Can Second Life Be Saved?


Yes, this is an actual screenshot from Second Life.

Second Life is going through strange days.

Well, stranger than usual.

Second Life’s neo-Utopian post-hippie prefix-spawning founder, Philip Rosedale, apparently got tired of the grinding whining that accompanies pretty much every online game product ever, and stepped aside so that he could work on cool stuff and not have all those suits harsh his buzz, man. In his place, the Internet’s last best hope for Cybertopia was managed by Mark Kingdon, whose prior experience in online gaming and virtual communities involved… marketing.

Yeah, this’ll end well.

Mr Kingdon’s arrival at the company shows that the online world created by Linden Lab is growing up and getting real.

He began growing up and getting real by meeting the somewhat leery and only partially obscene residents of Second Life as “M Linden“, thus proving his mastery of digital marketing by refusing to take the time to actually type in a full name.

M’s master plan for saving Second Life? Simple – turn it into Facebook. No, wait, stop me if you’ve heard this before. Second Life’s users, only some of whom were overweight men pretending to be fashionista women, reacted about as strongly as you’d expect.

The first step in this cunning master plan was Linden Lab’s acquisition of Avatars United. With this strategic play, Second Life, a client/server application with its own virtual currency that allowed you to create avatars, now supported the ability to… create web-based avatars somewhere else, which may or may not be related to your Second Life identity, with its own virtual currency which had nothing to do with Second Life’s existing currency, with even less usability than Facebook, and in general was a poorly written hack job. After a few weeks, Linden’s response was essentially, “let us never speak of this again”.

Instead, Kingdon and Linden moved, full speed ahead, towards producing a new client for Second Life. The goal of course, was to produce an interface that was accessible beyond Second Life’s current hardcore niche of users who absolutely are not overweight men pretending to be fashionista women. Now, if you gave me, a designer of hardcore games aimed at a niche group of users who pretty much completely are overweight men pretending to be blood elf dancers, this task to spec out, I’d give you the following list of requirements:

  • Web-based, using Flash, Java or some other ubiquitous platform to minimize installation headaches
  • Very, very low system requirements, running comfortably on netbooks and older machines
  • Minimal download times
  • A very, very simple user interface that passes the “Mac user/grandmother” test
  • Searching and directory features that guide new users quickly and easily into Second Life’s already extant vast economy
  • Ability to opt into embedding into/connecting with Facebook and future social networks

So, Linden Lab, who clearly knows far more than me about this metaverse reality stuff, rolled out Viewer 2! Which featured:

  • A large client, identical to Second Life’s already existing client
  • Punishing system requirements, identical to Second Life’s already existing client
  • Essentially requiring a fast broadband connection, identical to Second Life’s already existing client
  • No ability to connect with any social network at all, including the one Linden Lab bought for some odd reason a few months earlier
  • A user interface which most users found more difficult to use and more intimidating than Second Life’s already existing client
  • A new search engine which didn’t actually list most of Second Life’s already existing event listings and advertisings, killing Second Life’s already extant vast economy. Or… it would have if anyone actually used Viewer 2.

Shortly thereafter, Linden Lab lost most of Linden Lab and Mark Kingdom lost his M, replaced by Philip “Aw man, do I have to do this stuff AGAIN” Rosedale.

So, that’s the background. The ship of Linden state is listing pretty heavily to starboard.

Wagner James Au today weighs in with his take on how to save Second Life. Most of his suggestions are fairly apt, if not obvious (and if Linden is actually looking for MMO veterans, Austin is still a smoking crater of lost dreams and forlorn hopes!). But he does miss a couple of important points.

First off, Linden Lab doesn’t appear to know what its core business is. Hint: it’s server hosting.

Second Life is, essentially, a protocol. Everything content-related – game-y things, world-y things, people-with-cat-heads-meowing-things-you-really-don’t-want-to-hear things – all of them come from the users themselves. Linden Lab just puts up the servers, and people pay Linden money to  run them. They then presumably make that money back from other users, or run them as an odd hobby, or whatever. Linden doesn’t care – and Linden shouldn’t care. Their business is as Pakleds. They make things. That make us go.

Second, after the server hosting is there and done, the second neglected feature that is killing Second Life – customer service. Or rather, the lack thereof. I’m sure it will surprise few MMO watchers that much of Linden Lab’s recent bloodletting was in customer service. After all, CS doesn’t make you money. You just pay for CS agents and they sit there and talk to users and don’t make any money and what the hell, we got new Facebook clients to write!

Yet – Linden is a service provider. Service providers have to have good customer service. It’s a requirement. Without good customer service, everything else is irrelevant, because your new user experience will consist of your new users leaving your hermetically sealed new user zone and experiencing something akin to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but with slightly more overweight men pretending to be female fashionistas.  This is something that all successful online service providers eventually learn (Blizzard’s customer service team numbers in the thousands), and if Linden wishes to join their number, they need to learn that lesson.

Third, and most importantly, and what has apparently kept Linden Lab drowning in the ocean this past year – know your audience. I have it on reasonably good authority that Linden Lab’s perception of its current customer base is, roughly, overweight men pretending to be hot fashionista women. Guess what – that’s your audience. You don’t get a redo unless you make an entirely new product. You got lots of investor capital and media coverage based on all those overweight men pretending to be fashionistas. If you want to continue running a business that is profitable – you had best keep them happy. If they hate your new viewer and instead use an alternate third party viewer en masse – maybe this is a problem! If your business model consists of joining with a social network that emphasizes real identity as opposed to avatar anonymity, and a good portion of your user base is patronizing you specifically because they want that avatar anonymity – maybe this is a problem!

Sure, it makes you the laughing stock of Joel Stein, Something Awful and 4Chan. Gee. Given 1 million unique users a month, I’ll take a bunch of internet nerds laughing at me, too. Hint: some of them really, really want to be hot fashionistas.

  • Rodalpho

    Great post, takes me back to the LtM days.
    Long story short, Star Wars is so fucking massive that they should be making money like selling roofies to drunk frat boys, I mean seriously, what the hell guys? social media is huge these days (even though nobody really understands why) and they felt they should be doing so much better. Rather than serving their faithful customers, they tried to retool the product into a twitch-based shooter sans dancing wookies facebook to get some of that sweet fat nerd social media money. Bold idea, never been tried before. May the force be with you, always. Good luck, guys!

  • Rodalpho

    Well that sucks, strikethrough works in the editor but doesn’t show up in the comments. I’m not schizophrenic, I promise.
    I guess you get the picture, although my genius is somewhat obscured.

  • infocyde

    Fatman as virtual hot chick references aside (yes there are plenty of them there, but guess what, there are actual real hot chicks there too. Met my wife in Second Life (my real one now, not a virtual one, though our first meeting was virtual and in SL) while doing some RL work a few years back.
    I’d say your core point, know your audience and cater to their needs, is dead on.  When M. Linden came in, everyone was showering praise on Second Life as being the Snow Crash Metaverse come in the digital flesh.  There was a serious push by numerous businesses and academic institutions to use Second Life for everything from training sessions, net meeting clients, virtual storefronts, museums, etc…
    Mark was just pursing the direction that everyone thought at the time Second Life would go.  And you know what the real problems were?
    1) Web browser integration – that is fixed, opens up real possibilities
    2) Stability – stability wise for use in enterprise application second life sucks.  It is bugware with constant delogs, lags, and other oddities that make it unusable for serious applications.  A loan teacher using Second Life as a virtual classroom, ok, a University with 35,000 students doing the same, forget it.
    3) Porn.  Second Life is filled with it, be it Russian webcam chicks selling shows for Lindens or fat guys dressed as virtual porn stars exploring their screwed up sexuality, it is everywhere.  Second Life was very slow to give businesses the keys to try to control this.  These controls from what I understand do exists, but weren’t advertised well and not a priority during the initial development of Second Life. Sure you can ban people, mark regions as PG, whatever, those constraints are not really constraints.  You needed total control to keep avatars in a business domain or out of one.  The keeping in was the slow part to be addressed.
    Mark probably wasn’t the right guy, but hindsight is 20/20.  At this point I think Second Life should give up on becoming serious, shrink back to making furries and Gorean slave lords happy, and trim down to be lean, mean, and turning a small profit.  Hire some developers who can rewrite the bloated XML protocol sent in plain text to something binary and slim, maybe then lag and instability will become less of an issue.
    Second Life was actually really, really close to being the metaverse.  It just was too clunky for piratical use, so the folks that wanted a low cost immersive experience that could put up with a little instability (furries, pervs, bored house wives, etc…) are the main adopters and will continue to do so.  I agree, make them happy, let them buy you dev time to make the platform stable, and hope you haven’t leveraged yourself beyond what will ever be able to be paid back before you can once again make a stab at being something greater.
     

  • Siddar

    First comes attempts to turn mmogs into pvp centric games in order to try and appeal to the Quake Halo crowd. User response is we hate pvp sevral 100 million $ is wasted on pvp mmogs.

    Second come trying to turn mmogs into rmt cash machines in order to tap all those 14-17 year old walking around with mommys credit cards in there pockets. Users response is we hate this but they dont seem willing to actualy quit over it.

    Third lets leverage are customer base into advertising dollars by trying to change to a facebook model.
    User response a large percentage say I will quit im not kidding I really mean it.

    So one out of three of the above has actualy managed to take root in mmogs that being rmt. I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of the meetings where atempts to force these ideas into games over the objections of players took place. My guess is allot of people pushing these ideas despise there games players at this point.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    It’s sort of hard to feel sorry for the pains of one which has so readily embraced masochism.

  • dartwick

    Nice write up Lum.
     
    I dont get why its so hard for people to grasp that most user dont want their real life id attached to what they do in virtual escapist fantasy – whether its killing orcs and trolls or if its cross dressing and and being a sex fiend.

  • Not One Of Us

    How many posts has this been without a site theme change?  Has got to be some sort of record, Lum.

  • http://amburgey@rotman.utoronto.ca JuJutsu

    Can Second Life be saved. I mostly don’t care but if I had to lean one way or the other I guess I’d hope not.

  • hkedi

    Ha!  Those who do not study the mistakes of Star wars online are doomed to repeat them.
     
    On a side note, when I get my massively profitable company up and running, ( I kid… I kid… it’s insane killer attack robots in my future), It will be written in stone that any marketing or MBA puke that says “I have a great idea!  let’s make our core business like <insert hot company/topic here>!” must be defenestrated from the highest floor available….
     
    for the good of humanity of course….

  • http://iggyo.blogspot.com Ignatius Onomatopeia

    Scott, I said it at NWN and I’ll say it here:

    I really resent the “that passes the “Mac user/grandmother” bullcrap.
    Some of us with Macs write Applescripts, use UNIX that unpins the Mac OS, and more. We design digital videos and make Web content.
    This stupid generalization suggests Windows users to all be code-gods. Given what I see on my campus, ignorance of an OS is platform-agnostic issue.
    I’ll add that I used Windows for many years and still do. I prefer a Mac for my daily work and content design. I even like Windows 7, a lighter and leaner OS than the bloatware-hog Vista.
    I’ve found that most gamers who hate Macs have not been near one for a few years.  Or maybe I should spread around some stereotypes about gamers being 300 pound cheetoh-hoarding neckbeards fapping to tentacle porn in mom’s basement?

  • http://www.antipwn.com/blog/ IainC

    <blockquote>Or maybe I should spread around some stereotypes about gamers being 300 pound cheetoh-hoarding neckbeards fapping to tentacle porn in mom’s basement?</blockquote>
    No need! Pr*k*fy N*v* is due to appear shortly to make that very point. Only with about ten million more words than you used.

  • bonedead

    I sure hope not.

  • Vetarnias

    I really need a primer on Second Life — without going as far as trying it out, that is.  I remember when it got tons and tons of mainstream coverage, when every legitimate business with a deficient ‘edgy’ side thought of setting up a window in the game.  Media companies, multinationals, universities (like Woodbury, but apparently taking this seriously), governments even.  What happened to all that?  Did they realize Second Life was mostly hype unworthy of its disproportionate media coverage?  Or was there something else at work?

  • http://iggyo.blogspot.com Ignatius Onomatopoeia

    ” No need! Pr*k*fy N*v* is due to appear shortly to make that very point. Only with about ten million more words than you used.”
    LainC, that’s  the best insult I have ever gotten.  I sure hope she doesn’t rear her crazy cat-lady head.
    And Infocyde, your depiction of SL is spot-on:
    Second Life was actually really, really close to being the metaverse.  It just was too clunky for piratical use, so the folks that wanted a low cost immersive experience that could put up with a little instability (furries, pervs, bored house wives, etc…) are the main adopters and will continue to do so.
    Educators are bailing out b/c it costs too much and we can build our simulations in lower-lag private OpenSim grids where every user gets invited and we don’t need more than 50 or so to run a project. Kinda like a RL university ;P
    Plus we can own the hardware and handle our own back-ups.

  • Metacam Oh

    They said back when MySpace and Facebook was new, all my friends, “I’ll never go on that” The perception was it was for geeks and nerds and to people to meet online cause they didn’t have real lives.  Fast forward a year,  everyone and their grandma is on facebook posting photos and interacting all day and no one says Facebook is for overweight online geeks.
     
    If you want to say SL’ers are a tad nerdy, sure I guess, but we led the way with MySpace and Facebook, now we’ll lead the way with this.
    SL needs to fix what it has already, maybe a recode of the whole platform, WHATEVER it takes.  Grandma is never going to come into Second Life when it takes 20 min to load a texture that would load instantly if it were pulled off the internet instead of Second Life database

  • edwin meese

    Ignatius Onomatopeia: Scott, I said it at NWN and I’ll say it here:I really resent the “that passes the “Mac user/grandmother” bullcrap. Some of us with Macs write Applescripts, use UNIX that unpins the MacOS, and more. We design digital videos and make Web content. This stupid generalization suggests Windows users to all becode-gods. Given what I see on my campus, ignorance of an OS isplatform-agnostic issue. I’ll add that I used Windows for many years and still do. I prefer a Mac for my daily work and content design. I even like Windows 7, a lighter and leaner OS than the bloatware-hog Vista. I’ve found that most gamers who hate Macs have not been near one for a few years.  Or maybe I should spread around some stereotypes about gamers being 300 pound cheetoh-hoarding neckbeards fapping to tentacle porn in mom’s basement?

    Posts like these are why people hate mac users.
    Signed,
    Edwin Meese, Mac User

  • Scott Jennings

    > I really resent the “that passes the “Mac user/grandmother” bullcrap.

    The definition of irony:

    http://brokentoys.org/images/upshot_w44jUEjw.png

  • http://iggyo.blogspot.com/ Ignatius Onomatopoeia

    Scott, I’ll take some ketchup with my serving of crow, please.  Good job.

  • John Smith

    In an unrelated but equally insane story, Richard Garriot won his lawsuit against ncsoft. Go Lord British!

  • http://www.ancienthomelands.com Ancient1

    My business in Second Life has served tens of thousands of customers over the past three years. My store services a broad cross segment of the Second Life user base and in the time I have been in Second Life I have had the privilege of meeting and befriending many of my diverse customers, suppliers and neighbors.  My experience has been that I am predominantly meeting working class family people over 35 years old who pay for land and services in Second Life because its their part time hobby to be in a virtual world. You could say its an escape for folks who work hard, have life and family stress like we all do, and login to Second Life to just “drift off” for awhile in another world. Many of the people I have met love to build things in Second Life as a hobby and my experience is these are middle age, mostly over 40, men and women whose avatars in Second Life are normally what they are in real life. Yes virtual sex, using voice and animations in Second Life is a very big thing, but so what? Its almost impossible to see it happening in some remote sky box at 3215 meters above the ground and anyway, since its not in my face, its none of my business. The equation that the people who use Second Life are somehow weird or not well formed members of the world society is completely contradictory to my experience over the past three years.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    John Smith: In an unrelated but equally insane story, Richard Garriot won his lawsuit against ncsoft. Go Lord British!

    I thought that might happen. What jury would declare otherwise in the case of corporate suits versus astronaut?

  • Mist

    geldonyetich: I thought that might happen.What jury would declare otherwise in the case of corporate suits versus astronaut?

    You put an extra ‘a’ in that last word there.

  • Larry Lard

    Scott Jennings: > I really resent the “that passes the “Mac user/grandmother” bullcrap.The definition of irony:http://brokentoys.org/images/upshot_w44jUEjw.png

     
     

    Is that a real email address we can see there in the Reply To?

  • Scott Jennings

    Not any more!

    (the trouble I go through for a joke, sheesh)

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  • Jeff Stevens

    Scott, you’re hilarious.  I couldn’t care less about Second Life, but I read your stuff because it’s so damn funny, and you have good insight even on things I don’t care about.

  • Gx1080

    Is official: The executive changed their track from “Let’s make WoW” to “Let’s make Facebook”.
    It will be equally as succesful, of course.
    @IainC
    Shhhh. Man, don’t mention her. Do you want her to come here? Do you?
    PC Gamers who want the latest fuzzyness WILL inevitable gravitate to Windows because Games come to Windows first and is easier to install than Linux. Obvious stuff is obvious.

  • Mikyo

    I, (state your name), do solemnly swear and affirm, that I am rich and famous and young and sexy, and have been waiting all my life just to meet YOU.  So help me god, amen.

  • Mikyo

    Oops, sorry wrong channel.  R U RLY a CHIX?   AGE SEX LOCATION PLS! 

  • Serious

    @Vetarnias I regularly work with government and educators in SL. I think like many things there is a hyped stage and then a crash followed by the survivors that come out of the ashes. It’s growing in those markets tho LL’s behind the firewall thing was a disaster. IMO what will save SL is if they open their doors up to the growing metaverse. The metaverse in the future will be more like the WWW in so much as anyone can host their own SIM. openSIM is like the Apache server of the 1990′s and LL is like the AOL. If you try to hide behind closed doors the market will isolate you.

  • http://Website Mikyo

    Have you ever met anyone in SL who was “age verified?”  Apparently they can not even verify my  fircking drivers license, even tho they have their fingers on my credit card every day.  What do you have to do; go to the Linden offices and show them your attachments?  Doesnt work, probably never will.  Unecessary.  Destroying their business. 

  • http://www.steampowered.net Snowdon

    I still think LL needs to realize that having designers on staff would be an asset. Visual designers, game designers, maybe some UI designers who actually use SL for fun in their spare time.

    The first impression anyone has of SL is how ugly it is. The avatars they start you off with are 7′ tall mongloids. Tiny heads, and arms way too short for their bodies.

    You look around and see these horribly made environments that make up LL’s orientation and welcome hubs.

    Then you try to move forward and you’re treated to this god awful duckwalk that makes Bethesda’s animations look like Pixar.

    Sure, LL’s strategy should be that the users create the vast majority of the content, but LL sets the bar for new users. Because they set it so low, few people move much beyond it.

    Then you’ve got the problem that those of us who know better still have to compromise our work to compensate for problems like 8′ tall avatars who think they’re only 6′ tall, and SL’s 1994 era camera placement which makes it so every room has to be the size of a school gymnasium or you can’t see anything.

    Although, the user isn’t always right. I’d like to see LL ignore the panicked cries of users who think atmospheric shaders ruin their precious texture work. They added a halfway decent atmospheric shader plugin like three and a half years ago, but the defaults are set to make everything look as flat and lifeless as possible. Improved sky settings alone would make SL look a hundred times better.

    I can think of a hundred seemingly minor details that LL could address to make SL a much nicer looking, easier to use, and way more immersive experience. They just don’t seem to understand the importance of details.

  • http://Website Starlight Vandeverre

    As of Sept 1, 2010, SL has signed it’s own death warrant and fallen on it’s virtual sword. Hopefully the sword will fail to rez and the death warrant will fail to reach it’s recipient or be lost in chat lag. I have been a resident of SL for 4 years, and had planned to remain one for as long as it existed. I have put up with innumerable inconveniences and still remained loyal. The newest viewer has blocked my login for several days,despite repeated tickets to SL support. I can, however, still buy lindens on secondlife.com were I to choose to do so. From the beginning greed has been the bane of SL. From the early push to get more residents than could be supported by the platform still held together with saliva and duct tape to the more recent frenzy to embrace the newest technology before the old technology was fully functional, the prime motivation has been greed. For the past month, I have seen longtime residents leave SL in droves, as opposed to trickles. If I am unable to login, I know that a huge number of residents are having the same experience. SL, R.I.P.

  • http://Website JuJutsu

    “As of Sept 1, 2010, SL has signed it’s own death warrant and fallen on it’s virtual sword.”

    I hope not. If SL goes down Prokofy Neva will be released into the internet like Cthulhu…

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  • http://www.secondlife.com Jack Frost

    Erm… Second Life is mainly full of men dressed up as femalesand the men copulating with them are bisexuals in denial, delusion is a fine thing :p

  • http://SecondLife Savage Mistwalker

    I just read this and have to agree LL is not doing the knock up job they should be doing with a virtual world as wide known or as popular as SL. I am at this moment blocked from my acct because I did the UNTHINKABLE and went outside of LL to purchase my Lindens(I know how dare I get 8,400 for $10) So they put my acct on an administrative hold and it has been 5 days. The kicker was when I called the guy told me why I was on hold(they think the Ls from said comapny are stolen) and to call in the morning to speak with someone. I did and she was SHOCKED I knew why MY acct was blocked she said we are not suppose to tell you why. I’m not sure but MY acct means I should KNOW WHY??!! So..now it is Friday and I have no email from LL, no idea when my acct will be released and I am pretty fed up myself with this. Guess they are trying to teach me a lesson. The only thing I am finding out is that SL is indeed falling to ruin like everyone is saying. I am not sure if they actually work at LL but they sure do jump on things when it comes to money…Greed is such a sad thing really.