
What Second Life got right, and no one else has since - ohjeez
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=625&doc_id=267244
======
sdfjkl
Another thing Second Life got very right was the use of spatialized voice
chat. That means you're not just able to look out of your avatars eyes and see
who's in the room and who is currently talking (WebEx or Skype can do those),
but you hear with your avatars ears too - so you can tell which direction the
voice is coming from, which is very powerful when mixed with an avatar. You
can tell speakers apart better and you can even turn your virtual head when
you hear someone speaking from one direction and focus on them. It's a much
more natural way of communicating than just mixing all the audio inputs
together, and allowed me to associate voices with people (and their avatars)
much better. Plus, if you can be bothered to learn the editor, you have some
pretty powerful collaborative 3D modeling tools right there with you, which
are handy for quick illustrations.

------
GuiA
The problem that Second Life is solving, that is "how to have a shared
experience with someone when you're not physically close", is actually the
same problem that a lot of MMOs are solving in some form or another; see this
article [1] for a great example.

The subtlety lies in the fact that MMOs are games, and that Second Life tried
to tackle the problem by being more of a "lifestyle" application; sure you
could play games, but you could also read content, talk with people merely for
the sake of talking, and so on. The point was that content in Second Life
would be mostly created by 3rd parties.

In other words, while MMOs offer a shared experience by being the content
consumed by the users, Second Life positioned itself more as a platform for
content that would be consumed by users all over the world. Second Life is the
city, 3rd parties are the shops and businesses and movie theaters and so on.

It's a noble cause, and we are far from having solved that problem yet (as any
couple in a long distance relationship will tell you). However, I don't
believe we will solve that problem with software, but rather with interaction
embodied in physical objects (which is an extremely recent field). For
example, see [2] for a great example of what that could be (there is another,
older project I have in mind that involves beds, lights and webcams but can't
find any links right now).

If you're interested in tangible and embodied interaction, the academic TEI
conference is the best place for that- sadly it's an ACM conference, which
means you need an ACM account to access the paper archives, but you can easily
access the proceedings index (for example for TEI2013 [4]) and google the PDFs
from there :)

[1]: [http://www.latimes.com/local/la-fi-c1-rodrigos-
world-2013090...](http://www.latimes.com/local/la-fi-c1-rodrigos-
world-20130902-dto,0,2239765.htmlstory)

[2]: [http://littleriot.com/pillowtalk/](http://littleriot.com/pillowtalk/)

[3]: [http://www.tei-conf.org/](http://www.tei-conf.org/)

[4]:
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2460625&CFID=242863494&CFT...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2460625&CFID=242863494&CFTOKEN=97694859)

~~~
MISTERJerk2U
You're right about MMOs. But what's missing there is the opportunity to do
anything or many things. In an MMO, you can only do one thing -- play the
game. And that's fine, and millions of people are happy doing just that. But
it's not a general-purpose tool.

------
fernly
Back in the early oughts I spent maybe 30 hours over a couple months exploring
2L. Ultimately I got bored and stopped returning because there was nothing to
_do_ there: it was a non-game game, an un-gamified life that was a paper-thin
emulation of "1L".

Things they got right: a way of building and dressing your avatar that was
simple, comprehensible, yet extensive. In one afternoon I made an avatar that
was a reasonable facsimile of actual me, round-faced gray-bearded professorial
type, I even found a leather-elbowed sweater to wear. In another afternoon I
made a muscular mustachioed dwarf.

Also well-done: their system for crafting persistent 3D objects. For professor
me I made rose-colored glasses, transparent pink lenses (alpha channel) in a
delicate gold frame, and easily had the avatar "wear" them. For the dwarf I
purchased a gaudy axe but made an elaborate gold armband.

Once you'd done all that, you could buy property and build quite interesting
buildings on it, but that needed a degree of OCD-like persistence I didn't
care to invest because the reward for all this was zip. Building a scale model
of the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks would be somewhat more rewarding as
you'd have the tower for your mantel afterward.

~~~
derefr
I would posit that you don't "go to" Second Life and look for something to do,
any more than you "go to" a city with no plans and no friends and look for
something to do there. Second Life is a place to meet up with people, and do
things with those people that you would just as well do in reality, but can't
(presumably because they're spread out all over the globe.) It's a place, not
an activity.

------
simonebrunozzi
I knew Second Life very well. In 2007, I built a perfect replica of the
Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi [1], met with Philip Rosedale in San
Francisco, and almost cried when he told me: "This is the most beautiful
building I've ever seen in Second Life.".

I was very critical of Second Life at the time: I thought that most people
were using it in the wrong way, and that the "gold rush" would soon bring
problems.

However, I've been lucky: I found my job through Second Life. You can read the
story here. [2]

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE282TzLH3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE282TzLH3M)

[2]: [http://www.brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-
amazon...](http://www.brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazoncom/)

------
brokenparser
They created the perfect environment for furries to play out their fantasies,
that's pretty much all that's there. Furries and flying dicks.

~~~
angersock
And really, isn't that the reason we _have_ the Internet?

I see no problems with this.

------
goo
MMORPGs also got that right. World of Warcraft still has 7.7M subscribers, for
example, a solid order of magnitude more than Second Life.

~~~
troymc
Comparing World of Warcraft to Second Life is like comparing Monopoly (the
board game) to Lego blocks. The former has definite, artificial rules and
objectives, the latter is an open-ended kit. To put it another way, the former
is like living in someone else's imagination, the latter encourages you to use
your own imagination. Or:

WoW = paint by numbers

SL = paints and a blank canvas

It seems clear why WoW has more users: most people believe they have no
creative ability (sadly).

~~~
Zimahl
Or people understand how fleeting digital creations in someone else's sandbox
are. Or people just create in the real world and are looking for something
else.

As a software developer I wouldn't play SL because I create all day. I don't
want to play a game that requires the creativity I am out of for the day.
Sometimes it's fine to paint by numbers.

~~~
troymc
Your first point is right on. In the early days, Linden Lab's executives
always said that SL would eventually be 100% open source, client and server,
like the Web (and Linden Lab would just be one of the hosting providers). But
they never open-sourced the server code, so people who thought SL would become
"something like the Web" (i.e. not controlled by any one company) became
disillusioned. I'd definitely put myself in that camp.

Your second point explains you, but not why the population at large (most of
which is _not_ doing anything creative at work) prefers to paint by numbers
when not at work.

------
qdot76367
See also: Cloud Party, which is basically SL in the browser, thus solving many
of the problems SL has at the moment. Cloud Party plus WebRTC is gonna be
real, real interesting.

[http://www.cloudparty.com](http://www.cloudparty.com)

------
ilaksh
As someone who grew up reading cyberpunk scifi and saw how excited people got
about things like VRML I am amazed that there aren't more environments like
Second Life.

I think however that people have been using things like World of Warcraft in a
similar way though.

I never understood how little interest or actually how much hostility there
was towards SL by people younger than me.

I would like to build something a little bit like SL (but with less virtual
sex obviously) using webgl and webrtc scripted in JS.

~~~
zem
why "obviously" less virtual sex? it's a perfectly legitimate way of using an
online social space.

~~~
msabalau
Perhaps because it is distracting and overwhelms other useful uses of a social
space? A characteristic it shares with other compelling areas of deep human
interest such as politics and religion.

~~~
vertex-four
To expand on this: in IRC, most social channels get overrun with two things
really quickly if there aren't rules against them: sex (including public
roleplay), and talk of increasingly addictive illegal drugs. Unfortunately,
that means that people who are interested in discussing things other than sex
and drugs are made to feel uncomfortable, and end up leaving.

IRC's solution is that each IRC network is pretty much a world full of
communities, so it's not hard to find a sex/drug-related community to talk in,
and one can participate in both communities at the same time.

The problem with translating that to "virtual world" type spaces is that
generally, since one has an a single avatar that can only be in one place in
the world at once, one can't interact with multiple communities at once.

Thus, some significant amount of people spend significant amounts of time in
the sex and drug communities, and the other communities end up being
overshadowed, and eventually leave the world. Niche communities can never
develop in the first place, as they'll never reach the critical mass of people
in the same place at the same time.

------
rdl
I'm kind of surprised no MMO/3d immersive world has been successful on
consoles or (more importantly) mobile, yet. It seems like a pretty natural
thing.

I guess VR of some kind of (Oculus, or Meta, or Glass, or something better
than any of these) will be the ultimate platform for this. You could pretty
much implement the peak of 1980/1990s standalone-VR-using-$5mm-rigs with $1-2k
in equipment now, _and_ make it networked.

~~~
dsuth
FFXI was developed for the PS3, where it was very popular. I believe the next
one (FFIV?) will also run on consoles.

~~~
rdl
PS2, not PS3, right?

------
Nursie
I was kinda repelled by second life when it hit the news as basically a gold
rush. People getting rich buying and selling virtual property seemed weird to
me.

A company I used to work for had a building in SL in about 05. We were
encouraged to use it for meetings for about a week then never heard of it
again...

------
stephenaturner
They didn't get the demographic right -- MMO games have done that. There's
WOW, there's even Minecraft as a more successful example. Niches to be sure,
but that's how this sort of thing works -- you find your niche and push it to
them.

------
y1426i
I played with that platform a bit for its possible use in education. I was
blown away by what it provided so many years back. SL I think is one of the
best digital life environment still out there. What I would have hoped for is
that there was a DL (Digital Life) along with SL (Second Life) where users
would use their real names and real like avatars. Would have been lot more fun
for teachers to be meeting their students and people meeting their friends in
this environment knowing who they are. I think SL limited themselves by this
little restriction.

~~~
jaredandrews
I took a class a few years ago where we were required to play Second Life. At
one point we had an entire class meeting in the Second Life world instead of
the classroom. It was interesting. It was really just a regular lecture
though, but instead of looking at my professor in real life I was looking at
an avatar of him. There wasn't really any benefit provided by SL in this case
but I could imagine some more stimulating situations.

------
t0
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Surrogates
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/).
Forget mobiles phones, Secondlife needs some sort of conciousness hookup.

------
dccoolgai
I will probably get downvoted for this, because no one is old enough to
remember it...but Club Caribe for Q-link was a great example of this.

~~~
thwarted
I remember that it was definitely not "MMO", just "MO".
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_\(video_game\))

~~~
dccoolgai
You would think that with all the retro cache a SCUMM-based MMOW would have,
that someone would try to stand that up again...i bet a lot of people don't
even know it existed. I wonder what standing a Club Caribe server up would
involve?...

~~~
thwarted
I remember reading that it ran on some kind of bigiron mainframe hardware of
the time, so an old Samsung Galaxy phone could most likely handle it.

------
AsymetricCom
I seriously doubt SL would have been (more) successful by having a client in
the mobile space. If that is what the author really thinks then there is no
takeaway from this article.

~~~
Jacqued
Nonetheless, I think he's right in his assumption that it brought a sense of
togetherness that social networks desperately fail to reproduce.

However, i think gamers still experience it on more "regular" MMORPGs. I know
I used to.

~~~
__--__
I think a large part of why social networks have desperately failed to
reproduce the sense of togetherness has something to do with the state of the
internet at large.

I used to play AstroMUD in the 90's and grew close enough to the community
that when I stopped playing in college and started 5 years later, there were
people who still remembered me. For some reason, that sense of community never
transferred to the graphical mmorpgs (for me, anyway). Instead, the gaming
community grew more and more toxic and I've since cut all ties with that part
of the internet. Something similar happened with the progression from IRC to
public chatrooms and livejournal to facebook.

The only real pattern I've been able to see in all this is one of
inclusiveness. MUD, IRC and (the early years of) livejournal were hard to use
for normal people. It artificially restricted the user base. The restricted
access increased the value of the interactions therein. The threat of a ban
also carried more weight, since getting another IP wasn't as easy in those
days as it is today.

The theory is still kind of half baked and I'm not sure if I can focus it into
a service that will reward people for maintaining a smaller, more intimate
online network instead of the sprawling thing we have today.

 _shrug_ just thinking out loud...

~~~
pnathan
I think the pre-social network Internet had a more homogeneou userbase: more
text driven, more verbose, more learned, more, shall we say, "hackery". Or
whatever. But there was a distinct property to that userbase that you don't
get in the mainstream.

I think a lot of it has to do with the bar for entry: "RTFM" requires both
reading and a manual. Anyway, half baked theory.

