This is a really good new segment of Science Friday on the life and death of Science Friday's own Second Life islands over a decade ago, where the much-loved NPR show hosted an audience of avatar fans during the live broadcast, with host Ira Flatow even occasionally taking questions sent in-world via group message. Produced and hosted by Daniel Peterschmid, it expands from that story to talk about the value of virtual communities and virtual world play, especially now in the COVID age, and ends on a nice rebirth and reunion segment that I won't spoil here. (Also, a couple nitpicks: Suggesting Second Life's graphics "haven't changed" since 2009 only seems true if you're running it on a low-end PC, and Jim from The Office doesn't actually say Second Life is only for "losers", but that's a whole other post.)
For longtime SLers, it does introduce a mystery: Why exactly did the Science Friday sims disappear, especially when the in-world group had grown to over 2000 members? The segment's answer (around 20:13 in) only raises more questions:
Ira Flatow: We left Second Life on a purely monetary basis, it was too expensive, to put it simply.
Daniel Peterschmidt: It was 2009, we'd been in Second Life for roughly 2 years, and we'd reached a point where renting an island was just outside our non-profit budget, roughly $800 a month in rent... because we stopped paying for the island, it disappeared.
At first I thought Science Friday was hit by the end of 50% discounts for sims owned by schools and non-profits in 2010, but that was a year later. The segment mentions that audience capacity for the live show was so much, they bought a "spillover" island, but I'm still not seeing how that wound up being $800 a month. Were they not taking advantage of the non-profit discount and paying full freight? And do they know in any case the non-profit discount has been restored?
More on this hopefully soon, but meantime, give a listen and read the supplementary online interviews with the colorful SL users who helped build Science Friday's community.
You’ve heard of #AnimalCrossing, but do you remember @SecondLife? On #SciFriLive📻, we time travel to 13 years ago to visit the SciFri island that hosted a community of fans to learn how virtual worlds can help us through quarantine & times of isolation.https://t.co/jjOC2LbjZI
— Science Friday (@scifri) December 4, 2020
Hat tip: Cajsa
It's a shame they couldn't figure out how to make it work, I loved SciFri Island and the nerdy crowds that would gather there for the show. The recollection show was fun, thanks.
Posted by: Valentina Kendal | Saturday, December 12, 2020 at 07:50 AM