Gods & Devils: Wired UK's Rowland Manthorpe on What He Learned by Writing About Sansar, High Fidelity... and Palmer Luckey's Trump Support

Wired UK has a new long and excellent profile of Philip Rosedale, High Fidelity, and Project Sansar by Rowland Manthorpe, deeply delving into the evolution of virtual worlds and what drives them. NWN readers in particular will enjoy finding out about the "frenemy" competition between Philip and Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, their deeply differing view of their competing products, and for that matter, the salty sailor tongue of Commodore Altberg.("'You install a server,' Alterg says incredulously [of High Fidelity]. 'Who the fuck installs servers?'") I spoke at length with Rowland for the article, and having written it, he tells me, he now has a lot to think about:

"For me this was really a piece about dreams," Rowland tells me. "First, because dreams define companies. When I was reporting the piece I was struck again and again by the contrast between Philip Rosedale and Ebbe Altberg. Philip is motivated by a dream, a vision; Ebbe wants to give users what they want. Neither approach is right, but it really shapes what they're producing. It also shapes the risks: Philip may be trying to do much, Ebbe may end up being a bit boring and commercial. We'll see which approach proves correct (if at all).

"Second, and more importantly, this piece was about dreams because virtual reality is the place where dreams come true. That's how Philip Rosedale thinks of it: it's the place where we can do whatever we want, be whoever we want, call structure into being with a wave of the hand. It's not too much of a stretch to say that it's the place where we become gods."

I talked with Rowland back in June, and since that time, the VR world was shaken by Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey being exposed as a supporter of a pro-Trump group associated with Reddit's noxious alt-right fan club for Trump. Unsurprisingly, that seriously impacted Rowland's thoughts about the final story:

"I admire Philip's vision enormously," as Rowland puts it. "But my view of this changed after it emerged that Palmer Luckey is a shitpost-funding racist. I happened to speak to him three days before that emerged. It did make me think about wanting to be a god, i.e. perfect vs wanting to embrace this world with all its imperfections. This is still a thought in development – but I do wonder whether, if VR does get as big as many people expect, this is a conflict we'll see more of down the line."

As you might expect, on this I tend to think Rowland's right.

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[JC]

High Fidelity's investors like its ambition. "Every now and then there is a longer-term, riskier but bigger-vision bet that has a hundred-billion potential, and this is clearly one of them," says Steve Hall, managing director of Vulcan Capital, the lead investor in its $11 million Series B round.

Still, Rosedale is certain a solution will arrive: "Somebody's going to figure out how to build rapidly in here. Once they do that, the sky's the limit."

Maybe it would be a better bet then Closed-Sourced Sansar or Pilotless Opensimulator.

[Amanda Dallin]

Wired has it's chronology a bit off.
"Then, in 2006, Second Life stopped growing."
No. SL took off in 2006. When I started SL in Nov. 2006 there was about 10 or 12k concurency. It grew very fast then next 6 months too a year.

[inthisboxputaname]

Gods? Oh, I can imagine the book of Genesis with "rubber banding," "lag," and trying to ban all of the Devils alts from Garden of Eden and that darn snake avatar STILL gets in with another account and rez's right in at the tree of knowledge (128,128,21) darn it. Not to mention sim crashes, Adem getting Ruthed. Oh, yes we are such Gods in virtual reality lol. Noa's Teleport, oh wow this can go on and on. Don't look back at Zindra, or you avatar will rez with the default "Salt_001" texture and your av will be frozen AND perma-banned.

Wow it could go on, a whole bible wrote with substitution of SL and virtual world related stuff. It's too easy lol.

[inthisboxputaname]

Oh, SL may have technically peaked around 2006 because there was a hypothesis that bots really took off, plus alt accounts where not as easy to get (I think they cost some money) and until they started doing something about bots there wasn't really a true concurrency. Pretty sure it was somewhere between 2006-2011 though.

Even counting sims isn't the same, the population socialized differently over the years based on the pyschodemographic/demographics, buzz factor, laws (gambling online for instance), and a few other factors that lead to more sims with fewer avatars per sim.

So, much more study and numbers subtracted etc. to really figure this out. Maybe "some time before the first decade of the new millenium" is a better phrase...yes, I should be a journalist. Yup, my skills here are wasted. Ha, yeah sure. :-p

[sirhc deSantis]

'Who the fuck installs servers?' :) Indeed. So if you have a semi decent desktop and feel like getting something right now that you can play with thats very familiar...

With all of OpenSims faults, nss there are several, you can now grab a copy of an all in one easy to set up HyperGrid ready standalone sim (with a boatload of content and able to add more sims) from Mister Frederix over at Outworldz and voila - up and running in less than an hour (hey I am slow) and Lady of all you survey and from it the HGrid is your mollusc of choice, if you are in to that sort of purportedly edible thing.
And all this on a 7 year old 32 bit win 7 box to boot (boot it still does too). In 2 gig ram and a dodgy set of elderly drives.
And you can get it - right now. Complete with an easier to use viewer. And no need to spend a single brass margaret on hosting etc.

[JohnC]

Interesting article if only for what it reveals about these two diverse characters.
I get this feeling of wanting to say "Far out man, far out" after everything Rosdale says.
You can almost picture the childlike look of dreamy wonderment on his face as he waves his arms in a big childish circular gesture to express “As big as Earth and Beyond”, shades of a Buzz Lightyear fan beaming through.
His description of the main SL user base is pretty accurate IMHO, but he still does not see that it will be these exact same people once again who will populate any long term VR worlds that might come into existence in the future, and for exactly the same reasons.
Him and the rest of the VR producers still think that ordinary people are going to suddenly become completely different beings, just because VR is so “amazing”

Altberg on the other hand has no airy fairy notions, Fuck me no, excuse my Anglo Saxon, just getting into the feel of the next few lines.
"Who the fuck installs servers?" says Ebbe
One can have fun imagining Ebbe and Phil at their meetings. “How's that fucking High Fidelity piece of crap you are working on going Phil” “Its just amazing Ebbe, just simply amazing. We are reaching out to the stars, leaving Earth behind on a cosmic voyage to infinity and beyond and we are taking the whole of humanity with us on cosmic VR rainbow coloured space ships”
Altberg also has some interesting opinions that seem to indicate his view of the SL user base.
SL is apparently the "money machine" funding Sansar.
He sees no reason to tell us loony SL users what's going on in Sansar even though we fund it because:
“With the Second Life players apt to "get twisted around in knots about what it means"
they will keep it under wraps. Don't want the crazies to realise until the last minute they are funding something nothing at all to do with them.
And he goes on to give some indication as to Sansar's possible Target audience:
"Then you will have the vast majority of users that obviously don't give a shit - because how many billions of them are on Facebook every day?
The don't give a shit crowd are top of the list then.
And forget all that creativity rubbish going on in SL:
“Besides, in his view, only professionals want to edit. "Most people are just consumers of experiences as opposed to creators,"
The word consumers in this sentence to me has all the conotations of, they will eat shit if you market it right.
Beside we all know only Professionals want to edit, sure right, he obviously has a deep understanding of the SL user base.