New World Notes

Survey on Premium SL Accounts: Significant Minority Interested in Subscribing to Get More Virtual Land

Here's the results of my survey on the new Premium subscription enhancement for SL users. 49% of those surveyed are already Premium, so looking at those who are not, most non-Premium users say the massive increase in virtual land allotments does not make them more likely to subscribe.

However, a significant minority (roughly 1 in 3) say the expansion of land offering does increase their increase in upgrading their Second Life account to Premium. And any significant increase in Premium accounts, which didn't grow last year, would be good news for Linden Lab. (And indirectly, the SL user community.)

To be sure, this is a small data set (just 49 votes) and the survey was confined just to Twitter users, so I wouldn't suggest these results are conclusive. If readers are interested -- are you? -- I may run a larger one in Google Docs.

Why Some Men Gender-Bend In Online Worlds - Classic NWN Quote

Some men may roleplay as female avatars in MMOs to meet the real life woman of their dreams, but other males have a very different reason to do so:

In real life, I'm in my thirties, overweight, balding, married with children. I'd blend in flawlessly at Penny Arcade Expo or any renaissance faire of your choice. In Second Life, I am a flirty cyberpunk chick who hangs out at clubs and has hundreds of folders of clothes. Yes, I know I am a stereotype. I am THE stereotype...

I am gender dysphoric. That is, I'm not comfortable with the gender I was born with. I look in the mirror and am always surprised that the guy staring back at me is actually me. I've been in and out of therapy over the years. But I live in a liminal state -- half in my body, half detached from it, half male, half female. Second Life is a haven for me. I can look at the screen and actually see a part of me that I always knew existed, but could never point at. I can sit and talk with other women and be treated as a sister, not a potential predator. I can enjoy being beautiful (a feeling I've never had in RL), because even if that beauty isn't real and I bought all the parts off of [the SL Marketplace], the combination is something that I created and expresses me. It's a "me" that cannot exist in any other sort of environment. I'm not trying to deceive anyone. I am not trying to live a lie. I am trying to live the truth, in its entirety.

From "Second Life's Strength Is Its Power To Transform Identity -- And The 'Weirdos' Who Embrace It", a NWN guest post from 2010.

Last Names for Second Life Avatars, Originally Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, Returning After 7 Year Absence

Linden Lab taketh away -- but Linden Lab also giveth back:

Second Life turns 15 this year! To kick off our year-long birthday celebration, we’ve rounded up 15 exciting improvements and features that make Second Life better than ever in 2018 and beyond... 

7. The return of Last Names - You’ve asked for it (a lot!), so we will provide a way to customize your last name in Second Life! More details will be available later this year.

As it happens, last names for SL avatars were removed 7 years ago, replaced by a confusing and highly impersonal avatar account naming system. (At least veteran users from before that time were able to keep their own last names -- see above.) The end of last names was so unpopular, users began passing around a workaround feature for getting a last name. (This post explaining how to do that was among the most popular on New World Notes in 2011.)

I'm curious how Linden Lab re-introduces last names. The original idea was to give new users a pre-created list of surnames to choose from, then replace those surnames after a certain time. (In my Linden Lab days, I sat next to former community manager Daniel Huebner, and enjoyed watching him wracking his brain to come up with new last names, for a time going through various desserts of the world -- which is why many oldie SLers are named, say, "Tiramisu".) With shared last names, groups of users would have an extended "family" of other users with similar life experiences, so to speak, since they joined the virtual world at roughly the same period of real life time.

And if that idea sounds familiar, yes, it was partly inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick :

Sansar Removes In-Game Terrain Editor To Make Experiences "Accessible to As Many Users as Possible"

The latest update to Linden Lab's Sansar comes with event creation, avatar emotes, and sad to say (even Eliot, the Linden staffer writing the update, seems palpably bummed to announce this), the end of the in-game terrain editor:

This is the sad news. We are removing the Terrain Editor in order to improve performance. While we know many creators will be upset by this, in the best interests of making all experiences accessible to as many users as possible, sunsetting the Terrain Editor is the obvious choice. You can still import your own terrain objects created in 3rd party tools.

The Terrain Editor will be disabled as of today, and assets created by it will be replaced after the April release. 

I know it’s not ideal. We’re sorry.

If you have used our Terrain Editor to build any of your experiences, we’ll work with you to make this a smooth transition. You can read more in our documentation here.

I'm not surprised by the collective disappointment, because the terrain editor was Sansar's key tool for dynamic, in-game content creation -- a key feature that was fun in itself. (See below.) The mystery is why Linden Lab would remove it to make "all experiences accessible to as many users as possible":

Which Social VR Platform is Best for Content Creation? Award-Winning Developer Tries the Chair Test in Seven, Including Sansar & High Fidelity

Jessica Outlaw, winner of the 2017 Oculus Launch Pad contest, recently came up with an elegant test of the building tools in the many social VR platforms out there: How fun and easy is it to build a 3D chair in each? She ran this test on seven well-known platforms: AltSpace VR, Facebook Spaces, High Fidelity, Oculus Medium, NormalVR, Sansar, and VR Chat.

"My favorites were the ones where the tools were immediately available to me and it was obvious how to start drawing," she tells me. "VR Chat, Normal VR, Facebook Spaces, and Oculus Medium all made tool acquisition extremely easy and had the tools exposed to me easily." 

Here's her in-depth reaction to those and others, including Second Life spinoffs High Fidelity and Sansar:

SL Avatar Body Survey from Top Fashion Brand Dominated by Maitreya

Mishi Akin, owner of the massively successful virtual fashion brand Blueberry, recently ran a survey among her subscribers, asking them which mesh avatar body they use.  2879 customers responded (a very impressive data sample), and the results (above) are striking:

They show an overwhelming preference for the Maitreya body sold by Onyx LeShelle. In Mishi's survey, respondents could choose more than one body ("they could choose all if they wanted to", she tells me), but even then, Maitreya was far and away the clear choice.

Her reason for conducting this survey also provides insight into the state of the Second Life avatar economy: "I check to see if another body rose in popularity more than the six I design for," she explains, "so I can optimize my products. For example, if a new body was more widely used than the least used body on my design list I would replace it with the new body."

She tells me she conducted a similar survey 2 years ago, and the top choices are unchanged from what you see above: Maitreya, Slink Hourglass and Physique, and Freya, Isis, and Venus from Belleza. Or to put it another away: Three SL avatar body brands overwhelmingly dominate the market. This is partly due to what's called vendor lock-in: Once you buy a product that's dependent on specific accessories, it's very difficult to switch to a competing product.

But why is Maitreya far and away the market leader? Mishi has a fascinating theory there:

Decentraland Leads: There's Ways to Improve Blockchain for Use in Social VR

Last week in response to Adam Frisby's skepticism over blockchain as a payment solution for consumer services like social VR worlds, Philip Rosedale defended the use of blockchain for payments in High Fidelity. I also raised Adam's points with the lead developers of Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which raised $25 million in Ethereum last year -- here's their reply:

 "I generally agree with [Adam's] post," technical lead Esteban Ordano told me, "and it's indeed spot-on with regards to what the current deployed solutions have achieved. However, allow me to refute the point you make about the 'fast/decentralized/lowcost' compromise.'"

(He's referring to Adam's argument that "blockchain is caught between three competing objectives: fast, low-cost, and decentralized. It is not yet possible to make one chain that achieves all three.")

In contrast, says Ordano, "I'd argue you need to prove this theorem, or go into more detail to make a valid point. Decentralization doesn't mean 'everybody has all the data and archives on everything'. See the solutions under Path-Based Transactions (i.e., Lightning Network): While they maintain trust minimization (decentralization is just a way to achieve this end); PBTs are a fast and cost-effective way to conduct safe, verifiable and trust-minimized transactions."

To be sure, Decentraland still has a relatively small userbase, so the real stress tests have not yet begun. But Ari Meilich, Decentraland's project lead, tells me they're planning to introduce solutions in anticipation of that:

Why Do So Many People in Second Life Decline to Have Much of One? (Comment of the Week)

Interesting conversation over this post about how some men roleplay as female avatars in order to befriend a woman in hopes of revealing their actual gender and starting a real life heterosexual relationship. To which phenomenon, "JohnC" observes:

As interesting as this conversation is, and I have lived it from both sides for many years, I often wonder why we have it at all. We go to a place called Second Life where, as I understand it from the name, the idea is to live a virtual life of your choice, whatever that may be, and to live it if you wish totally disconnected from your RL. For many it is an escape from RL in fact. And that does not always mean you are having a bad first life, you just have other parts of yourself that maybe cannot be expressed openly in your otherwise fine RL.

But all around in SL you find people who just don't get it at all. People who have a chance to be something else, anything they wish, and they just create an avatar that looks exactly like them in RL. Or people who are all for creating a new self but, “Hang on I didn't mean being weird and pretending to be a woman”.

To me that seems a bit like being granted three wishes for anything you desire and asking for a Big Mac, fries and a Coke. Of course it is up to anyone in SL to play it the way they wish. Just seems a bit of a waste of opportunity.

Which inspires JohnC to think about an odd user interface that's been part of Second Life from its inception, that seems to contradict its branding -- which, he argues, then distorts our expectations when it comes to avatar-based relationships: 

Top 6 NWN Posts from Last Week: Defending Blockchain for Social VR, Gender-Bending Avatars, Mysterious Second Life Islands & Much More

• Philip Rosedale Defends Use Of Blockchain As Social VR Payment System
• Cajsa's Choices: The Sexy, Sunlit, Dream-Like Second Life Photos Of Cub Smit
• Why Some Men Gender-Bend In Online Worlds
• Three Points John Oliver Should Make In His Next Cryptocurrency Segment
• Four Mysterious Linden-Run Islands Emerge From Edge Of Second Life Sea
• Ready Player One Gets Mostly Positive, Enthusiastic Early Reviews

Sinespace Help Wanted: Remote Part-Time Web Developer & Designer

Here's a dream job opening (in my biased opinion) from Sinespace for a web developer/designer who also loves MMOs and virtual worlds:

We're looking for a part time Web Dev to be in charge of maintaining the main websites and promotional sites for a online MMO game environment. Candidates need to be moderate web developers, with some design skills capable of putting new pages together from existing templates and resources.

Full details here on LinkedIn from Sinespace's Sean O'Callaghan, who you can contact via his LinkedIn, or e-mail to <[email protected]>. And while Sinespace is headquartered in London, yes, you can work remotely from elsewhere. (There's remote Sinespace locations in Hong Kong, Sydney, and Los Angeles, for instance.) And best of all, since Sinespace is a media partner to New World Notes, you'd get to work indirectly with me!