Some comments about Land Costs, The Economy, Dreamland, and Calodon

Some comments about Land Costs, The Economy, Dreamland, and Calodon.


I have been around in Second Life now for nearly a year (this Alt is older than he appears -J) and I thought I would share some of my personal views with you all. Only an opinion of course and others are entitled to their own views.

First of all my own preferences. I like creating content, here in Second Life that usually involves building for me as I deem it a great hobby to construct three-dimensional buildings and formatting land to suit various constructions. In my own experience of Second Life I think that a lot of the older citizens share that pleasure.

I am not really into Doom type shoot up games, after all I still have a copy of the original game adapted for my mouse, and if I want I can play it for free.

My thoughts on the economy of Second Life is that the real big issue is “there is no here to there”. In other words anything purchased in Second Life remains in Second Life and is totally separate from our economic everyday life. With one or two rare exceptions (such as Slingo and the odd fashion designer) there is no economic benefit to my First Life buying anything.

I accept that I can take Linden Dollars out of the game/platform, convert them to real dollars, and remit them to me via paypal, but to do that requires others to buy my created products, which in themselves have no benefit to everyday life. In fact this current alt holds nearly 2,000 textures which I paid real US dollars for, and for all intents and purposes they are stuck.

To create anything worthwhile requires permanent holdings of land, for that read computer/web space. I accept a virtual reality environment requires fairly sophisticated software.

Let us debate that for a moment from an independent viewpoint. For this example I will take Dreamland and Caloden. Dreamland consists of around 100 sims/regions and is a complex of joined together private Islands rented from Dreamland by Anshe Chung. Certain additional rules are enforced by Anshe for the benefit of her clients, in which by and large they seem content. A similar situation exists in Calodon, although with 5 connected sims the total area is far less.

Assuming they are both paying the standard costs of sim rental, the US dollar cost to them both is around $20,000 and $1,000 per month. Area wise that is 6,500,000 and 325,000 square meters respectively. What else is (in theory) available to them.

A careful review of various virtual reality software worlds has led me to Active Worlds. There are some differences in software architecture but for the end user (once you grasp the core difference) the result is the same, a almost perfect three dimensional world which can be configured to your taste, and you can both build, design, and theme to your desires. But boy oh boy there is one massive difference and that is US dollar costs. Anshe Chung could possibly be satisfied with a G3000 universe of 9,000,000 square meters allowing 1,000 simultaneous users costing a ONE OFF $9,950 and Desmond Chang a P60 world costing around $700 per annum including hosting. On the hosting point Anshe might choose to either buy/lease her own servers or rent from a reliable commercial source. But in all cases the cost would be minute in comparison to the estimated $220,000 per annum she may be paying at present.

Ah yes you lot may all say, “it’s the economy stupid” “Nowhere else can I both create objects, use them, get rich enjoy virtual sex, and theme to my hearts content”

Not true.

Active Worlds software will enable you to do all that, plus one additional feature not really enabled in Second Life, a perfect link via web browser to anywhere on the Net by a simple script within an object. Indeed I enter Second Life via a slurl from an object in Active Worlds.

That blows the economy idea too, because if I want I can create objects for people to buy both in and out of game by showing the object in game and linking to any external website. So the economy idea is NOT unique to Second Life, it is very easily enabled elsewhere and for a fraction of the cost.

On that point lets look at things from the average Second Life user who owns land. I am told the profile of the average land user is around $25 per month with about 4,000 square meters.

Well where I live is in a universe that is 4 square kilometres. I am building a Castle themed home on a hill overlooking an estuary. I think I am using about a sim in square meters but to be quite frank it does not really matter because I can have as much land as I want within reason. Together with the land I have the use of fast speedboats, cars, hot air balloons, and an aircraft. My cost….about $6 dollars quarterly.

I accept I could be taking a chance on the continued existence of that particular world but after all there are more than 600 different worlds, the largest of which is bigger than the real life California. And if push comes to shove I could buy my own universe say 1 square kilometre with a 20 user allowance for around the same cost as renting 4,000 square meters from Second Life.

And on that point far sighted business people such as Anshe or Desmond may well conclude they might as well be Masters of The Universe, host their own World, create their own economy, and rule their domain. It sure beats the hell out of coping with Governor Lindens intent to sell yet more linden dollars (created from nothing) for hard US dollars.

Perhaps they should hold a snapcount poll with their residents

I am not against Second Life, and respect the technological advances that have enabled what some call the “Net 2”, that is the advance of user/content created sites. But I think they need to rethink their price structures to be more affordable for the average user. I also think that the concept of a “closed ingame economy” has its own risks. All gambling sites for example could be adversely affected if the US Government legislates against the use of credit cards on gambling sites. And don’t tell me Lindens are just game money when I have seen slots with almost no limit stakes.

Finally I hope to keep coming to Second Life and mean no harm. These personal comments are designed to be constructive, I am sure others have their own views

AW does have a massive advantage over SL when it comes to the price of land.

Where I think SL currently wins is:

1. avatars and clothes look much better in SL

2. The constuction system is so easy to get into anyone on a non paying account can learn how to create objects.
In AW while its simple to make buildings out of existing walls/floors etc, making new objects isnt something that is so easy to get into

3. Related to (2), its easy to have animations for your avatar and scripts in your objects in SL. While possible in AW, it isnt so well known or easy for the newbie to get into.
Sitting on furniture seems a new thing in AW so they may come in time.
SL worlds are full of pose items from chairs to exotic bdsm devices to dance machines at clubs or worn on your av

These 3 simple things draw the crowds to SL.

Inventories are also essential for people if they want to take their own objects with them rather than just using shared objects. For years AW didnt have them. I think AW may have inventories now or if they dont, they may get them soon (Stagecoach island has them as well as in world money)

Well said, and thoughtful!

I'm quite familiar with Activeworlds; I haven't been there much since about 1999 if I recall correctly, but there is some *truly* compelling content there. And good people.

One thing not to underestimate with Second Life: the continuing capital investment. 8M and 11M USD respectively, in recent times.

That, and the fact that *any* user can just as easily get their own universe in Activeworlds - why bother to rent, if it's so easy? My biggest draw-off of Caledon residents is, believe it or not - people getting their own sims for 1250 USD and 195 a month. (then they come back to rent/visit because of the community, but that's another thing entirely)



Two ways to look at Second Life:

1) a video game, yeah, cool, let's go to the movies now

2) the cradle of cyberspace itself - the closest so far

SL is maybe not the final be-it-all metaverse, but the lessons learned here will create the Virginia Companies, the Standard Oils, the GM's, Intels, and Googles of 21st century cyberspace.

The rules are different here - in fact, I see people struggling to fit RL ways to this new frontier - few things apply. Rather than learn, and embrace. It's the whuffie, not the $L - trust is our true currency, as ever it is on the edge of forever.


When the next big step forward hits, if it does, I'll be both there *and* here. That's the only sensible course of action there is, yes?


Edit for clarity: Six sims now, as of a couple days ago. 1170 USD a month in tier; including West Trade on the mainland and my account fees that's 1216 USD a month.

The thing with active worlds is it operates on the basis of everyone having their own little world and people being able to play on that. SL on the other hand is a massive world with many users. While anshe can go out and do this then have people subscribe to that AW as far as most of the usablity just cant relate to SL in fact i tried it and tossed it out relatively quick due to those circumstances.

Its not necessarily true that one needs permanant land to make it in SL. In fact there are quite a few basic account holders that would strongly disagree that you need permanant land. AW is a bit off and graphically its just not there =/.

I'm afraid that AW, nice as I'm sure it is, would not suit me at all; the opportunities for scripting and the use of physical objects are far greater in SL, and those are the sorts of things I am interested in. (I have to say that if somebody launched a world where one could script properly and also have a more sophisticated physics engine I would likely defect, but that's not happened yet - SL is a rare gem in that it actively encourages people to play with the underlying nature of the world.)

Just to add that that's not to mention that there is no Mac client for AW either, which would also hamper me.

It would probably cost us roughly 8 mio Yuan (1 mio US$) and, building on some open source projects, would take 18 to 24 months to create our own Second Life quality virtual world in China. I don't think it would be hard to raise the investment money, the government would see national prestige project and do whatever they can to help us and I know at least 5 local companies who would be eager and qualified development partner in joined venture. Converting the SL content would also not be difficult.

But why replicate Linden Lab's work as long as we can do our projects on existing platform? We prefer to create new things and not re-create something that already is there. As long as Linden Lab do their job well and fair and allow us residents to keep grow our businesses in Second Life I see no point. Beside, I would not find it fair. While parents should not eat their children (that means platform provider not abuse power to ruin resident business) I believe that children should also not try eat their parents. I think Linden Lab together with all us resident business and users is nice team for building the Metaverse

To answer the questions in order of posting

Cortex, there have been some very significant upgrades to the AW software recently, that includes being able to choose from a vast range of different Avatars, as well as the ability to create your own. And I fond scripting easy in AW, within 2 days I had created teleport devises to take me anywhere within the AW metaverse as well as URL web link devices including that of accessing SL via AW URL SL/Slurls

As you say inventories are not yet fully enabled in the concept of SL but again via URL webpages the concept can be enabled with of course password-protected objects

Desmond I more or less agree with you, it is NOT the economy it is the community. Indeed it could be quite possible to access AW via a terminal in SL (Anshe has one or two linking to her webpage in Dreamland and The Hub), password protect that universe and charge for that access in Linden Dollars. In short use Second Life as a financial centre for commerce (like perhaps the City of London) and own land elsewhere.

Lina, it is a community that makes anything work but commercial competition runs alongside that. Oh and the AW Gateway world is graphically better than most of SL, the only exeption being Caloden imho

Ordinal, I cannot comment about the Mac client but I found scripting easy once I understood some very helpful webpages. For example see the comments above relating to that. In fact I have just been “mover” enabled in my universe and can already see how to make very interesting things, something I was never able to do in SL

Anshe…your second paragraph (I more or less agree with the first one). I think you should stop thinking of yourself as a tied agent of Second Life and start thinking of yourself as a virtual real estate broker. Why limit yourself if you take my point. We both know communities and themes work so it comes down to a simple question of commercial benefit. After all my own default search engine is Google but there are many who use Yahoo and some using MSN. None is tied to one thing

All revolutions devour their own children. China is no different and expediency is also an issue. For example (and totally unrelated to this SL/AW post) there is some debate in financial circles as to if China would stand aside and allow Japan to solve the North Korea problem.

We adapt or die, especially with technology. The concept of using Second Life as a financially enabling platform using Linden dollars (or pay pal links) to sell virtual land in another universe is especially appealing and even elegant

Perhaps that is one possible future for Second Life, a virtual financial platform.

I look forward to a reply from you all on that one, thanks for your feedback.

Oh yes, one request. Anshe could you post a slurl on your website linking the Dreamland Hub or main Island. Will make it a tad easier to travel between universes. I will look you up sometime