Why a world?

I asked this over in the Hotline forum, but I'm also curious what the users and citizens of Second Life think. So, what do you think, and I'm not looking for a right-or-wrong: why do you think Linden Lab puts so much emphasis on calling Second Life a world?

Because it's not a game - although it contains some.

it's a world because that's what philip rosedale wants it to be. he's stated on multiple occassions that second life is ideally meant to be a(n) replication/substitution/alternate of the real world. it accomodates research in collaborative building (such as it is), virtual economies, and online mass social interactions. that's what it's for.

ll turning over enough cash to meet payroll, and thousands of people playing second life as an enjoyable game, are nice side effects, but not critical. oddly enough, i believe that most of the lindens work on second life much more for the joy of being an important part of the grand adventure than for a salary. one day, when it's no longer fun, they'll pack it in and be able to work for one of the new virtual environment firms that rent sims and license software to professional firms, schools, and governments because their resumes will be chocked full of this experience.

it's important to love your job and enjoy your work. the office would be a totally different environment if the employees were obligated to provide services and features to people who were trying to make money, teach students, and enforce laws rather than play a game. come on jarod. do them all a favour; play the game; enjoy the world; let them have their fun.

you can work to your heart's content when real platform software hits the streets. in fact, you can work with the massive libraries, opencroquet, muppets, or the latest osmp software now if you must. and when you get tired of working, you can come inworld and fly and listen to music and dance with animations and watch movies and drive cars and stuff.

I think LL wants to build a technology useful to and accessible by the general public (or at least the computer-using public), rather than a tool for specialists and professionals. They see SL as equivalent to AOL (without the stupidity) rather than something like Lexis/Nexis. They thus need to make the technology, if not dumbed down, at least approachable. SL-as-world is attractive, engaging, to people coming in "off the street". The same people, faced with a *completely* blank canvas, would simply walk away.

Even now it's hard to give a satisfying answer to a newbie who asks, "So what do I do now?" How much harder would it be if we didn't have a somewhat familiar context to start from?

I think a lot of us would bloody murder for an option to turn this into the "abstract collaborative CAD tool" they mention
Imagine a world where you could build without prim limits, or annoying neighbors, or blingtards...

Whereas "blog" was 2004's Word of the Year, I believe Eggy's just named 2005's.

Indeed. I often ask this question. I'm thinking some day soon SL-type thingies will be the banal norm on websites like amazon.com or Taco Bell and some avatar will come out and say "May I Help You?" and push your "favorites" list at you and menus and whatnot.

I don't under stand why they've injected all this breathless emotion and earnestness into it as if they were really indeed discovering some new world. I used to be more romantic about these worlds too but really, a lot of it is tripe. Quite a bit of it is grand illusion. It's the latest snakeoil and sleight-of-hand, at no time do the fingers leave the wrist.

I wish they would just concentrate on making it work, on making it so that the ordinary player doesn't have to log in a zillion times a time to shed lag and freezes, so that people can fly around without going into voids or freezing, so that the pictures wouldn't look like a sex education slide show from the 1960s, i.e. slow-mo. And when people say it's going to just turn into streaming porn, well, they're right.

All this earnestness about beneficial applications that help society is missing the point now. That's only a tiny fraction of the population to make use of such virtual world technology and let the government pay for it and practice with it like they used to pay for LSD experiments.

Meanwhile, you have to face the fact that if you scrape away all this tekkie bullshit aside, it is just an entertainment machine. It's not even so much a chat machine as it is an entertainment machine, a live drama. Remember Linda in the movie based on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 452? Remember those wide-screen 3-D televised plays in her living room, the 3-D people she was absorbed with all day long while her fireman husband burned books? The ones that turned to her and said "What do you think, Linda?" in interactive soap operas? Remember the soma sessions in Brave New World? That's all SL is. Not much more.

But what I don't understand is this idea that all these tekkis getting together across the seas and making a 3-D cube together is such an important thing. So they made a cube together. But what's it for? And who cares? That's what the problem is. They get so breathless about making a cube together that they forget that human beings have been making cubes together for millions of years, and they often use them to kill each other or extract money and favors out of each other or block each others' views LOL.'

It's just a medium, a channel, a space. On the one hand, you have to do something in it of some relevant to make it worth while. On the other hand, because Philip and co. made it a "world" and made it very compelling and immersive, you figure you'll play world games in it like "let's play land baron" or "let's play journalist" or "let's play technogeek". But sometimes you stand on the windswept strangely colored sands of the oddly named Cecropia and say to yourself how hollow it is, how really hollow.

BLING BLING!

Being both a chemistry and scifi geek I have to say that paper burns at 451 degrees, not 452

Carry on

[edit] Though, it does burn at 452 degrees... it just won't start burning until 451...

...

You all know what I mean

Because a world, and the humanoid things it contains, and all the mansions and castles and swank galleries and other things built on its virtual ground, are metaphors that the human mind can relate to very easily. If it was just a networked version of Autocad, it would not be as compelling for most people. Maybe if it was supposed to represent something extrinsic, like presenting a 3D map of the Internet, it would make sense to have it in a much more abstract form. In that case, it wouldn't need to have so many familiar metaphors, because we are already familiar with the Internet.

The very SECOND you people start taking yourselves seriously your going to become as redundant as 'THERE' did.

Prokofy, that was the most intelligent and well thought out post I've seen in these forums to date.

(The very SECOND you people start taking yourselves seriously your going to become as redundant as 'THERE' did.)end quote
LOL the mighty one speaks as if others and not himself is one whom has became reduntant Sox's your not a good one to post such reply. After booting a good friend of mine from your club because of an association she had yet not being aware of anything going on between yourself and the club they worked at, speak of redundancy for yourself do we ? .... enuff said I have spoken openly to you and about you.

I LOVE that kitty-cat picture! I LOVE that kitty! Without the superimposed bling. I could just stare at it all day; I'd love to pick that kitten up and rub its tummy!

Six nipple rings - lololololololol!

Prok, I don't think it is hollow; it is virtual; thus it is mental, and thereby meaningful and in ways actually more pure and real than other pursuits/pasttimes. I love internet interactions because they are strictly a mental-to-mental connection with other people, unencumbered by physical and culturally contextual appearances.

coco

Oh my, I agree with Prokofy on something!
Somebody shoot me now.
SL is going to be the new web.
No, let me rephrase that.
The new web is going to be something LIKE this world of ours.
Whether or not LL is going to be a part of that future remains to be seen.
LL should start catering more to serious businesses in need of a collaborative content development platform.

Sometimes I think the whole damn capital-U Universe is here just because we needed something to talk about.

Why a world? Because that's what SL is! It's whole point is to be a SHARED creative space. It's not trying to be Maya or 3DS Max. It's a place for us to get together inside of, and fool around with building and stuff. Emphasis on getting together.

Nah. They should keep doing what they're doing -- concentrate on being as easy to use and welcoming to consumers as possible. It they suddenly reinvented their business for no good reason, they would lose their existing business with no guarantee of gaining the new one.

SL is a lot like the AOL of 3D collaborative worlds, or maybe the Compuserve. When the internet came along and steamrolled everything in its path, AOL just adapted, and they're still around. Granted, some of the technically advanced people who want to set up their own servers and extend the platform will likely bail as soon as some kind of open, standards-based system exists, but catering to that market is hardly ideal either. Who wants to be the Netcom of the next internet?

Jarod,

You seem like an incredibly smart guy with a really strong vision of what you want to see built. However, it seems pretty different from Philip's vision about what he's trying to build. Personally, I think both visions are incredibly valuable, even if they're not all that compatible.

I'm really not try to say "go away" or anything, but I can't help thinking that you would be better off starting over and launching your own project to fulfill your vision.

It's called a world because there are; cities Grigiano for example. There are houses, there are ppl, there are neighborhoods, there are apartments, there are condos, there are themed communities, there are parks, there are islands, there are continents. Yes sounds like a world to me.

Linden Lab was at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) so yeah I think someone at Linden Lab thinks its a game too

I declare the world is flat and someday someone will fall off the edge! LOL KIDDING

ll should allow people/businesses/groups to create separate grids (either through hosting or licensing) and a way to move between grids (and of course ways to contol access).

this would allow businesses, schools, and other collaborative efforts to control access, content, and geography to their own needs without needing ll getting invovled for every little things like getting rid of griefers or undesirable content from these "private" grids.

compuserve and aol are struggling to survive/evolve (though compuserve's struggles seem pretty weak). aol has a major customer retention problems; sure people join aol in droves, but when they figure out they don't need aol to get to the internet... they leave in droves, too.

if aol had been more open in structure, it would have been biggest mightest power on the web, but instead microsoft, yahoo, google, ebay, amazon, etc are the big players and aol is barely competing with them.

i've seen the backend of aol's content code. it's a content mark up language with a display engine. aol serves content; just like the web that's pretty much rolled over aol.

aol had the opportunity to be the worldwideweb, and it missed the boat.

Maybe, StoneSelf, but building a virtual reality server sounds like a helluva lot harder task than building a web server. I suspect it'll be a while before we see a VR equivalent of Apache and Mosaic.

Which is not to say we never will. But there's much longer window of opportunity for commercial players like LL to capitalize on their investment in R&D. And LL has a fighting chance of adapting to the open VR environment when it does happen, given they have AOL's example to learn from.

Linden Lab doesn't have the opportunity to be the Amazon or the Yahoo of the 3D internet. Those companies came along when someone had already developed a more or less complete, open platform that they can piggyback off of with nothing but pure content offerings.

AOL and Compuserve came along when there weren't any platforms to piggyback on, so they had to build their own. Could they have simply financed developing a completely open internet system and shared all of their IP openly with everyone back in 1985 or so? Maybe, but it sounds like a pretty tall order.

maybe. maybe not.
it doesn't need to be like apache or mosaic.
people pay to install oracle on specialized machines. and most serious business websites will install on specialized machines or at co-los.

it is always a bad idea to think like this in business in general, and in software in particular. there is always some one hungrier than you are. and companies like microsoft are already throwing money at the problem.

you're missing my point. ll could be the company to provide the platform and the services.

had they done so, they would be sitting pretty.
one of the reasons they didn't get as many commercial partners is that it was a pain in the ass to get a content page up, and to change it regularly. trust me i know how hard it is to push aol content. i believe if they had made it easier, aol would have been amazon.com and ebay.

Maybe so, or maybe they would have been steamrolled by cheap knockoffs who piggybacked off their R&D to provide lower cost services because of their lower overhead.

There have been plenty of efforts to become the 3D version of the open www, dating back to VRML. As far as I can tell, none of them have been the ticket to riches.

Edited to add: there's nothing wrong with LL branching out to do all sorts of things. But I think they should focus on doing what they do incredibly well before expanding to take on additional challenges. Does anyone think that the SL software already works as well as anyone could ever want it to?