Second Rant #4 - Everyone In Second Life is a Loser

Ok this is simple - this guy should be highly embarrased. He has just demonstrated he is utterly ignorant in front of the entire world ( or rather his limited audience ). Probably why enjoys such spoon fed linear cash/bloodsucking nonsense as WoW. He even looks like one of the characters from the brilliant and totally accurate parody of WoW in South Park.

As Linden Labs have said, numerous times - Second Life is a platform. Yes it has an economy, but concentrating on that is missing the point entirely. Personally I believe SL is a simply an amazing massively multi user collaborative tool for creating interesting online 3d projects which may or may not be connected to real world projects - nothing more. I think the economy is just a sideshow. As they stated on their blog this week :

"Simply put, the L$ represents a limited license right to use certain features of the Second Life service – to participate in the virtual economy."

I believe if you removed the virtual economy completely, Second Life would still be very successful. There would just be a different revenue structure to keep it running.

Saying there isnt anything to do in SL .. is like saying there is nothing to do in RL. He just needs to get to know people and explore - just like in real life. Second Life isn't a game, its not there to "entertain" its there to facilitate.

I'm sick of the emphasis on finance in SL coverage. All the projects I have seen that are really successful uses of the Second Life platform, are creative. They use the things Second Life is really good at - social networks, communication, collaboration, user creation, fun, education etc..

Almost all the projects I've seen which attempt to use SL as some kind of financial opportunity ( often just translating real world products to virtual products - where is the understanding of "market" in that ? ) - just dont get it, and of course fail. Maybe I'm just not excited by economic stuff - but I'm also totally sick of the whole land value thing.. its just a distraction from the interesting creative stuff..

Prokofy's question - if SL really is a real economic opportunity, is totally valid and personally I think it isn't if viewed in conventional terms. I think it can have huge impact on brands, and therefore generate real world economic growth.

For instance - the recent advent of the Chichen Itza pyramid becoming a new wonder of the world, WILL translate into economic growth for that region of Mexico via tourism. This was partially due to the Visit Mexico build in Second Life.

A lot of good points in this podcast, although you keep on getting Starwood aloft wrong. They didn't *want* to make a permanent hotel in Second Life. That project accomplished exactly what it wanted to do in spades as both a marketing and R&D project. The marketing aspect of the project really came from the blog, which fed off of the virtual, but was not about how many avatars can you fit on a sim. They didn't want to create a destination site, and why is that a problem? You two should be more sophisticated than that.

First Wired, now Forbes.

Why did these MSM outlets avoid the one sector of the SL Economy that's not just robust, but growing and thriving: Independent Music?

Just read a TIME article... they focus on the scandals and the sex and gambling and nothing about the music.

It would be like pointing at AOL-Time Warner and focusing only on their Pathfinder portal failure, or pointing at Disney's GO.com.

As for the "Everyone in SL is a Loser" I wonder if he'd be so brave as to go from door to door telling people that?

Who first... who first... let's see him try that on someone like Circe Broome, who's done a hell of a lot in SL for a hell of a lot of people.

Sweeping generalities from so-called journalists who should know better.

Pathetic.

I'm not into conspiracies much, but with all the negative press lately, and so quickly after so much positive hype, one could probably be built.

Instead, I hope that people will eventually make the one thing that ALL these stories are coming together to represent. That if there are news reports about so many different types of things (financial, marketing, exploring, gambling rising and getting banned, clubbing, corporations, little business, legal issues, etc.) then this isn't something that is focused around any single one of those things, which each news report focuses on, but a platform where all is capable of happening.

I mean, is there any game that gets as much publicity as this? Any other software program (OSes excluded)? Any social networking site with such a varied genre of news stories? Any technological trend that crosses so many fields? Not that I can think of.

I know we all get it pretty well, but I'll keep waiting (but not with breath held) for the first major media outlet that "gets it" and starts reporting on that story. Then people will realize that this stuff is really acting like the WWW growth. Then they will all be playing catchup.

Forseti, the public is more sophisticated than you imagine when it comes to PR hype.

I understand what the official narrative is. However, I just don't buy the official narrative. Had Starwood been more successful and SL less controversial, they might be prototyping other hotels. They might be using it as a sales tool, to let people see what the hotels are like while planning trips.

They might have focused just on conference venue sales, with all the business types in SL, using it as a virtual "try before you buy" sort of thing. There's a lot of things they might have done. They didn't. I don't say it's about avatars fitting on a sim; it is in part about avatars visiting a sim, and the comfort level a company gets with SL. They didn't get one, or they just didn't want to spend on PR *this way*.

I don't see what this has to do with "sophistication", as people working in virtual worlds are puzzled -- why wouldn't Starwood, at such a low cost PR, wish to keep something going that could have a sales value? It would be easier to believe the official narrative if there were two factors in place:

1. if Starwood very forthrightly said upfront "we're only here for 90 days, then we give away our prototype to a non-profit." But they thought all that up after the fact.

2. if Starwood weren't featured prominently in every single "hate on SL" and "corporations leave SL" article -- and without comment. I don't see any officials holding up their hands and saying, wait, that's not true, we loved it, and we'll be back, or it was only for 90 days.

Sorry, here's the Forbes TV link:

http://blogs.forbes.com/digitaldownload/2007/08/the-download-se.html

@crap: My theory of "why" is that LL/LewisPR hyped SL long enough that they are getting a "fad backlash" -- they couldn't possibly be that cool, so it's now cool to diminish their reputation to show how savvy you are.

More here: http://slbizreview.com/2007/08/17/pr-whiplash-hits-sl.aspx

Shava Suntzu/Shava Nerad (RL)

Really good analysis in this podcast folks.

I think Michele Steele's opening comments say so much more than she meant to.. "..critics including our own Dave Ewalt have been predicting Second Life's demise for over a year now." I hereby make my own prediction: 12 months from now, people like our main man Dave will be saying, maybe a little less confidently, "Trust me folks, this baby's crashing.." and in 24 months, "You still believe me, don't you, it's going to happen any day now" etc. etc.

Similarly Dave gives a little too much away by smugly skating around the question of how much time he's spent in world. It's a difficult thing to comprehend the enormity and complexity of what people have created within Second Life, and the possible future it or similar user-built worlds may embody. And it's okay to say you don't understand it. But it shows a particular kind of journalistic naiveté to diss something you don't quite understand, the way Super Dave is happily doing here.

I'm confident time will show there are enough people who do "get it" to prove this ongoing prediction about SL's demise to be invalid.

Nick and Prokofy, you both make an entirely valid point about marketers missing *huge* opportunities within this virtual space. I don't think they need to throw truckloads of money at this thing - but a good place to start might be where other marketing strategies succeed: by understanding their market, and not throwing their hands in the air like Dave and declaring the whole thing a waste of time and money.

Cheers