
In case you missed it before the long holiday weekend, Linden Lab recently rolled out a new look to the Second Life logo:
Second Life has seen a surge of interest from people new to SL, longstanding residents, and groups and businesses seeking a uniquely interactive place for gatherings and special events. With this renewed attention we decided it was time to update a key part of how we tell the world what SL is all about... The new logo uses clearer, bolder type to communicate our optimism and confidence in what the future holds for SL. We retired the soft green color in favor of bright blue to reflect the boundless energy of our residents, who create amazing content and experiences. When it comes to what you can do with SL, the (blue) sky’s the limit!
It looks good, and the company's logic for the change makes sense -- but also seems far too conservative to me.
If you really want to update the logo, why not also update the name itself, too? As a brand, "Second Life" has always been problematic, and is probably key to the reason SL failed to grow the active user base despite tens of millions trying it out at least once. (At minimum, calling it Second Life certainly doesn't help with retention.)
Why? Short answer is the one any SL user is painfully familiar with: Calling a virtual world Second Life makes it too easy for a skeptic/cynic/troll to say, "Oh it's just for people who want to have virtual sex/parties/style/etc. because they can't get it in real life." An utterly dick-ish remark, to be sure, but an unavoidable one when that very implication is baked into the name.
Longer answer: The name "Second Life" was based on an understandable but ultimately flawed assumption about how the Internet would trend made back in 2002. Here's how early Linden Lab team member Hunter Walk, who started the brainstorming of the name (which the leadership team subsequently iterated on) explains it in my book:
Why Do So Many Gamers Passionately Want Star Citizen to Fail?
When I wrote about the latest update to Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' highly-ambitious, massively crowdfunded MMO -- with over $250 million pledged so far -- I expected it to be received as some interesting insights into an online world that many people haven't thought about much lately.
What I didn't expect at all was a religious war.
But a text-based one more or less broke out in Comments, the first wave led by Star Citizen apostates unleashed by an online community devoted to hating Star Citizen. (Yes, that's a thing.) Some of the milder comments:
"Crobblers", I guess, being a portmanteau for "Chris Roberts promoters". Which is witty! But it's the level of conspiratorial rage that's totally fascinating to me. Why do so many gamers actively, hungrily want this one indie game project to be a sham, and fail?
"I'll be the first to say I've had and continue to have frustrations with Star Citizen," my colleague Joshua May told me, after reading the responses to my interview with him on the game. "That's just life. Things I want got delayed, things I didn't care about got implemented instead, everyone wants something different out of it. Everyone has a different idea of what the final game should be and gets disappointed if they don't think [Roberts' company] Cloud Imperium Games is going in that direction."
An indie game developer himself, May speculates that some of the anger is based confusion over what's required to publish an online world so ambitious.
"It can't make everyone 100% happy, because everyone disagrees on the end product," as he puts it. "That's the nature of any video game, especially MMOs. People just aren't accustomed to seeing the sausage made and most of them don't understand it."
Surely many Star Citizen detractors are angry because they've pledged money to Roberts' project over the years, and now feel buyers' remorse, because it's still far from complete. But last year, crowdfunding increased, while more and more content has been added to the project. Despite that -- or perhaps because of that -- many detractors still insist it must all be a scam.
"Skepticism is healthy, but it's increasingly getting far enough along in development that the skepticism is less and less warranted," notes May.
But if Star Citizen has its detractors, it also has its defenders -- for instance, this reader comment that apparently came in via a pro Star Citizen community:
Continue reading "Why Do So Many Gamers Passionately Want Star Citizen to Fail?" »
Posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 04:46 PM in Comment of the Week, New World Gaming | Permalink | Comments (37)
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