I have been doing a weekly vodcast looking at the week in Second Life. It's all bit informal at present but seems at least to be becoming presentable. This is tonight's show which I co-host with Tara Yeats. We are joined by Stuart Wharf , together with Fleep Tuque and Zoe Connolly , in the studio.
Hope you like it. The 2 parts were broadcast about 2 hours apart.
Novoking have started its alpha testing.
I am honored to got the Novoking beta invitation two days ago. I have it installed now.I have some screenshots of the installation process
In this alpha test, the system has already allowed users to customized their avatars, besides default items, you can also buy items in its shops. As in other virtual world, you can walk, run, fly, and transfer to another location instantly by using map, you can do various pre-defined actions, such as hug, being crazy, etc.
chat with other users, but it is really not easy to find other users for social networking in this private test period, so you may feel a little lonely. If you want to find someone for chatting, you should check out the well-established cafe, bar, disco, shopping mall, restaurant and parks.
In Novoking land, you can use the ready-made furnitures or buy furniture items to decorate it inside. Click on others’ username, you can enter their spaces, and leave messages to them. That’s more convenient than other virtual world products,
You should go to a creation land in this test version. Novoking also support uploading your 3D models created by 3DMax or Maya.
Spending time in Second Life is like riding a roller coaster at lightening speed. Before you know it you have spent a lifetime worth of experiences in here. It has been interesting, the good, along with the not so good.
I have been in Second Life since August '06 and have tried many things; some for pure enjoyment and some for financial gain (dreaming of it anyway). I've bought land, sold land, had land stolen from me, owned a bed and breakfast that made it to the most popular list (then I sold it). I bought my first island when I was one month old. It was a brave new world I thought so I shall be brave too and dive right in. I was SL married within two months which lasted only three months haha. Yes indeed I was a brave little lassie. However I have taken some of my knowledge of owning over 24 sims since I entered Second Life and turned it into something I think can help others. I joined up with two other women and we provide security consulting. We come in and evaluate groups of sims or large Estates and let the owner know where the weaknesses are and we finish it up by providing solutions and doing some staff training. It's fun because I do enjoy teaching and how else can I legally hop a ban line or sink a sim! What an adventure!
Overall the good outweighs the bad. I'm looking forward to my next year in Second Life. Oh and btw --- remarried in SL again and it is working perfectly! We are nearing our six month anniversary!
Cheers
Dharma Austin
So you may have known vSide has just came out a few months ago. While it still needs improvment it is also coming into great strides as they made apartments availble to the public. They announce 2 new cities in RJ and LGA. More Muscians visit this massive world known as vSide PCD, AAR, Kenna, and Kevin Michael just to name a few. As I know greatly some of the music staff IE. DJ Lars Berg who gives his best effort for the in-worl music to be Lovely! As they announce Beta 2 late October it well only get better!
Many Metaversed readers have already read TechCrunch's post about our plans to create a "Metaverse Market Index" (MMI). Here is my view on what we are trying to accomplish...and perhaps more importantly, what we are NOT trying to do.
The primary motivation for this project is laid out in three separate but related posts by Christian Renaud. Two points resonate particularly strongly for me. First, people who are investing in virtual worlds need information on the world's prospects. It doesn't matter whether they are consumers looking for social networking, entrepreneurs looking to create an inworld business, or a corporate giant looking for a way to market their brand or teleconference with employees and clients. Second, the stakes of making the right decision are particularly high because investments in one world are currently not portable to other worlds (though hats off to Multiverse for trying to make this happen on their platform).
The key goal of MMI is to create reliable, meaningful and consistent information about three aspects of virtual worlds: the size and engagement of its user base; the vibrancy of its economy; and the key aspects of its technology. The first two goals should help people who are making decisions to invest in virtual worlds in the absence of inter-operability; the third should help platform developers move toward inter-operability.
Clearly this won't be easy. We will need to maintain independence and have broad representation, which we are doing by being a nonprofit organization with an advisory panel drawn from all quarters of the virtual world community. We will need lots of funding (hint, hint) from companies that don't have virtual worlds on which we are reporting, so that our independence is not compromised. And we will need cooperation from virtual world developers, so that we can provide the public with high-quality information.
We will also need to make sure people understand what we are not trying to do. We are not trying to impose our own definitions of what is and is not a virtual world. Raph Koster's post , along with its comments, make clear why doing so would be a mistake. Our plan is to view the metaverse very broadly--as I say in my own comment to Raph's post, I like the word "metaverse" because no one knows what the %@#! it means, so it is hard for someone to exclude a platform others argue should be included.
Second, we are not trying to impose any technology on existing platforms. Instead, we just want to report on the technologies that platforms are using, so that the developers can make intelligent decisions.
What we are trying to do is create standards for reporting meaningful information. As an accounting professor who works fairly closely with the Financial Accounting Standards Board, this is familiar territory for me. Everyone knows that Second Life doesn't have 9 million residents. Accountants would say that number is not a faithful representation of what people actually care about: how many people use the platform regularly, and how engaged are they when they are using it. (I frequently have it running in the background, in case anything comes up.) Naturally, key numbers will have different meanings in different platforms. Thus, we will need to develop a taxonomy to capture and talk about these differences.
I will be at the Virtual Worlds Conference next week. If you are interested in working with us on this project--or better yet, providing us with funding--please let me know.
I'm reasonably new to SL, still learning things but have hopefully got past that 'there's a newbie' behaviour ;-)
My hobby is digital art, 2D skins, textures and mattes. My original idea was to produce 2D framed pictures for sale as one offs, which is what I did. Unfortunately my inquisitive nature kicked in, and I wondered if my 2D textures could be wrapped around something with a prim in it.
I tried it and to my amazement it worked, not only that but I saw my artwork in a new light. or should that be a new shape? some of the effects I liked some I didn't but it effectively gave me a new burst of interest in art in SL. I'm now learning to build simple shapes like pottery just to custom paint with my artwork, I now also apply it to vehicles and aircraft.
In my A Corp gallery I have an attack helicopter on the roof custom painted with one of my abstract camouflage effects, inside I have paintings, painted pottery, surfboards a jetski and a quad bike and I may well add a car.
These vehicles and aircraft are not for sale as I don't own the copyright on them, but I do use them as an advert for my work , and I really enjoy trying new uses for my artwork as textures . One thing that really pleased me today though was opening a new small gallery and having a collector buy 3 paintings a piece of pottery-that was a real buzz -I'm used to selling my work but have only sold work to 2 collectors who but 3 or so items at a time, usually people buy 1 painting or a few pieces of pottery.
The only cloud on the horizon for me is the debacle over vat, I live in England and we're a part of the EUssr. While, for me, it's not a large amount I have to pay I resent the way LL went about this whole debacle, but for some who own large sims and are paying between 17.5% and 25% in extra taxes they're saying enough is enough and many are selling up. From the European blogs there could be as many as 40,000 people from the EUssr leaving SL.
It's a shame over what happened with the way the Lindens handle these things, they've known for a year what they were going to do and they give us a few hours notice in some cases by sending out an e-mail at midnight GMT.
I would love to turn this hobby into a real business and base it in SL and the Web, but I have to keep an eye on what's happening with the vat. if I earn enough to cover it I won't feel the pinch, but if I don't earn enough I will consider going to HiPiHi even though I don't like the Chinese politics or their bad human rights record. Between a rock and a hard place comes to mind here :-(
Hi everyone,
This is a partial recording from a geek meet we had a while ago now about voice technology. It was an interesting discussion Bernhard Drax from Life4u talked about the impact of voice firstly, then I discussed some of the future implications and possibilities of the voice technology. We then had a great talk from Vinny Fardel of Vivox, the company who implemented voice technology for Linden Lab, and some interesting discussion from a number of Lindens, including Joe Linden. At the moment this video just features my part of the talk, but Im sure we will get the rest up soon.
This machinima was created by Joi Koi from stills taken at the event and using some great speech animation software. Thanks Joi !!
Ever on the look out for innovation in how to present sims for business, I've been scouring the grid lately to see if anyone has done anything different than the usual recipe for a marketing sim -- that huge, modern, glass-and-steel build costing a young fortune, surrounded by that gigantic cement semi-circle stadium for avatars to perch in for events.
Milan Brynner, the concept director of Virtual Starry Night, an art sim designed to show the work of Vincent Van Gogh, has gotten hold of an idea that you wish more people had tried in the history of Second Life: make a large, 3-D rendition of a 2-D painting that you can actually get up inside of and feel a part of. And just like the promised description, you will experience the thrill of actually seeing a 3-D interactive version of popular paintings like Cafe Terrace at Night , and sit at a table and imagine yourself, too, as a troubled poet drinking absinthe and tugging at your ear in Paris in the '20s. I loved the texture jobs on this sim, which were soft and painterly without looking cartoony and blended well into the SL landscape. You can also buy objects that are in the painting, and put them in your home, like a vase of big yellow Van Gogh sunflowers or a rustic chair and create your very own "Room at Arles" at home.
Where this sim fell down for me, however, was in the failure to enable "fly," so that I couldn't in fact fly up into the painting experience I wanted, and sit on a roof or examine a boat detail -- I had to keep hearing the "thunk" of a no-fly zone. And the designers have placed clear-glass walls and builds slightly up in the air everywhere, which I kept bumping into, part of an anachronistic modern build to house the displays of the paintings in 2-D as well as the "live-in-it 3-D" experiences. These wound up throwing off the mood as you tried to navigate from one to the other -- it was really a shame. I also kept looking in vain for the star attraction -- Starry Night -- itself -- which appeared to be merely a painting displayed up in the sky with some stars and a modern living room on a see-through foundation.
To be sure, space on a sim is limited, as everyone who gets their first whole sim suddenly realizes after the initial new-sim smell wears off. But you can solve this problem by scaling down your ambitions or moving things into the seemingly limitless levels into the sky so that they aren't visible on the ground or to each other, adding teleports from level to level. In any event, visit this sim for a sense of just what the potential is for rendering 2-D paintings and data representation in the 3-D world and making it "habitable", something that there is far too little of SL -- surely puzzling, given its potential.
The New Business Horizons (NBH) sim also displays a concept not often used in the world of "advertislands" (as the SL Herald calls them now) in SL -- an installation on a mere 640 meters or so, instead of the giant 65,336 experience that is costly and sometimes hard to do well (SL is always about having too much or too little it seems!). BH has made it their business to provide the metaversal services all on the sim in smaller, bite-sized compartments that probably offer a better cost advantage than the whole island and thus represent less risk and possibly better management.
Imagine, a star act like Oasis can do as much in a 640 m2 as on a huge company sim just by setting the mood and putting out enough content for people to click on. This build has a preview of "Lord Don't Slow Me Down," a DVD that is coming out soon, links to the My Space page for Oasis, some t-shirts and most importantly, the trailer itself of the song, on a kind of movie kiosk. You can chill out in the groovy lounge and contemplate whether you want to lag out your game just yet to go order the DVD -- this is where the "fourth-wall" of these experiences always breaks down for some, because there is no HTML on a prim, and I have to get yanked out of my immersive avataric world and go goggle at a webpage. One other problem is one that perhaps no one else is troubled by -- I couldn't find the name of the record company -- the brand behind the band -- anywhere on the build -- but for that matter, the My Space page didn't have it readily visible, either.
Frankly, rather than have something shipped from UK Amazon.com, I'd much rather buy a DVD or CD for my avatar I can play inworld on my land -- and yes, we have those in SL and they sell like hotcakes, and yes, they work, and yes hundreds of thousands of real people spend hours on end with their friends actually watching tiny TV and movies (!) inworld and listening to music within SL -- things you'd think they'd do much better, and with less lag, and with better food and drink, in the real world. But sooner or later, these companies will get it about the avatars actually being people who *do* stuff in this world, and not just treat us and our avatars as glorified webpage browser attachments. Unfortunately, the NBH people turned off "fly" too -- possibly to force people to the ground to walk through the exhibits and be exposed to their content more thoroughly -- but that's always annoying.
The biggest lament for the business sims in general is that nobody's home. Tumbleweeds blowing, ominous boarded-up mines, and a cattle skull. OK, but that's not the problem at NBH, where I was not only greeted, and chatted up, I was then asked, "Could you explain the purpose of your visit?" Startled, I asked the gal if this was something all the visitors got asked, and whether the build was open to the public. She said it was, and said she was merely trying to get me on the tour. But...I imagine I'm not different than a goodly chunk of the SL avataric population that doesn't *want* an obtrustive salesperson in my face hustling a tour; I want to take time for the world to rez, to see what's up, and to see if it's for me. It's a fine art and science, getting the balance between no presence -- the lion's share of business sims -- and obtrusive presence.
Another pro tip: get rid of these cumbersome drop-down clunky blue menu teleporters that also require a second step to try to situate the beam and "sit" to move -- there are better teleporters now with just one touch that deliver the avatar in a click, instead of torturing him with gymastics.
While at New Business Horizons at the Oasis display, nearby you can also check out a non-profit project called Macmillan Cancer Support which is offering a coffee cup sort of thing that is involved in a big cancer charity drive. You donate to the jar, it gives you a huge spoon you wear and it makes a big stir -- and you can, too, evidently, by putting in your little Linden pennies.
SceneCaster jhas just been announced and here Robert Scoble has an interview with Mark Zohar, founder. He tells us how SceneCaster is different from Second Life and how it'll enable new 3D experiences for Web site owners.
Since putting this up, it seems the embed code for the clip above seems to be for the entire show. The sequence in question is accessed through the playlist button.
NPR broadcast today with Prokofy Neva, Robert Bloomfied and others. You'll know the names - some nice plus for Metanomics and Metaversed too.
We constantly hear about the newness of the metaverse, this interactive 3-D world that is opening before our eyes. We are often reminded of the immediate precedents -- chat rooms, pen and pencil role-playing games, and the fiction worlds of Wiliam Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Today I'm looking at a few cultural transitions of the past four centuries, with the rough thesis that virtual space has come to us through a long and fairly continuous evolution.
1. Diaries and the Novel
Medieval texts, even the most adventurous, were written as allegories for the moral imagination, to serve the spiritual improvement of the reader. Secular literature developed the very different role for the readers imagination that we know today: the reader was to actively put themselves into the scenery of the book and interact empathetically with the characters as peers. Diaries, validating the everyday experiences of the new middle class, are inseparable from the birth of the novel. With widespread education and industrial printing techniques, the novel became a hugely significant virtual space, opening up to philosophical and political debates of the day, and transforming popular culture and the popular imagination.
2. Realistic Art and Photography
Perspectival geometry and illusionistic painting techniques were available centuries before their widespread use. Most medieval art was religious in purpose, and symbolic and allegorical in function. The popular imagination had to evolve, opening up secular and scientific 'uses' of art and a way of seeing that put value on the reproduction of the visible world. Similarly, much of the technical apparatus of photography was available before the first camera. Pinholes, mirrors and reflective spheres were used by painters to help capture scenes. The ideal of versimilitude and the accompanying way of seeing had to become widespread enough to inspire the first camera. Photography then went through a long adolescence, while the culture caught up with the idea that the 'space' of a photograph could be a worthy place to exercise the artistic eye and the imagination.
3. History Writing
When did the past become a place? The modern view of history makes it a world of reconstructed detail, a world that we can imagine and occupy. With the advent of archeology, history writing became a scientific pursuit presenting tableaus in increasingly vivid and visual language. This kind of history serves to help us visualize new information, but it can also serve a persuasive purpose, engaging our emotions in political narratives such as nationalism.
4. Wilderness and the Foreign
Wild lands in the European imagination were not thought of as 'places' -- they were simply the realm of danger and terror. The Romantic expression of terror as a form of the sublime, or possibly even of beauty, opened up the land between settlements as a place appropriate for the imagination to roam, and thus appropriate for physical exploration. In similar vein, most early cultures described themselves as "the people" or "the center of the world" and dismissed other cultures quite straightforwardly as barbarians. There was little motivation to see other countries as understandable places, or other cultures as equivalent variations on ones home culture. With the Enlightenment, foreigners were promoted from being simply uninteresting (or dangerous) to being exotic. This sort of curiosity was often mutual, such as between China and Europe from the 16th century forward. and it has taken over a century of post-colonial cultural exchanges and advances in transportation to bring us to the level of mutual respect and interchangeability of cultures we enjoy today.
5. The Counter-Reformation
The churches of the counter-reformation can be described as the first multi-media immersive virtual spaces. They combined illusionistic architectural perspective, realistic painting, theatrical sequences, and elaborate meditative exercises to build a vivid map of the eternal life in the parishoner's imagination. The result was not a static image but rather a detailed sequence of vignettes, following the passion of Christ, and the progress of the believer's soul in the afterlife. I can't resist also mentioning here the elaborate private cultures of the Masons, Odd-Fellows and other brotherhoods -- clearly the first role-playing guilds -- who combined religious symbolism with borrowed scenes from exotic cultures.
6. Mozart
Mozart and his generation brought a new kind of symbolic language to music. There are many stages in the emergence of secular music, but with Mozart one sees music treated as a virtual space, where elements of the social and natural worlds are presented in quite literal terms. The listener is invited to actively imagine each person, place and event they appear in the auditory 'space' of the music. And if that isn't vivid enough, then of course there are the operas, stuffed with visual cues, dialogue and dramatic sequences.
We know that something quite new has happened -- technology advances have made it possible to build immersive, multi-sensory virtual spaces shard by individuals around the world. But I would like to think that the long cultural history of the virtual balances out the novelty in important ways. First, we benefit from the fact that our senses and imagination have been trained to make sense of virtual experiences -- we are ready for this. Second, we have a ton of content that we can easily import into this new space, like opera, fiction, photography, etc. Certainly this new space will open up new forms, but it can't hurt to have the old stuff there, too. And then there are all those fears to be overcome -- will the metaverse destroy our social lives, our local cultures, maybe our souls? Maybe, but if so, four centuries of popular culture and new media have probably done most of the work already!
----
Clearly this is a quick blog post, not an academic paper. You might enjoy these books, though, which are probably among the sources of my thoughts on the subject.
D.W. Robertson. A Preface to Chaucer
Erwin Panofsky. Perspective as Symbolic Form
Susan Sontag. On Photography
Roland Barthes. Empire of Signs
Edmund Burke. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Wye Jamison Allanbrook. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart
Let's step forward for a moment to a time a few years from now when virtual spaces are almost completely integrated into the lives of anyone with a computer. Second Life is but one of many platforms and sim hosters, and there is no 'novelty' value to owning virtual property or having your virtual 'stuff' accessible by the public. What values, then would a virtual presence have, and what sort of economy could these values support?
The thoughts in this post concern virtual land and its value. Land is not the only fundamental in an economy, but I would submit that it is the signature point of distinction between a 'real' and a 'virtual' economy. Who, what, where, when and why: although each of these undergoes some interesting tweaks in passing through to a virtual world, it is really the 'where' that is the defining factor. Of course, the metaverse is more than a "mirrorworld" in that many cultural and cognitive patterns of spaciality are open to significant transformation here, but its status as a place or places is still central.
Of course, there is a class of people who have their own private uses for virtual real estate, and are unconcerned with the problem we are looking at, i.e. valuing virtual property. They and their friends or visitors already know what, where and why, and they just show up and get on with it. I think as the metaverse expands, this group will shrink, or in any case will continue to be unconcerned with the 'value' of their properties, and if the cost to provide these backwater places is close to nothing, they will perform an important marginal function in the larger system.
It is easy to suggest that Linden Labs or other hosters can just mint new land like paper money, and that we will be awash in cheap places with no value. We already know our way around this issue -- blogs too are free and easy, but we only read ones with a certain critical momentum. Virtual real estate, (much like RL real estate, in truth) has little inherent value, but is made valuable by context and by the networks of people that come to visit.
It is also easy to suggest that one can just search for what one wants and visit it with a click, making context and proximity irrelevant. Certainly we have experienced this on the Second Life grid and indeed with the internet generally. But when we look closer, and especially considering the exponential scaling coming to us in the near future, this a-topic idea falls apart and reveals some significant values that successful virtual properties must hold. We know about this from Google. Earlier search engines bogged down under the weight of simple keyword searching, and Google pioneered searches based on context, proximity and reputation. These turn out to be reliable for searching purposes because they are real, inherent values held by the sites being searched.
It has become common recently for people to arrive in Second Life and set up shop, often at a grand scale, and assume that we will all rush toward their islands for the sake of the experience or the products. Skipping from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0, they fail loudly and blame the platform. When we look at YouTube, Myspace, Twitter and company, the attraction isn't the interactive features in themselves, but the open-ended possibility that it might actually be fun, and that user-created content and relationships will surpass the original functional values of the site.
Virtual land, then, has some basic values, like being findable, accessible, and useable for the intended purpose. Almost any or all immersive digital destinations will have these values in some measure, and it is likely that they will be commonplace and nearly free in the near future. But virtual land will have a second tier of values, including community, proximity, and reputation. These higher values will vary widely and will be the basis of an economy that can be studied and nurtured in mostly conventional ways. But I must insist, in response to Robert Bloomfield's comment during his Metanomics 101 presentation, that this will not be an economy based on scarcity. (We have to move past the cold war 'opposites' of Marxism/Capitalism. I would look to Ivan Illich and the appropriate technology and sustainable community movements for some leads here.)
In short, I believe that certain virtual properties in the near future will be immensely more valuable than others. Whether held as common values, supporting stakeholder communities, or whether commodified and held by stockholders, the value of these properties will be a fundamental of our 'blended reality' economy.
Community.
In community, in social interactions, in rituals of obligation and generosity, people satisfy needs and desires of a spiritual depth than economics cannot reach. In virtual worlds, social interactions bring value and meaning to places that is irreplaceable by any other means. The metaverse is a symbolic space where objects 'function' at a semiotic and psychological level, and meaning is overwhelmingly dependent on social context. The balance of power between space and time has been adjusted here; values are much more ephemeral and event-based, but place still has the role of holding the memory of past events and holding open the occasion for events in the future. 'User created content' is an awkward phrase covering the idea that 'places' in virtual worlds are really defined by the living now of creative activity, whether it is building, acting, writing, or simply enacting the fabric of the everyday. And creative acts in a virtual world are fundamentally generous acts -- contributions to the richness of the other's experience.
Proximity.
Geographic proximity still matters in virtual worlds. There is still a spillover effect, where visitors to adjoining properties walk or fly around to satisfy their curiosity. There are also intact cultural patterns such as courtship walks, rituals of escape and return, and demonstrating one's worthiness reflected in the neighborhood. And colocation is a straightforward way of representing network proximity.
Network proximity groups things in clusters by affinity, and is organized by a searchable indexes and group affiliations. A valued destination will be 'near' other similarly valued properties in the 'space of appearance' of group listings, advertisements, sponsorships and publications, even if it is not geographically near.
Reputation.
Reputation covers a group of values that help us find and choose among places to go among the millions of alternatives we will soon scale up to. Highly valued places will not only be characterized by the quality of their neighbors and affiliations, but also by their contacts in the 'vertical' supply chain. A club, for instance will be valued not just by the class of other clubs it belongs to, but by the quality and reputation of the photographers, furniture suppliers, DJs, designers and scripters it uses, and by the quality and social networks of its clientele, the businesspeople who use it for events, and the penniless writers who reference it in tommorrow's bestsellers.
I've avoided specifying land values as communal, commercial, or private, because the values underly the specifics of who uses a place and to what end. Virtual worlds will only further blur these distinctions, in that the lower frictional costs make virtual worlds more ephemeral, and the connection of place to use will depend much more critically on the interactions of private and common activities. For instance, I think very few corporate sites will be able to survive without the active participation and user generated content of an affiliated 'residential' community.
It will take much more anthropology to create and maintain an effective corporate presence in a virtual world, or indeed to monetize or commodify any aspect of the 'life' of a virtual world. Our virtual lives are light-footed and light-hearted, and can more easily shift to new locations and alliances. Business models will have to follow suite, and will always lag a bit behind the creative evolutions of our values. But we will adjust to this world, and find ways to standardize, risk-assess, and commodify the enduring values of community, proximity and reputation. We will arrive at a balance between the untrammelled creativity of a community based on generosity, and the necessary and stabilizing influence of capital.
I have to confess some chagrin at the line-up of a much-discussed conference coming up next week for "Metanomics," and the launch of an entire prestigious college course at the Ivy-League Cornell University. To be sure, the speakers represent some of the most celebrated figures in or around the Metaverse, and several of them are grandfathers of the virtual world phenomenon itself (Bartle and Castronova); one of them has made a million US dollars from virtual worlds (Chung); another represents major RL business (IBM) that has bothered to come into this controversial space and dig in for a long run (Kearney); yet another is poised to try to harvest the Metaverse for a real-world government's coffers (Miller),
Yet I don't believe they will deliver to us anything substantive about the present and future of the Second Life (and by extension Metaverse) economy per se -- even though, of course, they'll likely have something interesting to say, in a particularist or a generalist sort of way, that will undoubtedly be of value to us all.
While the conference grew out of the desire of one professor, Robert Bloomfield, to have material for an Economics class, what might have been a small and dryly academic experiment took on far more heft due to a series of fascinating developments for RL and SL media, the casino bans and the collapse of Ginko's and the emergence of new (and just as dubious) stock exchanges and banks. At the same time, some prominent real-life businesses like American Apparel and media like Wired announced they were leaving SL as it wasn't bringing them any return on investment -- however they were measuring this. That meant the media needed sound-byters to make sense of all this, and suddenly, what might have been the use of a platform just to make an insular experiment and teaching model for one class became a desire -- because there was a major media audience -- to shape the entire Metaverse's economic policies, creating regulatory bodies and policies at the drop of a dime.
The first question to ask about the SL economy is whether it is in fact interesting to talk about, anyway. It is a synthetic economy very heavily controlled by a software company that sets the basic currency exchange level through the LindEx. LL sells anywhere from half a million to a million US dollars worth of currency it prints out of thin air. The real millionaire of Second Life with the most reliable source of income isn't Anshe Chung; it's Supply Linden. LL also places brakes within that LindEx on large transactions and monitors and freezes accounts at will if they appear to be engaged in suspicious activity.
This same entity prints land out of thin air, and auctions or sells it roughly according to the fixed cost of servers in its colocation facility. The miracle of Second Life is that out of those very rigid and synthetic parameters, numerous people have made at least a small profit or a help toward online expenses, have arbitraged the land not merely by flipping it but by adding social and architectural value in its development (yet not truly owning the "land" or being able to port it elsewhere); and have designed and sold an enormously diverse amount of content which *can* be ported and has more intellectual property value than land, but less than the software and the technology itself.
Castronova said just about everything there is to say about game worlds and RMT in his seminal "Synthetic Worlds", which should be a must-read on this course, but he's simply been uninterested in this apparently non-compelling world of SL. His own current project of virtuality involves recreating the era of Shakespeare with another platform, not following a modern-day online economic experiment called "Second Life". For years, he's rarely pronounced more than a 30-second sound byte on SL, and has been able to pronounce it not because of his actual engagement and field knowledge of the world, but because he is turned to by media looking for answers, based on his reputation for study of Ultima Online or World of Warcraft, very different fixed and synthetic economies. By the same token Julian Dibbell, as thoughtful as he is, didn't make money through design and development in the open-ended world of SL, but made game loot by working the system of a fixed rule-set game -- an activity very unlike what business involves in SL. Richard Bartle appears apparently in the role of what the Russians would call "a wedding general"-- and let's hope that his visit to SL, the first in about 2 years I believe, will leave him more enthusiastic about its capacity for immersion this time.
Any fellow from the IRS such as Dan Miller should be squarely challenged on what on earth he is doing fishing in SL; given that we do not own our property, and that we suffer enormous costs in development, terrible losses in down time and griefing, unimaginably long hours of unpaid labour, and miserly return on both land and content that we don't fully own and can't port. Indeed, rather than chasing *us* around, the question for the IRS should be whether Linden Lab is exploiting "crowd-surfed" enthusiasts as free or poorly-paid labour, and should be tasked to fill out a thousand of so 1099s forms and distribute it to those who have assisted substantively in its "research" -- and perhaps even pay more payroll tax than it pays now. There really isn't an awful lot more to discuss at this juncture. I certainly plan to tell any revenooers coming on to my lawn to go look for something more productive like truckers running cigarettes from the North to the South, and patching them with fake stamps.
Anshe Chung, alone among the participants (besides Bloomfield himself, who has done an admirable amount of immersion and augmentation with SL in a relatively short time), could be said to "understand" the SL economy. Yet, the reality of this particular virtuality is that she has in fact *made* the economy by being without question the most enormous player in it, after Linden Lab. No other firm -- even the IBMs and Ciscos of the world -- comes even close, so it's really a question of a huge, oligarchic company that has benefited from close -- but sometimes contentious relationship with the one-party state, and has helped shape the entire policies for the world -- setting the price for prime mature waterfront, keeping the entire market liquid, and ensuring regular sales on the auction. But Anshe has little thought for the rest of the economy many tiers below her level, and the levers and checks and balances needed to sustain the many small or medium businesses below what is a kind of chaibol. So while it's fascinating to hear how Anshe made her first million and how she will adjust down prices of furniture with a Wal-Mart experiment in flooding the market with cheaper goods (something that is normal, and which I don't oppose) -- it does little to explain the potential of the economy for everyone else -- except insofar as they react, or get out.
Yet all of these panelists, as much as they might have a worthy conversation about the economy as it is now, and fuss among themselves about the sliding scale of outside regulation versus inside regulation (and the political question of who gets to do that pre-emptive inside regulation -- and it better not be self-appointed lawyers!), are all going to be besides the point unless they focus on the cataclysmic event coming in less than a year: open source. Any other abstract discussion is already overtaken by this event.
The Lindens have told us that they are open sourcing the server code, and also "opening up" a dialogue on the architecture and the technology. As I've noted in response to Tao Takashi's article enthusing about this development, this narrowly technical discussion about how servers will move to independent hosting and connect or not connect to Linden Lab's asset server is for now, not anticipating any "confusion of the facts" by outsiders and non-tekkies concerned about the *content and people ON the servers*. Yet this discussion is even more urgent than the technical one, and for want of any other viable think-tank on Second Life (given the enormous hostility and even biased coverage of SL that Terra Nova and some other mainstream non-Sl blogs give to SL), Bloomfield's Metanomics course is *it*. So let's make the most of it!
That means asking very, very hard and deep questions about the following:
o What will happen to the integrated, connected economy when other servers began to operate parallel to SL, and possibly not even linked to it, or linked to it in stages, or only in part? Will open-source ruin the existing economy, but open up potential for numerous other parallel or self-contained economies appearing as archipelagos in the Metaverse?
o Will the LindEx simply have to shut down, as the dollarization of the world will continue rapidly apace, with more and more services like building and rentals paid for in PayPal, and more and more control of the LindEx devaluing wages? (The "wage" for work in SL dropped from $4.25 for $1000 Lindens in 2005 on the old GOM, to $3.70 for $1000 Lindens today in 2007, under strict LL control).
o Do real-world businesses really have any viable metrics for measuring ROI, and can they conceive of the SL platform as valuable if there is no mass, general audience of customers primarily involved in entertainment, socializing, and small business? If Cisco can just build its own world; if MOU can go to Gaia to *really* get ad placement for its clients; if Laguna Beach choses There; if Sony Home is about to really threaten the user base, what is the value-add to having some, say, 100,000 people regularly logged on and participating in a synthetic micro-economy that is interesting as a kind of toy spectacle, but has no future because it can't scale or sustain itself against the relentless pressures of inflation, devaluation of land and content, and globalization represented by open-source? Is Second Life essentially doomed to be the Belarus of virtuality, able to retain its sovereignty and meaning only by being in the way of a pipeline that one powerful entity (Russia) wants to run to another powerful entity (the EU)?
o Will the new host-your-own servers really reduce server/labour costs (they all imagine that they will) and cause a disruption to the economy, by devaluing all those dependent on LL servers and land-printing, and replacing them with cheaper, more flexible, and simply better working servers? Since the Lindens are likely to go slow on actual full open-sourcing, and will go with their short list of friends as the early licensees, what does that spell for those of us participating in the economy, who won't have the opportunity to host yet, or may never wish to host? Will LL continue services on the mainland, and continue selling islands that it will host, or will it drive all its customers to seek haven with its chosen providers? Frankly, I look at such a scenario as a bit like Balkanization, and the rush of displaced persons hoping to make peace with this or that warlord to gain protection. It can't possibly be a process without a lot of bumps in the road.
o What about banks, stock markets, loan companies -- will the influx of less wealth people outside the U.S. create an inexorable pressure for the criminality of money-laundering and loan-sharking forcing SL to close?
o What will happen to content creators' IP under the new dispensation? The server code currently contains in it the god-mode to override any and all permissions and simply copy anything (and this has been reverse-engineered successfully with copy-bot, and even other bots or exploits that even copy LSL scripts as well). How will LL address the featurs of their software that enable essentially the loss of IP? Will they stream their asset server to new worlds/hosted sims that will wind up being able to work the exploits (or "normal processes" involved in viewing everything) and simply grab all the content?
Perhaps they won't care, and new venues and spaces will open up where copyright-protected static content will no longer be relevant or even for sale, but the ability to create multimedia diverse ephemeral content for experiences will become the new valued dynamic content that will mainly privilege large companies with the budgets to hire these more skilled programmers and designers. This will spell the end of the nation of shopkeepers that is Second Life, where people even sell something as modest as a $5 t-shirt or $100 prefab to make ends meet. Some of the more nimble ones will end up busking on the broad highway of the Metaverse; that's about it.
o Will the inability of Linden staff to sufficiently watch the world, especially foreign-language sims, and the increasing growth and population and diversity of activity, mean that money-laudering will begin to escape them, even with all their whistle-blowers, and some huge scandal threatens to shut them down?
I don't know whether Henrik Bennetsen (http://slcreativity.org/wiki/index.php?title=Augmentation_vs_Immersion), who worked for LL for a time, was first to make the distinction of augmentation/immersion, as before him, Hamlet Linden, Aimee Weber, and many others talked about "platform versus world" and even used these terms. But one thing is certain: with the end of the large proprietary walled estate of Lindenor in a year, "immersion" will merely mean the experience that this or that company hosting a sim will create; indeed, if we face the facts, we know that the "immersion" once represented by a contiguous, compelling world has now disintegrated under a welter of griefing and red-line land bans, and a future integrated world in fact has yet to be conceived and created.
We'll see the thinning out of worlds/servers to be merely drop-in glorified websites, a kind of flashy "Flash" component for people to try a car or pick up a prize or learn about cow flops and energy as they can now at Ben & Jerry's advertisland in SL (as the SL Herald now calls such ventures). If it's hard now for the Lindens to keep all the servers spinning with contiguous land on them that you can keep flying to and fro on, think of how it will be with thousands of different hosts. This will be something like the Meeboization of Second Life. Only the really experienced and wealthy will be able to get the servers working to sustain immersion, but will inevitably be in competition with LL itself if it stays in the world business.
Who, then, should be invited to this Metanomist series in order to speak coherently about this cataclysm coming that will utterly disrupt, and possibly even destroy the inworld economy, which, after all, is part of the lure for the outworld corporations hoping to do advertising and brand interaction in SL?
First and foremost, whether we like it or not, there has to be a Linden -- probably Zee Linden, given that the Lindens control this synthetic economy, they know what they are doing with it, and we don't.
Second, those who have consistently watched the SL economy very closely, writers such as Pham Neutra writing for the Avastar and SLOG, should be invited simply because none of these other panelists follow the vicissitudes of the economy *as a whole* for *everybody* (and not just their narrow take on it) like economic journalists. Frankly, I'd put myself on this list as well, and would refuse to be ghettoized into some narrow slot about "real estate" as I have done as much conceptual writing about the economy as anyone.
Third, the non-Anshe real estate moguls have to be consulted as they actually don't have the same model as she does (lower cost staffing in China, cross-platform business, plans for production of cheap content). Adam Zaius has also made a million US on his Azure Islands empire of hundreds of sims. He also happens to be the person reverse-engineering the code in the OpenSim project, and has actually begun opening up servers that have avatars and building features and even HTML on a prim, though not the ability to port content across servers. He should be asked to speak very directly on how he envisions his own business crossing the chasm from the closed garden Wild West that SL has been to the host-your-own Even Wilder West of the broader Metaverse.
Fourth, in addition to real estate, there should be represented those who have actually created large or medium content businesses in SL, such as Simone Stern, Stroker Serpentine, Timeless Prototype, etc. who can talk about what open-source will mean to their IP; to the future in general of legal support for IP; to the issues of pricing and freebies and competition from outworld RL business to inworld SL business.
Fifth, keeping in mind that we as North Americans and even Europeans are actually in a shrinking pond, and the real powerhouses of the consumer economy and user-made content economy in SL will likely come from Brazil, Japan, China, Russia, etc. the panel ought to be having some of the actors and thinkers of the non-English-language world.
Sixth, a real effort should be made to find economists who aren't game economists, stuck in MMORPEGs, and not actors in the SL economy learning from field experience, but economists who actually work on transitional and developing economies that can put the experiment of SL into some framework where they can examine the decisions made about land policy, or printing money, or preventing laundering, just as they would if the subject matter were Russia or Brazil or Nigeria. This requires a more macro and broader approach. The problem of Second Life isn't just having the IRS regulate it or the FBI shut down the casinos. The problem of Second Life is how to go from Yeltsin, printing rubles (the Lindex), and paying numerous subsidies to the poor (stipends), with an economy very dependent on smuggling drugs and alcohol and traffixing (the sex economy of SL), to Putin, where a select group of oligarchs have been allowed to run their companies without too much confiscation by the state, as long as they agree to stay out of politics.
That is, what's needed is to hear the views of an economist who compares various economies and also looks at globalization and the international economic order, not just the study of corporations and small businesses. A figure like Jeffrey Sachs could be approached, but it would be important to have someone speak who doesn't wear out their welcome by pontificating for an hour as to why no one should have a Second Life as it is a luxury in an impoverished world.
Dr Dobb's SL 20 Event - 15 till 21 september..
Check the program here, some interresting speakers and topics
http://www.life20.net/program.php
What is Novoking?
Novoking is a very ‘cool’3-D virtual world entirely build and owned by its residents - “Novo folks”. Novoking will be opening to the public in 2007. Welcome to the ‘cool’ world. Embrace your dream life!
The flowing text were translated by google language tools:
Novoking Kingdom after a long time of preparation, technical personnel are doing final adjustments, we will open Seal test in the near days. To ensure the test environment and test results, we want more friends who interested in design involved, you play in the design, creation and experience of the community to maximize the use of system tools to help us develop a perfect Novoking Kingdom.
Since this test is a test, only a small number of users will get the key to Novoking Kingdom, unable to satisfy the masses users who love Novoking Kingdom . We deeply regret.
If you wish to apply for accession to the closure of the test, please complete the following questions and send the completed answers to gm@novoking.com, entitled "申请激活码", we will select some of those applications users of test AEF.
Testing of the AEF specific date, the official website of concern.
Question:
1. Your age, occupation, sex and educational level.
2. Your education, the specialty.
3. The average time spent online each day.
4. Can you l use 3D MAX or PhotoShop?(level:normal,good,perfect)
5. Your understanding of the 3D virtual world?
6. Where is your general Internet?
7. Your average amount of money spent in the virtual community life?
The first real run of a weekly chat session I have started with Tara Yeats. The idea is to review the week in SL from a residents perspective and the programme should be live every Saturday at 7pm in the UK - 11am SLT.
http://operator11.com/shows/4091 to watch or join in. It's open house but we can only have 8 guests in the studio with video at any one time.
Who is Aegir?
Aegir is a design, marketing and communications company in Second Life. Some of her services are marketing, sales, and business consultancy, as well as advertising, branding, identity, logo, and web design.
Anticipating on the continuous development of a more flexible market, and the need for business-survival in a highly competitive, rapidly changing In-World economy, Aegir is to utilize new opportunities; opening up the market by offering original, fresh perspectives on business in Second Life.
Brilliant design, coherent marketing and comprehensible communications are crucial. Fair-pricing is a must.
Aegir provides solutions to all sizes of projects and businesses. Whether it is a company from the ‘real world’ seeking new prospects in Second Life, or a creative individual entering the aggressive Metaverse marketplace, Aegir makes it one of her key objectives to be involved in the process.
First consult is always free! Contact Aegir Giha, via IM, drop a notecard or e-mail at aegir.giha@gmail.com
We recognize professionalism, maximize creativity, inspire each other, and enjoy the experience!
Second Life user Sky Eclipse has a problem: something about their account or their avatar causes the sim they are in to crash. The sim they are in crashes as soon as they log in to it , if I understand the problem correctly, leaving them no way to do anything like remove attachments or delete the last few items they acquired.
The only solution for this problem lies in the hands of Linden Lab: either fix Sky Eclipse's account, or fix the sim crash problem such that Sky Eclipse's account remains just as it is but the sim Sky is in doesn't crash.
There's a Second Life Jira issue to vote on related to Sky Eclipse's problem. The Jira issue is at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2281 ; if you'd like to help Sky Eclipse by convincing Linden Lab to devote resources to solving this problem go to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2281 and vote for the issue. (Only members of SL can vote for SL Jira issues, so if you aren't an SL user, just join SL at secondlife.com, then vote for Sky's Jira issue. )
There's a thread in the SL forums, forums.secondlife.com, at http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1661915#post1661915 where you can read about this if you have access to forums.secondlife.com.
The Sky Eclipse Jira issue VWR-2281 reads as follows
:
Second Life Viewer - VWR
Sky Eclipse's avatar crashes regions EVERYTIME she logs in, regardless of where she logs in
Created: Friday 02:42 AM Updated: Saturday 04:58 PM
Component/s: Crashes
Affects Version/s: 1.18.3
Fix Version/s: None
File Attachments: 1. debug_info.log (4 kb)
2. SecondLife.log (161 kb)
Environment: « Hide
CPU: AMD K7 (Unknown model) (1396 MHz)
Memory: 256 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6200/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 2.0.3
An interview from SLCC. Recorded by a French company, but in English.
Originally posted on our house blog, This is Herd
In early June, the Guardian reported on the Beijing municipality using MindArk , the Swedish developers of online world, 'Entropia', to build a virtual world capable of holding seven million residents at any one time.
As Metaversed readers know, Second Life has nine million avatars though only around 50,000 are online at any one time and even that can put a strain on some of the more popular locations. This new world would create 10,000 full time jobs and based on the seven million figure, would be bigger than most 'real' countries on earth today.
Reports from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age in Australia have shed some more light on how this new world - now called 'Dotman' - is taking shape. Speaking at a technology forum in Melbourne earlier this month, Beijing Cyber Recreation District (CRD) President David Liu focused very much on Dotman as a business tool.
Unlike existing virtual worlds where escapism, leisure and entertainment came first and business a distant second (one of the reasons why brands have struggled to make an impact in Second Life), Dotman's evolution will happen the other way around. It will be largely a place for Far East companies to do business in a virtual setting to the point that many employees will no longer require real world offices. Individuals, "Dotmen", will also be able to set up businesses and become self-employed.
Anyone doubting that Dotman will open for business in 2008 as planned and with the seven million resident capacity, should pay a visit to Shanghai or Beijing to get a sense that if the Chinese want something to happen, it will. In Shanghai a completely new city with hundreds of skyscrapers has been built across the river from the old city centre in less than ten years, and Beijing's Olympic preparations are very much on time.
So what's the relevance to us here in Europe and the UK? My guess is that Dotman will primarily be of interest to UK companies wanting a virtual bridge to the Chinese market.
The wider implication is that Entropia developers Mind Ark will have experience of building a 3D platform on a much wider scale than currently exists, and there's no reason why they couldn't use that to revamp Entropia or create a completely new virtual world that's both brand friendly and appeals to the mass of consumers who take part in social networking sites but not places like Second Life or There.
The Gartner report earlier this year predicting that 80% of regular Internet users would have a virtual world presence by 2011 did point out that the presence in question wouldn't necessarily be in the virtual worlds around today.
Much like the AOL / Compuserve walled garden model of 1996/97 didn't become the norm for Internet users today, it might be a new virtual world that finally gives the medium mass appeal, and whatever Mind Ark has in the pipeline in future years could be a very strong candidate.
