Arcade Exchange Update

Revision 2.95

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Marketplace: http://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/22206

What’s New

AES (Audio Engine System)

When we first built the arcade series, we weren’t entirely knowledgeable about scripting in the high-end. Of course, there was the llPlaySound command to handle short clips, but when you’re dealing with arcade machines that have audio loops measured in minutes, even for the attract modes, you can see how this falls short as a solution. Stringing together the audio commands with llSleep in between only goes so far, and when you begin extending the amount of files needed in that loop, the rest of the menu system begins to stall while it waits for the audio and sleep commands to complete.

This has been an ongoing issue for the life of the Series III Arcade Exchange, but we’re proud to announce that as of Revision 2.95, it is no longer a problem.

We’ve re-written the audio engine system (AES) to be more dynamic, pre-load items in advance, and handle hundreds of audio clips in a loop without interfering with the main script.

What his means for you: The menu system is now responsive, even when playing the audio loop, as the AES has been separated into its own script and handler to multi-task.

As a result of the AES upgrade, your arcade machines are now able to loop many minutes of audio when toggled – in many cases, an entire run through the game itself.

That being said, please keep in mind that the pre-loader is not an indication of actual time to pre-load but merely an estimation. The actual time to pre-load and play those clips is entirely dependent on your connection speed and other various factors such as sim lag and Second Life itself. You may not hear the entire loop the first time through because of this, but we’re pretty certain the second time through you will.

Support Call Decal

On the back of every arcade machine, there is now an Andromeda Games Support Decal (Upper Right Corner). Because your arcade machines are under “Second Lifetime” Warranty, you can always trade-up to the latest revisions or have broken machines fixed for free. However, it hasn’t always been clear who to contact or get in touch with to handle this. Sure, we put that warranty information into your Instructions card that is included, but we also know that customers aren’t always interested in reading.

As a result, we’ve put the support call decal on the back of every machine, and made it an active call sticker. Which is to say, if you click on them, it’ll give you the warranty information, and contact for support. It’ll also page me (Aeonix Aeon) in-world and let me know who is requesting support and what machine you’ve invoked it on.

We don’t think it gets any easier than this, really.

Various Updates

There have been some amount of various issues (minor) which have gone unfixed in the past on our arcade machines. While not all game-breaking, they did warrant another look during this update and a correction. TRON, for example, had a minor alignment issue with the side panels which left a small gap. The Glow was set way too high, and so on. It is also currently one of two arcade machines that do not have an animated screen (Space Invaders being the other). With this machine there are some technical limitations in-world which we haven’t quite sorted out yet – the screen is not uniform and due to the complexity involved with the build (geometry and faces) it isn’t feasible to animate the screen as of yet. We’re still looking into it.

Fix-It Felix Jr has had the animation set for the screen re-done with better quality, and the audio is now much better without the lag. However, this game is only available in the Arcade Exchange Mega-Pack as a bonus.

Joust had the same panel alignment issue as TRON, and so it was also corrected in this update.

Tetris as of 2.91 and earlier is now broken – the game itself no longer works. The 2.95 update corrects this.

Instruction Card

The instruction cards on all of our Arcade Exchange have been entirely redone for legibility and to include new information. This includes a better explanation of your warranty so you know what is and is not covered. I’ve made the card more unified with ASCII headers and such, so now it should be quite easy to discern all the main topics as you scroll through. The same has been done to the card for “How to fix Flash for Second Life”.

Marketplace Availability

During the long tenure of the Series III Arcade Exchange, our customers will have noticed that the original premise of the name meant that you could purchase only the Polybius arcade machine on Marketplace and then trade it in-world for the one you really wanted. While available in-world via our vendor boards at certain locations, we didn’t make them available on Marketplace directly.

That is until recently.

There are many pros and cons to doing this, and most importantly is that being a near perfect replica of the original arcade machines in real life poses a bit of a problem. Many hours of debate and discussion have happened over the years about this very issue – IP Infringement.

While we absolutely will not contest that our arcade machines are IP Infringing, there is a deeper explanation about why they should be left on Marketplace. If you read below, we’ll get into those details.

Marketing

One of the other things you may have noticed as of recently is that the ad-copy and marketing for our products has been updated to be more uniform and professional.

Having a real life marketing background helps in this case, in that I used to work for Pulse Point Media as a VP of Operations.

Now, just as a reminder, when I use “we” and “I” in these posts, it’s a matter of who in AMG I’m talking about. I refers to me (Will Burns, the founder) and We refers to the rest of the team involved with the products (such as RobsterRawb Jaxxon, Jon Dragoone, et al) inclusive.

When writing these blogs, I’m writing them on my own and so it’s always coming from “me” as a representation of the group interchangeably. Just wanted to clear that up in case you were wondering.

In any event, as I have had years of marketing experience, I decided to go ahead and apply that to our forward facing image by creating proper ad-copy for our arcade machines. A unified look and feel so to speak. It is purposefully reminiscent of an Atari logo in a subtle fashion.

I think it’s something you don’t normally see with a lot of items on Marketplace or in-world. Of course, the bigger brands do this properly, but that’s the difference between the big kids and inexperienced. Doubly so for the listings involving Arcade Machines on Marketplace – but we’ll get to that below.

The ad-copy is mirrored on our boxes now, and the look/feel is also in our magazine advertisements (as you see above at the beginning of the post). We regularly advertise in both Attention! Magazine and Playdolls as a two page spread. It is clean, gets attention, and gets to the point with a visual and short, witty slogan.

We’ll be using this format going forward.

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Backstory

In the course of the Series III Arcade Exchange, we’ve undergone quite a lot of updates and revisions. Originally conceived in 2010 before Second Life had mesh ability, it was a major overhaul when we started updating them all in higher quality mesh.

Back then, and even today, we spent quite a lot of time sourcing our materials and pouring over reference photos for the arcade machines in real life. There was and still remains a lot of points to why we would go to such painstaking trouble with these builds for what amounts to a virtual product with a limited audience.

VIPER Licensing

One of the biggest issues with doing something like this is the obvious elephant in the room: IP Infringement. In the modern age, it is considered the scourge of IP Holders, and takes up quite a lot of time attempting in vain to police their Intellectual Property online.

The standard tools for this give those IP Holders the legal precedent to DMCA or issue a Cease and Desist order. On Youtube, we see this as “Copyright Strike” where a claim is filed against a video.

But does this really solve the problem? It’s a never-ending battle that is both costly and time consuming, with little result. You win battles but arguably are losing the war.

In the example of the fan created game AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), it was a brilliant game made by fans out of the love of the game. In my opinion, it absolutely did justice to the franchise and IP. However, it still remains that they did not have permission from Nintendo to use that IP and so Nintendo issued a DMCA to take it down.

But here is where it gets tricky.

The tools of DMCA and C&D are not effective in the bigger picture. If anything, it is akin to cutting the head off of a Hydra and being surprised when it grows back a thousand heads. What DMCA and C&D invoke in the modern age is known as the Streisand Effect – which is to say the thing you want to get rid of instead draws more attention and becomes more available as a result.

In the case of AM2R, this was true. Yes, the fans who made it took it down and complied with the DMCA, but those who had already downloaded it simply mirrored the files all over the world and on BitTorrent.

If anything, AM2R ended up with far more visibility in the media and higher accessibility as a result of the DMCA from Nintendo. In short, it had the opposite effect they wanted. Their strategy backfired spectacularly.

Back in 2013, I wrote a chapter in a college textbook whereby I outlined the solution to this miserable state of affairs: VIPER.

In the beginning, I outlined that IP Holders rarely (if ever) have a clear avenue to pursue in the instance of user generated media. For instance, most companies have a clear protocol to handle either a Producer of content or a Consumer of content, whereby a producer is seen as a large media firm that can pay a large licensing fee up front and a consumer is just the person who is expected to buy such items or be exposed to what the producer has created.

But what about the prosumer culture? The user-generated media made by the consumers as non-professional producers?

This is where we get into the grey area of legality and approach as we look at spaces like Second Life. Yes, those companies have every right to issue DMCA notices to take content down – but is it effective? In this case, the answer is absolutely not. If anything, it only exacerbates the problem as we see with AM2R.

You take one down and twenty more pop up to take its place.

So the premise of VIPER is to be an effective tool for IP Management in a user-generated content environment. Something that Second Life is sorely lacking, and companies in the real world do not currently subscribe to, which is exactly why we see this Streisand Effect continually playing out despite their best efforts.

VIPER is an acronym for: Virtual Intellectual Property Engagement and Recourse. The premise is simple: to manage IP on the prosumer level effectively and without the content explosion back-fire otherwise seen with typical DMCA approaches.

In the case of the Arcade Exchange, the premise is quite clear – to make available the best options for those media examples as a poison pill approach to IP Infringement. If high quality versions exist, it makes the countless low quality knock-offs irrelevant and so they will slowly cull themselves. By leaving the best options to fill a need in a space whereby a company would otherwise not be engaged, it has far more positive impact in regard to IP Management and Protection than had the same companies sent an army of lawyers to issue a paper storm of DMCA notices.

In short: Absolutely, these arcade machines are IP Infringing. By no means should DMCA take-down be implemented as a recourse. They are there to actually cull the plethora of existing knock-offs that are low quality, and in effect have the actual intended outcome that the constant DMCA take-downs and account bans have tried to accomplish all these years.

VIPER is a mindset that follows one of the biggest rules in user generated worlds; Whether that is the hobbyist at home making a fan game, somebody making creative content on YouTube (Adult Wednesday Addams for example), or virtual worlds like Second Life: Work within the system.

In this case, “the system” means not the legal recourse you’ve been given (DMCA etc) but the mentality of the community by which the IP is existing.

In order to understand VIPER licensing mentality, you as a company must ask a few questions to qualify the action:

• 1. Will a DMCA result in the desired outcome, or will it backfire and cause a Streisand Effect?

• 2. If our end-goal is to reduce or eliminate the IP Infringement, protecting our intellectual property, then would engagement in the system to fill the supply where there is clearly a demand actually achieve this end?

• 3. What is the least involved manner by which we can accomplish #2 on this list?

• 4. Does it make sense to engage and ask for a marginal licensing fee on each sale of said item in a virtual world (percentage) or is it enough to sanction the item as a preventative measure to cull the majority?

The answer in this case is obviously to identify the best version of the IP Infringing material and sanction it. However, one must also be willing to leave the other low quality versions alone to their fate as a result. This is how to eliminate the Streisand Effect in virtual worlds and elsewhere while actually accomplishing your end goal.

That doesn’t mean as a company that you should be saying “This is an official product” of our company. What you’re really saying here is: This is a licensed product in a virtual sense, we acknowledge it, and it represents the IP and brand in a positive light. It is the responsibility of the content creator to handle the sales, the marketing, the updates, and customer interaction.

In the event that said virtual item no longer represents the IP in a positive light, then you have a dialog with the end-user about how this can be corrected (reasonably). Again, we’re not going into things DMCA-Akimbo. After all, you’re running the risk of punching a hole in the dam of IP infringement and letting the torrent of knock-offs take its place.

We clearly don’t want this to happen.

This is also entails that companies (internally) set up some sort of “Best Practices” guidelines exactly for this purpose, and to convey to the end-users (consumers) that should they wish to use the IP in this manner, these are the rules they must follow.

Of course, in this document, the point is to be fair about it. So don’t go into it with massively unbalanced disincentive. In example – saying “Sure, you can make and sell this in a virtual world, but we expect a 90% cut on money earned.” or “Sure you can make this but you cannot sell it in the virtual space or make any money on it.”

Let’s be real here. If your goal is to cull the IP Infringement and protect your IP, it does you no justice to create a hostile environment whereby it makes more sense to just ignore you and do as they please, albeit in a less visible manner.

See also: BitTorrent and AM2R.

You absolutely don’t want to drive those virtual goods underground, because then you’re really screwed. So be fair about it, make some light concessions, and be willing to work within the system and with the end-users themselves to achieve these means.

The perceptual cost of those virtual goods sales versus the amount of money you’ve been burning trying to DMCA everything is like night and day. The perceptual loss of revenue from said virtual goods is negligible by comparison and is far less than what you would spend to police it otherwise.

So instead of approaching as a loss, approach it as a quadruple positive in your favor -

1. The loss of perceptual revenue from said virtual item costs you far less than trying to police it via typical DMCA means. Instead of counting it as a loss, count is as time and money saved. You could be paying lawyers ten or one hundred times as much to have zero impact on the state of affairs versus the negligible loss of the virtual item for sale having a massive impact on the state of affairs. It just makes perfect business sense.

2. Because the items in question are high quality, consider them as a marketing gain instead of a lost sale or cost. You’re not paying for that marketing, nor the time it takes to create the items and maintain them. You’re not paying the person responsible for making it either. You, as a company already know how costly this normally would be if you hired a marketing firm to develop this sort of content and maintain it. Again, this is advantageous to you.

3. High quality items in a virtual world represent your brand in a positive light and are the antithesis to low quality knock-offs, thereby killing two birds with one stone that costs far less than the DMCA nuclear bombs you’ve been using that apparently couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. It is actually effective, and that’s what you’ve been trying to accomplish all this time – isn’t it?

4. Instituting negative penalties for IP Infringement when it is presented in he best possible light to do justice to the brand is actually counter-productive in the most exponential fashion possible.

Allow me to expound a bit on the last point further.

Normally, yes the companies can issue a DMCA to Linden Lab concerning said items. Linden Lab would, therefore be legally required to comply, and as a result likely issue a temporary or permanent ban on my account in the process. This, again, is typical. It happens the same way with YouTube, and elsewhere.

But here’s the fallout from those actions:

1. The highest quality items would no longer be available, thus creating a void to fill in the market.

2. That void would quickly be filled not with one but likely dozens of IP infringing materials to take the place of the dam you just broke.

3. What is eliminated on the open marketplace will thrive in-world under the radar, making it impossible for the same IP Holders to find.

4. You’ve punished one creator for doing the one thing you actually needed done, and undone the positive outcome of those actions while vastly multiplying the negative outcomes. You’re back to square one.

It wouldn’t make any logical or reasonable sense to therefore issue a DMCA or Account Ban. There’s literally no positive outcome to doing so, and it amounts to dropping the bomb on your own foot making matters worse instead of better.

That doesn’t mean companies will listen to reason.

VIPER is simply an appeal to reason, and to accomplish the IP Management companies so desperately need in a world that is exploding with content. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

What the Arcade Exchange represents is a viable means to accomplish exactly what the owners of the IP have been trying to do all along and have been failing at.

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High Quality vs Low Quality

When it comes to virtual worlds, or any other media, there is no shortage of high quality examples. Just the same, for every high quality example there are ten times as many low quality “cheap” knockoffs.

You can very well buy a Galaga arcade machine on Marketplace for 99L$ and you’d get something like what you see to the left from Brazilian Surf.

Yes, it works (if you’re lucky)… but that’s about it. What you’re getting is a generic cabinet haphazardly retextured with a media prim glued to the screen.

It doesn’t have the game history, it doesn’t have an extended audio loop, it doesn’t have an animated screen, and more importantly it looks nothing like the actual arcade machine. We’re not even certain it has any sort of warranty or support if it breaks. This is the standard fare when it comes to arcade machines in Second Life.

Then you have the Arcade Exchange version of Galaga to the right which, as you immediately notice is of much higher quality and detail. It has far more features than the cheaper knock-offs, and is jam-packed with attention to detail.

If you were Midway (or whomever owns the rights to Galaga), which one of these would you want representing your IP?

Only one of them actually does it justice, and that is the entire point of VIPER.

We’ve supported the Arcade Exchange since 2012, with bug fixes, updates, and revisions. As of Revision 2.95, there is a service call sticker on the back of them all to quickly and easily contact us if ever your machines break or you would like to trade-up for an update.

So long as you own one of our arcade machines, we will support them and continue working to make them better.

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Cognitive Dissonance

Diagnosing Wonderland & The Future of Virtual Reality

 

 

The question was posed to me recently as part of the panel for Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education about what I feel the future of virtual worlds would be, and to define better what the next 18-24 months should focus on for companies like Linden Lab with Second Life. These are questions being bounced back and forth between the moderator and the panelists to sort things out prior to the panel this weekend.

 

My explanation for what I saw as the history and future of virtual worlds as a whole was a bit out of the ordinary in that I likened it to being a psychiatrist trying to diagnose Arkham Asylum. With the popular definition of insanity being “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” it is a perfect explanation and analogy.

 

What I’ve seen over the past twenty years is a textbook case of cognitive dissonance and quite possibly insanity, and so (even humorously) I relate to the Arkham Asylum analogy in that the only real explanation for the situation today and in the past has been a combination of cognitive dissonance and self-imposed insanity.

 

Nearly every case in virtual worlds up until today (not surprisingly) has a doppelganger in the past. There are a few very distinct phases that the industry goes through with each iteration, which makes it dead simple to predict where it will go and for what reasons.

 

But despite knowing this, it is much harder to convey this information appropriately in order to break that cycle. It isn’t because the information is wrong, nor is it because that information does not have enough evidence to support it. What it boils down to is flat rejection of new information due to strongly held belief to core ideals.

 

In this manner, the inmates are running the asylum.

 

If I were to define those phases, it would look something like this:

 

• Phase One – Introduction of a new client based system.
• Phase Two – Introduction of the VR in Browser system.
• Phase Three – Introduction of HMD & Related Hardware.

 

Each distinct phase leads to the next upon the trial and error of the prior. For instance, in the early 1990s there was Worlds Inc and their methodology of client as virtual world. You would download the entire world up front before you could enter and each space was a predefined area. After that was ActiveWorlds which was actually a technology spawned by Worlds Inc but rejected in favor of their other in-house client. ActiveWorlds had a dynamically downloaded environment and user-generated space in-client with the tools built in as a sandbox.

 

This was about the time that VR in a Web Browser arose with standards such as VRML/X3D and plugins to view those worlds emerged. VR on the Web, had an offshoot as Blaxxun 3D (B3D Today) and Cybertown was one of the VRML multi-user environments on the web that utilized this.

 

Later in the 1990s, we saw the popularization of virtual reality really take off, and HMDs and hardware became more mainstream. Companies such as Vuzix (1997/98) and VFX had headsets back then, in combination with peripherals and devices which today are the genesis of modern peripherals and devices.

 

Gaming companies during the Phase Three timeline also began introducing their own peripherals. You are most likely aware of Nintendo’s Power Glove, which was a stripped down version of a VR Data Glove from VPL. Jaron Lanier was actually the guy that was called in to consult Nintendo on making it. Sega and Atari also were slated to make VR Headsets for their consoles at the time, but obviously failed in more ways than one.

 

Jaron was actually pretty popular back then as he also consulted on stuff like Minority Report, Johnny Pneumonic and Lawnmower Man. However, this is really the tip of the iceberg for what his man is responsible for in the industry. For a more in-depth biography – check here.

 

The point of this observation being that when somebody says Jaron Lanier almost definitely knows more than you about the past, present and future of virtual reality, only a fool would challenge that. So in a recent WIRED magazine article when he stated it was like a weird time-warp listening to Zuckerberg explain what he thought the future of Oculus VR was going to be, we are really in no position to try to go in there and correct the man.

 

After all, Jaron is also one of the founding editors of WIRED magazine itself. This guy is like one of the godfathers of virtual reality, with an academic and accomplishments list that may as well be untouchable.

 

Interestingly enough, that doesn’t seem to stop virtual worlds enthusiasts from thinking they are going to do just that – once again showing the irrational decision making aspect of cognitive dissonance, and the blind adherence to the idealized future of virtual reality and Second Life. Cognitive dissonance makes you do really stupid things.

 

Seeing other analysts in that article also echo the same sentiments isn’t surprising, and it’s not because they’re just trying to be Debbie Downers or just suck up to Jaron Lanier... it’s because they have a long history in the industry and remember when it last repeated.

 

 

What you have to remember is that people have been making the same pitch as Zuckerberg for a good thirty years, and it has never come to fruition.

 

I didn’t hear anything that Zuckerberg said that hasn’t been talked about before in the VR community for a very long time,” says Brian Blau, an analyst with research firm Gartner was part of hard-core virtual reality community in the ’80s and ’90s. “It has always been billed as a next-gen communication technology — something that can provide a more immersive and deeper connection to somebody else.”

 

The truth, as Blau points out, is that most VR technology creates a very solitary experience. It’s something you do alone, not with others.

 

Recent history has shown that if you try to make it more than that, it struggles to find an audience. Second Life — the virtual world that received such hype at the turn of the millennium before falling into obscurity — is the big cautionary tale. And that’s what Zuckerberg and Facebook are eying: A new Second Life. They even talk of selling virtual goods in this world, painting this as a potentially significant source of revenue for the company.

 

 

If you think it’s just WIRED, Jaron Lanier, and an analyst from Gartner making these assertions, you’d also be wrong. Even UbiSoft and gaming companies are luke-warm to the virtual reality hype.

 

 

Might we one day see a new Assassin's Creed or Far Cry game that uses virtual reality technology? According to Ubisoft Vice President of Creative Lionel Raynaud, it's possible, but technology like Oculus Rift or Sony's just-announced Project Morpheus need to put up big numbers first.

 

"VR would need to sell at least 1 million units to be viable for development," Raynaud said tonight in San Francisco during a roundtable interview attended by GameSpot.

 

 

Of course, that was amended shortly afterward because making a statement like that in public would cause a shit-storm in PR to HMD makers who desperately need the big support. Having people not drinking the kool-aid and saying how great it is will hinder their adoption, and so everyone needs to get on board. But you get the real thinking in the first quote before they got that call from Sony ripping UbiSoft’s president a new one, who in turn had a pleasant talk with Lionel the next morning.

 

But it doesn’t stop there... even Business Insider is making similar calls about virtual reality, albeit a little less direct. Just saying that Facebook buying Oculus was just a throw-away at worst because it doesn’t matter if it fails.

 

 

 

 

Well, it matters to me and probably you if Oculus tanks because the wide reaching implication is that the industry falls back into obscurity and relegated as a fad once again, as we rinse and repeat back to Phase One. But that’s pretty much what is awaiting Oculus VR going forward...

 

This time it’s actually a little easier to see that coming, because Phase One is already tipping it’s hand prematurely in the form of hifidelity from Philip Rosedale. There’s your next Phase One “VR as Client” kickoff.

 

It’s starting to blur together at this point, as the industry is just throwing everything together in a pot and hoping something makes a recipe.

 

So the take-away here is that when Phase Three runs its course, it is usually about this time that we cycle to Phase One again, to repeat the history.

 

Looking at this logically, we can see the correlations quite clearly and unmistakably. It’s a matter of historical comprehension and not speculation, which is what analysts are citing when they are making their assertions about the current situation.

 

When we find historical doppelgangers to modern day industry, we can therefore trace the historical context and outcome to the modern attempts as well. Looking into the future involves looking into our past, so long as that present and future insists on borrowing from it heavily.

 

Take into consideration Avatar Reality/Blue Mars. An updated carbon copy of Worlds Inc as a model and software. It followed the same premise and operation, and therefore was subject to the same outcome. When this was explained to them, there was cognitive dissonance as described above – and so it was impossible to avoid that outcome.

 

Both models existed based on downloading pre-made worlds prior to entry, and as a matter of course, both existed on the premise of content creation fees for creating and storing those worlds.

 

 

 

 

But what of ActiveWorlds and Second Life as doppelgangers?

 

They both exist as dynamic user-generated virtual worlds, they both thrived on a simulator business model, both had a hard time justifying their Premium accounts, both offered personal houses/spaces as a benefit, both famously spent much of their time saying that updating their software was impossible or not feasible, and both suffered from not investing in that re-write to update their systems properly.

 

Both ActiveWorlds and SecondLife surround themselves with favorable opinions, pass the buck or make decisions not based on feasibility but on unwillingness to do so. Both are notorious for implementing things only after users find a way to hack the functionality into their viewer or repurpose existing methods for new methods, and both are notorious for dragging their feet or trying to bury dissenting opinions while rewarding only favorable opinions (cognitive dissonance).

 

I could go on all day about the similarities of practice and outcome between the two, and even the community itself shadowing the past, and how ActiveWorlds is the doppelganger of SecondLife, but the only thing that ultimately matters is that the outcome is the same if you are mimicking a past iteration.

 

So if we want to know what will happen to Second Life and ultimately Linden Lab, we merely have to ask what happened to ActiveWorlds as a result of this sequence of events.

 

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When the Phase Three of the 1990s failed, it recycled back around to Phase One again, and so we saw another round of VR as Client initiatives which again borrowed heavily from the prior generation. There.com, Second Life, etc all found their roots historically and had no problem copying it with a little more polish this time. But each one of those iterations succumbed to the same outcomes as the generation they were mimicking.

 

Again, we’re talking about blatant examples of cognitive dissonance and popularized definition of insanity.

 

So, too, it wasn’t a surprise to see Phase Two arise again a few years ago with the re-popularization of VR in a Web Browser, since the introduction of WebGL standards. But again, if you’re going to follow the historical route, you are already doomed to conclude the same way. It was no different than the rise and irrelevance of VRML/X3D and the companies that had a vested interest in VR on the Web in the 1990s versus the rise of WebGL and VR on the Web again a few years back.

 

In this generation, the version of Worlds Inc methodologies were mimicked with BlueMars, and the methodologies of ActiveWorlds have been mimicked by Linden Lab with Second Life.

 

It is actually eerily uncanny how this is repeating itself. Even the discontent with Second Life leading to reverse engineering it to make independent versions under OpenSim mimics what happened in ActiveWorlds with third parties rushing to make their own virtual world system altogether or via purchasing a white label version of ActiveWorlds license and them differentiating themselves as their own independent universe/galaxy.

 

The latter isn’t surprising to me in the least because a certain Adam Frisby (SineWave), who you might recall is one of the people responsible for OpenSim was also known as Gwala in ActiveWorlds at the same time as that independent universe/3rd party offering rush came to pass. So when the same discontent happened in Second Life, or maybe that virtual worlds frustration carried over from ActiveWorlds, it’s no surprise that Adam was on the forefront of OpenSim in the beginnings.

 

This is why knowing your virtual world history means so much.

 

 

“I really can’t believe nobody else sees this happening.”

 

The take-away from all of this is the answer to the original question posed at the beginning. What do I think the future of virtual worlds will be, and what can be done in the next 18-24 months to put a company like Linden Lab on the right course?

 

Well, the answer to that question is a quantum answer. It exists as a failure and success simultaneously depending on what choices are made going forward. It’s not something that can be reduced to a sound bite or explained in a few minutes, because the answer to that question is a monumental amount of reorganization, education, and execution across the board – not to mention it is entirely at the mercy of people who experience insanity and cognitive dissonance to enact, which is a nice way of saying it more than likely will be ignored or completely half-assed if considered.

 

But here’s some initial thoughts on what to focus on in the next 18-24 months, and by no means is it all-inclusive. That’s what having an advisory board is supposed to do for you over the course of long-term engagement versus trying to sum it up in a power point in ten minutes.

 

Because let’s be honest... if anyone could have fixed the virtual world industry in ten minutes, they would have by now. And if anyone could have fixed Linden Lab in ten minutes the CEO roster wouldn’t look like a revolving door, nor the company a graveyard of half-assed ideas, unfinished work and mid-life crisis.

 

So let’s start simply:

 

If the industry continues mimicking the past, it is doomed to repeat it. That means if we’re unable to truly re-imagine and evolve virtual reality into something new and exciting, something relevant to the real world on a broader scale, it is going to be relegated to repeating the same mistakes and we’ll have the same outcomes.

 

So the first order of business is to actually learn the history of virtual worlds/pop culture, and much of those outcomes, in order to avoid the same mistakes.

 

I’ve provided a link to a comprehensive paper on this exact subject that covers the entirety in detail. Subsequently, it’s my own paper from Association for Computing Machinery published last summer. I’m just nice enough not to make you pay for it. That being said, I can’t read and understand it for you on your behalf...

 

The second order of business is to get your own business in order. Figure out what actually is a Premium benefit and what you were bullshitting about (read: poaching the community). If you’re ripping off the community with it, you need to stop that and learn what the term “Added value” actually means.

 

The third order of business would be to resolve the company identity crisis. Realize that Second Life is a virtual environment platform in which all manner of things can be created for countless use-cases. Then realize that you’re not a video game company. Also learn the difference between virtual environment and video game.

 

If the platform itself were made more robust to cater to that content creation, Linden Lab wouldn’t need to make games independently as stand-alone products or purchase a content distribution platform. They already had both in Second Life if they chose to support it.

 

Instead of chasing their tails and playing “me too”, had they understood that Second Life is a universal platform that empowers creation in countless use case scenarios – they would have realized a few years ago that it would also be an excellent platform to empower an Augmented Reality future where Virtual Reality merges with Reality.

 

Some kid in Japan got bored and made this in his spare time. It makes what Linden Lab and the rest of the industry has been up to and trumping as the next big thing look like a monumental joke.

 

As an aside... I know how this is actually done in real time, and I also know how to build a better version of it that makes this one look like a toy. But it’s a sound concept nonetheless considering that there really is nothing else like it – unless you want to count Meta Spaceglasses... which are like... half as capable as this video demonstration.

 

 

 

 

---

 

The most obvious evolution of virtual reality in the future looks nothing like the past but redefines the future.

 

When you no longer can find a doppelganger in the past for what you’re doing today, you are now making your own future instead of reliving history.

 

That’s my answer for the future of virtual worlds.

 

Repeat History or Make History.

 

---

Stockholm Syndrome

Wherein Linden Lab was hoping everyone they screwed over would forget the beatings.

 

 

I’ve been doing  lot of thinking lately about what my beef with the gaming industry has been since I was in my mid-twenties. I haven’t really played anything in the AAA realm for years, and a lot of it I think has to do with how the games industry (as well as consoles) have essentially turned into screaming douchebags with their hardware and content. Take for instance, Downloadable Content or DLC for short…

 

Downloadable Content was supposed to be a supplementary to a complete game. That was the point... I mean, you pay full price for a game, and it comes with a beginning and end. The story is complete and you can be satisfied with your experience.

 

 

Without substance, there is no justification for being high maintenance.

 

But as time marches on, DLC has become the lazy way of charging for incomplete games (full price) and then milking the rest for more. Maybe the game was screwed up to begin with, had bugs, was unfinished, or whatever... and people pay full price for crap only to find out they didn't even get a complete game and have to pay continuously for the DLC in order to complete the game or story.

 

Call me crazy, but I think that's probably the reason I really stopped playing modern games or giving a damn about consoles in the current or next generation. Wii, XBox360, PS3, and their next gen versions coming down the road... I don't give a toss.

 

First of all, there is the crap single player modes. This isn’t true for all games, but more often than not the single player mode may as well have been added on by a 3rd grader with a pack of mislabeled crayons and the adults in the room have to then pretend that little Timmy’s elephant isn’t the colossal and incomprehensible gibberish it is just to save his ego. This is of course assuming that the game was actually designed well to begin with, which in quite a lot of cases (overwhelmingly) they are not. For any semblance of this plague upon gaming, just watch a few seasons of Zero Punctuation (a video of which I’ve provided below).

 

 

 

 

I like a social game just like anyone else, but I enjoy it more to play a single player experience. Think of it like reading a well written book... I don't want to be forced to join a book club and collectively share the reading experience to get anything out of the book. So games today rely waaaaay too much on the multiplayer experience online and then the single player aspect suffers.

 

I think it's a balance... you start with a compelling single player experience from start to finish. That's your core game. Then you expand that universe from there with multiplayer online options and DLC which are optional but not mandatory to get the experience you paid for. Neither side of the coin should be tacked on as an afterthought.

 

A lot of games like SimCity 4 (Surprise, surprise! It’s EA) force you to have an online connection just to play the game even in single player mode, which is asinine... a very bad DRM scheme if anything. Then there are games that you know are just built to milk you constantly for DLC because the main game was half-assed and unfinished. It's really a dick move... one of the reasons I stopped playing the Final Fantasy series altogether at the end of FFX was that it was essentially half a game with no closure unless I bought FFX-2 and I immediately said "hell no". You go through that much work and effort in a game like Final Fantasy only to find out you're playing half the game and you don't get closure in a story... oh, that pisses you off to no end. Not to mention Final Fantasy X-2 sucked ass.

 

 

Because EA apparently thinks DRM is the answer to piracy

 

 

In all fairness I tried to play Final Fantasy XII (12) and gave up at the onslaught of constant interrupting (unskippable) cutscenes and talking. Take a few steps in, get into a battle and suddenly a character has an interesting and witty story about the monster you’re facing and how he remembers long ago his grand-pappy fought a beast like this… well, half hour later they let you finally hit a button to fight.

 

I skipped Final Fantasy XI because it only made the FF experience I was pissed about in FFX worse (paying for a game and not getting closure). Except this time they were doing it intentionally by asking for an ongoing subscription fee. So then Final Fantasy XIII came out and by then I simply couldn't be bothered anymore. It would require me to care enough to get a PS3, HD Television, and purchase a game to play on it all. It was a deep investment for a game I likely knew was going to royally screw me over.

 

It was a good guess because there exists Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 which goes back to the FFX and FFX-2 model of having you pay full price for half the game and story.

 

 

The other half of your game awaits for a nominal fee…

 

Don’t get me wrong, they look absolutely stunning… but there is too much bad blood built up for me to be convinced on pretty graphics or mediocre gameplay alone. I need substance…

 

I already had the first generation PS Portable. The one with the UMD discs and stuff... and I waited patiently for decent games to be available for it... and the offering was abysmal. So I ended up jail-breaking my PS Portable and loading a ton of emulators on it to play NES, SNES, Genesis and Atari. That should tell you something right there.

 

So the reason I don't get into gaming anymore is simply because I've been burned so much that I stopped giving a damn. There isn’t much in the way of AAA titles that seem to do anything innovative, either… And with game developers actively being anti-social and actively hostile douchebags to their demographics… well, like an abuse victim I finally had enough and walked away despite all the pleas that they really didn’t mean it and they’ll treat me better this time, promise!

 

Instead, my main games of addiction these days are Tower Defense, the occasional indie title, and of course Minecraft. Tower Defense games aren't as much of a douchebag when it comes to unlockables and DLC... you can play the whole campaign and get the story but if you want extras (that's what DLC should be... extras to compliment but never to make up for lack of content or story) then it's an option.

 

 

I’m quite proud of this house… and the surrounding town I’ve been refurbishing.

 

 

In so much as Minecraft, I paid my fee and got the game. They fully acknowledge it's unfinished and will be constantly worked on. But my payment when it was in beta gave me the right to have indefinite updates for the price I paid. You're not going to see Mojang saying "We're going to release a patch for this and it'll be $10 if you want it". That's abusing their customer trust and good will, which I suppose is why the big names are falling on their faces and the indie scene is blossoming. As far as online gaming, I play on the 222craft.com server and they have additional perks and abilities for donators.

 

This is a proper way to add DLC or additional content/abilities, by not actively stepping on the existing structure but instead supplementing it with something truly new. I can play Minecraft indefinitely as I see fit in “Vanilla” mode which in itself is a constantly updating and complete game. If I wanted access to say.. Tekkit then I’d donate to the server to get that access. In no way are the server owners implying that my existing base experience should be or is crippled for not donating. In the same manner, Mojang isn’t telling me I have to pay a monthly subscription to keep playing their game or get updates. It’s not even an option anywhere to do that… and the reason is simply because they know it’s a dick move.

 

That would explain why the indie developers and remakes are doing better in terms of acceptance versus cost of production. Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and yes even Minecraft… the trend is going back to the original methodology for game creation, and honoring the customers who make you popular and support you. Celebrating community involvement and innovation is also crucial – again we look at Minecraft and the ridiculous amount of game mods available that extend or change the “shared experience”. Mojang didn’t come in and lock things up tight when they found out there were mods that changed the game… they openly celebrated the diversity and creativity of their community, and even began rewarding them for it.

 

However, with the AAA titles, the trend is different for the most part. I think it started around the 1990s when everybody decided it was a good idea to make everything 3D and concentrate on graphics instead of gameplay or story. It became more about a glitter pissing contest than actually making good games or having a community around it.

 

 

 

 

Even today, games like Pac-Man stand the test of time... whereas in 25 years is anyone going to remember or give a damn about Halo?

 

Honestly... think about it. Not saying that Halo is a bad game by any means, but it's nowhere near going to last 25 years in a legacy like a yellow circle eating dots and ghosts. I think that's why Indie titles are faring better... they are getting back to basics and concentrating on what actually makes gaming fun. That and embracing the community instead of digging a hole so deep nobody will ever find them again, or their precious… precious masterpiece of a game that nobody must touch.

 

So remember that next time you're playing the next Call of Duty: This Time The Martians Are Attacking, more commonly known as Serious Sam 3: BFE.

 

 

 

 

Game development is about innovative ideas and the KISS method. Keep it simple, stupid. Don't be a dick with your DLC, and for crying out loud - make a game people can actually play and enjoy on their own before you tack on multiplayer. Otherwise you're just trying to cover the fact that you've made a shit game and hoping nobody notices because they're all too busy tea-bagging players online. The obvious noteworthy point to be made is that it also comes down to how you treat your community…

 

See, Minecraft started without any intention of modification or custom plugins, etc… they made a game where you could just build and survive via resource use and collection. Seems simple enough… People have made amazing things in Minecraft as a result of this basic functionality, but when the community started opening the code up and modifying it with plugins and mods, texture packs, and more… Mojang embraced it and it has worked amazingly well for them in terms of advancing Minecraft itself (a lot of player created mods made it into the official updates), it created a ton of good will for Mojang, and excellent feedback and press around the world. And of course, they’re filthy friggin rich because of it.

 

But what happens when you start with a “game” that is built entirely on the premise that users are creating everything, right down to the content itself, and even the 3rd Party viewers which should be celebrated for the diversity and innovation? Essentially, there is no story but it’s entirely DLC… and you put an executive from EA in charge of that ecosystem?

 

 

 

Yeah, somebody actually thought an EA executive was a good choice to run Linden Lab

 

 

---

 

The Prim Connection

 

I really can’t talk about gaming and downloadable content without saying something about Second Life. The guy running the place (and I’m tempted to say “into the ground”) is Gaming Jesus… I mean… Rodvik Humble, a man with an EA Pedigree… which if you think about it for more than ten minutes, you realize that pedigree may as well be printed on used toilet paper when you apply it to Second Life. Ask any respectable gamer on Earth what they think about EA… I dare you.

 

Coming from a company that is notorious as the douchebag of gaming culture should be fair warning that this guy really doesn’t have a clue about virtual environments. If anything, he’s applying EA Logic to Linden Lab… which if you’re a gamer means:

 

“He’s got his head up his ass when it comes to knowing what the actual customers want and need.”

 

 

Gee, thanks Gaming Jesus!

 

 

When he came aboard as the CEO, the first thing I said was that I expected him to immediately set off to do everything except Second Life, and instead focus efforts and capital on making video games while looking for a way to fit the square peg that is Second Life into the round hole that is EA video game management. The simplest way for an EA executive to fix the problem is to simply sweep it under the rug, “re-invent” the company, and make a bunch of other video games in hopes that one of them sticks to the wall and they can once and for all stop worrying about Second Life.

 

It’s classic corporate misdirection.

 

At first, people thought I was off my nut for saying this. Rodvik insisted he wasn’t going to abandon Second Life and they would continue developing it and improving the experience. Then it turns out that they are more concentrated on all their new game acquisitions and secretly making games for everything else and less worried about Second Life.

 

After all, I’m still waiting for Mesh Deformer… which by the way the customer base outsourced and paid for because Linden Lab did such a half assed job of implementing mesh on launch, while wholesale ignoring their pleas to add a feature to fix the obvious and glaring fuck-up. That, of course, led to the decision to go batshit insane and start insisting that anything 3rd parties come up with have to be approved by Linden Lab, and shared with them. This way they can hold the reigns and be the Sword of Damocles on whether something gets done or not, instead of the customer base going over their head and making it happen. Classic corporate douchebag behavior in an age of social community interaction and organic ecosystem.

 

Not like Linden Lab was going to abuse that, right? The JIRA is now essentially toothless and not open to public review. They’ve cut out the ability for viewers to connect to anything but their own system, forcing developers who have made the most innovations on behalf of Second Life to now choose what amounts to allegiance between Linden Lab and Open Sim, or maintain two separate viewers. So much for not breaking shared experience, Linden Lab… You set it on fire and proceeded to piss on it as well as ten years of customer loyalty and innovation. 

 

But then we saw all the Johnny-Come-Lately apologist posts about how Linden Lab was always a video game company and Second Life is in itself a video game and was always billed that way from the beginning, and all this “Metaverse” talk and application was just a wrong turn somewhere and they really didn’t mean it. It was all a misunderstanding… just like when Mark Kingdon… well, said or did anything.

 

 

 

No, I’m pretty sure Phillip actually meant it when he said it was a Metaverse.

 

 

All that line has ever been is a monumental amount of ass-kissing. Like praising the robot overlords when the forces of Earth are taken over. It’s a spineless and cowardly approach at best. After all, those are the same people who were out front waving the “Metaverse” flag loud and proud in the golden age, and now that Rodvik comes along and says “Oh, it’s really a video game company. We’re gonna make video games!” those same people are turning tail saying “It was never a Metaverse… it was a video game all along!” – assuming they removed their lips from Linden Lab’s ass long enough to let those words escape.

 

If I had faith in any of the leadership at Linden Lab, it was Philip Rosedale. I may not have agreed with everything he said or did, but holy hell is he nowhere near the colossally and intellectually deficient replacements that have taken his place. I think Philip is probably the only person that actually seemed to have a clue about what Second Life is and how to approach things on the whole (including the community). Though I won’t give him total praise… I’m pretty sure they could have done better with the Open Source side of things.

 

I’m not looking to kiss anybody’s ass – especially when they’re royally and blatantly screwing up what should have been a global domination laid in front of them on a silver platter. So am I looking for brownie points from Rodimus Prime? Hell no… I’m looking to call it as it is, and really it would seem few at Linden Lab have the balls or uterus to open their mouth. It’s turned into a game of “Save my own ass and do whatever the boss of the month wants”.

 

I’ll tell you why they didn’t bill Second Life as a video game when it came to mainstream: because they realized a video game about absolutely nothing wouldn’t make them money. It was the hype and massive involvement around 2007-08 (Golden Age) that make them a shit-ton of money. It was specifically billing it as a Metaverse that made it popular and flooded to capacity. That’s when the simulator sales were at an all-time high. Times were good… even if there were issues.

 

Know what started killing Second Life? The minute they started trying to shoehorn it into being something it isn’t, which now resides as a video game again. Linden Lab is a company that is acting more like Sybil than a rational entity. Multiple personalities and can’t make up its mind what the hell it wants to be, mostly because management can’t make up their mind and there aren’t enough people left at Linden Lab that even remember what the company was about originally (or Second Life).

 

They had the academic involvement… they had brand names in-world, they had reporting news in-world and hell… they had a few episodes of CSI. But that wasn’t enough.. they had to start screwing with the ecosystem and burning bridges.

 

 

 

 

When they decided it was a video game again and started actively dicking over the brands, and the colleges, and everyone they thought they were too big to need… well, look at the declining simulator sales and tell me being a video game is better than billing it as a Metaverse? In fact, they were doing better as a Metaverse… and each time they try to make it about something else, things start going downhill quick.

 

It’s pretty obvious.

 

They cut off the OpenSim involvement, pulled up the drawbridge and declared they didn’t need anybody and they thought it was beneath them to cater to their clients and customers… all of which (mind you) are literally responsible for building the entire virtual world, creating the content, and more…

 

Problem is, now they’re realizing they’ve royally screwed up and are beginning to understand that they are about to starve. Or at least the dim lightbulb of acknowledgement can only be hoped to have fired off a cluster of remaining neurons and business sensibility in their minds like some straggling peasant in the medieval cow pastures of yore …

 

No academic involvement.

 

No real brand names in-world anymore.

 

No episodes of CSI.

 

And they’ve managed to take it a step further by stepping on the community itself through offering those useless Linden Homes and all the useless “perks” for being a Premium Member. Every single perk is no more than a sad attempt at “Me Too” syndrome. This is where a company realizes that the open market of services and content offered by the customers happens to be too good for them to not get in on the action themselves. So you see Linden Homes while you can get better from renting space elsewhere (and buying a skybox or house a designer made on marketplace). You see “Premium Gifts” which are all but a joke… Does anyone care about that premium couch? No, not when the word “couch” on Marketplace yields enough results to fill ten IKEA warehouses.

 

What about “Premium Sims” or Linden whatever the hell they call it?

 

Nobody cares. They showed up to the party ten years too late (like Microsoft) and thought it was a good idea to jump into a well established market as a player while wholly disregarding the fact that they are competing against better options which have had ten years to accumulate and refine. Not to mention are already generating revenue through sales on marketplace and in-world.

 

Who loses out for this arrogance and neglect? The new users who don’t know any better but will be pissed when they realize that Premium accounts don’t actually offer anything remotely premium.

 

Your stipend? You get about what you’d receive if you were a free user and paid for the L$. It’s not a bargain or premium.

 

Linden Homes? For a little more you get a roomy parcel on a nice island and your choice of pretty much any highly detailed and well designed skybox and house available on marketplace.

 

Premium Gifts? Yeah… about as premium as getting a toy with your Happy Meal.

 

Ability to buy land?

 

Ok… now we’re remotely talking. Except at the end of the day, you’re not really buying the land but renting it. I’ve been on the mainland and it’s not exactly prime real estate, let me tell you. Your own island away from the neighbors and bullshit? You can do that… but if we’re renting it essentially either way, then why pay a premium to rent when you can just rent as a free user?

 

Buying land then become a premium option legitimately but really only if you’re planning on being a real estate tycoon. There are plenty of Land Barons already who have done that over the past ten years… so it’s kinda stupid now to assume the average person would be interested in a premium account just to rent land from LL.

 

 

Not that being the virtual Donald Trump is really something to brag about…

 

 

So what do we have left?

 

Not a lot…

 

Linden Lab is quietly offering discounts to “select” colleges in hopes to get them to come back, which is again total arrogance on behalf of Linden Lab, and only makes them look worse than they started out for having dropped the educational discount wholesale to begin with. It implies they are in a position to decide who is “good enough” to “deserve” a discount and come play in Second Life again.

 

Nothing like rubbing salt in that wound, eh Linden Lab?

 

Problem is that Linden Lab took it upon themselves to pull a lot of dick-headed moves and burn nearly all of their bridges with an arrogance and willful ignorance I haven’t seen since the 90’s and ActiveWorlds.

 

As a “video game” it’s tanking. That’s why it was repositioned as a “Metaverse” and an open sandbox platform of social and creative interaction instead. The more they apply “video game” tactics to it – marketing, strategy, bundling “packages”, stepping on community toes, and acting like they don’t need anyone… well, the more they are going to end up permanently burning those bridges and good will.

 

Which, they might already have done in a lot of instances. So I guess Rodvik is doing an excellent job of translating the douche-baggery of EA over to Second Life and scratching his head when people are screaming “What the hell are you thinking?!”

 

As entertaining as it may be to watch Rodvik eat Humble Pie (like that little word play?) this all stems back to that notion of this widespread plague of assholery in the games industry as the post implies.

 

---

 

Journey into Second Life

 

The underlying point to all of this comes down to game developers intentionally being douchebags. Not giving people what they want or need from your game or product, and then having the arrogance and audacity to continue screwing them every chance they get. There is little difference between EA mentality and Linden Lab right now, and that’s the problem.

 

Linden Lab, as a corporate entity and culture, needs to go back to the KISS method. Keep it simple, stupid. That doesn’t mean with twenty different products but instead it means by figuring out what the core of the business for Second Life is from the standpoint of Linden Lab and simply excel at that, letting the rest organically work itself out and make money for them supplementary.

 

 

 

 

Don’t offer what your community already does. You’re not in this to compete with your community… It is a god-send and blessing that Linden Lab isn’t required to have in-house content development. Game studios around the world love that idea and wish they could just lay off their content designers in-house and let the customers do all the work for them. So don’t squander that.

 

Instead, look for ways to foster your community to continue building more and creating. Look for ways to bring them together. Be willing to work with them… for real and not some half-assed effort or two-faced doublespeak.

 

It’s a social community, so doing everything in your power to be antisocial and downright belligerent to them is probably not a good idea. Unless you like the declining simulator trend… in which case, have at it. No community means no content. No content means less experience. Less experi- well you get the point. Screwing the community and being actively hostile to their needs and wants becomes a self-perpetuating downward spiral of failure.

 

Indoctrination of a new technology or methodology for doing things starts with the hype but also the foresight to know that getting your technology in wide use among the academic and college community is a winning strategy. That’s why Apple Computer and Microsoft went to great lengths to ensure that schools and colleges had their software and computers in the classrooms at the earliest age they could get it in there. Ergo, Linden Lab clearly made the biggest mistake of it’s corporate life when it wholesale cut off the colleges from a discount and refuse (even to this day) to deal with an academic funding cycle instead of Linden Lab’s billing cycle. The most popular and well known corporate marketing strategy on Earth… and Linden Lab dropped the ball.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently Linden Lab is better than Apple or Microsoft now and can’t be bothered to deal with such things which are beneath their stature. Arrogance is what that is, and nothing more.

 

If Linden Lab wants an influx of fresh money from the purchase of L$, leading to new accounts, then the one thing they would have been expected to do when treating Second Life like a game, they somehow monumentally failed at. Of course, I’m talking about the total lack of Game Cards available at every retail store on Earth whereby gamers can buy (with cash) those cards and use them to redeem a predetermined amount of in-game currency. In that Second Life has no such option is yet again a boneheaded maneuver. When people see a Second Life currency card next to the other game cards on the rack, they start wondering what Second Life is and want to try it out.

 

Especially now that they can impulse buy those in-game currency cards with cash.

 

Gemini Dream

 

Second Life is essentially all downloadable content. Linden Lab shouldn’t be trying to dictate the story. The moment they start with the “we don’t need you” attitude and stepping on toes… they missed the plot entirely because without the “you” there would be no “them”. I think they’ve wholly forgotten that and have gotten cocky and arrogant about it.

 

Let’s look at this side by side for a moment:

 

Mojang

 

Built Minecraft, charged a flat fee to purchase the game. The game itself is an open ended sandbox environment with some gaming elements whereby a majority of the content is created by the players given the tools at their disposal.

 

 

Players build shrines to Notch in Minecraft. I haven’t heard anything bad about Mojang… Ever.

 

 

Mojang doesn’t run multiplayer servers. Their community run those servers independently and they are on their own for monetizing or supporting those servers. Mojang, however, embraces the community who run those third party servers and works with them to incorporate that ease of use and ability into their main client whenever possible.

 

Minecraft has plenty of 3rd party clients like Tekkit, and lite to heavy modifications to the “shared experience” – everything from minor item additions to entire gameplay experience overhauls. Mojang celebrates this diversity and offers the basic Vanilla client and game, allowing and fostering the endless customizability to wholly develop organically via the community. This has led to countless modifications, additional functionality (which Mojang at times stated was impossible such as MatMos dynamic ambient audio) and additions. Mojang embraces the community, their innovations, and determination to help make it a better experience overall.

 

As of this writing, a total of 9,771,413 have purchased Minecraft and of that total 9,887 have bought Minecraft in the past 24 hours alone. I wonder how many premium accounts have been purchased in the same time frame for Second Life?

 

Linden Lab

 

Built Second Life, they offer a free user experience but heavily push for a subscription model Premium Account. The virtual environment itself is an open ended sandbox with some gaming elements whereby a majority of the content is created by the players/users given the tools at their disposal.

 

 

Nobody is building a shrine to Rodvik, and there isn’t much goodwill toward Linden Lab.

 

Linden Lab runs simulators (multiplayer regions) and considers this part of their revenue model, despite statistics showing that this revenue model is failing. The community at one point offered the compelling option of allowing 3rd party regions to run through a connection with OpenSim, but Linden Lab chose instead to cut off ties with OpenSim and run the regions themselves, going so far as to cut all ties with 3rd party simulators and mandating that any client which connects to their service cannot also connect to 3rd party OpenSim as well. Clearly they did not embrace the community or make any real attempt to work with them, and in fact have become openly anti-social and hostile toward them. This in itself is a disturbing and running theme which is leading to their decline.

 

Second Life has a number of 3rd Party clients like Firestorm and Exodus viewer, however the variation of unique innovations from client to client have now been widely homogenized where once there was a thriving mountain of options.  Any new functionality must be first submitted, then approved by Linden Lab as the controlling force, and such additions or improvements must be pushed out for all 3rd parties to adopt. In no way can a 3rd party make changes to the “shared experience” unless submitted and approved by Linden Lab. In no way does this celebrate the innovation of independent thought or advancement that comes from an organic creative process, and in an opposite manner to Mojang, has divided and caused less innovation instead of more while wholly stifling legitimate advancement of the technology as a whole.

 

Unlike Minecraft, Second Life has an in-world currency by default and as such players/users are encouraged to purchase in-world currency to spend on digital items, a majority of which are created by other players/users and given or sold via a functional Marketplace whereby Linden Lab receives a percentage of all transactions. In fact, unlike a typical “game developer”, Linden Lab has the distinct advantage of  having the entire virtual world built and maintained by the very users who inhabit it. They even had the opportunity to capitalize on 3rd party regions and grids but somehow did not see that opportunity to reduce their overhead and be paid for it.

 

Stranger still is the lack of common option available to purchase game cards which are preset in-world currency. These cards are widely available for nearly every game known to man including Farmville and yet a virtual environment with a default in-game currency has no such option available. Indeed, this behavior further cements Linden Lab’s anti-social behavior in that (like everything else) they feel it is somehow beneath them to act like a real company with real marketing plans or work with the customers.

 

To this day, Linden Lab remains wholly anti-social and at times outright hostile to their community, any possible innovation they may bring, and even their content and services involvement as witnessed by Linden Lab’s wholesale disregard for existing content and service options created by the community whereby Linden Lab themselves offer similar and competing options such as Premium Sandboxes, Premium Regions, Premium Gifts, and Linden Homes in direct opposition to their established user-base of ten years.

 

Given the option to work and cater to business, branding, and educational sectors, Linden Lab again shows anti-social and often times hostile behavior. This can be seen in their inability to settle on a blanket Educational discount and work with schools or universities appropriately in order to make Second Life technology viable for those use cases. Moreover, given the vast potential to involve real life brands in the virtual world via their own Marketplace and retooling a Premium Account into a Professional account to give professional content creators access to licensed brands, Linden Lab again shows anti-social and hostility, instead demanding to treat Second Life as a game and Linden Lab as a game studio without actual consideration for the prosumer dynamic which they rely on.

 

Given the opportunity to engage wholly in Social Media whereby a large majority of their userbase interact, they instead chose to be anti-social and arbitrarily hostile in establishing their own walled garden version of a social media feed instead of building the sharing options to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest (among others) as direct options from within the viewer itself via openly available APIs.

 

This behavior is wholly narcissistic and arrogant at best. It is openly and unapologetically anti-social and hostile toward business, education and even their own prosumers which are near entirely responsible for the content and experience in-world.

 

After all of this, is it any wonder that Second Life is declining and Linden Lab is more interested in putting out the life rafts in other games while re-inventing itself as a “games company”?

 

The core mission of Linden Lab for Second Life, their flagship product, is simple:

 

“Your world, Your imagination.” –

 

“And we’re here to empower you to keep creating so we can take a percentage and profit”

 

Instead of screwing the customers over, being antisocial and hostile, and deliberately burning bridges and stepping on toes… they need to get back to the age old saying from Morningstar and Farmer in 1990:

 

Work within the system.