Several very observing residents have noticed the “real estate market crash” - since the Lindens have added much more land, prices have fallen down dramatically. With the GOM crash last week, this also means that suddenly we didn’t have any way to bring “fresh” money inworld.

Some analysts predict that the L$ will get weaker compared to the US$. The reason is simple: you can buy more land with the same amount of L$, or, seeing it the other way round, you will be able to spend only part of your money buying land, and keep enough for yourself to buy other things, without the need of going to GOM to exchange US$ for L$. What does this mean? Theoretically, it could mean that residents have more money to spend, thus, prices should be driven up by inflation. We’ll see if that’s going to happen or not!

One interesting side-effect is that for a few weeks at least, “land baroning” won’t be so much profitable (the barons will have to buy now a lot of real estate, when it’s cheap, and try to corner the market in a few weeks, when prices go up again…). Means that people have to go… back to work, instead of living from land sales!

Since I don’t have enough money to participate into the “land baroning affairs”, an unskilled resident like me has few options on “getting a job”. Unfortunately, being a dancer, stripper, escort or slave - the best-payed non-skilled professions in SL - is not for my taste. Fortunately, some nice SL company hired me as marketing manager. That’s much more my style!

Ah, but it’s hard. Instead of wiggling my bottom attached to an animated pole for a few hours, while happily chatting around with my friends in IM - that’s what the dancers/strippers do to pass time, you know - I can’t do that. Virtual or not, a marketing manager has lots of almost-real stuff to do - organizing meetings, getting in touch with suppliers and customers, organizing events, doing business plans, meeting with the board, do seminars and other events…

… wait! Do I hear someone yelling “hey, that’s what I do in Real Life, I’m supposed to ENJOY myself in Second Life! And why the heck is all these stuff necessary, after all? Can’t you just put up some vendors and that’s marketing for you??”

What most people fail to understand is that “social climbing” in Second Life - ie. being rich and famous - is HARD WORK. The people at the top of the pyramid are NOT there because they’re “lucky”. No, they did it the hard way, and let me tell you, it’s almost at hard as in the real world. There are differences, of course - the market is much smaller. Actually, if you take all the sims together, you’ll see we live in something like a big city - 6-7 km radius or so, I haven’t measured it properly - which would accomodate a few million people in RL. The number of shops, malls, and clubs are certainly appropriate for the size of the city, BUT we only have 15,000 residents, and perhaps only one third are “regular” residents.

So competition is incredible high. Imagine that your friendly neighbourhood of 3-5,000 inhabitants had 867 shops in the same quarter where you live. And 537 clubs. That’s Second Life numbers for you! How would all of those survive?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t survive. Competition is just too strong. That’s why people still go the same clubs, shop from the same malls, buy from the same suppliers.

Now if you want to go into that line of business, you have to have your feet on the ground and your head firmly between your shoulders. Ok, the market is incredibly competitive, and one good idea this week will have 12 copycats the next one. How do you carve your niche? How will you convince everybody else that your product is more original/better/cheaper than the one just sold next door? In a world without copyrights and patents, how do you ensure a “monopoly”, even a temporary one, just to make sure you sell a few devices or clothes, pay off your investment, and go to the next project?

Whew. The mind boggles. It’s hard, in some ways harder than real world. But, as I heard someone saying at one of the Thinkers’ events, “challenge and risk is what we need to feel fulfilled”. Or, put into other words: “no pain, no gain”.

Second Life is ruled by a benign demitheocracy. What this means is that the Lindens are the rulers - they care for our avatars, they keep the grid running and are further developing it, and they interfere to provide for justice in case of conflict. And they help the residents out. That’s what they do!

It isn’t a true theocracy (rule by the Gods) since the Lindens are “only” demogods: they are omnipotent, meaning that they can do whatever they want to do inworld, without any of us residents to be able to prevent them - and they have superpowers to enable them to do things we can’t. They shape the world, and they change the laws of physics of the world. However, they’re NOT omnipresent (but almost ) and are not omniscient. Still, they classify at least as demigods…

However, there is another class just below the “reigning demigods”: the aristocracy. Newbies usually laugh when I talk about them; after all, they are “just players”, and have no “superpowers”, so why are they so special? And are they REALLY special?

As most of us have already experienced, being a premium subscriber allows you for comfortable living. L$ 2000 a month is enough to take care of all shopping needs, going to parties, buy furniture, etc. And you’ll probably earn more than that, too, because of rating and dwell. So do you need to “work” to earn more money? And why should you do so? Unless you’re greedy, that is?

Well, getting a job in SL means learning a skill (the hard way, as in RL!). If you are good at it - scripting, clothes designing, DJing, animating, hosting events, whatever - you’ll get an extra income, which is very nice.

But if you are VERY GOOD at it - welcome to the aristocracy! They are the ones who succeded. They have thought thinks out differently, or they have been very successful in their own market niches, or they are simply much more skilled. In that case, you’ll easily become Filthy Rich.

What do you do with all that money? Well, after 20 or 30 L$ 2000 Bugattis from William Beckett’s Motor Workshop, and perhaps a few L$ 5000 of TrueSkin, it’s simply not much fun anymore! So, the only real expensive thing around is land. Filthy Rich people just buy land, and more land, and even more land. Even if they are not “land barons”, but just end-users of land barons, they WILL hold lots of land inworl. More land means paying more land usage fees - BUT also means more dwell points, AND eventually you’ll be renting that land you have, for added revenue - which, through GOM or IGE, will give you more US$ to pay the Lindens. Actually, some players say that the hard part is getting to a plateaux where it levels off. Once you’re there, you earn so many L$ inworld that you aren’t spending much more than a “lowly” premium user with 512 sq. m.!

So they are just like the real world aristocracy - they are rich, they have land. What more?

Since they have so much land, they are the basis of finantial support of LL. It’s natural that the Lindens are specially careful not to upset the biggest landowners! Let’s give you an example, paying for tier for a whole sim costs about US $195 if it’s on public land, private sims add an extra $195 to that, from what I understood from the web page. So if the Lindens upset 7 to 10 of the private sim owners, this means they’ll have to fire an employee! That’s not good, and that means that a FEW players can actually have enormous leverage upon the Lindens. My estimate is that a few hundred players own perhaps 30% of the game. If they would go away - Linden Lab would be no more! Remember that they have to support a 50+ staff, plus colocation costs, at roughly US$ 100-150 per machine, if they got a good deal, and not counting getting a return on the investment on all the machines (or a monthly fee if they’re leasing them). There is not a big margin there. Actually, the way the game works, the more people hold smaller plots, the more money Linden Lab makes, but the land barons work against that trend.

This is a very strange business, where just a handful of players “control” the company, and, of course, they use their leverage in their favour So that’s the real power behind the aristocracy. They can make our benign demigods tremble!

Fortunately for us, the aristocracy has, generally speaking, about the same interests as all the other players: good access, a stable grid, interesting content, and so on. But it also means that the game will always reflect the views of the aristocracy and not the majority of the players. Ah well.

After all, isn’t that exactly the same thing that happens in real life?

So you have lots of experience with online conversations, for years and years, have been accused of starting flame wars and managed to escape without getting burned, and you’re the nicest person in the world, so there is no way you’ll get misinterpreted in Second Life, isn’t it?

Think again. 12 years of online communication has not avoided me to mortally offend two very nice persons, both having helped me out often, and where, in both cases, I had started to build a trust relationship with them.

I thought they would already know me better and understand that I never mean to offend anyone. Still, it happened - in two consecutive days! What was wrong with me? Just woke up the wrong side of the bed? But true friends ignore a “bad day” easily - in this case, as said, we’re talking about mortal offense.

The problem with SL compared to other types of online communication is the fine line dividing role-playing and our true selves. In the RL (and also on many online chats) we certainly use our “masks” to hide our feelings, but there are “cracks” in this mask, and you tend to look through them, so it’s perhaps easier to understand if you’re touching tender nerves there…

In SL that’s not so easy. Your avatar may be laughing a lot, telling jokes, having general fun, but inside it may be weeping. Or you may pose as a fool and be rather a genius instead. As you can be anything, and your persona in SL is defined by what you say and what you do, you tend to jump to the wrong conclusions, when you react in the expected way to those words and actions. Because the “real person” behind the avatar may be quite different from what he/she appears to be!

How can you be sure?

In one of the cases, the person in question posed as a very open-minded intellectual, who had studied a lot about everything, and had very interesting views and opinions on things in general. Since I’m an open-minded person myself (not an intellectual lol… but I tend to read a lot about stuff, both con and pro, to make sure I understand both sides of the argument correctly) I felt naturally attracted to a similar open-minded person. I open up my inner self very easily with likely-minded people.

Of course, all went well until I discovered that the person in question is not open-minded at all but filled with prejudices in RL, and that his views/opinions are based on a world conception which is fixed, immutable, and not subject to discussion of any sort. In SL that person was just role-playing open-mindedness - but how could I know?? My mistake was to assume how people think based on what their avatars do and say!

A similar thing happened with another player, a very charming, helpful and amusing person. Still, a bad taste practical joke offended him deeply. Everyone in the group just assumed he was having fun, too - but he wasn’t. The joke was really bad taste - something you can joke with when you are among long-time friends whom you know very well for a long time. Not something to joke about with when you’re among people you really don’t know at all, you just know their avatars. So offense was taken, and it was pretty serious.

Lessons learned: SL is not RL, and the ease of communication does not mean you can assume everything about other persons’ feelings! As in RL, people are not so open as they may appear. To really know what they think and feel, you need time. And it’s not easy.

I lost two friends in a week for thinking otherwise. Worse than that, I could live with indifference - but they have now labeled me as a mean, unpolite, uncaring, untrustworthy person. I’m ashamed of what I said and what I did, and apologies are simply not enough - there are things you can’t simply apologize and forget about it. In both cases it goes much deeper than that, I’ve abused their trust and confidence, and shattered a relationship based on my own assumptions. So even if they’ll ever forgive me (time heals wounds), they’ll never change that opinion, they’ll just discard my existence as inconsequential and irrelevant. That’s my punishment for “taking friendship as granted” and it certainly hurts. In RL that would never have come to that point! Like every other human relationship, it takes much more time to grow and mature, than just a few conversations. Time in SL is hectic and the experience is pretty intensive, but some things just don’t happen so fast - some things are just the same as in RL!

Remember the old saying: “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate”. Take good care about what you say and the way you say it. And your “intuition” in RL may simply not be enough to deal with people in SL!

Well, if you meet me in SL and find me cold and distant, now you know why. I just can’t hurt anybody’s feelings again by assuming how you think. I must make sure I know how you really think. And that can’t be done in a few hours/days of intense conversation in SL…

So you have a new girl-/boyfriend in Second Life and you have been having a marvelous time with her/him? She/he is intelligent, witty, easy-going, loves parties, enjoys herself and pleases you, and she/he even has lots of interesting friends. Sounds great, right? But is she/he actually like that in RL?

Well, Second Life drops all barriers, and while people may disagree a lot about this issue, the old saying - “in the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” - certainly applies to SL, too. With a vengeance.

Forget about age, ethnicity, religion, social status, or even sex. In SL everybody knows that the avatar can be infinitely changed at any time. So people simply don’t care about “appearances”. You just can’t rely on it. The shyest person in the world may be online as a strip dancer. Who knows? And more important - who cares?

This, of course, is a great thing that SL doesn’t share with RL. There is simply no conception about “prejudice” because it doesn’t make any sense at all. How can you have any type of “prejudice” against someone who may look completely different in 5 minutes or so - the time you take to completely switch your avatar to something different?

Then again, there is a hidden danger. While there are no barriers to communication, there isn’t any body language to give you hints about the other avatars. You simply can’t know who’s behind the pretty animated graphics. The only way to know more about the avatar’s “owner” is… to talk to her/him!

And after a while you see a pattern… there are lots and lots of people who use SL as an escape from RL. From the simple view “my RL sucks, I play SL just to forget about it” or “in RL I’m just a geek, here I can be a hero”, to “nobody cares about me in RL, that’s why I play SL”, you can come across many more serious types of problems. People with disabilities - social, mental, physical - or severe illnesses come here to enjoy “normal life”. For them, it’s much more than an “escape” from RL. It’s the only way they have to enjoy absolutely normal human interaction without any prejudice at all!

Therapists have actually encouraged some of these people to join an online 3D game for that reason. Since it’s unpolite to ask people what they do or what they are in RL, they can enjoy hours, days, months of a completely normal and healthy “life”. Even if it is a virtual one!

This amazing characteristic has begun to attract the attention of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and many types of mental healers - several even setup their own offices in SL! People are writing their college thesis on human interaction in a world without barriers or prejudice. All this is absolutely amazing and probably a completely unexpected “side-effect”.

It will be interesting to see it evolve…

Scripters (or scriptors) are the Second Life programmers. They usually have some background in Real Life programming and have just discovered the joys and wonders of dealing with an awkward event-driven state machine with inconsistent library functions. If this paragraph sounds like gobbledigook to you, STOP READING! You won’t find this very informative anyway.

In the Real World, we have two major ways of dealing with software development: you either secure your code (ie. no one can have access to it) and license it (ie. people pay you to use it, and you give him/her some guarantees or maintenance and support), or you can put it into any sort of Open Source agreement: you retain the copyright over your software, but anyone can get the source code and distribute it freely (however, nobody can SELL it for you).

In Second Life things seem to be more hard to do. Actually nobody pays for a nice script! This is NOT the reason why all scripts are free - the nicest ones aren’t - but simply because a script usually needs an object to work with. This means that a non-building scripter will have a very hard time trying to sell his work.

What i usually advise to scripters is that they join forces with an object designer. Objects get their value enhanced greatly if they have a few scripts inside - like chairs with a script to point avatars towards the correct direction, or candles actually emitting light, flames and smoke! And who wants to buy a gun that doesn’t shoot at all? Working together, scripters and object builders complement each other and both profit. Sure, it’s the object that gets sold, but it’s the scripter’s work that enhances its value. After all, who wants to have a wonderfully designed car if you can’t drive it in SL?

For those who wanted to attend but weren’t unable to do so, here goes a resumed version of the event.

Attendants were informed that I would post this information online and edit it; everyone who attended is welcome to email me and ask for corrections if they feel I have represented their views incorrectly. Names are not revealed to protect privacy, as some of the comments were quite personal.

The moderator introduced the session by asking participants to think about their relationships in Second Life. There were both very new residents as well as some quite old ones in the meeting, so there was a good spread of possible opinions. It was pointed out that things “go much faster” and are “pretty intense” in SL so that relationships also develop quite quickly. New residents already established a firm relationship of friendship and preferred to roam the Brave New World together.

Some residents pointed out that the mix between SL and RL actually go very deeply and no one really warns us beforehand before we start to join this “game”.

One former TSO (The Sims Online) player had already a previous experience: players with different connection habits (or physical distance) tend to develop close friendships but these do not translate well into real life (RL), and the friendship tens do drift apart.

The next topic was the “phases” that people apparently go through in this “game”:

• It’s just a wonderful game
• It’s a serious addiction but still nothing more than a game
• Something more than a game

Most agreed on having gone through phases 1 and 2 already. A few begun to take the “game” as their true “second life”. The terms “addiction” and “initial overdose” have popped up in the conversation, but everyone agreed that these words have a very negative feeling, even if they describe properly what one feels during the first weeks of joining up. However, there seem to be no “withdrawal symptoms” if someone leaves the “game” for some reason (like vacations) and return later on to pick it up where they were.

The question if SL is “more than a game” was never definitely answered. Many of the participants had similar experiences on previouse online games and compare SL to a big 3D chat where they talk to real people and naturally develop relationships here.

Communication and the ability to break all barriers is the strongest reason for the “addiction”. We had a deaf participant which has a “wonderful way to communicate here without barriers”. High school grads participated freely in meetings and debates, at exactly the same level as older people with “serious degrees” and “important jobs”. There are no prejudices against looks, ethnicity, age, job, etc. Even people with alleged “anti-social behaviour” in RL can have perfectly normal relationships in SL because there is more freedom! Some even commented that this has enabled them to have more friends on SL than in the RL.

Despite some bad experiences (love affairs which simply didn’t work out), there was an overall consensus that SL just transfers relationships from RL. People brought friends and contacts from other games or chat rooms inside SL and their relationship continued there. In SL, friends are very supportive and comforting, even with problems that originate in RL. Actually, this view was even reforced - people are more supportive in SL than in RL.

Of course, there may be a good reason for that - people are with their SL friends much longer than they are with their RL friends. Still, the question of defining a frontier between SL and RL. Most agree that RL must always come first. However, as we relate to human beings in SL - not avatars or computer graphics - and these relationships are absolutely “real”. In any case, there are difficulties in transposing them back into RL. There are some success stories - after the initial shock of meeting the friend offline - and more good examples than bad ones. This happens more often with people having long experience of dealing with “online friendships” (> 10 years).

The next issue to discuss was trust. Can you trust someone you’ve just met online, and, in the case of SL, can be anything? The first reaction was interesting - after all, in RL, if you meet someone in a bar, he/she can also claim to be anything. This evolved into the discussion about the way people slowly tend to role-play less in SL (ie. adhere to more “fantasy”) and become much more like themselves. A current trend seems to be that “normal-looking avatars” are more “fashionable” or “attractive”. The reason behind this is that trust has to start somewhere. It is easier to build it in RL because in SL you have a stronger “fantasy” component - but this is changing. SL avatars acting and behaving just like their RL counterparts tend to build up trust more easily (so some proposed or encouraged having several avatars, one which is “really you” and looks and behaves like you do, and others for more fantastic settings and just for general fun).

Will this trust cross into RL? There is not a clear consensus about it. Many see that SL is just an online communication tool, like other instant messenger systems, chat rooms, emails or even mobile phones. If you’re used to build trust that way, SL will be not very different from you. Several mentioned that people in SL (or other online communication tools) give more opportunities for people to be more open and sincere - so trust can come more easily. On the other hand, some do not believe that this will work well; and several simply don’t want to consider any online tools as a “dating service” for RL and clearly separate both. Some simply don’t see SL as having “dating potential” at all - if it happens, it’s by chance alone, and not something done on purpose. Of course, we also shoud define first what “trust” really means!

An interesting view was brought by one of the participants is that your mind tends to substitute things when you don’t have all the information on the other person. There is a baseline built upon what you know, but much is left to imagination and assumptions used to fill in the gaps, and this may be a source of potential problems later on.

How to deal with relationships based on deceit and misconceptions? Experienced gamers just disconnect for a while and forget about it. This does not mean that it’s “easy”, just that you have the possibility of saying “no” and keep your distance (in RL this cannot be so easy, say, if your friend is a co-worker or a neighbour).

It’s not necessarily “easier” to make friends in SL - just faster. This comes from the intensity of the game and the time you spend together with your SL friends. However, it takes just as much work to keep a friendship online as offline! Some believe that “casual friends” are easier to make in SL (some claim that they are not emotionally abused online as often as in RL), but close friends are actually more difficult (or even impossible if you don’t meet him/her in RL), but there was no consensus on that. Some have the opposite view: personal offense is easier online, as you simply “aren’t there” to look the other person in the eyes. In any case, stable relationships are definitely possible and last for a long, long while (even if only in SL). Very difficult cases are the ones when one of the partners want to carry the friendship over to RL but the other doesn’t.

There are advantages in SL to meet likely-minded individuals, as there are no distance barriers, and it’s very easy to find them through events or places where they enjoy the same things.

Does RL interfere with SL? There are SL marriages, will they get interferences from your own family and marriage in RL? Experience seems to be an important factor here - both online experience in dealing with relationships, as well as experience with RL relationships. Some mentioned, for instance, that sexual affairs in SL - cyber sex - aren’t really cheating on your spouse/partner in RL, in spite of the deep emotional involvement in the act. Of course, the more solid your RL relationship, the less fear of having it threatened by an SL “experience” like that. Others simply discard “cyber sex” as irrelevant, uninteresting or simply not “realistic” enough to emote to. Others still accept sex and violence in SL as being parts of our own human baggage which we bring with us to the online worlds naturally (where humans are, there will be sex and violence always).

Another interesting issue was raised. SL does require an unusual commitment at the outset - once one you chooses a character (ie. not only the avatar, but they way he/she relates to other people), one cannot discard him/her for free… so one has to make some decisions at the outset, because one’s reputation in SL is not easily changed, once you’ve begun. This reflects what we do everyday in SL, too.

Curiously, SL as a “therapy” was also mentioned. “Wounded” or “hurt” people can learn and recover in SL as it is more “safer”. It still hurts, but is more manageable than in RL, and you can learn faster here. Some know about other players who come to SL as an escape from RL pressures. In SL you can unlearn and re-learn behaviour relatively cheaply. On the other hand, engaging in typical SL activities - building, creating, chatting - is very relaxing, rewarding and contributes for an overall better state of the mind. We should “jump from SL to RL (and vice-versa)” as it pleases you. A balance between SL and RL is, however, a goal to achieve. There is a temptation to give excessive importance to SL, but RL should come as top priority, even if several agree that things like domestic chores come after SL, for instance, or that these priorities were completely reversed for other online games.

But almost everyone agreed that SL influences a lot your RL, both positively (a healthy environment to be creative and communicative) and negatively (you have to take into account the time and real money you spend with it and keep both at manageable levels). People tend to have dreams (or even lucid dreams) about SL, or at least thinking about activities and projects they have in SL. This was followed by several comments around lucid dreaming and VR environments in general and how some can overlap. The issue was not only with SL, but with 3D-realistic games in general.

In any case, one group of attendants are slightly afraid that SL will “take over” (ie. predominant in your lives) while others reject the idea as they have taken measures to prevent that from happening. Still others would jump at an offer from Linden Lab to stay “forever” in SL if there was a way to get payed for it (personal note: me too! And yes, I applied for a job there, too…)

What exactly is SL for the attendants? Each one seems to have his/her own experience. For some, it’s a new level of online gaming. For others, it’s more than that, but there are “games” within SL (ie. paintball, water polo). Still others refer to it as a “virtual environment where anything can happen”. Others just refer to it as “a place to practice scripting”. This comment was followed by several people explaining that they were dotcom burnouts (personal note from myself: SL as a gathering place for dotcom burnouts? Interesting! I am one myself).

To quote an ex-Apple employee who attended: “[SL] is officially the coolest thing he’s ever seen done with a network”

There were 18 people in attendance (not counting myself )

Well, when I started updating this site, I was thinking more of writing a few tips and tricks and things I’ve been discovering in Second Life that would benefit more new users.

As time goes on, however, it seems that I’m more into thinking about what Second Life is really about, and what issues may develop about this “virtual life”.

In the past few days I have got in touch with lots of people with their hearts broken.

This has encouraged me to launch an event:

Do you think that your Real Life intrudes upon your Second Life experience? Can you separate one from another? And should you do so? Where is the frontier between both?

The Soul Solace Meetings will try to explore our experiences as human beings living in a virtual community. “Avatars are just pretty computer animated graphics, but with a very human soul behind them.” Do you agree or completely disagree? Are relationships and even love “for real”, or is Second Life “just a game” where we even role-play our feelings in a make-believe world? Do you trust other players’ avatars like you trust your family and friends in RL? Why? Or why not?

Bring your experiences, good and bad, and join us in a (slightly) moderated debate by Gwyneth Llewelyn, in a beautiful pavillion set up in lovely Uli. You can get some ideas and starting points for the debate here.