Here we go again with Hamlet nee Linden Au, paid for by Millions of Us, trying to generate the spin cycle this time to a widely-read article in the LA Times, "Virtual World Loses Its Virtues". The virtual world *has* lost its virtues, yet the metaversal myrmidons who contributed to its deflowering are in deep denial. As he's done before, Hamlet tries to offset the impact on public awareness of the issues surrounding Second Life not by seriously grappling with them, but by disparaging the messengers and discounting what critics inside the world say, impugning their numbers, ridiculing and even sneering at them. It's really a shameful display. The most odious thing about Hamlet, for my money, isn't even that he writes this tripe; it's that he actually thinks this way, like some overzealous Soviet propagandist in the Union of Writers, and actually doesn't have to be the house organist on the company payroll, as he used to be at SL, or be on MOU's dime, as he is now, to write what he does.
I'm proud to be an independent, non-paid blogster about Second Life, and as far as I know, the RL newspaper Los Angele Times isn't paid for by any business with an interest in SL, either, though perhaps they have advertisers that might overlap with some corporations with a presence in Second Life. The "firewall" that is supposed to exist between the editorial and the business ides of a media operation is never one that these "new mediacrities' like Hamlet have ever bothered with.
People in Second Life are atomized; there is no mass media within SL; accessing this population is difficult. Um, you don't even access it if you have buttered up Hamlet and gotten to be one of his columnists; the NWN fan club, as FIC as it is, still only numbers 155; contrast that with hundreds of other news, media, etc. groups and you'll see it's a paltry following. What is Hamlet's traffic? Well, he's not telling, and whether or not it's more than the Herald's, as Hamlet would hasten to tell you, traffic isn't necessarily an indication of influence.
Hamlet specializes in the derisive literalist spin on things that don't fit in with his worldview; that's how he can come up with this ridiculous figure of "only 36" people protesting about the Bush signs in SL, as if that can successfully diminish the issue.
First of all, it's safe to say that at the time I personally ran a petition drive to get SL to enforce its own TOS against this spam and disruption, I had hundreds of signatures, numerous cards that we sent in day after day with lists of people -- easily 500 if not 1000. The one card passed to Hamlet to see the text of the appeal had a mere 36. I have the cards in inventory and could go count them, but what's the point? 500 is no more valid than 36 for Hamlet. The point was already burned in to Hamlet by Cocoanut on his original blog about this linked to today's piece, he was corrected, but he still says "36" and will go on sneering "36" for the rest of his days on game conference panels.
And that's becuse, unless it's his handful of beta buddies having a socialist protest against the prim tax that the Lindens themselves already regretted as soon as they imposed it, it doesn't count. For him, protest means merely saying out loud what a Linden has thought or whispered already on the IRC channel -- that's the RCA Victrola dog for you!
REAL protest in SL is really amazing to watch. I saw the anti-Copybot protest take off like wildfire, with hundreds of people shuttering their stores and joining groups. That's not many if you count the people against some fictitious number of 3 million sign-ups
But that's not how to see it. If only 1000 out of the 50,000 land owners -- 2 percent -- are angry about island price-hikes or failure to mitigate CopyBot, that's enough to turn the Lindens around on bad policies, as we've already seen.
At the time that I and others running petition drives surely got at least 500 signers if not many more, how many landowners were there? Well...was it 5000? 10,000? Real, logging, existing, landowners, who would be the people who would care if a spinning, ugly sign marred their view. Obviously try-me unverifieds wouldn't care; landowners would. So if we had 10 percent of the land owners or even five percent, that's significant.
There were many things accomplished by that campaign, which BTW had nothing to do with loving Bush -- 99 percent of the people who hated the signs would have been glad to impeach, or at least not vote for Bush, including myself, but that doesn't mean we should be forced to sign up for extortionist sign griefing making our land unusable.
And let's revisit the Bush Guy controversy, while we're on the subject of corporate presence, shall we? Given that the Lindens always said that companies would be advertising on their own islands, I have to wonder who on earth these Lindens were saving themselves for by taking such a destructive, asshole position on the Bush guy.
It really was unseemly. They allowed businesses struggling within SL before the corporate onslaught to suffer thousands of US dollars of loss. They forced many people to give up their homes and move, or not even be able to sell or rent land. My God, what destruction. They were doing this in the name of some purified civil rights position that totally overlooked how all those people with the goddamn signs in their view destroying it lost their rights to expression and peaceful life on their purchased land. It was the most ideological hidebound thing I've seen since Soviet Russia. Here, we see Lindens not seeing their way clear to applying their ALREADY EXISTING fastidious, anti-merchant "anti-spam" TOS rule, a rule that sends a newbie to the cornfield for innocently sending out 3 queries about pictures he wants to sell to THIS situation, where a sneering, cynical oldbie on alts was crapping up HUNDREDS of sims with spam. Goddamn, I will never forgive them for that.
Despite the Lindens' perfidy -- and it was a good early warning system to understand their perfidy -- we established solidarity, helped each other, got some land sellers never to cut up to 64 m in order to avoid purchase by the Bush Guy; we got people to stand tall and not cave and pay the extortionist prices; we kept raising awareness; at times the Bush Guy would even get banned when he went too far. Ultimately, he was bought out or disappeared, hard to know, the experiment of a cynical asshole programmer with tacit or even enthusiastic Linden support done. Yeah, the population of Second Life will bend over and take it up the ass hard, even if only one ugly corporation wants to put billboards all over Second Life, and will even be willing to make them go away by paying outrageous extortionist sums.
Was that what you wished to prove, Philip Linden? Ok, you proved it. Mission accomplished! Perhaps that was the necessary next step to the corporate takeover of SL, eh?
Still, human solidarity grew stronger, people mitigated this embryonic corporate enslaught called "the Bush Guy Corporation", but most people fled to your more expensive islands and bought there to avoid mainland blight. Was that your purpose all along? "No business but my business."
It's funny, you talk to a journalist for more than an hour, and they pick out what they like. But that's fine, I don't worry about quotes being taken out of context or go into justification overdrive.
Many misread the story in the LA times as me saying (it's actually Urizenus Sklar) that "OMGODZORZZ the car companies came to SL and their gas fumes drove out all the elven folk".
Nothing of the sort literally happened. Wayfinder Wishbringer left, and makes a very good case for leaving, because of SL's poor performance and unstable business environment. He has trouble summing it up this way, because he has many conflicting emotions, and people viewing his situation are very emotional as well. They blame his arrogance or poor leadership, or they blame laggy sims, or they blame SL, when it's a little of all of these things. But all of these things are indeed exacerbated by a profound, deep-seated and zealous belief on the part of many if not all Lindens that the software for producing virtuality is more important than the virtual world itself. That's the root of the problem, and there is no way Hamlet can cover up that ugliness -- it's visible a mile away.
When the LA Times quotes me about elves and the shock of Nissans, it's about a culture shock. It's about the problem of a company ushering in companies who think the software for their applications is more important than the world. It's about a user-made world, uses who designed all kinds of lifestyles and roleplays and artifacts like bows and arrows out of their own imagination, from amateur to professional level, and made it stick, and then Nissan, which is a large, commercial entity with cars that don't really even look like they "fit" in Second Life, even being drawn and produced by a long-time SL-er, because they are meant to look like the real world, not a snail chariot. It's about a clash of values.
And the intrusion of the real world is something that zealous Puritans like Hamlet and others who wave their "It's not a game!" Bible at you every minute want SL to be so that they don't have to feel like loserz and gamerz and dweebs mucking around in virtuality. They need SL to be RL-oriented like oxygen, or they look stupid. If they cover games, they aren't cool. Even covering worlds, well, you can do one summer when you're in your 20s. But if you haven't drawn a serious-game lesson out of SL and written about how it's saving Darfur by the time you are 30, you're sunk, career-wise. Walker, are you sure your save-the-world post count is really where it should be?!
The reality of the virtuality is such that none of these corporations would be here if it weren't for the fantastical and imaginative quality of Second Life. Richard Posner wouldn't be engaged unless he could chuckle at a racoon asking him about cyber-terrorism's equivalent in a virtual world. The IBM people like to be able to tell others that they have people flying into their lectures --literally, on wings. This is all part of the VW's charms.
When I mounted a elfen bow and arrow on my wall the other day in SL, I knew there was a threshold crossed. Before, we were in Africa, exploring. Heck, we even *were* Africans. Now, we are back in our real lives, rightly pronounced as tourists, and merely mounting a trinket of a bygone era, a destroyed primitive way of life that proved actually more resilient and sophisticated than anyone knew...
If there are 1000 elves in Second Life -- about 10 times more than the people who sign up breathlessly for early news of NWN -- so what? It's not about literally eroding or reducing elf culture on sims. They may live, thrive, and expand. The elf is merely an emblem signifying "user-made culture" and what it's being replaced with now -- corporate or sherpa culture -- is merely symbolized by "Nissan" because they're the ones that made this sort of giant, out of place dispenser for cars, combining the absurdity of virtuality (in real life, you could only have a Coke machine dispense something, not a car) with the reality of the look of a Nissan. That's creative -- but it's also intrusive.
The balance has to be kept -- and the equilibrium is probably already hopelessly lost. A stampede of marketing companies coming in to set up shop have to be able to sell something to their clients. What is it they sell? It's not the church basement problem of 40-100 avatars or you violate the fire code. It's not the events -- they lag and crash and get postponed and are frustrating. So what IS it? It's the experience of virtuality itself -- flying, shopping, cybering, communing, exploring. That really is what is for sale here, and stepping on that and crushing it is not in their interests. Stepping and crushing it can be done even subtly -- and that's what I see happening. No one is available from all the top builders anymore to build something inworld, for the world's sake -- they are all subsumed into the maw of corporate contracts building things like AOL Pointe. These people have abandoned all pretense of concern about the bread-and-butter issues of avatars inworld -- traffic, lag, inworld accounts removal, etc. -- because they don't collect micropayments to live themselves.
They really ought to care more about the middle class of SL that does live from micropayments because we're the tier of creators and non-inventoriable content providers, if you will, who make it possible for people to have their presence in SL. But they don't. Someday down the line, they might buy 444 islands, lay them out with condos, and rent them after they find a Russian woman or Indian man to outsource to as the rentals agent and wait on their customers that way. Globalization!
Or else everybody will give up trying to live and move and fly in SL and just use it as a glorified webpage and chat room, especially after the put a lot of it up on the Internet like the groups and such.
What I find especially irritating is the idea that corporations don't have influence merely because they stay on islands -- and islands without high traffic. Here it's laughable that Hamlet tries to take the one embarassing factor about all these corporate builds -- their low traffic -- and converts it to a positive to show that the inworlders don't have to fear anything.
But that's literalist and silly. The corporations have had an overwhelming and largely negative impact on Second Life, at least at this stage, for the following reasons:
1. They've become dependent on the sherpas (the FIC) and enabled a tiny handful of people -- Hamlet among them -- to go on serving as overlords of SL, influencing the feature set, getting the ear of the Lindens, and serving their own interests -- and making the "look" that they adopt as architects be the Empire's look everywhere
2. They sneer at democracy, as Hamlet does, deriding the population of SL merely because they didn't show up to toggle the very seriously broken Features Voting Tool, which, like a Soviet republic, doesn't have any "no" lever to pull. Shame on you, Hamlet, thinking democracy can't or doesn't exist because of the goddamn stupid voting tool, which is a sham of democracy meant to distract and deny! The voting tool was hijacked by Angel Fluffy, and is captive of special interests. It was coded by ideological crowdsourcing Cory Linden in a day or something, and it shows -- it isn't as robust machine that can really help democracy and enhance it, but that's because the Lindens don't want democracy. It has absolutely no admission of *political proposals* or anything that isn't strictly related to the actual coding of features like "push" or "no push". For all the polling you see these marketers do, you don't see them actually attempting to access the public of SL in any meaningful way on the real political issues of SL -- verifieds or unverifieds? make clubs pay for CPU or ban camp chair scripts? etc.
3. They hog the press limelight. That's not their fault exactly if the media covers them, but as they are marketers paid top dollar to do just that, one has to fault them. Second Life news coverage has been unrelieved wall-to-wall corporate propaganda for months and months. No wonder there's a backlash! It's not just all the me-first rollouts, but the constant attempt to position SL as a "business platform" that will assist with "training". As anyone who has been in business or non-profits knows at some level, there is nothing more vastly vacuous, silly, and pointless than this whole corporate concept of "training". "Training" covers a multidue of sins. "Training" can merely be about socializing. "Training" can be just about imposing corporate culture. "Training" is, in SL, more often than not, a session within a social media venue that is about the wonders of social media...which is for...you guessed it, holding corporate training sessions about how cool social media is. It's recursive, reductive, silly, and as my father used to ask pointedly about such things: "When will the money change hands?"
4. A critical eye on the flounderings of the social media meisters is rarely cast, except by Urizenus "You Fucktard" Sklar. I'm glad he put those markers down. A lot of social media is as fatuous as the day is long. It's a time suck and a productivity suck trying to figure out how to make itself less blatantly worthless, and it probably needs to be put in time-outs in the corner more often and do its homework or something. Trying to justify social media's costs, ramp-ups, and time-sucks so often strikes me as similar to the rants of people in the 70s and 80s on coke who said they needed it for artistic inspiration. Social media so often is about...talking to other people about new social media that will enable you to have a workshop about....social media. You do have to wonder, when the mystified and scared big corporations and utopian large foundations get done with experimenting with this, and pull out all the subsidides, what value will be left.
5. Corporate events that have put on so far seem largely staffed by the sherpa cheerleaders and their friendship card networks. When I drop in on them, that's what I see. I see a lot of fluffers and wooters trying to turn out their old friends they used to make places like Neverland with to hypervents, as I call them for their hype ahead of time and their hyperventilation in the media afterward. I mean, did you go and sit on a laggy sim and watch a movie, even a Sundance movie? Well, did you??? You mean *gasp* you decided to go out for a pizza and a beer in RL, screw your girlfriend, and play old Nirvana tunes INSTEAD of sitting in laggy SL watching a movie???? Shame on you! You didn't go to church!
6. Corporate presence in SL, like much of real life people in SL, is sanitized, better looking, seemingly pollution-free. That is, it can make itself look any way it wants to. It covers up somewhat the degree of controversy that corporation might actually be experiencing in the real world, with real-world protesters.
I often comment when I go to cover such demos that the electronic equipment the protesters are hauling and the gadgets and computers they have back at their dorm rooms are enough to power a third-world village. Maybe they need to globalize a little bit of that back, eh?
It's funny how I've come to occupy a position critical of corporations in SL, when in RL, I don't join the idiot throngs at the often violent anti-globalist meetings. Globalism isn't something you stop. It's something you report on. Globalism might acquire more ethics or human rights, as former High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson tries to bring about by working on issues like trade and water in Africa. Globalism is something you might make kinder or gentler through this or that policy, but you cannot end it. Indeed, Karl Marx, sitting in his library centuries ago, was the first anti-globalist as a lot of what drove his theory and writings at the time was the underpricing of German craftsmanship on the world market by capitalists; that's why Communism, among other reasons, has to be understood as profoundly conservative, and not revolutionary.
7. Corporations have a mode of organization that is about the collective, with a board of directors structure using putting a few privileged managers at the top. This mode of organization immediately takes to Second Life, which has all kinds of smarmy utopian ideas about collectivism and social leverage and wisdom of crowds. This stuff needs a much more critical look, and accurate coverage. I have to go find this article I saw on IBM a few weeks ago in which the reporter quoted a seemingly breathless Eightbar guy saying that collectivism was the wave of the future -- he sounded downright giddy. I contacted him inworld to spar with him about what I thought was yet another bad case of British socialist mind-meme disease, but I came to find out that this guy, who works in a big company that is anything but socialist in fact, wasn't the person who actually said this quote -- the journalist mixed it up (waiting for some helpful Twitterer to scavenge this link for me).
I'm not interested in corporate-driven collectivism. Communist collectivism wasn't any fun in the 20th century, with the mass murder of millions. I hardly think "capitalist" (read: corporativist) collectivism in the 21st century will be a day at the beach, either. I'm definitely going to go on rooting for the dignity and meaning of the individual.
So, I could come up with 10 other reasons why Hamlet is all wet (and Philip, too, who uses this "corporations in their silos on islands" argument to claim there is no influence) and you could, too. We all know corporations have landed like huge water buffalo at the pond of Second Life, they are drinking heartily, and while they only seem to take a sip on their own sim, the water tables are going down, down, down. The fabric and feel of Second Life is eroding, changing. We're supposed to always and everywhere "embrace change" and say "change is good" but why is it "change" when all that has happend is that the same overinfluential and unaccountable forces from real life -- namely, corporations -- have invaded our second life? How does that fly? Why is that "a better world"? How come marketing a *brand* for Christ sake's of some sneaker or t-shirt or cell phone could come to *replace creativity and art for yourself and the world* for these sherpas? No cultural change occurred because these corporations bought out the most creative people in Second Life. This is not the Medicis and Michealangelo. This is a car company, trying to sell you an expensive gas-guzzler in real life, that's all.
There isn't really a fix for this, likely, even if corporations tried to do a lot more for social responsibility in SL -- funding the ballet or the newbie educators or sponsoring non-profit events like the breast cancer walks. They ought to do more of that in SL in Lindens and not even do the usual charity stunt. They could do much more to support more inworld indigenous businesses, not relying solely on their few hand-picked sherpas who aren't necessarily the best talent in every field anyway. It won't be near enough to solve the cultural and philosophical problem we face here, which SL has only amplified, having to do with the consumerist and corporate culture of the developed world in general.
The fix for these things lies deeper within ourselves, SL is merely a manifestation, not the worktable to fix it.
Now what of the SLLA? I find this thing as phony as a three-dollar bill. I've written elsewhere that I think it could even be a concoction of the Lindens or some sherpa firm or corporation that wishes to distract from real dissent.
Urizenus and I and a few others make one comment published in the Los Angles times about the corporate influence in Second Life -- which I've outlined here amply -- and the spin cycle goes into overdrive. First, a rash of stories about the SLLA, which helps make dissent quaint, silly, and archaic sounding, a bunch of liberation nuts who think their bombs could actually hurt something in a virtual world.
Next, the backlash backlash specialists like Hamlet -- who himself then cleverly disparages the SLLA (which had in the previous cycle already done the service of disparaging all inworld dissent as a caricature on the same leevl). It only has 70 members -- well, 30 more, guys, and you'll have about as many as NWN group in SL!
Agreed.
(Though I think the SLAA is genuine.)
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | March 01, 2007 at 02:19 PM
No one can verify it is genuine. It has no past history in SL. It doesn't fit the pattern of the usual griefers. It never attacks anything but these already-hyped and already-secure businesses that have gadzillion miles of press already and cannot be fazed by these "attacks".
Cory Edo even jokes with them and offers bounties to them for photos of making their hits. It all reeks of phoniness to me.
It's one of those things that if it didn't exist, you'd have to invent it. And that's why I think in fact it is invented.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 01, 2007 at 04:03 PM
Prof some good food for thought here. a lot of these issues are new to me and I've only glanced from the periphery. I will say information is always good for the community as is open conversation.
Posted by: Chill Moksung | March 01, 2007 at 10:21 PM
70 members.... and a few of those are alts so they can hide their already hidden identities. A psuedo terrorist group who never tell their rl identities to anyone - in case they are arrested for pig bombery... lol
Love the Red Stars on their HQ- a "left/communist" link to bring unsuspecting and unthinking Che fans on board - but demanding shares... sounds like they are trying to mop up as many supporters as possible to make Marshall Cahill the President a la Adams he wants to be.
What next on an SLLA HQ - Bush photos?
Posted by: Corp Down | March 02, 2007 at 07:40 AM
Seems to me, as long as a resident driven culture exists within SL at a significant level - and no I could not estimate the threshold for what that significant level would be - that the corporate influence will be dampened.
Come visit my place in Whinlatter sometime. No Prok, you won't like the BDSM mind-controlled atmosphere of some of it, but it is me. I have friends who, seeing my place for the first time, have said "Oh, this is so you".
And what I love about the places I love and go to in SL is that those places are a reflection of those friends. Their space, the embience, the "culture" if you will that surrounds them reflects who they are.
I used to live in Maryport. I even had the dubious honor of witnessing a "tub-girl" attack one night from my roof. I have friends who fish in Alston. So I am familiar with the Ravenglass properties and area. You can see part of you in that area, Prok. Good, bad or indifferent, I would assert that to be true.
I also suspect that those who come to SL and stay as residents, stay because of the personal connections to their own little cultural pocket within SL. Whether that is business, creating, sex in all manifestations, just plain friendships, or some combination, the resident culture - not the corporate culture - keeps SL residents returning.
In my opinion, most people object to the corporate presence out of fear - fear of the loss of the personal cultures that exist. I can understand that. SL would be a total drag if everything were Nissan and Nike. But isn't it up to the regular residents to maintain the resident driven culture? I suspect that one of the biggest risks to the SL that regular people love is that we will give in to the fears.
Posted by: Polymorphous Projects | March 02, 2007 at 09:56 AM
I used to own a good chunk of Whinlatter before you were born, Polymorphouse *shrugs*. And I sold it because somebody parked a giant casino riverboat on water there and also a notoriously indifferent oldbie kept testing submarines and missiles and lagging the whole sim to a grinding halt. I was glad to sell and get out.
Maryport suffered one tub-girl attack, and Alston suffered one tub-girl attack, both of which were made possible by tenants who had inadvertently left their vendors on "share with group" making it able to be "deeded to group" using group tool exploits. I usually policed all those areas trying to get rid of anything with a mistake like that, but something would inevitably be missed.
These attacks were awful -- Ravenglass had 3 I think -- but eventually they were ended, and the people committing them were banned, main and alts. Of course, some alts persist and return but it's been free of particle attacks mainly because people use all the methods for preventing and mitigation.
Um, I have no idea what sort of crap is intended by a little manipulative remark like "there's good and bad" in these areas based on my persona, but certainally the tub-girl isn't something I've produced, it's produced by griefers.
And if you find the buildings tacky or too amateurish or not in sophisticated taste enough for you, well, like most of SL, it's at the discretion of the tenant. They chose nearly all the houses. And it's usually 90-100 percent full in those areas, so it works giving people the freedom to chose their own houses; it works less better to dictate taste.
Places can take on the culture of people and their friends when they build or arrange it, but sometimes they don't, and take on the culture of whoever made the prefab. People selecting the prefab
Yes, BDSM is noted for its mind-controlling culture which unfortunately they constantly spill out on to others, more and more. I see this all the time. Some arrogant weekend whipper who during the week is probably some insurance salesman with a RL vanilla wife gets demanding and domineering with me, ordering and bossing me around like he's a big deal with a big expense account -- the thousands of Lindens as a demarcation must make him feel that way.
Disliking and wishing to mitigate corporate culture isn't "fear" -- if anything the "fear" could arguably be seen in these corporations, who articulate the usual knee-jerk reactions to having to deal with furries, griefers, and sexual manifestations.
I just don't see why this is "better". It's not. Some idiots in suits holding a self-important seminar on their sales figures for pouring from the empty into the void don't impress me, and I suspect lots of people, even people who buy the products they sell.
If we're getting an ugly glimpse of sexual dysfunction and even criminality blown up very large in Second Life through its capacities -- and we sure are -- we're also getting a big amplification of greed and growth-for-growth's sake as an ethos. It's definitely an ugly picture. In fact, you could argue that the violence, sadism, and mind-control of BDSM is fed by, or even originates in, the culture of consumerism and domination represented by corporations.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 02, 2007 at 12:27 PM
"I also suspect that those who come to SL and stay as residents, stay because of the personal connections to their own little cultural pocket within SL. Whether that is business, creating, sex in all manifestations, just plain friendships, or some combination, the resident culture - not the corporate culture - keeps SL residents returning.
"In my opinion, most people object to the corporate presence out of fear - fear of the loss of the personal cultures that exist. I can understand that. SL would be a total drag if everything were Nissan and Nike. But isn't it up to the regular residents to maintain the resident driven culture? I suspect that one of the biggest risks to the SL that regular people love is that we will give in to the fears."
-----
Okay, the gestalt I've been getting lately - which is TOTALLY unscientific, biased, and all that, but maybe you know what I mean if you have played various online games and been in various online environments - is that SL as we knew it has peaked and is on the wane.
The revolving-door eyeballs are increasing tremendously. The people I meet lately are here just to see what the deal is, to find sex, or whatever - for the moment.
Nothing more than you would do if you visited any web site out of curiosity. Except they are doing it as avatars.
This is apparently what Philip wants. But it lacks what I call "involvement." These people aren't even entertaining the thought that SL might be a place to stay in for a while, like they would assume that for other online games and environments.
It feels like being a part of a freak show, with the revolving-door players being the audience.
It feels like one sort of game has peaked and another is now on the rise. And the one on the rise is apparently the one Philip wants - the 3D web, where people just come and go and mostly go.
I've gotten this gestalt of a sort of a peculiar deadness. Not just in friendship lists no longer lighting up, or the deadness of formerly vibrant forums, but within the game itself.
Now it's not ALL that, of course, and it isn't necessarily going to stay that way. But that is how it feels to me now.
But I do fear that it will grow more that way, rather than less. I don't think that fear is anything but realistic. "Not giving into the fear" (if such a thing were possible) would in no way stop it from happening.
In other words, I don't think this is something we can stop just by refusing to be afraid it will happen.
To me, it's all simply the natural result of the progression of SL to a place for real-world businesses to advertise (and for education, and all that, for prestige), rather than a place for ordinary people to play and create and enjoy.
I see two potential futures:
1. SL will grow more and more real-world-centric, with fewer but more coalesced, isolated sub-cultures, which exist somewhat as oddities. People will no longer think of SL as a place for regular, normal people to live in.
2. The real-world entities will eventually lose interest, and SL will be ours again.
Both those things will take time - particularly the second one. So I'm expecting a long, long time of (1), and by the time (2) ever happens, if it does, SL will probably be yesterday's news for everyone, really. Not even cool and hip for regular players. Ruined for us, essentially.
I sell houses, so I have a sort of pulse on the level of involvement of new people.
My impression (totally non-scientific) is that very little of the increase in sign-up numbers represents people who will become involved and stay.
It feels like, oh, used to be maybe 50 percent of people would hang around for a while, and get involved, but now it's more like 2 percent.
Whatever the numbers are, it seems to me a lower total number of people are becoming involved and staying than once did, despite the 4 million number.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | March 02, 2007 at 01:04 PM
"You can see part of you in that area, Prok. Good, bad or indifferent, I would assert that to be true."
That's just a recognition of the truth. Some people will see you as "good", some as "bad", some don't care (indifferent). Regardless of what anybody thinks of you personally, you can be seen in your effects on the Ravenglass area and surrounding sims. Maybe not in details of builds themselves, but your personal management style affects the builds and how the area looks and feels. In fact, I've seen comment by those who do not like you personally who would recommend your properties because of what you bring to management of them. Personally, I think Ravenglass and surrounding sims are quite nice.
(Do you see an attack in every comment?)
Sounds like Whinlatter has improved much since you owned there. Most is owned by a few, regular SL residents, which seems to help a Sim greatly. It had been split into some First Land and some larger chunks for auction in late 2006, but much of that has been absorbed/consolidated now.
I find your BDSM views amusingingly off base, but that's ok. I can accept that my views don't match yours and let you keep them.
If you were to visit and find me home, I would try to welcome you as I do with most. You'd probably see little if any direct evidence of BDSM. And that's what I think SL needs - more regular residents builing a welcoming SL - rather than worrying what corporate entities might be doing in SL.
Cocoanut, I agree. I call them "flash Avs" because they seem to come and go in a flash. And yes, I agree that LL policies seem to encourage rather than discourage that in ways. Which is why I personally want to create as stable a little corner as I can while I am there - to be a part of a resident culture rather than a part of a "flash" spectacle. That's the issue with fear - in what manner do we respond? Do we flee, or build solid fortress into the rock? Do we keep trying to build resident centered attractiveness to counter the shallowness of the corporate? I think these are question that, while maybe brought up by such fears, we can answer for ourselves.
Posted by: Polymorphous Projects | March 02, 2007 at 02:01 PM
Well, I'm just doing what I have always done, but we will be run over.
coco
Posted by: Cocoanut Koala | March 02, 2007 at 03:37 PM
I'm glad you find the Ravenglass area nice. Again, this is probably 90 percent due to the people who themselves build or chose prefabs. I try to make it just so that they have clear viewlines and don't ruin the view with the obvious junk like spinning signs.
Yes, BDSM people like to extend their controlling and mind memes to others who disagree with them or refuse to bow to them or who won't role-play their RP. They like to *pretend* they obtain consent. They don't, however.
And an example of that is someone in BDSM who tells you that they are "finding your views amusing" or "finding your views are not liberal" or "finding your views are erroneous". In each and every act, they attempt to control, humiliate, vilify, as they do in their RP. But we didn't sign up for it. So we utterly reject and condemn and expose it.
Be amused all you like; your lifestyle is intellectually and morally indefensible and unacceptable : )
I'm sorry, I just don't feel the need to visit your home. I'm glad you have one and continue to defend your personality and your choices and that you even chose not to "make it all about BDSM" in your face as so many do. That's all welcome in SL. It's not enough to keep the water buffalo from draining the pond water, however.
Again, criticizing corporations or change doesn't me "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt"> Hardly. What is means is criticism of their Fear Uncertainty and Doubt if anything, which is manifested by the aggressiveness, rapaciousness, and inconsiderateness with which they carve out market share, media share, mind share, and labour share. People who are that aggressive and think only growth and profit are metrics for success are themselves the ones usually most seriously fearing loss, failure, lack of success, undercutting by competitors, etc.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 02, 2007 at 04:03 PM
I've noticed the same as Cocoanut- that the people seem more obviously shallow, flighty, here today, gone tomorrow types. Yet the pancake continents seem to be being filled all the same, and they're all buying houses to put on them.
What's funny though, with all this increased "real world" influence, is that the money seems to be lagging behind the RL photos, companies, skype links etc etc. Like someone thinks they're being generous, rather than insulting when they toss me a 200L "tip" for taking time out just to be helpful because I felt like being helpful. Of course, the other side of it seems to be here in evidence- I had all kinds of demands made about changing my whole house system or else I "wasn't listening to my customers" all from one guy who never bought anything from me. It's wierd, I don't remember it being like that. Maybe it's just me, but I never, ever, went asking for a refund when I bought a skin by accident (two actually, 2500L I didn't mean to spend but I got use from them eventually) or if I saw something that wasn't quite what I wanted, I just shrugged and walked away. I never once thought I should begin harrassing creators to make changes to their products to suit me, or that I would be entitled to call on an hour's worth of personal service time for the sake of a $2 asset. I don't know, I guess that's how people are. The real/virtual slider seems to fluctuate precisely in accordance with the selfish desires of people.
It's only a game when it suits, and it's serious business when it suits, too.
Posted by: Ace Albion | March 05, 2007 at 06:51 AM
>It's only a game when it suits, and it's serious business when it suits, too.
I totally agree. People are in entertainment mode and casual and just chilling and hanging about "in a game," but as soon as they encounter a service, they sit up and bark and demand it to be a business with unimagineably high standards that they don't get in RL, especially not at those prices.
I've always accepted that they're playing a game and entertaining themselves, and I'm waiting on them. That's how it works. But what I don't do is wait on them *for their entertainment* to fuel their manipulative, power-hungry asshole fantasies. Sorry, they can find other people to torture with that game. There are limits, especially when the price tag on their entertainment involving me dancing attendance on them amounts to $1.50 US; even at $150 US, I don't play BDSM, no way.
I see that people are getting more and more rude and entitlement-happy, it could be that because more and more casual entertainment types are coming in who aren't as "high-minded" about creating, or it could be that the overall performance of SL frustrates people so much that they lash out at service providers.
I wonder perhaps I'm just wearing thin on all the really rude fucks I've had to deal with lately, but when I check my records of a year ago, I see there are simply less of them; I even see some of the same repeat customers that have become even more rude now than they were when they refunded in spite a year ago lol -- how quickly they forget.
I'm going to rant just a bit on this.
I get a guy twice putting out a security orb, despite having it removed (they are banned under the lease except above 250 m on islands), even when warned specifically over and over -- making it impossible for an entire island of people unable to return to their own homes they paid for for hours, or for me even to fly into my own property. I evict him, tell him to pick up his things, and I still get his little friends whining that something unfair has happened to them.
I get some nitwit spewing particles throughout a building disturbing all the other tenants, despite being told that it is not allowed and being asked to put it away twice, and when they are evicted and refunded, their boyfriend says, hey, you refunded to my girlfriend and not to me -- even though she paid the box (the realities of this situation is VERY common, the girls pay for a LOT of the sex nests, not the cheap-ass boys).
I just had someone who first claimed that "on her other rental" she was able to change "PG" to "M" at a whim as a renter (false) and then began to berate me because the parcel she just rented was PG and residential and not M and commercial. She kept haranguing me for 20 minutes, claiming I advertised the parcel as M and commercial, when the ad clearly stated, as did the lease, what the terms were.
In my general ad, I have the word "commercial" but it was explained that this was for clearly-marked store rentals, and this person felt entitled to keep haranguing me and demanding me to convert a lot for her, because of a general store ad about all the kinds of parcels available.
I constantly get people demanding to have build rights so they can change house textures (I send them to you to BUY the houses Ace lol); to place their house for them (which I can't do, it's their object) (I provide lots of help cards and assistance to how to do that); to concern myself with policing their sex nests so that no one ever walks in their door 24/7, etc. etc.
I marvel at how very often, they think they can expect this at...$1.50 *US* PER MONTH. Not $150 US or $195 or $295 PER MONTH US which is what an entire hidden island able to be completely unavailable to any outsider, but...$1.50 US, $200 a week Lindens.
I find that the less people pay, the more entitlement happy people get.
I now can usually tell that if a person IMs once asking the answer to the obvious question already on their lease, that I can expect probably 50 more similar questions -- and they ask the questions not because they are new, but because they want to be manipulative and feel they have concierge service.
I find that the same feature that makes people send food back in restaurants and behave arrogantly like pricks with service people clicks on when they go on to SL. They are spending a grand total of $1.50 to $6.66 US. But because it is denominated in the thousands, they feel like Big Spenders.
Where once, these stories were limited to a few times *a month* I now find them a few times *a day*. I'm constantly revising cards and leases to try to make things even more abundantly clear for such people, so they never have a problem in the first place, but if I load up any more information on these things, it just won't be read. I can't start writing stuff like "I can't place your house for you because it's your object" when they haven't grasped this about permissions yet quite possibly.
With my apartment buildings now, after absorbing hours -- days -- of abusive rants from people demanding tours (of a building they can fly around? that has all identical floors) or instant access (hello? when they didn't pay yet? lol) or full money-back returns after they've stayed one day (cancellation fees are there for a reason, to prevent joy-riding), that I've had to become absolutely hard-nosed and put out a sign that says exactly this:
YOU MUST HAVE A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA AND READ AT A 12-YEAR-OLD'S LEVEL TO RENT AT THIS APARTMENT BUILDING.
I spell out the self-service terms brutally, telling them to rez a cube, break in, pay and join the group on their own and only IM me when they have a floor number and are willing to stay.
I've cut the bullshit down by 75 percent since I did that. I have every building filled with high-school graduates now. Those who didn't graduate can find another landlord to torture.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 05, 2007 at 11:18 AM
Prok, thanks again for posting this. Second Life is the place where fashion journalism, public relations and technology reporting are converging -- New World Notes is the prime example of this. Thing is, technology writers can't or won't admit to how much their trade has become like fashion journalism: beholden to new product and large companies, wrapped in the thin guise of fetish and justified under the pretense of innovation and creativity. It's not like Second Life is solving homelessnes or anything. Yet some people speak of this game with kind of the faux-gravitas that fashion writers regard this year's haute couture. That any self-respecting journalist would embrace this, as well as gleefully blur lines between public relations, corporate interests and independent reporting, is beyond me. But yet I cannot look away, such a spectacle it has become!
Posted by: Tenzin Tuque | March 14, 2007 at 11:42 AM