In this excerpt of Making a Metaverse That Matters, we explore the importance around naming a metaverse platform. Notably, Second Life (now with 500,000+ players) launched only 2-3 years before Roblox (now with 350 million+ users):
Another core friction point for Second Life mass adoption is not technical or related to the UX, but perhaps the most subtle and the most profound of all: Calling it “Second Life” in the first place.
The virtual world’s naming, led by early Linden Lab business developer Hunter Walk (now a highly respected venture capitalist), seemed to make sense at the time. As I wrote in The Making of Second Life:
“A lot of the game worlds were verbs which described what you’d be doing,” as [Walk] recalls it now. “You know… ever-questing! I wanted the name to be a vessel that people could fill themselves, that would be evocative of the promise of the world, and then put that responsibility upon the user to fill the promise.
"It’s such a strong notion, it’s such an idea: everybody wants a second life. You see more and more people with avatars and screen names,” he told [Linden management]. “I think if we hit our stride we can sell this. It won’t be geeky. It’ll be ‘Of course, why wouldn’t you want one?’ Because it doesn’t have to be better or worse, it doesn’t mean your first one is lame or great, it just means it’s different, and you can be somebody different, and do something different.”
His original suggestion, “Life 2”, was then massaged by the team into “Second Life”.
In fullness of time, we can confirm that consumers do generally prefer metaverse platforms named after verbs, or at least strongly imply them: Minecrafting, building blocks and forts in Roblox and Fortnite, VRChat-ing, and so on.
Looking back at it now, was it a mistake to name the platform Second Life?
Next: Hunter and Philip Rosedale reflect.
“I don't know,” Hunter Walk answers after a long pause. “It is a profitable startup, but it obviously did not fulfill the reach and potential that I hoped for. It feels right to ask in retrospect: Did that seem too geeky, describing what it was as opposed to what we needed it to be? I'm not sure a name with a different product would make a difference…”
From my vantage point, calling it Second Life created a double blade of skewed expectations, alienating most potential users (especially gamers) while also attracting a niche of people who did very specifically want a second life -- which alienated the first group even further.
"I think that's totally true,” Philip Rosedale says, when I run my analysis by him.. “The very idea that it was a second life and that it was separate from your first life and maybe that reflected, you know, memetically or negatively on your real life.
“I didn't think about it at the time, because in my mind, I was only thinking about the Second Life," Rosedale says, emphasizing the first word. “I think we also thought it was going to be a temporary problem.”
Adds Walk: “Maybe the way some people reacted to the name reflected on what we were prioritizing in terms of what the world would be like, and led us down the path of making a microverse and not a metaverse."
This is also true: To the extent that the name was embraced by the dedicated user base, many or most of them interpreted it to mean a kind of roleplay luxe life they want but cannot have in the offline world -- which is why the virtual world now teems with virtual seaside mansions, high-end shopping malls, and sexy nightclubs. (This direction was also shaped by the choice of default avatars -- but more on that in another.)
Paradoxically, while the name Second Life did contribute to the virtual world’s lack of growth, it also helped attract excessive media coverage. With their game-like monikers, no competing metaverse platform, even those far larger in terms of users, have received anywhere near the same level of outside attention.
Without that name, observes Philip Rosedale, “[H]ow else could we have done it, and gotten the kind of fascination that we did get? I don't know that if I find a time machine [to change it], I'd hit that button. Because I don't know what other name I'd use.”
Please read (or hear) the rest of my book:
Bottom image via Metaversed.
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