I log on several times a month to hang out, chat about books, have DJs streaming good sounds,
Try scripting and 3D design, enjoy the interactive artworks and games others create.
There are long-running SLARP groups. and of course, porn and cats.
It works well for some instructional purposes, but not for others.
One successful project trained medical students how to interview patients, using trained “clients” with a script the med students didn’t know about. And training counselors. The body language and expressions are good, and when you are both avatars there is no uncanny valley.
One FAILED project was HP’s “help desk” inside SL. If you can boot your computer, load a complicated program and connect to the internet and see the screen, there’s not much wrong with it.
Second Life has been a mess to me. Apparently meant to be a social platform where you could be creative, unfortunately it had intrusive ingame ads everywhere selling virtual services. Texture loading took forever. There was a limit to how much could be built in any area. Owning land was very expensive. The RPG elements were nonexistent or primitive and turned off in most areas. Every single one of these things was better in Minecraft. The only drawback to switching to MC was all the unusual shapes of objects were gone, but there’s a mod for that. For $20/mo. I can have a decent MC server and we can all live in an enormous virtual world and fight monsters.
Every so often, my nostalgia for SL kicks up again in full force. I joined way back on January 1, 2005. I was prompted by a Boing Boing banner ad, actually. Spent 5+ years there, and I still have a tiny little monument to my former Second Life in the northwest corner of Louise sim (funded by selling off my Linden bucks weekly allowance and the occasional product sale from a shop running since 2008). I visit it every few months to make sure everything still works- putting fresh flowers on my own virtual SL grave.
Those were among the most creative periods in my life. I’d spend hours on random tech projects, and on tweaking my various homes and workshops. My virtual pogo stick was a worldwide hit! There was even a brief stint making screenshot webcomics for the in-world newspaper, my own personal version of the Internet’s version of Warhol Time.
Oh, and there was also a brief flirtation with virtual publishing, starting with Cory Doctorow’s earlier books for a game blog contest. My book format never caught on, but I still see my homebrew cover art for the SL edition of Eastern Standard Tribe floating around (the text was open, the publisher’s cover was copyrighted).
For a while, I honestly thought SL was going to be the seed crystal around which the future of the virtual world grew. At the time, we all took Snow Crash as our virtual bible, even if Stephenson turned up his nose at the attempts. Alas, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
Yes, considerably less but not really comparable experiences.
The last year I went to BRC I was sitting in camp relaxing and watched a car drive up and park in the empty slot across from us. Two guys in their twenty’s got out. Pulled a table out of the car to the edge of the road. Set up laptops. And started gaming online. They rarely left the table for the time they were there. I’m a developer and a gamer and always looking at my phone but when I went out there one of the things I liked was being completely unplugged.
Nothing wrong with gaming out there of course. To each their own. But it did mark a pivot when BRC was no longer internet free.
I remember a few years earlier when Hurricane Katrina hit and everyone lined up in center camp to use one sat phone to call family. It was a scary moment for many but also a moment when everyone pulled together.
The ‘ghost town effect’ is something I’ve noted since the time of MUDs and MUCKs and which has continually re-appeared in every kind of virtual environment platform that’s come along because of a common idea among their designers that the environments --landscapes and architecture-- are the chief ‘content’ drawing users. And this has always tended toward monetization models based on virtual real estate schemes.
But in practice, virtual space is social space. It’s only reason to exist is to be a stage upon which users communicate and perform for each other and it only needs to exist for as long as it is inhabited. People go onto these things looking for other people. So, typically, people congregate at the first entry points of virtual habitats and over-flow into a handful of most popular, easily accessed, gathering places, with the rest of the environment largely ignored except when small numbers of people want privacy. This tends to create bottlenecks as it taxes the limits of server-centric architectures that always seem designed with an erroneous assumption that people will be distributed more-or-less uniformly over the whole environment. And so, over time, most of the persistent virtual space becomes a ghost town, filled with elaborate creations originally intended to impress a few people for a short time and consuming much system resources that no one ever sees, or can easily find and get to, or often even enter when they do stumble onto them as they are often locked away behind virtual barriers as ‘private property’. Private property in a persistent shared environment makes no sense whatsoever. Unless you are making traditional computer games, there really is no practical point to vast contiguous persistent virtual environments.
It’s long puzzled me how no one, over these many decades of such platforms, seems to have realized that VR isn’t about the environments but about the avatars, their interaction, and the user’s ability to express through them. The end-users typically get it right away. Frustrated from the start with its limited avatar graphics system, people on Second Life were quickly hacking that to create avatar options the original creators never imagined or saw a need for. And that same story repeats with every one of these; from the MUCKs, to Palace Chat, to the latest VR chat systems. Designers always seem to underestimate the importance and role of the avatar.
This is why I’ve long thought that VR needs P2P architectures. Systems without vast persistent environments and central servers but rather a dynamic multiverse of pocket realms hosted on generic net resources and where the development focus is on the front-end, the avatar, and tools of creation --just like the Web works. Only then will we see VR habitats as big as the Web.
As someone who is still a daily user of a MU* I can’t agree more with these observations. I can personally attest to the amount of effort that goes into building out a wide selection of interesting areas to explore only to have the majority of a player base hang out in one or two popular spots. That said, the people building those spaces are getting to express their creative impulses and do derive satisfaction from it and those spaces do get explored, no one hangs around them is all. As for private property in a persistent shared environment, well that makes perfect sense. Sometimes you want a space for just yourself and a select group, it’s normal expected behavior.
As for the end users being the ones who discover the need for more options when customizing their avatars, that one I can personally attest to. Especially in certain MU*s where roleplay is common, people like the ability to heavily customize their descriptions and change them on the fly like they would clothing in any real life situation. I’ve coded my own personal description system of modest complexity and I know many players who have coded systems with a ridiculously minute level of detail and complexity.
I completely agree with the point that there is a use for private space and a desire/need for user expression through environment crafting. But, if their purpose is private activity, it isn’t actually necessary to have these spaces take up room and resources in the same contiguous public space. In VR we have an infinity of possible dimensions freely at our disposal and everything has a zero-marginal cost.
One of the interesting user reactions to the increasing cost of having private property on Second Life was the hack of ‘skybox’ scripts. These scripts would automatically spawn temporary private rooms and complexes randomly located in the very high altitude of the Second Life virtual space where they were effectively invisible and out of normal ‘flight’ reach. They would be linked by similarly spawned teleport objects with optional keys. Objects/props could be added to the scripts to outfit the spaces, and those could have their own scripts attached as usual. To create the illusion of large vistas or landscapes around these otherwise small spaces, skyboxes would use backdrop matt pictures like a stage set. With a skybox you could craft your virtual dream home of most any size in one of the sandbox areas and carry it around in your personal inventory to deploy whenever you needed it, all for free. A possible infinity of little worlds for every occasion in your pocket. When you’re done, it’s gone. Skyboxes were sometimes used like model sets for role playing games and one elaborate set was designed to simulate the Tardis from Dr. Who, along with many of its ‘destinations’.
This hack made obvious the essential flaw in the concept of private persistent property in VR. In an environment where everything is bits and anything can be created on demand --including space itself-- what is the point? I suppose that question speaks to our zero-margin future too…
Certainly, you might want many people’s participation in crafting persistent common spaces too. People may want to share their creations with everyone, which you want to encourage. But that should always be clearly established as an open environment --a commons-- not intended to be private. No fences, locks, or barriers.
There were some videos in the past of people trolling ‘private’ clubs in Second Life, where people would rent space to make personal buildings in the midst of public areas, put no fences on them (because they couldn’t figure out how the scripts worked), and then get violently angry when strangers dared to walk into their perfectly open ‘private’ space. Such conflict wasn’t necessary at all, save for the developer’s desire to monetize this virtual real estate and perpetuate the delusion of static private property with presumed rights. The thought that people actually spent money to maintain their own imaginary private property in Second Life always struck me as bizarre. Takes both a special kind of chutzpah and a special kind of sucker to monetize the imaginary…
