The “older” you are in Second Life®, the more you understand the changes that this world is subject to. Some call it “accelerated change” — virtual worlds being what they are, there are ways to simulate real processes much quicklier than in “real life”, thus, the hectic and ever-changing nature of Second Life.

First Generation — “Tekkie Wikkies”

First-generation SL users were mostly a mix of gamers (who came to SL just because they wished to see “yet another MMORPG” and found out what SL’s all about) and programmers (attracted by the advertising promising SL to be a next-generation, rapid-prototyping, games development platform). This is what Prokofy Neva calls the “tekkie wikkies” — a generation of early adopters who came to see the marvelous new technologies available in Second Life, and get bedazzled (pun intended!) by it.

They’re still Second Life’s most active supporters, enthusiastic in-world users, and untiring evangelisers. Yes, they’ve found out — like the rest of us, I suppose — that SL is neither a game, nor a games development platform, although it more resembles the latter than the former: it’s a crippled games development platform. You can do games in SL, but don’t expect to be able to replace Counterstrike or World of Warcraft or whatever you fancy with a SL-developed MMORPG.

Still, the roots of SL’s population are very strongly grafted on top of these early adopters, the “core” of what this world has to offer. Just take a look at who did the LSL wikis or who gets Linden Lab’s thanks for helping to debug and test each new version. Most of them aren’t ever tired of Second Life (yes, for them, it’s an ever-changing challenge!) and will probably be around until the bitter end (whatever that means).

One thing this core group never really understood was the economics of SL — not surprisingly, when most started, there was content, but no money (thus, no economy). People ganged together to do creative things for free. The world was, of course, much smaller — Anshe Chung has now her own subcontinent which is larger than what SL was in late 2003, for instance — and everybody knew by name everybody else. There were (and still are!) strong bonds of fellowship among the earliest adopters.

This group also increased over the time, “recruiting” new, similar-minded residents: people more interested in creating new things with SL, tying it to off-world applications, pushing the limits of the Linden Scripting Language — in a word, testing the technology and seeing what could be done with it, and how far it was possible to push the limits. They are the ones who started to understand what creates lag and what doesn’t; they exploited bugs and “incorrectly” programmed things in SL to give us astounding new effects, completely unforeseen by SL’s creators. A few, of course, in due time, “upgraded” to become Linden Lab employees as well.

Second Generation — Content Barons

A second generation of users were much less technological, but aesthetically oriented. These are what today are called “content barons”. Instead on focusing on technology by itself, they concentrated all their efforts in making an empty world into a living, colourful one. They’re the builders, the texturizers, the vehicle and weapon designers, and, of course, the clothiers. In a sense, they also exploited LL’s platform to the utmost, but in a completely different direction. Primmed shoes and primmed hair addressed a shortcoming that LL never managed to fix: hair and shoes are simply ugly, and the talented designers worked around it. The Sl History Wiki records Mikiloo Murphy (now Ming Chen) as being the first person ever to wear prim hair (still in Beta), so this attempt to aesthetically enhance SL’s content has started well in our past.

In any case, this second generation is the one responsible for how Second Life looks like today. If there is something like a “SL artistic trend”, it was this group that has created it. Companies/groups like Spellbound, Bedazzle, or Avalon are children of this generation, organising themselves as groups of talented designers who have a certain “style” which they have brought to SL. Also, it’s impossible to imagine what SL would look like without the creations of the Midnights, Aimee Weber, Nephilaine Protagonist (Pixel Dolls), Palomma Casanova (DoveVogue), or Namssor Daguerre (Second Skin, which is installed in your computer and not inside SL); they set standards of quality in clothing, texturing, and also building, that virtually changed the face of the world.

This group also brought something else to Second Life: commerce.

Third Generation — Commerce

With the willingness to trade-off learning everything by yourself for buying ready-made, high-quality items done by professional designers, commerce and the economy flourished. Not susprisingly, Anshe Chung began her work in SL as a clothes designer, and transitioned to a 3rd generation SLer: by buying land for her shops, she became a land baroness herself, and now most people forget how wonderful her designs used to be and only remember Anshe as the leading force in SL’s economy.

She’s not the only one, of course, just the most successful one But these days, 3rd generation SLers join SL for the explicit purpose of learning how the market forces in SL work and establish themselves as the “best in town”. It’s interesting to see how many professional designers look at SL as simply a market opportunity; they were used to do buildings, furniture and clothes in other MMORPGs, or sell their digital creations on e-Commerce & community sites like Renderosity. Now they’re doing it in Second Life as well. Yes, we all know that you won’t be rich easily by selling your content in SL, but you can make money without a shadow of doubt, if you’re good enough.

This group is also what Prokofy Neva is betting on to bring forward the Metaverse: a place where economy/commerce, culture and arts flow together, and where people can have their “alternate lives” just because they’re economically feasible. Many of the talented designers have in SL a hobby that “pays off”. This makes them very strongly bound to SL, and will not leave SL easily: they see it as a market opportunity, a niche to exploit, a chance to get some money from your hobby — and have a tremendous lot of fun by doing so! The truth is, these are the ones who populate the Metaverse and make it live. It’s thanks to them that we have 250 or so events per day (contrast with around 10 per day before 3rd generation SLers became seriously involved in SL), that things like the e-Commerce sites (SL Boutique, SL Exchange, Gigas/SecondServer) are possible at all, that we start to have urban planning in communities (people wish to sell their wares more easily; customers want nicer environments, friendlier access to shops/malls, better customer support… and so on, mimicking the real world.

No matter how successful this 3rd generation has been, the truth is, we can’t all live off Second Life, although a few of us certainly can. What is there for the rest of us?

Fourth Generation — RL work in SL

Gwyn visits the Tagus Opera House, destroyed in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake

Enter the fourth generation of SLers.

This is the infamous group that says: “SL is not a game but a platform“. At the forefront of their thought is the idea that it’s too soon to have a self-sustainable Metaverse, where the money in circulation is able to pay the (real world) bills. That may be possible in 2015 or so, when the Linden dollar (L$) is high enough for the exchange to US$ be worth making SL commerce viable as a “real life job” for perhaps 70-90% of the population. We’re still not there yet — perhaps less than 1% are able to “live off” SL, and that is certainly a good sign, but the growth must be much faster to allow a larger group of people to live off SL as well.

The second point is that SL is simply not big enough. We must cross the one-million-users mark first to have critical mass. And we’re talking one million active users, not dormant accounts that nobody uses. At the time of this writing, we’ve surpassed the 70,000 user base — similar in number to communities like Renderosity or DAZ, where the content creators are able to get some monetary return from their hobbies, but almost all still have to have a job besides that. The difference is that they use these community sites to attract RL jobs — “here is what I can do, hire me”

This is exactly what the 4th generation of SLers are promoting: “SL is an amazing platform with a wonderful community where we can do all sorts of things that are utterly impossible with any other technology. Here is what we can do with it; hire us”

Linden Lab’s Community Team is very strongly encouraging this group. Last year there were perhaps two or three projects in that area — the SL Campus (greatly encouraged and promoted by LL), Brigadoon, Live2Give, Vertu. This year it’s almost impossible to list them all! The SL Educators mailing list, for instance, has a traffic of dozens of emails per day — hundreds of people eagerly exchanging their ideas on how to use SL in their daily jobs of teaching and training. But this is just one of many projects. SL Future Salon has given us, of course, the Second Life Community Convention. While I don’t know if it was operated at a loss or at a profit, the simple truth is, it involved a workforce of around a hundred people and moved dozens of thousands of US dollars — not Linden dollars! And besides conferences, academic teaching, profissional training, there is still much more being done: the “RL work in SL” group joins teams of people doing simulations using SL, or using SL for health care issues (in this area, there is really a lot being done). And finally, more prominently on the European side, we have the artistical/cultural use of SL. It’s hard to find anyone from Scandinavia who hasn’t an arts grant or private funding to further explore the artistic expression in SL (see The Port for an example); but other countries do similar things as well (the above picture is a virtual reconstruction of the Tagus Opera House in Lisbon, Portugal, completely ruined during the earthquake in 1755).

And last but not least, a few are using SL as a “rapid prototyping tool” for their own jobs — like a few architects, furniture and industrial designers, interior decorators, and even people like Mrs Jones, who, through the Avalon group, introduced a line of clothing for avatars, using it as a channel for advertising their RL clothes. In this subgroup we find a few groups that announce to the world at large that they have the required talents and skills to do new projects in SL — the most prominent being Bedazzle’s Stagecoach Island project for Wells Fargo. Outsourcing for real money is the latest trend. Even LL does the same (see the Welcome Area, built by residents)!

Teaching, training, simulation, health care, outsourcing skills, culture, arts, advertising — this is all what the 4th generation of SLers is bringing into the Metaverse. They see the Metaverse as a door opening into another world, a platform to do things otherwise impossible, a way to earn enough money in the real world to fully commit themselves to Second Life.

Not surprisingly, this raises a few doubts. If the Metaverse is not self-sustainable, but needs money from the outside, what will come next? Advertising and sponsorships? We have known for long what is LL’s official position on that: “We’ll tear them down if the community doesn’t like them”. But it seems inevitable. People fight for the right of posting classifieds, things like MetaAdverse sell billboard space in Second Life, and events are sponsored by residents to promote their content. But will that scale well with RL projects? Anshe has taken almost two years to own a few dozen sims and establish a resident population there who pays her RL bills, but companies like Wells Fargo spoke of “easily” buying a hundred sims to provide and promote their own content. What chance will hard-working residents to “compete” with a RL money influx? If Ralph Lauren starts to sell digital recreations of their lines of products in-world, and promote them aggressively, how will the top “content barons” react? (Why should you buy from the Pixel Dolls brand if you can get a true, Ralph Lauren-branded T-shirt instead?)

These questions are very hard to answer. First, because RL companies will not look twice at Second Life with just 70,000 or 100,000 residents. It would be simply not worth all the trouble. So, the first groups that will enter SL through RL projects are niche groups — students, artists, isolated communities. We’ll also see people logging in just to consume a certain type of content — Wells Fargo’s customers on Stagecoach, college students at their respective private islands, customers of an interior designer just logging in to see their prototyped requests, and so on. In a sense, we’ll see some fragmentation — a part of the SL community that doesn’t wish to have anything at all to do with Second Life’s “Metaverse community”. But the best projects will introduce new users into the SL community as well. So, health care projects will bring people with disabilities into the hands of the friendly SL resident population. They’ll get perhaps a special training, their own version of the Orientation Island, but will be “released” in the “outside world”, and expect to thrive there. I also foresee that customers of things like Wells Fargo will quickly tire of the “limited content” and wish to explore the “rest of the world” (under their own accounts). Having participated into a similar (but non-profit) project, I can reveal that one of the results is that an isolated, 50-person community, is not able to be self-sufficient in terms of content production and consumption — they need the “Metaverse” to be satisfied. At least a thousand people are necessary to become self-sufficient — and all these projects target, right now, much smaller groups. Put into other words — tiny, isolated “villages” or “hamlets” cannot survive and thrive by themselves; people will only be able to continue to log in to SL if they can somehow benefit from the “city” atmosphere that is provided by 70,000+ residents.

Thus, the 4th generation brings certainly a new challenge to SL: how to deal with the idea that suddenly millions of L$ may be available to people without any roots in the SL community, to create from scratch things that took others many months or even years to accomplish, but that will target a group of people that will “remain” in the Metaverse, as opposed to small, tiny, isolated groups? Unlike the first three generations, which grew inside the Metaverse (they were simply paradigm shifts inside the Metaverse itself), this 4th generation is able to produce “external growth” by itself — in artificial ways. Linden Lab certainly desires these groups to participate in “their” Metaverse. But are these groups real Metaverse architects, in the sense that they’re helping out the Metaverse to grow?

This is, of course, an answer that needs to be found by each and every group. And the net result is that the Metaverse will not be alone any more. Like the World-Wide Web grew from a small, academic community, to become the universal tool for things like personal blogs, database access, information retrieval, shopping and e-Commerce, I also believe that, by going “beyond the Metaverse”, Second Life will be able to establish itself as the ultimate tool for creating a “virtual country” — whatever that will mean in 2015.

SecondLife 1.7.0 release scheduled for Monday, October 24th, 2005
In our continuing efforts to improve the Second Life experience, we will update the Second Life grid on Monday October 24, 2005 from 6:00 AM PT to 2:00 PM PT. During that time Second Life will be unavailable.

The release notes for the new version are as follows:

Second Life 1.7.0
===========

Major Features
—————–

- Simulator Performance Improvements
* Simulators can now handle many more users without running slowly
* The simulator now attempts to run at a fixed frame rate (45 frames per second) which is the same as the physics frame rate. This means that if there are a large number of scripts on the simulator, the frame rate will stay the same, but all of the scripts will run less frequently/slower, improving overall performance.
* Major redesign of the way objects are transmitted from the simulator to the viewer.

- Added Multi-Select in Inventory
* Most inventory operations (move, delete, drop in world) can now be done on multiple inventory items at a time.
* Ctrl-Click & Shift-Click are both supported.

- Added eight HUD attachment points
* Attachments appear in the Users Heads-Up-Display (HUD) and not in the world.
* These attachments can only be seen by the person wearing them, not by other residents.

- Full Bright Objects
* Full-bright objects/faces/textures do not give off light in local lighting mode but appear lit.

- Improved World Map
* More details for each square tile. World map shows satellite view of objects in color.
* Less server load to generate the map.
* Auto-complete when typing in estate name, landmarks and friends online.
* Removed the drop-down list from the Map Region Box, because it has too many regions in it for a menu.

- Residents can no longer be negatively rated. Old negative ratings have been removed.

- The land sale tool has been reorganized.
* Land can no longer be sold for L$ 0 to anyone. You must set it for sale for a specific person.

- New “Open” window to interact with object contents and unpack boxes
* More intuitive way of opening boxes.
* Only available when object is rezzed in-world (replaces ‘Rate’ on pie menu when right-clicking an object).
* Replaces using “Edit” window to view object contents and unpack boxes.

- Added a “Publish on to web” checkbox to the Resident Profile UI and Postcard Dialogue UI
* Controls whether information can be seen on the Second Life web site. (Profiles are always visible inside Second Life.)
* Future updates to http://secondlife.com/ will enable items selected for publishing to appear there.

- Residents can create classified ads in the “Profile” window.
* Ability to advertise for a fee; includes image, location & information.

Minor Features
—————-

- Added a clear cache button to the Preferences->Network tab
* Click the button and then restart the client to clear the cache

- Added “Build” button to the Toolbar

- View->Leaders has been removed.
* See the SecondLife website for Leader information.

- Enable Windows XP Limited User Accounts the ability to run Second Life
* Admin and Power Users are still required to install Second Life.

- We now ask on a client crash if its ok to send in your crash report, rather than on install

- Improved region crossing when wearing attachments, both in mouselook and normal view modes

- The behavior for music player has changed.
* If you click play, music will begin playing and will autoplay when you enter a parcel with music. If you click stop, music will stop and will not autoplay.

- On receiving an item, the dialogue box now distinguishes between objects and avatars

- Added ability to rotate and position subsets of linked objects

Script Changes
—————–

- Added llSetPayPrice
* Users can now set the default pay price and the quick pay button values via the script llSetPayPrice function.

- Improved llRequestSimulatorData
* Added DATA_SIM_RATING to query the rating (PG or MATURE or UNKNOWN) of a simulator.

- Added llGetInventoryType
* Gives users the ability to get the type of an inventory item.

- Added Full Bright option to llSetPrimitiveParams
* Usage:
llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_FULLBRIGHT, {side}, {enabled});
* Enable full bright for an entire object:
llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_FULLBRIGHT, ALL_SIDES, TRUE]);
* Disable full bright for face 2 of an object:
llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_FULLBRIGHT, 2, FALSE]);

- Added llSetPos, llSetRot, llTargetOmega, llSetPrimParams support for attachments
* Attachments can now be scripted to rotate and move.

- Added llEscapeURL and llUnescapeURL
* These functions can be used to handle URLs. Spaces can be escaped to “%20″ for example.
* Usage:
llEscapeURL(string url);
llUnescapeURL(string url);

- llSetPos() can now move objects up to 768 meters high (instead of just 512)

Bugs Fixed
————

* Objects no longer move when scaling w/ grid snap
* Edit camera no longer jumps when zoomed in on prims
* Leave group confirmation window is now modal
* Uploading image files without an extension no longer causes a crash
* Stop button in ‘New Gesture’ window is fixed
* Objects are no longer sometimes auto-returned to trash
* Move inventory window is now modal (prevents crash)
* Selection silhouette now outlines all prims
* Parcels now correctly count their objects after a subdivide and subsequent join
* UI is disabled in High-resolution snapshots
* Mac OS X: FileVault-encrypted accounts play UI and user sounds
* You can always reduce group land contribution to 0
* Movies no longer appear on texture if url or auto-scale option changes
* Group signup fee is no longer ignored if the group is open enrollment
* Touch events no longer make objects draggable by owner
* Gesture wait time constrained to 0-3600 seconds
* Installer no longer pauses without message for 3-4 seconds
* Bandwidth is set on first login based on download rate
* Title of buy panel and blue messagebox for seller & buyer now all contain object name
* Avatar skin and clothing permissions work around
* Edit window tab pane bounding box no longer extends off the window
* Force parcel ownership can no longer cause incorrect object returns
* Residents can no longer delete their Trash folder
* Deleting a script in an objects no longer set the object to non-phantom
* Name bubbles now correctly fade at a distance
* Locked objects can be unlocked
* Typing sound and animation are no longer played when chat bar gains focus
* High-resolution snapshots now set a ‘wait’ cursor
* Mute audio setting is remembered after minimizing and restoring the viewer
* Money transfers now fail if not acknowledged by both the viewer and the simulator
* Calling cards are no longer listed as (no modify) (no transfer)
* Base64 encoder/decoder understands Unicode
* llSetText, llSetSitText and llSetTouchText can now display unicode
* Telehub Coverage colors are no longer different on Mac and Windows
* Wear Clothing Now feature now working in Buy Contents box
* Scaling root object of shared drawable no longer scales child objects
* Create menu now has same options as right-clicking folders
* Individually uploaded media maintain their proper capitalization
* Feedback returned when someone accepts your calling card
* Multi-colored items no longer are turned one of the colors if selection of new color is cancelled
* Cursor no longer incorrectly indicates you can touch objects behind a transparent object
* Tube sides are now the same on Mac and PC
* NVidia 5×00 cards now show the difference in shiny levels
* Can no longer accidentally move objects while in mouselook
* Improved ability to teleport after quickly crossing several region boundaries
* TargetOmega rotation no longer stops on selection.
* Textures in Library show for new users in texture picker
* Moving no-copy objects to inventory and ignoring pop up no longer causes a crash
* Mouselook view no longer blocked by head attachments at sim borders crossing
* Particles behind your camera do not slow FPS more than those ahead
* Messages sent to vendors about purchased “objects” now give name of item
* Pie Menu disappears when detaching clothing

Many of you are now tired of listening to me talking about the old Neualtenburg Projekt (yes, with a K, to use the German spelling), currently known as the City of Neufreistadt, and about several of its aspects. While it is not a “city” — a good description, due to its size and population, is a “hamlet” — it incorporates several things that people associate with a “city”. The urban planning and a City Council are, of course, two of the best-known aspects of Neufreistadt. Recently, the finantial aspect of it has been discussed, regarding bonds and other finantial products that a City could offer to potential investors. I expect that, as time goes by, and Neufreistadt explores successfully these and other issues, it will “resemble” a RL city more and more, in all that it has to offer.

One of the things that intrigued me since the beginning was Ulrika’s original proposal including a “church” and expecting “non-denominational” religious/spiritual meetings to be held there. After a few false starts (we got some volunteers for running the events but that never showed up when the city had finished), it was my time to try to do something

Right now, you have in SL a few “preacher” and “tele-evangelist” types holding pseudo-Christian events, here and there, and, of course, lots of small communities meeting in-world, like Paganists, Wiccans, and to a much lesser extent, Taoists and other Oriental spritual philosophies. In a sense, SL has openly embraced all the multitude of religious groups, and it’s true that usually religious groups attract regular attendance, or so it has been reported. Thus, my first step was to devise a model of “meetings” that would appeal to all, making sure that no one was left behind, and try to emphasize the common cultural heritage, instead of concentrating on this or that aspect of a particular religion. The purpose was not to do “comparative religion”, but to set up a place where different belief systems could find a “common ground” of discussion.

Now, I must obviously explain to everybody who attends that I’m not a religious priestress, teacher, catechist, minister, or whatever you may call an “event hoster” on religious meetings. I’m not even formally trained as a philosopher (although I certainly studied a bit of philosophy, both at high school and later). Hosting an “universal” meeting on religion without formal training is not something to be done lightly. Also, I would certainly desire to achieve a degree of conversation, of inspiring and provoking thoughts, of self-challenging common assumptions and misbeliefs, and keep people focused on spiritual guidelines that are valid for each and every religion, in spite of so many “alleged” differences.

My only help was my ongoing research and reading of Esoteric Christianism. Being raised as a Roman Catholic, it’s not unsurprising that, after some deep thinking, I naturally embraced my own spiritual path, following the teachings of many esoteric Christians, although I tend to concentrate always on the “message” and almost never on the weird concepts related to their cosmogeny. One of my “spiritual guides”, if I may call him that, once told me that this cosmogeny only makes sense to an Enlightened one; that may very well be true, but I’m definitely many years away from that goal, which I highly likely will never attain. Thus, I kept to the more mundane teachings. They’re universal enough to appeal to any religious/spiritual background (one common view of esoterism is that ultimately all paths ascend the same mountain, and that when you are at the summit, no matter what path you choosed, the answers will be precisely the same).

Since it’s hard for me to research a new topic every week, and as attendance is low (around half a dozen people), I’ve kept to a “series” of meetings, always on the same topics. Since people also change every time, there is always an undiscovered angle that can be approached, specially when you have people around with very different religious backgrounds. I think that always make the discussions more interesting!

A common disclaimer is at the beginning of each meeting — that I’m no minister or priestress, and that I’ll try to avoid preconceptions like “God” (since many religions replace that concept with things like Gaia/Universe or The Stream of Consciousness). Sometimes, sadly, I cannot fully escape my own background and inevitably fall back to these terms, although the essence stays the same, people will only need to replace the metaphysical concepts with ones they’re more comfortable with.

A common guideline to the meetings are based on the following concepts:

• All human beings are “tuned” to religious belief; some exercize it, some don’t; the ones that don’t very often believe as strongly that “nothing exists out there”.
• Humankind is a gregarious species. Unlike other predators, we have no choice but to work together, form units of collaboration beyond the family and clan, and we need to organize ourselves accordingly. Religion reinforces the social rules to make us keep the altruistic and egoistical aspects of our nature in check, for the common good.
• Ignorance is the major reason for suffering (but like any good Buddhist would tell you, the first step is to recognize that suffering does in fact exist, and that there are ways to reduce suffering).
• We have free will (this is one of the most fundamental premises).
• A religious path is something that you have to chose to follow. Among the way you may find fellow travellers and even some good guides. But you can’t be forced to travel a path it you don’t wish to.
• Holy writings usually capture the essence of basic teachings quite well. The trouble is to understand them. Most are so incredibly simple to understand (and even easier to follow) that sometimes we feel disappointed about the simple-mindedness of some religious authors (in other words, “understanding the Trinity” is not supposed to be so important for a Christian as focusing on the key message of compassion towards fellow human beings).

To the above I usually add that it’s harder to follow a rational path (the occult way) than an emotional one (the mystic way). But that, of course, is simply due to my own limitations.

The series, loosely described, go like this:

Praying

Several religions teach praying as a form of getting attention or favours from their deities. Believers are encouraged to several forms of praying to appease their deities and in a sense to measure their “status” towards them.

However, this is a certain fallacy. A common example shows the problem with this type of praying. Two tennis players, very devout believers, pray to their deities to win the game next day. But only one will win. So, the loser will ask of himself what he did to displease the deity, while the winner will be happy because he stood in favour with his own deity. This, of course, is mightily unfair.

As a matter of fact, praying can’t interfere with people’s lives. To understand that, we’ll have to tackle with free will, the deity’s most precious gift. The deity cannot “force” its own will upon us (that would mean depriving us from our own free will), so it has to remain silent and not interfering.

So, prayer should be used for two things: one simple, one complex. The first one is just praising the deity (or the Universe, or the Stream of Consciousness…). The second one, instead of “asking” or “demanding” things, is simply to listen.

Free Will

This is just a discussion around free will. It’s hard to dismiss old superstitions like “fate” or “destiny”. None of these are “compatible” with free will, so the discussion usually explores the differences between those concepts.

Sometimes we explore the reason why the deity cannot interfere in this world.

Good vs. Evil

Human beings are gregarious by nature — although many claim to be able to live as hermits, the truth is, only a tiny minority of people can live as “true hermits”, due to living within the comforts of a modern, technological society.

So, simply stated, “good” is anything that benefits a community, while “bad” are the things that break a community apart. Overall in the world, most social rules encourage positive behaviour towards the community, so it’s not unsurprising that most “definitions” of “good” tend to overlap.

Humankind’s First Task

Positivists these days claim that there is no place for religion, and that science is the actual opposite of religions. Well, interestingly enough, the first job that Humankind got from God in the Bible was: “name my creation”.

This is usually dismissed for the much more interesting Second Job — procreation. But what means “naming creation”? Well, one possible explanation is watching the Universe, observing its interactions, cataloguing them, and trying to make sense out of them. Sounds familiar? These are the guidelines for a scientific system.

So it seems that the authors of Genesis wrote down that Humankind’s first job is… to become scientists (and then, of course, procreate )

The Afterlife

This is where we try to use an analogy. Imagine an artificial intelligence in Second Life, that interacts with the rest of the humans. This AI sees that we disconnect often, but come back all the time without any apparent loss. If the AI asks us directly: “where do you go when you’re offline?” our answer is that we don’t really go anywhere. As human beings, we exist in two worlds simultaneously: the physical world, where we have flesh and blood; and the virtual world, where we have a pixellized avatar. So we are “the same being”, but, using this clever “interface between worlds” called SL, we can also be in a “different” place at the same time.

I think that the “afterlife” is just that — a “different” place which we can’t understand, but where we’ll be “the same”, just… different.

Esoterism: the occult way and the mystic way

Just to clear up a bit of name definitions here. “Occult” does just mean going through a rational, learning process. “Mystic” is a process of sudden enlightenment. Esoterism is the study of the meaning behind the words and symbols

This is just a reminder to my faithful readers that the Second Life Community Convention is taking place in New York City, at the New York Law School, during October 8 and 9, 2005.

The fun part of it will not only being able to attend it physically, but virtually as well, for the ones that aren’t able to travel over to New York City. We’ll have some sort of two-way videoconferencing in-world to enable residents of Second Life® to be able to “virtually attend” the conference as well.

Also, a few in-world discussions have been scheduled around the theme “community” and have been announced as Events in Second Life.

At the last Town Hall meeting, where Philip Linden explained to us how Linden Lab will “facilitate” the selling of L$ for US$ in Second Life®, he mentioned how worried he is about competitors catching up with SL.

As a matter of fact, he mentioned the word “competitors” several times. This is the first time I atended a Town Hall meeting where Philip justified this action with [...]this is the sort of things that if we didn’t do, a competitor of SL would.

For those that don’t understand the mechanism, it works like this: Linden Lab is quite open at having their users (”residents”) doing all “sort of things” that other companies strictly forbid. So, the copyright to your content in Second Life is yours, guaranteed by the Terms of Service - unlike other companies, whose worlds retain all copyrights (you are basically creating for them). Second Life also allows third-party sites to integrate with their world - actually, it encourages them. Instead of filing lawsuits against people who are creating “external” content and bring it in into Second Life, just like every other MMORPG (they consider that they have an exclusive monopoly on content), Linden Lab actually promotes these third-party sites actively. And finally, instead of sueing people who are selling Linden dollars at eBay, Linden Lab has worked closely with some companies to set up a system where you can exchange money in a free market.

Currently, at least three sites offer these facilities: IGE, Anshe Chung, and the e-Commerce site SL Exchange, which also sells L$ for US$.

Gaming Open Market sadly is shutting down their two-year kingdom as undisputed ruler of the money exchanges. It had a different approach — it was an exchange market, where users would set the price - thus, no wonder people felt that it has the most “reasonable” ratio and the one more correctly representing the “real value” of the L$. It also showed the trend of the market and reflects the fears and the optimism of the users - like any other exchange, it reflected the psychological market. We’ll have to see if the Linden-operated in-world exchange will step in GOM’s shoes and is able to replicate their role in SL’s economy.

But this is apparently just the tip of the iceberg. There were always people exchanging money and accounts at eBay for all sorts of MMORPGs. And even before eBay existed, people had their own ways of selling/reselling money and accounts. It’s not this aspect that makes “competition” threatening.

The point is, there are many, many aspects which may threaten Linden Lab’s continuing success — and the virtual economy is just one of them.

What are SL’s threats?

Let’s do a bit of SWOT analysis here. For the ones unfamiliar with MBA-gobbledigook, SWOT analysis is just a term to describe an operation’s Strengths/Weaknesses (internal), Opportunities/Threats (external). This is usually a fun and creative way to approach the way a company/entity is being run.

Far from me to claim to be an expert on these areas, but let’s see what we can come up with:

Strengths

• Motivated team - Linden Lab employees works extra hours, does billions of things at the same time.
• Expert team - from their resumees/CVs you can see that you have top-of-the-line experts working at Linden Lab right now.
• Willingness to experiment - unlike other companies, LL often introduces radical ideas, even if their benefits are not immediately visible. They try to draw a balance between “features” and “bug fixing”, even if some features seem to be worthless. But the drive to innovate is present.
• Despite many claims to the contrary, it has an amazing technical support team.
• Also despite many claims to the contrary, LL is probably the only platform so far that was designed from scratch with an emphasis on scalability (MMORPGs tend to add further “shards” or “new worlds”; SL has a single “world” which can, in theory, accomodate an infinite number of users and was always planned that way. Some competitors claim better scalability, but that is unproven so far).
• It’s the only virtual world with collaborative, dynamic content, with such a large user base — since the modelling tools are designed for amateurs (other worlds are either dynamic, or simply static but collaborative, but in the “static” case, you need to work with 3rd party, very complex modelling tools).
• Copyrights are held by the users creating content, not by Linden Lab. The latest versions of the Terms of Service allow LL to regulate this aspect further. LL also fully complies to the DMCA to provide further protection and a means to deal with copyright violations.
• Virtual economy - it’s stable, it works, it has checks and controls, it is successful, it allows people to make some (real) money with it. This is encouraged by LL in total contrast to most other platforms, where only “official” items can be created/bought/sold.
• Social aspects are even encouraged and promoted by a group of people at Linden Lab (known as the “Community Group”) that are employed just to support the emerging society. Overall, most Linden employees are often seen in-world, and they are active participants in conversations with the users (or host events for them), encouraging a stronger and closer relationship between LL and their users.
• Separate grids for “adult” and “teenager” content (as well as private islands which only you can use).
• Growth has increased to about 500 new users per day (thus, probably Philip’s claim of “1 million users by the end of 2007″ will not be met, but it won’t be too far from that).
• Board and staff are generally open-minded to open source projects (internally they rely mostly on open source tools) and integration APIs. They view their platform as “user-expandable” and not necessarily as a monopoly on technology they wish to secure for as long as possible. The platform supports “minority” operating systems as well (Mac OS X, soon Linux).
• LL is partially VC-funded by Pierre Omydar, the founder of e-Bay (and definitely another great business visionary of the Internet!).
• Overall, the strongest points of LL seem to be the strong links to their community (beyond technical support), and, naturally, R&D.

Opportunities

• Firstcomers to the Metaverse model - Nobody else is really building a similar model yet. So, Second Life is the reference that others will need to copy.
• Grasped quickly the attention of the academic world (7 college classes this semester!), the education/teaching/training world (c-Learning or cyberlearning is the next buzzword to watch) and the Big Corps (like Wells Fargo).
• Draws interesting comments and remarks from the media, which cannot “fit” them very well on the usual MMORPG model and thus most often than not make positive reviews on their platform.
• For a tiny company with a slow growth, they have a “global” vision, incorporating telecommuters all over the world in their staff (ie. they embraced quickly enough the need for German, Japanese and Korean content and tech support).
• Broadband bandwidth and sufficiently fast computers to run SL are starting to be the norm, world-wide.
• The 3D content market has hit a ceiling (ie. professional 3D designers that sell their 3D models and creations through websites like Renderosity) in terms of potential users and needs a new market (so, more talent is pouring in into SL).
• SL is free nowadays, an obstacle that many pointed out to be a barrier for new users (the number of new users went up five times per day since that announcement).
• SL is now attracting less “niche” users (ie. programmers and designers, who are still the large majority) and more “mainstream” users. Many of them were never interested in “games” (ie. MMORPGs) and put SL to completely different uses than it was originally planned. This is probably the fastest growing market for LL in the near future.
• Artists worldwide are getting funding, grants, and sponsoring to embrace “digital art”, and more specifically, “3D digital art” — thus encouraging the artistic milieu to explore SL.

So the future looks definitely promising! To be honest, let’s see some of the major drawbacks:

Weaknesses

• LL is not making much profit (if at all). The business model simply does not allow for much benefits due to growth (more users mean more servers and more bandwidth and more technical support — this means more income, not more profit, since the costs rise in linear proportion to the growth).
• Complete lack of priorities (no roadmaps, no project management, no quality assurance — the vacancy for the Quality Assurance Manager job offer, posted last year, is still open).
• LL relies too much on users to tell them what to do (worse than that, it relies on a surprising small number of users to have their saying, without any concern on their background and credentials to emit proper opinions).
• Nobody at LL knows what they’re actually selling (see my previous article on this subject).
• They are still figuring out the best way to communicate with their users (ie. too much relying on the forums, the voting tools…).
• The decision, in October 2004, to stop all new feature development and to concentrate on bug fixing definitely gave us a more stable platform, but it also means that SL did not get much “innovation” in terms of the platform (ie. the competition is developing much more fascinating features these days).
• Too many abandoned/incomplete projects:
  • XML-RPC was introduced in June 2004 and never completed;
  • The implementation of Havok 2 in SL is now a running joke, since nobody believes any more that it will ever be implemented (Andrew Linden recently said that they were “half-way through with the development”);
  • Even the LSL interface to Havok 1 was never fully completed, many functions are still missing;
  • The interface is still not customizable (nor are the keys on the keyboard), despite many “configuration files” which show that something in that direction has been planned;
  • No new permission system (and the current one seems always to have problems), although it was discussed/announced last year;
  • Groups never worked as they should, and fixes have been always postponed;
  • At this moment, the status on in-world HTML is “shaky” at least — despite demos shown publicly months ago, it seems that it won’t make it into 1.7;
  • Some bugs are still around since beta days;
  • LL continues to stubbornly defend their “own”, primitive Instant Messaging system, instead of adopting a permanent solution (like Jabber).
• Time to introduce new features/bug fixes is rarely correctly estimated (examples: 6 months for Havok 2 — waiting time, 2 years and counting; 6 weeks for HTML — waiting time, 6 months and no results…).
• Certain implementations are way out of control in terms of man-hours allocated — for instance, PayPal integration, which also allows payment by credit card (these days you don’t need a PayPal account to use the system…), is something that just takes an afternoon to implement (assuming you have a billing system in place, which LL does) — LL took over 3 months.
• The Abuse Reports system gets… abused. It’s hard to get “fairness” and “justice” in Second Life, since LL has some difficulty in understanding “what is the truth” based upon the few facts they can gather electronically.
• Overall, the weakest spots at LL seem to be Marketing and Project Management.

Well, you get the idea…

Threats

• Small user base compared to MMORPGs (although somewhat near the “social” virtual worlds like There and The Sims Online) makes SL be “virtually unkown” among the 5 million estimated users for 3D entertainment platforms.
• Funding is not enough for really big teams and projects, and since profitability is low, nothing prevents a Big Player to enter the very same market with enough money to surpass LL’s struggling achievements in just a few months.
• The most successful 3D environments are right now done on MMORPGs with static content, providing a much richer and fuller experience than SL can ever aim to provide (3 years ago, the difference was not so visible). MMORPGs can always make their engines better and faster, and deploy DVD-ROMs with more and better static content. SL, in contrast, will always be limited by the amount of bandwidth you’ll need to get “better” dynamic content, and certain aspects of the rendering techniques used simply cannot be applied in the near future to improve SL’s rendering pipeline.
• Big world-wide marketing campaigns by the top entertainment companies are able to reach a few million prospective customers in few months. LL takes years to get to the same level just by relying upon “word of mouth”.
• LL, not having a specific market to target their platform, tries to please all, and ends up giving each niche market crippled functionality — ie., it’s a platform for creating, playing, making money and socializing, but in all those aspects, the interface is always limited (3D modelling has an amateurish tool; combat and vehicles are not up to the same level of development than any MMORPG, even the slowest and oldest ones; models like There or IMVU are totally oriented towards making money; and, sincerely, there isn’t a worse IM system currently available).
• In contrast, other MMORPGs/3D Chat Rooms have learned from Second Life’s emphasis on “create your own world” and are now offering much better social interaction tools, all forms of content development (to the degree that static content allows it) with better integration with professional 3D modelling tools (thus appealing to the 3D pro designers searching for new markets) and slowly starting to “open up” their games/platforms to allow users to make money “legally” out of their gaming experience (instead of sueing them, as has been the standard practice so far).
• SL’s cost structure is way too high! To support around 60,000 users, LL needs around 2,000 servers at its co-location facility. World of Warcraft, the biggest success these days, is able to support 4 million users (1 million of them simultaneously!) with just a hundred servers. LL already runs one of the 500 largest grid-based parallel computers in the world. If it grows to 1 million users in the future, it will highly likely be one of the 50 largest! Thus, around 2010, when eventually LL is able to have the same amount of users as WoW has today, they’ll have to employ an operations staff of perhaps a hundred or so highly trained professionals (sysadmins are expensive to hire and need years and years of training), while WoW can probably survive with just one or two right now! (A good rule of thumb is that one sysadmin with 10 years of experience can successfully run 500 servers by themselves, specially if they are all alike in terms of configuration, which is the case).
• Also take into account that since SL is now free, LL has to rely on people buying land to get some extra income. So, they have immediately increased their user base, but not their revenues, while at the same time demanding the need for more tech support people (another good rule of thumb said that you should have one tech support operator for each 1000 new users — these are the ones that require tech support most, at the beginning. LL partially offsets this by encouraging volunteer tech support in the form of the Mentor/Greeter/Instructor/Live Help groups, around 500 unpaid users who contribute their time to do tech support). In contrast, WoW users, paying a fixed amount every month, constitute a highly profitable venture, even if WoW “fades out” in another half a year or so — to be replaced by WoW II or something like that.
• The proliferation of so many good engines for development of 3D virtual worlds (the most notable — although by far the one that impressed me less — being OpenCroquet) show that there is a growing academic and open source network of excellent developers working in this area. Free from the stress of having to run a successful business, academia and open source volunteers are slowly growing “curious” experiments into fully-fledged engines for running virtual world. Again, to the best of my knowledge, they are still far from SL’s current development level. But the sheer mass of volunteer developers eager to jump into the 3D VR bandwagon is growing. Since they cannot improve (yet) upon LL’s code, they start from scratch with a 3D engine and add all the features they need. Things like the Open Source Metaverse Project, with just a handful of active developers, are already at the stage LL was in, say, 2001 or so, with meshed objects, more complex prim types, a 3D modelling tool, a better physics engine, and Lua as the de facto scripting language. And it will probably be “Second Life compatible”. Again, this is just a tiny project, but an example on how fast the technology can advance “outside” Linden Lab.

Conclusions

To the best of my analysis, Linden Lab’s biggest crisis came with version 1.5. It was improperly tested, and, despite some eager optimists (I seemed to be one of the very few exceptions that actually got a much better performance!), it rewrote completely Linden Lab’s development plans. Instead of concentrating on earth-shattering features, or to fix very old-time “bugs” and “nagging details”, all the efforts of Linden Lab were focused on stamping out the more outstanding bugs — like all the issues with the asset server (inventory-related, teleport-related, and otherwise) and the login servers. Only with the latest versions of 1.6 were these problems overcome. In the mean time, all other “projects” or at least “projected features” were delayed sine die. We now can’t expect a Linux version soon, or an integration with Havok 2 (in the mean time already outdated), a new interface under control of the users, or even HTML-on-a-prim, not to mention some Mono support (faster scripts). The most radical change in the past year was video streaming (never had the success of audio streaming) and some better building tools (nothing too spectacular, although they are definitely better. All the rest were minor tweaks. The upcoming 1.7 version, already 2 months late, will just have 3 new LSL functions, an improved scheduler for the scripts, and HUD attachments. Although it has several hundreds of bugs fixed (yes, really!) it does not bring anything radically new to Second Life. It can only be considered as a “maintenance release” — like the jump from Windows 98 R2 to Windows 2000. LL was very conservative in their development. For the users, this means looking at competing platforms and weeping. Things like the end of GOM also meant overtime development of a new in-world money exchange (something that an amateur programmer would be able to do over two weekends, but that LL needs, of course, about 6 weeks to do). So, the only hope is that some of the promised developments will make it into 1.8, but some pessimists say that 1.8 is simply going to be “skipped”, and we’ll just have SL 2.0 instead, with a new renderer (which we already know that will be crippled in so many respects that most people won’t be much impressed by it, except perhaps for its speed). This means waiting for sometime next summer for some exciting new features, at the current development speed — although, to be honest, LL released 38 (!) versions of the 1.7 beta in just 2 months (compare that to 14 versions of 1.6 in about 6 months or so). Estimating another 6 months for 1.8 (again, just to wait for HTML, and eventually some integration with Havok 2) and a further 6 months for 2.0, this would mean that by the end of 2006, with perhaps some 200-300,000 users, Second Life will look much like what we know today — just busier in terms of population and events.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that LL is emphasizing “community” (with the first Second Life Community Convention coming next week) instead of “technology”. However, my feeling is that this is not enough. The most eager users of SL are the ones currently relying upon the community aspects, but there is quite a large user base of programmers that get more and more discouraged as each version is rolled out without anything “interesting”. Perhaps Mitch Kapor, President of the Mozilla Foundation and currently a LL board member, is applying the “Mozilla experience” to SL: if you have an outstanding technology (Netscape’s rendering engine), people will wait for it to be deployed (7 years in the case of Mozilla), no matter how long it takes. Does that mean that “outstanding features” of SL will only be available in 2012? Only time will tell, but I’m pretty sure that LL’s competitors won’t be idle that long. The only reason they haven’t been more agressive is simply, as said, because the business model is not very interesting.

Still — Philip now thinks about the competition. That, in my eyes at least, is a Very Good Thing