Thanks so much for writing such an eloquent and independant SL-At-A-Glance sort of read for me to introduce non-SLifer friends and family to Second Life.

It’s a brilliant and lovely summary for people fascinated by the future of where cyber social (and business and all other sorts of…) networking maybe headed in another half-decade ~ a place at which SL has already quite arrived!

~Amy:)

So let me answer them, then, at least with my own opinion:

>- is LL too deep into “gamer culture” to the point that they aren’t able to change to corporate culture instead?

Yes. Some of the leading figures in LL come from games and gamer culture; even those who did not specifically have game development in their resumes come from the hacker/programmer kind of culture that is compatible with games and which views everything as “meta,” and the code writers as the gods.

Philip Linden himself has spoken very explicitly of seeing himself as a Greek god, in an interview with an industry publication.

>- what does “favouritism” mean, from the perspective of an immersionist (this is a country) and an augmentist (this is a platform for content creation), using Henrik’s definitions?

Favouritism has occurred both for immersionists (top content creators the Lindens fete to keep content flowing and new players attracted) and augmentists (help to spin off metaversal consulting companies, coddling of big business and big education, etc.).

>- will a company made of 99 kids and one adult be able to survive beyond the year 2007? If yes, is that an emotional “yes”, or one based on researched data?

An emotional yes, and one also based on research data, which shows they will have a very rocky time of it, but ultimately will likely keep enough of their soul, even with a buy-out of a larger media company, to keep most customers happy.

>- can a company and their closed software product be “dictated by their users” (in the sense that they participate in the decision processes, hopefully in some sort of democratic way), is “crowdsourcing” the only possible way of participation, or do other models exist? (open-source, for instance, and even that means different things for different people)

Why not try? Who says you can’t? The game-god model of software production surely can’t be the only model; it’s merely one that emerged in the early years of software making itself. Who *says* it has to be this way and cannot be more collaborative, even with accepting of non-programmers and users as equals? Of course it can.

When software making becomes as normal as making vacuum cleaners or cream cheese, companies will become less self-referential, obsessed with their own reflection in the mirror, and more attentive to consumer needs.

Making software is really no more glamorous than making and repairing automobiles.

I’ll say it here as I do in every discussion: open source=closed society. I’d rather have a professional company with accountability to a bottom line and a customer service ethic making the software and involving me as a consumer, then have a lot of script-kiddy freaks working it open source and putting control maniacs in charge everywhere — the most deceptive thing about the open source movement is that end result — use of it and development of the opened software by people who themselves make closed, magic circles of technical expertise privileging themselves and their culture.

>- how professional is a company that uses “The Tao of Linden” to control their development process? Is inventing a new business model, just for the sake of it, a good idea; or would a more conventional model bring better results? If so, why?
- does the LL culture influence the way SL works, to an extent that at some point, only the ones aligned with LL’s ideologies will thrive, excluding the rest of the world? If so, what can we do to prevent that? Is that even possible?

Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood on TV had a really, really long run, using only the concept of things like looking soulfully into the camera and saying to the viewer, “You’re special…just because you’re YOU.” In fact, only the death of the RL actor put an end to the show. I imagine the Love Machine will have the same kind of hold for many years to come.

>- will Second Life be *one* Metaverse or a plethora of metaversettes, each with its own rules?

Metaverslets, until through a series of world wars, the various fiefdoms begin to unite.

>- is *Linden Lab* creating the Metaverse, or are *we* creating it using the tools that Linden Lab provides us?
- and finally, will Linden Lab still be around in a year or so?

We are.
Yes.

Your turn.

Gwyn’s Home The Big Controversies in Second Life “The Big Controversies in Second Life” If you have not read this article you should. You owe it to yourself to read……

Actually, this article is about *questions*, not answers. People should ask the questions themselves and have an opinion on what their answer is for them, personally. Sometimes, though, people don’t even know what questions to ask!

So, yes, people should look at LL and ask themselves the following:

- is LL too deep into “gamer culture” to the point that they aren’t able to change to corporate culture instead?
- what does “favouritism” mean, from the perspective of an immersionist (this is a country) and an augmentist (this is a platform for content creation), using Henrik’s definitions?
- will a company made of 99 kids and one adult be able to survive beyond the year 2007? If yes, is that an emotional “yes”, or one based on researched data?
- can a company and their closed software product be “dictated by their users” (in the sense that they participate in the decision processes, hopefully in some sort of democratic way), is “crowdsourcing” the only possible way of participation, or do other models exist? (open-source, for instance, and even that means different things for different people)
- how professional is a company that uses “The Tao of Linden” to control their development process? Is inventing a new business model, just for the sake of it, a good idea; or would a more conventional model bring better results? If so, why?
- does the LL culture influence the way SL works, to an extent that at some point, only the ones aligned with LL’s ideologies will thrive, excluding the rest of the world? If so, what can we do to prevent that? Is that even possible?
- will Second Life be *one* Metaverse or a plethora of metaversettes, each with its own rules?
- is *Linden Lab* creating the Metaverse, or are *we* creating it using the tools that Linden Lab provides us?
- and finally, will Linden Lab still be around in a year or so?

I just ask the questions. People are expected to find the answers for themselves. You have your own; I have mine (which, on most of the above questions, are even overlapping, although not on all); I invite others to answer the questions for themselves. Providing all the answers would be presumptuous on my part; people have different expectations on Second Life, so it’s unfair to tell people what they should think. Instead, I encourage people to think by themselves, to compare SL to other, successful models, and see the differences, and why they might affect the present and future of SL. But it’s up to them to take their own conclusions.

And yes, I do “forgive” Linden Lab quite often I have a terrible shortcoming in my personality: I truly believe that people should learn from their mistakes first, and only from what other people tell them second. You might label me as subscribing to some sort of post-modernist education school. As a matter of fact, while I’m quite conservative in terms of teaching children under age, once you’re an adult, you should be able to figure out things on your own, test them in the field, fail, make mikstakes, and learn from the mistakes you make. Ok, so, LL is “playing around” with a quarter of million people, and eventually they might fail because noboy told them what to do. It’s true — I’m rather passive in that regard. All I try to do is to incite open-mindedness: “look, there are other ways of doing the same thing, why don’t you give them a try?” If the answer is “no way, I’ll do it stubbornly *my* way”, it’s their fault.

And this is ultimately what CAN happen to LL. They’re stubbornly following “their” way. If it works out as they want, great. But it is not the *only* way. Learning to adapt to a plethora of opinions is not an easy task for whomever is at the helm of Linden Lab. All I try to do is to point out to them that there *are* alternatives, and they should look at them.

But if they don’t… and if their model works out well, in spite of everything… well, I’d look silly So I don’t “blame” them for not doing things like “I” would do, if I’d be walking in their shoes, I just provide input, ideas, concepts, models, and watch what they’re doing with interest. Who knows, their way might even be best. After all, after 7 years, they’re still around and have three quarter million users. That should tell us something. They can’t be *totally* wrong.

As I see it now, you’ve really done a very deft slight of hand on the whole favouritism discussion, making it seem like everything that many of us feel and see and analyze properly as blatant and illegitimate favouritism is only a mirage and isnt’ *really* that but is merely “business consultancy* (rolls eyes). WE are to blame for “seeing it all wrong” — or being “jealous” — they aren’t to blame for not taking the trouble to really make a level playing field.

You say WE have to get rid of our “gamer culture” where we assume that everything “works that way,” that there is a “quest” and “game gods” that we need to “level up” and “suck up” to — that we’re at fault. But they’re the game gods exerting their unaccountable power often — we aren’t even gamerz, most of us. We just work here.

You keep excusing this game-god-infused Lab as being some very model of a perfect “software company” when clearly, it’s a software company absolutely immersed and suffused with gamer and game-god and MMORPG culture. Some of its chief architects/programmers/ managers come from other game companies, are gamers, and first tackled this as a game, even using the word “entertainment” in their press releases.

In fact, it pays to go read the ad copy on http://www.lindenlab.com, and not just that for the customers on http://www.secondlife.com, because on lindenlab.com it speaks frankly of “entertainment”. One of the ways they entertain is to get people immersed into thinking they are “running a business” etc. and of course that’s easy to do when real money changes hands.

It’s they who need to get rid of the exclusivist, gamer-god culture that privileges some over others – not always with really obvious merits. Not us.

You’re feeding into this very dangerous development of recent months where the Lab is going around telling everybody they have to be “constructive” and “positive” — or get out. They close the forums. They shut out contact with people they don’t like. They privilege the smarmy, suck-up brown-nosers who have no social legitimacy. This is a recipe for stagnation, corruption, death.

And this is how you get a really outrageous coup happening with the hijacking of the voter tools, as I’ve written about extensively — one resident, Angel Fluffy, comes along and just “helps out” and says “do it this way” and does it — in the absence of transparency and effective planning for resident involvement that we see at LL. I can’t believe you are justifying such a blatant coup by your little nostrums hwere about “business consultancy”.

So he grabs the entire reform project of the voter tools, gets cursory Linden approval, makes a group with only himself as officer (these groups you’re getting all celebratory about have their dark sides as controlling instruments), puts 3 Lindens in it who are only relieved to be able to show “a resident who is given the reins” in their activity reports where they are taxed to show “devolution of management on to the community” — an voila, we have a dictatorship-in-the making, precisely because YOU and your confreres insisted on seeing this as merely a software company that *gets* to do things this way “just because”.

Well, what are we, chopped liver? We pay the freight on this floating crap game.

Whoever heard of a software company *in their lives* doing stuff this way? Of course they don’t take customers, have them work for free, and reward only a few smarmy fake smilie suck-ups. Can you imagine if real life in fact worked that way lol? Of course it doesn’t. Real software companies don’t have all the customers making content, cooking up solutions to bugs, and even reverse-engineering for free. They hire professional staff, they pay them for their work, and they submit it to public scrutiny and market testing. They don’t hide it, or discuss it semi-secretly in an IRC channel.

You never really see this, Gwyn — you’re always willing to excuse and forgive these people who are tasked with making an entire realm of human existence — the Metaverse — but are treating it as something like a private school clique or a country club.