Is Dwell doomed?

Just a thought...why is it that club type establishments seem to be against charging an entry fee? Something like 10-20L really wouldn't be that much of a stab to the wallet (and i'm saying this with something like 500L to my name right now) and I'd be happy to pay it if I liked a place. Instead of getting the linden god machine to deem who has earned the most dwell and therefore the most money...let the people who care about a place worry about it.

If you open a club in RL and no one likes what goes on there...it's not going to be open for very long. And because of this clubs in RL tend to have standards they have to meet (good looks, fresh range of quality activities). It's sort of that whole...ah...concequences follow actions thing. If you can't cut it as far as content, then you shouldn't be recouping anything. This allows crappy content to die off and get replaced by someone elses attempt (which may or may not be better, but should die off accordingly as well).

But...I suppose SL is all about the "you can do anything evar in the world of dreams and magical dreamy fantastic magicness" and that there should be no losers. Does LL trust us to pay for what we want? probably not. Because if we don't pay for it...and dwell(LL) doesn't pay for it...then people aren't going to come in droves looking for this new business opportunity and that's bad for the LL wallet (i'm not faulting them for this or anything, they have a business to run and maintain and i really LIKE that they DO run it).

We aren't owed success by LL. We pay them to maintain this virtual world and what we do with it is up to us. That should mean ALL of it. Want awards for content? Create an award for content. Want great clubs/hangouts/gaming sots to get rewarded? Reward them. Want crap places to fade out? Don't fund them. Want to see more original content and events? DO IT YOURSELF. Be the change you wish to see in the world (that's someones quote, i dunno who's, but i like it). It's that simple (or...that complicated )

Yumi, if the sim owner is paying for tier with the dwell and developer bonus, then the money they're paying is money LL can't spend on people who are actually bringing in paying customers. It looks like Lindens are free to LL, but they're not: to keep Lindens a convertible currency, they have to limit the money supply, so every Linden they inject into the economy through bonuses is a Linden they can't use for something else... just like it is for you or myself. Because of the exchanges, L$250 is US$1... and Linden Labs is no more able to ignore this than anyone else.

So LL need to make sure the Lindens they inject into the economy go to things that bring more US$ into the economy, because it's the US$ going into the economy as a whole that funds them.

Trust me, you can't create infinite income from finite effort. The idea that you can has lead to more heartbreak and burnout than practically anything.And c) the people who are able to build what they want to for themselves, but don't bother with the extra effort it would take to turn that into the nickel-and-dime income they would get get from running a business inside LL, when they can make an order of magnitude more in the outside world for the same effort.

I'm in group c. Group c is just like group a, except we don't have to put up with dragging the customer support excrement we get in RL into SL. But it's still the case that buying Premium doesn't buy you anything... because renting land on an island and buying Linens on LindeX is more cost-effective unless you want to pay a year in advance.

Not to mention that you're totally shortchanging your group "b". Particularly if you lump Anshe into it. I call creating a *better* Second Life environment than Linden Labs "building or whatever" on a grander scale than most builders.

Because they want SL to look like a world that's actually recognisable as being a parallel to the real world of today, because that's what people in the real world are looking for. SL has the same problem that Science Fiction writers trying to write about technology that's so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic... the society you would get if you had the ability to rez up anything you want from nothing... whether that's by magic, "smart matter", "replicators", "nanotechnology", or "wakalixes"... would look nothing like the one we live in... and if SL let their social experiment run wothout a hand on the wheel to track the real economy it would quickly accelerate beyond a kind of technological event horizon into something we may not be able to understand.

In science fiction this is called the "Singularity", a word coined by Vernor Vinge. Vinge, by the way, is the author of the first story that actually depicts a virtual reality that's recognisably like Second Life... back around 1980... so he's worth paying attention to.

There's nothing WRONG with it, except that they would get vastly fewer customers if they did it. Which is, by the way, precisely what happened to the SL equivalent of movie theatres when LL reduced the simulated sugar water sales for planned events and effectively increased the effect of sugar water sales for unplanned ones. So now it's like your Basic account holders are going to a theatre they wouldn't normally go to, buying sugar water with food stamps, and getting a kickback in the form of camping handouts.

Instead, reduce the amount of sugar water they can buy with their food stamps, let them earn tips through the reputation system and go to the theatres they want to instead. Keep the total number of Lindens coming in to the economy the same... and see if that produces a less awkward result. At least that way when they game the system they'll be gaming it in a capitalist rather than a feudal manner.

But don't get rid of the sugar water altogether, either for Premium or Basic accounts, because the economic model needs it.

The issue is creating a virtual economy that is recognisable to people who life in Economics 1.0, not Economics 2.0. If LL increased your stipend, would you spend the extra money on sugar water or the correspondingly more expensive movie tickets? How much have you spent on for-pay events in the past three months? If increasing the Premium stipend wouldn't increase the money available for the kinds of activities that have disappeared since LL shifted the balance of Lindens being injected by Basic accounts (or rather, accounts that don't have a significant income, whether Basic or Premium) from the stipend to dwell. Shifting the balance the other way, by reducing the dwell (sugar water) that low-income accounts are worth to land owners and increasing the tips (reputation bonus) for those accounts that earn it by being social animals.

The real world economy is driven both by the entertainment of human beings and the maintainance of human bodies, and without modelling both you won't get an economy in SL that looks like the one in RL. And none of the "needs" you describe are the actual "gotta maintain my body" needs that keep the core of the RL economy spinning along.

I haven't advocated getting rid of free accounts, or getting rid of accounts that aren't active, or egtting rid of any other kinds of accounts.

Those are 90k active players, but they're not 90k paying customers.

Dwell isn't a bribe. Camping handouts in exchange for dwell are bribes.

Because you seemed to be lumping all non-Premium accounts into one category. The point is that simply basing the dwell on whether an account is premium or basic wouldn't provide a good model for whether that account should represent a lot of dwell or a little. Dwell models an economic activity that's not entertaining and so doesn't take place in SL... but is an important part of the economy. Modelling it more closely on the way that part works in the real economy will lead to the activities in the real economy that people are missing in SL coming back.

No, I mean the exact opposite. That basics, free or not, include many people who are actively contributing to the Linden economy and who are providing cash that ends up in the pockets of Linden Labs through Tier payments, and are thus worthwhile as part ofthe economy rather than simply being potential premium accounts that haven't converted yet.

Um, so do I. I'm arguing that dwell should be modified rather than eliminated.

No, it's the US$ paid to them that funds them. US$ present in the SL economy, in the Lindex holding account or those of other money holders, don't benefit LL (well, I suppose they can keep them in a bank account and grab the interest)



Sure. But being in group a) isn't just about being in business: it's about being able to live in "your world, your imagination". It's the difference between knowing that you can get what you want if you put in enough effort and knowing that you can't unless you luck out and someone else has already built it for you.



I don't consider Anshe to be in group b), since, uh, she does build and create on huge scales. What I'm saying is that the people in group b), since they find they can't live in their world of imagination, pick an alternate challenge instead: "get as much as I can for free". And they believe that can be done because, according to all the PR, Anshe did it. Most of the PR material says that Anshe "started from nothing" and made her money "buying and selling land". They don't say anything about the actual work she did, selling animations and landscaping.

I've always found dwell to be quite irrelevant. For instance, I accepted a few invitations to vend in high dwell locations i.e. on the popular places list regularly. However, i have not noticed any correlation between the high dwell of those places when used as a selling point to vendors and merchants. So if daily dwell equals say 30,000. Weekly rent equals say $200L. Sales per week may only yield a L$1000 or so if you even sell anything there. Whereas dwell equals 1000, no rent or minimal rent, and sales blossom. I have maybe 12 store locations and out of that tweleve 90% of my sales comes from two stores. Thats my two cents and experience with dwell.

I guess I don't see the elimination of dwell as losing control of the economy. Or SL as a general attempt at simulation of RL. SL uses a simulacrum of physical reality as an interface because of its familiarity to users, but I don't think LL is generally concerned with running a simulation. For instance we are able to fly and teleport, rather than being forced to drive cars and sit in traffic just because that's how RL works. SL seems more like an amusement park or a mall. Malls have free attractions (e.g. a Santa) in order to bring people in to shop, but they don't pay store owners for having customers in their stores. If SL is going to simulate something, maybe it should be that.



If we remove all the subsidies, maybe we will find out how many theaters we need. Although as I said I think clothes, etc. are the sugar water of our virtual world.



Unfortunately the reputation system has already been gamed. There used to be rating parties. And when we had vote boxes, those were gamed. What I'd like to think (and I'm not pretending to be sure) is that the SL economy is now developed enough that it doesn't need subsidies from LL. And that if SL does need free attractions to bring in tourists, LL should be the one making them.



Personally, if they increase my stipend I'll be selling it to people who want to attend for-pay events and buy bling. That's what I'm suggesting.

Honestly the whole discussion that started with camping chairs has been bumming me over, so I'm sorry if I seem grumpy on the subject. The TSO stuff is really making me feel like spending my money on a 360 instead of SL.

Not that anyone was concerned about this, including LL... But after this discussion I did decide to spend my money on a 360 rather than SL. I sold my land, and exchanged the proceeds and most of my other L$ for $US200. Then I tiered down from $US25 a month to 0, which will save me $US300 this year. I haven't decided if I should maintain my quarterly subscription to keep the 1024m I get with no land fee, or just switch to basic and rent a place where I can script with a few prims. If I switch to basic that will save me another $US100 this year.

In general I think LL needs to communicate better what they want SL to be. Despite the marketing about our imaginations, they are in control. Right now I'm just not comfortable with what SL may or may not be, or where my money is going. Giving newbies TSO houses or dwell cash for make-work (among other things) makes me see SL differently than when I joined up. I guess it's as much about perception as reality, since my experience hasn't changed a lot. I still enjoy SL, but the one thing I am tired of is all of these debates about its nature and its future without a clear voice from Linden Lab.

Cadroe, you're more than welcome to hang out and script or whatever on my land in Freelon, any time. I'd hate to see your cartography and other inspiring projects disappear from SL.

I agree with you, to a point. LL has always made it a point not to tell us what SL is supposed to be. Most people seem to blame the shift in SL culture on the introduction of real money, but I don't think that's it. It changed greatly when the mass immigration from TSO started happening, and they brought the TSO culture with them... paying people to attend events, mafias, and many other things are direct imports from TSO. Nothing against TSO or the people who've come here from it, but I can't help but feel SL needs some kind of TSO refugee reeducation camp.

I absolutely agree. This is basically why the only way I ever attained a decent sum of land was through renting and the Game Dev Contest. The fact the game was subsequently broken one major patch later only drove this fact home.


Really, it comes down to this: Second Life has bipolar disorder. It wants to be a game one day and a platform the next. Thing of it is, you can't have it both ways unless you draw the line where one ends and the other begins.

I can't imagine this happy-go-fun marketing tug of war is good for any resident.

Chip - Thanks, I appreciate that. Strangely I do most of my SL hobbying off world now. I've been working on new map stuff in Java. So I do plan on continuing to do stuff in SL. I'm sure a veteran like you knows it's important to enjoy SL on your own terms.

I agree about money not being the problem, and in fact the problem with communication I see was already here at that point. A landmark event for me was when Fizik bought Avalon and planned to use it for some sort of marketing (I forget the details). He was dragged through the mud on these forums for bringing the evil of commerce to SL. All I remember seeing from LL was a generic comment about him not breaking the TOS. That really stood out to me. If they wanted commerce in SL, why were they leaving Fizik to defend himself for engaging in it? What did they want? To me it's the same thing with the camping chairs. I would feel differently about it if the Lindens clearly said how it did or didn't fit their vision of SL.

Jeffrey - I think your bipolar description is apt. I think if/when LL decides to view SL as a platform, a lot of problems will go away, because they will not be in control. It will shift from AOL to the web, and people will be able to choose from a multitude of worlds with clearly defined purposes. I don't wish LL an ounce of harm, but I admit I've become hopeful that MS and Google will push things more quickly in this direction even if LL doesn't.

<Tangent>
My bet's on Google buying out a startup that ultimately "gets it" if LL doesn't. Heck, Google buying Linden Lab would be an interesting situation in and of itself.


For Microsoft, their DRM investments and want to monetize the world would seriously conflict with such an investment. Not bashing on them by any degree here: their philosophy is just so diametrically different from many others held in Second Life that I just can't see it happening.
</Tangent>


But, at the end of the day it really needs to be a platform as you said. Not this "Hahahar, I run a virtual country." Not virtual suburbia. And certainly not this:

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=280



We just need control over our own schtuff. Not rocket-science.

You can't be dependent upon dwell....period. In our club's infancy we tried it. It just isn't cost effective and you really would have to resort to 'ingo' mania to compete. But eh, who wants to do that and totally ruin their sl experience?!

The key is offering a quality site and a no-pressure appeal to your guests for supporting donations. We have found that a simple, unobtrusive donation jar always generates unsolicitated donations from people that attend our events -- or who just happen to land at the club, even when it is empty. Most of the people that come to our events, do so because they expect quality. They are more then generous with their donations, not only to our club, but to the LIVE performers who make our service unique. I truly beleive that.....If you build it right....they will come. You may not get rich, but you can comfortably exist and still maintain a quality site with time leftover for the things that make SL a good place to be.

Liv Karuna -- Club Belle Feu Nouveau

It's the paradox that's to do with money. To be a platform, it'd need applications that were sufficiently independant of it to develop in their own directions. But in SL, such an application would have to be given away for free - which immediately puts anyone off developing it. The reason why it would have to be given away for free is that otherwise, the people who want to use it have to earn L$ which drops them into the "game" side of SL and weakens its consideration as a platform. Yes, they can buy L$ with US$ to pay for the application, but they'll still have the knowledge that people who "won" the game of SL could get the app without paying any US$ - and as long as they know that, buying L$ is just another move in the game.

Without that money in the Linden economy there wouldn't be those US$ paid to them from people renting land.

You are way stretching that sound-bite (and that's all it is, a sound-bite, a slogan) way beyond reason. If I'm imagining being a 20 foot robot and Kage Seraph makes better 20 foot robots than I do, even if I can make 20 foot robots I'm going to get closer to the world of my imagination by buying.

I could script up an animation overrider in a weekend at the absolute most. Am i selling out my imagination by using Franimation?

And yet you're suggesting in another thread that people buy "extras" to help them fulfill their dream of being a club-owner (whatever that means) without putting the effort into it.

And what I'm saying is that you're shortchanging the people who aren't builders. And over in the other thread you're going on about how you need to convince people to go along with you no matter what your dream is, which is true, and which is why people in group (a) still can't live in soundbite-land without other people's help.

Of course. But just buying someone else's giant robot avatar isn't going to require you to be in business.

My original point was that people outside group a) feel they are dependant on what others provide for them. If you feel that you are buying someone else's giant robot avatar because it's better than what you could produce, then you're already decided that 1) buying it is getting you what you want, and 2) you could make one if you wanted but are choosing not to. That's perfectly fine, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who come in wanting to be things, find that they aren't provided by anyone else and realise that they can never get them because they can't build them themselves.



Nope - it's nothing to do with "the effort". If it's a competition to be a popular spot, then there has to be somebody who loses even if they did put in lots of effort. When you rank the spots in order, there always has to be someone at the bottom no matter how much effort they put in. And I'm suggesting that it would be better for LL's pocketbook and for SL newbies or less skilled players if that person could instead hire a bunch of extras to participate in that location and fit into what they had imagined, rather than deleting it all and tiering down.



Sure, absolutely! That's exactly what I was getting at with the extras post. Want some of those other people to get their asses out of camping chairs and come see your (not you personally) place? Pay them! It's only good economics, after all - you obviously want them more than they want you, else they'd be the ones complaining.

But, uhh... doesn't that make the L$ a flawed assumption if direct USD is more efficient?

The need for a closed economy is really a big part of the problem. A lot of that has to do with Philip's economic wet dream and the want for good "come get money playing a game!" press when, really:

Work is work,
money is money,
and Second Life is only a game every given Tuesday.


And, assuming that, the more efficient currency/market usually wins.

L$ are just a way of working around the psychological effect of micropayments, and the problems with small charges on cards.

An item being priced at L$150 looks more sensible than it being priced at US$0.45, and avoids the natural price comparisons that would occur in that case.

And it feels nice, and game-ish, to get L$500 every week, rather than US$1.50.

Dwell is a mechanism to nudge the economy in a particular direction. If you don't have it, you've removed one of the options you have to apply that nudge.

I'm not sure why you don't see SL as a simulation of RL, because you do seem to understand why:

... and it uses a simulacrum of RL economics because of its familiarity to users.

... which is why they need to nudge the economy to produce an economic environment that is familiar to the users. Because economics is not some kind of natural force, economics is the result of people individually trying to make the most efficient use of the resources available to them, subject to their own individual goals. They may not be good at it, or think that's what they're doing, or applying them to goals you find sensible, but economics is still the result of adding all those individual actions together.

The thing you have to realize from that is that gamig the system is simply another way of saying making the most efficient use of the recources avauilable to them. Economics is the study of people who are continually gaming the system, and what kinds of systems respond to that kind of activity well. So if you're going to create an economic simulation that's going to behave like the RL economy (and you do want to do that, because you want something that's familiar to the users) you have to make it generally behave like the real life economy.

One way to do that is to make the physical world mirror the limitations of the real world very closely. Force avatars to sleep, to eat, to need medical attention, to get cold and sick, like super tamogotchi. That might even be an interesting game but it's probably not going to be as much fun for as many people as one where they can fly and teleport and so on.

But if you just set that up, add money, and stir... you're not likely to get the kind of familiar economic activity you get in RL. I don't know what you'd get... and as a simulation it would be very interesting to find out. But as you say... LL isn't interested in running a simulation, they're interested in using a simulation to make a profitable game, and they've chosen to do this by making the SL physical and economical reality pretty much like RL, but better. Better not just because you can fly, but because you don't have to work (and you don't), or eat or breathe or get sick...

Of course it has. That's what economics is all about. Gaming the system. It doesn't matter what your rules are, you're going to get people doing their damndest to make the most Lindens, points, whatever, that they can under those rules. You can't NOT have people gaming the system, and you can't NOT have rules, and you can't NOT have subsidies (if only because the permanent automatic good health of your flying teleporting infinitely malleable avatar and your ability to create an infinite amount of "physical" goods just by wishing is a HELL of a subsidy in itself). All you can do is react to situations where people are gaming the system in ways that don't reflect the kind of economy you want to see created by making small and careful changes to the rules.

But LL isn't doing that. They're making huge changes, all the time. If people are responding to the reputation system by having reputation parties, they should gradually change the bonuses until that's no longer profitable... without losing the good features of the bonus system. If people are abusing dwell by paying kickbacks to free accounts, they should make the free accounts, or the accounts that are spending less money, worth less dwell. But trying to take all the checks and balances out of the Linden economy and seeing what happens when you let it run faster and faster under whatever feedback systems evolve in an economy of superabundance isn't going to work any better. At least not if they're trying to keep people from gaming the system, because they can't ever stop that. All you can do is encourage them to game the system in SL more or less the way they do in RL. The alternative is something that doesn't look anything like the economy your customers think they understand.

I'm not sure why you think that. The DRM regime inside SL is much stronger than anything microsoft could possibly apply to Windows. For all the griping about it not giving creators enough control, the fact is that it gives creators more real control over their creations than any other environment I can think of offhand. I'm kind of interested to see how that plays out.

I think we see SL and the economy differently, Argent, and by now you might just think I'm dense or something. I think the economy looks familiar enough without dwell and make-work. If it looks unfamiliar I think it's because LL is confusing the issue with this TSO game stuff. I have assumed that SL is meant to be a part of the RL economy just like Amazon.com and Disney World, not an entertaining simulation of it. I admit with LL now considering "unskilled labor", I'm not sure what they're doing. Which is why I don't want to contribute my money to it. Or more specifically, I don't want to contribute my money so that college students can play Economy/Sex Simulator 2.0 for free. Which is not to say that LL shouldn't be doing exactly what they're doing or that other people shouldn't contribute if it floats their boat. But it's not the idea that made me join up.

I think an important thing I'm not understanding is why, at this point, the market can't nudge developers rather than LL. I don't see why developers can't generate revenue directly from traffic instead of the roundabout dwell mechanism. If LL does need to nudge SL development, I think a better way would be producing content themselves or paying people to make what they think is needed.

It seems like LL has strong checks and balances. They decide how much money to put into the economy through stipends. They control how much land there is and how many prims people can use. These are balanced with the contributions people make to SL. The odd parts of the economy to me are the ones that aren't checked, like the size of our inventories. That's not familiar, a free garage with infinite capacity.

But I suspect we're just coming at this from such different angles that we're not going to be able to see eye to eye on it.

That's not difficult. It's because if the revenue comes from traffic, then the revenue has to be paid by the people who visit, which will limit the frequency of access to venues based on wealth. However, because many wealthy people in SL got that way by building/making stuff, and presumably they enjoy that and would want to carry on doing it, they have the least actual need for other entertainment and places to visit. The people who need that are the ones who can't entertain themselves by doing their own building, but if they can't do that, they probably can't make much money either. Erk!

There's a big difference between the RL and SL economy: nobody who doesn't enjoy their job, has a job.

The revenue has to come from the people enjoying the service, yes. Charging admission is one way. Advertising space is another, although that is also based on the premise that those people will spend money. But overall, yes, the idea is that the people getting the service compensate the people providing the service. There are several ways to get the money to do this. You can pay Linden Lab for L$. You can buy L$ from other residents. You can provide a useful service of your own and be paid in L$ for it. I think if you're unwilling to do any of those things, then you should not feel entitled to enjoy the service in the first place. Perhaps you should visit the library, which is free and incredibly entertaining.

(Edit - that's those people "you", not saying this applies to you personally, Yumi)




I think this is a strange assertion. The best content in SL is produced in order to make money, not as a hobby. It is a RL job. The people working for hours in Photoshop and Poser don't do it in an imaginary universe. It's real labor, and they're motivated by real money.

Personally, I think DRM screws the wrong kinds of people: Honest consumers.

As for the DRM in Second Life, I really don't use it. The majority of my stuff is open; the stuff that isn't is mostly stuff I privately own.


On both fronts, the technology is broken. The "permissions system" in SL conflicts with several script commands we have. I mean, shit, I got burned at the stake half a year ago because my script "could circumvent No Copy and No Transfer," when really that's something the Lindens never took the time to work on.


So my point stands. Our stuff is just data. If it can't compete at the binary (read: copiable, not easily modified) level, well, sucks to be you.