I thought to repost this post I did on the forums, regarding the latest developments and announcements by Linden Lab. To be honest, this is not Linden Lab’s officially presented plan, rather the contrary. By pulling information from bits here and there, from half-told stories, from vague allusions to a distant future, and several other sources, mostly informal, one can get a rough, overall picture of where Linden Lab is heading with their Second Life platform.

Some people have seen my post on the forums on this issue, and asked me “who told you that?”. I feel it’s only fair to answer truthfully: nobody. Thus, I might be totally off-track. There might be some confusion between what Linden Lab is actually doing (or what they should be doing) and my own wishful thinking. I might have read their snippets of information incorrectly. And, more important than that, knowing how Linden Lab works for the past 22 months, might not be enough to have the required insight to interpret their actions correctly.

So, take all the following with the required pinch of salt. Caveat lector I still hope you find it interesting.

(originally posted at: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1045872#post1045872)

While I’m no futurist, and despite (some) claims to the contrary, I’m not Philip’s alt — but still I’d like to add that I’m also a “naive optimist” and have been accused in the past of having been a visionary myself

It’s fun to see that as SL grows, more and more people notice that the “problem” with LL and SL is not a technological one — but one related to people I think that’s a good sign. It means that, hopefully, by recognising that the flaws are directly tied to people, the technological bits can be worked out easier.

LL worked rather well when they had two major advantages:

• direct ties to their customers. When there were only a few thousand of them around, they could get in touch with all of them directly (anyone in SL for over a year which hasn’t been locked behind a virtual door will quickly accumulate near to a thousand acquaintances)
• a slow growth, allowing them to think a bit before committing ideas to paper (or rather, to code).

The first advantage meant that they could work on three focuses:

• giving people the tools/features they needed
• fixing bugs they knew that annoyed most of the people
• developing their own “visionary” new concepts and trying it out in the field

For this sort of company, a flat hierarchy with highly talented individuals was more than adequate. Developers were interchangeable; I guess even Philip would have enough time to do his famous rocket launcher or music device (how is it called again?), while fine-tuning the streaming algorithm, and still have some time to do PowerPoint presentations

Then growth hit Linden Lab. It was not exponential at first, but gradual — still, for a long while, there were diminishing returns. The first thing that happened was losing a more direct communication with their users. At some time, just the number of new forum posts was so high that nobody at LL could read them all. In-world meetings tended to attract the very few that managed to enter the lagged sim; most didn’t care. The joys of “working together with LL” — in the sense of meeting them face-to-face on the grid and discussing things together — were slowly faded out as almost all Lindens started to handle an increased workload. Discussions and meetings started to be held in “corporatese” instead of “geekese”. These days, most Lindens seem to be working on 12-hour-days, even during the weekends, and forget about holidays. They still love to work there. But they simply can’t encompass the lot of things that are going on.

The voting feature thingy is a good example of something gone awry just because of the sheer number of people using it. I’m one of the many who have pushed the concept to be implemented; I was one of the many to cheer and applaud the decision to let residents help the prioritisation of ideas; I’m now one of the first to say that it simply doesn’t work. It’s an abandoned concept, impossible to follow, and the time required to track it down (namely by simply merging proposals…) is way too high, it would be a full-time job just for that, and even so, I suspect it wouldn’t be enough if we grow to a population of one million. Or ten millions.

On the other hand, I view the SL client as an advanced piece of technology… of 1999 As a proof-of-concept, it might have served its purposes. After so many years have elapsed, one thing has come out of the whole experience in developing it: SL is not the ultimate game-development tool that LL thought it would be. It’s being used for too many different things, and the codebase simply can’t handle them all. The result: a monolithic nightmare to mantain.

From snippets here and there, I’m aware of several incredibly interesting ideas that seem to have failed to be implemented:

• Havok 2/3/4. The port is “almost done”. It was always “almost done”. But the problem is, you can’t integrate it into the code without breaking everything.
• SpeedTree. Cool concept. Sadly, it can’t be integrated into the code.
• uBrowser (Gecko-in-SL). It was scheduled to be “a six-week-project” after someone developed video streaming inside SL — the concept that you could have a somewhat independent bit of code actually outputting pixels on top of a texture. Nothing new there (OpenGL handles that natively), but it hadn’t been attempted. So, six weeks should be enough for the job of putting HTML on prims. 14 months have elapsed. Only now will we get the 2D in-world HTML browser, which was “95% finished” 10 months ago or so.
• Mono. The whole implementation was done by just one top programmer, who presented his results last year. Sadly, in the mean time, the code grew, and now it can’t be integrated into the current code base — it needs a complete rewrite.
• The new 2.0 renderer — which doesn’t exist anymore. After it was pretty much finished, it would give rise to a completely new (and incompatible) SL. I assume that they devised several approaches to re-import all the data from SL 1.X into SL 2.0, but after seeing that it would break too many things, LL proceeded to break the 2.0 renderer in chunks and integrate it back, a piece at a time, in the current code base.
• New permission system, integrating Creative Commons licensing systems. A lot was written about that; LL promised that they would do a long discussion on those, until it would get implemented. And so they did. We’re still waiting, over a year later

I could go on and on, but what seems to be the pattern here is always the same. Developers are assigned to projects. They develop them rather quickly; amazing things are done in a few weeks or sometimes a few months, and they have a proof-of-concept operational to show the rest of the staff. Everybody applauds and approves the change. Then they start to integrate it with the current code — and it all breaks apart. So, all the effort done by these very talented guys get freezed. I imagine it might be terribly frustrating for them! (I always imagine Xenon Linden behind his 23″ screen doing utterly lovely Poser 6 avatars, with hyper-reallistic texturing, animating them finger by finger, all with 12 different layers of textures getting baked together, and developers telling him that there would be no way to integrate that in the next ten years…)

To get things under control, LL hired not one, but at least two project managers. They have a whole team of “bug hunters” and a quality assurance team. They have fixed 6,000 bugs in 9 months (not bad!). Still, at the end of the day, what do we have? Lots and lots of unfixed bugs, major performance problems, a model that doesn’t scale too well, almost a year of bug-fixing and dealing with scalability issues, and no performance increases, nor new major features (except now for 1.10….). And on the other hand, hundreds of thousands of lines of code of absolutely fantastic concepts, all of them working at some time on specially-modified SL clients — but which won’t work on the current version.

Well, is there any easy way out of this? I think there is.

Once I wondered why LL had so many web developers, when their website was nothing spectacular — except for tying in into some grid-based database servers for some cool features, the website is the sort of thing a professional web programmer could set up in less than a week (after all, it’s built upon a Drupal install…). But they still keep a HUGE amount of web developers. What are they doing? Nice maps and SLurl?

Actually, now we know: they’re slowly and painfully porting all the bits of the client-server communications to webservices.

One might argue if this is a wise move or not. The point is, I think they’re addressing their biggest hurdle right now: making sure that they develop the renderer separately from the user interface. Yes. At last

Once they manage that, two things will happen:

• Internally, they’ll be able to split their teams. The ones currently working on the interface — where adding a checkbox could be enough to crash the renderer beneath! — will be able to work on the interface without having to worry about the rest of the code. This will mean that interface changes will be deployed quickly; and that future versions of SL could be released independently: one team releasing UI changes, the other playing with the renderer. The two teams will be able to work independently and not worry if they are doing things correcty for the “other” team.
• This will open the door to easy interface mods, integration with third parties’ applications, and multiple clients. Yes, eventually, even the SL 2.0 client could be released separately But the more interesting bit: they could finally get the whole programmer community of SL residents start to add all sorts of features to SL as “plugins”

Will this address the major issues of SL — lag and scalability? Well, perhaps. As an optimist, what I see is a major change in the future (or should I say ongoing…?) development model. As long as there is a clear, open, public API, people doing the server code, the renderer code, and the interface code will be able to work independently, making sure none of the teams creates a bottleneck. We have already seen some changes — it has become more common to see rolling upgrades on the servers that don’t require a client change. I expect this to be the norm in the future — with a good API, you would be able to deal with different versioning on the three bits that are collectively what we see as “the SL platform”. So imagine you’d be able to have a simple 3D renderer, but a very efficient one — and all chat would go to your favourite Jabber-based client Inventory would show up as folders on your hard disk, as a remotely-mounted drive. That would be simply awesome — no more struggling with the client interface For the die-hard lovers of the current interface, you’d get that option as well, on a monolithic client like we have right now.

Then the resident programmers would say: “ah, I don’t really like the way they have implemented the renderer, I can do much more — I’ll just grab a copy of the Quake engine or something, and get it to talk with the SL grid servers”

Now, we know for a fact that Philip is not afraid of going that route. What seems to be the underlying problem is the required security of all communications and data storage — SL relied upon the concept that no one would “look” at the data stream between server and client, so security was not a big concern. But this needs to change if they really wish to “open” the code more — at least, provide an open, public API to the server. What seems to be the major development effort at LL right now is going this route. When SL had perhaps a few hundred resident programmers, they dismissed (perhaps rightfully so) their willingness to help. As this number has increased to a few tens of thousands, it’s a source of willing development power that they wish to tap. It only makes sense!

So what I can imagine that will happen during 2006 is that all this work to clearly separate the three bits — UI, renderer, server software — will take most of the developing time of SL. Making sure that both client and server are not monolithic structures will be the next most important issue. When that is achieved, they’ll be able to say: “You don’t like this bug? You want this feature? Do it on your own” It won’t be “totally open source” but the closest you could get at this stage; and I think it’ll be the major change in the way we look at the development effort at Linden Lab.

This doesn’t mean that this development will be “chaotic”. It will mean that there will be a rather large group of core developers working at Linden Lab, providing mostly hooks and interfaces — and encourage a host of programmers to add third-party tools, plug-ins, or totally different clients. On the server side, more and more should be done to tie-in into external applications. Philip has just announced yesterday that llHTTPRequest() has a 0.1 sec round-trip time (totally consistent with my own measurements made on the preview grid). This will already be a huge step in getting external applications being driven from inside the SL grid. The next step will probably to allow external images to be retrieved and displayed on your SL client (ActiveWorlds has had it for ages — so it’s time SL does it as well). This would then mean that LL wouldn’t have to worry about storage — if your textures load slowly, it’s the resident’s fault, not yours As more and more things get integrated on external, third-party servers, LL’s grid computers will look more like “entry portals”, or proxy servers if you wish, to a host of applications that will simply be offloaded from the web.

Put into other words:

• Does your script lag? Run it on your own external server instead.
• LSL is too limited/buggy for you? Use your own favourite language on your own server.
• Is the client too slow for your computer? Develop your own light version!
• Too many bugs? Get a client with less bugs — or develop your own.

What remains to be changed under this model is the whole structure of the grid to achieve better scalability — that should remain for another thread.

So, my hopes are high, although I believe we’ll have to wait another year or so to see these changes actually happening. At the end of the day, this will bring a completely different relationship between Linden Lab and their core programmers, and the whole of the resident developer community. I truly look forward to it. I would also love to have Philip subscribe to these ideas publicly; for now, he just drops a snippet of information here and there, for us to listen, digest, and interpret…

“Linden Lab Encourages Resident Self-Organisation”

After a few weeks of being regularly online at Second Life after joining, you will get Linden Lab’s message coming to your ears from all directions: “Your World. Your Imagination”. Very likely, on your very first day in SL, a helpful Mentor will tell you something like “99.9% of everything you see has been created by the users, not Linden Lab”. And as time goes by, this seems to be validated from all sides — residents create content, residents offer services, they develop things with SL that weren’t ever possible, and all this meets with the overall approval of other residents, and, of course, of Linden Lab themselves.

Or does it?

It’s unquestionable that Linden Lab has been on the Great Quest for Self-Organisation. Apparently it’s part of their internal policies, or even their mission statement: “Linden Lab Encourages Resident Self-Organisation”. This is not just idle talk; a 100-person start-up barely manages to keep afloat in the sea of 220,000 or so very creative active users. Try running a whole city with just a hundred people and you’ll soon see that it’s next to impossible.

So, it’s our world, and we should accept some responsibilities as well. One of them is the responsibility towards the community; it’s “our” community, not Linden Lab’s, and the community needs organisation — for us to provide. All this should be obvious; all this should also explain why Linden Lab has a full-time staff of several people just to create the necessary interfaces between the residents and the company — and I’m not talking about technical support, but the employees of LL that are supposed to empower residents in their acts of self-organisation. They allegedly encourage them, provide the required tools, meet with them, request feedback, provide guidelines and a super-structure, and get back to the Board of LL for re-arranging priorities. All this is in place for several years; and this internal structure has increased in size over time, as more and more residents manage to organise themselves.

So far, I’ve described an ideal world. One that many residents believe to be the utopian community they have envisioned. However, there are no utopias, and by definition, they cannot exist at all — something so many tend to forget quickly. Linden Lab is not “perfect”. It’s a company made of human beings, human beings with their agendas, their thoughts, their personal choices, and their own egos. As human beings go, they are (collectively) very open-minded and they will almost always have an ear for their residents; this does not mean, however, that “having an ear” means they will listen — they will only hear. The difference should become apparent in the next few paragraphs.

Recently, in the past half year or so, people have started to push the boundaries of these guidelines. For instance, being very open about economic transactions, a group of users (later creating their own company) have set up the first exchange of L$ vs. US$, the Gaming Open Market. At one point, where it was clear to all that an open exchange would show the world how unstable and fluctuating the economy in SL has been, LL was “forced” to intervene. The details will be forever secret, but at the end of the day, LL failed to negotiate with GOM, GOM closed, and shortly thereafter, LL set up their own exchange, LindeX. It worked quite well for a while; now it seems that LL is planning to introduce direct sale of L$. In any case, this was the first public case where LL’s policy of “let the residents rule their own world” started to put in question. The word “gommed”, meaning “don’t cross LL’s policies, or they’ll absorb you” has since then be applied to several similar efforts.

Personally, I have only been directly or indirectly involved in a few; I remember how directly the Blumfield residents, when complaining about their lack of tools to self-plan their community (set up by LL as a marketing programme), presented their views for review by the Community Team, with clear-cut demands. They wanted LL to interfere — to sanction their own community rules, approved by all their members — or, failing that, to provide them with a mechanism to enforce their own rules somehow. The result: the programme was closed, people were given a pat in the backs, and told to move on — while at the same time launching an open discussion in the forums on “new group tools with covenants to enforce the layout of the land” (these tools will be released in the ‘near future’, of course).

On another occasion, a group evolving their own government (and which has been given more than due attention in my blog ) also came to the same conclusion. At some point, self-organisation will need enforcement. And enforcement is only possible if the residents have anything to lose — financially, for instance. If not, there is simply “no jurisdiction”. You have to rely on Linden Lab to administer justice. But if they refuse to intervene in those cases, there is nothing the residents can do about it — except complain. Which they can, but they’ll be ignored.

And finally, at this very moment, another discussion goes on by another self-organised group. Tired of too little LL support towards the volunteer groups, one resident, working 80-100 hours a week, managed to get a rather large group of people co-ordinating their efforts together, and working towards the same goal: improving new user experience. What was LL’s reaction to that? Let’s throw in some more people into the volunteer group, and stifle that enthusiasm. Diluting the ranks is always a good idea; instead of having half of the volunteers working together, the group grew five-fold, and now there are only 10% of them wishing for better co-ordination. In a year, they will be just 1%, and completely forgotten. Second Life is ruthless when it comes to numbers: the old strategy to wait for problems to disappear is quite true in a world that now grows exponentially.

So: while the number of people truly believing in LL’s internal goals of promoting “resident self-organisation” grows in absolute numbers, they’re swamped by the huge growth of new users. If at some point in time, 200 people self-organising meant 0.1% of the SL world population, one year after that, even if growing from 200 to 300, the percentage goes down to 0.01%. The lesson residents have to learn: time in SL works against you. Your opinion today may be unique, but tomorrow you’ll be one of many, and in a week, you’ll be totally anonymous in the flood of new users.

Knowing this, LL can afford to ignore any requests. Imagine that a group of land barons collectively demand a lowering of tier fees. They’ll come to LL saying: “we support 25% of your economy. We think you should review your tier fees”. And it would make sense to listen to them. But after a year, those very same people will only represent 2.5% of the economy. And less that 1% in two years. Is it worth listening to them now? The plain and simple answer: no.

So what is LL’s attitude? They go into denial. Having lost their touch with the residents — and who am I to say that? My own view of SL is necessarily flawed, since while in 2004 I could claim to have met perhaps 5% of the population, now I I’m down to less than 1% (although having met more than five times the people!), even if I struggle to keep in touch… — their best strategy is to ignore the residents. In a year, they will be irrelevant in absolute terms — they’ll be totally overshadowed by the flood of new users.

Linden Lab’s Denial

Linden Lab’s attitude is not unlike the newbie’s experience when attaching a box to their heads. Many of you remember when that happened near you. Suddenly someone yells: “OMG! How do I remove this box from my head??” That’s pure panic on that request, and then the resident starts to run around in circles, like a headless chicken — it happens all the time.

Someone friendly will patiently say: “Right-click on the box and select Detach”. But will the newbie listen? Not at all. Most of them will continue to yell their plea for help. But then something changes: they become angry.

They will say things like: “You’re doing this on purpose to have fun with me!” Patiently, people will try to explain that no, what happened was that they “wore” the box by mistake, instead of opening it. But the newbie doesn’t care. Now, all he knows is that someone is having fun and nobody is helping them. They go into denial. They evade those that are trying to help. They mutter, grumble, or even swear. They blame the older residents for not doing anything about it. And while doing so, they’re passing the following message:

• You’re not helping me when I asked for help!
• You’re doing this on purpose!
• You don’t know how to help me!
• I’m going to get help elsewhere!
• I’m now angry, and will ignore you!!!

At this point, residents give up. People that don’t want to get helped, and are even arrogant to the point they insult the others trying to help, are not worth their attention. There are more things to do in SL besides contributing your time and patience towards someone who is in denial and refuses to listen.

Also notice an important bit about this interchange. The newbie-with-the-box is not only refusing to listen to advice — he refuses even to admit that the problem might be on his side! All he blames are the “others”. And he’ll run around, yelling at passers-by, that no one is helping him out. The rest of the world are just arrogant bastards, refusing to give aid in his hour of need.

He will then come to a conclusion: it’s better to remove the box by himself instead.

Now this is exactly what Linden Lab is doing. They have boxes on their heads, and when we politely tell them how to remove them, they refuse that offer of help. They “know best” — after all, “attaching boxes to heads” is something they are supposed to know how to do. Why should residents know better?

Some Lindens are different. Instead of removing the box — they simply paste some new textures on top of it. So now it’s not a plywood cube anymore! So there — problem solved. What they fail to realise is that a box on your head is still a box — plywood or not. And even the obvious choice — place a transparent texture, and it will look just like no box is attached — is not an answer. The box will still be there. It just won’t be visible.

Stretching an analogy too far? Perhaps. Imagine how many Lindens run around the world with transparent boxes on top of their heads. Most people will never know if a box is there. And if someone politely tells them that a transparent box is a box nevertheless, their answer will be: “What box?”

This always reminds me of one of Terry Pratchett’s character, the Duck Man. A perfectly normal person, with just a minor detail: there is a dck on top of his head. The running joke along all of Pratchett’s books is having other characters telling him: “there is a duck on your head” and the Duck Man will answer “What duck?”. Pratchett could be describing Linden Lab’s refusal to admit what goes on in-world.

So, you have some Lindens with boxes on their heads, but they refuse to listen to residents with tips for removing them. Others know fully well that they have the boxes on, but will simply change the textures to make it look “nicer”. Quite a big number have actually been handed out transparent boxes and refuse to admit they have boxes at all. And, of course, some very few will, in fact, have listened to the instructions and removed their boxes. Sadly, most of those won’t be in a position of power inside LL to effect any change. The best they have to offer is helping other Lindens to remove their boxes; naturally, most will refuse to do so.

Company culture, gamer culture

Let’s tackle the reasons why this is so. Why do LL employees refuse to listen to residents, and enter into denial about the issues in-world? Aren’t we their customers? “The customer is always right” used to be a key motto of the American Way in 1950s. Did LL lose that vision? (In true honesty, I’m not one to blame them on that; the customer seldom knows when he’s right or not But that’s besides the point).

One would think that LL would not limit themselves to listening to their customers, but, true to their internal policies, actually feel encouraged by residents offering not only advice, but solutions, while at the same time volunteering to improve things. Imagine that Microsoft would have its users actually applying patches to Windows, and offering it back to Bill Gates, bug-free and virus-proof. What would Bill do? Very likely, offer them a job Or at least give them a big thanks and encourage them to keep up the good work. After all, through the work done by a few, all customers will benefit — at no extra cost to Microsoft. Bill is smart enough to know how to profit from that!

When the same happens in Second Life, however, Linden Lab becomes shy and embarrassed, shuffles their feet, and seek refuge inside their homes and close the door, refusing to accept help, and then throwing the key into the toilet. Why?

The difference between Microsoft and Linden Lab (well, besides the obvious one: size ) is that Microsoft has a “corporate culture”. Linden Lab is still too tied to the “gamer culture”. And this is starting to show.

We can discuss for ages and then some if Second Life is or not a game. What we can’t shake loose is the idea that a huge proportion of people, both residents and Linden employees, come from a “gamer culture”. I don’t, so that’s why it sounds so alien to me. It also gives me a detached view to analyse what goes on, and why LL reacts the way it reacts.

A corporate culture will focus on customers. When customers complain, you have several options to deal with them, but one option you don’t have is to ignore them. You can encourage customers to create User Groups, and address complains (and solutions!) in a structured, organised way. This tackles the issue very nicely. Users get “empowered” — they feel that their whining and grumbling and muttering can be tapped, their energy and focus directed towards creating a strong User Group, and in turn, this will give them much more strength when dealing with the corporation. On the other side, the next time someone complains to the company, they can redirect the customer to the User Group.

All companies work like that. When I need to get resources or information about Apple’s Macintosh products, I don’t bother to check the official site. I go to things like the User Forums, or the Developer’s Network. They assemble all required information using several tools and disseminate them among all who need them. Very often they have Apple employees participating on those online sites as well; and it’s in Apple’s interest to provide technology (web sites, forum tools) for the users to discuss among themselves, and help each other. I imagine that the same happens inside the Microsoft User Groups; actually, I’ve been among many many software user groups, and all work similarly. No matter how “closed” a piece of software is, there will be a large community of users gathering spontaneously just to provide help among each other. And they have an ear from the company.

Why doesn’t this happen in SL? There was once a “Second Life User Group” — what happen to them?

The answer: gamer culture.

Under “gamer culture” (as opposed to corporate culture), users have to be treated the same way. There is a dreaded word: “favouritism”. It applies to everything that is said and done inside the company. If someone gives feedback to a Linden — favouritism. If someone creates a wonderful tool and a Linden uses it — favouritism. If someone writes a blog and a Linden comments upon it — favouritism. If someone sets up a meeting to discuss ideas with Linden Lab — favouritism. We’ve got the FIC, the Content Barons, the Land Barons — favouritism, favouritism, favouritism. Ask to yourself: when Anshe Chung sits down with Philip to discuss the land auctions, is that favouritism?

Of course it is. Even if you remember that Anshe provides about 10% of all revenues of Linden Lab? And accounts for the same share of attention from the media that talks about SL?

When the US Government, who represents perhaps 10% of the revenues of Microsoft, sits with Linden Lab — do the half-billion customers of Microsoft yell “favouritism”?

Of course they don’t!.

I’m now seeing the reader of this article scratching their heads and saying: “uh… but well… Microsoft is Microsoft, they do Windows, which is a software product, so things are different… while Second Life, well…”

… is “just a game”, right?

Let’s tackle another issue. Corporate culture not only establishes User Groups (with their Special Interest Groups — not all users have the same needs), but it is very keen on establishing partner programs. A partner is loosely defined as a non-affiliated company that targets the same customer base, using your product, and both work together towards the same goal: increasing revenue for both the partner and the company, by using the company’s tools and services.

Why are partners important? They might address niche markets that the company is unable to address. They might be on different countries or continents. Or the company might not even have a sales force — doing it only through partners (Microsoft and Oracle work like that, for example — they don’t sell directly to their customers). In any case, there are all sorts of possible arrangements, but normally, a partner is “someone who works together with the company for the same goal”. They tend to be better informed. They tend to have access to special tools, services, and information. They work with the company’s employees (marketeers, sales force, engineers, consultants…) to go to customers together; the company supports their partners placing a hand on their shoulder and saying: “This is our most trusted partner. Deal with them, we’ll stand by his side and provide you, the customer, with our full support”.

Has anyone seen anything else in the corporate world? Well, not I. Still, I just have 15 or so years of professional experience, so I might have missed one or two companies that work differently.

Enter Linden Lab. Is there a “partner program”? Well, yes, it means placing a link on your web page to get new users. That’s about it. Why? Because if someone “partners” with Linden Lab to address their target, 220,000 “gamers” will yell: “FIC!” So Linden Lab has to be very hush-hush about it. They meet in secret with people like the Bedazzle Group or the Electric Sheep Company to go to a customer wanting to place content in Second Life. More often than not, things get announced, and you won’t even know who has worked “with Linden Lab” to create content. Most users would be surprised to know that things like Stagecoach Island or the Harvard setup were done through “partners” of LL — and they are definitely not the only examples, but a few among hundreds of others.

There is no “partner web page”. There is indeed a “developer listing” somewhere, but nobody really knows what purpose it serves. There is no “partner mailing list” — just a website called “SL Developers”, but this was not set up by Linden Lab…. but by the “developers” (a fancy name for “partners”) themselves! Linden Lab is afraid to sponsor even that. They would be accused for promoting FICness and attacked in the forums!

You see, there is no way to get Linden Lab to bring this simple message across the gamer culture: “we are a company, we have to work within corporate culture”. Tens of thousands would immediately brand Linden Lab for their favouritism. Because gamer culture will not allow the company to talk to its users.

Clearly, gamer culture works against corporate culture. And this is incredible hard for the users of Second Life to accept — and thus Linden Lab will not go for it. Instead of understanding that silly labels like “favouritism” or “FICness” do not apply in the corporate world — where users get together to have their views represented in an organised fashion, and are usually one good source of official information; and where corporate companies set up partner programs and distribute privileged material to their partners first, because they are the ones whose business is constantly attached to the company’s own business — Linden Lab shyly withdraws from becoming a corporate entity, and still deals with issues like these under “gamer culture”.

This has worked so far while the user base was small, while it was pretty much unorganised, and while there were few exceptions working as “partners” of Linden Lab. But nowadays this is much harder to “hide”. Companies, potential customers, now get in touch with Linden Lab on a daily basis, and they ask them for services. Linden Lab shyly presents them with their “partner list” and tells the customer “we don’t provide content, but we know a few companies that do… uh… they’ve worked with/for us in the past with some success” The prospective customer thus asks:”Are these your partners?” And LL answers: “Uh… not exactly… they just happened to work for our other customers as well”. Hardly the corporate way to deal with a customer

Far from me to tell Linden Lab how they should start to address a “corporate structure”. The only thing that they really have to do now, before it’s too late, is to drop the gamer culture. Fast.

And this should start very clearly with an announcement on policy changes. Make it a Town Hall meeting. Have Philip stating, loud and clear, “From this day on, the word ‘favouritism’ is being stricken out of LL’s vocabulary. Starting today, people willing to work with us will not be FIC. They will be part of the User Group; or part of our Partner Program if they’re companies.” And that will be the end of the gamer culture inside LL. Sure, a few thousand people would cry and gnash their teeth — but who will care? Let them join World of Warcraft instead and deal with their frustrations shooting Orcs, or whatever one does there.

We are not intellectually challenged!

… or, to put it more bluntly, we’re not stupid! Linden Lab tends to love the highly creative aspects of SL residents and be fascinated by what they do. What they fail to realise is that behind the lovely avatars lurk RL experts in several areas, some of which have come from fields of expertise very close to Linden Lab’s founders.

You might have heard about Second Life being referred as to the “dot-com burnout club”, where highly talented visionaries around the world, with higher education and learning, with years and years of experience in the field, have found SL the place to hang around. I’m quite sure the demographics are interesting to watch (apparently SL has two “spikes”, one on the expected 18-25 group, but other on the 35-55 group), but more interesting would be to look at all the professional backgrounds of all those people. They’re anonymous avatars, rarely talking about their past, and it’s not easy to find out who is who. But a large group is around Philip’s age, and have gone through similar experiences. They have built and created Internet companies in the late 1990s, developed state-of-the-art software, or created their own ISPs and managed their data centres, targeting tens of thousands of users — or sometimes millions. They have been heads of technical support teams. They would be able to write the source code of SL’s server and client software given enough incentive in a few weeks; they have done it regularly for their own companies in the past. And if they’re academics, they’re PhDs, sometimes multiple-PhDs, who these days gather a few L$ DJing at clubs in SL You wouldn’t believe half the stories I could tell — like the biochemistry PhD that lurks at a popular vampire club, DJing for an audience of 20-year-olds. Or the person tuning servers running distributed applications for 2 million users who now patiently explains newbies how to detach boxes from their heads. Or professors of law that were at the US Supreme Court who now enjoy watching the sunset like any other avatar. Or double-PhDs who write scripts for the BDSM community; or that engage in regular shooting at Jessie and elsewhere The list is way too long for me to write here, but all these people have something in common: first, they are a huge group in SL, not a “minority”; they all spend a lot of time inside SL (instead of hopping around MMORPGs like the late teenagers); and they are usually very hush-hush about their backgrounds. They’re here to have fun, not to flaunt their higher education or professional background. Most of the residents wouldn’t believe them, anyway!

Naturally enough, most of these people frown upon Linden Lab’s attitudes. They have actually run or created companies not unlike LL’s in the past. They have worked with dozens of people, or headed whole departments that were bigger than LL. They have dealt with customer issues, on vastly larger companies than LL. And naturally enough, they’re keeping very silent about their background. But here and there, they meet with LL’s employees, and give them some advice.

Now remember that I come from an European culture. Around here, the notion that your opinion has to be heard is not so wildly defended — one thing is having the freedom of emitting an opinion (no difference in Europe ), the other is the right to claim that your opinion counts. Actually, we Europeans are a bit distrustful of other people’s opinions — what counts is a fundamented opinion, not any opinion. And this fundament comes from several sources. It’s not just pretty rhetoric. It’s not just manipulative argumentation. These are available to everybody. Instead, an opinion is valid if it comes from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

In SL, since nobody has “credentials”, so to speak, your acts in-world decide if people listen to you or not. It’s a more egalitarian society, in the sense that the young student of Armenian languages voices his opinion on how the grid servers should be configured — and his opinion is “as valid” as the 40-year-old system administrator that has fine-tuned Google’s servers to reply to hundreds of millions of queries per day. On a forum or on a blog, both “opinions” are valid. Who knows who is behind the avatar? When these issues come to Linden Lab, they will weight each suggestion equally — there is no discrimination in listening to those two opinions:

Young student of Armenian languages: “We should have unlimited prims per sim. Linden Lab, let’s have it, and have it fast!”
System administrator with 20 years of experience: “Decentralise the asset server. Let each sim deal locally with assets independently. Make that your priority, and the grid will scale well.”

When both come to a Town Hall meeting, which Philip will use to evaluate his priorities, both opinions will have equal value. But the truth is that they don’t. The first is plainly irresponsible — due to lack of experience, nothing else. The second might not be technically feasible (or even incomplete/wrong), but it’s an expert’s opinion. Still, both opinions will have the same weight.

Now replace “Linden Lab” by “Google” and imagine the same thing being addressed to a Google board member. Who do you think they would listen to?

But you don’t need to stick to technological issues, of course. Over a year ago, a group of marketeers and salespeople came over to Linden Lab and offered them their services in developing, free of charge, a completely new web site — one that would appeal to the corporate customers of LL. So, SL would have two “official” websites, one for the “gamers” who want to have some fun in SL (no harm in that!), and one showing off SL as a 3D platform, for the corporate customers. Those marketeers and salespeople were afraid not to be taken seriously by their customers if LL persisted in addressing the gamer population. What was LL’s decision back then? Well, one avatar’s opinion is like any other avatar’s opinion. Having a group of residents develop an “official site” for SL— free of charge! — would be the ultimate level in favouritism. So this offer was declined, since no resident should have an “advantage” over others (imagine someone putting on their in-world ads “I did SL’s corporate website!”), and LL still has a single site, although it has stripped it off many of the “gaming” buzzwords of SL.

As an exercise to the reader, view one of SL’s competitor site, Multiverse. See how differently they’re positioning their platform. While the concepts are totally different — Multiverse develops the software for others to create MMORPGs (and not only those!) but also does some hosting, Linden Lab also develops the software but prefers to position itself as a 3D content hosting company — their audience is the same: people who want to create 3D virtual worlds. But Multiverse’s approach is totally corporate; Linden Lab’s targets the gamers… shyly mentioning here and there that if you’re a corporate customer, you can also buy a few islands for your own projects.

Clearly, Linden Lab is “out of phase” with its resident population. They expect it to grow so fast that the voices of the few professionals that are gladly offering advice and actual help (even unpaid work!) will diminish over the time. But this might not be the truth. Actually, the way SL attracts people, it might totally backfire. The “new” users do not come all from the 18-25 “gamer” culture (I’d like to dare LL to provide public statistics on that); quite a large group is now coming from the professional and academic backgrounds. These are the ones that will expect LL to behave like a corporation and implement a corporate culture — one that favours professionalism, respecting people’s backgrounds and not necessarily “everybody’s opinion”, that supports user groups, that establishes partnerships, and that doesn’t simply dismiss good, fundamented suggestions from experts just because of “favouritism issues”.

The New Second Life

I’ve often talked about the way I think 2006 will be a fascinating year to watch LL’s and SL’s growth. In a sense, I was optimistically hoping that the whole platform and community grew to become more mature — and I don’t mean it in the SL sense of “mature” . My reasoning behind it was that the not-so-early adopters have a totally different mindset than the early beta testers, and these will be the driving force of the “new” Second Life. As SL grows, you’ll get more and more different people — and the group affiliated with the gamer culture will diminish, just because SL’s appeal will diminish over time. After all, no major MMORPGs have been developed in SL; if all your fun is griefing through joining a Mafia and buy that latest push gun, after a few suspensions, people will go back to World of Warcraft — SL is a pointless experience to them.

The largest-growing group will now be the ones looking for entertainment. Not necessarily “games”, but a 3D chat, a social environment. People are slowly giving up their “usual” 3D chatrooms and trying SL instead. Even the appeal to being able to program in those other 3D chats quickly fades away when the amount of knowledge necessary to do something is way too high. In SL, simple things are done simply — and the complex ones can be bought for a few hundreds of L$. This is quite appealing to the ones just wishing entertainment. And entertainment is something SL provides quite well!

Another group will have no roots with the gamer community at all. They’ll have totally different backgrounds. They will be journalists, marketeers, professors at college, historicists, architects, artists, and all sorts of “unlikely” fans of virtual worlds. They’ll come interested in using SL as a tool — either a learning tool, or a machinima platform, or something else — but always something that SL was not “meant” to be. They will not understand the concept of “griefing”. They will not understand what “favouritism” means — they’ll be used to talk to the company’s employees as customers demanding service. When they get an answer like “sorry, we can’t do that for you, or the other residents will kill us for favouritism” they’ll go “huh?”. Dealing with this new group will be quite a formidable task for LL, if they don’t want to embrace a corporate culture.

The good news is that the required people to help them out to complete the move from the gamer culture into a corporate culture are already in SL. They have solutions to all those problems; they have been dealing with those professionally for years and years, on much larger scales, or with much harder customers.

All it takes for LL is to listen to the advice on how to remove the box on their heads. And yes, it’s as simple as “Right-click, select Detach”. Hopefully we can make them listen to us.

The above images have used an actor with a plywood cube on their head. No Lindens or newbies were harmed when producing this blog article.

In the past I used to have on my emails a signature saying something like: “Avatars are computer-generated cartoons with human souls”. I remember people protesting and saying “I’m not an avatar, I’m a human being!” (since then, I’m more fond of quoting Philip’s famous saying “I’m not building a game. I’m building a new country.”).

In certain circles this is known as one of the rules of netiquette: “Remember the human being”. Behind layers of anonymity, there is always someone else, with their feelings and emotions, who is typing behind the keyboard.

Why do we forget this so easily, to the point that we need to write it down as a “rule”? After all, we can very well imagine people’s lives when we read the newspapers or even an autobiography; reinforcing “words” with a 3D graphical representation should even make it easier for us to picture that there is a person behind the picture. But we don’t.

Somehow, we are not “wired” to recognise “people” behind electronic communications. Is it as simple as that?

I would say that something else is at play here. Let’s go back two centuries. People wrote to their lovers and put their emotions and feelings in their carefully hand-written letters. They literally “fell in love” through an exchange of mail. This was customary — it was, to a degree, expected. As late as our parents’ time, “love letters” were part of our civilisation.

What did change?

After all, people still claim to “fall in love” in IRC, in the many IM programs, or by sending emails to each other. To this bold claims, most people’s attitudes are denial, dismissal, or a benevolent smile. “It can happen — but not to me.” In a sense, people who say “not to me” are thinking that they’re “immune” to emotions through electronic media. They frown upon the “sincerity” of people communicating through computers.

If you push the issue further, what will they tell you? Almost all of them will say the same: “I cannot trust someone that hides behind a computer. Who knows who is there? How do I know that their feelings are honest and sincere? How can I differentiate between lies and ‘fake’ emotions and a real desire to communicate honestly?”

Why is it so hard?

Why do we assume that an “anonymous user” will always use that anonymity for “harming” others?

I’ve been toying with that idea for a while, and even held a Thinker’s meeting to discuss it, as well as exchanging ideas, concepts, and proposals for an answer between friends, family, and acquaintances. The answers are not easy. When I talk to my brother via MSN, I know he is my brother. I know how he looks like; what he really thinks; I have grown up with him and know when he feels good or bad. Even if his words show differently when he types something to me, I’m quite sure that deep below these words, he is just feeling sad/tired/bored or happy/exultant/humorous. I know all that because I’ve lived with him for a long time

Similarly, when dealing with my Significant Other, it’s very easy to pick up these “signs” — we can type messages to each other and easily know what the other is thinking, just because we’ve developed a common “complicity”. Mind reading is something we humans are rather very good at. By picking on hints, body language, and subtle, unspoken semantics, we can pretty much know what the other person is thinking.

So, if you know someone very well (in real life), you will naturally “read beyond the words” when they type on a chat box. As human communication goes, we’re quite good at dealing with partial knowledge — our brains compensate, based on previous experiences, what is left unsaid.

Let’s see a simple example. You type to your significant other:

“Hi dearest, how are you?”

and they answer:

“I’m ok.”

What is your feeling about this? Remember, this is your significant other — someone you’ve learned to love for several months/years/decades! If they say “I’m ok” something is certainly wrong, your next line of chat will be very likely:

“Oh, what’s wrong now??”

And you’ll very likely hit on the spot.

Why is it so? After all, your significant other has written exactly the opposite of what they’re feeling! But because you know them very well, you also know that they would never simply type “I’m ok”. They would highly likely ask something in return, or tell you something about what’s happening to them, or anything else. “I’m ok” is just “body language” (in this case, written body language — which is weird) for saying that “I’m busy/bothered/worried/feeling sad/pissed off and just answering you quickly because I’m not really in the mood of explaining it all to you”. With someone that you know truly well, you’ll be able to read well beyond a simple “I’m ok”. You won’t be fooled. And very likely, nine times out of ten, you’ll be hitting on the spot.

We humans are weird, compared to computers. All this “unspoken words” are as much part of ourselves than we think. We are able to communicate large amounts of data with simple keystrokes, because we have shared knowledge. Nicholas Negroponte, in his outdated book “Being Digital”, gives a good example. At a dinner with several people, someone mentions something about a certain Mr. X. At this point, Nicholas’ wife winks at him, and Nicholas smiles. His wife used just one bit of information (a wink) to remind Nicholas that she was at Mr. X’s place this morning, his house was being rebuilt or something, and she had found out that he had misplaced a tool or broken something (I can’t recall the details myself!). All this she had shared to Nicholas a few days ago; Nicholas naturally remembered all the interesting bits of the story, and replies with a smile for acknowledgement. Now only two bits of information have been exchanged between Nicholas and his wife — but how much “hidden information” was in that simple communication?

The answer is: both shared a huge amount of common information. This enabled them to be very efficient in communicating. Nicholas wife did not need to tell him the whole story during the dinner; he remembered it.

In online communications with persons you know well the same applies. You can type something like “Philip Linden sucks” and someone will just answer with a “:)”. You both share a common ground — you have read the same forums, the same blogs, have attended to the same discussion events, and, for all that matters, you have discussed thoroughly why Philip Linden sucks. At the very least you share the common idea that Philip is always fond of saying “Blame it all on me”, and so, if something sucks, he is the one to blame (sorry, Philip, this was meant to be a silly example only, no offence intended — and for the record, you do not suck )

So, two people who know each other well in Second Life will share a lot of common knowledge as well. This is why I usually recommend people to try to absorb the whole culture and society of Second Life before, say, doing a forum post. We have all a common background to draw from. Sometimes people are in awe at what recollections I have. I remember my first days in SL very clearly. After a month, one was expected to know who was the best clothes designer or the best scripter (it was easy, with a population of around 20,000 ). If you didn’t know even that, how would you be able to enjoy yourselves? That was how thins were “done” those days.

Let’s see the opposite example. I know people that hate TV, but they still watch it from time to time. When confronted with that apparent contradiction, they simply say: “How will I be able to understand what other people are talking about, if I don’t watch TV?” I usually make surprising sounds when I hear that. But after 6 years without owning a TV, I’m beginning to understand that question. Suddenly, when everyone around me are talking about the latest TV show they watched, I feel like an alien from another planet. I have no idea why the red dress that Sue wore the other day was so indecent; heck, I don’t even know who Sue is! But naturally enough, as 99% of the people in western world watch TV every day, they naturally assume that I should know who Sue is and what she was wearing (and probably emit a fundamented opinion if her dress was indecent or not). But the point is — I have no common references any more regarding TV shows. I simply don’t know. What is so hard for me to explain is why this piece of “common sense” is lacking in my knowledge (”oh, Gwyn, surely you have seen Sue’s dress? I mean, even Cosmo had an article on it! With pictures! It was on the 8 o’clock news and all!”).

I have been through several embarrassing moments like that (when I have to patiently explain that no, I have no idea who Sue is, why her dress was indecent, and since I rarely read Cosmo, I have naturally missed the reference — but even if I read that article, I’d still be clueless about the whole issue; my revenge is, naturally enough, to chat about Second Life with my RL friends who are in SL as well

In any case, the assumption that people need “a common background” to draw upon to fully communicate at a deep level is, indeed, important. I would say it’s the base of the whole issue regarding misunderstandings and miscommunication in Second Life.

Consider the following problem. Mrs. Jane Doe, who in RL works as a secretary in an office, with a very boring outcome in life, comes home at 7:30 PM after another dreadful day at work. Her boss has yelled at her because the coffee served during that oh so very important meeting with the CEO from Japan was cold. Then her best friend was fired for having misused the fax machine — which is now broken, thus preventing Jane to send those crucial forms to the suppliers. Her boss, already furious, yells at her again, and she has to go across the street to fax the forms from a friend’s office. While she crosses the road, a lunatic driving a sports car almost hits her; she is not hurt, but breaks one of the heels. Now hopping on one leg, she comes to her friend’s office, but has to wait for him over an hour — while her boss keeps phoning her on the cellular to “make haste”.

She comes tired and angry to her home. The cat has vomited on the carpet again. Her two kids finally found out how to unlock the drawer where she keeps her felt markers, and have decorated the dining room wall with undeletable graffiti. She thinks about preparing dinner, when she finds out that for some reason the cord for the fridge is unplugged — all food inside is now a smelly mess. Her husband comes home at this precise moment, dragging his feet — things did not work well at his workplace either, and his boss has recommended that he looks for another job, since the company might be bankrupt by the end of the month.

Jane Doe, frustrated, furious, and very tired, logs in to Second Life just to think a bit about something else. And what does she see as soon as she logs in? Her neighbours have put up a giant rotating prim with particle showers all over the place!

Furious, she now engages in very verbal abuse in IMs with the owners of the rotating prim, and starts to post all over the forums on how this abuse cannot go on, and how the f***ing Lindens should start doing something about it, and it’s all because of those d*** FICs that nothing gets done these days, etc. She turns back to SL, and a griefer is now launching a prim replication attack on her sim — which collapses and fails. Almost in tears of frustration, she goes back to the forums, where all sorts of people got seriously offended and engaged in name-calling. “Who do you think you are, your fascist b**ch?” being the general trend of the replies. Torn between frustration and hate, she raises the threshold of name calling, to the point a Linden is called, and suddenly her account does not work any more. “Jane Doe, you are now suspended for violating ToS…”

Now, Jane’s friends know that she is a loving and caring mother. They also know that her husband is incredibly fond and proud of her, and while her job might be boring, she is one of the oldest and most valuable employees there. Her group of friends is sad at Jane, they call her up to cheer her up, and they really feel terrible about her bad day, and invite her to dinner and everything.

In the mean time, the forums are cackling with glee yelling with 60-point-characters “JANE DOE — YOUR FASCIST TYRANNY IS OVER!”. Everybody applauds Linden Lab’s decision to ban Jane, and her SL neighbours create a mock statue of Jane being burned. Rallies and events all across SL announce “Jane Doe — The End of the B**ch”. There is not a single voice to support Jane in SL. She won’t be forgotten, but the decision to permaban her will be told over and over again to generations of newbies.

How different is Jane’s RL from SL! In RL, the next day, her boss will apologise to her. He has known Jane for years, and he will admit that he was very nervous about the important visit from Japan, but will praise her skill in dealing with the fax machine (her friend at the office will get a nice phone call to return; the boss was just “in a bad day”). Her friends will smile upon the good news, fully understanding that there are good days and bad days; they have known Jane for long and know that she will overcome every problem with a smile and persistence. She will find a new cleaning thingy that removes the children’s graffiti easily. And her husband has bought her a new pair of shoes; with a shy smile he’ll admit that probably the company won’t be bankrupt so soon so he’ll still be able to afford a small gift.

But then Jane goes to her computer, and finds out that she is still banned from SL. She cries. None of her acquaintances in SL has left her a message. Not even a “bye bye”.

This is naturally a made-up story, cooked from bits and pieces from real stories. But how often is this true? We forget that we don’t really share a background, a circle of friends, or a job with most of the residents of SL. All we know is how they behave. We judge them by their acts. If our Jane Doe only posts hateful messages on the forums every time she is angry — she will be seen not as a caring, loving mother, struggling to make a living while taking care of her children under stress — but just as a “fascist bi**ch” who torments the forums and the residents. The residents have absolutely no way to think otherwise of Jane; all they see is her “dark side”, the only one she shows in Second Life. This is the only “shared background” she allows others to see.

So, electronic communications have indeed a disadvantage. We tend to forget so very quickly that we’re being constantly evaluated by our fellow residents. We’re building a reputation — no matter if we really wish that to happen or not. And here lies the tricky bit: we are what others see. Or, as the old netiquette saying goes: “Act like a jerk, and you’ll be treated like one.”

Take an example from the picture shown here. I happen to enjoy to go once in a while to a hard rock club in Second Life called Rocker’s Requiem. It features some of the best rock DJs in SL — in contrast to the usual score of trance, hip-hop, house (and, more recently, eventually some jazz), that predominates in the SL culture (mirroring closely RL in that respect). If someone drops by Rocker’s Requiem, you’ll see a large assortment of vampires — one group that strangely likes hard rock. Now, put yourself in the place of someone who sees that picture — would you do serious business with that person? Would you entrust her the care of teens and young adults for training and education? Would you sign up contracts with her? Would you do any complex land business? Would you give her the responsibility of organising large-scale events?

And why not? It’s just an avatar; the habit don’t make the monk — or does it?

Think again. We humans are very sensitive to “trust with our eyes”. That’s why we take pains to do a good presentation of a meal to be served — after all, if it’s all about taste and smell, why do we care how food looks like? But that’s not how we humans think. Images are very strong a part of our culture. We immediately associate stereotypes with the way someone looks and presents themselves.

Unlike what happens in text-only chat or in the forums — where people only need to act through their words — in-world you get a strong, visual reinforcement. Like iRL, first impressions do count a lot! So, when I’m teaching a class, or doing a presentation, I’m usually wearing some sort of business suit and wear glasses. People associate that image with the archetypical “professor” — and they’ll see a “respectable” person in front of them. I also dress up for meetings with the Lindens — not that they care (by now, they know me very well ) but because impressions count. Similarly, when I’m invited to a party — a birthday party, some celebration, or just an impromptu party — I usually ask first what the “dress code” is. Is it formal? Is it casual? And I dress accordingly. At Rocker’s Requiem I’d be laughed at wearing a simple pink summer dress with flowers; at the Help Island, when doing some volunteer duty, I don’t wish new residents to get the wrong impression about me and wear simple outfits (often made of freebies, or from my own, imperfect collections — so I can always tell them that you can get very low-cost outfits or do them by themselves).

We might find it strange (I certainly did!) in a world where changing clothes, shape, gender, or even species, is as easy as slicing bread. But the “easiness” does not influence the way our brains are “wired” to think. We are a visual species, and visuals are what catch our first impression.

The second impression, the one that will last a long while, comes from our actions. You can look like a college professor, but if you type bad English full of spelling mistakes, that “first impression” will be shattered immediately. You can wear a nun’s habit, but if you swear like a whore, you’ll be classified like one. You can have the smartest business suit, but if you cheat your customers, your suit will be worthless — your reputation will go all over the grid in less time than you think.

Why, then, do so many avatars “look” completely different from what the person behind them is? It’s escapism, certainly; and role-playing; and dreaming about what you would like to be. But remember the hints/clues you’re giving away. A scantily dressed gorgeous blonde who talks about TCP/IP or XML-RPC and is as familiar with the command line of Cisco IOS as with the best shops for kinky underwear gives “the wrong signals”. One extrapolates from real life — and let’s be honest, in real life, the chances of meeting someone like that is virtually nil. So you have no experiences to deal with that overlap of visual and textual clues — they are dissonant, they grate on your nerves, and you can’t fit that person in your archetypes and stereotypes.

Some may argue that the whole point of SL is that you can have hard core computer geeks posing as brainless valley girls; or middle-aged housewives, closed at homes without a job and a horde of children to feed, pose as top designers, SL lawyers, or land barons. One thing is being able to do so; the other thing is being able to do that consistently. Unless you’re a professional actor, it’s quite hard to be consistent with the image you present.

Naturally enough, a “veteran” in Second Life will look “beyond the avatar”, understanding it to be childish to label someone just because of their looks. This needs training, too; you need experience to “look beyond images”, and this experience does not come easily, as so many BDSM subs, when they unfortunately found out when their gorgeous master was nothing else but a creep. The examples pile up. How many people do you know that have created their own “cult club” and have rounded up their groupies for self-gratification? What does that say about them? Just that really are (mostly) emotionally immature persons, usually with low esteem, “professional victims”, and desperately needing to be admired. They compensate with living an extravagant style in SL and surround themselves by others that want to bask in their (apparent) glow of “power”.

This is sad… since many will, after a while, see “beyond the avatar”, and find a pitiable human being behind it. Once that external shell is shattered, you won’t be able to go back. SL creates very good illusions — illusions of external beauty that have no internal beauty to match; illusions of power, when it is just manipulation; illusions of knowledge and intellect, when it is just bragging and repeating lies ad nauseam to make it “sound” true; illusions of confidence and self-assurance, when in reality there is a poor excuse of a human being behind the lovely curves of an avatar.

Because we “forget the human being” behind the avatar — those people are able to create their illusions for a long, long time. Some of us are “natural actors” (or role-players) and will be able to maintain long-standing relationships (personal or business) for months and ages, without anyone suspecting who is behind the marvellously designed and tailored avatar. But sooner or later, our acts will catch up with us — and be prepared when that happens. The castle in the clouds will quickly fall in ruins, and there is no way you’ll be able to build it up again.

So does it mean that one should only be allowed to have “RL avatars”? This issue has been brought up over and over again. It is, like everything else, a fallacy. A RL avatar does not say anything about the person behind it. It just gives a first impression, nothing else — it’s not because you have a “RL avatar” that you’ll be trusted more. Imagine that Al Capone had joined SL with a RL avatar — would he be less of a crook? Of course not. As said, the image you present to others can influence the first impression — but it never lasts long. Your “true self” — your good and bad sides, your balance between rational and emotional thought, your altruism and egotism, all these facets of your soul — will shine through, in bright colours, sooner or later. You can’t avoid it — even if you think that “later” may mean several years As the old saying goes, “you can fool some people all the time, or fool all people for some time, but you can’t fool all people all the time”. This is true in RL, and as true in SL as well — although so many pretend otherwise!

There is no intention of sounding condescending here. Over twenty years ago, a rather large group of people wrote articles and texts on “codes of conduct” for online communications — the Netiquette rules. And they had some few basic rules of common sense:

The Golden Rule — Would you say it to the person’s face?
The Silver Rule — You’re not in the centre of the Universe!

I have found out that these two have served me well in the past 15 years of online communication.