Support For the Arts

Location: In front of big plate of crow

Top-hat tip to Viv Trafalgar, who alerted me to this old but vital news item

Image: Burning Life 2008, closing day

I don't follow developments in Second Life as readily as many of my more connected colleagues who stay better plugged into various forms of communication, so I missed the Feb. 23 announcement of the Linden Endowment for the Arts.

The initiative makes me qualify the angry words I've sounded, from time to time, about the Lindens pissing on the creative classes while they cultivate suburban lifestylers. Could there be room for a virtual gallery district as well as virtual cul-de-sac burbs in SL? It seems so, and Linden Lab follows a clear precedent: corporations have long supported the arts.

Of course, there are some in SL's resident base who are terminally indignant. They will see this initiative as something akin to arbitrary promotion for selected artists. To you I say: wait to see what happens.

From my perspective, it's high time that Linden Lab reaffirmed the role artists have played in fulfilling Philip Rosedale's vision of a place where one could revel in self-expression and, given the low overhead costs, make a bit of spending money doing so. Of particular interest to me, as with the Svarga revival, is that the Lab understands the best immersive work merits archiving in some form, so future SLers can experience it.

If the Linden Endowment goes to those making subpar work or only to those who toady to the Lab, the discontent from others in the community will be long and prolonged.

And I'll report it right here. Meanwhile, this has me looking forward to Burning Life 2010!

Update May 19: Reading Prokofy Neva's post on this issue, especially Desmond Shang's comments about how it will affect sim-owners who have rented space to artists, complicates what I posted here.

Let's hope that we don't come to see those artists outside the 70-sim arts cluster treated as second-rate or those inside pressured to create content that meets LL's standards. Again, it will be a wait-and-see game, since the decision has been made.

Professor, Nuke My Second Life Please

Location: Real Life Desk

"A recruiter told me I'd better have you remove my wiki pages," a former student told me. The work about Second Life, like his old profiles in Facebook and (gasp!) LinkedIn, were not professional enough to reside under his real-life name. He's busily at work grooming his social-network sites to be boredom-friendly.

So I took down an entire portfolio of student work. It's vapor now. Gone.

Nothing in this student's work about SL was risque in the least, beyond his interest in wearing a Santa-Claus suit constantly.

What does this say about SL's reputation in the broader world?

And they ask me why I chose an academic career.

No Flying, But No More Death By Powerpoint: The ProtoSphere Virtual World

Location: Eyeing ProtonMedia's Eye-Candy

A business-only virtual world that makes meetings of hundreds of avatars possible? Sure--give Linden Lab $55,000 for SL Enterprise. That sounded like a large chunk of change until I ran across a competitor's impressive product, ProtoSphere.

At $100 to $250 per user, it promises to cost a lot more than the Linden solution, so perhaps we casual and educational SLers should not gripe so much about expenses.

ProtoSphere already claims to provide more than SL Enterprise has on offer, and without SL's larger and not-so-savory reputation. Of interest to me is how ProtonMedia's CEO Ron Burns touts the virtual world as more immersive and inclusive than video conferences, noting that participants are remarkable honest when communicating as an avatar. He claims too that "There is [sic] no self-conscious video telepresence video artifacts here."

There is that, for the poor readers who have bad-hair days. Note to self: every day for me is a no-hair day, so I'm set for either world.

Perhaps Burns discusses it elsewhere, but any virtual environment lets simulations be made quickly. That is just not possible in a video conference, where no one can "walk through" a virtual environment.

Maria Korolov at Hypergrid Business also points out that unlike SL Enterprise, there is no content generated by end users, and that the company does the building for clients. This may account for the price, going upward with the degree of customization and content creation that is required." For for a 500-user world, the fees might begin at $50,000, right in the range of SL Enterprise.

Selling points to companies are not new ones: lower travel costs, prototyping, and so forth. But ProtoSphere is primarily for meeting and exchanging materials. I'll focus on how it differs from existing virtual worlds we use for education and socializing.

First is anonymity. "Every user in Protosphere has their own social network profile," Burns states, so the company has reached a point Linden Lab strives to have for its business clients: full transparency to real-world identity.

Second is document sharing, a holy grail for educators in SL. The little kiosks for document-sharing in-world seem rather nifty to me, working like diner juke boxes to scroll through available materials.
Microsoft is a partner in this venture, so ProtonMedia has a major-league backer for their virtual-world client. Of course, MS is also active in Reaction Grid; a case that the big boys from Redmond are after several virtual world contenders, with an eye to buying out the most successful developer? This would not be the first time MS has made just such a canny move.

One of the company's FAQs says it all about the distance that Linden Lab needs to travel to cross the gulf established by its reputation in the business world:

What is the difference between ProtoSphere and Second Life?
 ProtoSphere is a 3D immersive environment built on the Microsoft stack to address business collaboration needs. SecondLife is a business to consumer 3D online service built on open-source technologies and focused on e-commerce, entertainment and third party development.

Burroughs takes a shot right across the Lindens' (and Avatar Reality's Blue Mars) bows by noting that "The teaming environments created by by our customers in ProtoSphere are strictly for business and will deliver measurable ROI in terms of operational efficiency." So no furries or sex clubs or driving balls 1000 yards at low-g Martian golf courses, I suppose.

A business only world without those things would bore many social ussers, and one without end-user content would bore most educators, but ProtonMedia has made a wise business move. As a marketing professor friend who spent time in SL during the "hype" era said, "there's not any ROI here for traditional businesses." This was only months before the exodus of brick-and-mortar companies from SL began in 2007.

ProtoSphere's makers learned from this and go beyond a "Virtual American Apparel Store" model to what virtual worlds do best: permit old forms of collaboration to exist quickly over great distances. To get an even closer look at ProtoSphere in action, check their video page. A high-definition WMV files can be downloaded; it's where I've taken the screen captures for this post.

Kudos to Rob Kelley, an old friend from grad school who is now a partner and COO at LiquidHub, for telling me to have a look at ProtoSphere.