Recently virtual community visionary Howard Rheingold described Second Life users as "a tiny cult following", which he clearly didn't mean pejoratively (Howard's an early supporter of SL), but in the sense that it's still relatively small, and the platform awaits killer apps that will grow the user base into "a small cyber subculture." Still, the term provoked Roland Legrand of Mixed Realities to make this observation:
I must admit, sometimes I clearly feel the cult-like aspects – especially when avatars react [against] people who don’t believe in Second Life or in virtual worlds in general. When such people eventually change their position and “admit” there is value in Second Life, there is joy in the Second Life communities which can only be compared to the joy of the faithful for a conversion.
And I see some resonance in that admission too. To me, it's less important that the uninitiated embrace and "convert" to Second Life (especially when the entry barriers are still so high), than they understand the full measure of possibilities it affords now. What's your take on Roland's reaction? Image from this Rheingold video presentation.
Here's a simple challenge for fellow Second Life bloggers. Here are the most recent economic numbers for in-world spending, as compared to previous quarters, going back to 2006:
In this chart, where is the evidence that in-world content theft is having a substantial impact on the Second Life economy? Recall that the first instance of the CopyBot, often blamed for the most damaging forms of content theft, was in November 2006. Since then, however, user-to-user L$ transactions have increased, often extremely so. Recall also that the number of Residents who spend L$ in-world has remained relatively stable since last year, at around 450K. (It was roughly 300K in 2007.) And while the number of consumers hasn't significantly increased, total transactions between them very much has. If content theft increased, wouldn't consumer spending decrease?
Once again, this is only a challenge regarding the economic impact of content theft. The moral and social impact of such theft, as seen in a recent, mysterious incident reported by Shopping Cart Disco, has a terrible substance of its own. But looking at the broader macro picture, where is evidence of the damage?
Surely I'm missing something obvious; please tell me what.
Update, 9:02am: Typepad seems to be having trouble enabling Comments today, working on that now. SL bloggers, if you post replies on your own blog, be sure to send a Trackback to this post.
Update 2, 11:40am: Comments seem to be working now. If you have trouble, let me know via "Hamlet Au" in SL or via email to hamlet at secondlife dot com.
I have made a point of only blogging the items that I like, and that allows me to say really nice things about them. And for the most part, the majority of fashion bloggers are the same. We pick what we like and we say nice things. But what if we didn't?
... What if I blogged everything I was given, even if I didn't like it? And what if I SAID I didn't like it? What if I pointed out all the bad seams, over-pixelated hems, bad prim work, messed up sculpties? ... Nah. I don't think the blogosphere is ready for a fashion blog like that.
I sense a survey question in there just dying to get asked. And so I will: If you read SL fashion blogs, would you read one that was critical of poorly created designs? Answer here, then discuss below:
Danny Nolan, breast physics coder; inset, the Emerald menu option he pioneered
The rise and fall of a female breast may seem like the most basic thing, but as it turns out, trying to simulate it in a virtual world is not all that easy. So when Danny Nolan and other programmers tried to add realistic physics to avatar breasts as a feature in Emerald, an open source Second Life viewer, they were sometimes stymied in strange ways. In one trial, adjusting the breast physics seemed to create spikes that burst out of a test avatar. Other times, the bouncing motion of the breasts somehow made a giant hole where the chest should be. (A bug the Emerald team is still trying to fix.)
The thing is, when the human breast meets Newtonian mechanics (or a virtual simulation of same), it "involves quite a bit of math," as Emerald lead developer Skills Hak puts it. "We were discussing the math behind it almost daily, and fixed a lot of bugs it created." (Trigonometry was brought to bear.) But Emerald's breast physics worked sufficiently well that they were added last week to the viewer latest build.
How does it work? In actuality, a limited form of breast physics already exists in Second Life, but it's only available in the avatar adjustment menu, as a "buoyancy" option. "I simply did the math in calculating the physics itself... to simply visually show it," Danny Nolan explains.
"It's basically just modifying the breast buoyancy slider in realtime, fully client-side," as Ms. Hak puts it. That means the breast physics are only viewable to someone who's running Second Life with the Emerald viewer, and has enabled that option. From the world's point of view, however, the breasts have not changed. (Which suggests a unique metaverse twist to the old philosophical conundrum: If a virtual bosom heaves in a Second Life forest, but only you see it on your monitor, does it actually make a jiggle?)
Emerald was already the most popular third party SL viewer before the breast augmentation, but since it was added last week, it's been in even higher demand: "Downloads for our latest release are over 50,000 already," Skills Hak tells me. "We switched over to hosting at google-code in the meantime though (because people were literally DDOS-ing our server with download requests) so it might be well even more." With roughly 750,000 active users, that means about 6% of the Second Life population now has access to Mr. Nolan's breast enhancement. Or to put it another way, if you have a female avatar, and you're at a Second Life event with 16 other Residents, chances are that one of them is able to watch your bosom bounce in a way you may not have intended.
Which suggests a problem that often happens with the social contract of Second Life, when technical ability crashes up against user consent. In this case, what if you have a female avatar, and you don't particularly like people watching your virtual breasts moving in a way you didn't choose?
[I]n these practical times I can’t help thinking that one by one we’re losing the voices of the visionaries who came here first, who saw that green light which beckoned across the waves: the ones who could stir us not with practicalities but with visions that didn’t quite make sense or were somehow blurry and ill-defined, but deeply compelling nonetheless. Because if the visionaries move on, if all we’re left with are practicalities and business avatars and dress codes, then those deep and mysterious places may become increasingly hard to find.
The literary geek in me calls shenanigans to the Jay Gatsby analogy, since Fitzgerald's character wasn't a utopian visionary, like Philip, but another kind of American archetype: the dedicated rags-to-riches capitalist, who barges his way into the upper class, in this case mostly to impress a rich dame. (Philip was already wealthy from his dot com days as Real's CTO, when he started Second Life.) However, Dusan's basic concern is a valid one, especially with the Lindens and developers pushing for enterprise uses of SL, and companies even talking "dress codes" for avatars.
My take, for what it's worth, is this is ultimately a misplaced worry in at least several ways. Second Life will only become successful as a business platform when and if it achieves mass adoption -- and the only reason virtual worlds in general enjoy a mass market now is because they inspire fun and imagination. And in any case, it's not a zero-sum game; it's perfectly possible to have a thriving Second Life that contains both practical business solutions and floating castles in the sky. (That's true of the web, why wouldn't it be so with the 3D internet?) Finally, while Philip's vision for Second Life was essential in the beginning, SL has since grown far beyond what he imagined, just as he hoped. No doubt his new business (whatever it is) will inspire new directions in all of us, but until then, I think it's safe to say the world will keep evolving just fine. What's your take?
Remember jokay Wollongong, the Australian professor whose Second Life education wiki was hit by a Linden trademark infringement notice last week? Here's a notable post-script to her story: "Rather than focussing on the negative aspects of recent events," she announced last Sunday, "I have created a new jokaydia Outpost on Reaction Grid as a next step in our virtual worlds explorations and hopefully the first in a series of outposts across a number of platforms!" Reaction Grid is, of course, an education-centric virtual world running on the OpenSimuator platform, which is in turn an open source offshoot of Second Life. This isn't a full departure from SL, Professor Wollongong insists. "I love Second Life and continue to be passionate about virtual worlds (of all flavours) in education," she says, but adds, "this whole [trademark] episode has offered us some great learning opportunites and we are using it as chance to diversify."
A similar reaction occurred in the wake of last year's OpenSpaces dispute, with numerous Residents loudly expressing their interest in OpenSim. (Though judging by user numbers afterward, few of them actually quit SL.) Still, I wonder if this phenomenon needs its own jargon. Here's a try:
SLOPEN: When a dispute or controversy in Second Life causes a Resident to publicly express active interest in moving some or all metaverse activity to OpenSim (though not necessarily a full commitment.) Usage example: "I'm not sure I can cover next month's land tier, but I'm SLOPEN to other options."
Responding to my challenge to profile great undiscovered personalities of Second Life, Misa Delight has an informative Q&A with Zayn Till, founder of Raglan Shire, a large SL community who's inhabitants are very small. Tinies, in fact, those damn adorable avatars roughly the size of your hand. For a time, as it turns out, Till had what he calls a "biggie human Ken doll avatar", but that was when he was an SL real estate baron, "it was a job and I wanted more silliness." Enter Till into Raglan Shire as tiny fluffy bunny. Read the rest of the interview here.
There's still many great, under-appreciated personalities to write about: here's the full list. When you've written a profile, post the URL there!
What you're looking at above is from an astounding compilation: It's the top twenty types of Resident violations of Community Standards/Terms of Service rules, as noted on the Lindens' Incident Report page. It covers virtual crimes from June 2007 up to now, with the total number of each kind counted above right. We have this information thanks to SL analyst Tyche Shepherd, and an anonymous volunteer. "I have a program which crawls the Incident Report page and stores the results in a database," Tyche tells me. "A lot of the back data came from someone who has been collecting the RSS feed from that page back to June 07."
Tyche has the full results with exhaustively compiled graphs available on the SL Universe community forum, and they count a total of 21,665 published incidents over a period of just over two years. I'd estimate about two-three million people have been in Second Life during that time frame, which means less than 1% the total user base for that period perpetrated these metaverse misdemeanors and felonies. As you can see above, most of the common violations fall in the garden variety griefer category; no surprise there. What is surprising, especially given recent controversies, is how few content theft-related incidents were reported. You have to scroll down for those:
Copyright Infringement 17
Terms of Service: Trademark Violation 14
Failure to Comply with Intellectual Property Notification 1
So over two years, just a few dozen content theft violations among tens of thousands. Several possible interpretations to that sparse number: Content theft incidents are under-reported, or under-enforced. Or, of course, content theft as an official, community-reported and Linden-enforced violation, are relatively rare.
Other interesting data points: Ageplay violations, a controversy which exploded in 2007, are also extremely rare: 182 total. Incidents of Camping Chairs, a more recent controversy, rarer still: 63. Strangest incident category: "Second Life: Respect, Pets 5". (Sion chicken slaughter, perhaps.) What's your read on this data?
With the latest build of the Snowglobe SL viewer, the goal of making Second Life a truly international online society which transcends national borders is significantly closer to being realized: Released last week, Snowglobe 1.2.0.2680 comes embedded with a system that automatically translates incoming and outgoing text into multiple languages of your choice. (Above, I'm at the famed Kowloon's Gate, developed by a Tokyo studio, communicating bilingually in Japanese and English.) The translate process happens almost immediately (at least in Japanese).
You can get Snowglobe version 1.2.0.2680 here -- it's still a test release, so user beware. I also had a difficult time installing it over the existing version of Snowglobe already on my laptop, so it took a few restarts before the option in Preferences > Text Chat appeared. Not sure on the quality of translation, so I encourage bilingual to give it a test drive. Hat tip: Robins Hermano.
