Yeah, instead of looking out the window and seeing a cool dog, or an interesting bird, you’ll see five-story dildos, fantabulous transforming guitar-men, and an exploding carnival of interesting looking people.
And I thought I had a difficult time ignoring the cool dog.
I have tried using faster than walking vehicles in the last year with the same corner capture bugs as earlier.
This sounds like you reading your own defensive spin onto it. I only skimmed it, but it seemed to be exactly what was advertised - a tour of some abandoned SL sites. Writers shouldn’t need to provide balance against your own assumptions of the article’s significance.
Would love to show you the world as it is today. I am in everyday, supervising set building, filming, location scouting, meeting with clients etc. I can’t relate to this issue!
I agree with that certainly: the headline is exactly what is written up. I am simply concerned [not only in regards to SL but media at large] that with the need for click-bait pre-conceived narratives are being green-lit by editors that regurgitate stereotypes and are simply corrosive to the debate.
I am not defensive: I am sad to see BB go as low in terms of quality of writing as other outlets…
So, what are the narratives and stereotypes you are concerned about? Why I said that you seemed defensive was because you brought a negative framing to the article which I didn’t find in it. In any case, I think it is beneficial to be critical of media, even those I happen to like.
My experience has been that BB always demonstrates a certain fondness for retro-technology, and I’d say that a ten-year old social media service can certainly qualify as retro. Sure, there will always be numbskulls whose only reaction is “Old thing is Old, LOL”. My own telepresence environments have been based off of the Quake game engines, especially Quake3, which is even more ancient.
So what is “the debate” you are referring to?
Wait, so you’re saying you are disappointed … in Boing Boing?
By a lot you mean maybe 1000 at most.
I have nothing against Second Life, I certainly spend my share of time in computer generated environments; I just suspect it of being one of those things that is doomed to be cooler in concept than in implementation; unlike either banal-but-effective text-shuffling-through-technology systems or various telepresence systems and games more tightly optimized for specific purposes.
This doesn’t make it bad; there is plenty of room below the platonic ideal; but it seems to me to be one of those concepts doomed to spend a lot of time in the shadow of that ideal(unlike systems that quietly turn out to be more used and useful in practice than their description would suggest).
Did someone mention Minecraft?
Notch is filthy rich for a reason.
The debate on SL is what I am referring too. Funny how BB seems out of touch by calling SL retro too, I had not even picked up on that. SL works super with the Oculus and Linden Lab pays out 60 million US$ per annum to makers of virtual goods and services. We are having a great time: creating, working on healthcare and educational projects, simulations for fun and games and making a good living.
It is at the same though annoying as hell when the media trots out these old stereotypes.
I don’t find this healthy at all, rather corrosive as I said: there is a responsibility that comes with being a “journalist”.
Btw: a great weekly radio program on the matter would be WNYC’s “OnTheMedia” which dissects those phenomena!
What, at Boing Boing? Nah, that’s never happen.
Back sort-of on-topic: I know of at least one university playing with reproducing its campus in Minecraft. Is that a Thing?
WHAT debate? I have read about SL here, but I have encountered no particular positions or opinions being debated.
I said that BB tends to like retro-computing. Not that BB describes SL as being-retro computing. But I think “retro” is more of an adjective, than a debate. I said that I think it can be described as retro, not that it should be. I don’t think it matters.
I asked you before - what stereotypes?
That’s great, but it doesn’t have much to do with the article. It has a very specific focus, and I’d rather critique it on the basis of what is there, rather than why it wasn’t something else. Saying that SL is or should be beyond criticism seems zealously fannish - especially since the article didn’t even seem generally critical of SL in the first place.
Minecraft is great for education. We did a whole show with a German teacher who uses MC [check the Drax Files Radio Hour = fab conversation].
In Second Life of course much more is possible but it also requires a bit more planning and knowledge of the interface. Just like any other powerful tool [Blender, Pro Tools, what have you] with more possibilities come more challenges.
For the users though I’d maintain SL is a much better choice because of true immersion and the fact you have a multi-million dollar economy that is very stable!
I encourage folks to check out the discussion about the original article that appeared on fusion.net on Inara Pey’s excellent SL centric blog http://modemworld.me/2015/08/14/con-fusion-about-education-in-second-life/
Now THAT is a nuanced look at things 
Not saying at all that criticism is not allowed. Sorry you misread me: nuanced criticism is ALWAYS welcome when it comes from knowledge and or research. Everything else is just 3rd grade essay material…
They must literally be still paying the rent. If they stopped, they’d lose control over the land and all the prims would be returned, meaning that it’d become empty. So, probably, they just sort of forgot about it? The time period when SL was big with corporations and universities was roughly 2006-2008.
Regarding the linked article. I don’t think “nuanced” means what you think it means.
Long-time SL user here. (I joined in 2005 or 2006 and was in there pretty consistently until mid-2012.)
Linden Labs made a series of poor decisions that got in the way of players & hype. Some of them were understandable or even unavoidable. Others were characterized by laziness. Some were policy decisions that were clearly advertised, while others were technical decisions that had subtle but pervasive effects.
On the technical side, there are two major things you need to know about SL. First is that it was designed in 1999 and a lot of design decisions that made some economic and technical sense in 1999 got baked in (in the same way that email is a crystallization of design decisions that made sense in 1970). A lot of the stability problems come from these decisions – like using a custom reproduction of some TCP features on top of UDP instead of just using TCP, and having a strict one-server-per-65536-meter-square-area rule. A second thing you need to know is that absolutely no effort was made (as far as anybody can tell) to avoid technical debt or keep things maintainable. There was a systematic push for new features, even when old features were completely broken. There were reportedly a certain number of LL employees outsourcing their own jobs to teams of less-competent contractors, because of a bonus structure that made that into a good plan. As a result, there were a lot of ‘fixes’ to major systemic problems and design failures that were essentially just quick hacks, and ultimately they created more bugs or got in the way of whole classes of legitimate user behavior. Anyone who has written anything in LSL that rezzes objects dynamically or interacts with the network will remember running into such limits.
On the user-policy side, despite SL’s reputations, LL has had a series of instances where they’ve lost users by creating vice laws. The first major one that I recall was when gambling was made a violation of the TOS. Gambling was basically the most effective way for somebody to make money on SL, and accounted for some large number of the businesses; while I never saw an estimate of how many people left, it was a lot. Reportedly, LL was worried that crackdowns on internet poker would affect them. Later, they made some zoning changes and limited porn/sex related shops to designated ‘adult zones’. The non-adult zones made up most of the map, and were almost completely emptied out, because one of the biggest draws for virtual reality is being able to engage in fetishes that are literally physically impossible and some large number of people were on SL specifically for that, while many others just sort of followed where the people were. Around the time of the zoning changes, the second life server system was reverse-engineered and cloned by the opensim / open grid system people. At a certain point, LL outlawed ageplay – the act of dressing the avatars of adults in such a way that they resemble children. Everybody who was on SL and had an ageplay fetish moved to OGS, because the open grid had no such rules (in fact, no rules at all – it’s a federation of sims running on individual people’s boxes), was comparably reliable, and had a variety of other features (the set of languages you could script objects in was extended, for instance, and pluggable).
Basically, LL made a series of poor decisions and alienated their own userbase. There was also a hype backlash, immediately after the hype appeared in the first place.
A lot of people liked SL. Some still do. In terms of being able to collaboratively build 3d objects with interesting scriptable behaviors with people across the world and across platforms, it’s still a good option (the only comparable environment I’m aware of for that is OpenCroquet, which isn’t properly peer-to-peer & requires you to code in smalltalk). In terms of places in which to, for instance, transform yourself into an anthropomorphic egg and use a penis the approximate size and shape of an adult deer to get oral sex by a levitating head in a jar, it’s the only system I’m aware of that lets you do that and then immediately afterwards go dancing in an all-ages nightclub. It’s the only system I’m aware of where you can buy a dildo and then program it to take voice commands to follow people around by flying through the air toward their ass, chasing them, and then spew out fireworks when it gets within range.
SL started out as a place characterized by the ease with which people could make self-replicating swarms of dicks, and how common such things are. SL is now a place where both self-replication and dicks are strictly limited, but literally nothing has been added in their place of comparable interest. So the people who wanted to build self-replicating dicks left.
One of the larger issues that higher ed institutions are grappling with is the synchronous/asynchronous debate in online learning. When you have distributed students, and time zones being what they are, asking everyone to be in the same “place” at the same “time” is a tall order.
There’s a long history of using Learning Management Systems (LMS) to handle all the media/assignments/lectures/forums/etc that a course needs. The biggest is Blackboard, but there’s also Canvas, Sakai, and a pile of others (GAFE, etc etc)
These systems are trying to do the one-stop-shopping method for all courses, with varying degrees of success. There’s an argument that a more modular systems is the “next big thing” though most of the existing systems have some degree of modularity anyway, so…
Anyway. Second Life was an interesting idea for education- and I’d argue maybe a necessary evolutionary step to get where we are now. Which is in no way to say the current state of things is an endpoint, but there you go.
