Above is my current avatar standing in one of the patches of land that I rent. At the time it was taken, this SL visit was just like any other day. Little did I know that a few days later I, and other SL players, would discover that Second Life is basically over. And not over by any other company than its parent company Linden Lab. Due to a planned or unplanned leak, Linden Lab has confirmed that it is building another virtual world.
At first I was excited. Second Life needs a great many quality of life upgrades which are mostly out of reach due to the age of the platform. A new place with better avatar tools would be great. But as I came down from my high, other more logical questions started to surface.
Mainly about land. The land market is now essentially dead and that is a little frightening. Because Second Life's revenue stream is land. Prokofy Neva wrote a great post about it from the rental business viewpoint. This could potentially be a fiasco that could be a bigger than the Zindra shakeup a few years back. Ebbe Linden answered a few basic questions on Sluniverse.com regarding the new world. He mentioned that they were thinking about lowering land costs in favor of item taxation. A concept which I thought was strange. Does the lab think that they can make more from adding fees to creators and buyers? Did they have an accountant look into this? Or is this another pie in the sky idea from some insane ideology that Silicon Valley people love to worship?
How will LL plan to deal with all the landholders, including myself, who are now holding the bag for worthless land that costs a monthly fee? Granted I only hold almost a quarter of mainland. Not a lot compared to people like Anshe Chung, Prokofy Neva, etc. but it is still a big investment compared to most single users in the world. This isn't including the land I rent from themed estates that I love such as Winterfell and 1920's Berlin. I admit I spend much more on land in Second Life than I should. But I look at it as an entertainment expense on par with going to the movies. When all is said and done, I would spend the same amount attending the local movie house. But I get more joy from Second Life than I've ever received from passive film watching.
Will there even be land, as we know it, in the new place? Already people on sluniverse are screaming for no setup fees or tier fees. They are campaigning for bubbles (like the failed Cloud Party) that will disappear when their users are not logged into the world. So there will be no world, no places to visit, and no homes or landscaping to admire. That would be a deal breaker for me. I simply would not move over but stay in old SL until the lights go out.
According to Ciaran Laval's site, he pointed out a Linden post on sluniverse that Second Life isn't on par with World of Warcraft but more like the old Everquest. Which just flabbergasts me. Why is an employee of the company downplaying the success of the company's core product? What possibly good could that do in the public image? This indicates to me that LL, as well as the rest of the VR tech community, are still beguiled by the Snowcrash/Ready Player One fantasies. Fantasies that have been shown time and time again to be just fantasies. WoW didn't get made with fantasies that there were about 10 million people out there waiting to play its game. They were hoping for old Everquest success of a few hundred thousand to a million people. That they attracted more was an outlier. So developing the next VR with the idea that millions of people will pile on is laughable. Especially when it has been proved that only a small number of people feel comfortable with the avatar experience and an even smaller who are capable of self directed play time.
Recently there was a news story which stated that children who don't learn their letters through penmenship (just by typing or tracing letters on a computer pad) are not forming the same neural connections as people who did learn their alphabet by writing. Technology is literally changing the human brain. And I'm beginning to suspect that this has a large bearing on Virtual Worlds. Mainly because the audience for a free form virtual world that only LL offers (SL) has an audience that skews older. The known, guaranteed audience for virtual worlds are old as in old enough to have gone through the schooling system before new technology. This is something that must be taken into account and in fact should worry virtual world creators. If this is the case (as it appears to be) their audience is old and getting older with no one to replace their numbers. I speak from experience. I'm in middle age and getting older than that soon, I love SL but my young niece was wary of it. All the people who grew up in new technology either gravitate to on the rail games or just hang out in Facebook like interfaces but mainly text message/twitter. Twittering, by its very nature, doesn't encourage exploration, it doesn't encourage deep thinking. What it does encourage is burp like exclamations about lunch and bathroom habits. That is not the kind of thinking that takes well to virtual world experiences.
Despite warning signs, I really hope that it will be Linden Lab that creates the next popular platform. Mainly because I'm more comfortable with the devil you know over the devil you don't idea. Linden Lab does like doing things its own way but it also has consistently changed its direction due to public feedback. Granted many changes were due to outcry but at least things got changed. Worlds don't get made without protest or the ability to protest. Unfortunately the fascistic turn that real world and the tech world are experiencing actively discourages protest. Where will that leave us?
Right now, we are left in a holding pattern. Land will become a lot cheaper as people dump their holdings in preparation for the new place. But I don't see much of this land being purchased. Who would want to buy something that will not carry over to the new place? I'm at the max of the tier I can pay, I should probably dump what I have but I can't do it. Not yet. I already came to the conclusion that I will not recoup my expenditures. Not only will the land market suffer but I see people holding back on home purchases such as housing and landscaping. Maybe fashion will be able to hold up. But really why spend loads of money on things that will not transfer. This is worrying because by all accounts the new place will not even be ready for another two years.
Whatever the case someone's goose is being cooked. Just whose it is, is not clear.
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