Sim Deathwatch: IBM Closing Second Life Exhibition Art Sims Next Month, Continuing Larger SL Withdrawal by Big Blue

Last vestiges of an era: IBM's Exhibition Sandbox

IBM just announced that it will remove its three "Exhibition" sims from Second Life on May 1st, continuing a larger withdrawal from SL that began in earnest last year. Once Second Life's largest corporate booster, for several years IBM maintained a large virtual campus in SL comprised of dozens of sims which even had its own employee avatar guidelines, and in its heyday, was the site of an international labor protest. Without fanfare (or any public announcement I'm aware of), however, that campus was closed in early 2010. As of this writing, I can only find less than 20 IBM-branded sims in Second Life, and most of them seem to be associated with specific department projects or regional divisions (for example, Italy and Singapore.)

IBM's Exhibition sandboxes are (or soon, were) community spaces which encouraged building by non-IBM staffers. Under the aegis of IBM Design Researcher Andrew Sempere (Tezcatlipoca Bisiani in SL), they played host to some of the most talented artists in SL, chief among them Bryn Oh. It's a credit to him, I believe, that these spaces have remained in SL so long after IBM began withdrawing most of its presence from Second Life. Now, however, the artists who have made a place for their Second Life work on IBM's land will need to find another patron who can host their virtual creativity.

I received a full official statement from Andrew a few hours ago (who I should by way of full disclosure, is a pal.) Read it all after the break:

"Since 2006, IBM has maintained a presence in Second Life which has included the venerable IBM 6 sandbox, a home and training ground for some of the grids most talented builders, both IBMers and non IBMers. Through the operation of these servers, IBM has recognized that community building and social content creation are a key part of the value of virtual worlds. With regret we will be closing the IBM Exhibition Space and Sandbox on May 1st, 2011.

"We have had an excellent run and are incredibly proud to have been able to bring you several years of some of the best sim-scale artworks the grid has to offer. The artists we have hosted have gone on to win government grants, brought thousands of visitors to Second Life and helped to raise the profile of virtual artwork for everyone. We wish all of our alumni and visitors continued success in all the endeavors."

Hat tip: NWN arts columnist ColeMarie Soleil.

7:20PM: Bumped up due to newsworthiness.

Comments

[Cole Marie]

Tez is the man. I wish him success in everything else he does XD

[Takaji]

Sad to see it go! Tez-club forever.

[Scott]

DOOOMED

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

You have this "deathwatch" thing down to an art. I dig the Hardboiled/Noir meme: Rugged, somewhat disheveled Hamlet 2.0 avie posing against doomed virtual landscape.

Cue the Coleman Hawkins and the cigarette smoke...

"The fake sun was going down one last time over Numbakulla and my environment editor was set to 'Sailor's Delight,' named like the sort of virtual nightclub where she used to go before the world began to fall apart.

I rubber-banded down a laggy dead-end street, just like all the others a mass of gray textures in a world as gray as a dowager's hairbrush, and I thought of all the other lost gray places in this city of lost angels...etc."

But yes, it is sad to see these dominoes fall.

[Ciaran Laval]

I can recall Valleywag putting Second Life as a whole on Deathwatch, how's Valleywag doing these days?

This deathwatch series is incredibly negative, IBM cutback a while ago, the sandbox group closed enrolment a while back, as your friend says, they've had a good run.

[Pathfinder]

The moving finger writes,
and having writ, moves on.

[AldoManutio Abruzzo]

FULL DISCLOSURE: One of my compositions was used by a visual artist as part of an interactive installation on one of the IBM Exhibition SIMS.

And what of the art that will soon be gone, never to be seen again...unless IBM, of course, has undertaken a program to archive and preserve what was created?

Historically, IBM has been a surprisingly strong corporate sponsor of the arts.

It's very distressingly to think that 5 years of creations are so much ephemera.

[Ener Hax]

well IBM was very good to Linden Lab and tossed them millions of their own money. sad to see them go, they had nice builds

[Hamlet Au]

OMFG Iggy.

"I can recall Valleywag putting Second Life as a whole on Deathwatch, how's Valleywag doing these days?"

Valleywag was folded back into Gawker during the collapse of the last tech bubble, and since then, the network has been expanding like crazy in other directions, adding new sites, and getting upwards of 250 million pageviews A MONTH. Last December, the Wall Street Journal valued it at $240M. Right now Linden Lab is worth roughly $220M, according to Sharepost.

[David Cartier]

It could be mentioned that IBM will continue to have a lot of sims; just not in Second Life. IBM have taken the technology and run with it, where Linden Lab seemingly refuses to do so. Several hundred avatars can be on an IBM sim, concurrently, with very little latency or lag. It would be great if Linden Lab would license and incorporate the technical advances that allow this. Live events and virtual meetings would make a whole lot more sense.

[Jon Brouchoud]

This post could have read "After 5 years, IBM *still* maintains more than 20 sims in Second Life!"

Even if they've adjusted their sim holdings, they clearly perceive a time-tested and enduring value from their presence in SL. I'd love to know more about that...

Also, I wonder how many sims they've grown into over on their private SL Enterprise installation(s)? (oh yes they do..) Plus, they've made some pretty serious plays into OpenSim, which is relevant to your audience and this story, I think.

The real story isn't that corporate presence has dwindled in the SL/opensim metaverse, but that it's still growing and it went back under the radar some time ago. Just ask a random sample of active solution providers if they're bound by NDA on any of their projects.

For a short time, the PR and marketing bang of a press release about a sim in SL vs. keeping it secret was a worthwhile trade-off, no matter how flimsy the build was. But that PR wave was a short-lived anomaly, and we've now moved back to the more industry standard practice of keep projects like this quiet and off the public radar. I don't think we should be surprised or alarmed by that.

Some of the most exciting and innovative work is still being done in SL. They're just not making a big noise about it anymore.

[Kimberly Rufer-Bach]

What Jon said.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Fully agree with Jon as well. It is amazing they still have such a presence after all their independent experimentation.