Visionaries and a changing world — the challenge for Linden Lab is how to get the two together.

Early last year, Philip "Linden" Rosedale has been keen to announce to everybody who cared to listen that "Second Life was about building a country" — with its own society and economy. Linden Lab’s job in the "country-building" was mostly a technical role with some gentle guiding by providing some moderation.

This assumption was easy to understand. Since all content is created by its users, Second Life is not a directed-goal enterprise. With new users every day, this would mean that slowly the virtual world will have to change, as it accomodates more and more users, each one with their unique view on what a virtual world should be.

What Philip and many others who "bought" the "virtual country paradigm" expected was that slowly, over time, people would congregate in this common task. Yes, one day, Second Life will be a virtual country. It already has its own culture, a society with its interests and groups, and a flourishing economy. But the big question, always, was "what is missing?" Or "how do we get from point A (today) to point B (the virtual country of tomorrow)?"

The first attempt to nudge things in the right direction failed tragically — there is no way, and highly likely will never be, that something akin to a "world government" will ever emerge from the primeval chaos of anarchic Second Life. The best some of us expected was a "federation" of similar-minded individuals, available to trade off some of their unlimited freedom, by putting their trust in elected individuals who would do some organisation overall. This kind of organisation has basically two possible outcomes: either the "corporate type" (landowners provide organisation in return for a fee) or the "cooperative type" (regular users join efforts together to pool resources like time and money to provide organisation to the overal group). Both have succeeded at small scales, although the "corporate type" has, by far, been the more successful.

Virtual economy attracts organisation

There is a good reason for that. Like in the frontier days of the Wild West expansion — or, if you prefer, like in the late 15th and early 16th century, when the Europeans suddenly found out their frontiers suddenly expanding, not by conquest, but by exploration — commerce was the major driving force. In order for commerce to succeed, you would need a stable economy. This in turn made the economy agents to self-regulate the economy together — in cartels, if you wish — so that they had a base to work on. And finally, to attract (and keep!) happy customers, it only made sense to provide them value for their money.

In almost all examples, this meant urban planning and additional mediation facilities (beyond the ones provided by Linden Lab). Thus, the economic agents provided planned communities, residential neighbourhoods, malls and bazaars, a distinctive look & feel of Second Life that was so different from the anarchic environment beyond the limits of the planned communities.

Look at the private islands as an example. There are almost none that have the "sandbox" look. Their owners have taken pains to hire virtual urban planners, designers, SL architects. Their land was terraformed to look as good as possible. They controlled and oversaw that scripts and textures would not lag the sims. They handled griefing and complains from the users. And they compete among themselves with providing service, urban planning, organisation, and mediation/moderation.

This, of course, also happens on the mainland as well — with an added difficulty. You cannot own land and have an "overseer" technically controlling that common guidelines (say, unblocking views, or too-high buildings) are enforced and followed. You can only rent land from a landlord (never own it). Still, many planned communities are based upon rentals, and these work as well.

Land is valuable according to added value

A simple rule slowly emerged: wherever planned communities (and this obviously includes things like malls, shopping districts or bazaars) appeared, the value of land increased. Economics feed upon order; the better you plan and organize land, the more valuable it is. This doesn’t mean that land can’t have some "base value" — mature land or waterfront plots are always more valuable, just because of potential value on what can be done there. Thus, the landscape — the virtual geography of SL — and the zoning (PG or Mature) influence the pricing of land. Managers of planned communities and malls took these into account when figuring out prices for buying/selling/renting land.

In a sense, this starts immediately to look like a pretty good analogy to what happens in real life. Land is not "created equal" — some plots are "better" than others. But "empty land" is less valuable than "value-added land" — where owners thoughtfully organise what is going to be placed there. As some would say, nobody wants to buy former First Land in the middle of a glorified sandbox with property lines.

But this is what happens since the 15th century at least, when countries expanded their frontiers overseas. They established order here and there. They built fortresses first, then small cities, using the natural waterways or access to sea ports. Communications infrastructures were the "attractors" for the first spots to be designated as sites for new cities. Later, when we entered the 19th century, you could build railways which would in turn become the new attractors — beyond things like access to mineral sources, something which in SL we don’t have.

So, even on the landscape of a virtual world, there are "natural" spots that attract people more, and which get developed first, attracting in turn the "urban planners" who favour these spots, and increasing the value of the land by organising it properly.

Slums in RL

What happens when land is left beyond the control of the organising agents? It develops into slums. This is mostly what happened to most cities in the 20th century. When land inside organised cities became too expensive, people simply went outside the city to build — without order or organisation. These slums grew to astonishing sizes, often dwarfing the "organised cores", until governmental action tried to develop some infrastructure on the outskirts to be able to bring those the same standards of living. This, of course, has been a challenge for perhaps the last 150 years or so. Social-minded, rich governments are able to extend their facilities beyond the planned core; poor countries are not so lucky. You’ll always have a split between the organised core and the unplanned slums. Fortunately for the optimists like myself, as time goes by, all countries become richer (although not at the same rate, sadly) and in a few centuries or millennia you’ll be able to provide all residents on Planet Earth with high living standards.

Of course, assuming that the governments on Earth wish to do so. Without their efforts to make planned cities grow, the slums hardly will have a chance to self-organise. They’ll just organically grow more and more.

… and slums in SL

Take a look at a sim with only First Land plots and compare it to a planned community. Notice the difference? Unplanned sims are the big slums of SL, where land is cheap, anarchy rules, and among hundreds of residents’ plots you might find here and there one building of exceptional talent and quality. New residents moving in will buy from the cheapest land, and build whatever they like there. Despising any sort of "control", they will happily build at their pace, until one day something happens.

A neighbour will throw in something that annoys you. It might be a rotating cube, or a 300 m-high-tower, or a sign with language that offends you (but that is not strictly against the Terms of Service). What can you do about it?

You’ll soon learn the answer to that: nothing. Sell your land. Move on. Start from scratch.

After a few iterations, assuming that our new resident is persistent and hasn’t left SL by now, they’ll come to the alternative: joining a planned community, either renting on the mainland, or owning deeds on a private island. In some extreme cases, a few planned communities on the mainland even allow you to buy land, relying upon common sense for the new owners to keep the overall look & feel. Sometimes this works; sometimes this means waiting for months for an unpleasant neighbourhood to get rid of the troublesome residents.

So, our resident is now faced with a dilemma. Shall they forfeit their "absolute freedom of building" for the security that, in a planned community, they will not have to deal with griefing? Or shall they just jump to any other place in SL to start from scratch?

Many make the first choice, although not all.

Organic growth "controlled" by economic agents

A new resident highly likely wishes to "make money fast" — almost every newbie’s first question is "how do I make money?" They soon understand that the way to go is to sell something profitably. And to do that, they need a shop.

Many upgrade to Premium accounts, get their tier-free First Land, and set their shops on top of the roof of their houses. And then they wait. And wait. And wait.

Nobody comes to buy a single item from them, and this makes them ask around what they’re doing wrong. And it’s easy to understand. When you’re outside the communication routes, it’s hard to catch the attention of casual customers. And let’s be honest — at the very beginning, you need those to build your customer base. Later, when you have enough casual, impulse-driven customers, you’ll be able to grow through word-of-mouth, still SL’s most important marketing channel.

So, how do you get the casual shoppers? Right now, this means mostly establishing yourself in the busy malls or shopping districts. Not unsurprisingly, these have been set up first near the "travel routes".

In Second Life, this means the places nearest to telehubs. This is where most people appear every day, when they wish to go somewhere else.

Now we are all familiar with this image. Railroad stations helped cities to grow organically around them. Most cities will still have their major shopping districts around the older railroad stations (nowadays probably around the bus terminals and similar travelling facilities). Anyone who has played SimCity "knows" how this works. Transportation-system terminals are the key to "organic growth": commercial districts encircle the terminals; and, by contrast, residential districts, where you wish your peace and quiet, will be established further away.

This always was an "unwritten rule". The busiest place in Second Life is still the Welcome Area — but all areas around it are closed to the public in terms of land sales. So, the economic agents had to gather around the "transportation network" — the telehubs as the single point of mobility.

It’s around telehubs that you get ads (even the Linden-sponsored ads and their free content is distributed at telehubs!), shops, malls, and the high-cost commercial districts. Further away, you start to see the original landscape again, as people wish to avoid the high-traffic zones to place their homes. As we all know, both the SL railroads and the roads are "pretty" or "interesting" but without proper function, due to the limitations on the current vehicles. Thus, the only "transportation system" to drive organic growth are the telehubs. There is no other choice offered to us by Linden Lab.

Replacing the attractors of organic growth

Telehubs, of course, are a problem for some new residents, because they never quite manage to go exactly where they want to go. You click on the Map, a Landmark, on the Events list, on a friend’s pick list… and instead of being magically transported to where you wanted to go, you’ll find yourself in a place you never wish to be. Did something go wrong? Why aren’t you at your intended destination? Why are you in the middle of nowhere, with ugly malls and rotating signs all around the place, instead of being at that super-cool place you wished to go?

After two or three teleports, every new user learns the truth: you can only teleport to the nearest telehub, unless a friend offer you a teleport. You have to travel that last mile by yourself — either by foot, on a vehicle, or, more likely, by flying.

For many, this is annoying. This means being dropped in the middle of a commercial district you never wished to see, fly up in the air avoiding the huge towers that try to trap you inside their walls as they slowly download from the grid, and find a "clear" route of travel (often very high up in the air) to your ultimate destination. Do this three, four times a day, every day of the week, and people start to complain.

Get enough people to complain, and Linden Lab is due to change it. That’s the way Second Life seems to work. Around 100 or so avatars (not people — we don’t know the ratio of avatars-to-people) voted to change this system and to get rid of telehubs. Perhaps half of that number protested loud enough on the forums. A large amount of those are new users, still not having a clue on how our virtual country is organized — they don’t understand the need of planning, of zoning, of having an organized landscape, it takes a few months to understand that — and they are the ones that complain loudest: "why can’t we go directly to our intended destination?? This is soo confusing!"

(Over 88,000 users have successfully dealt with that "confusion" rather quickly, but that’s besides the point)

And then there is a final blow dealt on this issue. The economic agents that plan and organise the landscape of this virtual world are successfull enterprises. They are, in a sense, Rich. And this is naturally a Bad Thing. It induces an assymetry in Second Life not unlike what happens in the real one: economic agents are naturally the pivots of the economy — they are the ones that accumulate power, land, and benefits related to both. They are, in a sense, The Ones That Prevent This Virtual World To Become an Utopia. Anathema! This Ought To Be Forbidden!

By dealing a blow upon them, many seem to view this as an opportunity to balance out the field a bit more. The first step is to get rid of assymetries on the landscape: let all land be equally worth the same! The second step is eliminating the need of urban planning: shopping districts are not necessary if everyone is easily available from a click on the "teleport" button on the map. There is no need to have malls or bazaars or districts to attract casual customers; people only need to search for an item and click on "teleport". So, let’s abolish all this silly "commercial district planning" once and forever; let us have choice again!

These arguments are very hard to contradict. You see, they build upon a very strong premise: this is not a virtual country, and it should not be one, because a virtual country will eventually develop assymetries between its residents. By making all land "democratically" equal and removing one opportunity to create assymetries, the virtual country — becomes a virtual country no more. And that is a Good Thing.

So what do these 50 or 100 residents want? They wish that the believers on virtual countries go away. What they wish is a glorified sandbox, extending for km and km on the grid, and a 3D chatroom. All the rest is worthless and silly to implement.

Most residents have previously used other virtual reality platforms, either game-type MMORPGs or social MMOGs like IMVU, There, or The Sims Online, among others. On those platforms it was absolutely unthinkable to talk about concepts like "virtual countries". What people wish is escapism — the glorified giant sandbox cum chatroom which is what other platforms provide. And they wish SL to become like that.

In a few months, this is what Second Life will probably look like. Interesting high-quality content will be inside the boxes where people will meet, shop, and chat.

By reintroducing point-to-point teleport, Linden Lab is complying with those wishes. It’s not unnatural they’re wiling to do that. They have "observed their competition carefully", as they are now so fond of telling us. They are listening to (some) of their customers, who wish a Second Life that is more akin to the competition. And more important than that, they wish happy customers, that upgrade to Premium accounts, and buy cheap land (or existing Premium account customers to tier up). By levelling out assymetries on the land market, by forcing the economy agents to completely change their strategies (and eventually leave SL forever), land is going to become more cheap, and more available.

If all goes well, this will mean more land sales. Which is Good for Linden Lab. If people are not going to buy more cheap land, it’s still good — it will mean lots of empty plots that can be re-auctioned. No more complains from new Premium users about the lack of First Land. And the rate of deployment of new servers can be diminished — so, Linden Lab will need less investment per month, and have reduced costs.

More happy customers, more land transactions, less overall costs, and an SL that looks much more like the competition’s platforms. It’s all Good. No wonder they have reversed their previous decision and is planning to re-introduce point-to-point teleporting. It makes sense from a business’ point of view.

Bye bye virtual country

In the forums, as well as in some in-world conversations, people have accused me of being a "doomsayer" or of wishing to cling to a mythical past and refusing to adapt to change by promoting the existence of the telehubs that nobody loves. This is an issue that is a bit complex to explain and I’m not sure if even this article is able to convey my feelings on the matter.

Change is good. I’m a firm believer that SL, with its incredibly swift pace of change, is overall succeeding because so many people are quickly adapting to change. I remember the discussions almost a year ago when Linden Lab removed the event stipends. Doomsayers were announcing that SL would lose all its social value, since nobody would ever host quality events any more. At those days, we had perhaps 30 or so events per day. We now reach almost 250 events per day. Of course, almost all of them are of a commercial nature — it only makes sense, since it’s the only way to sponsor them. This change was akin to the move from state-owned TV to private ones. Remove central sponsorships, and what remains is private initiative: in terms of events, this means that people will only host the kind of events that both attract people and give a finantial return to the event hoster. So, bye bye creative or cultural events; they still exist but are simply buried below a ton of "money-making" events these days.

At that time, SL lost something, to be replaced by something new. It was definitely not the biggest change. These days, people get half of their weekly stipends (for a Premium user) or even a tenth of it (for Basic users). This means that residents have less money to spend, and naturally people thought this would stop the economy. Rather the contrary — it controlled the inflation and kept the Linden dollar very stable on the money exchanges (despite all problems related to that issue). Residents either got a job in SL (ie. they became more creative to earn more L$) or they started to regularly buy L$ from the money exchanges. All in all, this did not imbalance our "virtual country" much.

The re-introduction of point-to-point teleporting will also not crush Second Life once and for all. Despite my personal feelings about it, what will happen is that new residents will never know what happened before. For them, point-to-point teleporting will be normal. Due to the growth of Second Life, in a year or so, only a quarter of the population will remember how things were with the telehubs as attractors for organic growth. Three quarters of the new residents will naturally be "happy customers" — they will be used to the concept of "the giant sandbox". They will love it. They might admire the planned communities popping up on the islands (in a year I expect that more people will live on the private islands than on the mainland) but they won’t ever understand why anyone would like the mainland to get "organised". They won’t ever admire the landscape or have any idea on why it is important. Content will be inside boxes (like on the picture above) and people will directly teleport inside them, nobody will ever think how it could be otherwise. This will be "normal" for Second Life, in spite of being "alien" right now.

Of course this won’t be the "doom" of Second Life. So people like Anshe Chung will have lost US$20,000 due to investments in the telehub areas. Who cares? The 250,000 users of 2006 will not ever understand the issue, not to mention caring about it. This is the most important difference: only visionaries and planners of virtual countries will be affected by this development. And how many of the other residents have, in truth, understood why it is important to be building a "virtual world" instead of a glorified sandbox? I personally have just met a handful — yes, perhaps 30-50 or so. Sadly, they’re almost all on the Hate List of the remaining residents — they’re land barons, mall owners, organisers of planned communities, architects, RL urban planners. Nobody really cares about these Evil People — they’re viewed with suspicion, since they were successfully building a virtual country. By pushing them off the face of the world, almost literally, LL is showing that they are looking to the average residents’ best interests: get rid of this silly "country building", give us the sandbox instead.

So, the Lindens said, "let there be a sandbox"! And they saw it was Good.

Why is a virtual country important after all?

So many very intelligent people I’ve been talking to about this issue don’t seem to understand the importance of building a virtual country. They’re right when they say that Second Life won’t disappear overnight (according to some, notably some Lindens, new users will be so thankful of having point-to-point teleport, that it’s more than likely that Second Life will grow more and faster (and LL will have less costs) in the near future. They are also right to say that the big content creators won’t be affected at all (they are established businesses by now, and they’ll get new customers in their private islands anyway — more likely, they will have less costs, since they won’t need to invest in several "chain shops", but concentrate on a single shop instead, thus, reducing costs, and eventually drop their prices). They’re perhaps even right when they admit that the lesser content creators will get more customers this way — if we get better searching tools, this will mean that people will just throw in a few keywords to search for, and go directly to the small content creator’s shop, instead of wasting precious time navigating across miles and miles of ugly towers and rotating signs. All this is definitely true.

There are some urban planners who also believe they are able to create their own "attractors" — replacing telehubs with their unique creations. This might also work for a while. Historically, however, "building a country" needs attractors. The urban planners in SL believe that they can replace "artificial" ones (the telehubs) by lovely builds that will make people stop there for a while, and organize space according to popularity.

Well, I once pointed out that the second revolution on the World-Wide Web came with the appearance of the search engines. Before Google (and friends), the WWW also had its "attractors" — portals, filled with content, which were the "entrypoints" for casual navigators. People started from certain points and followed links from there. Web designers concentrated on designing thoughtful homepages which would gather interested parties as well as casual browsers, and they expected people to return to them because it was the only way to "navigate" across the virtual world of the Web.

Google challenged all that. A homepage is unimportant if you can directly go to any page, provided you have good search tools (and Google’s are the next best thing to perfection). So, the "portal market" became suddenly unimportant. People simply search for what they wish to find. It’s not unsurprising to see that all major Web ventures — eBay, Amazon, the Wikipedia, even dating services… — rely strongly on very good search tools instead of a "cool"-looking homepage. They know that their customers will go directly to the content that interests them, and they have redesigned their pages to allow for that.

In a sense, what happened on the Web is that you’re slowly losing the importance of "attractors" (beyond the search engines!) and good-looking pages, and concentrate only on functionality and information retrieval. People want information fast, not nifty and cool-looking pages. Design is once more becoming minimalist and functional; the Web is once more becoming a tool for information retrieval, and not the building blocks for a "digital country".

This is precisely what is going to happen to Second Life as well. The "searchable sandbox" metaphor will apply to SL — you’ll have isolated spots on the grid where you’ll spend all your time. Your "navigation" across SL will be from point to point, according to what you wish to do. One place will look much like any other — since you just need to teleport there. People will still politely say things like "oh, nice view" but in truth they won’t really care about the view — they’ll only care about where to retrieve content quickly and efficiently.

In a sense, SL will be a place of isolated chatrooms, linked together through point-to-point teleporting. People will not care what is "in-between" (like they don’t care about it in IMVU or MOOVE). It won’t simply interest them. Notions like urban planning or organic growth will simply not fit in this model — what will be important is the ultimate destination, not how and why you get there.

Very likely, in a short time, you’ll also get the equivalent of "webrings" in SL. You go to a spot directly after you did a search; from there, people will offer you new spots to link to (ie. landmarks). So you’ll travel randomly across the grid, by picking landmarks according to your wishes. People will look at the map of Second Life as something outdated and futile; yes, it looks good on the homepage for http://secondlife.com, but it doesn’t fit any purpose at all. You have all seens maps of the Internet; they also don’t relate to anything useful!

This will definitely not "destroy" Second Life, or "destroy" SL’s economy, or make everybody go away in disgust, or anything like that. The only thing that will happen is that Second Life won’t be a "virtual country" any more — ever again. It will be a collection of snapshots linked together by teleports. The notion of SL urban planning will fade in the background; it won’t be necessary. Zoning, even artificial zoning, will be pointless; you’ll have, once more, clubs near to Tringo halls, casinos near to homes, all on cheap land, and quite likely they won’t bother you, since you’ll live inside and close the windows. People won’t wish to live in neighbourhoods, since it’s pointless to meet your friends and neighbours by travelling to them by foot or by flying — they’ll be only a teleport away.

Every place will look like any other. That is the future of SL — a levelled-out landscape. Even today, this is already true to an extent (just take a look at a sim full of First Landers, and you’ll see what I mean), but at least people had the choice to escape all that and go to live on planned communities instead. But these will be quite worthless in the future.

I also agree that some exceptions will be the "future attractors" of SL. Midnight City, for instance, is a quite well-planned virtual island. When you teleport to there, you’ll be at a main square, full with the most important shops. Just navigate around it for a bit and you’ll see that there is quite an intelligent design behind it. The same applies to many other private islands, like Rue d’Alliez or Dreamland (or even Neualtenburg). We humans are conditioned by centuries of urban planning, and quite likely this trend will not diminish on the private islands, just because their owners will be able to impose their wishes upon the landscape.

Not so on the mainland. Many have argued that people will get naturally attracted to beautiful buildings, and these will become the new attractions. I disagree with that concept, because that’s not what happens right now, and we certainly already have tons of lovely attractions on the mainland — often far away from telehubs. There are a few exceptions, of course. But the truth is that some of the more amazing builds are far away from available land — an inconsistency which perhaps explains why this never happened in the current mainland. For instance, Nexus Prime, the cyberpunk city in Gibson and Bonifacio, has been around since Beta — almost three years now. It’s an awesome and fantastic place. Thus, it would make sense that people interested in cyberpunk would congregate around the city, and extend it with their own themed buildings. But this is impossible, since all land around it is protected land! Other examples are Abbot’s, or even the Welcome Area, or Luna, or many other "attractors" that you care to mention. You’ll see that they exist — and they’re isolated from the rest of the mainland, surrounded by protected land.

There are some exceptions, of course. One of my homes is at the old sim of Io. Nearby in Ganymede is RiverWalk, a park for artists that extends also a bit into Io (which is sparsely inhabited). Owners of land bordering the RiverWalk Park have, to a degree, tried to blend their builds into the overall scenario — organically, not in a planned way. I had a similar experience when I was living in Uli, also sparsely inhabited, and where people tended to contribute to their neighbours’ builds by smoothly integrating their buildings with the landscape. This is something that happens in many places — Slate, Luskwood, and several others. But you can name them all in a paragraph. That’s all there is.

Linden Lab is also trying once more to reintroduce some planned communities of their own, by providing "rented homes for Premium users" (an alleged benefit for upgrading to Premium). They also previously had a few "planned communities" like the camping site and the suburban Black sim. Again, these are isolated exceptions. To have organic growth, it means that people will be drawn to those locations, and wish to grow from there in concentric circles. This simply doesn’t happen, except by accident or on a very small scale.

While living on Uli, I used to travel less than today. Uli is an old sim, part of the Volcano Island chain of sims. While the quality of the builds differed substantially from sim to sim, I tended to live in the neighbouring sims and find there everything I needed. There was a "community mall" near the telehub (later bought by Anshe, who improved it a lot). The first Plush club was nearby, and I admit I went there once or twice while it was something like "your neighbourhood club". There were a few scattered shops around, of small-scale designers, but which I favoured. There were gathering places where I held my first events. There was a Beach Club nearby where people met occasionally, and even some homes near the Beach Club, because it was "cool" to live by a place which attracted people. Now all this was "organic growth", unplanned, and not designed. Why? Because there was a telehub in the middle of those sims, and people tended to live around their neighbourhoods. This, of couse, was the work of several months — organic growth comes at the expense of time.

Point-to-point teleport will mean that this kind of organic growth will simply be pointless. Every place will be your neighbourhood, just a point-and-click away.

Conclusions

Is it important that we have to develop "organic growth", urban planning, and a "virtual country"?

Well, the answer is not easy, and there is no single answer that satisfies everybody. For Linden Lab as a successfully-run company, the answer is no. You can get rid of all those and still make money. As a matter of fact, what several Lindens seem to tell us is that by getting rid of the crazy "virtual country" idea they’ll probably reduce costs, get more users, make more users upgrade to Premium, make more Premium users increase tier, and well, make more money overall. So for Linden Lab this is a good marketing decision. I’ve already scratched my favourite quote from Philip "Linden" Rosedale from my signature ("I’m not building a game. I’m building a virtual world."). It’s now history.

For the new users, entering SL’s society and economy is often challenging. Understanding how to buy land — where to buy it, and why the land is valued differently depending on location — is often confusing. So, getting rid of all this silly nonsense will make the new users more happy.

The established content creators are happy. Point-to-point teleport will mean less competition from start-up designers (no more malls for casual users) and reducing their costs (no more need for chains of stores everywhere). So, for them, the "virtual country" just means extra costs and more competition; getting rid of it only benefits them.

Even the start-up designers dislike the "virtual country" concept. Under the new model, a small shop will be as easy to find as a large one. From the perspective of someone searching for "sexy lingerie", it’ll be as easy to find Jane Doe’s shop as Aimee Weber’s. So, the small designers view the change as positive. For them, it’s all about being able to compete with the established designers without investing more in marketing strategies.

(Sadly, if that were true, it would mean that Jane Doe’s Sexy Outfits Shop in RL would be able to get more sales through Google than Victoria’s Secret, since Google levels out the field. Think again. This is simply not true)

Casual shoppers are happy. They can now pick the places they wish to go, instead of getting trapped into malls which rezzed in front of the telehubs. Well, this might be right, but it also means that you’ll shop much more from established designers and never learn about new start-ups. Of course, that’s also how things work in RL.

Old-timers are happy. Mall owners will go away, land barons will get bankrupt, land value will drop crazily, and even probably the L$ will fall (meaning that you’ll be able to buy much more L$ with a single US$). This is a typical attitude from an egotistical point of view, which sadly affects so many of SL’s residents: by failing to understand concepts like "the group is more than the sum of its individuals", they see only immediate benefits for themselves. Yes, it’s true that land will be cheap, and probably the L$ will fall, and that the land barons will move to private islands, and for every individual in SL, these are Good Things. But it will also mean that SL as a whole will never be a "community" or a "metaverse", but just a "group of individuals", each one living in their favourite spots.

A recent argument is that this will even be good from a technical point of view, reducing the load on the poor asset servers, since for arriving at a destination, on average, every person needed to cross 3 sims. Now they’ll immediately drop on their destination — just one "hit" on the database servers. That’s true. But it’s also true that people will use point-to-point teleport much more, so I guess it will balance out at the end.

A much-repeated phrase is that "this will enhance everybody’s experience". Well, I’m used to marketing phrases that don’t say anything. Taken from a certain point of view, everything enhances your experience. And if you wish, you can even make a survey to back up your claims: ask each and every user if they prefer point-to-point teleport, and, after introducing it, if they’re happier about it. My guess is that 90% of the people would say "yes" to both questions. Conclusion: everybody’s experience was "enhanced".

Think again. Imagine a referendum made on a western country where the Government would ask their citizens if they should abolish taxes. Over 90% of the citizens would answer "yes" — have no doubts about it! So, should the Government abolish taxes because it would enhance every citizen’s experience?

(Now you know why they never ask us such things )

Demolishing the notion of the "virtual country" by giving us the glorified sandbox cum chatroom is a big step. From my point of view — shared by all who believed in the virtual country metaphor — it is not necessarily "good" or "bad". It means reshuffling the deck of cards and dealing again: we’re now playing a different game. Some will drop the game and shake their heads in disgust, but the truth is, most of the players will get a new hand of cards and learn the rules of the new game. The problem here is what opportunity we’re losing in order to make more people happy under the new system.

A finishing thought: most countries in the western world are representative democracies (except for Switzerland) and not base democracies. Did you ever think a bit about "why"? The truth is, your average voter doesn’t really know what is good for them. They may simply not have the available data to make a pondered decision, or they may not be qualified enough to make one. Like on the issue of taxes, it’s best not to ask people what they think that is good for them. In almost all cases, and this is what History has shown us uncountable times, people simply don’t know what is good for them as a group, long-term. They cannot see beyond their immediate satisfaction.

In real life, we live in a structured society, where people take decisions according to their level of experience and training. We are a specialized society, having grown from the days where everybody was required to do almost everything to survive — from building your own home, to hunting or gathering plants, from cooking to raising your children. What we call the "modern" world is a place where people fill in niches where they excel in their skills and abilities — for the overall good of everyone. Specialization brings us a more sophisticated society, with an advanced level of quality that was unthinkable on pre-civilized ones. We gravitate towards those areas that interest us most and develop our skills in them. Overall, this means progress, civilization, quality, and faster development — not to mention a more "fair" society, where everybody is able to deploy their own skills more efficiently. Sadly, the other side of the coin is that we are not all "equal" and that assymetries will inevitably set in. This is the downside of a specialized society — but, overall, most societies will agree that it’s "the lesser evil" when compared to the alternative.

We have seen this happening in Second Life as well, where time was compressed. Like a real country, Second Life’s residents gravitated to niches where they could fully deploy their skills, desires, and wishes. A side effect of this virtual country is that it soon became assymetric — talented designers selling more, successful business owners becoming more rich, development starting organically near telehubs, and so on. The "average" resident — ie. over 90% of the population — felt that this assymetry was getting too evident and demanded that the deck of cards was reshuffled, because it was "unfair". Linden Lab complied. Reset the virtual world, start from scratch again. And good luck on the new world!

I don’t think that new assymetries won’t emerge again (it’s in human nature, after all). What I fear is that opportunities for building a virtual world are now seriously set back a few years. SL needed 2 or 3 years to grow to the point we were now — and incredibly enough, this was all brought about because of the introduction of telehubs, 2 years ago! Will we need 2 years to develop a new virtual country under the new assumptions? Or will the hurdles be so great this time that it will take either much more — or even be never accomplished at all? That is the question I ask myself every day. I look upon companies still setting up Web portals and ignoring Google’s new "reshuffling of the deck" and disappearing after a few months, shaking their heads because they could not understand that the Web changed dramatically. People are still setting up cute homepages, despite their being basically worthless — only access to content matters. The same will happen in SL. People will still try to create "artificial attractors" for urban development (even LL is doing the same with their own planned communities!). But I’m not sure if they will succeed. At the very best, this will mean that the importance of private islands with their Estate Tools will rise. LL has also talked a bit about providing similar tools on the mainland — perhaps on 1.8, perhaps on 2.0. Until we wait for that to happen (which will eventually never come, like the "running joke" of Havok 2, the Linux version, inter-object communication, better XML/RPC, better avatars…), private islands will be the place to be. And the mainland… well, the mainland will become "wasteland".

In a previous article, I tried to think a bit about marketing efforts in Second Life.

Recently someone asked me in IM: “so, are you a Linden now?” and I was utterly baffled why they were asking me that. Sure, like perhaps half of the residents, I applied for a job with Linden Lab in November 2004, and did not get an answer, so I guess they don’t require anyone with my skills. I wasn’t expecting much anyway; and, by becoming a member of LL’s staff, it would also mean dropping all my personal projects using SL. In a sense, last year, “becoming a Linden” made much more sense than today.

So, why this sudden and unexpected question? Well, this person knows how much effort I put into promoting Second Life in my country. Last weekend someone presented our team as “the guys that are introducing Second Life in Portugal”. This is hardly true — first, because Portugal’s oldest SL resident is Eggy Lippmann and has predated our efforts by perhaps 2 years And there are many others around, who also predate us in terms of doing projects in SL. And highly likely there are many more about which I haven’t heard anything, just because SL has grown so much lately. Last but not least, it’s also a well-known fact that Linden Lab is not thinking about “internationalisation”, and even if they were, this would probably just mean opening up a second grid on the East Coast and another one in Europe, most likely in the UK or in Germany, where most of the European-based residents come from. It doesn’t make sense to have “partnerships” with entities in any other country — there is simply no critical mass for those.

What is happening is something quite different. People using SL as a tool are providing RL services using SL — education and culture being predominant, but there are more. By offering their services, they’re indirectly promoting Second Life as a valid platform for creating 3D virtual worlds. Is this so unusual?

Consider the following example. You open Microsoft’s home page and get a big article on the web site: “James Cooper, an Excel user, is giving a workshop on how to use the SUM() function”. At the appointed time and place, this James Cooper, a Microsoft user, gives the workshop, and is directly promoting himself and his skill in using the SUM() function, but indirectly promoting Microsoft and its applications. So, naturally, James Cooper gets a spot on Microsoft’s web page. He is not a Microsoft employee — just someone happy to use Excel and tell others about it. But James is certainly presenting “case studies” for Microsoft, doing good PR for them, organising events, evangelising. All these are marketing skills well employed. They don’t cost Microsoft a bit of money — James is willing to do it just because he loves Excel so much, earns money by using it, and is happy to demonstrate how it works. Microsoft, benevolently, just repays in kindness by getting James a bit of web space and an article here and there, and perhaps a contact for him somewhere. Meanwhile, James exchanges IMs in MSN Messenger with Uncle Bill, who introduces him to other Excel lovers, and together they chat in a room to discuss what they can do to promote Excel even more.

James then organises a meeting of Excel lovers, and together they raise money to create the first “Excel User Conference”. Bill, of course, insists in being a sponsor of the event, and even has Windows Update putting a few messages or adware to gently remind Microsoft’s user base that the first EUC will be held soon, and that they should get in touch with James Cooper to get more info. During the EUC, Bill Gates sits casually on top of a table and talks about a bright new world of Excel users worldwide that will use the SUM() function to create a better, more friendly and more peaceful world. The keynote address by Bill will be streamed to MSN users everywhere in the world. The event is a big success, and new “Excel User Groups” pop into existence all over the place. Microsoft then creates a new website for them, and incorporates into Excel a new menu option called “Live Help” — when the disk-based help system is not enough, and the online help system doesn’t provide an answer, you’ll be able to go to “Live Help” and instantly send a message via MSN to James Cooper and all the “Excel User Groups” available in the world, and they’ll try to voluntarily help you out. Microsoft encourages this a lot, and Bill is quoted on Wired and the New York Times as bringing a revolutionary, “humane” touch to its application platforms — encouraging users to talk to users and exchange ideas and helping each other.

Microsoft then launches the “Excel Community Team” — a group of Microsoft employees that have as their sole function helping out Excel users to get better and better organisation. James Cooper is by now a regular visitor at One Microsoft Way in Redmond, WA. He’s still not an employee, just a regular user, but he definitely meets often with Bill, comes with new requests from Excel users, new ideas on how to put the SUM() function to good use, and regularly encourages Bill to give more support to the “Excel Community Team” and the many, many user groups that exist now all around the world. Bill complies; he knows that James Cooper and all the Excel Users are doing much more for Microsoft and its applications than most of Microsoft’s marketing team. After all, who is the best kind of person to do application evangelising — the company’s employees or the happy customers? It should be obvious…

By now, I guess most of you are rolling on the floor laughing, since, obviously, James Cooper doesn’t exist, nobody would ever get that kind of attention from Microsoft, and Bill Gates, while certainly a visionary, would never agree to anything like this.

The ones among you who are in Second Life and have understood how Linden Lab works will probably recognize the example. Replace “Excel” by “SL” (it sounds almost the same!), “Microsoft” by “Linden Lab”, and “Bill Gates” by “Philip Rosedale”, and everything does not only make sense, it has happened and is still going on right now.

One year ago or so, residents of Second Life protested to Linden Lab and asked them why they didn’t spend more money on advertising or on doing “the usual stuff other game companies do” — go to the big games exhibitions, put CDs with Second Life into games magazines, pay for ads there, resell CDs at the big retail stores, etc. There were always embarassed answers. The usual excuse is that “Second Life grows more through word-of-mouth” — a happy customer brings another 5 with them. As we all know, this is working quite well.

But the next stage is happening at the same time. Linden Lab attends regularly lots of conferences. Just ask Robin or Pathfinder what they’re up to in the next weeks, and you’ll see that they’re very, very busy attending conferences, workshops, seminars (I’d expect Philip to be as busy as well). They’re just not really “games conferences” although they go to a few of those as well. The difference is that they don’t go “alone”. They more than likely will go there with a handful of residents — who know the Lindens will be there, and will help them to co-promote SL. What kind of residents are those? Well, the ones that are using SL as a platform for their RL work. Naturally, they wish SL to become a successful endeavour, and they promote SL madly. Sometimes this means meeting the Lindens at conferences, by mere chance. “Oh, so you’re a speaker here too?”

Sometimes this also means that people ask us, the residents, why we do all this marketing effort for Linden Lab, if we’re not being paid for it. Consider the following: there are around 500+ “volunteers” working as Greeters, Mentors, Instructors and Live Helpers. They don’t get a single US$ (or L$) in return for spending hours online helping other users. And these are the “organised” groups — what about the uncountable thousands that help others in exchange of nothing? Why, why, why? There seems to be only one explanation: the more people are happy with SL, the bigger the virtual world will grow, the more consumers of your products/services you’ll have. I mean, my very own first presentations on SL started with “SL, a world with 15,000 users…”. Now I say “SL, a world nearing 100,000 residents…”, but in a year I’ll probably say half a million or so. More people in SL mean more opportunities. We all want more people in SL. And it’s not an altruistic idea, or wishing Philip & The Lindens to become filthy rich — what we want is that SL grows enough to make many projects possible through reaching a certain “critical mass”. If I have a platform that is used by 50 people (say, OpenCroquet ) nobody will take it seriously, no matter how well it’s designed. If it’s used by a large user base, well, there must be some reason for that.

Of course, quantity is not the same as quality, but we have both in SL. This is also important for us. We need to attract more good designers, builders, programmers — but other kinds as well, like teachers, educators, journalists, and all sorts of people that will see SL as the “new medium”: the Metaverse. By “migrating” their current set of tools into Second Life, people are clearly sending a message: “this is the way to go — this is the future”.

Quoting a resident without his permission: “You’re 15 years into the future.” That may very well be true. But the future has to start somewhere, and “now” that’s all we have: residents promoting Second Life, residents organising the technical support, residents creating external web sites — residents creating content.

In a sense, the humourous Microsoft analogy is wrong. The ficticious James Cooper should not be “showing off” his skills on the SUM() function, but rather promoting “Exceloid”, something created with Excel that surpasses anything thought to be possible to do with Excel. That would be much more analogous to what happens with Second Life: we grab the tools we’ve been given, and do amazing things with them. And then, by promoting ourselves doing those amazing things, we’re going to indirectly promote Second Life as well, by saying “hey, you can do the same!”

It’s an interesting concept of building a marketing team (and a technical support team as well): get your users to participate. After all, the discussion goes on about what would happen if “Linden Lab would pull the plug”. I may be wrong on this, but every day I feel this hardly won’t happen. You see, Linden Lab, without user-generated content, is nothing; we, the residents, without Linden Lab to support us and encourage us to stay around the grid, we’ll stick with them just because they’re nice We know there are alternatives. Highly likely, if SL is not a big success, and if LL’s investors seriously threaten to remove their funding (it may happen, but every day it’s less than likely), what do you think that would happen?

I would bet on the following scenario:

Philip and Cory would ask people to come over in-world to talk about the future of SL. They would explain that they have to shut down the grid and dismiss all employees. And then they would ask for comments and suggestions.

After the initial shock, the first thing that would be asked was: if you got rid of the Liaisons and the email support team, could you hold on for some more months? Philip would consider this. After all, the Liaisons are the biggest part of LL’s employees (although I suspect they’re also the least expensive ones). You can replace them with around 500 volunteers, for free. That would give LL some more maneuvering space to think about solutions.

Then LL could get rid of their marketing team. After all, most of the marketing is by word-of-mouth anyway. Volunteers would quickly fill in the vacant spots. I’m quite sure that not a single user would not be reached if LL did not have a marketing team! And don’t even think about PR — most PR you get from Second Life does not come from LL, but from its residents. Just take a look at the interviews — while in 2003 it was all about Philip, nowadays it’s all about the residents. So, no problem here.

Next comes the development team. We have around 5,000+ seasoned and experienced programmers, who, sincerely, would simply drool over the opportunity to improve the code and fix all the bugs in no time. I mean, not even Microsoft Office has that many programmers to fix its bugs So this would mean that the development team could be scratched off LL’s payroll easily, and we would still get improvements, new features, and bug fixing. Probably Andrew and Cory could just stay around to do a final commit on the contributed code, and that’s it. Or better still — Second Life could get a hand by Mitch Kapor and be “integrated” into the Mozilla Foundation, who has a more than enough workforce to support an ongoing project management effort on Second Life.

Last but not least, the Grid. Well, with an open source solution on the server, the grid does not really need to stay in its current co-location facility. People would simply add simulation servers from wherever they wished — at their universities, at their own expenses in some hosting facilities, whatever. It would probably be a bit more shaky and unpredicatable, but, ah well, aren’t we residents used to that as well on the current grid? It would definitely be a very different grid, that’s for sure, and the economy and business model (modelled around land) would certainly be very different.

So, what does this all mean? From the day that Philip would announce “the end of Linden Lab” to the day that a Metaverse based on the Second Life platform would be able to run by itself, only a few months would pass. Yes, I’m sure many would shake their hands and leave forever and go back to There or try IMVU or whatever will be launched as a “social MMOG” in the next few years. But a “core team” — the ones using Second Life as their platform of choice — would never abandon Second Life. They would struggle to set it up by themselves and keep it going, just because they love it so much, and need it for their own projects to succeed as well. We have a great example on a very similar situation — Netscape and its successor, Mozilla. Nothing was lost, and these days, Mozilla and its derivatives are still around, still growing like crazy, still being incorporated into other technologies (like inside Second Life itself!). A project never dies if there is enough critical mass, and I think that SL has critical mass already, or will very soon have it.

This also means that the self-proclaimed “SL evangelisers” are not betting on a dead horse. Rather the contrary — they’re actively revitalizing the platform, pushing it well beyond its current amount of quirks and bugs (unimportant in the overall scheme of things), and promoting it in a way that Linden Lab has not imagined. It’s much easier to do so if you have a “company” behind it, of course — credibility is important — but it can also be done without a company behind it. Philip will always be around as the “founder of Linden Lab and creator of the Second Life platform”. Even without Linden Lab, he’ll always be available to talk about SL, its model, its original purpose, and how the many people using it pushed it beyond its purpose — like Marc Andreesen is still doing with Netscape’s successor.

For an optimist like me, SL is here to stay — in its current incarnation, or any other that may follow it. All that is due to resident’s promotion of SL’s use.

Recently, a few people looked up my blog to get an idea on what I’m currently doing using Second Life® as a “platform”, and commented that they were expecting more information about that here.

Well, there is a reason for almost everything, and the first thing that came to my mind is that this is mostly a blog on Second Life’s society and psychology (with a few tips, tricks, and guides thrown in-between ). Like many others, I try to avoid mixing “real life” with my “second life”, not at the least because of my respecting other’s restraints in publishing more of their own real life information, but also due to some aspects that will become clear by the end of this article.

First of all, you must understand that I do have a technical background (it’s not hard to find that out), but I have been involved in practically everything, some things with some success, many others which have been utter failures. I sold web sites as well as kitchens; I painted shops at malls and carried hand-painted handicrafted tiles in my car across the country; I worked in big open offices in my cubicle, as well as in tiny shops with perhaps 24 m2 and 3 companies inside the same space; I configured computers, routers, and phone switches, while at the same time publishing literary books, planning ad space on outdoors for cultural events, or sending letters inviting authors and artists to exhibitions; I ran international events in congress centres with attendances of 15,000 people, some of them technical, some of them cultural, but I also organised small discussion events not unlike the Thinkers’ events (and about the same topics as well) with an attendance of 15 or so people. I co-managed companies with 20,000 customers and companies with 20; I did accounting for tiny companies and marketing for non-profit associations. And I also was a organ player at a local church and sang (very badly, mind you) in choirs. Whew. Does this sound like bragging? Not likely. When I was a teenager, I very seriously wished to have an artistic career (like so many do). But I quickly found out after learning four different musical instruments that I would never be able to play one professionally, no matter how hard I studied; my painting/sculpting skills are so bad that I was absolutely ashamed of doing such a mess with the tools I had, although I had some training in aesthetics, techniques, and art history; I like photography and even cinema, but can’t hardly expect to compete even with the clumsier amateur; I could discuss philosophy, but would always invariably mix up authors; and when the Web came out in 1993, I found out that I would never be a Web designer, despite having the dubious honour of setting up Portugal’s first ever Web page and teaching the team that did the second one; to a certain extent, the only moderate ability I did have was writing reasonably well (enough to get an award and publish a book) but definitely not good enough to make a living of it. Also, it doesn’t help that I live in the least literary country of Europe, where there are probably more “literary awards” than readers…

I soon found out that I’m not good enough on anything, and, as a teenager, I had to deal with that. It was tough and frustrating to be around groups of people that had lots of talent in so many different areas, and have most of the training they had and even master most of the skills they had acquired, but be completely unable to do anything they did — all my attempts were, at best, laughable. As a teenager, this was something hard to swallow.

When I graduated from high school, it looked like the only thing I would ever be “good” at was to be the first in something new. Take web design, for instance. If there is only one web designer in a whole country, it’s easy to get people’s attention. As soon as the second web designer pops up into existence, I’d quickly fade into the background (my lack of an aesthetical eye would be too obvious). But at least I had achieved something — being the first. The others would always come next, and they would always be much better. I can’t compete in quality, so I’d compete in the “visionary” field. And that’s what I mostly did in the past, oh, 15 years or so. When people around here started playing role-playing games (a novelty in the late 80s), I already was part of an organised association promoting role-playing games as “intelligent games” and as a tool to promote education and literacy skills, giving small workshops, conferences and even talking at the national TV about that. When the commercial Internet came along, I did the same approach. And right now — you guessed it! — I’m doing the same with Second Life.

“Being the first” is a tough career opportunity. There is no market for “being the first” because nobody knows what your product is for. This means getting laughed at a lot — people simply thinking that you’re raving mad and pulling their legs. “People are going to use Web sites for their shopping? Come on, go away.” That’s what I heard in 1995, all the time. People sniggering or even offensively insulting my “radical” ideas — that was something I dealt with, over and over again. It happened with role-playing games, with kitchens, with hand-painted tiles, with web pages — and, naturally, with things like Second Life as well.

Sometimes a few of these ideas paid off. People do their shopping online these days — e-Commerce is not another “buzzword from the visionaries”, but something still growing, despite the Internet bubble having burst. There still are non-computer related games companies around, some of them selling things like Magic: The Gathering and their successors and making zillions of dollars. That’s the trouble with “being the first”. If you’re lucky, you’ll succeed, but if you’re not, you’re going to be a laughing stock for a long while, with lots of people shaking their heads and smiling condescendingly. Only a few survive to tell their tales.

Thus, we come to 2004 and my “discovery” of Second Life by mere chance. Dispatched to an island in the middle of the Atlantic in search of customers for the company I was working with, I had an awesome broadband connection, and enough free time to spare (which is something quite uncommon in my life). One weekend in July I was bored and wanted to try some game on my Macintosh. As you might expect, I’m also a terrible game player. I tend to favour simulations that are turn-based or at least slow-paced that allow me to think first and react later. I also like 3D thingies, and a combination of those are not easy to find. Most 3D games are simply shoot-’em-ups or “pseudo-role-playing” things, which I never liked much. Sure, these usually grab my attention perhaps for 20 minutes or so — then I quickly understand that I’m simply not skilled enough to play anything. You can imagine that Internet-based gaming never was something I considered seriously; the closest to that was a Play-By-Mail (snail mail, not e-mail) I used to play for a few years. I was the worse player in the game, but I found something more interesting (to me, at least): diplomacy. That was much more fun than watching your armies getting trampled over by newcomers with much more skills in organising campaigns. At least, I took pains to write elaborate letters to my enemies and allies, convince them to come together, to discuss our options, to create banners and fancy titles, and, well, do all sorts of things that your usual “create-army-conquer-world” type of games do not offer. Again, I was the laughing stock of that game, but at least the other players found me amusing

So, here I was, 1000 km away from my RL friends, stranded on an island, with an excellent Internet connection, and some spare time. You must understand that PC users are luckier — they have zillions of choices, but, as a Mac user, I could only search at Apple’s software download section for “3d game strategy”. You’ll see that this will still show Second Life listed there. Not being a MMORPGer (for the reasons listed) I was expecting something quite different. Yes, like many, I had tried ActiveWorlds in the time it was called AlphaWorld, ten years ago, and after 3 hours, I thought that this would never work — people simply wouldn’t populate an empty space (which takes so much time) to make it “appealing”.

After trying SL for a few hours, I was hooked. There was this something about SL that I needed to understand, and I would never stop before I found it out: what is Second Life for?

My immediate reaction was that SL was a sociological experiment under the disguise of a “game”. It was hard to shake off that feeling. Remember America’s Army — another one I just watched for a few minutes, it simply requires much more skill than I could ever dream of possessing — which is stated as a “game” to simulate combat techniques and pick out “team leaders” as potential candidates for the US armed forces. Well, I first got the serious impression that SL was something similar, but not targeted towards the military, but the civil society. Some sort of “recruiting simulation” for social leadership.

Then I went back to Linden Lab’s site and took a look at the board. Philip Rosedale, was, of course, familiar — yes, I’m that old to remember he had invented audio streaming — as well as Mitch Kapor on the board. The others are easily looked up — they have their curricula listed on Plaxo — and what I found out was a small start-up in California, with lots and lots of talented people from key technological areas, who, at some point in time, have been “visionaries”. And they were releasing into the market something completely “different” and not even sure what it was about — a game? An “experiment”? A “platform”? A “country”, as I’m so fond of quoting Philip?

It took me about one month to figure out what Second Life was to me — a tool from visionaries, for visionaries. This basically means that the notion that “you can build everything” can use the different employments of the word build. Yes, you can build lovely houses out of prims; but you can also build communities; or build economies; or build much more — build the Metaverse, whatever that is.

Always eager to explore “new things”, that’s exactly what I did with Second Life. The first idea I got was, of course, advertising. Around 2001 or so I was presented with some clever web solutions involving 3D (not VRML, which is the “academic” side of 3D on the Web). People were marketing it to recreate real things virtually, like museums for virtual tours, or setting up booths visually on an exhibition floor. I found the concepts interesting, but they all lacked something — people. The virtual space was always empty.

Not so in Second Life — the virtual space is crowded with human beings all around. They communicate, they exchange ideas, they congregate according to interests, they make friends, they make business. This is the difference of SL: it’s alive.

So I started writing e-mails to companies and public institutes and offer to do small presentations on SL. Again, I was laughed at by most (except a Canadian company doing clothes), but I still “felt” I was in the right path. Perhaps advertising in SL in 2004 was too early and too radical; or giving virtual tours was something most entities were really not so happy with, since during the Internet bubble, this was the kind of project that costed millions of Euros without any visible benefit — people simply didn’t use those virtual recreations. No critical mass, and an expensive setup.

By mere chance I got in touch with ARCI, a small non-profit organisation that was teaching IT to teenagers, victims of abuse, that lived on safehouses, removed from their parents. Suddenly the pieces started to fit in the puzzle: here was a small organisation, with a few dozen users (the teenagers), already computer-savvy, with broadband connections, spread geographically, and using IT to promote their skills, and which needed to remain anonymous (a legal requirement — their homes are kept confidential, as well the teenagers’ identities). Second Life seemed almost to be designed for it: it allowed all teenagers to be in a virtual space together (they could connect from their homes) in order to get training; it protected their identities and those of their teachers/educators; it worked on the technology they had (recent computers with broadband access); and it was dirt cheap. It’s hardly surprising that things worked so well

“Cyberlearning” (c-Learning) and “cyberculture” were thus “born”. Right now, when you listen to these new buzzwords, you’ll dismiss them as a “novelty” which hardly turn a few heads. People are tired of hearing about “yet another remote teaching technology”; every month or so, something new pops along the way. Entities have spent millions to develop complex Web-based e-Learning tools to recreate “virtual classrooms”, complementing those with forums and chat rooms to have teachers and students interact. I’m not sure how successful those have been. I’ve read tons of documentation about it, however, and it’s almost like people are afraid to post the results. The only success cases I know of are the ones that had external funding — say, from European funds — or private sponsoring and that you didn’t need to care about the “investment”, only with the running costs.

Well, Second Life is the ideal place for virtual classrooms, despite its so many quirks. Setup is done in a few minutes, just rez in a few chairs and a slideshow presenter. The students only need to download their copy of SL, create an account, and join the class. There is no need for any additional tools or long months of developing things. Even without HTML-in-a-prim you can create notecards to spread notes in the virtual classsroom; and, of course, add online information on the Web (like having transcripts of the chat history). Students can meet online and exchange ideas all the time, not only when the teacher is logged in. And if you wish, you can even complement the setup having video or audio streaming, with just the cost of downloading, say, the free QuickTime Streaming Server and installing it. So, what else do you need for “cyberlearning”?

Total cost in software: zero. Development time: minimal (beyond having the course materials ready). Training time for people to use the “application”: a few hours for them to adapt to SL’s interface (which is not unreasonable). Does it come to a surprise to you that the SL Educators Mailing List has a few hundred people already, and that the traffic on that list is quite high, with dozens of messages per day? For me, it’s only natural.

This is a picture from last year’s fund raising event

During the period of 11-14 November, ARCI had a small booth at a big charity event to raise funds for the children and victims of abuse of the Novo Futuro association. We presented Second Life itself and what the teenagers have learned to do with it — several of the children were anonymously “showing off” their skills, most physically in front of the computer we had there, a few logging in remotely from their safehouses. As you can imagine, this impressed quite a few people who would never dream that young teenagers some of them having had limited access to computers or technology in general) were able to create so much in such a short time. Some of the children are notorious “problem cases” at school or even at their safehouses; but in SL, they excel in “building communities”. This is part of a study which is under progress and which hopefully will show that things like Second Life are much better to have teenagers acquiring several skills, both technological as well as social. “Teaching through playing” is a motto we have used often. By looking at “Second Life as a game”, SL attracts the kids’ attention, who view it as an environment for self-expression, building interesting things, and communication. In the mean time, they learn to operate a computer (or even to build one from parts), to launch Second Life, to understand visual 3D concepts and some maths, and, of course, to learn things like Photoshop or audio editing/streaming tools to be able to offer clothes for sale or to set up their own clubs. ARCI managed to get a new set of interested social/health care institutions who are willing to give SL a try. 2006 will definitely be an interesting year to watch. Sadly for me, it also means it will be a year where, due to a recent job move (ARCI is just my “second job”), I’ll be probably even busier than usually and not fully committed to the cause of “SL evangelisation”, which demands a whole article on its own