New World Notes

What The Sandbox & Snoop Dogg Could Learn from Second Life

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has a new thought-provoking essay on The Conversation, pointing out the importance of learning from metaverse/virtual world history. For instance, what Second Life's real estate management policies can teach new metaverse platforms like The Sandbox:

Second Life originally had “point-to-point teleportation” (P2P). You could arrive anywhere in an instant. But in 2003 Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, disabled P2P. Residents trying to reach a destination would appear at the nearest “telehub.”

This had implications for real estate. Valuable for businesses and entertainment, plots of land near telehubs sold for top dollar — until 2005, when Linden Lab suddenly announced the end of telehubs and the return of P2P.

Land near former telehubs no longer had special value; some people lost thousands of dollars. The most powerful landlord can’t change the laws of physics, but Linden Lab could literally recode scarcity out of existence.

Fast-forward almost 20 years. Land next to Snoop Dogg’s virtual mansion is scarce: A plot could cost $450,000 because The Sandbox doesn’t have P2P. But were the company to suddenly add P2P, that $450,000 investment could become nearly worthless. 

The thing is, The Sandbox's actual user growth is tiny, so the value of Snoop's Sandbox property is negligible. By implementing P2P, Linden Lab created universal inherent value in Second Life real estate, no matter the specific location in Second Life. Partly for that reason, unsurprisingly, there are far more active users in SL than in The Sandbox.

I Talk About the Depiction of the Metaverse in Movies/TV on the CBC -- What Are Your Favorite Versions?

Pretty fun article. Unfortunately, my favorite metaverse-meets-the-movies story didn't make the cut: When a rising tech CTO watched The Matrix for the first time in 1999 with his friends, he left the theater somewhat bummed.

"That," he told them, "is what I wanted to make."

And that man's name? Philip Rosedale.

My favorite lines for the CBC article:

Watch: Second Life Land Baron Who Hates Evicting Tenants Featured on HBO's How To With John Wilson

How To with John Wilson is an acclaimed and quirky quasi-documentary comedy series on HBO -- think a handheld video version of This American Life, but even more nasally -- where John explores New York, attempting to accomplish various everyday tasks. (Not always an easy or non-ridiculous goal, since this is after all New York). In the first episode of Season 2 which recently premiered, we find John trying to buy a house in New York, opening up the zany hellscape that is real estate in that merciless metropolis.

Which is why John also pays a visit to a New York-based landlord also named John -- who as it happens, manages real estate in an even more expensive and wacky market: Second Life:

Metaverse Veteran Zuckerman Unleashes on Metaverse Wannabe Zuckerberg

In the Atlantic, longtime Internet activist and scholar Ethan Zuckerman takes textual fisticuffs to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Metaverse ambitions, going through the long evolution of the technology like an avuncular Bane. ("Ah you think the Metaverse is your ally? You merely adopted the Metaverse. I was born in it, molded by it.") Because Ethan's hands-on history with the Metaverse started as a developer in the 90s, and features a long stop at Second Life:

When Linden Lab launched this metaverse in 2003, there was a brief burst of enthusiasm where otherwise serious entities, such as businesses and universities, bought and built out their own islands in Linden’s proprietary world. (Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, now the Berkman Klein Center, had its own island.) The learning curve to build objects in Second Life was steep, the universe was populated haphazardly, and the Second Life client demanded a very fast computer and a very patient user. But pioneers in the space saw beyond these limitations and envisioned a system that was so emotionally compelling that journalists and activists would be forced to engage with it to reach audiences.

I was invited to the Metaverse Roadmap Summit in 2006 to see some of these “serious” Second Life spaces. The one that finally caused me to lose my shit was Camp Darfur, an exhibit designed to help metaverse explorers understand what Sudanese refugees were experiencing when they were displaced from their homes. Of course, this was Sudan as understood through the eyes of well-meaning Bay Area techies, which meant it featured a roaring campfire surrounded by wooden tree stumps where you could sit and contemplate the horrors of genocide. Given that women routinely walked miles from barren, tree-free desert camps to collect firewood, risking assault and rape in the process, it seemed like the sort of detail you’d want to get right in simulating the refugee experience.

I vividly remember Ethan losing his aforementioned shit on the topic, because I was onstage at the Metaverse Summit when SL's Camp Darfur project was discussed. (I first blogged about it here  -- pic of the notorious campfire above.) I was more interested in the group of Green Lantern roleplayers who protected the camp from griefers, but Ethan's objections to the project itself were painfully on point, a lesson in how easy it is for us to lose sight of what actually matters amid our ebullience over new technology.

Ethan also gets into the challenge of Second Life's poor branding, a theme I also keep coming back to:

Listen: I Talk Second Life, VR & Making the Metaverse With Melinda Byerley, Fellow Linden Lab Vet!

Click above or listen here for a real treat (in my extremely biased opinion): An in-depth interview of my career in the Metaverse leading up to Second Life and beyond.

It's for the podcast Stayin' Alive in Tech, created and hosted by Melinda Byerley, and she's among the best qualified people to conduct this conversation: Because Melinda, as it happens, is also a Linden Lab alum (she joined a few years after I left in 2006). So we get to dive deep into the inside details of making Second Life, such as the problem with the company's engineering-focused culture. I particularly like our conversation on why Second Life, while a great influencer, failed to go mass market. I argue that it comes down to three key things -- and the third thing may surprise you!

Links to some of the topics and articles we discuss after the break. And speaking of all that, Melinda interviewed Philip Rosedale in a previous episode -- listen below:

Monday Memory: How Second Life Roleplay Wound Up in Hot Tub Time Machine With John Cusack & Clark Duke

Listening to The Office podcast about the 2007 episode where Dwight and Jim play Second Life reminded me of another appearance by the virtual world a few years later -- in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), starring John Cusack along with Craig Robinson and Clark Duke. (Both of whom, funny enough, also starred in The Office.) In Hot Tub, Duke is Cusack's geeky nephew, who apparently is obsessed with playing in one of SL's many dark urban roleplay communities, like the infamous Crack Den (think Grand Theft Auto Online but with hardcore sex), but is stuck in the game's prison, doing hard time.

When the movie came out, I got to talk with Steve Nelson, the SL creator who worked with the filmmakers on the machinima for the SL scenes:

TONIGHT: Inventor Prototypes Battlebot in Second Life -- Then Creates it in Real Life to Fight On Discovery Channel's Battlebots!

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Above: Sharky in SL and in RL (images courtesy Constantine of Nano Station Technologies

Tonight at 8pm on the Discovery Channel (check your local listings!), there's a chance for Second Life users to cheer on a hometown champion: Episode 6, third fight of the night, it's Sharko (woot woot!) versus Slap Box (boo! hiss!) on the popular Battlebots reality TV show. 

Sharko is the creation of Edward Robinson, known in Second Life as Artorius Constantine, owner of the Nano Station Technologies store.  For the last few years, Constantine has not only been making a real life living from his SL inventions (animesh roleplay bots and so on), but taking what he's learned from the battlebots he's made for Second Life fights, and applying what he's learned to design real life battlebots:

The Life & Death of NPR's Science Friday in Second Life Ends on a Mystery

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:

Carmen King Kicks Up Second Life User Concurrency -- YouTube Star's SL Videos Likely Lead to 1st Growth Since COVID Quarantine

Recent SL concurrency stats via Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey

It's been over a month since YouTube gaming celebrity Carmen King started streaming hilariously raunchy Second Life videos on her channel -- September 3, to be exact -- but has that led to growth in Second Life use by her nearly 1 million subscribers? Based on data shared to me by Tyche Shepherd of Grid Survey, it sure seems that way. 

"There has been a rise since September (though there are signs this is falling in October) but not anything as dramatic as we saw in March/April," as Tyche tells me. March and April is when Second Life saw a spike in usage due to, well, the COVID-19 pandemic and a global quarantine. "See [chart] attached which shows the underlying trend in median daily concurrency after controlling for weekly seasonality."

See above, click to embiggenate. Before Carmen's videos, median daily concurrency for SL was declining to around 38,000. That's since grown to roughly 41,000 at peak. To be sure, her videos aren't the only factor at work (Tyche tells me the upward trend started in mid-August), but seeing as her SL videos have amassed over half a million views so far, they're almost certainly a major factor.

They've definitely been a major factor on Carmen King's inbox:

"All of my direct messages are filled with people asking me to help," she tells me laughing. 

Despite this sudden surge, she tells me Linden Lab has hardly connected with her -- but as a longtime social game doyenne, she does have advice for the company:

Prince Harry & Meghan Markle Spend First Week of Independence Looking at Art Made in Second Life

New World Notes has spent little or no time covering the British Royal Family over the last 14 years, but here we are: This Tuesday, a day before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced an official withdrawal from their royal duties, they spent some time looking at art made in Second Life.

Yes indeed they did:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle took in Skawennati’s exhibit "Avatars, Aliens, Ancestors" on Tuesday while visiting Canada’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom to say thanks for the hospitality they received during their recent trip to Canada...

The show imagines indigenous life past, present and future. It opens with the video work Words Before All Else, in which Skawennati’s avatar recites the Haudenosaunee’s Thanksgiving Address.

“My avatar, who is named xox, is an extension of myself,” she said. “She allows me to go places I might not be able to go.”

The artist Skawennati is pretty amazingly ambitious, and makes amazing use of SL in her art. Here's a talk she did about it a few years ago: