THE VIEW FROM GWYN

SL visionary Gwyneth Llewelyn just published one of her perennial, must-read surveys of SL's present and future.  Among the topics she highlights:

- Linden Lab is profitable (as mentioned in a recent interview with Jeska Linden, though surprisingly, it hasn't yet reached mainstream awareness.)
- The age verification policy fracas.  Gwyn's take:  "A better approach would have been to give residents a choice of company to work with."
- VOIP communication will dominate the world: "Sorry, [chat only] immersionists — you’re out of this game. It’s [VOIP-powered] augmentism from now on that will dominate the shaping of the Metaverse."  I continue to be amazed at Gwyn's bullishness on voice communication.  Since Second Life's existing community overwhelmingly prefers non-voice chat/IM and since new user retention is only 10% and since (generously assume for the sake of argument) that only 10% of that 10% will come in using VOIP, who exactly are all these brave new headset-wearing augmentationists going to be talking with?

Still, disagree with her here and there, you cannot ignore what Gwyn says.  Read it  all here.

Comments

[Brenda Archer]

Gwyn seriously underestimates the resiliency of the existing users, which would be understandable if one believed the noise in the forums was typical.

Many immersionists will continue to do as they have always done, even with the presence of voice around them. I am already hearing this opinion from residents as diverse as some Gorean roleplayers and some genderqueer residents who prefer to be in a avie of the other gender. The level of fragmentation already present in SL community allows everyone to go their own way, and they will.

I head up an active community of several hundred people, most of whom oppose using voice in our meetings, and we're not even "immersionists," just a support group willing to be fully accepting of gender variance.

Verification is a tempest in a teapot. I don't like Aristotle much for their politics, but it's not even a done deal. In my social set, the preference is running quite strongly in support of some form of age verification. So much for that. Ageplay is even more of a tempest in a teapot, blah. Most of us are disgusted by it and glad to see it go.

The changes in the way people handle bans are unlikely to be great. I now trust Banlink because I know of the character and goals of the founders, and because I can see for myself that most of the users also have goals I find agreeable. If the Lindens GOM Banlink, they have not created anything new, just extended it down to a larger pool of people. With in-world mass communication all but impossible, the odds of a gridwide ostracism, using the new system, affecting anyone but a griefer, are tiny.

There will certainly be people who ban willy nilly for no reason, but they will only gain patchy amounts of trust from strangers. Gangs of allies will mutually ostracize each other, while the rest of us remain unaffected. Banlink and the Gorean councils already share ban information and life goes on, with most people not even aware it has happened. No news here. The increase in ban lines for any one user is unlikely to be more than it is now with the proliferation of group land banlines. Privately owned regions with businesses on them have a vested interest in banning no more than is absolutely necessary.

Gwyn's plug for democracy is also unwarranted. It's not necessary to have democracy as a protection against mob rule; if anything, without a standardized rule of law, democracy is the purest form of mob rule. Rule oriented democracy is not possible without levels of authentication we simply don't have yet. Or is that the point? In any case, it's just as likely that organizations of trust will spring up based on ad hoc anarchist consensus or even *gasp* hierarchy. Just like now.

The signers of the Project Open Letter include some of the most creative and technically skilled residents in Second Life. We are not Luddites; we want technology that works well, and we understand and fully support that it takes effort and time to achieve that. Inventories and other everyday features may not be sexy, but giving them their due is far from Luddite or low tech. Indeed, the foundations of the grid are amazing. I fully honor those who labor under the hood to fix existing bugs in Second Life or create resident built workarounds. It's not shiny, but it's noble, and putting it first is not anti-technology. It's valuing the future of Second Life.

[Komuso Tokugawa]

Gwyneth Llewelyn a visionary?

That's about as sensible as calling people Luddites for complaining about the bugs and complete lack of quality control in an Alpha level product marketed as a commercial production system.

It's so typical of back end tech geeks to completely ignore the fact that the end user [ie: paying customers, you know gwyn, the ones that make your company profitable] does not care [and should not have to care] about the development cycles/systems going on under the hood.

All they need to care about is reliability of the service that was sold to them...and so they should.

Of course, if there were "Alpha/Beta testers only need sign up" or "Early Adopters only need apply for entry" or, god forbid, "Caveat emptor" signs plastered on the front page of SL website you could handle the complete instability and bug ridden releases....but, mmm, I can't say I've seen that recently.

Balancing incremental product innovation, core R&D for mid to long term radical product innovation, bug fixing of production system, testing, quality control, recruitment, financing, etc etc...these are the challenges that face Linden Lab on technology and organisational management levels.

Dismissively labeling customers as Luddites is ignorant to the extreme, when the real issue is LL's inability to manage it's own management challenges in pursuit of providing a quality experience to the end user...which is ultimately the objective of any business entity.

[Brace]

Shame on you Gwyn

I can only speak for myself, that is, type for myself - but I'm pretty sure the 100 or so members of the SL Deaf Underground group and their friends and the friends of their friends aren't jumping up and down at the prospect of voice.

philly has been labled a visionary too. And look at where his vision is now.

Hmf!

Lud THIS

[Luth Brodie]

Oh yay more extremly biased "reporting" from Hamlet. Will it ever end? Will he ever figure out what it means to be a reporter?

Just because she's been kissing your a$$ for the last 3 years does not a visonary make.

Things such as:
"You’ll have very high quality items from a handful of professional 3D modellers, and lots of junk (and copied material) from the rest of the residents."
"Sorry, immersionists — you’re out of this game."

Shame on you Hamlet for praising such intollerance.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Oh my, people have really some issues with sarcasm... have a heart, and read between the lines, it should be pretty obvious for everyone who has read anything I've written in the past three years that there was nothing but pure sarcasm, irony, and a lot of cynism on those paragraphs.

Apparently, the literalists were thrown off with the heavy dose of sarcasm — to the extent that I had to add a new blog entry with a disclaimer. Yes, I'm not good at writing humorous pieces, but sarcasm and irony were always my favourite literary devices to get a message across.

I never thought it wouldn't be immediately *obvious* for anyone concerned that I'm obviously claiming the exact opposite, and worried about a SL where intolerance, discrimination, and ostracism — even if indirectly — could become an everyday reality.

In the past I have praised the open-minded and tolerant community inside SL, where nobody really knew who was behind an avatar, and where changing your age/gender/skin colour or even species was at a click of a button. Thus the whole notion of "discriminating" people was absurd — you wouldn't know anyway who was behind the ever-changing avatars, so "discrimination" based on what you *saw* on-screen was a silly concept...

But now, things will be quite different. Non-validated and non-voice-enabled people will be the "oddities". I might claim that these will slowly fade out and disappear, but the truth is, they will not — they just will become a tiny, insignificant minority in their private and remote places. Perhaps one or two million, of course — but in 2010, with about 150 million users, they will be "oddities" in the landscape. They will be mentioned in polite conversation: "oh, the role-players, gender-benders, deaf people... yes, they have their own subcontinent somewhere... they're oddballs and weirdos, but pretty harmless". And that's what the mainstream will *mostly* think.

Sure, not everybody will think like that, and definitely not at the beginning. It'll be a slow change, and mostly a peaceful one — the ones affected harder will be the first to go, of course, but most will stay, and as I posted elsewhere, they will even grow in number (just not so exponentially fast as the rest of SL). We'll have several months of events being posted as "NO VOICE" and they will be very popular; many conferences and discussion groups will still be "No Voice, we need transcripts to post later" and similar things. As well as "Safe environment — no validation needed — come and join us, and have fun together". All these will not only be available for a long time, but in fact, they will even become more numerous — for a while.

Remember that the first large events using voice will be mostly "voice spam" — and people will avoid those like the plague. On the other hand, there will be quite a lot of "exclusive" offers on 'adult' content that will be available for validated avatars. As I've also told a lot of my friends and acquaintances, exploring this new niche markets will, for a long while, be a very lucrative business. Imagine the whole adult content business out there — a very, very tough business, of falling prices and rising quality, all fighting for those millions of customers. Now suddenly the number of both consumers and producers will be 'artificially' lowered due to the validation requirements. The ones willing to go through validation will be the first making cartloads of money — since all validated avatars will now have less suppliers to buy from! The same will apply to mall and club owners that don't have any problems in validating themselves; they will naturally be the immediate focus of the whole resident population that has no issues about validation, and just wants that kind content. If it's limited artificially (like diamonds!), prices will rise, and people will make huge profits — at least during a transition phase.

So, for the overall resident population, what they will see is rather a very different picture:

- a minimum number of people leaving SL. They will barely be noticed, except here and there, on some forum drama, and some sites with huge pictures saying "Closed because of the new Linden Lab policies — enjoy your SL, while I enjoy something else". These will attract a lot of attention during the first weeks, but they will soon be forgotten, as new users come in, and new content producers will quickly fill in the niches left vacant
- a large number of new users coming to SL just *because* of voice. This, as said before, is a known and studied market phenomenon: voice, as a novelty, attracts a LOT of new users (the Preview Grid never had so many people testing it out, just because of voice — well, and sculpties now, of course)
- lots of new events, offering voice or adult content (and obviously both!) will flourish for a long time, and they will compete very hard on this new market opportunity! These will *increase* in number, and take opportunity of the new generation of users that will come to SL *expecting* voice, and having no qualms of getting validated
- business will prosper to the ones willing to do both things (voice and validation). With the new banlists you can create "safe" environments (finally!) and not worry about potential kids that might lurk in the grid. This will also lead to an increase in the economy, which will more than compensate the eventual loss of *some* content creators
- as these become the new loci of interest for the "mainstream" users of SL, it will define the overall trend, fashion, and culture in SL. Voice is in, text is out; adult content, free of the problems of childs having access to it, in a safe environment, will become much more interesting

So will there be a place for "the rest of us"? Of course. As said before, the immersionists are still something between a hundred thousand and two million accounts in SL — still a quite large number, and perfectly able to sustain its own economy. I'm pretty sure that Anshe, if she's reading this, is already planning a whole set of hundreds of sims for the voice-impaired and the ones that refuse validation. In a way, the immersionist ghettoes are *also* a business opportunity — and, tying together likely-minded people, even if "shut off" the rest of the mainstream, means focusing the synergies of likely-minded people, which in turn will produce their own counter-culture — with their own text-based events, their own non-adult content, their own settings and environment.

So, don't get my sarcasm too literally :) I don't think it's "the end of the world", and much less "the end of all immersionists". It just means a relocation of habits and people: reforging acquaintances, selling land from one part of the grid and going to another, shutting up shops with a type of content but opening up new ones on other areas — all the marks of a dynamic and flourishing economy. It'll be a very different landscape in SL, obviously. I'll be very sorry to have to "pack and go" and move elsewhere and start most things from scratch. But for the ones that do not fear the challenge of huge changes, and welcome new opportunities, this will not be *too* bad, just a chance to start afresh and do something worthwhile on our own corner of the world, where we will "enforce" our own lifestyle and don't care about what goes on "mainstream" SL :)

Oh, and we'll still have Cory Linden's Town Hall to attend — for some reason, Cory prefers text to voice THs, and Cory's lovely female avatar is definitely within all parameters of a PG grid :)

[Hamlet Au]

Gwyn, I'll be more convinced of this when I start hearing *your* voice in SL. But why do I think we'd miss something special if you switched to VOIP?

The last time this topic came up, I pointed out that Nick Yee's research suggests only a minority use VOIP regularly in WoW and other MMOs, even though it's heavily supported and necessary for high level play (see below.) If it's not being broadly adopted there, why would it be in SL? And we're not even at one-tenth WoW's numbers, in terms of regular users.

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001519.php?page=2

Of the players who have tried a VoIP tool, about 40% would indicated that they “often” or “always” used a VoIP tool. If we count these users as regular VoIP users, then combining this data with the previous graph, *approximately 30% of all MMO players use a VoIP tool on a regular basis*. [emph. mine]

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

The issue, Hammie, is that SL is not an MMORPG, and not even a MMO, where the socialisation aspects are secondary to the gaming ones. Whereas in SL, although there certainly are "loners", it's mostly a socialisation platform :)

[Hamlet Au]

But Gwyn, There is mostly a socialization platform, and has had integrated VOIP for years, and it's certainly not helping its growth any.