A Surprising Second Life for Second Life

I came across an interesting piece by Alice Bucknell recently about the curious longevity of Second Life, the virtual world that served as impetus for this blog.

Having returned to SL for an occasional round of naval wargaming from the Age of Sail, I think that the piece's title misleads. Second Life lacks the visual depth of modern video games, but the world hardly seems decaying. If anything, graphics quality has vastly improved and performance-based crashes on WiFi connections with a laptop seem rare, even for naval combat. Fifteen years ago, my students' avatars could barely move from one sim to another without crashing, and they were walking, not sailing a square-rigger. In 2014 I found a simple mainland driving trip impossible.

To hazard a guess, Linden Lab's integration of Mesh-based builds surely has helped with rendering and running the content on each sim. I understand the servers moved to Amazon's cloud long ago, which may explain a lack of what we used to call Black Wednesdays, when the entire grid would crash midweek with alarming regularity.

Why stay in such an old game...I mean virtual world? I think for many SLers it remains a community of long-time residents, Linden Lab's term for those who log on to their servers. More is at play in my case. Here the author nails why I love SL still, for "the platform’s refusal to submit to the always-be-optimizing logic of other MMOGs is precisely what grants Second Life its enduring appeal among a certain cohort of loyal users. Bucking larger trends of the gaming industry enabled the user experience to evolve in weirder ways....there is no boss to beat or competition to win, the vibe on Second Life is ambient."

Exactly. I don't go online to kill boss-monsters or level up, and the occasional glitchy build in Second Life landscape or gear simply does not bother me. I enjoy Eno's ambient music, too.

Minecraft boomed despite its Legoland look; it's the fun of building things and playing with them, rather than trying to recreate the real world's look and feel, that draws me still to SL's giant sandbox. As Bucknell notes, the virtual world does not always embrace the "heteronormative, linear, violent" tropes of video gaming, though she could find those tropes easily enough had she looked hard.

If there's one thing different now as compared to 2010, it's the emptiness of the Mainland where Iggy once had a parcel of land as a premium user. I gave up that status some time back, but I log in with a Pirate ALT for naval battles or with Iggy's pre-mesh laggy self, to walk or drive around the world. 

Instead of empty mainland, I took Iggy back to Svarga, as close to a National Park as you'll find in Second Life, for a flying tour on the back of a giant bee. The island is now run by Patch Linden, Senior VP of Product Operations for Linden Lab. His otherwise human avatar wears squirrel ears.

Some things do not change about the Lindens. That's a comfort.

I set graphics in Firestorm to "Ultra" and enjoyed the data-sucking view. When done, I hopped off my mount for a photo using Bryn Oh's "Virginia Alone" Sky.

I was, indeed, alone on Svarga, where Iggy spent his first Linden dollars to buy a pair of sunglasses. That was 2007? What amazes me most, beyond my failure to crash my client as I did regularly then, was that so many years have flown by but the world remains.

That's something special, likewise comforting, right there. 

Perhaps I should look about a little more at some old haunts.

Why the Hype Cycle Does not Quite Work For Generative AI

(Not) The Same As It Ever Was

Many years (!) ago, I wrote here about why the Virtual World Second Life had followed, fairly well, the Gartner Group's well known "hype cycle" for new technology. Follow the link here to read about the history of the concept.

I'm reminded by Wagner James Au of New World Notes that other virtual worlds such as Fortnite and Minecraft have thrived, and indeed, have seen some good use-cases made for education.

At the same time, I don't hear of anyone at Capitol One's hive using virtual worlds. We don't see links from Office 365 or Google Workspaces to a virtual world. I have a sense that AI is a different animal for these worker bees and their daily applications, as well as my own students.

I do know a freelance graphic designer who lost her primary client to AI work; the client outsources graphics to AI run by semi-skilled staff in-house. My friend has moved on to ramp up her greeting-card business. That may color my skepticism that AI is a "fad," as Second Life clearly was.

SL and Gartner

I joined the virtual world in 2007, and yes, I was foolishly an enthusiast. Since I believe in being forthcoming about personal mistakes, I recall telling my students investigating this Strange Land that "you will all have avatars in a few years, for work!" I let slip the same to some colleagues, one of whom aid "you never met a technology you didn't love!"

Cringe. 

I'll own being horribly wrong. Prognostication is a dicey thing! A silly image I cobbled together years ago shows the evolution of Second Life avatars (namely, my own, Iggy). At the same time, my update to the old image points toward a new direction in desktop and mobile computing that we all felt, a decade ago, to be far over the horizon.

For many reason, including the difficulty of building simulations, a clunky interface, heavy system requirements, even poor management by Linden Lab, Second Life began a descent from what Gartner calls a "Peak of Inflated Expectations" in 2007.

By 2012 Second Life was well into a "Trough of Disillusionment." As early as 2008 I sensed that the media-party was over. A year later, I cited three factors working against academic use in a post here: Lack of rewards and incentives for faculty, the time needed to master the interface and content, Linden Lab's vacillating leadership and policies, the presence of what I and my students called "the creepy treehouse" of adult users doing sometimes naughty things.

In the for-profit sector, businesses that set up virtual storefronts in 2007 soon fled; a professor of Marketing I helped get started found SL fascinating, but after interviewing in-world merchants, she put it plainly: for brick-and-mortar firms, there's little return on investment in Second Life.

SL continues to be a large virtual world, with better graphics, promises of a new physics engine, and a dedicated base of users, but it did not become a daily experience on the job or at school. The Hype Cycle proved accurate. This has happened before: stand-alone creative hypertexts such as Michael Joyce's afternoon also map onto the cycle, though never regaining the popularity they enjoyed in the 1990s or even a steady base of users. Creative hypertexts appear to have faded utterly.

When a colleague in our campus digital pedagogy cohort claimed that generative AI would follow the same path traced by Gartner, I bristled because this time I feel that Gartner's model does not fit what I am seeing, daily, among students.

I could be wrong if a series of issues afflict AI. So let's compare the Second Life experience to that of generative AI:

The Browser

SL was never browser-based, even as a plugin, unlike the easy-to-master Unity 3D interface; AIs are built already into tools we use daily or can be queried from any Web browser.

Client v. Server Side

SL has high client-side requirements, whereas AI puts the burden on the server farms; these use enormous amounts of energy that my students and colleagues only recently started to notice, with all the inherent dangers related to sustainability.

The Interface 

SL has a difficult interface, employing menus worthy of an entire operating system and arcane coding options, whereas Gen AI's query features resemble (for now) those of a familiar search engine but with natural-language input. 

Platform Independence

SL and AI both work on multiple operating systems, but SL has never worked well with mobile devices; AI is baked into many apps now, with some Google searches automatically invoking Gemini results and Apple promising Apple Intelligence in their next phones. 

Creepy Treehouse

 SL has adult content that troubled my students; the guardrails we increasingly see with AI tend to keep users (sometimes clumsily or incompletely) from making Napalm or pornography.

Investment Sources

Investment in SL comes from individual users at this point; AI attracts venture capital, user subscriptions, and big-tech investment (Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google).

Source of Growth in Academia

Faculty and campus-technologist curiosity spurred interest in SL; student use erupted for AI spontaneously in the Fall of 2022 and remains very strong. 

A Shaky Prognosis

To be fair to Second Life, system load has largely remained steady in the last decade. In my recent experience, I can run SL and a third-party client called Firestorm on my MacBook using no more than my phone's hotspot to connect to the world. That's astounding progress.

I don't foresee any of these differences posing a stumbling block for AI, leading to a Trough of Disillusionment, save energy use. We have a climate crisis; the last thing we can afford as a civilization would be to ramp up emissions of Carbon Dioxide.  

Yet if Moore's Law continues apace, we'll see AI reap rewards of lower power use because of more powerful processors in the servers that run it. Any disillusionment is likely to be temporary and its "trough" quite shallow.

For these reasons, I don't see the Hype Cycle apply to Generative AI in the same way as it has to several earlier technologies. I may be wrong, but for now Gartner's model does not fit it well.

Image Sources: Wikipedia Commons for Hype Cycle.

Dutch Boy Running Out of Fingers at Linden Lab

Location: Back at VWER Roundtable

How odd it feels to be blogging again, ever so briefly, about Second Life. I have returned to the virtual world for a couple of VWER meetings and am even considering updating Iggy's avatar shape and skin. His relatively new dreadlocks demand it!

Yet following a post I spotted in New World Notes, about Linden Lab's deciding to lower set-up fees for sims, I thought my two cents might contribute to the debate.

Second Life continues to lose sims at a stately pace. I wonder, as many SLers do, if the entire world is no more than a cash-cow for the Lab to milk until Project Sansar launches. Purportedly, it will:

"democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and monetize their own multi-user, interactive virtual experiences, without requiring engineering resources. The platform will enable professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation."

These promises are at odds. If Sansar lets us "easily" create such 3D content using our Occulus Rift headsets, it would require tools far simpler than Blender or Maya.  Those high-end tools then put Sansar out of reach of many educators I know.  Motion-sickness issues for the Rift may be easier to resolve than those about the tools needed for content creation. I reserve judgement on the "native building options" the Lab mentions. Perhaps in-world creation for ordinary mortals and student teams will endure, freed from the cumbersome permissions system that hamstrings SL team-builds.

Meanwhile, the Lab's original virtual world chugs along shedding 20-30 sims per week of landmass, rather like an iceberg drifting with the Gulf Stream. The Lindens do no, and probably can not, do the one thing that would democratize Second Life again: cut monthly tiers deeply for ordinary users.

 

Image of trends for private estates, from Gridsurvey.com

At $25 per month for a homestead and $50 for a full sim, I'd rent server space to make a roleplaying game from my twisted imagination. I could then take advantage of SL's rich marketplace, finely designed mesh avatars and other content. Linden Lab launched its Experience Keys program precisely for content like what I envision. Unlike 3D creations at Turbosquid, the SL marketplace offers content for pennies or just a few dollars. I could build the rest.

I've no faith that the Lindens would do what it takes to get tiers lower, such as moving to a low-rent neighborhood far from San Francisco's posh restaurants and boutiques. I've no faith they'd focus more staff time on finding out what ordinary SLers, and not just their land-barons, need.

It will be interesting to see what happens as Sansar launches. I fear that some SLers are so immersed in the world that they do not see the dyke cracking and the Dutch Boy trying every finger and toe he has to plug the leaks. Then, one day, comes the deluge.

How Embrace Second Life's Inner Niche? Ask the Crawl-Space Dude

Location: Study-Break From Grading Finals, Butt in Chair

The numbers are trending back down for the number of private regions in Second Life. I cannot speculate about the temporary rebound we were seeing for a few weeks, but soon SL's region count will be lower than its ebb in February 2014.

Let's assume, for a moment, that the venture with OnLive's SL Go client, the coming of the Savior called Occulus Rift (praised be His Holy Name), other improvements by Linden Lab, and other efforts by the newly hired CEO do not stem the ebbing tide.  What then?

I agree with a remark made at New World Notes by CronoCloud Creeggan:

Nothing wrong with being a niche. We live in a finite world, the myth that growth is infinite and can continue forever and that triple digit yearly growth is required for 'success' has got to go. There's nothing wrong with finding a niche market and making steady money off of it, year in and out.

Other than the limited-population OpenSim Grids or walled gardens like InWorldz and Avination, who DOES what Second Life does? Activeworlds? PC Only. IMVU? Just a chat room with avatars. Cloud Party? Gone. High Fidelity? Still mostly a gleam in Philip Rosedale's eye. Unity 3D? Beyond the scope of most faculty and hobbyist developers.

Garry's Mod? Exactly how much technical knowledge does one need to run that thing?

Let me know what else does what SL does: a sandbox for user-generated content that purports to be a metaverse. I'm waiting.

That's the brilliance of finding a niche. If only Linden Lab would exploit that. Others do.

In renovating a house currently, I found myself completely unwilling to undertake needed work in the crawl space. I have done such work before personally, raking out ruts, putting in a vapor barrier, sealing around wires and pipes, installing subfloor insulation. Most HVAC and plumbing companies--mainstream all--would not touch my latest crawl space for a price I can afford.

Enter a local firm called CrawlSpace Ace, whose owner told me that they found a profitable niche, dirty work to be sure, and cornered the market. They do not want for business. Read this thread for contractors to see why, but read it during the daylight hours. You won't sleep well otherwise.

So what would Linden Lab have to do to think like a crawl-space contractor? The improvements  listed early in this post would help. Then they must retain the loyalists. Eventually, they have to lower tier. 

All that has been said. Yet if a crawl-space contractor can make a go of it, an IT firm in The Bay Area certainly can. We are still waiting.

SL Go Road Trip: A "Five-Star Flight to Somalia"

Location: OnLive with SL Go

I didn't even get photos with it, so my Firestorm shots will have to suffice.  Today I thought I'd do a comparison test with Linden Lab's OnLive-based client, SL Go and my regular Firestorm client.

Iris Ophelia had great luck walking around and taking photos with SL Go. Iggy, however, wants to drive a CAR and cross sims, not be a fashionista. That should work in a driving game, so in this newly gamified SL, why the heck not?

First I logged in with Firestorm and tried, twice, to get my car across some sims. Here's the first attempt:

 

Yes, readers, that was fun. And familiar.

I relogged and went back to the rezz spot by Linden Highway 7A to try try again. This time, things worked rather nicely! I had some rubber-banding when crossing sims, but no outright failures or crashes. I even got a few glam shots with draw-distance set to 256 meters on my viewer.

 

Not bad for third gear in the GTO, which would have been almost racing velocity back in the olden days. I figured "if it's THIS good with Firestorm, I need to try SL GO and burn through my free 20 minutes."

Fumbling along after installing OnLive, I found SL Go with some difficulty in the "My Games" section and logged in. More fumbling, all of my own doing, ensued as I navigated the client.

Then I tried to rezz the car and "jump in" as the pie menu commands.

I was standing in space, high above SL, unable to teleport. My friend Grizzla IMed to ask if I'd tried SL Go. My reply, about the client and Linden Lab, remains unprintable.

This new experience would lure me at 99 cents an hour for a bit of gaming-style driving across SL's increasingly empty mainland, when and if SL Go works on my favored rig. Right now, $3 an hour is too steep though it could be an important new revenue stream for Linden Lab. I will try again on my Macbook Pro (their highest end model) and later with iOS when they release that client. But color me dubious, if not gone.

In the end, on both log ins I saw scads of abandoned mainland and a few green dots. Linden Lab has needed something like SL Go for a long time. But the time for it may have passed. SL Go did deliver nice graphics during the three minutes before I crashed. 

But the core technologies of Second Life are antique. As a commenter at New World Notes so aptly put it, SL Go reminds him of taking a five-star flight to Somalia.

Private Estates Climb in Second Life

Location: Thinking about a new SL Road Trip

I admit that I have had a morbid interest in watching the slow decline in the number of private estates in Second Life, using Grid Survey as my point of reference.

For the first time in a LONG time, the number of private estates has risen.  One week does not a trend make, but a net gain of 16 regions sticks right out.

Have a few folks who hold land in the virtual world, sensing a new direction by Linden Lab's newly annointed CEO, decided to expand their considerable investment? Or is this mere chance?

If we do see an upward trend in region numbers, then many prognosticators, myself included will have to revise a few ideas.

Some Numbers to Ponder

Though I did get an A+ in the one statistics class I was forced to take (and perversely, enjoyed immensely) I'm no number-cruncher.

So I "ran a few numbers" today, while watching the verbal pie-fight at NWN about the Linden Lab terms of service and how it might be influencing content creators.  It would seem to me that a better test of Linden Lab's success or failure would be how many new content-creators are coming into the platform. A few high-level departures now won't do much, in terms of establishing a trend.

There is a clear trend to ponder in SL. I pulled these figures from Grid Survey's rankings of private estates in-world:

Date/ Number of private estates / Change from previous entry

10-18-10 / 24791
10-31-11 / 24432 / -359 regions
10-14-12 / 21504 / -2928 regions
10-13-13 / 19582 / -1922 regions

I suppose there's comfort in the smaller decline from 2012 to 2013.  What does the overall trend portend? At some point, there will come a tipping point. What the Lindens do when their world is no longer profitable enough to satisfy their Board remains as mysterious as anything else that comes from their offices.

Deformed: Virtual Worlds & 1970s Computing History

Location: Watching Douglas Engelbart's "The Mother of all Demos"

image credit: New Media Consortium at Flickr

Many of us who have dabbled with virtual worlds have wondered how they could form a constellation of networked systems, in much the same way as the Internet's servers do today. Whatever the fate of this niche technology called virtual worlds, from the failure to run on mobile devices to the inherent boom-bust cycle of Second Life's particular brand, the road not taken always beckons.

There is an historical precedent here, and it's one that has a happy ending. Could the same be true for virtual worlds?

Today's Internet: Clarke's Law in Action

For a moment, consider the complex and delicate magic that occurs whenever we use the Internet. My university server talks fine to Google, for work such as the just-completed Usher project. Whenever the Outlook mail client randomly eats student file attachments sent to me, I smile. Ah, Microsoft's wonderfully Byzantine and wonderfully doomed, technology, eating even its own Word files. Cue Apple and Google, as the Ottomans on the horizon, slowly gobbling up a once mighty empire.  Good riddance.

Then, because of the lack of monopoly that Microsoft coveted and almost got, I have the students try, try again with Gmail. Excede's servers send me the results and, once I type, transmit my thoughts--profound or inane--from home travel via satellite to Google.  When I send notice of this post to interested folks at Twitter or Facebook, the servers hosting that data all "talk" to one another.

Types of Gardens and a World-Wide Web, 1975?

Compare that to virtual worlds technology, ostensibly part of the Internet since that is how we access it. Second Life, InWorldz, and many others that share core technologies could, in theory, speak to each other. Had development not branched off as it has done, Linden Lab and a few other grids might have pioneered a system for avatars and inventory to travel from world to world.  That happens with OpenSim Hypergridding, a technology that John Lester promoted, before his work for Reaction Grid turned to Jibe-based 3D worlds.  But "interoperability" died years ago at Linden Lab, and it seems unlikely to return.

It's curious, this set of walled gardens. If today the Internet resembles Borges Garden of Forking Paths, Virtual Worlds resemble something else: the road taken in the 1970s toward personal computing.

I realized that while reading John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, a history of early computing got influenced by the American Counterculture:

When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the history and research that had gone before it. As a consequence, the personal-computer industry would be deformed for years, creating a world of isolated desktop boxes, in contrast to the communities of shared information that had been pioneered in the sixties and early seventies. (179)

The Internet did not begin with Al Gore, whatever he may have claimed. It did not begin in Jobs' family garage and with Steve Wozniak's brilliant hardware hacks. It did not begin at Xerox PARC with the Alto. The personal computer with a GUI and mouse? Yes, we can credit or blame Xerox and Apple for that.

But years before, nearly every element of the modern Internet would have been possible with the Augment system, developed under the leadership of Douglas Engelbart. Yet that development stalled and ended, a revolution stillborn.  I think we can see an analogue for what is going on, at this cultural moment, with user-generated virtual worlds.

Engelbart's Mouse

Want to see what might have been for the Internet? I am convinced that had something like Augment  been made less opaque for casual users, we'd have had an academic, and perhaps consumer Internet in 1975. Engelbart gave a show-stopper of a demo in 1968, with mouse, text-editing with clipboard and copy/paste, multiple files, graphics on screen, electronic mail, hyperlinks tagged to graphics, and remote visitors via a network.  You can see what he was doing with Augment at these videos from Stanford.

The reasons for Augment's failure are complex; Markoff's book does justice both to the creator's vision and his ultimate failure to produce a widely adapted product.  What happened, however, for consumers was the emergence of walled gardens and proprietary systems from Apple, Microsoft, Digital, Tandy, and other competitors forgotten except by historians of technology.

When the Internet emerged, it came late to a culture of desktop boxes that could not, generally, talk to one another.

What if the personal computer revolution had begun with networking? And similarly...

What if Virtual Worlds Had Begun with Interoperability?

I'm writing an article about one group of USENET hobbyists who have made the jump to Facebook, because the old .alt group proved too chaotic and full of spammers, trolls, and other bottom feeders. They also made the leap because, frankly, .jpgs and text import and export well between applications. Text did in Engelbart's day.

Little aside from these, plus Collada files and some other graphic formats, can move between different virtual worlds.  Standards for inventories, for avatar meshes, and for "land" templates are different. In this technology landscape, OpenSim grids serve as today's Augment. Managing a bunch of avatars and a region in OS is hard to master, not stable in my experience except in the hands of a pro, but interoperable. Running an entire campus-hosted grid would be lovely, but it's beyond my time or expertise to learn.

Other products with potential beyond SL's technology, such Unity 3D and Jibe, produce elegant worlds, but they don't talk to other worlds and expert designers need to craft objects. They do offer vast potential, according to OpenSim pioneer Adam Frisby, for scaling, running on mobile devices, and improved grahics.

That sounds great until one considers faculty skills-sets and what it takes to build with Unity or Jibe. As noted  before in this blog, developing for these platforms may be within reach for architecture and engineering students, but at my university, it's challenge enough to get students to juggle multiple e-mail accounts and embed files from YouTube into their blog posts. We faculty lack time and incentives to do more with them, let alone learn 3D applications such as Maya or Blender.  Yet nearly all of us at my school have created content, mostly with text and images and sometimes digital video, and shared it on the Internet.

For all its limitations and toxicity as a brand, Second Life and, lets amateurs with a copy of Photoshop build easily. I'm told that Cloud Party does too, and I will soon try again with Cloud Party's latest build tools. Scripting remains something for those not faint of heart and projects to make visual scripting tools, such as MIT's Scratch for SL, remain as stillborn as Augment.

What it will Take to be Disruptive

Here comes a sweeping generalization, and I'm ready to fall on this sword if some wise person can prove me wrong. Virtual worlds will never be a disruptive technology, in Tim Wu's sense of the term, until they become an interoperable and popular tool for everyday life, as the Web and e-mail have become.

Had virtual worlds begun with a series of collaborative academic ventures rooted in common standards, rather than a group of for-profit start-ups from The Valley, we might have that disruption and a 3D Web today.  Then the profits would follow, because in 1968, who could have foreseen eBay or Amazon or Facebook?

Right now, however, it's still 1968 and we've all seen the potential of a disruptive technology, as those who watched Engelbart's presentation did.

So today, who will build the 3D Web?

Leaving Las Vegas: 6 Years in Virtual Worlds, Farewell

Location: Grading Finals

During the Spring Semester of 2007, this fool rushed into Second Life, something he felt would not only change education but the world beyond. Virtual worlds looked like a utopian technology with lots of zealous folks ready to evangelize the masses.

Six years later, grading what may be my last-ever student projects about virtual worlds and somewhat wiser, this educated fool wonders why SL did not change the world or even higher ed. I've written elsewhere about why SL failed to become that "3D Web" of yore.  Meanwhile, the bandwagon has moved on, the cheerleaders yelling "hurrah!"and "higher education will never be the same!" for MOOCs.

I'll sum up what I've learned about utopian narratives and would-be transformative technologies here, based on not only the last 6 but the last 25 years of studying and writing professionally about technological change, especially that which generates legions of enthusiasts.

1. Look past the message to the messenger
2. Wait for results unless you are an entrepreneur or venture capitalist
3. Be a trailing-edger
4. Find community locally, not just online
5. Consider what students have in their hands

Lesson one: Look past the message to the messenger

I first head about Second Life in a story from Wired. That is not a sedate or juried publication; it's the Popular Mechanics of the digital era. Ever the sucker for flying cars and moon bases, I decided "I need to get in early with this technology," not considering that one company, with a closed platform not built for education, held the cards. I trusted the vision of Magic Koolaid provider, Philip Rosedale. Linden Lab's corporate culture and Rosedale's wandering vision both disappointed this educator, along with many colleagues.

Who is pushing MOOCs today? College faculty members? Technologists who embrace the new without considering pedagogy of large classes with little or no contact with faculty? Right-wing lawmakers eager to dilute the power of those "tenured radicals" supposedly in charge of Higher Ed? Boards of Visitors eager to promote a school "brand" without a clear sense of what it will do to curriculum, staffing, or the long-term value of that "brand"?

Ask yourself, and take a deep breath before jumping on the band wagon.

I do wish I'd looked past the euphoria about virtual worlds in 2007 to see who was cheering most loudly.

Lesson Two: Wait for results, unless you are an entrepreneur or venture capitalist

I was not in virtual worlds for the money. As noted just now, I wanted to be in on "the next Web," as many were then pitching SL. In 1993, when I first saw a moving weather-pattern on the Mosaic browser in Dickie and Cindy Selfe's lab at Michigan Tech, I knew I was seeing something historic. In 2007 I thought so again, without applying the very critical-thinking skills I teach my students.

From 2003-06 or so, it made sense for venture capitalists to take a bet on this new technology. It might have become the next Web. Educators, however, need to always place sound pedagogy ahead of tech, which is a suspicious I have about the euphoria over MOOCs at the moment. I saw that same brand of enthusiasm for MOOs in the late 80s and early 90s, literary hypertext a bit later, glove-and-goggle VR from the 80s to the present, and of course, virtual worlds.

While one might reasonably claim that virtual worlds are going to become significant culturally, I'd suspect lots of Magic-Koolaid drinking by an educator who claimed SL will ever again be more than a niche-product in years to come. AJ Kelton of VWER rightly called SL "The AOL of virtual worlds" to the disdain of several Linden Lab staff. AJ was correct, and the Lab staff in question now work elsewhere, after being fired during the first stages of Second Life's ongoing and palpable decline.

Bottom line for me: waiting to see if SL lived up to its hype would have cost me nothing in 2007, and would have saved me time. Had I first taken a class in-world in 2009, I'd have been ready for the myriad frustrations and technical issues that bedeviled a product that seemed very much in Beta up to that point.

Lesson Three: Be a trailing-edger

During the summer I spent with the Selfes and their grad students at Michigan Tech, Richard "Dickie" Selfe, co-founder of that school's CCLI humanities lab, along with wife and fellow scholar Cynthia Selfe, once told me only to adopt trailing-edge tech for teaching and learning. The Selfes were among a group of 1980s pioneers with personal computing in the classroom, and Dickie's lab at MTU was a playful space, with stuffed animals, a coffee machine, snacks, and weekend gaming sessions with Doom and similar titles.  I'm sure that at Ohio State they continue this practice, so influential to young scholars of writing pedagogy in writing-intensive curricula.

At every step, while the Selfes liberally experimented with leading-and-bleeding-edge applications, in the classroom they proceeded more carefully with undergraduates. The older technologies were stable, easier to support, and grounded in best practices for teaching.

My experiences in 2007-8 in SL, and then in 2011 with OpenSim's Jokaydia Grid, taught me the dangers of being on the bleeding edge. My students and I bled. Only Jokay's personal help saved the final exam in 2011, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth for teaching with OpenSim. As for SL, only by 2009 was it stable enough for a class to appreciate. That class was, ironically, my last one to focus on the technology, rather than using it for a single project.

Today, SL as a product is fairly stable, and critical and scholarly work about virtual worlds has emerged to guide our pedagogy. One would be far better off starting today as a SLer with students, given these two changes. Those on the bleeding edge, however, get cut by it.

Lesson Four: Find community locally, not just online

My years with the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable have been good ones, and I cherish the faculty contacts I have made there. That said, the weekly meetings and constant advice did not compensate for a lack of interest in virtual worlds on my campus. With other innovations, from our Writing Consultants program to First-Year Seminars, we meet in person and I have lunch with folks in the flesh. There is no substitute.

Our technologists all had avatars before I did, but they never convinced more than a handful of faculty to try SL. The learning curve, the oddness of avatar-based education on a residential campus, and the lack of incentives for faculty all worked against us.

In the end, SL was an experiment that failed at Richmond. When Linden Lab renewed the 50% discount for education (if you ask the right person!) we declined. Why spend even $150 monthly for a product that might be used once every few years by one faculty member? Meanwhile, our technologists have other more tasks, from supporting Blackboard and other meat-and-drink software to  new initiatives with mobile apps.

Mobile may turn out to be the "new shiny object" for education, but it's not a niche application for students. As for MOOCs? I will wait to see comparative studies of students' learning outcomes in them and outside them. That should have been done for virtual worlds.

Lesson Five: Consider what students have in their hands

The transition to smart phones as students' primary communications tools has changed everything for us. While laptops abound, students use them like big phones: never plugging in the AC adapters, perching them in nooks where Millennnials gather to collaborate, plastering them with stickers to personalize them. I suspect that with a better keyboard, students would do their content creation on fast tablets, since we have ubiquitous and fast wireless everywhere on campus.

None of that I could have foreseen in 2007, since I did not even slow down enough to consider how poorly SL would run on many laptops, especially those not hard-wired to an Ethernet port or plugged into a AC outlet.

Even with desktop connections, students loathe SL's lag. I saw that last week in the finals. Perhaps server-side baking from Linden Lab will make SL run better on what my students still use for content creation--laptops--though not on phones, where virtual worlds simply cannot display with any sort of grandeur.

But by then, Iggy will have left the virtual building.

Coda:

I'm thankful for an experiment of six years, even if the experiment failed. At least virtual worlds generated two publications for me, as well as a forthcoming anthology I'm co-editing with some chapters about virtual worlds. I don't write the rules, but publications and teaching evaluations are the currency of academia, despite the best wishes of utopians that it be otherwise.

It is always possible that my teaching load will shift again, and my Chair and Department will call on me to teach my course about the history, culture, and future of Cyberspace. In such an event, Iggy and his students will be back. Look out.

SLers and Paying Attention to Updates

Location: SL Marketplace

As I prepare my swan-song teaching in SL (at least for the foreseeable future) I made some changes to the setting and dangers of the virtual House of Usher.

My last students to use it, in 2011, wanted some real chances of mayhem. I've obliged by adding a roleplayer's HUD to all of the premade avatars, and I set out to spend a few thousand Linden Dollars to add some traps, tricks, and mayhem.

The problem has been that items from Marketplace I ordered have not been delivered. Repeatedly. I think I know why.

Linden Lab recently updated its system for merchants, so they do not use a "Magic Box" server in-world, a remant of the time when the Lab purchased the retailers XstreetSL and Onrez. Now merchants who have read the notices use a direct delivery method. Note those words "who have read the notices" from Linden Lab.

Debates about Marketplace or the coming of direct delivery killing in-world real estate rage, but my concern is elsewhere. Never before have I had a Marketplace delivery to me fail.

Never.

Now both items I've purchased for the Usher avatars failed. I'm guessing that the creators have them in a Magic Box that is now useless.  How many other hundreds of small merchants, no longer active in SL, have had this occur because they were not paying any heed?

I'll send the Usher avatars shopping in-world to buy what they need, but the situation brings up a larger question. With the approach of server-side baking what will happen to tens of thousands of SL users who did not get the rather obscure blog post by the Lab, some time back? Firestorm's team has warned us to be ready. Linden Lab, however, has been all wine and roses and one blog post.

Yet even with Firestorm's good advice, I would hazard a guess that many of us don't read the text on our log-in screens.

If what I see at Marketplace, among folks who could be making money, is any indicator, hold onto your prim hats.

Chaos is coming to a metaverse near you. Wait for it.

Linden Lab's Project Shining and Educators

Location: Valley of Disillusionment

Of the many vexations with Linden Lab, no other exceeds my anger at their inability to understand how the US academic calendar works.

In October 2010, they threw us all for a loop when they decided to jack up tier for educators in the midst of our fiscal year. At the time, educators reacted with confusion, shock, and finally, justifiable anger. Since then, even SL stalwarts have noted the decline in educators using Second Life with their classes, as evidenced by the dwindling of college & university sims, posts to the SLED list, and lower participation in meetings such as our VWER group.

Now, with the mix of classes I teach, as well as research interests, shifting,  I prepare for what is likely my last-ever use of a virtual world in the classroom. I've planned a suitable finale at the Virtual House of Usher, but then I read the Firestorm Viewer blog, noting an easily overlooked Linden Lab announcement from June 2012 about "Project Shining."

On the surface, the switch to "server-side baking" will reduce one of SL's vexing problems of avatars not rendering properly. That's of interest to every category of user. For the technical details well explained, I point readers to Inara Pey's post on this topic.

Yet once again, the Lab prepares a massive change to its viewer software without considering what educational institutions might do mid-term in a semester. Project Shining will apparently roll out this month, just in time for my students' final examinations involving Usher.  For some schools, it will mean more and finding a Plan B viewer that works on a few computers: lab software often gets changed over summer and winter breaks. This is one reason my school, even during SL's honeymoon era when our IT staff had avatars, never installed any viewer on our lab images.

Now these folks, like many IT staff nationally, have forgotten their SL flirtations and have focused on the new (and more promising) shiny object, mobile devices.  No way I could get an SL-based project on their radar.

Yet thanks to the good will of Evelyn McElhinney of Glasgow Caledonian University, Usher returned to Second Life, with the structure of the House built at Jokaydia Grid and many props added from SL builders such as Morris Mertel and Trident. I've been shopping for a combat system too, all of which would support the hard-working, long-suffering content creators of the virtual world. They are probably the only group to suffer more than educators from Linden changes. Every time a server-code update breaks a script, it means more work for them.

The last time Usher ran for my class, I used my Jokaydia Grid's build, soon to be packed up as a final OAR as I end my work in OpenSim as well. Jokay's grid has moved to OSgrid and I've not yet logged on to check if my Plan B works. Expect an update here, and soon.

Thus I'm not sure we'll use Second Life for the exam. Expect an update on my decision after Jessica Lyon of Firestorm meets with VWER members later today, to talk about what her team is doing to be ready for the big update.

Linden Lab & Customers

 

Location: Bizarro World, Clearly

In what other community would rotten treatment be construed as part of a utopian dream? In reading recent posts about sim-closings over at New World Notes, I detect an evangelism that has all but vanished in academic circles whenever SL comes up as topic.

I'll keep an eye on Fearzom and my old parcel, maybe even do a walking tour since sim crossings no longer work well enough for a road trip. It's interesting what denial can do for a former darling of the mass media.

To quote a CEO in Bizarro World, "me lose customers and business! Company do great!"

Nobody Home (Still) in Fearzom

Location: Fearzom sim, beside my old abandoned 1024 plot

After reading about the closure of two Japanese-themed sims, plus a string of comments about the mainland emptying out, I wondered about my old bit of mainland property. It was the last time I paid tier.

I'll try to post here, occasionally, about its fate. I think I let it go in March 2010, but I kept a premium account and bought a 512 to pay the Lab no more tier. At the time, my university had its own island and I did not need a 1024. I might have stayed, had I known that an exodus of educators, including us, would occur in the next 12 months. Now, according to Tyche Shepherd, "10.6% to 11.6% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels" and the Lab owns 46.5% of the Mainland.

I rezzed at my neighbor's old plot. He ran a furniture store but  abandoned it too, driven out of business by Marketplace. I thought at first I was at my old home, but a quick check showed my land is still not reclaimed by Governor Linden. The former neighbors' plots all went up for sale in October of 2012 or January of this year.

I wonder how long it will take the Lindens to sell the land? To reclaim mine? Stay tuned, as I've a morbid interest in this topic.

Update: I recall, perhaps incorrectly, that a year ago abandoned land constituted about 9.5% to 10% of total. Not a huge uptick, but it's a troubling one for those still with an emotional or financial stake in Second Life.

A New Airplane

Location: Premium Sandbox

I want to both congratulate Linden Lab for the premium membership gift of a nicely rendered WWI biplane  and ask "if I want to dogfight, can I cross sims now?"

The answer is "maybe." From where I rezzed the biplane, it flew nicely and to test my aviation skills, I did a few barrel rolls. Immelmans and loops can wait for next time. I crossed a couple of borders into protected land that is not full of user-generated content. I'd not want to try that on the mainland where I still have a small parcel.

Is it even possible to fix that problem? UGC is what makes Second Life Second Life. It also bogs down sims with loads of poorly written scripts, overdone builds, and other lag-magnets.

Drive or fly anywhere. That's the gift I'd really like from the Lab. Aerial combat does not tend to run into invisible walls in the sky.

Curse you, Red Baron!

Hosting a Mixed-Reality Event the Right Way

Location: Conference Room at Work

In late August, the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable held a really interesting meeting in which we interviewed Tom Boellstroff and Celia Pearce, two of the authors of Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method.

I wanted to have a local audience attend, and most of them do not have avatars or did not see the need to sit in a virtual space to hear our speakers. With a laptop, a video adapter, and a big screen, I both hosted the local event and, as voice-to-text transcriber for the meeting, connected the virtual and physical audiences. I learned a few things:

• Promote and arrive early. I always do for such events, using campus e-mail, plus direct appeals to interested faculty, staff, and students. Then I get to the room half an hour before the event in SL begins. This mitigates the usual problems of connecting to SL, teleporting to the venue, and doing sound-checks.
• Second Life sound is lousy. To compensate, I had my camera location as my listening point, and I positioned the camera between our two speakers and moderator
•  Focus is key. There was no need to show the crowd constantly. I focused the camera on the speakers, either from in front or just behind, and this avoided any raised eyebrows from avatars dressed like Hooters waitresses or body builders (such avatars were mostly non-academic visitors at the SL meeting)
• Explain who, what, where. Some of my campus audience did not know the nature of the presenters' book or VWER. It took some quick task-shifting, but I was able to transcribe, provide side-notes orally, and share questions from our audience.
• Provide interaction! Even with my system lagging, I was able to convey a few questions from campus and get responses from the virtual venue. We followed VWER with some real-life chat about the potentials of virtual worlds.
• Be serious before, during, after. This is an academic audience. In my 2007 enthusiasm about SL, I wrecked a great chance to show good content to my audience of nearly 20 at a campus conference. What went wrong? Blathering about "the next Internet" and showing how easy it was to dance and change avatar appearance (to a Wynx Whiplash gorilla avatar, no less) was the stupidest thing I have done since my 21st birthday.

The audience on campus came away impressed by the professionalism of VWER, and they learned a great deal about the topic (read the transcript here). In other SL demos, the interface or world got in the way. Not that day, and I'll apply my tips to every "mixed reality" event I host from now on.

Cory Ondrejka's Vision, 8 Years On

Location: Reading Desk

I have had a great deal of academic fun reading Ondrejka's 2004 article "Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse" (get a copy here). I'll provide a few page references below, but not a works-cited list (this ain't no formal article, yet!).

Hamlet Au mentioned it over at New World Notes recently, and I decided to have a look at the creative fire from an era when the investor-utopians, and not the CEOs and bean-counters, planned to build something akin to Neal Stephenson's metaverse from Snow Crash:

This article will argue that creating a defensibly real, online world is now possible if its users are given the power to collaboratively create the content within it, if those users receive broad rights to their creations, and are able to convert those creations into real world capital and wealth.  This would be the Metaverse of Stephenson’s imagination. (Ondrejka 4).

Ondrejka, a supporter of Cloud Party, is still at it, and I like the way that new virtual world has seized the creative fire that Second Life, with its balky interface and legacy code, may never achieve. Cloud Party already has an avatar building kit, and while the results do not match what we have in 2012 SL, they are impressive for a world so young. As I get ready to play Patterns for the first time, however, I also wonder if it's too early to count Linden Lab out of the game.

What did Ondrejka want in 2004? Here are a few claims he makes that excite me still. I won't focus on the author's economic musings. They are fascinating, but I'm more concerned with his arguments about engagement and immersion.

User-Generated Content: Give Me Sandbox AND Arena

As Marcello DellaCarpini, my Vodacce character from the game 7th Sea, would say, "Two famous Vodacce sayings apply to such matters. First 'When in doubt, just make something up and say it with a straight face.' Second, 'It is never really fun until someone is caught on fire, run through with swords, made into an pincushion for archers, or eaten by monsters. Preferably someone you cannot stand.' "  Marcello made those both up, of course, on the spot for good RP. Creation, both verbal and physical, are essential:

People want to be perceived as creative by customizing their surroundings. People want to have their moments on the stage. In many cases, it seems that users are just waiting for access to the right tools (Ondrejka 9).

Due to the in-world tools and lack of a submission process, Second Life’s users have been able to create an amazing amount of content. At the end of May 2004, users had created more than one million objects, over 300,000 objects with scripted behaviors, and over 300,000 pieces of clothing (Ondrejka 10). 

I have long argued that UGC is the "special sauce" keeping me interested. I can destroy things in a thousand games, but in how many can I make them?

Eventually, both sorts of play will co-exist. What we call on my weekly Nerd Night "the minimum daily requirement of violence" in games will only take us so far.

If game designers want to attract my sort of relatively well-heeled customer and hobbyist, they need to consider two sorts of sandy spots where a type of "play" occurs: the sandbox and the arena.

Emergent and Predictable Behavior:

Ondrejka notes that when one drops and object, one expects it to fall. To fall back on a favorite expression of mine from Snow Crash, designers must not "break the metaphor" by, say, letting folks "beam in" to any location. Though many sims in Second Life support that type of movement, it's more predictable that one would walk or drive from a fixed point to the destination; this is what the original Linden Lab "telehubs" wanted to do.

Not breaking metaphors, whether gravitational or spatial, is predictable behavior.  Ondrejka contends that successful metaverse must support behavior that only emerges with creative play (15-16). In my OpenSim House of Usher simulation, for instance, I had no way to injure other characters when I was in the role of Roderick. I found that, however, I could rid myself of over-inquisitive guests by pushing them off the edge of the virtual region I rent at Jokaydia Grid. This was a software bug in OpenSim, but it served my purpose: through emergent behavior, I'd found a way to drown nosy and suspicious visitors to The House of Usher.

So When Do We Get our Metaverse?

Emily Short, working with Linden Lab on a new and non-SL narrative game, notes in a Gamasutra interview that the sort of game Ondrejka calls for would be lovely but it is not currently available:

Something that I tended to think was unfortunate about certain MMO storytelling... you get these narratives where the NPCs have lots of really emotive things to say to you, and they want to throw you into this narrative. Then on the other hand, your interaction with the characters played by humans -- even if they're inclined to play it in a very role-playing way and they're not running around shouting trollish remarks and that sort of thing, even if they've entered into playing that role, because of the way it's structured, none of the conversations you ever have with them are ever going to be acknowledged by the story as meaningful pieces of the story.

I have no time for childish players who type in text abbreviations or talk in voice like extras from The Jersey Shore. I am a snob. I would not even consider RPing in the local game shop; my preferred groups are guys I've known for 30+ years or a bunch of fellow PhDs who were with me during graduate study. Neither group is trollish but both can be a bit silly, to add humor to a gamemaster's crafting of a scenario. Neither group is childish.

So how can a game engine ever let players into the story as co-creators, as can happen in an SL roleplay sim or tabletop RP? One of Short's commenters noted that we'd need AI that could serve as a "dungeon master."  When will that occur?

Quantum computing, a gleam in the eye of many of us, recently got a public boost by the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics. With processor speeds that fast, we may see something like the magic of Stephenson's vision realized.  Until I have that sort of power in my palm or my laptop, I will read the dreams of Ondrejka, Rosedale, Short, and Stephenson and keep hoping.

Top hat tip to Hamlet Au, for covering both Ondrejka's and Short's ideas.

Who IS a Virtual Worlds Educator?

Location: SLED List

It may be easier to say who is most assuredly not.

A few weeks back, a colleague in VWER asked me "who is an educator" in a private IM.  I replied "well, if you teach at an accredited school..." but then I realized that some folks provide education to others in informal circumstances.

A story about Saj, one of my best students ever, came back to me. Saj is an Indian national who graduated to become a well known economist. He credited his considerable talent in mathematics to informal tutoring done, at a dining room table, by a retired professor who would work out equations by hand for a dozen Indian boys.  The teacher used recycled "green bar" computer paper for the teaching, and one by one he would write down equations and solve them for a horde of pupils who watched and memorized. They had a hunger to learn: Saj learned his "maths" by this method, and he had to watch the professor's work upside down, since Saj was the newest pupil and could not get close enough at the table to see the equations in their proper orientation.

So an accredited position does not an educator make, the material or virtual worlds.

But what makes  you NOT a educator? In the recent SLED-list discussion of Linden Lab's decision to offer SL through Steam, many participants fretted about rising graphics requirements for the virtual-world client. Then one soul chimed in:

"Game gfx have always been scalable. Just for the few that plop down a couple  hundred dollars on a new GeForce will gain the full experience.  Best $200 I ever spent!"

Easy for him to say! Imagine an educator telling students, "to take the course you must own a desktop PC and have this graphic card, or buy one, for something you will never, ever do again while enrolled here."

I have begun to reply to this SLED participant several times by e-mail, but I don't think I could do so politely.

Clearly, this person has not recently taught at a college, where nearly all students employ laptops of various, and usually middling, sorts. Nor has this person taught at any K-12 schools, where budgets are strained and computer replacement cycles run in the five-year range. While volunteering at one middle school in our city, I found that to order a replacement USB mouse from Central Office took six weeks.

Sure. Drop in a new graphics card, class! While a professional might spend that amount for a desktop upgrade...let's be serious. This is not the voice of any educator I know.

So let's try this an a definition: an educator is someone who not only works in an educational setting, be it a lecture hall or a dining-room table. An educator also understands the facts on the ground in these settings: what students need, what they can or cannot do, their level of motivation.

I am sure that a student like Saj would find the money to buy a new graphics card, if that were what he needed to excel in his studies. But most of my charges? It would mean dropping the class at best, grumpily slogging along and slamming me in my evaluations, at worst.

Now here, from the same discussion, in the voice of an educator:

"Interestingly the lowest res graphics game ...Minecraft...is incredibly popular...I don't think kids expect good graphics as much as they expect engaging learning, challenges that are relevant to their lives and acceptance that the world today (Google and the information repository it can search in your pocket) is different from the world 50 years ago (where you had to remember a lot of stuff). "

A new graphics card is a pain in the butt; engaged learning will pull the learner alone to all sorts of challenges, including those posed by rapid technological change.

A Favorite Merchant, Rediscovered

 
Location: Second Life Marketplace

I'm not fond of Second Life Marketplace. It makes the virtual world less a world. I do use it for last-minute purchases as well as window-shopping for a visit in SL. I salute creators like Laufey Markstein of Trident, who keep a storefront going. I like to stroll through 3D objects and not simply look at photos of them.

The closing of Morris Mertel's in-world store, some time back, saddened me greatly. But there is good news of a sort.

Back when I was first building the House of Usher,  Morris was kind enough to supply it with a nice fireplace! After sitting on a few demos and buying items from Morris, I blogged about the good designs and let him know. He reciprocated with some nice gifts. I don't know that we'd have "met" in quite the same way had he not possessed an in-world store.

Linden Lab made a mistake in forcing so many creators to abandon in-world commerce. After all, the Marketplace commissions are paid in the money the Lindens themselves mint. That pricing scheme only means that merchants earn less.

But at least Morris maintains a Marketplace storefront. So visit 3D Dreamworld Studios for your medieval and renaissance furnishings, including the rats I have so enjoyed using at the Virtual House of Usher.  If Morris does not have it, I bet Laufey does. So go do some shopping!

From Scratch, Key Elements For an Educational Virtual World

Location: Thinking Cap in Place

After my few posts about Cloud Party and Glitch, I began pulling together a list of features that I'd want in a virtual world if I had unlimited funds and time to build one myself.

I plan to put this list of features to the vote with colleagues in VWER, before we hold a meeting about "What I learned from a silly game called Glitch" early in August.

• User-Generated Content: The killer feature for virtual worlds used by educators. We can make and share our creations in a world that is, essentially, a big sandbox
• Collaborative Permissions: Creators can transfer full ownership for shared builds so backups and exports are possible. Mixed-permissions builds in Second Life are a nightmare
• In-World Building with Simple Tools: Again, for collaboration this seems very popular with educators
• Offline Building with Professional 3D Tools: For advanced builders with 3D modeling skills
• Local Hosting Options: Educational Institutions like to own their hardware and make backups frequently
• The Illusion of a Contiguous World: World maps are available for Glitch, most OpenSim grids, and Second Life. In Cloud Party, to my knowledge no map is available
• Several Means of Travel: All virtual worlds include point-to-point movement such as teleportation.  Those making simulations in a world, however, should be able to turn that feature off, so participants are forced to walk or ride to a destination. Second Life manages this well with settings for parcels and regions
• Freedom of, and From, Adult Content: This will be contentious even among educators. I'd suggest that pornography is not needed in an educational world, but adult content, such as art-museum nudity or discussions of sexuality, is necessary for many educational purposes
• Simulations Tools, Including a Physics Engine a Combat System: My students asked for this again and again in reviews of my House of Usher simulation. In realistic simulations, bad decisions have consequences.  Avatars in these settings should get tired, hungry, injured when appropriate. They might be able to "level up" for accomplishing goals in a course or assignment. This idea got suggested in Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World and I like it a lot
• Simple Help Tools: Glitch wins on this. The designers' humorous approach to FAQs and the Pet Rock charm me every time I log on.

What did I forget? Sound off!

Shadows, Privacy, Restarts in Cloud Party

Location: Shiny Canyon

I had a comparative experience with server restarts in Cloud Party and Second Life today.

But first, some details about the new virtual world that caught my eye.

Mobile access, More than Facebook: 

Usually we skip such reading, but in the CP privacy policy, I ran across references to Google+ and Tablet access. Clearly, the CP folks intend to branch out from their Facebook-centered approach to their world. How far--and the use of "nyms" instead of display names, remains to be seen.

Given the frequent mention of iOS devices in the policy, I assume I'll soon be able to log on with my iPad.

I'll quote the next bit verbatim:

Offer Walls:

Cloud Party games or their purchase pages may display an "offer wall" that is hosted by an offer wall provider. The offer wall allows third party advertisers to provide virtual currency to users in exchange for interacting with an advertisement or for completing a marketing offer that may include signing up for an account with one of those advertisers. These are not offers made by Cloud Party. These offers may be displayed to you based on certain technical information, such as your geographic area or anonymous demographic information.

Does this mean billboards in the game or sidebars beside it? I can live with them, as I do with Google Ads, but I see one revenue model, beyond CP's modest tier, for the firm.

Others with more experience with privacy policies can comb through the rest of the document, but at my first-glance exegesis, it seems standard stuff.

Dynamic Shadows:

They are blocky in my limited experience, but considering how difficult they are to render in Second Life, I'm already impressed.

Fast Restarts:

I could not log onto SL today for our meeting of the VWER. When I did get in, about half-way into our meeting, I got rerouted to an adult welcome area full of furries, virtual prostitutes, a woman cradling a prim baby, and Gorean slave girls. Luckily, they were gray and stayed that way because of the load on my client and the sheer number of logon refugees present.

This sort of collision of worlds often happens when an avatar is age-verified and server issues force a "last location" login to redirect to a welcome area.

Thanks to a VWER member, after I escaped this den of vice I learned how to prevent this from happening again. Let me compare that to Cloud Party, where today the CEO announced a server restart not long after I logged on. I waited to see what would happen.

The app quit and restarted automatically, and I was back in Shiny Canyon, inside my fake home.

I realize that as Cloud Party grows, Sam Thompson won't be available to chat with gamers in Cloud Party. But so far, that hands-on attitude is refreshing. I IMed Sam to tell him of how pleasantly different his restart was from Linden Lab's. Reply? Sam sent back a smiley face :)

Maybe we'll see prim babies and Gorean roleplay in Cloud Party. I hope not, but we'll see.