New World Notes

Comparing the BTC Apple to the L$ Orange (Comment of the Week)

Reader Joey1058 has a fair point about my comparing the oranges of Linden Dollars to the apples of Bitcoin:

The US designated crypto as a commodity. So asking to use BTC as a currency is like asking to use gold and silver as an everyday currency again. The L$ is an inworld currency, and has been planned that way from the outset. Broadly speaking, Second Life holds it's own sovereignty, so exchanging Lindens for USD is like exchanging GBP for USD.

Both BTC and L$ require an exchange to convert to USD. Once converted, they get taxed. The difference in exchanges is that LindeX/Tilia do a full transaction disclosure to the Feds. Crypto exchanges do not. Which is why the Feds are attempting to regulate crypto. If you are not reporting your crypto cash-outs to the Feds, you are in violation of whatever rules the IRS deems to slap you with.

This is roughly right. Though overall, I'd still say L$ and BTC is a comparison of tangerines and oranges, i.e. citrus fruit with more overlap than apples:

For Metaverse Creators in Developing Nations, Second Life's Costs to Entry Have Grown Too High (Comment of the Week)

Important comment from Brazil-based reader "Moanna", responding to my economics survey which suggests that the cost of entrance into the Second Life economy has become so high, it's difficult for newcomers to break in.

For people in developing nations like hers, those costs are far higher than what they'd be for creators based in the EU/North America. She breaks those expenses down in terms of Brazil's currency, the Real. (Currently valued at 20 cents USD per 1 Real.) 

I've been trying to learn because I want to enter this market.

To create something good, we spend on courses (I paid 600 Reals), programs (Avastar, Marvelous Designer, brushes, molds) and other things that need to be purchased (image services, tables, furniture, parts, equipment, all quoted in US dollars in Brazil). It's very difficult to find support...

I still analyze it from a different angle, because I'm Brazilian. My country has a very undervalued currency. So imagine that we have to pay 4.7 times more for a Linden Dollar... 

1,600 SL creators earn over USD $10,000/year from their virtual content and services. However, that's 3X more than what a Brazilian earning minimum wage in their country makes:

Bring New Excitement to Ancient SL Locations With a Discovery & Exploration Game (Comment of the Week)

While Linden Lab has saved Tempura, we discussed how preservation does not guarantee survival. Reader "Nadeja", however, thinks Tempura has better than average prospects:

Tempura is arguably a special case. Visitors know they can meet someone always there, so the traffic has always remained high even without any event (25K today). It is also a romantic place with a nice atmosphere, but it has a good design that seem to encourage meeting and hanging out: it's spacious, there is a large tai-chi area where many people go, someone meet at the mediation circle, the bridge with a spot with sits (and divination) in the middle, and so on. Also a bunch of people at the entrance; but there are quieter spots here and there, for couples or to relax by your own, some even cute/funny such as the giant nest.

Different preserved places were meant for a different usage, they were interesting or fascinating, but left to themselves they died out. Svarga stopped working correctly. The SS Galaxy was also a mall, with rentals and DJs in the ballroom and the pool. After the preservation, the mall and the rentals were gone, obviously, as well as the DJs and dancing and clubbing. The traffic is about zero now.

What's the solution for sites that don't have as much native stability as Tempura? Nadeja has the glimmering of a great idea -- turn preserved SL sims into a grid-like game:

Endangered Second Life Sims Need Other Options Than Just Non-Profit Preservation (Comment of the Week)

While it's great that Linden Lab swooped in to save the much-loved private sim of Tempura, there are still concerns as to whether that's the best way to preserve great virtual locations. Echoing thoughts from her own blog, longtime reader Nodoka Hanamura reflects on some of the challenges, citing an SL community project inspired by New York's legendary Hotel Chelsea arts nexus. 

In real life, unlike in SL, cities do not exist within a vacuum. They rely on state and federal funding as well as local taxes and other things such as Occupational License fees (OLF) and other financial endeavors to survive. They also depend on regional and federal agencies and entities to do things such as maintain the power grid, build and maintain roads, establish and regulate infrastructure. To run a city in Second Life is a wholly independent endeavor, which is offered little to no support by Linden Lab. Now, some will point to the SL Region Preservation Society, or SLRPS, but the reality is that SLRPS does not support infrastructure in Second Life in any capacity outside of the protection of historically important properties.

Which brings us to Second Life's Chelsea Hotel project:

The Challenge of Saving Beloved But Financially Unsustainable Virtual Places

Tempura, the popular and much-loved Second Life island, is now gone from the grid, with only screenshots and video to remember it by, another victim of SL's high monthly server maintenance fees. As when any other beloved virtual place meets a digital death like this, community members post well-meaning if belated ideas on how to save it:

Could these amazing regions be resurrected in OpenSim (Kitely)? Seems such a shame to lose them altogether. --  Kaylee West

Hypergrid and OpenSims are using SL's open source software and are in most cases entirely free. SL has the largest infrastructure but its been killing creativity and beauty in the name of profit for over a decade. Tempura can exist at no cost or $5 a month really. -- Domino Effect 

OpenSim definitely is an option! The first challenge there is, the original owner/creator would have to expedite that process, and be prepared to see their works "ripped" and copied by others for uses in other worlds -- content theft in OpenSim remains an ongoing problem. The other challenge is that OpenSim continues to have a small active userbase, with the top 10 OS grids attracting fewer than 20,000 active users. (Active users in the aforementioned Kitely: Fewer than 1300.) An OpenSim version of Tempura may not attract enough regular visitors to justify even a $5/month fee, especially when you add on the (presumably free) community management time.

Another option, as longtime SLer Saffia Widdershins writes, is plead for patronage from Linden Lab:

How Much of "The Metaverse" Concept Was Made as a Literary Device?

Is "the Metaverse" as we typically understand it mainly made as a literary device, i.e. to tell a cool fun story? On that theme, here's an interesting couple of reader comments inspired by Gabe Newell's skepticism over the Metaverse (at the least in its current incarnations) -- first from Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, who helped launch the university's virtual world campus:

The original Metaverse as envisioned by the cyberpunk fiction writers (Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Stross, etc.) was essentially an extrapolation of the Internet, as an immersive 3D parallel world where the users interact through their avatars, but with the gaming overtones, for literary purposes.

Somehow that degenerated into a now prevailing interpretation of the Metaverse as a gigantic collection of (interoperable?) games and social spaces, or even just calling individual games "metaverses", which makes even less sense. It is like calling one's website "my internet". Maybe this is because most people engaged in this business come from the gaming world. I think that this completely misses the point, and there is no future in it. All this will accomplish is to doom the term "metaverse" as a misguided notion that will be forgotten and/or mocked.

Instead, we will see a continued evolution of the Internet, where all of the humanity's informational content is, and where most of the human activities are, driven by the evolving technologies, including XR. There will be gaming and social spaces, of course, as there already are in the current incarnation of the Internet as a global parallel cyberspace, along with everything else that people do. And that is where the people will stay. To think that there will be a new, separate gaming and social cyberworld distinct from the evolving Internet, a gamers' Metaverse, is just plain foolish, in my opinion.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg does seem to understand this, never mind all of the usual critiques of him or his company. His record and vision give him a lot more credibility.

Reader Martin K. expands on this, arguing that a lot of the specific features attributed to the Metaverse, such as a vast contiguous virtual world, were also invented to make a cyberpunk story cooler:

Why Valve May Be Slow to Make Its Own Metaverse (Comment of the Week)

Why does Valve seem so bearish about making the metaverse when it has everything it needs to do so? Reader Martin K. proposes this pretty good analysis:

It might be useful to break down the most popular ideas of what today's metaverses are.

Partly, Newell appears to refer to the crypto bros' metaverses, which were never attractive to gamers and will only benefit a tiny percentage of their user base, i.e. sooner or later that metaverse idea will be disappointing to the vast majority of its fan base.

Then there is the Ready-Player-One-inspired idea that the metaverse is like many AAA open worlds in one game - think GTA, Red Dead Redemption, EVE Online, and many more all in one game. Developing such a metaverse is just not a solid business idea - neither with nor without VR support. (Hint: if it was a good idea, then it would be a much better idea to develop just a small part of it at much lower cost and risk.)

Somewhat related is the idea that the metaverse is not a game but a layer on top of many (AAA) games such that they become more "interoperable", which might include many things (e.g. sharing avatar skins, virtual equipment, achievements, communication across games, etc.). Of course, Valve is very interested in pushing that idea forward for games on Steam, but they probably have worked on all the low-hanging fruits already and know very well how difficult the other parts are.

Here's a good thread by veteran game designer Damion Schubert on the interoperability problem.

Martin goes on to talk about UGC platforms that Valve might be considering as competitors:

Veteran Metaverse Analyst Gwyneth Llewelyn on Meta's Horizon Woes -- And How They Might Be Improved

Longtime metaverse analyst and developer Gwyneth Llewelyn recently posted a good reader comment analyzing Meta's early efforts in the space. And I do mean "longtime" -- this is her avatar from 2006 when she was in a trademark dispute over a collectivist utopia in Second Life. (Yes, that's a thing.)

Leaping off from my observation that Meta's Horizon Worlds ad for the Super Bowl seems depressingly targeted at middle age people who feel washed up, she dives right in:

Actually, let me play Devil's Advocate here. What's so wrong about targeting GenXers with a depressing video? Most of them are on Facebook anyway, and already depressed (and getting worse). So that's Meta's target audience — trying to recapture those GenXers who finally gave up on Facebook and are ready to try the Next Best Thing.

Interestingly, the best part of that ad is the most depressing one — the one that uses real life action with CGI for the animatronics. That's the bit where the director's got creative.

The worst bit is, well, Horizon. I'm sorry, but shelling out a small fortune for a VR headset to get legless, low-polygon avatars that seem to do little more than crowd around you, having a weird minimalistic almost-wireframe-y background of speeding flying cars... I don't know, but the appeal is simply not there.

Unless things start to improve soon and fast, I'm not really sure that Horizon will last long as a Meta product...

However, I'm not saying that Meta will move out of VR gadgets and games. These are lucrative businesses by themselves, with strong, well-proven business models. And with hundreds of millions of computer game players world-wide, that's not a niche market. What Meta could attempt to do is a long-running series of (independent) games that use the same avatar technology, and capitalize on the ability of players to personalize them (even outside of the game itself) on a 'social' VR platform where outfits and props for avatars are for sale — a bit like the old PlayStation Home, which has been resurrected by the fan base, and, looking at their Git repository, it's being actively maintained.

Now, I never owned a game console (I have no time for that!), so I cannot tell how much interest PlayStation Home has (or had). There is clearly a reason for why Sony abandoned it in 2015 (I just don't know what reason was given at the time). Nevertheless, the notion that a fan base can resurrect such a project shows that there is some interest in such a product. How 'niche' it will ever be is anyone's question. But I'd say that Horizon could become the next 'PlayStation Home' for the Oculus ecosystem.

Ah, PlayStation Home. Remember when Second Life had so much industry buzz, one of the top console manufacturers in the world launched a (poorly executed) alternative? Pepperidge Hamlet remembers.

Gwyn, who's led development on metaverse projects for major companies through her firm Beta Technologies, goes on to analyze Meta and Horizon's future prospects, and has some good advice for Meta going forward:

Can Second Life Compete With Modern Metaverse Platforms? Top SL Content Creator Brilliantly Explains Just the Avatar Challenges Ahead

Now that Philip Rosedale's back advising Linden Lab, challenging modern metaverse platforms like Meta's Horizon, can he help fix Second Life's complex avatar system? I asked that question last week and a pretty amazing reader conservation ensued -- culminating in this excellent rant by the excellently named content creator Allegory Malaprop, of the style brand Schadenfreude:

I desperately desperately desperately want Linden Lab to come out with a new avatar to put an end to the avatar wars. I might actually make clothing again if I wasn't reminded every time I do that it is the most horrible tedious thing on earth to try to re-fit and re-rig and re-fit and re-rig and re-fit and re-rig and I'm just going to cry now and never do this again.

With Meta and the hype, now is the time. Now is past the time to be able to scream to the hills "Hey you get no feet and you can't actually get anywhere near people there [in Meta's Horizon], come here look at this!!! Also we have cookies/amusement parks/dance clubs/cheese caves*/sex dungeons/probably anything else you could want already built and ready for you to check out."

Now is the time to be easy to sign up for SL [and] ...to have an avatar that just works. AND works without the whole very super obvious us vs. them you're totally a n00b (or backwards mainlander with your 2005 blinging shoes and of course people are going to divide into their tribes and their snobbish preferences but let's not make it THAT easy, ok?) divide.

Even getting SLers "up to date" is a massive headache that takes literal days if they haven't been following along the whole time. (I've helped walk a few [of my store] returnees through it lately, it's awful, and that's WITH people holding their hands AND having an idea of how a lot of it works). And even if they have, once the new thing comes out, and how many times have you personally had to explain BoM to someone again?

It's too much of a pain in the ass to think anyone who is coming in from zero, who is not already invested, is going to put up with any of this.

Except...how are they going to fix it?

Ms. Malaprop proceeds to dive deep into the SL weeds on the problems facing Philip. Buckle up:

Can Philip Fix Second Life's Complex Avatar System? (Comment of the Week)

Good comment from Dee, one of many Second Life users welcoming back Philip Rosedale to advising the virtual world he founded:

I am MUCH more optimistic than I have been for a while where SL is concerned. I hope that Philips' return will bring renewed enthusiasm and fresh ideas that are outside the Linden Lab "box". I hope that he attends the creator group meetings held every other Thursday, or hosts a series of town hall meetings perhaps.

And the thing that is highest on my wishlist is a new avatar body. Where people can continue on with the system + alpha + mesh this that and the other OR a new integrated body. The body I envision is one where existing body and head creators could make deformers to create all of the body and face types they had in mind (and to sell of course) but one single thing to be worn and arranged. No more neck seams, no more crazy fiddling with all of the complexities of the current way of doing things. Just one seamless system way of adding a shape, a skin, applied textures, etc. Like the original system body, on beauty steroids. A body where clothing makers would only have to create ONE single version of their rigged clothing item and have it work with the blend shapes right out of the box.

I think it is critical for Linden Lab to address the current complexity (and expense) of trying to have a decent looking avatar in world. Even folks who have been in and out of SL for years quickly become frustrated with all these new complexities, mesh everything, BOM, etc. Dressing yourself should not require an advanced fashion degree!

This is all very true. Offhand, I'd estimate that a highly intuitive avatar customization system that was immediately fun and easy for the first-time user would grow retention by at least 5%. (I'm talking as seamless as it is in the The Sims series.)

If only. The core challenge is, there's already a massive cottage industry that depends on all that complexity: