New World Notes

Do Most New Second Life Users Not Know It's Mostly User-Created?

The current SL account creation page with opt-out for e-mail updates

Reader Luther Weymann, who describes himself as a tech industry veteran who last ran a company with 1000 employees, describes his experiences using Second Life during his retirement years -- and his impression of new users, and what they have to cope with:

I started with my first avatar on January 1, 2004, while browsing the web waiting for the Rose Bowl to start on television. That's how I discovered SL. That was 16 years ago. Like many in SL over 16 years, there is nothing I have not done or tried. SecondLife became my only hobby.

So, during the last 8-9 months, I've been looking at the nearby avatar list wherever I go and finding lots of avatars that are one or two days old. I find them at Big Daddy's dance place wondering how to fit in and dance or in large retail stores, not really knowing how they got there or someone on the mainland just frozen, not knowing what to do or somehow on an island in the Blake Sea not understanding where they are.

And in all cases, I send an IM that says, "Hi, I see you're 1 day old, new to SL. It can be difficult getting started, is there anything I can do to help you?"

The response is immediate and heartfelt. They don't know what to do. None of them know how to rez a prim, or have ever heard of the SL Market where you can search for L$0 clothing, none of them know how to change clothes or why their feet stick out of their shoes, or part of their body is transparent or what a sandbox is or where to look if you give them something.

None of them, really none of them, know that everything they see except the sky and ground was made by SL Residents.

And every one of them will eventually ask this question "Is this worth it?" because they have never been told this is a do-it-yourself world with no support or help getting started and it just seems so impossible for them to understand what is going on.

This is somewhat anecdotal, but it is also my impression that most first-time users don't know Second Life is a user-created world, or even know about prims. I certainly haven't seen many (any?) recent ads for SL which promote prim-based creation, even though that's something that would immediately be appealing to tens of millions of former Minecraft players in search of a new game world to play in.

Again this is anecdotal, but Luther's sense is that most new users aren't joining SL to create, but in search of something more essential:

With Sansar Gone, Second Life Needs a New Vision -- And Strawberry Linden Appointed CEO (Comment of the Week)

Most readers weren't exactly enthused about Engadget's interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg talking about his company's defenestration of Sansar, his calling Second Life a "cash machine", or of his list of improvements to Second Life, such as moving its infrastructure to the cloud. It inspired this rant from reader "Anne Frank" (I sure hope that's her real name):

Color me skeptical. I have about as much faith in these plans as I do that the US is moving in a good economic direction. It just assumes that the little people are always going to be along for the ride.

Why should I care about "the cloud"? Why should I care that their power structure is preserved after their huge failure? Why should I care that moving some free WindLight settings might become a commodity? Let's all hold hands and get stupid together. I didn't hear anything about "names". I guess now is not the time to want anything more than making sure you don't get less. Yay for us.

This is an unimaginably horrible time in our history, but we can celebrate an uptick in SL business. It's all good, babe. We're here for you and we're not planning to do a damn thing to make your experience better in the future.

Did I hear about any generous economic incentives to actually encourage broken people to engage in their tired old game? What are they giving to the future?  They seem to be giving their own well-being and we're supposed to be happy about that and give them our resources.

If ever there was a time for vision, it's now. If ever there was a time to lay the foundation for a better world, it's now. My god, the message LL should be sending is one of hope and compassion to its users. It should be sending an invitation to rally the troops to build, network, and engage. LL should be engaging directly with its base and its world.

Speaking of vision, Anne ends with a pretty visionary proposal of her own:

Philip Rosedale, SLers and Me Tweet About Overhauling Second Life's UX/UI & Whether Third Party Viewers Could Do It

Hiring a 5 person team of great UI/UX designers with a game industry background to fix Second Life’s vexing user interface & 1st time user experience would have cost about $5 million.

Instead, Linden Lab spent about $50 million developing Sansar.

Which they just gave away. https://t.co/KKNqGQmkl6

— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) March 28, 2020

If you're on Twitter you may enjoy reading or contributing to a tweet thread I started over the weekend (I blame quarantine fever) by somewhat ranting about the opportunity cost of spending so much on Sansar when a fraction of that budget could have been spent on overhauling Second Life's first time user experience and user interface. Philip Rosedale comments, as do several other smart SLers with developer chops.

Linden Lab "Very Profitable Company" With Sansar Gone, CEO Tells Engadget, Says Cloud Deployment & Other Improvements to Second Life Still in Works

Good long Engadget interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg just posted, who addresses much (if not all) the speculation around the recent acquisition of Sansar by an unknown company called Wookey, and how it will affect the future of Second Life. I've heard much Internet chatter that Linden Lab or even SL itself is now facing dire times, but in contradiction to that, Ebbe is ebullient:

With Sansar off its books, Linden Lab is now "a very profitable company," according to Altberg. "Second Life is an older, very established cash machine that works really well, and right now, we're seeing some tremendous growth happening as we speak. Whereas Sansar is a VC, more long term, need-more-investment-type-of-thing. Mixing those two within one small studio like Linden Lab was kind of tricky, so it was easier to have them go separate."

...  Linden Lab, meanwhile, is going to double down on Second Life. The company is currently in the middle of moving its cloud-based infrastructure to a third-party platform. "Instead of having to nurture and build and maintain our own infrastructure for a lot of things, we're going to be able to rely on someone else doing it for us," Altberg explained. Linden Lab is also working on a number of user-facing improvements, such as the ability to customise worlds and "trade environments in ways they haven't been able to do before."

Good to know the cloud deployment of SL is still happening, though kind of odd that it's moving to an unspecified "third-party platform", when the project was originally specified as going to Amazon Web Services.

As for Wookey, the mystery of what it is and how it will turn Sansar into "a new generation of online AR/VR experiences" (Linden Lab's words) remains, though I suppose Ebbe drops a few hints there:

Copyright to Linden Lab's Sansar Now Claimed by Company Called "Wookey" Which Promises a New VR World

Pictured: Sansar.com's homepage (inset) and the homepage to Wookey.com

Sharp-eyed Second Life user Chic Aeon noticed that the official homepage to Linden Lab's Sansar now displays (at the very bottom of the website page) a copyright and "All Rights Reserved" notice for an entity called "Wookey".

Going to Wookey.com takes you to a page with little details beyond promising "The web animated for VR -- A NEW WORLD COMING SOON!"

Well, what's Wookey? Crunchbase lists the company as WOOKEY Search Technologies, founded by Garnet Chaney and Mark Gustavson, neither of which have any background in online games or VR (at least going by their LinkedIn profiles).  However, on his Crunchbase profile, Gustavson lists his core business experience as "turn-around transactions", i.e., what happens to a company that's hit hard times and is put into recovery mode.

This news comes about a month after Linden Lab, having spent an estimated $50-60 million to launch and develop Sansar, announced that the company was looking to give the world a new owner.

What's this all mean besides the fact that Wookey claims the copyright to Sansar? I've reached out to both Wookey and Linden Lab for a comment and will update this post when/if I receive any reply.  

Torley, Beloved Second Life & Sansar Community Advocate, Left Linden Lab Last Month, According to His LinkedIn

Some insiders mentioned this to me in recent weeks and it seemed so incredible, I could not believe it at first. But his LinkedIn page apparently confirms it:

Torley, beloved evangelist and community support staffer for both Second Life and Sansar (among his many other roles over the years), is no longer with Linden Lab as of last month. I've reached out to Torley for more details, and will update this post if I get a reply. So as of now, it's not clear to me whether Torley was part of the Linden Lab layoffs in February as the company walked away from Sansar, or if he left on his own accord, or if there was another reason for his departure.

Kona Gurion, who also left Linden Lab last month (and definitely part of the layoffs), was a member of Linden Lab's QA team for Second Life for 16 years. At the time I described Kona as the company's last link to Second Life's glory days, but that turns out not to be true: Torley was with Linden Lab for 15 years, and is just as crucial a link to lose, if not moreso, far as the SL community is concerned.

Like Kona, Torley was recruited from within the Second Life user community during its earliest years, and was among the first people I profiled when I was still an embedded journalist for Linden Lab, first back in 2005 here, writing: "He was a slim young dude in flowing neon clothes who hauled his keyboard around everywhere, and though a relative newcomer, quickly charmed Second Life's citizenry with his quirky, mad creative charm."

And as Second Life approached peak glory days, Torley was well ensconced on Linden's staff, making totally charming tutorial videos like this in 2007:

What Went Wrong With Sansar: Victim of VR Hype & Failure to Learn from Second Life's Mistakes

Pictured: Sansar featured in 2016 at a Wall Street Journal event on virtual reality

Linden Lab has probably spent about $50-60 million to develop and launch Sansar. We know this is likely because back in 2016, the company had likely already spent an estimated $20 million on Sansar over 2.5 years in payroll alone. Add four more years of payroll, not to mention marketing and operating expenses, and that range is a reasonably educated guess (if it's not even larger). I've been thinking about this ever since Linden Lab announced last week that Sansar would no be a company-sponsored project.

How was so much spent for so little return? There's a number of factors, but I believe it ultimately came down to two interlocking mistakes:

• A flawed assumption, fueled by Goldman Sachs and other respected entities, that virtual reality was on the fast track to becoming massive.
• A corporate culture that was unable or unwilling to learn from Second Life's early mistakes.

I do not think it's fair to lay the blame square on the company's CEO, Ebbe Altberg. Linden Lab insiders, even those who have left the company, fairly consistently praise Ebbe as an inspiring leader. Meeting in person him last year, I was impressed by his passion for virtual worlds. But even the best leaders must work with the limited options that are handed to them. In this particular case, it's likely that Sansar was already in development under the leadership of the advisory board and Ebbe's predecessor, Rod Humble. (Who was in turn working with limited options laid down by the board and previous CEOs.)

That said, to go into more detail:

My concerns for Sansar started early, when it was positioned as a VR-centric project. As I told Wired in 2016:

Sansar's End as Linden Lab Project Angers Second Life Users Who Feel Short-Shrifted (Comments of the Week)

As this video tribute to Sansar by Daisy Winthorpe suggests -- published to YouTube a few days before Linden Lab announced the virtual world's end as a Linden Lab-sponsored project and since seen nearly 10,000 times -- it does have (had?) some passionate supporters. To judge by the overwhelming barrage of reader comments about the news, however, Sansar also has quite a few detractors from the Second Life user community who feel short-shrifted by Linden Lab. Just a small sampling of the more civil comments (relatively speaking):

Linden Lab CEO Announces Sansar Now Up For Sale; Company to Instead Focus “Entirely on Second Life and Tilia”; Philip Rosedale Not Among Returning “Heavy Hitters”

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg on today's episode of Lab Gab, its company-to-community news program on YouTube, discussing Sansar:

“Sadly we have decided we as Linden Lab couldn’t continue to sponsor the project financially so we’re looking for a plan B for Sansar to continue.

“I can’t say much but we’re having interesting conversations with several parties to help that project move forward… but no deal is done yet, so people will have to be patient to see what happens with it.

“But yes it’s true that Linden Lab going forward will focus entirely on Second Life and Tilia. But I’m still busy making sure Sansar finds a great home.”

Ebbe then went on to address the announcement that several "heavy hitters" are returning to Linden Lab to help develop Second Life:

Survey: What "Heavy Hitters" Did Linden Bring Back to Improve Second Life?

Linden Lab's confirmation of recent layoffs last week included this incredibly intriguing line:

[W]e had to say goodbye to a few employees, but at the same time we also strengthened our team by bringing back some heavy hitters who will help make Second Life better than ever. 

Assuming this phrasing is accurate, it's two or more people formerly with Linden Lab, or currently with Linden Lab but working on another development team, such as Sansar, Tilia, or Blocksworld. Or perhaps it might even include a Second Life content creator who has since left the platform. And "heavy hitters" implies that an announcement will be made, and that many/most SL users will know who they are.

But who? Hence this survey! I hesitate to speculate openly, but a few obvious candidates come to mind: