Wristwatches for extras: the next SL economy?

Ok, this comes about as a result of having had a really depressing SL session so it might not be the most rational thought in the world, but it seemed to instantly explain a whole range of things including the camping chair situation.

If you're playing SL to "live the dream", rather than purely to make money, then in a general sense you're going to need av items, objects, and land, and a good amount of SL is devoted to selling them to you. Of course, you might not actually need to buy all these things - there are other ways of getting them and you might be able to throw in with someone else and get things for free, etc.

But there's something else you need. You need people to participate. Unless your goal is something that relates only to you or only to you and your friends. Effectively, by participating, they enable the dream. If people show up to your structure, you've built a club; if they don't, you've just built a pretty bunch of prims for yourself to look at. But all those people you want - in fact need - to participate to enable your dream, have their own dreams too. So you'd better give them a good reason to show up in your dream instead of working on their own.

Right there is why cybersex and BDSM are so popular online: in cybersex both parties are basically dreaming of the same thing, and in BDSM, everyone who dreams of being a sub insodoing enables the dream of everyone who dreams of being a dom.

And what I believe is happening now in SL is that the social participation needed to enable a dream is becoming a marketable service, just like the items or land required to do so.

When you think about it, it's the ultimate solution to SL's job market. What can an uncreative person do? Answer: they can charge for the service of visiting the areas run by all the creative people, without which those areas would be empty and lonesome white elephants. It's the instant explanation of why money balls and camping chairs became necessary. People dream of owning clubs, not just dancing in them (which they can do every weekend IRL with no lag). People dream of being on stage, not being in the audience. So if you want the public dancing or people in the audience, you'll have to pay them for the service of being there. After all, you're probably getting the better end of the deal (eg, given the limitations of SL, it is probably more fun for you to get to be a club owner/entertainer on SL than it is for the participants to watch you or dance in your club) so surely you should be the one paying?

And I'll hazard a prediction that soon it will be the case that paying people to enable your dream by participating in it will become as natural as paying to wear a red shirt.

Does this mean that shops will have to start paying people to visit them? No. The role of a customer is an empowering one and therefore fun on its own, that's why shopping is a leisure activity as well as a practicality in SL.

Am I saying that people who organize events shouldn't be rewarded for their effort? No. There's no question of "should" style morality involved. The reality is that in at least some cases, they're doing you more of a favor by letting you play the host role than you are by providing the event. Yes, I know it's a lot of work, but as you might or might not know, there are some people who'd kill to get to do that work - even if that perception of the work is in fact wrong, developed because they've never tried it. (Look at the RL computer games industry.) So why don't they just do it themselves? Possibly because they feel they can't due to lack of talent or whatever; or because they feel they wouldn't get people to participate, and so why should they participate in yours? The idea of it being a "mutual deal", as I suspect it was at the beginning of SL, got called off when the population became too large to support it.

And yes, the limitations on SL come into it. In many cases, that money you're paying is paying them to play SL - which apparantly isn't that thrilling for them (witness their choice to sit in camping chairs) - as opposed to doing something else with their leisure time. The "come to SL to make money" marketing line isn't doing any favours either.

But here's where things get tricky. Because I think this could actually be a good thing for SL. It gives everyone a chance to make money, by enabling others' dreams. Yes, you have to pay for every visitor you want in your club, or for each person you want to look around your build and go "wow", but in exchange you get paid every time you do the same thing. At the end of the day, it can only mean more movement of money in the economy and more encouragement to enable the dreams of others. And what's so bad about that?

An excellent point, good sir. I don't have time to respond in full right now, but I will later!

OK, now follow through on this thought. Why would someone who wants to dance go to your club rather than somewhere else? What makes your club special? The fact that they can get paid to go there? OK, that'll work for a little while, but if it turns out to work pretty soon all the clubs are paying dwell back to the dancers, and you're back where you started... what makes your club something that people would pay to dance in?

Not only doesn't it work as a way to differentiate your club for very long, it doesn't work all that well. If it did everyone would be dancing in dwell ghettoes already and nobody would be dancing anywhere else.

So if you want people to hang out in your build, you need to make it interesting. You don't build a club full of dance scripts. You build Abbotts Airfield. There's always people there, and not just because they're shopping at Cubey Terra's. It's an interesting build, it's got a variety of things to do, and they work together well with a theme. If you can't do it yourself, then get together with other people who want to do the same thing and build it together. You probably can't do it yourself, you know... Abbotts is a team effort.

What's natural about paying to wear a red shirt in SL? The first time I bought a shirt and found it was no-mod I went crook. I'll never pay a penny for clothes I can't fit and tint, and I'll never go back to a store run by someone so full of themselves that they think I should be glad to buy the same texture twice with a different color layer applied each time.

That's not quite the case. The question, far more, is why would anyone want to go to a club and dance in SL anyway?



If you want to live the dream, and your dream is to own a club, then you build a club. You could build something else more "interesting" instead if you wanted, but apparantly you don't want to, because your dream is to build a club. And once you've done it, you get participation by paying for it just like you paid for the land and the dance anis.

This isn't anything to do with me personally, by the way. My dream isn't anything to do with owning a club.



That's if your dream is to build an airfield. It was for Cubey and the rest of his team. It isn't for everybody. But it's more fortunate that lots of people dream of flying planes, and Cubey's airfield and other builds lets them do that. It even helps them learn to build them, which immediately puts Cubey into the "way awesome" category for me. If everyone dropped a tutorial as to how to make their stuff inside their store... (sigh)...



I remember when I mentioned to Simone Stern that I felt conned being a scripter because people demand configurable scripts while clothing makers can sell the same thing in different colours for the whole value again. She pointed out that actually recolouring something properly can take hours of work, and I realised, "hey, I've never actually tried it, so I don't really know otherwise..."

I've tried it - and I'd like to recommend that clothing designers that find it takes "hours of work" to recolour their clothing should reconsider their tools and workflow.

A set of clothing created in Photoshop - if you use layers, adjustment-layers, mixing modes, etc etc, and if you know how to handle Hue/Saturation/Brightness, Levels, Curves, etc etc - can usually be recoloured just about anyway you want in mere seconds! (or minutes if you want it to actually look good )

This concept applies to apps like GIMP as well, of course. Make sure you aren't limiting yourself to only the techniques you learned 5 years ago. Keep your skills up to date with your software - and you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish.

because we're social animals, and it's fun. Whether it's in a club where we can show off our AVs or in an impromptu party in a sandbox or someone's land, dancing is fun.

Yeh, I could pay people to hang around my skyport and run animations and even fly scripted planes on autopilot, but they wouldn't be there any more than the dancers you're paying to hang out in a club are there, and it'd be cheaper to rez up a few freebie avs on your spare credit card and run them in the background.

Either I don't get why someone would have a dream of running a club full of zombies, or you don't get the whole point of "dreaming about running a club/business/whatever".

And some people dream of dancing who can't dance in RL, or who dream of being a beautiful babe dancing when they're really short and dumpy. Remember, on the Internet nobody knows you're really a dog.

I'm sure there's clothes that are really that good, though I suspect that if it takes that long after the second or third color variant of an outfit you're really doing something wrong... and if you're putting that much effort into it I'd rather buy a slightly different shirt than one that looks just like the one the next guy is wearing except for the color.

My mother used to sell clothes in her gift shop. You got the colors they came in. It was very rare that you'd get two identical shirts, let alone a shirt that was just a different colored variant of another one, they were all unique. I didn't hear any complaints. My grandmother made clowns out of scraps, long gangly things, and you couldn't adjust the colors but... again... they were all different.

But I'm talking about clothes that are "no mod". I can't even *try* tinting them slightly, let alone wearing them loose because skin-tight shirts just plain look uncomfortable. Because of the 'artistic integrity' of the creator. Doesn't matter if they HAD to be skin tight or there was some magic ingredient in the color I shouldn't change, that's the way they HAD to be. For all I know (since I only bought the one shirt, and the only way to see what they look like is to try them on, which means buying them) the magic ingredient was the setting of the tint dials.

But, anyway, I don't buy "no mod" clothing any more. Or pay for red shirts.

Don't the red shirts just mean you die before the episode ends?

As social applications become more prevalent, quite the opposite is now occurring. If you're a dog, the whole world will find out. Which then leads to issues of Reputation.

Hence, do not confuse so-called 'artistic integrity' with the desire to maintain one's reputation. Someone could mod an originally well-made item and turn it to crap. In fact, it would be one way to grief competition: mod it ugly, then go "advertise" it.

Related (not the same, but similar) example in SL of that would be the wild slime drones, altho they haven't been quite structurally "advertised". There've been other nice items turned to crap, and the original creators (not the modders, since a changelog isn't shown) got negrates for it!

Well, exactly. You don't need to go to a club to socialise, so why go?



So people who are attracted to clubs by moneyballs aren't "there"? I've seen plenty of comments here that they're essential to attract anyone to a club these days. The standard reason given is because it become normal practice to pay people to attend events at the time Linden were giving out event support. But I get the impression event support was cut long before the free accounts came in which means that the free account newbie population, who had never been exposed to this, would have reversed this trend by now (after all, there's thousands of them) if that was really the case. No, the more apparant reason is that when you attend a club in SL, the club owner gets a better deal (by this huge thing they've built actually becoming a club instead of a big lonely sculpture) than the visitors do, and so of course the visitors would expect to be paid.



That might be true. It depends if those things are their only dream or not.

What, by the pawprints on the keyboard?
Um, I wasn't. You've taken two completely unrelated comments and run them together.
If they're "competition" they wouldn't need a mod copy of it to do that... they could just photoshop up a crude lookalike texture and get an alt or patsy to pass it off as the real thing.

Because you like socialising at a club. Even I do it, and I'm a dog.

I'm not talking about moneyballs. Moneyballs are one of those things I was talking about that only gives you a short-term payback. Once they're the norm, if your club was empty before you put the moneyball in it'll be empty again... because the people who are interested in dancing at a club will be back at the other clubs again.

So you're back to paying purely for extras, competing with the dwell ghettos, and getting the same zombie crowd.

Probably by the people whose clubs haven't otherwise got anything to attract visitors. If you're building a big empty sculpture, then I guess maybe you're not going to get to be a club owner on SL. Paying people to come and dance isn't going to make you a club owner any more than hiring someone to ghost-design prim hair for you to sell will actually make you an artist. You can be anything you want to in SL, so long as it doesn't involve getting other people to go along with your dream. If it does, then you're going to have to work for it just like you would in RL.

This paragraph needs to be repeated. Well said.

LF

And anything meaningful is going to involve getting other people to go along with it. But, again, the problem is that all of those people are going to have their own dreams. Maybe some people have dreams related to socialising at a club, ok, but do you think anyone has dreams that are related to walking around looking at how impressive someone else's work is?

I'm not talking about the dwell zombies. Indeed, the more successful someone is, the more likely you'll need to pay them to get them to show up, because the time they've spent hanging out in your area could have been spent building something that they could sell.

At the end of the day, the only way you're not going to have to pay is if the thing you build helps others achieve their dreams in the course of getting your own. And that's the case for some things but not all, and I'd venture, not most.

Yeh, but the point is... if your thing is being a dancing queen... all you have to do is dance, chat, socialise. Some dreams require convincing other people to make a big effort, others require convincing people to, well, keep on doing what they're already doing.

That's me. I'm an explorer. I "walk the virt" and find stuff, take insane risks and come back from two billion meters with funny pictures, fly my glider around a black forest castle because I like the smoke patterns.

The more successful someone is, the less likely you're going to be able to afford to pay them enough to hang out in their club. Even if you're Anshe, you won't be able to pay those kind of rates on any kind of regular basis ... not unless you have a good reason for it. I mean, I'm far from the top of the heap in SL, but if I don't like your place I wouldn't hang out in it for L$1000 an hour... because I could easily make ten times that in the same period in RL. I'd happily park my avatar there for an hour while I programmed in another window for real money, though.

That's just a rephrase of what I said about people having to have a reason to do whatever it is at YOUR build rather than someone else's. Except that even if you do pay you're not going to get what you want.

Well, yea, but that's usually impossible because most factors in SL are either equal for everyone or based off prior success, so there's no way to get an advantage for yourself over an existing person.

And why wouldn't you get what you want if you paid?

TONS of people do that.

Ever dream of visiting the Louvre? The Eiffel tower? The Great Wall of China?

Because if all clubs are paying people to dance, then it's a zero-sum game. You all end up with the same people dancing at the same clubs, except now you have to pay them to stand there idle.

You said that "everyone" will be paying for "extras". If "everyone" is paying for extras, the extras won't have any incentive to visit your night club instead of the one they like better that's paying them as well.

Unless you can make that night club a place that people enjoy hanging out in, you're going to lose whetehr you pay or not, over the long term.

Best post in the entire thread!

I really disagree in this point. A lot of the factors that can be leveraged to achieve success in SL are RL skills - being a people person (good for running a club) or skilled at trig (good for building) or just plain good at making a plan and following it through (good for every business).

I don't know what you mean with "based off prior success" - if it's having SL-applicable RL skills upon joining SL, well, that's a "fault" inherent to the system (some people are going to be a lvl30 coder upon joining because being a programmer iRL is a hard advantage in SL); if it's that success is not achievable by newcomers, all I can say that once I had developed a good product, it was easy for me to achieve a modicum of success even though I don't know many people here, don't have any previous success to show and didn't have any special sponsor or startup help. The recipe? Passion, patience, and many cups of coffee.



The cheapness of instant gratification vs. the worth of a hard-earned success? Dunno about other people, but while my current SL goal is to have people go "Ohhhh!" over the stuff I make, it would really feel like cheating if I were to buy those people, and completely devaluate their feedback.

Either that or the extras could be centrally organised to distribute them - probably the best way to make sure the money gets paid out fairly. Sign up as a newbie, get a certain amount added to your stipend in exchange for going where you're asked; then location holders pay and get added to the time schedule. If lots of clubs are paying then, well, the extras agency can divide people up - depending on its size, up to 40 people in each location, no problem. With 1.8, the extras could even have attached objects that teleport them wherever they're needed.

SL is supposed to be about "your world, your imagination" - not about having to go "oh well" and throw in the towel because somebody else has done the thing you wanted to and started earlier/started with better skills/got sponsored/has more RL time/whatever. Being able to pay for extras would at least go some way to filling the gap, and provide a good income stream for newbies (LL, here's your "unskilled labour" right here!). Even if it's "not real" because they're just paid zombies, well, it's better than nothing, it's the best some folks are going to get, and nothing in SL is real anyway, so why not?

I've gathered name/age/location/occupation/education on an "anonymous" poster on an unregistered forum with nothing more than a few non-revealing posts, an educated guess, and a single, carefully-worded email. We've had people in SL outed. And ask Danny Aquino's girlfriend how people found her MySpace page. The minute someone interacts with another person, they're revealing clues about who they are IRL. The net's search capabilities and connectivity make piecing the puzzle together increasingly simple. For example, mere mention of a passing thunderstorm could narrow a person's geographic location.

People are not used to self-censoring themselves. I've little doubt I could track a fair number of "anonymous" SL acquintances down IRL. Because the old "dog" adage is effectively incorrect (and, btw, there was no need to post a link to emphasize your sarcasm, we remembered just like you asked us to), I do not attempt to be anonymous.


I disagree. They are not "completely unrelated". Someone engaged in SL's social scene who believes themself to be free to express their opinions (racist, xenophobic, whatever) or behave in ways they wouldn't IRL may find themselves regretting it at some later time. I can't help but wonder how someone who starts off in SL as an "anonymous" virtual hooker dancing in clubs/cyber'ing and who later finds financial success feels about having their real life tied to those earlier activities.

Of course some people will dump the avatar and start again. But my own experiences in SL with people who have done this indicate it's easier said than done. People tend to gravitate to old haunts; run into old acquaintances. How many people have done this and slipped up by mentioning some seemingly trivial personal fact twice: once as the old avatar and again as the replacement? People have a way of remembering details; connecting the dots.

Consequently, for "no mod" creators who are not justifiable painted with the unflattering brush you so liberally used, and who realize that the reputation they create in SL may be transferred off to another platform (IMVU, WoW, some Multiverse title, etc), issues of Reputation are important. And some (like myself) will use "no mod" because we know the old "dog" theory doesn't work in practice. Starting over may not really be an option.


Anyone that talented wouldn't waste the time. Creating a "crude lookalike" from scratch that passes as sufficiently similar but with only a minor, sickly tint change is difficult to do. It may also turn out to be a possible improvement. At that level of skill, someone could easily just create new content (and most will). And imagine what would happen if the sickly-tint version became a hit? Kinda hard to capitalize on all that effort.

There are few - if any - RL examples of this occurring. As an example, I'm unaware of any No-name Brand suit company putting out crap versions of Armani suits to drag down the brand. There are knock-offs (having spent time in China, I've seen some doozies), but they're attempting to capitalize on the brand - not ruin it. However, if you know of any cases of this bad-copy-as-rep-ruining-tactic occurring IRL, I'd honestly be interested in hearing about them.

Lastly, thanks for the exchange. This has given me some ideas (for things you'd probably call unrelated).

{Edit: Want to add this link which has some general relevance: LINK.}

1. You're still taking advertising seriously.

2. If you can only imagine one thing, you're probably not going to be happy in SL.

I wanted to have a character who was a member of an alien species from Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep. The Tine are individually smarter than a dog, but it takes a whole pack of them working together to make a human-equivalent intelligence. If it's possible in SL even with scripted follower objects (and I'm not sure it is) how would I simulate Tyrathect's radio cloaks that let him/her spread their mind over leagues? It's at least right at the very edge of what's possible in the current generation, and just animating one pack member adequately may not be possible (the scripted animals in SL are scarily bad).

If I "had to throw in the towel" because I didn't get that, I'd never have learned how much fun a giant robot could be. Nobody "has to throw i the towel" if they're not soundbite-compatible.

3. If someone REALLY wants slaves, they can go to the Gorean sims.

4. The realest thing in SL are people.

Yumi, thi is an interesting and thought provoking thread. I would just point out, that part of the dream is often the pursuit of the dream. If we pay people to particpate in our dream then ther eis never any risk. I think its abit like gambling, there is a thrill to the chase. So yes we want others to particpate in our shared dream, but we want to know its because our dream interests them, and not because we pay them.