Second Life Overwhelmed By Virtual Fashion Shopping Events & Consumerism, Argues Longtime SL Blogger

Longtime SL blogger Prisqua Newall of SLex in the City has a must-read blog post about how rampant virtual world shopping events are choking the creativity and originality from Second Life culture. It was inspired by her own personal moment of clarity as a rampant shopper:

This journey through Second Life’s marketplace has led me to a significant personal insight regarding digital consumerism. A moment of clarity emerged when I realised my inventory contained at least L$20,000 worth of items I had never unpacked and, as a result, never used. The excitement of events and continuous sales often leads to a pile of unused digital items that remain untouched, forgotten, and, over time, obsolete. This was especially true for me when I switched from the Lara body to Petite and then to PetiteX. Each change made many of my old items useless, likely mirrored in the experiences of others as they navigate the vast array of body options within Second Life.

Part of the problem, she argues, is that SL sim owners have a strong profit motive to continuously push shopping events hosted on their land:

With the event hosting 75 stores, this pricing strategy could rake in approximately 675,000L$ (around US$2,700) per event for the organisers. When contrasted with the monthly expense of running a 30k region on Second Life, which is around US$259, the financial allure of organising such events becomes starkly apparent. This juxtaposition suggests that event organising can emerge as a lucrative venture, potentially offering a more appealing profit margin with arguably less effort compared to maintaining an estate or developing products.

Read the whole thing here, and watch the accompanying video she created for this (below).

This is a topic I want to delve into more, but my immediate sense is she's roughly right. My social media feeds related to Second Life are almost entirely around shopping events or shopping deals, and the very existence of her blog post about SL culture highlights another trend: The vast vast majority of Second Life-themed blogs are actually (and completely) shopping/fashion blogs. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but there was much more diversity of topics 10-12 years ago or so.

My own perspective is this rampant consumerism largely became inevitable as Second Life shifted to a mesh-based economy beginning around 2010-2012, creating the ability (and therefore the market, and the promotional push), to create and customize ultra-realistic human avatars. As I wrote in Making a Metaverse That Matters:

 

“Once users are presented with a believably human template,” as virtual world researcher Nick Yee explains, "You want chairs and furniture and cars where your bodies can sit in and drive around, and you need large virtual closets to put all your virtual clothing and people are building these beautiful cantilevered houses by the beach side because that's what people do in the real world.”

While Linden Lab may have hoped Second Life users would define reality according to their wildest imagination, the realistic human avatars shaped how much of the world would evolve:

And with them came all the social problems typically associated with wealthy beach enclaves in the real world. 

“[That's] where the racism and the sexism comes from," as Yee puts it. “Because when the avatars are sufficiently human to make human assessments upon, our inherent human biases come clawing into the digital world… It's almost unavoidable, because once you have bodies that are anywhere near realistic, people feel the need to dress up their bodies, and to look cooler than the next person. And suddenly you have this whole economy based around selling bodies and hair and body parts.”

Emphasis mine!

None of this is to say Second Life is only about human avatar fashion and shopping, because many other thriving subcultures and creative communities exist. It's just that they're very noticeably less the overall focus.

Neither is it inevitable. As noted, much of this is driven by the economic incentive of sim owners. But Linden Lab can change those incentives by changing the world's price structures -- and perhaps more important, taking an even more active role in creating an in-world experience that's an alternative or a respite from the endless shopping grind.

Comments

[Chic Aeon]

In my mind it is all about greed --- well that's not unusual.

I too did the math long ago about the profits generated from events. Not only that -- the profits of "in store events" that aren't even EVENTS!! OMG.

For the most part I don't blog events any longer. Neither do I take part in them other than Shop and Hop. AND as you might guess --- I don't SHOP either.

Over my many years (16ish as I recall) I have LOST about 10K US in goods due to inventory failures. I read that there was more of that today (sigh). Most of that I didn't purchase but some I did and some were original items that I made that could not be replaced. Since most of us OLD folks already have more than we can possibly use already -- really, what is the point?

I suspect it is boredom == especially since gachas got outlawed. It is a mess. We have lost so much creativity over the years. And, most of the creators that "I" know are making much less money now than they did say five years ago.

I am not seeing how Linden Lab can "fix" this. I think it is up to the consumers and they unfortunately don't seem to care. It IS a choice.

Even as a blogger I am still in my (updated) Lara body from a decade ago and a free head and a brand new Cosmo anniversary skin gift. All this consumerism is a CHOICE not a necessity.

I will continue to highlight the folks that are still making lovely things and applaud their efforts, but honestly I do get depressed at times.

[Spiffy Voxel]

Prisqua's commentary in her video and article struck a chord with me. The number of shopping events going on any day of the week has exploded, both in frequency and size. As a result, I was resorting to setting reminders and bookmarking gallery pages to work out what if anything looked interesting. On top of that layer of complexity, there's now the extra work of finding out which outfits will fit which mesh bodies — with many creators now targeting just a few bodies and nothing else.

I've now declared shopping Inbox Zero. No more groups, no more mailing list subscriptions, no more shopping blogs in my RSS reader. I will shop occasionally, but only when I come across a store in my travels or spot an outfit in the wild and track down where it came from.

Instead of shopping, I'm now seeking out art and music events, visiting art galleries and exploring Second Life. As a result, I'm seeing a lot more of the creativity that is still out there. And wherever I can, I'm donating to support these creative spaces.

As well as conserving my L$, I'm also gaining back the time that I'd previously given over to shopping, and spending that time wisely, on activities & experiences that enrich both my Second Life and real life day.

[Luther Weymann]

After twenty years of selling in SL, I closed my SL Market store and my inworld store and created an inworld Free Store with my 400+ products. I routinely see avatars that have been in SL for more than five even ten years come to the Free Store and spend up to an hour taking 200 free products. This of course is completely unmanageable as even 20 free products just sit in inventory unused and unopened with only one or two being of actual use. I truly don't understand this mentality, what to speak of actually spending L$ on things that go unopened.