For businesses contemplating getting their feet wet in virtual worlds, the appearance of new virtual worlds rivalling Second Life matters, both for gaining more flexibility for their own needs, and ensuring that competition drives not only further innovation but better stability, quality assurance, and customer service.
Second Life, for so long the first Next Big Thing in virtual worlds, is everywhere -- and nowhere at the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 convention in San Jose. Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, do not even have a booth in the expo, and no swag in the goody bag although they are a sponsor. Philip Rosedale, Linden's CEO, who was a keynoter at this prestigious industry conference and expo when it convened in New York in March, is not on the program to speak at all, although Robin Harper, Vice President of Marketing & Community Development and John Zdanowski, Chief Financial Officer, are scheduled to speak.
Rosedale himself nevertheless showed up with trademark carefully-coiffured touselled hair and a tight black shirt, when his plans to go to Korea were changed. Asked if he felt left out, he said, "We're famous enough that we don't have to worry about things like that." Linden staffers explained that they don't want to overwhelm everyone at a time when Second Life has had enormous press coverage -- both positive and negative -- and want the spotlight to shine on those who use their platform to do high-profile projects, like the CSI cross-media project to attract viewers of a television detective series to come into a virtual world and search for murder clues on their own, or IBM and Cisco, companies that have bought dozens of private islands to do trainings and conferencing with their staff.
Some Lindens looked a bit nervously at the huge number of virtual worlds springing up around them -- this convention boasts 30, and a sampling of all the demos showed strikingly Second-Life like scenes, with beautiful graphics, avatars that can do any Second Life animation including flight, as well as movable objects, and geographical contiguity. To be sure, some of them, like Forterra Systems, Inc., appear to be designed for real-life simulation uses such as in the medical field, not for socializing; others, like SceneCaster promise very rich possibilities for socializing and user-made content and integration into Internet social sites like Facebook -- although not user-to-user sales.
Truly, we're now going from the Golden Age, of mythic heroes and conquerors like Philip Rosedale, to the Iron Age of replication by lesser gods -- and more importantly, users themselves. Except...after perusing the many worlds and games on display here, I didn't see any that had as robust a virtual economy based on free user-created content and virtual land sales and rentals. "There's no real estate market quite as free and robust as Second Life- you're good," I assured Philip -- but in fact the others are getting a bead on him. Red Light Center, a new very easy-to-use virtual world for adult activity, will soon release a developers' system where apartments and designs cleared by the world makers for sale will contribute to a user economy, and eventually items are planned for sale. There.com already has a content-creator system that must pass through a central committee and be judged for PG suitability; Red Light Center's review will be for compatibility to prevent crashing of their servers -- which they assure us will hold hundreds more avatars than Second Life, with the limits determined by your client-side ability to render them, not by the companies' servers. Red Light Center could see a surge in membership when the Lindens finally institute age-verification and the adult-only blocks on land menus.
Still, regardless of whether Second Life itself is eclipsed by some of its users flocking to other virtual worlds in search of less lag and more swag, the experienced gained on this pioneering platform has been invaluable, and is cited repeatedly in every workshop discussing practices to replicate -- or avoid.
Some of the newer worlds will let you have your own land for free. ;) I won't advertise for them, but SL shouldn't take their fame for granted. Please LL, don't take your fame for granted.
Having you land for free, or for minimal game currency that can't be cashed out means you are in a game, where your IP will never be sold, where your labour will never be compensated.
Having land for free in a RMT world is the Holy Grail of some geeks and artists, but land is on servers, and servers and programmers cost money. Somebody has to be paid for your shelf paper to be endlessly rolled out for you to colour on.
When something is free, often people don't value it. They scrawl on it.
Making land have value adds value to the world, and gives people a stake.