Content Monopoly

I don't think that's true. Amongst other things, they might be right, in which case it isn't the sense of defeat that's stopping them, but the reality that it is indeed too hard.

But moreover the fear is that in order to keep its unique competitive advantage, SL needs to be enabling people to create, and that means enabling them psychologically too. (Notice I did say enabling them, not forcing them.) If it can't do that, then from the point of view of those users who are blocked (for any reason, including psychology) SL is just the same as the purely-social worlds like IMVU or Kaneva, but with a lot of extra technical difficulties caused by a pervasive user content and editing system - which those users have no stake in.

Now, maybe, it can do well in that environment. But we don't know that. The danger is that someday a virtual world could set up which offers all of SL's functionality _except_ free content creation, is technically superior as a result (no need to stream content so no lag), and develops a community of a similar strength to LL's. At that moment, if too many users are disconnected from SL's unique advantage - content creation - then LL will have two choices, either carry on driving along the way they're going and fall off a cliff when the consumer base quits, or slam on the brakes and make an abrupt turn which will betray all kinds of people's trust in LL. Neither of these would be a good thing! So we have to try and avoid that situation entirely and trying to keep people interested in creation is the only way I can think of, to do that.

Well, I am certainly not arguing we shouldn't keep people interested in content creation. But saying there can be such a thing as a psychological monopoly is just invalid. It's good to keep in mind that there are far more people in SL who have no inclination to make anything, than there are those desiring to build. And if a competitor to LL comes along and makes a better platform, I think *everyone* is going to jump ship, and fast. However, I don't see that coming anytime soon, and LL *is* heading in the right direction. H4 and Mono alone are going to be huge boons to SL's stability and usability. And those are only the tip of the iceberg...

I believe it was you that mentioned about Amethyst collars, and how you didn't go ahead with your plan to make a competing product because you felt it would be a waste. It wasn't Amethyst that kept you from doing that, it was you! I felt a similar way, but went ahead and created a competing collar despite the fact there are at least 6 other major brands out there. You know what, the collar I sell is doing fantastic, and is now one of the top 3 collars in SL. Where is that monopoly? I don't see it. Anyone is free to enter the market, it's up to them. If you create a better product, or do as Desmond's rules state, and get your product into people's heads, you can do just as well.

Utterly fascinating! How did I miss all this... though it seems really blatantly awful...

* * * * *

RE: a better platform coming along: I don't think everyone will jump ship. Like Prok was saying in his blog recently, Second Life is more than regions. It's the business relationships, the friends, all that.

Sure, a lot of people may leave. But in doing so, well, suddenly the market got that much sweeter for those who hang on.

Soon every content creator that sticks around is a bigger fish in a small pond. Example: There.com, post-2004.

I have to ask: why do people stick around Habbo hotel, There, TSO, Activeworlds and places like that? Second Life is by far the richer, better platform. C'mon, seriously, all debates aside, the SL grid pwns. But they do stay in places like that.

It's because the world is about a whole lot more than platform. Honestly, I can see a day when many are drawn off, but on that day I expect Caledon to still be proudly flying its flag... here.

Not in foolish defence of a 'worse platform' - but in defence of all that we are, as a network of friends and history that goes far deeper. Ask the 85 million people still at Habbo hotel why they aren't all on Second Life... I'll bet you'll hear something similar.

lol

make sure you have a nice cover picture

I have a monopoly on un-released products.

Okay, actually I probably don't.

You're right. (ack, did I actually say that? )

just for you Desmond....
The cannon and non cannon list, with sources... (if you can't impress them with intelligence, baffle them with bullshit)
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Ferengi_Rules_of_Acquisition

Darien, yeah, I been there - you get into an idea from an angle, and get so focused it's easy to miss the big picture - happens to me a lot. Along the lines of winning a battle only to hear: "I'm in ur base killin ur dudes" ... but thankfully, there's no such thing as a 'forum score' - yay!

I drew more goofy conclusions here before 2004 ended, than most people have considered... the only one I missed was 'we are gonna exceed 10 million signups in 2007.'

Those Ferengi rules are ruthless! I shudder to think that they might actually *work*...

Actually Grendel's does sell furry avatars, they're just not the cute and cuddly type. A furry is any animal with humanoid traits. There are also other people to get non-anthro dragons from, myself included. Then there are the anthro dragons. My point is that the above companies are at the top, yes, but they do have competition, and a lot of it. The beauty of content competition is that no two people will make the same thing the same way.

For the OP: I deal in full animal avatar packages, more often refered to simply as furry avatars. I make cats and foxes and dragons, same as the fifty zillion other avatar creators out there. But they still sell. The reason is that this is an art form, so no two are ever alike. Sure Luskwood has been around the longest, but if someone doesn't care for the unique Luskwood style, they may instead opt for the same species from Ninja Weasel Studios, or Lost Creatures, or Magican Productions, because they all bring different things to the table. Among avatars at least, the market is very healthy. Competitors really don't even see each other as competitors, it's not uncommon for methods and tips to be shared. Even complete scripts are shared. Recently for instance, it has become standard for avatars to open their mouths and use a conversing animation when the wearer types or uses voice chat. Even I don't know how it got started, but the basic method is common knowledge now, there's even an open source script and animation available, and at least half the new avatars released use it, with no animosity amongst the creators.

Some random tidbits for ya.

Well the Example of the XCite monopoly is only holding because of the ability to keep their protocol closed.
But sooner or later someone will figure it out and Xcite won't be able to keep the control anymore.
The other possibility is that peoples progressively turn over to more open systems where they aren't trapped inside.

It's pretty much a mirror of the little wars in the IT sector that happen in real life.

It's difficult but there's a lot of difficulty with saying it's invalid too. Because if you say a monopoly can't be psychological, then essentially you're saying that all human judgment must be removed from the decision if something is a monopoly or not (because psychology will inevitably affect any human judgments made). So that for instance, nobody could claim in court that another business was a monopoly unless they had actually tried to compete with them, spending all the wasted resources involved. If they claim it's a monopoly because of the judgment of an expert market analyst, then maybe the analyst was just feeling defeatist.



I do understand that many people have no inclination to make anything, but at least some do and hide it, and at least some do not like having that inclination. I mean, the problem is that many young adults around 18-30 have only just recently been barraged with anti-creative stimulus, usually along the lines of "you need talent to do that and if you had talent you'd already be doing it". I know that this is quietly a societal thing, to stop the situation where 10,000 people try to be rock stars, maybe society only needs about 100 rock stars to satisfy demand, and then society has lost all the other work those 9900 people could have been doing in those years they were trying.

And my concern isn't about Second Life is a platform. I know that Second Life, as in the product made by Linden Labs, is a platform. But Second Life, as in the total experience delivered to an end-user - the sum total of all of the user created content plus LL's infrastructure - isn't a platform any more. (If it was, people with no inclination to build would have no interest in it.) SL-total-enduser-experience is an entertainment product. The idea that SL is a platform where you can just build anything you like and have it work well has already been shown to be wrong by the closure of the multiple corporate advertising islands that were build on that basis; on the other hand CSI did well because it essentially built a computer game.

That's my big concern. Not that SL is outcompeted as a platform, but that it's outcompeted as an end-user experience, thus leaving no end users interested in the products on the SL platform, and consequently the platform greatly reduced in utility.

We can say that well, all SL needs to do is to improve the technical quality of the platform and then content creators will do the rest, but there's two problems with that - first, that can't change the social model of SL (which can make the difference, Socialotron or text-based MUSH games are technically inferior to SL but some people still prefer them). Second, that as long as SL has to keep making the technical tradeoffs required to allow any user to create content at any time, any virtual world that doesn't have to do those will have an inbuilt technical advantage. So if free content creation stops being part of the end-user experience of SL, then it follows that another world could offer the same end-user experience as SL without having free content creation, and not needing to have that would then make their technical development easier for them by a huge factor.

And if we get to a state where 70-80% of the end-user experience of SL is being delivered as a result of the work of a number users which is less than the number of people that another virtual world company could reasonably just hire as their creative staff then that becomes a huge risk.



Well, um, all that means is that you're in the monopoly now, and are part of the system that creates the same circumstances I was in. The effect of the environment on human decision making is like the butterfly which flaps its wings and creates a typhoon, but in Second Life, if that butterfly flaps its wings it's because a human scripted it to.



And that's exactly the problem. As you've observed above, I wasn't free to enter the market, precisely because it WAS up to me. If it had not been up to me then maybe I would have been able to do it.

We're getting into a philosophical paradox here which comes down to the issue between positive and negative freedom. "Positive Freedom" is the ability to realize your potentials and desires, "Negative Freedom" means not being forced to do things. If a child decides that they want to be a rocket scientist, it isn't breaking their freedom to force them to go to school, because they'll need to do that in order to become a rocket scientist and they decided of their own free will that being a rocket scientist was what they wanted to do. (Note that for positive freedom the action still has to spring from the child's initial free decision, it wouldn't apply if the parents were forcing the child to go to school purely because the parents wanted them to while the child had no ambitions requiring education.) I can't help feel that SL could do with doing that a little more.

I make unique hand drawn textures but I don't sell them because probably the psychological aspects of trying to do business here or anywhere else.
Lot of my friends say I should sell my work.
Yet when if I do furniture for example I often feel intimidated because I see others who have unique animations, poses and fancy scripted menus for their own furniture.
I have thought long and hard about whether to just release textures for enough to continue making them and not even bother with the usual things texture artist often say when selling textures to put myself in different spot as far as who can use textures...
but I don't know.
Either way person who going to make the most money usually has more skills then myself but I will continue to create for love of it regardless if anyone sees my work.

And as I've mentioned above.. I believe that reading the law strictly, that's a cartel. (Not that I'm saying this should be stopped - I think that in this case the law is wrong!)

Also, is the script truly open source (ie, on a public website somewhere?)

I only know the dictionary definition of a cartel, so I can't comment on that. As for the talk jaw stuff, you can't put an animation on a website (you can put the .bvh on a website, but you still have to figure out the upload parameters), so no, not that I'm aware of. You can get it from the creator, or just copy it out of an avatar that uses it. Shared things like that have full permissions.

I am of the opinion that the threshold at which something should be considered a monopoly is lower in SL than it is in RL.

"Why is that, Ordinal?" I hear you ask. Well, what, really, is the point of monopoly regulations in RL? Surely to stop a particular industry from stagnating, to stop a particular provider being able to dominate a market based not on the idea that its products are somehow the best possible, but because of history and market penetration and all that sort of thing. In other words it is a measure to try to encourage new development.

Because of the nature of SL, where people become creators with limited amounts of time available to them to work on things, and often as their second or third or fourth job (if they consider it a job at all) the level at which they will become discouraged and just not bother is a lot lower. It's all very well saying that they _could_ compete but then anyone _could_ compete with Microsoft, or get together the funds to install cable to compete with <insert local monopoly cable company> in an area, or build their own water distribution system to compete with <insert local monopoly water provider>, and so on. But society recognises that there is a limit as to how far people will reasonably go, and once things go beyond that limit, we have a monopoly.

That reasonable limit is, for the reasons that I mention, lower in SL than it is in RL. Therefore, yes, I would say that Xcite should publish an open API; perhaps other systems such as DCS2 should too.