The scene is a crime investigation lab, a preview of a clip from CSI, one of the most popular TV shows in the world. The detective is looking inside Second Life at an avatar woman whose real-life typist has been murdered. He tries to explain the reality of virtual worlds to his skeptical colleagues. "It's not a game," he says philosophically, staring at the screen. We first-lifers need to understand that you can socialize, even make businesses, he begins to explain. "Why?!" says his fellow detective, completely skeptical.
The detective's question may be asked by many TV-viewers on October 24th, when the TV episode airs, and when CSI's creator, Anthony Zuiker. and his consultants, the Electric Sheep Company, a top metaversal service agency developing content within the platform of Second Life, will offer viewers a chance to follow the mystery story into a virtual world. Anthony Zuiker, keynote speaker at the Virtual Worlds 2007 Fall Conference in San Jose this week, and Sibley Verbeck, CEO of the Sheep, are expecting as many as a million CBS viewers to log on to Second Life to investigate a crime story generated within Second Life. If behavior of TV viewers on other shows with placement of 2-D Internet sites within their story line is any indicator, 50 percent increase or more in log-ons to the TV-related sites results, even frying the servers. Sibley says they won't fry -- they are laying on hundreds of new SL islands to accommodate the surge. The Lindens say they'll be able to support these new sign-ups and a huge jump in concurrent log-ons -- a special team at LL has been assigned to work on the CSI episode, a decision they justify by telling themselves that if they can accommodate big user jumps like this, it will help everyone eventually, not just one company.
Skepticism at the convention abounded -- but the real issue isn't whether the Lindens' servers crash -- an old story for Second Lifers. More importantly, industry observers will get a chance to see whether couch-potatoes will bother to download an avatar and begin interacting with media inside a virtual world instead of merely consuming a TV show passively, and whether existing Second Life users will bother to visit the pre-fabricated CSI site, given that many long ago abandoned passive television watching for the compelling experience of making their own content or at least acting in their own generated free-flowing virtual story.
Zuiker believes that the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attack made a whole generation of youth feel as if they could no longer control their world, and forced them "underground" -- to worlds, games, social networks they *could* control. The question is whether there is enough of a niche of people who will accept prefabricated story lines and content generated from a television show -- especially if some of the scenes have free content or prizes -- or will ignore or even trash such scenarios. Only the traffic will tell -- if people can get logged on, the Second Life community accepts it, and if some darkly suspect, "preferred log-ons" aren't instituted at least to make a good showing for the real-life media. Given that asynchronous accessing of the story is possible, and people will try and keep returning to solve clues, so load may be distributed, and the potential for the move away from the blue screen to the green hand cannot be judged by the one day of heavy log-ons
TV executives are hugely motivated, like print media, to investigate virtual worlds, because they are losing their viewers to the Internet and online games -- and they are trying to find ways to follow them. Marketers are assured that they can drop products like i-Phones of Q-tips into the crime scenes of CSI and get placement assured a lot of eyeballs. The model has not yet been seriously tried in Second Life yet, although Metaversatility did create a mystery house filled with clues as part of the promotion related to the movie The Nines and of course the L-World, a Showtime series, has theme-related sims in Second Life. One thing is certain: existing television production budgets and story ideas are still huge enough to make a big impact on virtual worlds, and perhaps that infusion will be enough not only to get passive viewers to become assisted doers, but to get the Linden servers to hold up under the load.
