SL5B - a little disappointed

When I thought of SL5B, I didn't think it would be so commercial. A lot of plots I see I think are advertisements for inworld businesses. I suppose it's okay, but when I saw the call for builds, I assumed it was for more artistic and cultural ventures... not commercial. Otherwise, I'd have built something myself. What did you think SL5B was for?

Commercial builds to be honest, any showcase is going to bring to the fore those who can sell their wares.

Personally I'd like to see SL6B have more of a festival feel to it, comedians, music, discussions and of course I don't mind commerce, but there's plenty more to a celebration than advertising.

what little I looked... to me it just seemed a place for SL to showcase the better things of SL to the outside businesses and such that are out there

so... I guess in a word

business and lots of hype and way too much lag

For mostly static displays, it was beautiful. But I wanted to be entertained, engaged and explore. Exploring: Check. Engaging: The kids' fringe one was more engaging.

By the way, museums in which I just stare at things bores the snot out of me. And this seemed more like a museum than fun, but I could have missed the fun sims...

There was a lot of commercialization, but there were a lot of truly great exhibits too. Just like SL and life in general, you've got to go through a lot of stuff you don't care about to find the things that you really connect with.

I'd say it was a bit naive to assume that it wouldn't be heavily inclusive of, if not overwhelmingly dominated by, those looking to promote their in-world businesses. Just like in RL, and as Ciaran said, anything well publicized in SL is going to attract entrepreneurs. And as you said, Cristalle, there's nothing wrong with that.

Art for art's sake is great, but ultimately most people do their artwork for the same reason they do everything else, to make a living. Maybe "reason" isn't the right word, since I'd like to think creative people create because they have a need to do it whether it pays or not. But at the end of the day, if it doesn't pay, most people won't be able to afford to do very much of it, if any at all.

Think about what drives artistic creation in the real world. Those guys at Pixar aren't making 3D animated films for their own personal enjoyment. They're doing it because that's what Pixar is in business to do. Aerosmith hasn't been touring for 35 years just because they like to play. They do it because that's how they make their money. And I think you'd agree even most painters don't just hang their stuff on their own walls and call it a day. They do try to sell their paintings. And how many RL parades have you ever seen that weren't sponsored?

Even art museums, which are perhaps the most supportive institutions there are of art for art's sake, are in business to make money. Nobody works at one for free, after all, and they all have that gift shop in front of the exit.

The potential for commercial success is as much a source of thrust for creativity as any other motivation you could think of, if not more. That's as true in SL as it is in RL, and always will be.


Also, like it or not, agree with it or not, the fact is in-world business is a gigantic slice of what makes SL SL. It's the lifeblood of the culture, really. Most everyone who wears a shirt or drives a car or lives in a house buys it from someone else. Not to give in-world business its due proportion at any celebration of SL's identity would be to deny that identity, to try to pretend SL is something it's not. If you want to represent what SL really is, then commercialism has to be included in no small way.

It's the other way around though...

LL is paying for and creating awareness for the "parade" and letting residents participate for free and instead of creating something for visitors to enjoy they all just walk around with billboards for self-promotion.

SLB was a huge dissapointment to me and nothing like I expected it would be. I'm sorry I wasted my time looking around honestly.

Performance was too bad to enjoy it much. The ever present gray textures had extreme slowness added to it.

Of course, I've seen enough prims with textures on them to choke a horse.

So I went there several times and left fairly quickly.

I found it hard to find things.

I seem to have lost all holiday or special day spirit. I didn't do a thing for the 4th, hardly a thing for Christmas, even birthdays for my kids don't have much impact. So it kind of hard for an SL celebration to stir me up much.

About the commercialism: I was kinda taken aback a few times, too, by exhibits that seemed especially direct about being just an alternate venue for the sales pitch, one landmark-giver away from the vendor boxes. This didn't happen with all the commercial builds, either because I was somehow intrigued by the product, or more often because the build itself was imaginative enough to distract me. But others just made me wonder how the exhibitors described it to the organizing committee in such a way that it read like a contribution.

(I was also thinking almost constantly "My, that's primmy!" )

Numerous times I'd catch myself thinking, "Gee, this is a lot like SecondLife in general. It's like a bunch of the better Mainland sims, kinda squished together." Not sure how it could be otherwise. But to that point, QFT:The exhibits that really worked for me were definitely more than just walking through a gallery--and the ones I didn't get much from were boxes with lots of pictures on the wall. I don't really know good alternatives to sugges for in-world 2D artists and photographers, but it seems a problem. Picking on Mari for an example: the exhibit had an interesting build, so I liked it, but I spent a lot more time looking at the build than at the contents, which presumably was not the intent. Anyway, I don't know how much of this is just my idiosyncratic reaction to static in-world 2D art. FWIW, this is *not* my reaction to RL paintings, so... dunno.

As long as I'm waxing bitchy: Are we about done now with the playing-around-with-scale thing? I've been to Greenies, several times, and not always entirely voluntarily. At SL5B there were the Greenies and at least a half dozen more "Let's get small" exhibits. (Apologies to Steve Martin.) Okay, "Message in a Bottle" is an exception: it has a dwarf flying hippo, so all is forgiven. But to me, climbing clumsily Through an enormous Looking Glass was considerably less fun than hopping Down a relatively life size Rabbit Hole. (YMMV, etc.)

I did not go this year, I don't mind business but this year there was too much politics and just a bad taste from the exclusion of child AV's. A retraction just wasn't enough to help, but there is more to it, I have come full circle with my SL existence. I was an LL cheerleader for a long time and have helped so many learn here in the forums. I was paying back a debt I owed to SL, a blood debt. It is very possible that I would not be here if it was not for this platform, game or whatever else you want to call it. I myself call it a community.

9 years ago after becoming increasingly ill, I was forced to quit working. The loss of one half of the income in our household eventually forced us into bankruptcy and me into severe depression. After months of endless pain and laying in bed watching the world go by, my daughter get older and wishing I could play with her again I nearly ended my life. In an obscene commentary of my life, 9/11 and the death of so many saved my life. I left home and went to Seneca Rocks, West Va. I used to be able an avid rock climber and I was planning on "accidently falling" from the top so my daughter would get the insurance money. When I arrived in the parking lot I heard people talking and then turned on the radio, I heard the news and it shocked me so bad I returned home.

It was still rough for the next few years as I slowly regained my strength. I have done so much in my life to be proud of but my self esteem was soooooo low, I never thought I would regain that and being a shut-in didn't help the situation as freinds left, one by one. Then one day I read an article about SL and downloaded the viewer. Life quickly changed, I now had a body that wasn't ravaged by illness and found people to talk, laugh and cry with. I started to script and found I had a knack for it and then I spent over a year in Aditi, learning how the platform worked and hunting bugs.

I first pestered so many people in the scripting forum asking questions and eventually this changed to me answering questions. I became freinds with many Lindens and was accepted into Dan's Bug Hunter's group. It is impossible to describe how much this helped with my feelings of self worth. I am back in the work force again full time and life has returned to some version of normality.

Others have come to fill my shoes and guide other people learning to script now and I might have logged in maybe a dozen times this year. But my life is full once again and I am also learning other programming languages. I will always be gratefull to SL for the time when I was forced to leave most of humanity behind but now unfortunately I do not have the extra time I once did. It may be pixels and avatars instead of flesh and blood but laughter and memories and jumping up and dancing around the room when I learned something new ARE real and the memories will always be with me.

They say that cancer survivors never look at life the same, they look at it as a gift to be lived, one day at a time and I can attest to that.

Suezanne, after years of not being able to get what I wanted to get for my daughter for her birthday or Christmas, this year I was able to splurge and buy whatever I wanted for her and it was wonderfull. I sincerely hope that one day soon you will wake to find that it is a special day, a day that you are still alive and that your children are the most special children in the whole world. These words of mine may not be the most eloquent and are slightly jumbled. I apologise for that but your words jarred me and finally brought out in the open what I had been trying to figure out how to say here for the last few months. When I sat down to type this response there were tears in my eyes and now I am smiling once again.

I may not be on here as much as I used to but if I am not here then I will be outside taking a walk with my dog and my daughter. SL might be more commercial then it used to be. Linden Labs is changing and growing, sometimes in ways that we may not like. But SL is and will always still be a magical place for the individual to learn and grow.

I didn't go and I figured it was way to promote the FIC's and those business
SL felt worthy with tons of lag.
I have never been to one.
I make Art for Art's sake.
I don't have a expectation that it will ever be popular or earn me money except the
rare L$.

I had a brief fly around, and I did note that so much of it seemed to be commercial advertisement, but more to the point it was very _boring_ commercial advertisement; just replica shopfronts in fact in many cases. Some people did certainly have some excellent and imaginative builds (commercial or not) but they were few and far enough between that after a while I just did not care enough to continue.

After that I popped across to the last day of the NPIRL Garden. There was a little contrast between the two, shall we say.

*hug Jesse and Suezanne*

I have been in some funk too and know a little bit how you feel. Not that far down, but I have a sense of it. That's partly why some of these builds disappoint me. I learned quite a bit at several of these and walking around some of these were really fun. I took a good bit of pictures for ideas. But I had hoped to see more things that would really blow me away. I enjoyed going, I do not regret it. I just wish that there were more things to really make you go hmmm and stretch your consciousness of what you can do with prims.

I agree with the OP, I assumed it would be more artistic and creative rather than just another commercial advertising opportunity. If I had realised it was free advertising for 2 weeks i would have contributed. Also, regarding the quality of the builds, i dont think this is a true representation of the best that SL has to offer. There are some fantistic displays but a good majoroty of the builds I saw were mediocre at best and being someone who zooms in to inspect the build quality of anything of interest, I was appaled at the quality of some of the stuff on display. For future events I think they need to split it into areas, with sims for commercial displays, artistic, inovative, businsses, education etc and also LL should be more specific in exactly what their requirments are for displaying content. Given that this did turn into a commercial opportunity for content creators, allot of the best and most creative deisgners were not represented which is a shame.

FEEL THE PORK!

Hugs Jesse I have been going through something similar but much longer without family,etc.
but I have found things, I found good in humanity, things to inspire and create that is why I keep coming back, keep giving whatever I have left.
But even I have sometimes wonder if there is more for someone like myself that doesn't include as much SL.

Aside from assembling my build, and putting in the required "hosting" time at my display.. I didn't really explore much at all. I saw a couple of builds, and I was really, severely disappointed in what I saw.

I don't think I'd go again.

This wasn't representative of MY Second Life.

As a business owner, I really have to let you know that we are the backbone of the metaverse. If there were no business owners then you would have a bunch of 'Ruths' running around not really capable of doing much but living in big square prim homes. In a world where only the land is supplied then who do you think makes all the content you see around. And of course most of us do it for the cash, myself included. But I also try and bring in new and what I think to be beautiful content to the grid. And yes I make a living doing so.

I really didn't find this years celebration to be any more commercial than the past few. When you put out a call for submissions, the best of the best mind you. You are going to get content creators who have businesses. I would say that some may have applied, but they were all judged based on content and skill level. And I found quite a few exhibits that weren't selling anything.

I didn't mind commercial presence at SL5B at all. After all, not many people have the luxury of investing serious time and effort into content creation without any compensation. The structure of SL is inherently commercial and thus it's only fair for SL business owner to show their presence at the event.

It shouldn't be _only_ business oriented; neither should SL sellers be excluded. Since this was the case, I think overall the representation has been more or less fair.

If you do it for the money then you're not the backbone of the metaverse because without consumers to actually buy things there wouldn't be any businesses at all.

SL would be a whole lot less attractive and crowded without quality content available for purchase but it wouldn't be quite a wasteland without stores, people would just make do with what someone talented makes available or with what they manage to create on their own. But people would still be around because noone is on SL to stay just to do nothing but "buy stuff" since without the social context to give what you buy any meaning or value there's no difference between looking like Ruth or looking good.

An SL without consumers on the other hand would be a wasteland since no business would ever stick around when there's no profit to be made.

The content creator elitist attitude is really undeserved. It's a symbiotic relationship that benefits everyone and neither is "better" than the other. If you have a store you might want to show less contempt for those who make it possible for you to have your business in the first place.

Kinda related: I've been shopping-around the notion that the next one, SL6B, should involve a core of Linden-only content with satellite sims sponsored completely privately--that is, the "Fringe" would pretty much *be* the "Festival"--so as to return a greater measure of control to the residents. But I realize that I first thought that was sensible before SL5B opened, and based on about 15 minutes of exposure to last year's, during which I somehow missed any commercial content altogether.

I certainly agree that commercial exhibits belong in the celebration, and I think just the ground-rule that there be no actual purchase mechanism at the venue is enough constraint: if merchants don't have the instinct for what works, they'll presumably learn.

But now I'm thinking that letting private commercial interests host their own celebration sims would probably be unworkable. If it's to be anything more special than just a tour of their existing stores (or replicas thereof), there'd still have to be some organizing committee with authority to enforce a "no purchases" rule.

Or would the savviest merchants realize that they just had to do something else to get any visitors during such an event? I dunno... the urge to set something for sale would be pretty hard to control, and then I just don't see how to keep it from being same-ol'-same-ol' BAU shopping.

Sorry to ramble like this. I'm trying to convince myself that there's some way to rescue the "fringe as festival" idea for commercial exhibits, but unless merchants are willing to subject their own self-sponsored contributions to some organizers, I'm not seeing it anymore.

You are talking about the chicken and the egg here. What came first, the shops or the customers. Yes of course without customers I would have no business, I am aware of this. As for my elitist 'tude. I think it's very deserved, thank-you very much. I didn't think I was a total ego maniac in my post. I just made it clear that with out content creators in a content free world, what would you have? Not much really. As for my oversized ego, I have several years of formal training at a university level now, all in graphic and digital design, programming as well as computer animation. That's what I do, I am a professional graphic artist. And as for the limited sales and development contracts i do have inworld, pretty much are a slim to nil percentage of my annual income. As I said above, I try and bring things in that I think to be beautiful, create content that I think people would like to see. And I never said I am doing this simply for the cash, in fact I am organized in several charities and donate cash and time pretty much non-stop since I joined a few years back. You can feel free to search out my real world press regarding my work inworld. Some of us deserve to be a little elitist, especially after we gain international press and a few real world design awards for our work. Sure I am a total snob, but I think I have the skills to back that claim.

Being a snob is never something to be proud of. If you were truly secure in your achievements, you wouldn't need to feel snobbish about them, to be honest.

As for content creators, yes they are a critical aspect of SL, but the backbone of SL is the consumer market. Without the huge consumer market, there would be no buyers for your goods, no matter how nicely made. It isn't really a chicken and egg problem -- economically, demand drives the economy, not supply. The key driver is the consumer, not the producer, in any open economic system.

Well according to my friends I have always been a snob. Just being honest here. As for the psychology of my snobbyness, really this is so contrived. I suppose psychologically if I was a truly balanced person living in a utopian society, then perhaps I would be less snobby. This post has gotten so off topic, its truly laughable. The point was that SL5B was far too commercial. Now we have gotten to a psychological profile of what it is to be snobby. If the world truly functioned as you claimed then there would be no need for such things as advertising. Which is mostly the industry I work in. As for the supply and demand of goods, and living in a truly minimalist society. Well we don't, and thinking we do is really quite innocent really. Some of us work very hard to develop our skills, dedicate our lives to this and make huge sacrifices along the way. If we truly were all equal in this respect then we would be living in a communist society. Unfortunately it isn't, it's a consumerist society. People don't live within their means, nor do they buy things based on necessity. I didn't create this, but it surely is true.

What people are failing to agnowledge here is that Linden Labs is a company, a business. I assume they have an overhead of a few million by now. With an international grid of servers and such. Sure the residents are there because they want to be. Myself included. But this is a business as somebody posted above. They are in this business to make a profit. Sure they also care about their customers, but they are customers.

I personally didn't come here to buy things, I came here in 2003 to make my own things and it's been battle ever since, this is why I return and remained.
Not to buy someone else's products. I don't expect the same from others to want my creations either but it is always nice to be appreciated.
Let's face it who makes the money isn't the residents, just small select few and the company.
We are paying them for the canvas and the equipment.

There is no chicken and the egg problem here.

People came to a blank SL and found that it appealed to them for whatever reason and the population grew.

At some point someone created something that someone else thought would be worth something ("something" since there was no US-L$ tie in the beginning) and trade was born, later extending to actual RL profitting when L$ could be exchanged for US$.

Businesses don't pop up in a void and hope consumers will suddenly flock to them, they pop up where there's already a target market.

Here's what you said: "And of course most of us do it for the cash, myself included."

What comes after is just some attempt to make yourself look better, just like an escort tries to convince her potential clients that it's about pleasure rather than money.