Edward Castronova is believed to be the world’s leading researcher on virtual world economies. Recently, in a post on Terra Nova, the ultimate blog offering news and opinions regarding the social, economic, legal, psychological, and political aspects of these worlds, Castronova, reporting on the recent security breach in SL, asked himself the question: “Is 3D internet something that Terra Nova should cover?”

Put into other words — if Terra Nova writes about virtual worlds, that are almost exclusively some form of games, and Second Life does not fit any of the “usual” classifications of MMOGs, should Terra Nova talk about Second Life at all?

The comments on that section are most enlightening. It seems quite clear that Second Life is breaking all paradigms. Suddenly, we got a virtual world with all the characteristics of a MMOG — immersive experience, persistent 3D content, social interaction, and so on — but with a tiny, tiny difference: it’s not a game. The economy is real, not virtual. The content is created by the users. The rules are made by everybody, not the company that designed it. SL works as a front-end to application servers that run somewhere on the Internet.

No “game” does that.

So, I find it quite interesting that in the same week, Second Life gets added to the list of countries on a website, and that the academics that study virtual worlds are at a loss to describe what Second Life is or isn’t.

I feel excited The last time this happened to me — paradigm shift — it was around 1993 and I had a grey screen in front of me, mostly with black words, but some (the interesting ones) were in blue and underlined. “What is it for?” I asked my colleagues. “Everything,” was my colleague’s very enlightened answer. The tides of paradigm shifting at the time were immense and unbelievable (I couldn’t imagine that in a year or so after that mystic experience I would be leaving my comfortable job as a researcher, get a loan, start a company, and tour the country telling people on presentations that “One day, people will use this Web thingy to buy books online” and getting laughed at).

I just got that strange feeling about Second Life this week. Again.

Mitch Kapor recently quoted at the SLCC Andy Grove’s famous words: “Any technology with a 10x (or more) advantage over the current is potentially disruptive.” Uh-oh. It might be true, after all. It’s still slightly early to tell, but, in any case… the academics are confused, the real world is confused, nobody is certain about anything anymore.

This is good. Let’s keep them confused.

Societies and communities have their own “backgrounds”. Although Second Life® does not have equivalent concepts to “skills”, “levels” or “experience”, commonly found on massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs), there is a single difference between a brand new resident and an older one: you’ll be familiar with the complexity of relationships inside Second Life, and, most likely, have an opinion on the types of controversies that occur in this virtual world.

So, to bring you up to date on what people talk about, and what you’re expected to know, here is a list of topics. Most people, after a few months, will have very strong opinions on most or even all of them. Some will not even recognise those as being “controversal”; many will ignore their existence; and some, while having read a bit about it, will clearly state they don’t want to give any opinion on it, since they don’t care (which is, in a sense, an opinion as well!).

In a world where you’re defined on what you think about issues, “having an opinion” is your ultimate way to depict your self…

Social aspects

Group tools

No matter how much people ignore them, the abstract notion of “groups” in Second Life, as supported by the new and improved group tools, is the (current) focus of structure in Second Life. Groups allow mega-corporations, local artisan’s collectives, or a simple way to get announcements from your favourite club. They determine co-ownership of items and land. They facilitate communication and they bring together people with similar-minded issues. Thus, they’re the very blood of SL’s society.

You’re defined by the groups you join, and very likely, your choices will define the persona you present to others. If you’re fond of partying, you’ll be subscribing to as many club groups to stay in touch with their announcements — since everybody will know that all you care about is to join these. If you’re a big landowner, you’ll have several rental/land management groups. “Being in a group” is, thus, the first step of showing others your place in Second Life.

Sooner or later, you’ll develop an evaluation of what these groups mean to you, how their limitations affect you and your friends, and they will also get you in touch with similarly-minded people who share your views. You won’t be able to escape being labeled because of the groups you’ve joined.

The “SLogosphere” vs. in-world society

Forums, blogs, websites, Snapzilla, and videos and pictures posted on everything ranging from MySpace, Flickr, Google Video, you name it. These days, you see one new website becoming part of the SLogoshpere every day. While at one time you were able to keep up with a handful of blogs and the Linden forums, nowadays you have to work harder. The sheer amount of data and information that is written (and read!) about Second Life is daunting.

Sooner or later, you’ll have to make choices: what are you going to read? What will be your choice? Because, at the end of the day, your choice will define your interests, your affiliation, and where your heart lies. It’s next to impossible to list them all — but once it was easy to be a “SL celebrity”, just post on the Linden forums. Nowadays, with just 600 or so users, the Linden forums are just a pale shadow of their former glory; even Prokofy Neva’s blog has far more regular readers than that. So your choices of where to get current information will be way more overwhelming. What should you do? Whom should you ask as a reference? Should you look up del.icio.us to see what they recommend? Or Technorati? Or Digg? Or Blogshares, or… well, you see, with literally thousands of websites related to Second Life, you’ll have a tough choice. How will you know you have made the right one?

Favouritism and the gamer culture

Many users of Second Life — some would say, the majority of them — come from popular gamer culture, which is a rather fascinating subject to investigate properly, perhaps on a separate essay, although I’ve alluded to it before (yes, even Linden Lab is seriously contaminated by the gamer culture).

Gamer culture has its own social norms, which are quite unlike the “real world”’s social norms. They split the world between the “Gods” (creators of the universe) and the “Users” (players of a game). The closer one is to the “Gods”, the more you can ask from them. Thus, favouritism bends the “rules” by giving some people a higher percentage of “success” — it is shunned.
One expects the “Gods” to be as fair and neutral as possible. But what happens when they aren’t? And what signs do you expect to see when the Gods play unfair?

On MMORPGs, the signs are sometimes clear to see: a “friend of the Gods” gets an impossible-to-find item just after days of entering the game. Or they get killed, but somehow still keep their character. Or their suggestions become new features. This all is obvious, blatant favouritism.

On Second Life, however, things are not so easy. Sure, some people have gotten a discount on a private island, because they have a “cool” project. Residents will yell “favouritism” — but in reality, that group was perhaps a non-profit company (or exchanged part of their fee in return of some RL advertising on some sort of media). Nobody might know the reason why LL gave a discount to that group. Is that favouritism? You see, we might never know everything between the transactions between a company (LL) and a partner (the group getting the private island). Unlike what happens in MMORPGs, Linden Lab actively engages into negotiations with other companies…

The more common sort of “favouritism”; however, comes simply from good ideas. While some might view Linden Lab as “Gods”, they’re not omniscient. They make mistakes. Very often they choose the “worst” path towards a goal. And suddenly, out of nowehere, someone comes up and publicly says: “Why don’t you do it this way? It is much better like that!” Sometimes, Linden Lab reads that comment and implements exactly that. Favouritism? Hardly so. LL is not a company run by mindless white-collars. They understand some issues, and they can see how sometimes an idea from a resident is much better than their own ideas. And thus they implement it.

Give Linden Lab enough good ideas — or solid, constructive criticism — and they will be prone to listen to you more. Favouritism again? No, just a question of an attitude. You see, people with good ideas and knowing a way to implement them, in a non-costly manner with few resources, are precious: they’re sometimes called business consultants So, LL is getting free consultancy. They would only be stupid if they didn’t take advise for free, if people are willing to give them that. Favouritism? Now things become tricky…

Real life software houses depend on input from their customers to make products better. But they work like dictatorships, not like democracies. Not everyone is “allowed” an opinion — since just because you’ve got an opinion, it doesn’t mean that you know what you’re saying. Naturally enough, crying out loud “Stop lag immediately! SL sucks!” is definitely not being helpful — it’s just emitting a (rude) opinion. While giving them a link to a free graphics engine where some issues with alpha textures are better dealt with, and pointing out the sections in the code that could be used by Linden Lab to improve their client, would be a valuable piece of information. LL, here, acts like a software company. They have to filter out the chaff from the wheat — and naturally enough, the ones whose opinion on “why lag sucks so much” will be left behind. Immediately, the community will yell “favouritism”.

Understanding what exactly is “favouritism” in the context of a software house which has to strive for improving their product to keep their customers happy is not easy. I claim that the whole notion is part of the “gamer culture” that has to be discarded as quickly as possible in order to advance SL successfully as the future Metaverse, but many disagree. You have to work out your own answer.

Ostracism and discrimination

Let’s face it: we all have encountered clear, blatant examples of discrimination, segregation, and ostracism in real life. Be the company where all the chiefs are males but the females do all their work; your colleague who is gay and never gets a promotion; the Afro-American Einstein sitting on a corner filing forms with his potential neglected — we all have seen similar examples in our alleged “equalitarian” world. But we humans are pattern-seekers, and quickly apply stereotypes and labels to our experiences.

Some would even go so far as to claim that this is the way our brain works: instead of filing each individual we met with complete data, we classify every individual in neatly tight, isolated boxes with a label. And then we add some extra tags on top of it. That way, our brains can just store the differences from proptotypes, but some neurologists even claim more than that: that our capacity for tagging people is limited. The authors of the Monkeysphere concept tend to defend that we can only keep track of a limited number of people as being part of our close sphere of contacts (150, according to some theories). Beyond that, every human being in the world has to be stereotyped, and that’s the way we deal with people beyond the Monkeysphere.

It’s hard to say if this concept is correct or not, but at least it explains prejudice very neatly. Prejudice appears because we classify someone under a stereotype, with its own tags and flags, and simply don’t bother to “update” the information for a particular individual, because we don’t care (or, perhaps, because our brain can’t handle it).

What this means is that even in Second Life you’ll get very strong ostracism. The most usual example in the book is the recurring prejudice against furries, which is truly not rationally explained. Like many dozens of thousands of people, I have some furry friends, have been around at their marvellous places (and are still amazed every day I visit Luskwood), and have some good customers among their community. The ones I talk to are clever, friendly, and often very very dedicated — I can see how hard they work at the Help Islands, for instance: you can rely upon them to be available and to come when you call for help.

But most of the resident population doesn’t see them that way. Why? Under their stereotype tags, they flag furries as “deviant sexual behaviour” (more of that in a minute) and “egotists”. Egotism leads to individualistic behaviour, which means that sooner or later, one will ignore other’s feelings and needs, but just your own — you have the basis for griefing there. So, in people’s minds, a furry is tagged as a griefer. And there is nothing one can say to change people’s opinions on that. It’ll be a stereotype that gets propagated all over the virtual world, and is so hard to shake it lose.

I’ve never been “griefed” by a furry — rather the contrary, I got help from furries when dealing with some griefers. They are community builders, not destroyers — in fact, one of the largest community in SL is run and inhabited by furries. The largest community destroyer I’ve ever met was an insignificant human being, a Caucasian, living in a democracy, happily married and with a child, and who is studying for a PhD, allegedly helping people with Alzheimer in real life. What could be more further from the typical stereotype for a “griefer”?

Still, it’s not my place to discuss the way stereotypes grow into ostracising people or whole communities — just to warn you out. Yes, ostracism exists in Second Life, and prejudice runs very deep in the resident’s veins. You have been warned — chose your friends carefully, and ask them what they think about. You’ll be far better off if you know beforehand how people will react to stereotypes.

Borderline behaviour

It is not my place to discuss the aspects of “hacker culture” — it used to be a word that some people were proud of. Being a hacker would simply mean having the necessary know-how (often applied to computers, but not necessary exclusively to them) to be able to do amazing feats with simple tools that would seem impossible to the eye of an unexperienced person. That’s all it was.

On the computer networks of the world, the word “hacker” has become synonymous with cyberterrorism, massively destroying systems and networks, often for cybercrime. And in a lower key, they’re “annoyances” — the guy that is able to remotely shut down your computer just because he’s exploiting a security breach. Annoying, but hardly “dangerous”.

The problem becomes more serious when these types develop an egotistical, autistical, sociopath-like behaviour. The emergence of things like Asperger’s Syndrome, which has studied deeply the connections with a certain degree of autism with highly intelligent individuals, has become a focus for many studies in human behaviour. In earlier times, we would call them “arrogant, egotistical bastards” — people who would care only about themselves, and employ their intelligence and cleverness to gather benefits only for themselves, disregarding the whole world. This is rather well studied nowadays, and you can understand much better all the nuances of this kind of borderline behaviour. An interesting aspect of SL is that, for instance, many people with Asperger’s Syndrome are actually community leaders — they always explain to me that SL allows them to “filter out” very successfully “confusing signals” from voice and body language, and they can thus employ all their intelligence and skills towards social interaction (I’m quite sure that once we get VoIP, things will not look so bright for our Aspies). A fascinating concept, well worth another essay

Still, it’s true that sociopaths abound, lurking in virtual communications, and Second Life is not an exception. On virtual worlds and MMORPGs, they’re called “griefers” because they inflict grief upon others. On textual communications (forums, news, blogs…), they’re “flamers”. Totally egocentric, on what Kohlberg would call the pre-conventional level of moral reasoning, these individuals never evolved beyond autoritarianism and moral relativeness. Every action is justified if it gives the self any advantage; you associate with others only to improve yourself. The rest of the world are basically mindless beings that are to be preyed upon (unless they have the power of authority, ie., if they can lock you up in jail). They also view everyone else as being at the same stage of moral reasoning.

This is a stage that we all go through when we are children, but almost all of us will evolve towards later stages. However, a large number will never evolve beyond those basic levels. They’ll remain utter egotists — we can call them sociopaths — for the rest of their lives. This will not mean that they will be violent, or automatically become murderers or rapists. Not at all. They simple will not be able to understand why there is a need for something like “sharing” (thoughts, goods and services, feelings, a common culture) — the concept will not make sense to them at all. Only the self will matter.

Second Life has an interesting catalyst for so many sociopaths to come to it: it doesn’t actively enforce (almost) anything. Griefers go mostly unpunished — they simple log off with an account, and log back in with an alt. On the mainland, you can’t even touch them — if you do, a clever griefer will file an Abuse Report on you instead, and send a clever email to Second Life on how awful you are and how deeply they were hurt by your actions, and that they’re now going to leave SL because they never thought it would be so bad… remember, these guys are often very, very clever.

Help Island is a notorious place where people are completely at the mercy of griefers, and they know that very well. No Mentor might lift a hand against the griefers — that would mean immediate removal of the Mentor status, which is not so easy to get. But on the other hand, there is no way you can protect either you or the new users from griefers. The new users will be too confused to be even able to react. The griefers, with returning alts, will be able to do whatever they please.

There are tricks and strategies to deal with this kind of borderline behaviour, but they’re not easily applied — it takes some training, and some skill as well. Most people are simply unprepared to confront griefers — because in real life, if you’re harassed, you go to the police. In SL there is no police, no justice, no laws, no enforcement. This is very hard to accept for many, who are used to live under democratic institutions and a code of law — and naturally, it’s only when you miss those that you understand how important they are

Sociopaths are actually dangerous for a virtual world that touts “social interaction” and a “collaborative environment”, specially if they are allowed (as they are) to roam the world unchecked. It means that sooner or later you’ll meet them, but you have to understand their psychological traits and not let them affect your enjoyment and participation in SL. Too many people get such a strong reaction against griefers and leave, never to return. This is actually the wrong approach; one should stay and ignore the griefers, since the more they’re ignored (something which can be very difficult for some), the faster they will go elsewhere, where they can be the focus of attention. Griefers, unable to deal with social relationships, only know one way of gathering attention: by disrupting social networks. If you prevent them of doing that, they’ll leave.

Deviant behaviour is not found only on this area, but on many others, mostly of a sexual nature. Being not an expert in those, I will mostly let you explore for yourself. A few articles on Wired magazine by Regina Lynn should be able to give you a good outlook on the many possibilities for sexual interaction in the virtual world of Second Life (Regina had also a special appearance at the SLCC 2006). Here, you’ll truly have to keep a very open mind! About a third of all users of Second Life have some sort of relationship inside the virtual world, and in many cases, it is everything but conventional. Failing to respect that will get you ostracised

Political aspects

Anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism, or libertarian neoliberalism?

Forget “communists” vs. “capitalists”; the notions are too blurred to fit in exactly. Calling someone a “communist” because they only participate in volunteer projects (say, social causes, fundraising events) where someone else pays for the land and you only provide your work in a team collaborating on construction projects is a too narrow-minded view — people might do that simply to gather attention for their shops/malls or services, so these can be just marketing stunts of a good capitalist. Similarly, just because someone owns vast amounts of land and hundreds of tenants, it doesn’t mean they’re automatically ruthless capitalists — they might use all that money, for instance, for social causes: in SL, this means mostly helping out new users with free (or low-cost) rental areas, providing them with prefab homes, helping them out setting up their shops on a “common ground”, and so on.

The old labels simply don’t apply so well. Still, a few trends can be spotted, the anarchist being the best example. Anarchists will disregard any rule whatsoever, except the ones they have created for themselves. Many, unlike the common stereotype, are not loners. A good example is concertated griefing: they disrespect and disregard everybody else’s buildings and privacy, are strongly convinced that the fun of Second Life is having a game where you can do whatever you want to do without repercussions. Everybody should do the same, and settle on the boundaries — “you don’t shoot me, I don’t shoot you” approach.

Anarchists can be utterly non-violent. They do simply what they want to do, but don’t disturb anyone while doing it. They just want to be left in peace, and enjoy what they do. Nobody has the right to bother them.

Anarcho-syndicalists are very commonly found among older users. They group together to defend themselves from external threats. They idealise a Second Life where money, land, and prim limits are unnecessary and contrary to the purposes of making “a better world”. They also believe this to be Linden Lab’s plan for Second Life, and will defend the right to freely collaborate on amazing projects and concepts, without being tainted by money. Thus, they feel morally superior to the rest of the residents, who are still on a lower level of social thought, where “money” is still a needed concept. Not surprisingly, they’re angry at Linden Lab for having introduced the concepts of “money” and “propriety”, which they find utterly alien in “the brave new world” they’re building.

Many are effectively anarcho-capitalists (a notion that is disputed): they believe that the strength of their group is enough to defend their right to free trade, without the interference of LL or, obviously, other groups. They want unbounded and unchecked free exchange of money, items, and services, but… only by having themselves as the sole producers of goods and services. To do that, they will form close bonds with LL’s employees, specially with the former residents who have become employees. Prokofy Neva identifies this group with the “Feted Inner Core”; no matter how informal or formal they are, they have the means to influence LL’s actions and planning, and exhibit two important aspects of social relationships: they protect themselves (ie. they work in a closed group), and they persuade LL to implement their concepts world-wide. Since they’re open to commerce — assuming, of course, that they are the providers, and the rest of the world are the consumers — LL tends to overly encourage members of this group as well — more in the past than nowadays. They are fond of structures of power that organise and plan this world according to their own views, to the exclusion of anyone else’s.

The larger majority of LL’s residents, however, are libertarian/neoliberalists. They believe in equal opportunities for making money for everybody; the best way of assuring that is keeping LL from interfering on the economy. They disregard and disrespect (and even find it dangerous) all kinds of resident-based organisations that promote some tort of ethical codes of business conduct. People ought to be free to exchange items and services as they like. What others call “cheating” or “lying” is just a twisted view on commercial practices — everybody knows that you’re allowed to “slightly bend the truth” when selling a product, and it’s up to the consumer to know “the rules of the game”, inform themselves, and shop from merchants with a good reputation — or the cheapest prices.

This group utterly despises the others, since they view them as dangerous inhibiters of free, unregulated commercial transactions in Second Life. The in-world economy is established by people selling their creations or services, not by fancy, utopian moral values that are imposed upon others. If people want complexity in defining “rules” to organise commerce — they should go away to RL and live there.

Many residents are neither of the above, of course, and are very likely on the moderate centre, either on social capitalism (SL companies have a moral obligation to develop this world to support new and poor users, through low-rent/low-cost mechanisms that allow poor residents to enjoy themselves, and slowly help them to work up in the social ladder) to what Rudy Rummel calls “soft socialism” (or Europeans call social democracy), a means where, through a non-voluntary financial contribution, businesses create a pool of money and resources to deploy structures (social and architectural) to be enjoyed by all (like, say, education, arts and culture in SL). These types of “moderate” residents are the ones commonly found around and being shocked by the lack of organisation, planning, and structure, and will volunteer their time (and often their money!) to better plan and organise things at the local level (their own groups, their own communities, their own businesses), hoping to “lead by example”.

Sooner or later you’re going to find people from all these groups, and the way you relate to them will label you accordingly. The daunting task of balancing friends from all these contradictory groups will get you ostracised by all of them

So, think about Second Life politics. What are you, a democrat, an anarchist, a libertarian, or you simply don’t care? Take a look at the Wikipedia’s page on forms of government to know what people are talking about!

Relationships towards Linden Labs

The employees

Lindens — love them or hate them. We all have our “favourite Linden”, and we all have that special guy at Linden Lab that we point to when things go wrong. Some will know who the Lindens were before they became Lindens, and they’ll be everlasting friends; some, for exactly the same reason, will be their antagonists forever.

Linden Lab has a rather heterogenous group of employees. While they share with us the bright-eyed, wonderful magic of Second Life, they have personal motivations as well. Each will look at SL in a different way — just like us residents (see below). Also, they are not ugly, lazy monsters that refuse to add this or that feature, or not answer the phone when you need; if there is something that unites them all, is their amazing ability to work hours after hours to make SL work — even if so very often they’re accused of doing exactly the opposite.

It’s hard to work at LL with such a demanding crowd of angry residents. Remember that they’re also humans, even if they can click on God Mode

The company

Being a Californian start-up, lead by visionary Philip “Linden” Rosedale, and funded by several visionaries as well (Mitch from Lotus 1-2-3 and Mozilla fame, Jeff from Amazon, Pierre from eBay… among so many others), Linden Lab is quite hard to understand as a company. They have an amazing (and utterly naive!) corporate culture — the Tao of Linden, meaning mostly that their employees can pretty much work on what they want, and hopefully they’ll cook something together that is greater than the sum of the parts. Hopefully

Sometimes the company has the weirdest ideas. They’re the only software house in the world that doesn’t have a User Group (too worried about favouritism!) or a Partner Programme (they don’t understand the concept). They sell a software that allows integration with back-end application servers, but haven’t published any documentation on how that should be done. They get lots of press reviews and references in the (real) media, but they don’t have a marketing or advertising strategy. Their former “hired evangelist” left LL to create his own company, providing customers with consultancy services on how to create a virtual presence in Second Life. They don’t make deals to get ads inside SL to at least cover some of the costs. All in all, this company is too weird to defy description!

To baffle even more the ones desperately looking for any signs of “corporate culture” at Linden Lab (and who are obviously quickly disappointed), they’ll soon find out that it’s impossible for LL to be a huge profitable company. They’re a struggling one, covering the costs, but still struggling. Return on investment will take decades, if not more — they are now on a steep exponential growth curve, and we all know how dangerous these are, after three years of steady, linear growth. Still, they don’t make a lot of money, but they’re still around. Why? How?

The answer is simple: Linden Lab is lead by visionaries, not by business people. They want to create something unique, something that has never been tried before. And for that you need stubbornness — not greed. Being a visionary in the post-bubble days is something very hard to be! But still they struggle along.

Also, you will have to make your opinion on what Linden Lab’s role in Second Life is. Are they “distant gods” that “left the world in our hand”, just coming in to observe what we’re doing? Are they benevolent dictators ruling over a mostly libertarian landscape, just stepping in for some blatant violations (hate speech, child porn) but letting us do whatever we please? Or are they “merely” a software developing house which created an amazing platform for creating the Metaverse, and we should deal with them like we deal with any other software house, and expect them to behave just like the Apples and Microsofts of this world? The way you relate with Linden Lab will also define what you think that Second Life actually is.
Skeptics — or realists perhaps? — think that LL has about 18 months to prove that it was worth to be stubborn, and to go along their planned route, despite not making enough money to make it worthwhile as a company. If LL has 3-5 million users by the end of 2007, they will gather a huge attention — the momentum will be so great that it will be unstoppable. Things like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, and all these “social tools” of the much-touted “Web 2.0″ will suddenly become meaningless — they will just be seen as crude attempts of doing something, at a very limited scale, of what Second Life can be and become: the ultimate social tool ever developed on top of the Internet, dwarfing everything done so far. At the same time, it’ll conquer its spot as one of the potentially most interesting e-Business marketplaces in the world: with 3-5 million users, they’ll easily have over US$ 10 billions in transactions per year, shadowing all the other virtual worlds, even if they’ll have a small overall share of all people connected to virtual worlds. The whole business (and techie) world won’t simply be able to ignore them and sweep them under the carpet.

If they fail — well, then, this technology was developed ten years too soon. People will still talk about it with fondness for a while, then quickly forget it and return to blogs and MySpace and Flickr and Google Video. And in ten years, someone will announce the Metaverse, using 3D photorealistic texturing and cheap goggles for an immersive experience “unlike anything ever done before”. Although, from a technological standpoint, compared to some 3D engines, SL might be terribly outdated, from the point of view of a product, it might just be on the market too soon.

The product

… which comes to the ultimate question regarding Second Life. Both amateur techies and professional programmers, system administrators, and network engineers tear their hairs (real and virtual) when they look at SL’s suite of clients and server applications. Why the so unconventional choices? Why was the group server writing on text files, and not on a database, thus limiting our choice of group tools? Why do we need to update our clients (dramatically so) every time a few bugs are fixed? Why is performance so terrible, and why do we have to suffer so much when over 25 avatars are in the same spot? Why does the asset server crash, if it’s supposed to be a cluster of servers? Why is IM proprietary, and not Jabber-based and federated with Google? Why did they stop development on Havok, on in-world HTML, or Speedtree — things that 10-year-old products have had for ages? Why the so many limitations and delays built-in on Linden Scripting Language, that all experts and professional scripters know how to work around (and are thus silly as a concept), but need to spend almost 90% of their development time doing so? Why are monetary transactions not atomic? Why is the whole user interface drawn by the renderer, instead of being on separate windows (on their own threads)?

Why, why, why?

On the other hand… why don’t we just pop over to another virtual world, where “everything works like it should”, and are instead on Second Life?

The interesting bit of Second Life’s technological platform is that sometimes it can work in such an awesome way that we have to think twice on “how did they manage to do that?” while on the very next moment a spike lag can make us turn back to reality and make us remember how clunky, primitive, amateurish, glued-together-in-a-hurry some things are.

As soon as you deal with both extremes — wonder and amazement when something works way better than it should, and grumbling and mumbling when it doesn’t — you’ll have to forge your opinion on Second Life, the Metaverse platform.

Philosophy

A game versus a platform?

Henrik Linden (now not working for LL any more) has coined two very interesting words that define Second Life’s experience very well. The first-generation SL residents were interested in Second Life as an “alternate reality”, one that is disconnected from “real life” but bears some resemblance to it. In this alternate reality you would be able to be whomever you wanted to be — and requests for revealing your real life data are considered rude. This group is called by Henrik “immersionists” — they want an experience where SL becomes a real country, with a real economy, where real people are going to live, have their jobs, have their fun. It will have nothing to do with the physical world. And they’re working hard to make this become true.

A later generation, the “augmentationists”, have a different point of view. They look at Second Life as an extension of real life — a tool, a platform, a communication medium, the 2nd generation World-Wide Web in 3D. For them, anonymity is as silly as faking your voice on a phone call; just because you’re a “phone number” you’re not a different person. And sure, people can have a job as virtual architects in Second Life — contracted in real life, with real customers, and paid in real US dollars. This doesn’t mean that SL is just work and no fun; rather the contrary, it’s an entertaining experience, a fun place to be and meet people. But it’s just that and nothing else.

Being trapped between both extremes, I can’t really say what to advise I guess I’ll always be an immersionist struggling to look at Second Life as an augmentist. But you have to make the choice on your own — and be ostracised by the other group, forever.

Types of users

SL resident Jon Seattle defines four types of users of Second Life: Builders, who join Second Life to express their creativity by creating things — from buildings, textures, animations, clothes, to creating communities and interesting projects. At the extreme case, some are “self-builders” — known for their plethora of alts, each one a personality they have “built” for themselves. The second class are Business Owners. No matter what they do, they have a very strong focus on Second Life: this is a place to make money. Some are more or less obsessed with it, and the scale can be very different. Not everyone is an Anshe Chung; many will be perfectly happy to open up a small shop and sell their clothes. In any case, their idea is that SL is a nice place to open shop and cash in, by being good at some product/service and filling in a niche nicely. The third group (by far the largest!)are the Consumers. They are in SL to get entertained. They don’t really produce anything — SL is an escape, a place to relax, to be with friends, to get entertainment, to join groups, to have fun. They admire Builders because of what they do; they grumble at the prices set by Business Owners; but they accept both in their place in SL: to fill up the empty sims of this virtual world and get them some goodies. And lastly, there are the Debaters. These are usually untalented as creators and are lousy business owners; what they do, mostly, is to think about Second Life, and get an audience to listen to them (I’m sure Jon had someone in mind when he defined these four roles!), and mostly write/talk about it. They’ll be the proselytisers and evangelisers of all what is cool about Second Life — and will do that in-world, on blogs and forums, or or real world conferences.

No one is truly just one of these groups, but you’ll have to figure out what you are, because your needs and desires (and the ones of your group) will be quite different of the other groups! And they’ll be at odds with each other, when pushing for new features, for example.

But it’s not real!

After a few weeks online, you will very likely see how serious the inhabitants of Second Life are. They’ll get offended quite easily if you are rude to them. Drama will erupt because someone stole a texture, or because one sim was down for a few hours. And some residents will laugh at them and just shake their heads and say: “What are you making a fuss out of it, come on, this is not real, this is just a game”.

Although this naive group is slowly dying out, the question still remains to be answered at some point. What is “reality” after all? What we perceive with our senses? But through Second Life we have visual stimula; so why is it “less” real? When you watch a movie on TV, you know it’s not “real” but just “pretend”. But you still laugh and cry — why, if the people portraied there are just actors? And how do you know that what’s in the news, just before the movie begins, is “real”? Just because someone tells you so?

We are all humans here, with our motivations, our feelings, our friends and companions, our daily chores. No matter how much you can dismiss pretty pixels on a screen, you’ll have to face with the ultimate reality (virtuality?): there are people behind the screen, staring at you.

Identity and self

Avatars are cute pixelatted graphics with human souls

Extropia DaSilva will very likely be the reference of “self” and “identity” in Second Life. Even if you don’t agree with her ideas, this will definitely make you think a bit about what means when you talk about “self”.

All we know is that people in SL behave like people in real life. Their patterns of social conduct, norms, and even things like physical distance will be “brought” over to Second Life. We apologise for bumping into people; some men (or male avatars) open doors for women (or female avatars). We dress up for special occasions. We build homes, mostly on the ground, and with roofs (although it never rains inside, and our avatars don’t get wet). We adopt the language of our own medium, status, or reference group (computer programmers will talk about computer programming, lawyers will talk about laws). So, if we don’t identify with our cute pixellated avatars, why do we behave as if we do?

The question begs asking, and many will dismiss it saying that “I can look like I want in Second Life”. Sure you do. But why do 7-feet-tall ogres run for elections and talk like professors? Why does the blonde bombshell patiently train new users in scripting or building? Why does the lady dressed in a Victorian dress organise large groups of volunteers? Why does the guy dressed like Prince Charming flame the world with his bluntness and strong words, acting as a hero of the nation bringing righteousness to SL? The answer, of course, is that we can shed our physical aspect, but it’s way harder to shed our mental processes. You’ll behave in SL more likely like you behave in real life — unless you’re a very talented actor or role-player (and sure, these exist as well!). At the end of the day, you’ll be stripped off all physical attributes, and will commune with your fellow residents mind-to-mind. So, where is your sense of identity then?

Conclusion

Imagine you’re planning your travel to a new country which you haven’t visited before. These days, with the Internet so handy and with such a wealth of information on what to visit in any country (think Wikitravel), it makes a lot of sense to browse for the existing information before making a trip. Will you need vaccines? What are the nicest places to visit, and how will you be able to travel there? What do the natives speak or eat? And more important — what do they talk about?

Second Life gets more complex by the minute, as about 10,000 new users log in every day. Most of them just saw a link on a web page or a magazine, or watched a TV broadcast mentioning Second Life as the “virtual world” where every dream can become possible. They come unprepared and in desperate need of guidance. Just looking at the new users that drop in every day at Help Island, I would say that over two thirds simply come from other MMORPGs — with totally different expectations on Second Life: they want to know how they can make money, or where the red light district is. Another third simply has no clue — they have never logged to a virtual world before, and like the very first time when you connected your computer to the Internet and launched a web browser, they ask themselves: “Now, where do I begin?” The next question is most likely: “What is all this about?” or “What do I need to know”?

If you can answer each and every one of the questions on this article, and make an opinion on all the issues, well then, you’re ready to take the plunge into SL’s dynamic and complex society

I don’t know if this is the first time ever if Second Life gets listed as a “country” in a website, but this is deliberate. Arin & Susan have arranged to have their feature movie to be premiered in Second Life… provided that there is enough interest for that. As an indie production, the team behind “Four Eyed Monsters” is naturally open-minded enough to take up SNOOPYbrown Zamboni’s challenge: to preview it in Second Life, if it fares as well as any other city in the world, ie., at least 150 people showing interest in watching it.

Talking with Rubaiyat Shatner yesterday, he pointed me out to a very interesting article blogged by Hamlet Au, referring to a research paper announced on Terra Nova posted by Nick Yee. On that paper, using some statistical analysis, the researches were able to prove that in Second Life, avatars behave like human beings when keeping interpersonal distance and eye contact, and that the same variations (male/female, indoor/outdoor) that exist in RL can be found in SL as well.

The result is perhaps a bit surprising. We’re used to a cluttered interface, full of IMs, open Inventory boxes, the ubiquous History, sim stats, and perhaps one or two open notecards. Most of the time one is unable to even see with whom they’re talking with, much less keeping interpersonal distance, or eye contact (ie. turning towards the avatar who’s speaking — and what these guys measured was not the “automatic” camera movement which is in-built by LL, but the way you need to use the keys to face the person you’re speaking with, so it’s a deliberate and conscious movement).

I would assume that nobody would care to even attempt to do that. It’s rather pointless — you can still listen to people on History on IM, and you don’t need to “look” at them. And it’s also rather cumbersome, it’s hard to chat and move, since the UI does not help you with that. So nobody in their sane minds should be doing it. Well, ok, I do it all the time, no matter how many windows are open… and well… perhaps all my friends do it as well, at least I see them moving… and… uh… well, even newbies do it… wait a bit. Now that I think 5 minutes about it… everybody does that.

Baffled and puzzled, I went back to Terra Nova and downloaded the PDF. While you can naturally contest the methods used, Nick Yee and his team have proven exactly that. There is a statistically significant number of people that, in spite of everything, really take pains to keep their interpersonal distance and eye contact just like in real life. How strange! Why?

Rubaiyat even went a step further after reading that. Although there is no evidence to support that thesis, it looks like this sort of behaviour — again, in spite of the cumbersome interface! — is actually aided by LL’s interface. So, the camera works “just right” to keep your interpersonal distance at a reasonable focus, and it’s rather easy to check that you’re “just right” in the correct position for interaction (according to the theories measuring interpersonal distance). Now that’s truly uncanny — or is it? Might Linden Lab have taken the necessary camera movements into account to facilitate this sort of “natural” behaviour — in the sense that every human being is supposed to have these distances “written down” in their genes or learned through education? Are LL’s interface developers, after all, much cleverer than we thought?

I have no idea, but I made a simple test. Mac users are notoriously left out of the gaming world, but after reading Brace Coral’s articles on A Tale in the Desert, and finding that these nice guys also have versions for Linux and the Mac, I thought I’d give it a try. Perhaps one of the things that surprised me at their equivalent of the welcome island was a very nice Mentor (*waves* at Eighteen, wherever she might be, since very likely she’s not reading this ) whose first question to me, after some very newbie mistakes was: “So do you come from SL as well?” (note that she didn’t write “Second Life”) I truthfully answered “yes” and asked her why she did ask. “Well, my husband and child are on SL as well, and we seem to get so many people from there these days”. Hmm interesting

In any case, I digress. What was truly fascinating to watch was the way the UI of A Tale in the Desert worked. The camera is hopelessly wrong — the way it works will give any SLer a headache. And there is no precise movement, you just click on places to move. What this means, in terms of social interaction, is that it’s almost impossible to get near an avatar and face them. This would be rather pointless to do, since you only have 5 or 6 silly emotes to begin with (a few more to be gained after months of play, I was tolds), and there is almost no way to attract people’s attention. To compensate, you have some sort of “regional” chat — like you can shout across a whole sim, and communication is done that way.

It’s not the place here to discuss the merits of A Tale in the Desert compared to Second Life; it’s a role-playing game where citizens try to gather support for laws to get passed, or feature requests. It’s interesting in that regard. Also, the sun and the water are rather nicely done, and, like on all MMORPGs, you have absolutely fantastic performance — since content is so limited and downloaded to your hard disk anyway. All the rest, well, looks sort of poor. Namely, the “social interaction” bit is almost completely absent. We complain and complain about Second Life, but, as Yee’s research show, in SL at least you have a simulacrum of interpersonal behaviour. It’s not perfect. It’s limited. It’s cumbersome. But it exists, and apparently, if Rubaiyat is right, it was even designed that way.

Yee’s research was limited to SL for several reasons, and one of them might very well be the easy way of using scripting tools just to gather data of people interacting. On most (not all, though) MMORPGs, this would require more manual processing. Still, SL is not absolute perfect in gathering data — you can’t, for instance, tell if an avatar is male, female, or genderless, except by looking at it. But things like SLstats, which fortunately have started to comply with US and EU legislation on the privacy of personal data gathered on the Internet, can show that it’s rather easy to track down interactions.

This naturally will make me think a bit more about the issue of “self” inside virtual worlds, and probably re-read Extropia’s essays once more.

With (part) of the Second Life forums closing down, some of the few hundred regular readers of the forums were very worried that Linden Lab was somehow limiting their “freedom of expression”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of SL’s residents live in free countries with freedom of expression being one of their constitutional rights — and this naturally mean that most of us are able to set up our own means to express our opinions. We don’t need Linden Lab to act as a guiding parent!

A side-effect of shutting down the forums is that obviosly this encouraged literally hundreds of people to start their own blogs, websites, and e-Zines. The SLogosphere is booming, and many have blogged on how this change might, after all, be for the better.

In the Grid is one of the most recent offerings. After having seen the evolution of things like the New World Notes, the Herald, or the Metaverse Messenger, which are run by professionals in their areas, and thus of a different quality than most, it’ll be interesting to follow this new magazine, which is described by its author, Miller Copeland, as “’60s-Playboy meets Radar meets McSweeney’s”, it should become a “hip”, trendy, art-related magazine.

Again, the formula for success has been professionalism. This is something that many, many residents are actually scared of — that the necessary requirements of professionalism and RL work experience required to do amazing things in Second Life will be much higher than before. After all, some claim, SL was designed for amateurs, and nobody is supposed to be flaunting their credentials, so why do you need to be a pro in SL to enjoy it?

I’m always reminded of the first questions every newbie has when coming to Second Life: “what do I need to get a job?” What I tell them is that you’ll have to use your real life skills. Some are confused and baffled. The community which comes from the 3D graphical design area, web designers, or programmers, find SL “familiar territory” — this is just a tool, and tools is what they use. But what about the rest of us who are technically challenged? Will there be a place for us as well?

You bet there will

The Rise of the SLogoshpere is the best example of it. Here you have people with communication skills. Writing a blog — like writing your own RL diary — is easy, anyone can do it. Writing it consistently, in the sense that you update it periodically, for a long amount of time, is harder — but easily accessible to everyone who is strong-willed (but here you already notice a requirement: a strong will is important). Writing well is the next step: some can do it, some have learned it, some simply haven’t that skill.

Even so, this is not all it takes. You can write well, be stubborn enough to continue writing, update your blog regularly — but… nobody reads your blog. Why?

The issue here is that another thing is now needed. When SL just had a handful of blogs, you’d turn to those, because there was no other option really — you’d read what was available. Now you start to have hundreds of them, plus magazines, multi-authored blogs, and a plethora of forums to choose from. The selection process is now much harder. Prokofy Neva’s Not Tasty tends to analyse the technical part of what makes a blog more read than others: the complexity of making sure it pops up high on things like Google, Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us, or the recent blog aggregator Planet of SL by Tao Takashi (famous for being a talented organiser of large events, like this year’s 3rd Anniversary). Prokofy’s complains mostly address how artificial all those tools are to effectively rate the quality/popularity of a specific blog, which is done entirely by “gaming the system” (several systems, as a matter of fact) instead of relying on the quality of content.

He’s obviously right, but these are also the “rules of the game”. To succeed, your blog/magazine needs promotion. In the RL, this means advertising. On the Internet, besides advertising, you can “game the system”.

But there is a last, necessary, step to make a blog/magazine a success. Being at the top of the lists is naturally important — it’ll mean more visitors, of course — but the more important ratio, in my opinion, is the number of recurrent readers (and the absolute amount of recurrent readers). For things like Google’s Adsense or any other form of online advertising, this statistic is hardly relevant: one reader is just one reader, and a person that clicks on the ad never to return is the same as a recurrent reader that also clicks on the ad just once. From a purely marketing point of view, thus, the technical manipulation of the various systems to get your blog/magazine “highly rated” is not very important. It’s just numbers.

On the other hand, if you want to become a long-term success, the important statistic is the recurrent reader — the one that will always ome back to read more. Not unlike SL’s own two statistics — new users and users logged in in the last 60 days — recurrent readers is, I believe, a more reasonable metric to deal with the quality of content. For instance, only 40% of my few readers (just a hundred or so visits per day) are recurrent, about the same level of SL’s “active users”. This means that this blog you’re reading right now just has 40 or so people who have an interest in it, but they’ll be faithful and come back ever so often. The rest are people who perhaps clicked on a link that pointed to it, read the first article, and yawned with bore, never to return.

What will make the readers faithful? It’s the quality of content that matters. A blog/e-Zine written by professional authors, who are clever and insightful, who provide their audience with the required level of interesting material, will be the ones that continue to attract new readers — but readers that stay. This is something that untalented amateurs will have a hard time figuring out. Tweaking the system to get Google to put you in the top of the search list will not get you more faithful readers. It will only give you more new occasional readers, which is a different metric.

Consider the nice guys that drop you every day a supermarket nesletter in your RL mailbox. They reach millions and millions of people, but the quality of the content is virtually nil — it won’t attract your attention for the merest fraction of a second. So, a supermarket which publishes a free newsletter, mostly to promote themselves, will probably boast “distributed to ten times as more people as the New York Times has readers”. Well yes, and so what? People will turn to the NYT for quality content, not to your supermarket newsletter. The sheer number is quite unimportant; who cares about a newsletter that advertises groceries and may also include a horoscope and the weather prediction? It won’t “change the world”. It won’t “be a reference”. It won’t “stand out in a crowd”. It will only sell more groceries!

Understanding this concept of “quantity brings in more people — but quality will make them stay” is quite important for the prospective new blogger/e-Zine creator. Plainly spoken: unless you know how to capture and enthrall an audience — and this is what professional writers do! — you’re out of luck, no technology will aid you there.

Thus, to the non-techie newbie, I always insist that there is a place for them in Second Life as well. Communication skills, organisational skills, promotion and marketing skills, writing skills, which are usually frowned at by techies (but not by business owners, who also understand the need for those), are actually quite important to establish yourself in Second Life — perhaps, in the long run, even more so. It is no surprise that the top residents that have established themselves in some business niche are also excellent communicators (I’d certainly put both Prokofy Neva and Aimee Weber on that list ). Some, like Hamlet Au, née Linden, or Torley Linden, née Torgeson, are just purely exceptional communicators — and they still thrive in SL, side by side with the top content creators or business owners. And some turn their professional skills to business only, and thrive as such — Anshe Chung being the usually quoted example (she has no need for a blog ). Thus there is a place for all — but you’ll see the RL professionals rising to the very top.

Sure, I admit that there are — and will always be — exceptions. Here and there you’ll see an example that will overthrow that theory — like the mother of 5 who has stayed at home, taking care of children, who never used a computer in her life, and suddenly discovers her hidden talents in Second Life, and rises to become a reference in the SL furniture business. All this nice stories pop up here and there — people discovering talents they never had. In a sense, SL is the ultimate tool to grant equal opportunities. You don’t need a degree in Civil Engineering or Architecture to become a talented builder, admired by all — examples of that are legion. However, when it comes to pinpoint the ones that are the best of the best, you’ll be surprised to see how many of those are actually professionals in their areas.

This trend will continue, not only in-world, but on the SLogosphere as well. As it grows, people simply won’t have time to keep track of all the content being produced there, and you’ll fall back to the blogs/e-Zines that have been written by professional writers, and that provide you with quality content all the time. This will very likely mean going back to the Herald, the NWN, the Metaverse Messenger, and Second Thoughts. Hopefully we’ll be able to add “In the Grid” to that list as well. For now, all I can do is to wish Miller Copeland the great success with this new magazine that he deserves.

And to my 40 or so regular readers every day, I give you all a warm and friendly hug from this amateur that hopefully will still keep you entertained in the future

Thanks to moo Money, I was pointed to this amazing piece of software called Crazy Talk 4, which is able to do all sorts of very creative lipsynching, very easily, using just a few pictures uploaded from Second Life (or… well… basically anything, really!).

Sadly, this is the sort of company that still believes that the only computer platform that exists in the universe is Windows, but alas, what can one do? If you’re a Windows user and interested in machinima using Second Life, you’ll love this application. The trial version works for quite a long time, and the cheapest version costs around US$50, so you won’t need to starve and do a double mortgage on your home to buy it

Here is an example of what you can do:

Link to streaming video (if the above link doesn’t work)

Cool, isn’t it? The amazing thing, of course, is that this is a rather “lightweight” application, it also works with any language whatsoever (even with rather bad sound clips, which is the case of this movie), and it’s blindingly fast in “real-time” rendering of expressions. Linden Lab, once more, should look at what people are developing these days, and see how to incorporate all those fancy niceties into SL…

Stay tuned for more amazing things done with Poser 5 figures — and keeping us imagining how SL will look like in 2010

After finishing a 2-month-long marathon to make a “proof of concept” machinima using Second Life for a customer, I just saw this post on the Official Linden Blog. Yes, for four days you’ll be able to get a valid license key of Poser 5 in your name.

Although Content Paradise is famous for doing these types of promotions, this is a “one of a kind” type of promotion — Poser 5 being the best way to create SL-compatible animations. It’s by far not the only way, as followers of this blog have noticed

So get your valid key through Content Paradise, and don’t complain if the downloads are taking too long — instead, be happy because you now got an incredible opportunity to have a valid Poser key!

Well… here it is. My blog gets a new look, and more important than that, it gets a brand new engine running in the background.

Two years ago, when I started writing these articles, I had to pick a weblogging engine. I’ve evaluated a few, and almost all were very limited, primitive, and rather inflexible — you just got simple things like a place to type your article, save it, and that was it. With a bit of luck, comments would even work

Later on, weblogging software slowly catched up with new things like RSS feeds and nifty features like auto-classifying posts by month in an archive. Or people logging in to add comments. Still, when it came to making an option — I chose an old content management system with which I was quite familiar with, and tweaked it to “look” like a blog.

The advantage of a professional web content management system is the ability to add to it as you wish; as well as exactly implementing whatever layout you want (not being a web designer, I used some freely available templates instead ). Weblogging software came with the same set of 4-5 templates, and with luck, you could change a few colours. Or add perhaps a title with two lines. And not much more. If a community supported the software, you might get one or two sites offering new templates, and a 80-page manual on how to do your own templates… and you could forget anything that needed extra coding, like tying into things like Google AdSense, having a search engine, or — like I have done — show your online status in Second Life

Well, times have changed.

It’s 2006, and now weblogging software has definitely leaped ahead. Now we get all the sort of niftynesses that people expect on modern software: support for all sorts of protocols — RSS, ATOM, RDF, you name it. Integration with Technorati, de.licio.us, and Blogshares. Get ads from Google AdSense, integrate with Google’s search engine, use Google Analytics to streamline your software. Manage trackback links, and have permalinks. Support comments where people can either create their own profiles or integrate with their profiles from other sources (like OpenID).

Backoffices of blogging software should still be easy: place title here, write text here, save and post. But it should also give you lots of flexibility: classify articles, add tags, create multiple pages, have restricted articles for logged-in users. Add all sorts of plug-ins for the latest and greatest in technological advances. And, most importantly, create your own templates with total freedom, modify existing ones to your taste, embed PHP inside the whole blog structure — in short, give all sorts of freedom in changing everything according to your personal taste, as opposed to what the weblog programmer thinks it’s a good idea.

While still keeping it simple.

Well, I must admit I’m “sold” on this new generation of blogging software. For practical reasons, I’m currently using WordPress — not because it’s “better” or “faster” or “easier to install”, but for one very good reason: it’s the one Linden Lab uses for their own blogs, and integrating between blogs using the same technology is easier. It’s also free, open-source, and has a rather large community supporting it — how strange, considering that two years ago, WordPress was a “minor player” in a world dominated by Google’s Blogger and Moving Type

For the ones finally having a working comments-based system, there will be simple rules that I will enforce. No spamming, no ad hominem attacks, no hate speech. Keep it to the point, do your criticisim with cleverness in an effective way, but keep it polite. Also, you’ll need to be logged in to comment, or have an OpenID somewhere (more on that in a future post). And remember, if you think I’m too strict on the rules, you have an easy option: just create your own blog to protest

I hope you enjoy this new phase of the blog. One thing that will happen is open collaboration with some very welcome co-bloggers, like Extropia DaSilva, who has written so insightful essays in the past. I’ll look forward to have more people collaborating actively. No, this is not going to become the Academic Transactions of the Sociology Society of Second Life and has not even the pretension to become something even remotely like that. It’s just that a blog can have multiple purposes; this one will focus on the First Steps of the emerging Metaverse society — its pitfalls, its stumbling blocks, the lessons learned. Hopefully, we’ll be able to come back in ten years and and laugh a lot about how naive we were

Enjoy