SLOG: Sitting On A Goldmine

Have you ever eaten Godel meat? It's poisonous! Bring it on! Glad you realized I was kidding. The urge to make fun on the Linden's "enforcing" copyrights was just too great to pass up.

Yes. And I was bluffing about my legal hounds anyways.

Oh, well, I wasn't kidding about the poison. Godels are like Xenomorphs, bad enough on the outside, but worse on the inside.

hell if I know, you're asking me to explain something I didn't say.

I said this is not the equivalent of working in McDonalds. That's a minimum skill job, yes, but it does actually require you do something. There's a level below McDonalds, the "no skill" job, the "warm body" job. This is more like that... sitting at a freeway intersection with a stack of papers, or showing up at staged demonstrations to inflate the crowd figures.

Yep, nobody said that there should be "no skill" jobs.

Sure it does. It gives you a place to "go home" to that doesn't land you in the spammy welcome area. And I'm sure there's times when you want to "GO HOME" and not be outside when you get there. And, there's a psychological value to a house even if nobody but you goes there.

And back in teh real world, you don't actually need to own a physical house to get those other values. The first President Bush's primary residence in Texas was a hotel room that other people sued most of the time, and there are lots of people who really do live in hotels for long periods. At the other end of the spectrum, you can live in your car (or a trailer) and get mail at a post office box, this is socially less acceptable but you just said you're not talking about the social value.

Because you're not just saying it, you're showing it. Being able to show it gets you those "see what good taste, cool ideas, whatever" vibes that talking about it doesn't.

And the rules of that contract are that you roll the dice, and if those dice say you're a hulking barbarian you get to do it. If you end up with a strength of 6 instead of 15 you don't get that option. The only difference is the rules of the social contract. Whether those rules are printed in a rule book or source code is an implementation detail.

If not having a big house makes you worse, that's your problem. I decline to accept your problem as part of mine.

If I actually wanted to game the social contract and not be "coerced", I could do it. I could easily have a big house in SL, even without owning land, by borrowing unused prim counts in mostly empty and neglected sims... at least long enough to show it off. I could build my house out of jointed vehicles flying in formation and make it a sky fortress... and wouldn't that be cool... even without owning the land that it would require. I could equally well erase the 6 and write in a 15 to get my hulking barbarian in D&D, but that kind of pencil promotion is frowned upon.

And this is different from real life how? "Wow, look, you spent time and money buying a bunch of numbers in a server in Wall Street! And better yet, the more people have this attitude I'm displaying right now, the more meaningless they get!" And the next thing you know it's Black Friday.

So don't pick one. I mean, all you're doing by buying into this hypothetical camping society is to join a community that generally sucks for the kind of things that make SL different from IRC or MUDs. So why not look for a community that's actually engaged with the thing you spent all that money on that video card for?

I haven't met anyone yet who can't create. I've met people who have chosen not to, but I haven't met anyone who can't. The one person who I know who actually camps is certainly a creator... when I met him he'd already built up a convincing avatar from scratch.

Maybe you can't create dazzling prim hair or wings... that's fine. Create funny or funky ones. There's a lot of people who have set up the most bizzarre toony avs... ones that are even bizzarre by toon standards. They still get taken seriously.

I honestly can not imagine why anyone would put up with the SL client and the way it behaves in those camping environments without some reason that actually involves being in a 3d world outside those zones...

You're not showing it because the house still doesn't exist any more than it does if you just talk about it.



That's D&D. In a lot of tabletop RPGs it's your choice, these days.



It doesn't really make me worse - that was just an example. The point is that this is a shared imagination space, but you having in-game items means that you can force stuff into the shared space even if I don't agree.



Wall Street servers only track things that relate to reality, not a seperately "reality".



Because if you do that, you have to spend even more money on prims, and you'll never get very far ahead in that community because you have to make stuff to do so?

Like I say, it's a "not so great but the best I'm gonna do" situation.



Folks are friendly here. The community's much better than most talkers/text based games.

Um, the whole point of SL is that you are showing it. Here it is, you can see it, that's what "showing" means.
I was using a score-based RP system back in the early '80s. Allocation instead of random isn't new, and it still has rules. If you allocate enough points to strength and other physical attributes to get your Barbarian right away, without working for it, he's going to have a hard time remembering the name of the scantily dressed witch next to him.

You've actually got LESS leeway in an allocation-based system.
Only if you choose to stay in that space. When someone drops C4 and my AV's thrown off-sim, I just relog and return, it's much easier than walking around having glowy shields pop up every time someone bumps into you or keeping an ear out for "SIT ON A PRIM".

Just like you can say "your two-handed sword didn't really cut my head off, that's just a pattern of light and dark on the dice"... hell, it's actually harder to get away with ignoring consensus reality in D&D. You don't get to relog and come back, if you want to keep playing with the same people.

The relationship between objects in SL and LindeX is less abstract than the relationship between some of the more esoteric funds and the indexes they're tracking.

There's communities where you don't have to spend a Linden on objects and still take part. Heck, it probably takes more time to learn to to a target drop using a freebie e-Chute than a Sport Chute.

Anyone making that claim is lying to themself.

Never had anyone C4 me on a MUD.

Hmmm. Nothing much to add here, alot has been well said. I a gree with the original post entirely.

As far as camping chairs go. That's the market, its entertainment capitalist minimalism. Get paind to sit on land and pay people to increse dwell. This is your cold hard capitalism at is finest. A perfect exchange involving minimal resources. It is very efficient.

Of course all this business of platform and money making and getting a job to fund your SL opportunity shoves its head in the sad like an ostirtch from the reality that many, if not most, play SL as a lesire activity. They want to buy the cool stuff but not make it. Sitting in a chair gives them a way to afford stuff with little effort.

Yes sitting in a money chair does not really equate to full partcipation in the SL expereince. But then SL, and the SL capitalist community tends to marginalize those players as lazy who want something other than being the next anshe chung. If you ask me I'll tell you that and increase in the number of players, a reduced bonus, and an unsustainable stipend make money chairs invevitable.

If you want a capitalist platform, then you must accept money chairs. If you want to make a game that fulfills the promise of the hype, then maybe you see that money chairs ever so slighty retard SL'd developement as a social platform.

You're parodying capitalist theory... because that efficiency is supposed to efficiently produce real wealth: goods and services. That is the reason for the economic system in the first place, and a real capitalist analysis would never neglect that.

This produces neither goods nor services... neither in the game context nor outside it... because it's based on recycling Lindens paid by Linden Labs back through the same chairs over and over again without actually bringing anything in to SL: the "free" money provides neither income for Linden Labs (which is last I checked is supposed to make its capitalist profit from the land tax... which is in turn paid for by new money coming into the Linden Economy), nor an audience and entertainment for the people who DO bring money into the system.

In a real capitalist system the dwell payments and other forms of landowner socialism wouldn't be necessary, payments to the landholders would come through the stipend system, via rent and direct payments for goods and services provided by landholding businesses. You wouldn't have free money balls, or subsidised gambling, or camping chairs, because landholders would need to actually attract paying customers. But the physics of SL don't allow it and frankly people wouldn't bother with SL if they had to mime the level of maintainance on their virtual bodies that their physical ones take.

So the effect of lots of people buying basic necessities is simulated by dwell paid by people looking for luxuries. Which is all well and good, but it's a much cruder emulation of economics than the stipend is, and much easier to game. If you look back to when the stipend was dropped you'll see there were a few messages pointing out that the stipend really did pay for something of value, and cutting it would cause problems.

Well, that's happened.

So, anyway, not only doesn't this make sense as a part of SL as a social platform, it doesn't make sense as part of a capitalist platform either.

I disagree. There are a few voices that sound like this but only a few. In most of the "what about the poor people with no talent"-like threads, you see so-called "caplitalists" simply objecting to someone wanting something for nothing... because a lot of people don't get the situation that paying Linden Lab's monthly fee (or no fee) is only the starter in this game. Is it just psychological? I mean should LL offer a higher monthly package and buy L$ from the exchange and give it out to those customers (essentially saving a DIY step?). Is it simply the fundamentally human activity to complain for more, no matter how much (or in this case, how little -- i don't disagree) you are given?

personally I don't have a problem with the chairs... I don't even find them depressing because I don't for one second actually think there are people sitting at their computers doing this... they're just logged while doing something else because in some places bandwidth is all-you-can-eat for a fixed cost. People will try to game any extra incentive system and this is just one manifistation.

it doesn't even really destroy the dwell system because everyone trying for dwell money can just fight fire with fire, add their own chairs, and then the difference will once again be the rest of the attraction.

I guess "platform" can mean different things to different people.

To be succint:

I don't think SL is that much different from renting a shell account on a unix box, mainframe, or computer grid.

Which makes it a platform.

When I sat in my development meeting for the college I work for, I asked the college president to look at SL as a tool for distance education. Then I immediately felt self-conscious because asking for this made me worry that my other suggestions would be taken less seriously. Mainly because the distance between what it would take to do that and where my college is now (no video cards in computers, narrow thinking about distance education technology) is so great. But also, because the distance between what it would take to do that in comfort and where SL is now is so great.

I would be very interested in a slightly different platform (like stagecoach island, but strictly for educational purposes) of SL. I do not want my rl classes bombed by idiots or my students sexually harassed (as I was by a train-dressed avatar) by people who think of SL as a game.

Or, you know, shrink-wrapped software we could run. Clients we could strip down and modify for students. Prim and texture packages students could download overnight and then install, so they wouldn't need such a huge pipe for real-time streaming and continuous asset server calls. Second Life would be an excellent platform for education -- especially now, since the movie screen could be jury-rigged into a whiteboard, and "land music" could be tied to a streaming teacher -- but the fact that the people in charge of E-Learning have no say in the matter, it just sours the whole deal. (Speaking as the E-Learning developer for a community college.)

As an instructor who does distance teaching, I see so many ways SL would make a better environment to deal with many aspects of distance ed that impact ease of conveyance and also student motivation. If only... *sighs wistfully*

I don't think that's true.

Once the people in the camping chairs have their money, they spend it on goods and services. If there were no camping chairs then those people would not have had that money to spend (I doubt the folks in camping chairs are the ones who'd be prepared to buy L$) and the money would have remained in the account of the club or site owner, who probably already has most things they need (after all, they were prepared to give the money away via the chairs) and probably would cash it out or use it to pay out gambling prizes somewhere else.



Not true. Club owner A is prepared to put L$2000 in camping chairs, therefore presumably they don't need it to pay their tier. That L$2000 goes into the pockets of consumers who then buy from stores. The stores put that share of that L$2000 towards their tier. That's much better for LL than just having the club owner cash out the dwell money.

Can't agree with you there. Money sold through Lindex earns LL a transaction fee.

The question is if the combined transaction fees from all the club owners cashing out (assuming that they would cash out, which they probably wouldn't - deprived of camping chairs to attract dwell, they'd just run more Tringo, and I doubt LL would consider disrupting that) exceeds the extra tier fees they'll get over time from store owners making more money than they otherwise would.

I'm still torn on several issues.

I think there is indeed a problem with the focus on SL's economy. I think there is indeed a class of user out there striving and struggling to keep up with the focus of SL; buying and selling. I think there are alot of frustrated folks out there. I think many folks fade because they either don't have a goal in SL, or they view it as just a money drain.

But I also agree that there are alot of things to do in-world without spending any money. The thrill of exploring does eventually wear thin for many folks, and the rampant commercialism does get to be an eye-sore or a stressful atmosphere for some. But the social aspects can be had for nothing, and they continue to thrive in some aspects.

I do think taking away event support hurt events. Even if it didn't HAVE to, it still did. I think many old and new players alike have become disenchanted with SL because of LL's focus on economy, while others thrive because of the same focus.

Like many have said, SL can't be everything for everyone, and many folks will find MMORPGs more fulfilling and money better spent. Others, with either a more social or creative frame of mind, will enjoy SL over a more narrowly focused environment.

I think there are platform problems and limitations that will be with SL for a long time to come.

There are problems, and will continue to be, but no real easy answers. I have a few suggestions, but nothing groundbreaking and certainly no cure-alls. I'd still like to see:

More LL-created, large scale events.

More support for creative/competitive or social events.

Larger stripends, or another way to earn bonuses without having to make SL a job.

Less focus on money and economy, and more focus on education, creation and social issues.

Lower tier costs, along with better land tools and possible incentives to create free public content.

Better education and support for new players.

Better "police" force.

More sheep!

great post david. I still think a few (not all!) of your proposals run counter to LL's stated desire to motivate people to create great content, but I understand where you are coming from, and LL has to somehow muddle through the chicken-and-egg problem that exists with this kind of business model.