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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.

In a word, avoid. Unfortunately it’s a competently executed movie, at least as far as acting and cinematography—so sadly, I must break with etiquette and provide a synopsis. It’s the only way to explain how truly bad the movie is.

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Finished Silent Hill 2. It was something of a disappointment. The graphics are clearly better than the original, and the fog effects are lovely… but it relies heavily on the stalest of clichés and arbitrary restrictions to railroad you. Entire buildings gratuitously have all their windows boarded over so you have to wander around in the dark. I lost count of the number of times I had to jump into a pit, uncertain of what was at the bottom. As the game went on it became more and more linear, and the puzzles got worse too. (Was there any logic to the cube room? Who the hell buys light bulbs in tins?)

My guess is that it was a rush job. The monsters show a lack of variety, and the fire effect towards the end looks cheesy and unconvincing. I also have a bias against games that use the teleporting map trick, where if you walk through a door from A to B and then back the other way through the same door, you don’t end up at A; and the “objects appear in places you’ve already visited for no apparent reason” trick.

Verdict: Creepy fun, especially at the start; worth buying when it drops to $20, maybe not worth fighting all the way through to the end.

I had a creepy dream last night. In the dream, I got up and was fetching a glass of water when I saw a humanoid shadow move across the kitchen wall. I looked behind me, and saw that the inner door was open; through the glass of the outer door I saw a figure disappear into the darkness.

I looked in the living room, and the TV was gone. Other items were moved, but still there. A breeze was blowing through the house, as if the front door was open. I woke sara, and started to dial 911.

And I woke up. I was really thirsty, and my neck was sore. I got out of bed and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As I was looking nervously in to see if the back door was really open, and reassuring myself that it was just a dream, there was a sudden burst of white noise and static from the living room, for about a second. I span around, but there was nobody there. The ReplayTV hard drive was spinning quietly, but everything else was turned off, so where could the noise have come from?

I turned on a bunch of lights, and checked every room in the house. Then I went to bed thinking about Silent Hill.