Getting a Second Life
Imagine a world where you could create literally anything you could imagine, and explore it in 3D. What would you make?
If your answer was “strip malls and casinos”, I know a place you’ll love.
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A while back I had the unusual experience of having my employer suggest that I spend some time trying out Second Life. IBM is quite interested in the commercial possibilities of 3D shared environments, and has even set up some experimental conference spaces.
I managed to get into Second Life via the experimental Linux client build. It was slow, but did the job. It was also very good at making ATI’s buggy video drivers crash. But between crashes and bouts of net lag, I managed to explore a little.
What I found was mostly depressing.
When Linden Labs set up Second Life, they had a vision of a William Gibson style cyberspace, with people flying around in 3D conducting business. So they set up their digital world as a free market, with its own currency, exchangeable for real money. Unlike the real world, however, land in Second Life isn’t purchasable; instead, you have to rent it.
This has had an unfortunate effect on the virtual world. If you want to build any kind of building, you need land. If you want land, you need to pay for it with Linden dollars. So you need an ongoing source of Linden dollars, or you need to spend real money. Hence, about half the buildings in Second Life seem to be either strip malls or casinos.
The strip malls mostly sell clothing and other accoutrements for your virtual body. If you buy a building you need land to put it on, and most people don’t have land, so there’s not much point selling buildings.
The space not taken up by casinos and strip malls is taken up by nightclubs. My guess is that they’re mostly owned by the same people who own the adjacent strip malls, and are used as a tool to stimulate the sale of fashionable clothing.
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I don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all commercial trash, though. There are some great places in Second Life. My favorite is the International Spaceflight Museum, which has scale models of an enormous selection of real life spacecraft. There are some nice Zen Gardens in Achemon. Braunworth has a reimplementation of the town of the first Silent Hill video game which I quite like wandering around.
Sadly, the quality of 3D objects is additionally limited by the fact that everything has to be built inside the game; there are no proper 3D tools, and you can’t (say) construct something with Google’s SketchUp and import it into Second Life.
So, if 95% of the population can’t afford land, can’t work out how to make things, and eventually get bored with watching pixels dance in a nightclub, what does everyone do? Well, mostly Second Life is a giant chat system. It’s IRC with 3D graphics. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it seems such a waste of a 3D rendering engine. And in practice, the 3D doesn’t really add much to the IRC experience.
There are also technical issues. Each patch of land has a limit on how many people can be in it, and the limit gets hit fairly regularly. IBM has resorted to buying a square of 4 patches of land, and building the conference hall where the corners meet. The client is also slow and chews CPU. Even on my brand new MacBook Pro, the frame rate drops rapidly as soon as ten people turn up in the same place.
So, is Second Life the future of the Internet? I’m going to say no, not without some pretty radical improvements. It’s an amusing place to spend a few minutes every now and again, but so far, that’s about all.
Related posts:
While necessarily your description is close to what a tourist might find, say, getting dropped in the middle of the red light district in Thailand, and getting the impression of what the Thai culture, history, and society is from watching the prostitutes on the streets, it nevertheless misses 95% of the point :)
Perhaps a better analogy would be dropping into MySpace or YouTube for the first time with a link from a friend and getting some porn pages/movies. As these all link to other pages and movies of a similar kind, a new visitor of MySpace or YouTube quickly gets bored. “Is that all there is?” Well, definitely, the answer is no, but you have to understand how to search for the interesting content. As a “tourist”, with a limited time at your disposal, you might never find those, though (admittedly, both MySpace and YouTube have much better search facilities than Second Life).
Your assessment that “you have to rent land to own a building” is partially correct, although your statistics are not precise. In fact, you can own a deed to a land — it’ll be yours, registered in your name, and you can resell the deed to the land for a profit — even if effectively the “land” is stored physically on Linden Lab’s servers. But it’s propriety, and valuable property, nevertheless — just like, say, a website stored somewhere on a hosting provider.
Around 1.5% of all registered users are owners of virtual land for their buildings. You’re required to be a Premium user for that (costs US$72/year if you pay annually, plus a fee for the overall size of your land).
However, a much larger slice of the population rents land from other users. Again, the analogy is hosting your page with a service provider who buys servers wholesale and locates them on a data centre, and then resells web space cheaply for other users — often dropping in some tools to help you configure your web site. This is way harder to estimate. There are 7.3 million accounts, of which a bit more than 4 million are active, and it’ll be very likely that a million or so users rent space from others. That’s 15% of all accounts or so, or 25% of all active accounts. These values have to be estimated based on observation and samples, since Linden Lab has no way to gather those statistics. In other words, while ownership of property is limited to about a hundred thousand users, the number of users that effectively “owns a permanent building” in SL — irrespectively of how they pay for it — is ten times that number.
Next, the economy. It’s true that you need land for a permanent structure, but anyone can build on a public sandbox — and these are usually teeming with very creative and talented people all the time. In fact, one business opportunity is creating your own sandbox and use advertising (or a nearby mall) to earn enough money to pay for the land you’ve bought/rented.
Now, you say: This has had an unfortunate effect on the virtual world. I wonder, though, how you’d imagine that it should work, since you don’t provide an alternative model — remember that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay for the 5000+ servers hosted on a 10 GBps link on two data centres in California and Texas. Someone has to pay for the people maintaining the network and the servers and provide technical support. While it is arguable that the development costs can be diminished (or avoided) by open sourcing the software — something which Linden Lab is doing; the client is already open source, the server will be in a year or so — someone has to pay for the code developed so far.
I wonder thus what alternative model would you suggest to create a “metaverse” where millions of people share the same environment, having to support the costs of thousands of servers (and maintaining them!…) and have “free buildings”. Usually, at this point, the “open source mantra” is invoked to the rescue. But… there are a lot of open source solutions (OpenCroquet is one, but there are more). All work reasonably well. None have ever produced the amount of content (1.6 million GBytes and counting), number of users (7.2 millions registered, and counting), or economy (US$1.5 million transacted per day and counting). So on one hand we have a working metaverse — with a population and an economy, but where things “cost money” — and on the other we have “wishful thinking”: the technology is there, and it works, but it has failed to attract a massive amount of users. This might change in the future, but we don’t know yet.
Then, we’re talking about people. And yes, it’s all about people. Although it’s definitely true that an estimated 30% of all content in SL is mature/adult, and it’s even more true that this is the kind of content that immediately catches the attention, there is a whole lot more. How many of the 2 billion websites do, in fact, contain adult content? I have no idea, but I could very well imagine that they’d be “hundreds of millions”. The difference is that you don’t get them slammed in your face unless you’re looking for them. The Web started with tons of adult content, and next came business, and it took quite a while until people could be browsing the web the whole day, on social Web 2.0 sites, and never ever see either a mature site or an e-commerce site. We can do it now.
On Second Life, however, 1.6 million GBytes of content are still not enough. We might need a million million GBytes of content (like the Web!) to be able to walk the whole day around Second Life and never meet a mall, casino, or club. Or, of course, like when visiting Thailand, we should do our homework or get a guide, and look upon what nice and interesting things there are to offer. And — surprise, surprise! — there are a million interesting things to see in Second Life — if you only know where to find them!…
On the technical side, yes, there is a lot to be desired, and it’s true that SL could be “much better”. There is not a single user that didn’t look at Second Life and said “this should be better”. You need a fast computer and a state-of-the-art graphics card to be able to be in the same place as 30-50 avatars — although your card will “only” be rendering around a million polygons per frame. There is lag, there are sudden crashes, there are issues with “broken” textures that crash your client, and there is a lot of finetuning to do on your computer so that it runs smoothly. These are all true. They are reminescent of the early days of Windows 2.0 — you started to get a glimpse of what the future of Windows was going to be (and it was a bright one!), but envied the Mac people with their sleek and, most important, working interface. So you had a clear picture of what was going to be the future. Second Life is like that. We look at photorealistic games and know that Second Life will be like them one day. Alas, we wish that day would be “now”.
The lack of an “import .obj” feature requires a detailed technical explanation: there are two reasons why this happens. One is purely technical: all content in SL is streamed data, and the way their system works, almost everything is converted to very tight packets of information (or even lossy-compressed images that can be easily streamed — Philip Rosedale, LL’s CEO, did, after all, “invent” audio streaming). It’s far more efficient to store N primitive types, have the necessary meshes for each primitive on the client, and just store “tweaking” parameters on the servers. These are just a handful, so they’re quickly sent over the network. Avatars, for instance, are all based on the same 7500-polygon mesh; however, each avatar can be personalised with 200 parameters that can give a virtually infinite number of combinations, and no two avatars are ever the same. Again, on the server, you just need to store those 200 parameters and not an .obj for the avatar mesh. The same principle is used throughout Second Life for everything that is rendered on the display.
1.6 million GBytes of content, if these were all .obj meshes, would very likely increase a thousandfold. Also, the bandwidth requirements for SL would also dramatically increase, as well as the need for a huge local cache. This would mean overall much longer waiting times until everything loads. So it’s a compromise. In fact, Linden Lab recently introduced “sculpted prims”, a sort of normal map that is downloaded as a texture and applied to a sphere. This allows, to a degree, “organic” shapes, which can be done on any 3D modelling tool, and, through a very complex conversion process, uploaded to SL as a 64×64 texture. It obviously allows just a limited “mesh-like” ability, but it’s better than nothing — and definitely keeps the professional 3D modellers busy in trying to adapt their existing content to a format understandable by Second Life.
The second reason, however, is simply a social one. Professional 3D modelling tools are complex (even SketchUp is daunting for a beginner unwilling to spend a lot of time with it). Linden Lab wanted a 3D tool that could be used by utter amateurs. While their own tool is not so dramatically good (well, it predated SketchUp for half a decade…), at least it allows people to have fun building things, and learn from the experience with simple items and do more complex things as they manage to understand how the platform works. 90% of all users have at least built something; 70% of all logged-in users create something every day. This is quite dramatic — it would mean that Second Life is a 3D modelling platform that had, at some point, up to 6 million people using it to create 3D content. Contrast that to the number of users of, say, Maya. How many copies has it sold? How many people in the world have used SketchUp? We should compare the numbers (they’re not easily found out) and think if a “3D modelling tool for amateurs” is such a “bad thing”. Well, at least it means that everybody in Second Life can have fun building, instead of relying on professional 3D modellers to create content for them…
Please understand that I’m not claiming that the technology behind Second Life is outstandingly good. It is most definitely not. However, it’s the only user-modifiable metaverse that has “millions of users” — and has grown out of “lab experiences” where “hundreds” of users, on a 1 GBps LAN, create content together, collaboratively. So the technology is crude; the tools are limited; the environment feels “primitive” (pun intended), but… what is the alternative? We all dream of a faster Second Life, with full meshes, unlimited avatars in your field of vision, and photorealism. All, naturally, user-created and stored remotely, and streamed-on-demand. But we don’t know if anyone can do the same (all existing competing products are split among three kinds: much worse overall look, but user-based content; much better looking, but content is fixed and stored on your hard disk; or a mix of both, but never left the research lab), better, cheaper, and faster. Linden Lab promises photorealism in five years. At least we know how far they went in the past 5 years (one of betatesting, four in operation) and we can rely on them to give us a “better Second Life”… in five years, not five days, or five months.
So is Second Life the future of the Internet? Well, Second Life is the text-based Web browser of 1992. Nobody believed in the “World-Wide Web” until Mosaic entered the scene with graphics and a cute interface, even if it meant slowing your computer to a crawl. Second Life might, or might not be, superceded by a better designed product; but, for now, the Metaverse is, in effect, Second Life. We can only speculate on what might come next; but in the mean time, visit Second Life as a knowledgeable tourist and go to the interesting places. And you might find out that it’s a rich environment, socially and intellectually stimulating, and very business-friendly — if you learn to avoid clubs, malls, and casinos. You’ve learned that on the Web; it might be even easier on the Metaverse.
Just a sidenote:
When I began my “SL-career”, I tried out the Linux and the Windows client (on the same machine). I noticed no difference in speed.
I can relate very well to what you are saying.
IRL all of us also rent rather than own land. That is to say, if we don’t pay our property taxes, the government will take away the land we “own.”
When I tried Second Life a while back, I found that my 2400 AMD processor and ATI drivers simply could not render the world very reliably, so I gave up.
Gwyneth:
The problem is, I have searched for the good stuff in Second Life. I’ve trawled through the ads, I’ve tried looking at the places that are popular, I’ve searched for keywords that might match interesting places. I’ve searched the web for people who’ve written about interesting places in Second Life. But the few good places I’ve found don’t really make up for the fact that most of the rest of it is a total wasteland of malls, nightclubs, casinos, and buildings sitting empty.
Renting land from other users isn’t the solution to the land ownership problem either; rather, it’s an additional problem, in that it increases costs and leads to the development of a bunch of people who do nothing more than buy and resell virtual land without adding value. Your statistics of a 10% who own land and a 90% who rent from them reminds me of the real world, where the top few percent own the vast majority of the wealth. This is not a feature of the real world that I want replicated in a virtual world; it doesn’t make for an improved virtual world experience.
I understand that servers must be paid for. However, coming up with a workable business plan isn’t the problem I’m interested in; I’m interested in whether Second Life is a compelling and interesting virtual world. If the business model dictates that it’s a world of strip malls and strip clubs, then to me it’s not compelling or interesting, even if it does work as a business.
Maybe Second Life will get more interesting as it gets bigger. However, it seems to be taking the reverse course to the course the web took. The web didn’t start off filled with porn and casinos; it started off filled with interesting content, and the porn and casinos came later. Can you go in the reverse direction? I’m not sure, and I’m not convinced that Second Life is an affordable or viable place for interesting content to flood to.
And for what it’s worth, quite a few people believed in the World Wide Web, or at least something very similar to it, years before Mosaic. I know because I was one of them.
Anyhow, the best thing you could do to convince me of the value of Second Life would be to post coordinates of some of the interesting places you say exist.
As Gwyn points out, there are some small holes in your arguments. Overall though, I would mostly agree with you. Except that you see the glass half empty. Yes, you mention in passing some good things about SL and that’s why I say HALF empty. There are “challenges” (or problems if you want) in SL. There are wars in real life too. But SL is still a vibrant and interesting world.
It takes a lot of patience to explore SL and to find something that interests you. And it takes a lot of time to meet people and make friends, and that is one of the most important parts of SL.
And it may not be the right state of mind for trying SL when you do it because “your employer suggested that you try it out”.
Mathew, you sound like someone ingrained in your views, and probably little that could be said to you would persuade you — and probably the problem starts with the fact that your employer asked you to do this so it felt like work, and not fun.
It’s funny how waving around the name “IBM” got Gwyn here, and with such a long post! I couldn’t agree more with her statement, never said *inside* SL, where she pulls her punches on criticizing open source:
“So on one hand we have a working metaverse — with a population and an economy, but where things “cost money” — and on the other we have “wishful thinking”: the technology is there, and it works, but it has failed to attract a massive amount of users. This might change in the future, but we don’t know yet.”
It’s a stunning critique of open source, that with all the open sourced stuff out there for virtual worlds, none of it has been compelling enough to attract the same number of users as a proprietary company. And that’s about par for socialism in the real world too — once you take away the coercion factor and the mass killings, it’s hard to convince people to stick to it — it’s always only a very tiny elite that wants it, and mainly wants it for the masses, not themselves.
I don’t believe that Gwyn’s figures of 10/90 are correct, but it completely misses the point to treat this 10 as if they were greedy ugly land barons with moneybags in some caricature in the Guardian or some other leftoid paper. The people renting land are not rich — or they wouldn’t be investing in a hardluck, risky game like this. They are just determined. Some are part-time stay-at-home moms, or pensioners, or disabled people, or students working part-time. It’s not a cohort of the sort of people Mathew imagines and loathes from RL stereotypes. In fact, these rental businesses — and there are *gadzillions* of them in SL — function as income generators and cost-coverers not only for those people doing the renting, who range from people leasing 512 meters to 512 islands, but for Linden Lab. I have yet to hear a coherent business plan involving anything but land sales and tier — and even Philip Linden, who you’d think would be the first one to enthuse about something *else* than land sales as a business plan, told us today yet again that they will keep the mainland open, and keep printing land, at least for the forseeable future. Of course, this could change next month or next year, we realize that — but it’s not at least an articulated plan.
Not everybody avatarizes well. Not everybody *needs* a Second Life. Not everybody has to have one. It will always be denigrated as less than real life because it’s virtual. That doesn’t mean millions of people will not acquire it for all kinds of reasons. The sheer mass nature — eventually, not as fast as some say, but eventually — of people acquiring virtual identities in virtual worlds will work toward making it more real — just as TV and the telephone and the Internet became part of the “real” parts of people’s lives.
IBMs four-corner thing is wonky, and like everybody’s — it’s not workable. People need to ditch the concept of SL as mass media, serving the masses, having giant stadiums to influence the masses. It’s not about mass media. It’s about niched, long-tailed, user-made and user-shared media and that means you cannot come in and be passively entertained at will, but will have to find your niche, or make your media and your own groups, just as you would searching for a YouTube to watch or someone to connect to on MySpace. If those social media thingies aren’t for you, understood, much of it is mediocre or low-brown and in mass taste. Eventually more sophisticated uses will be found.
The camera began as something to record mainly family portraits, relationships, historical events with political figures, and sex. It took a some time for the camera to move out of the hands of elites with expensive equipment into the hands of every person to record whatever they wanted. I think the adaption curve for most media works that way. I can remember as a child having some old relatives who thought telephones were never to be used except in dire emergencies, and then, only for very short barked commands, like in the military. I can remember having no TV, then only black and white, then colour, and now…no TV again.
When I first came to SL, I was disheartened by the empty cavernous malls, the preoccupied snarky people in build mode, the elitists, the griefing idiots, the obsession with clubs and porn. But it was a set of tools with which one could take up a narrative. So I worked at finding my way in it and parsing it out and making my own world which consists of everything to rental communities where people talk to each other and become friends, to building sandboxes open to the public, to a land preserve, from SL to RL businesses — and mainly homes for people who in fact don’t spend all their time on their sex beds but who have a wide variety of things they do from creating to learning to attending political rallies. I don’t pretend that it is more high-brow than it is. I do realize that making it better means picking up your own hoe and digging in.
The “You hate Second Life because your employer suggested you look at it” excuse is weak, especially since IBM’s area is one of the better bits I’ve managed to find. IBM also suggested I adopt Java and Eclipse, yet a few days ago I advocated to a novice programmer wanting to write a game that he write it in Java using Eclipse, rather than trying to get to grips with C++.
The argument that nobody needs to respond to my criticisms because I’m obviously decided on hating SL is pretty weak too. If I’m so determined to hate it, why do I keep trying it? Why do I keep upgrading to each new client release? Why did I try three times to install the proprietary ATI video drivers on my ThinkPad purely in the hope of improving the performance of Second Life? I spent a good 6 months trying the system from time to time, attending discussions and other events, before commenting on it.
I don’t see the lack of an open source SL as a stunning indictment of open source at all. It could be that SL is popular simply because it has an advertising and PR budget which the open source projects lack.
And the point about land barons wasn’t that today’s Second Life landowners are rich land barons (though Anshe Chung is alleged to be); it’s that SL is setting up an economic system which will ultimately result in land barons.
Anyhow, I repeat my earlier request: if SL really is great, post the coordinates of some of the great stuff. Why engage in lengthy ad hominem explanations of why you think I’m biased against SL? Evidence speaks so much louder.
meta wrote: “post the coordinates of some of the great stuff”.
Svarga, Numbakulla, Gardens of Bliss, The Future, Zero Point, Cave Rua, Samurai Edo. And really, these are only a few of the places that *I* like.
I cannot give you coordinates though to sitting with a new friend on a floatie, in a pool by the beach, on the land that our group just bought. In RL we are on different continents, separated by an ocean. In SL, we stream music to each other from our jazz collections and we end up reminiscing with nostalgia about progressive rock.
SL is not just a 3D virtual world, it is also a community, a place of friendships, cooperation and discourse. I have met so many interesting people and I have made friends with some of them. There are no coordinates for that.
As an analogy, I was once on a short trip to Chicago and I stayed at a hotel in Naperville. I chose to drive to downtown Chicago without taking the highway. I ended up driving through some sordid neighborhoods in west Chicago, late in the evening. As a tourist, my impression of Chicago includes also that experience. But if I ever chose to live in Naperville, I would just use the highway and only go to the places that I like. It is the same thing with SL, once you find your niche in it. You can still explore because there is so much new stuff getting created, but I rarely see a mall or a casino anymore unless I am particularly looking for one (well, a mall, I am never looking for a casino).
Chicago is not a city for everyone. SL is not for everyone either. The real Chicago is also not the same as the Chicago in the postcards. But Chicago is a great city nevertheless and a review of Chicago should not be based on parts of west Chicago (or south, haven’t been there, but I’ve heard of it) with only a brief mention of the Sears tower and no mention of its culture.
PS: as much as your experience is not unique, here is another one that is probably just as common: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/85/8526sci3.html
I’d just like to say that I tried Second Life out of curiousity, and found it way too much like my first life to be interesting. That, and it was a clunky as hell.