
The failure of Second Life - sbierwagen
http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/22/the_failure_of_second_life/
======
extension
I worked at a Second Life consultancy for a while (yes, they exist) and I
naturally felt obliged to "get into" the game. I spent hours exploring and
building and chatting but never found any joy in it. It is an ugly, hollow and
seedy world.

The Minecraft comparison is a good one. There is a world with purpose: to
survive and ultimately control nature. It perfectly indulges our most primal
instincts.

In contrast, everyone is a god in Second Life and the world is empty. For some
reason, this ultimate power is used to recreate the most mundane and tasteless
aspects of reality:

\- Consumerism -- SL citizens _love_ buying clothes, furniture and other
useless junk even when they can create anything themselves.

\- Lame commercial "theme parks" like McDonalds Island etc. Even the ones that
should be interesting, like NASA, fail to either educate or entertain since
the medium of static 3D models is generally terrible at both.

\- And of course, vice: kinky sex, gambling, pyramid schemes, and spam. These
things made up most of the metaverse, last time I was in it.

By far, the most interesting thing about SL was the elaborate and imaginative
attacks on the world e.g. self-replicating objects, and the equally elaborate
countermeasures used to fight back.

I guess the lesson is that a virtual world needs to find a balance between
innate meaning and open ended creativity. SL is one extreme, the other being
MMOs that involve too much carrot-chasing to interest most people.

~~~
ay
There is (was? I haven't been to SL for a couple of years) a thriving live
music community.

Have you played in front of the crowd ? I did - and even if the crowd is
virtual, it's a pretty cool feeling.

My employer did rather successful seminars/meetings in SL.

There was also a research that the virtual worlds are a sort of therapy for
the autistic folks (<http://goo.gl/iaOH7>)

Finally, a small story I heard from someone.

A couple walks into the "club" in secondlife. They ask the DJ to put on a
particular song and start dancing. When the music finishes, they thank the DJ
and the woman explains - "It's the first time in 20 years that we're dancing.
My husband can only move in the wheelchair".

That story alone is a sign that SL has served and is serving its purpose. And
that everyone can find the different things.

As for your points: \- "...even when they can create anything themselves." -
Much the same way as everyone can make a painting, or a poem, or a song. They
can, but to be good you need to devote the time to it.

\- "Lame commercial "theme parks"..." - these are companies that did not get
the potential of the secondlife, and treated it like a video game - hired the
consultants to build what they thought would look good - which they did. But
they did not put a life behind those constructs. Ergo, lame theme parks.

\- "vice". Participating in the pyramid scheme in SL and learning about it in
a painful way by losing a few hunderd dollars is way better than putting all
your life savings into the banking scam in real life. And if a kinky sex with
a virtual stranger averts even one occasion of the aggression in real life -
that'd be great, isn't it ?

As for attacks - lots of it is the same /b/chan crowd that plays the pranks in
real life - it's all for lulz of disturbing others. So I do not see a whole
lot of interesting there.

As for the "interesting" technical part - opensim (opensimulator.org) was
(is?) a pretty fun project, it recreated to a larger extent the server side of
the second life.

So, to summarize - I think there's more to it than it seems. :)

------
hristov
A. Second life has not failed. From what I hear about it, it is actually a
pretty lively community and it makes plenty of money for Linden. Actually even
the author of the post admits that SL has not failed.

B. The writer completely misses the point when comparing SL to a video game.
The entire point of SL is that the users should be able to build the world.
Yes, this results in less than ideal environments, yes if an engineer designed
the world there would be less polygon popping, better cache utilization,
better hidden loading times, etc., but you would get a video game. Not the
crazy world that second life is.

From my very brief foray into it, I have to say that SL has completely
succeeded in doing what it aimed to do. It has grown a very involved community
and they have built their own world or worlds. And of course most of second
life is beset by weird and bizarre things and people, but then again, if you
think about it, that was to be expected.

The above being said, it is actually a very interesting technical problem to
do the optimizations you usually expect in video games for a completely user
designed world like Second Life.

In a video game when you have something seen from far away (for example a city
seen as you approach by air) it is usually specifically hand designed by
artists to be seen from far away. Once you come close, you will see what seems
to be the same buildings but they will be different renderings designed to
look good up close.

Of course Second life cannot do that because people create and break down
buildings all the time, so they cannot have artists render the town from far
away all the time.

But what could be done is to have an engine specifically blend details and
combine polygons in a way similar to the way objects blend in distance as seen
by the human eye. This would make both the world more realistic and the
networking load lighter as fewer polygons need to be transferred.

This is an interesting possible improvement that SL does not do. But to the
best of my knowledge no other computer game does it either, so you cannot
blame SL for this.

~~~
ImperatorLunae
"The entire point of SL is that the users should be able to build the world.
Yes, this results in less than ideal environments, yes if an engineer designed
the world there would be less polygon popping, better cache utilization,
better hidden loading times, etc., but you would get a video game. Not the
crazy world that second life is."

You haven't seen Minecraft then, have you? The users, in fact, can build the
environments on their own, and the game loads and runs at a playable speed.

Perhaps Minecraft has greater "video gameness" than Second Life, but couldn't
the designers of Second Life have focused on user experience instead of
delivering laissez-faire, polygon jungle? Although Second Life wouldn't fare
well reverting to voxels, there are other approaches to optimize a user-
developed game experience and maintain flexibility; it seems the developers
aren't looking hard enough, if at all.

~~~
hristov
I have seen Minecraft, but it's graphics and detail are nowhere near to what
second life has. Again some people like video game like responsiveness, some
people like better graphics. It would be ludicrous to design and shop for
clothes in minecraft, for example, but a lot of people enjoy doing that in SL.

------
starwed
If anyone is tempted to click through to the article, be warned that its just
a rant about how Second Life's engine sucks. It doesn't analyse anything about
the world's _systems_ at all, or even whether it's a success/failure at what
it set out to do.

~~~
gnoupi
Yes, but the title is enough for people to agree before clicking. Good choice,
I guess.

Myself I was also expecting a more detailed article about the economy, the
communities... And it's just a basic rant about the time it takes to load
items.

------
tectonic
I'm a little surprised at the general SL hate going on here, mostly from
people who have never actually done anything in it. I haven't logged on for a
while, but when I was involved a few years ago I had a great time building
multi-agent systems inside of SL and pushing the limits of what their
environment can do. For example, here is a multi-agent ant simulation I did a
few years ago: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehEzRUu4_RM> I also wrote self-
synchronizing virtual fireflies and physics simulations.

For a programmer, it's a 3D, multi-user IDE where you can learn new
programming techniques in real time with your friends. Yes, people also use it
for weird things and porn (unlike the rest of the Internet). But there's quite
a lot of genuine art, talent, and learning going on in there as well, and I
still think it holds a lot of potential as a medium to teach people to program
while "playing a game."

~~~
tha-dude
I agree. I've used eventlet, a concurrent networking module for Python made by
Linden Lab I believe. It was cool to see how helpful the developers are to
answer your questions on IRC. It helped me a lot with my project.

------
edw
> In July of 2005, when I created my account, Second Life was the cool new
> thing. Moving between regions was kinda wonky, loading textures and objects
> was slow, and it was pretty ugly when compared to other games of the time;
> but it was generally assumed that these were teething issues, which would be
> quickly sorted out as new versions of the software were released.

No, Second Life was _not_ the cool new thing back in 2005. It was never cool.
It was always lame, and its popularity was always inexplicable. Why did
companies like Amazon hold virtual meetings there? I don't know. Maybe some
manager had a thirteen year old son who thought it was cool. But the thirteen
year old kid was wrong.

------
forkandwait
Perhaps one of the things to learn is that for things (games, creating world,
etc) to be really interesting, the constraints are just as important as the
power to create. Basketball wouldn't be all that interesting if you could just
do whatever you wanted; oil painting is more interesting than photography
because it is so much harder than pointing and clicking (sorry for the
cheapshot, but you see my point); automatically generated music is never as
cool as something that sounds like the composer struggled to make it happen. I
think we re-live the creative process with its challenges when we experience
real art (you can feel the challenge in a hard guitar solo, for instance); if
there is no challenge for the creator, there is no human experience for the
audience to share. So, yawn, another sexbot/ big building/ etc.

------
mahmud
I always cringe when I hear Ira Flatow remind Science Friday listeners they
can participate in the conversation via "phone, email, facebook, twitter and
Second Life"..

~~~
troymc
Why? The folks listening together in Second Life are generally more science-
literate than average, so the discussion going on in chat (text) makes the
whole experience very engaging. It's something like the chat room associated
with Leo Laporte's TWiT network. It's fun, and as a bonus, Science Friday gets
feedback and many good questions.

------
jmervin
Maybe not failed as such, but I'd agree with the author that SL tech has
suffered an apparent stagnation for a quite a while now. Indeed there has been
a long festering complaint on SecondLife forums that Linden Lab has added
various sugary features without addressing core performance concerns. This may
or may not be fair, but that seems to be the general impression.

Large draw distances, high particle & script counts and more than a few dozen
avatars in a single region all tend to result in poor performance and user
experience. And the platform appears to be quite sensitive to the usual
concerns of bandwidth and GPU. As a longtime SL user I'm not surprised at the
issues described by the author.

Linden Lab itself has seen a number of shaky management changes (founder + CTO
out, new CEO, founder back, founder out again, etc) and this may have taken
some toll on engineering efficacy.

That being said, I think that innovation on the SecondLife platform will be
forced by pressure from the furiously advancing OpenSim project, an open
source, reverse-engineered version of the SL "backend" that is usually
described as "the Apache of the open metaverse". <http://opensimulator.org/>

Basically, SecondLife, though filled with an amazing amount of wonderful art,
code and creativity, won't last another 8 years without somehow opening up and
keeping up with the explosion happening just outside its walled garden.

------
nostromo
I wish a startup would learn from Second Life's issues and try to execute the
original vision. I think Minecraft has proven the widespread appeal of
building and inhabiting virtual environments other than the traditional MMO.

~~~
hugh3
I don't know whether these things are doomed to failure, or whether it's just
a matter of getting the rules right.

I had a look around Second Life a few years ago when it was at the height of
its media coverage. And it was just filled with crap. There was nothing there
except brothels and shops to sell you stupid clothes.

The most interesting thing I found was an attempted replica of San Francisco,
but after riding around on a cable car for five minutes I remembered that I
live near the _real_ San Francisco.

I can't see any point in having a second life that is less interesting than my
first.

~~~
tokenadult
_I can't see any point in having a second life that is less interesting than
my first._

That's what everyone building a virtual world has to think about: how to make
the new world more appealing than the world customers already know. Most new
online worlds become appealing by being more inviting communities than the
generality of each user's haphazard subset of real-world meatspace. I'm
enjoying Facebook much better than I expected to, because it is, well, filled
mostly with my friends. I was surprised to see that the author's comments in
the submitted blog post were largely about the bandwidth limitations on Second
Life's graphical representation of its virtual world shown to users, rather
than about the community formed there. If people like a community well enough,
they will put up with a pure text interface--as I have seen in my own
experience.

So the blogger's noticing that Second Life's owners would rather make money
with willing users who deal with the current interface than spend a lot of
money to upgrade the interface makes sense. But I'm not sure that I can agree
that that is a "failure," unless the purely technical exploit of worldwide,
interactive, real-time virtual reality would build some new kind of more
appealing community.

~~~
hugh3
Yes, I admit that despite having read the article before commenting, I
nonetheless decided to reply to what I thought the article _should_ have been
about rather than what it was about.

Because really, who wants to pay real money to allow a bunch of polygons to
get a new hat and a lapdance from a robot?

------
troymc
As mentioned by others, SL isn't a game, so of course it won't compare well
with games.

Linden Lab (the makers of the Second Life platform) is a profitable company
with about 250 employees. In fact, their latest quarter was their best yet,
according to a recent blog post:

<http://bit.ly/l6ds5a>

Of course, most of the content in SL wasn't made by Linden Lab, it was made by
the SL users (residents). Because there's an internal economy (where content
creators retain the IP rights in all content created for SL), there's a
competitive market for quality content. Top-quality content has improved
greatly over the years. To get a sense of it, check out the latest Best of SL
magazine:

<http://www.thebosl.com/en/latest-magazine-issue>

The SL vision is audacious: to create a real-time simulation of a malleable
world based on our own physical world, but better (e.g. you can fly). Of
course, the characters in SL aren't simulations, they are real people (except
for a handful of bots), so they're interesting in all the ways people are
interesting.

As for user numbers, nobody says "Facebook has 650 million active people, but
San Francisco has less than a million, therefore SF is a failure." That would
be absurd. (The active user base of SL is about the same as the population of
SF.)

------
gnoupi
Since this article is only about the technical side, let's add to this.

Another game has the same issue with loading times and general performance:
The Sims series, until the 3rd. The Sims 2 was excruciatingly slow when you
had lot of elements on screen, even of fast computers. The reason? It's a game
in which people make their own "levels", by adding items, which can even be of
external source. So it's hard to really scale for it like for other video
games.

The Sims 3 is faster, improved performance a lot, mostly because it is
streaming as much as it can, now. Most of the time you will see dirty loading
polygons, blurry textures, before it loads. Because that's the only way to
deal with a level on which you have no control.

The issue is the same with SL, with the increased fact that people can really
create anything, import meshes, make objects from thousands of polygons. And
they can run scripts in each of these polygons, potentially able to launch
scans of the whole area several times per second.

I'm not saying that this is as optimized as it can get. But it's far from
being a "laziness" issue. The basic problem doesn't really have an "easy
solution".

------
motters
Second life failed, in the sense that it never gained mass popularity in the
same way that social networking did, for a variety of reasons.

i) It's mostly deserted

ii) It's not easy to find your friends, or people who you might want to become
friends with. There are no friend suggestions or other mechanisms to encourage
network effects.

iii) Commercial barriers are everywhere. If you want to do anything of
significance, such as build a virtual house, you have to pay real money up
front - and often not insignificant amounts either.

iv) The default avatars are unattractive, with poor animation. This might seem
like a minor point, but I bet many new users have turned away from SL because
of this.

v) New users are often subject to derrision or "griefing". The initial
experience is typically not very enticing. I can attest to this personally.

vi) The user interface is awful. Recent version have improved, but SL still
needs someone to redesign the UI to make it easier and more intuitive to use.

------
malkia
I used to work on few streaming games (Spiderman 2, Ultimate Spiderman for
example). I had to do the file I/O, some decompression (only for PS2, lzo
running on the IOP chip).

But what he talks is balooney. Now I wasn't directly involved with how the
levels were made (they were in segments, I believe kind of like hexagonal,
more likely brick style layout, with a big strip every one in a while). Every
such brick or strip would get asynchronously loaded.

Okay, now how to get that fast on console? Well first, your data has to be
precooked, at minimum only pointers should be fixed up. No
"new"/"delete"/"malloc"/free" - you load it in a buffer, and it's almost
initialized (without the pointer fixup).

Then problems - say for example Spidey goes towards one of the bricks - you
should start loading the neighbouring bricks too, but as soon as you know more
about where he's going you should start CANCELing these I/O requests. And
better if your system really supports them (or if not so, read in less chunks,
or find the buffer size that the I/O controller or OS is splitting the request
into - for Xbox I think it was 128kb).

Then make sure that you get as much as possible I/O asynchronous requests per
frame from the levels, sound, etc. and for a DVD (and maybe for HDD) do an
elevator sort - e.g. start from somewhere and always take the next request
that is closer to the previous ones (sometimes that's tricky, as by the time
you want to start the next one closer, and the head is already on something
further away).

Then the biggest pain is that on burn media you get one results, while on GOLD
discs another. Mainly because of how CRC checksums are put - I believe it was
for every 32 sectors (or 16), while on the burn was a bit different.

Then you might experience problems, where the japanese PS2 version of the
console just reads badly, hopefully your devkit has the same problem, so you
know you would run in to.

And not forget - check which mode would work better for you - constant angular
velocity, or constant speed. In the first you get slower results in the middle
(I think it was the beginning of the disk), rather than the end - somewhere
(ballpark figure) 1-2mbs/s vs 3-4mb/s

And find decompression algorithm that decompresses faster than what you
reading (I was able to get lzo with some small unaligned write assembly
optimizations) and have uncompressed speed of 5-6mb/s instead of only highest
3-4mb/s.

So my problem with the article? He's not even talking about the simple things
I explained. Believe it's that's only the scratch in making streaming game
(Look what Naughty Dog did, when they could not load the level in time - the
character would trip and hop - now that's very good solution, but really tied
with your gameplay).

In our case, we had testers banging out what Spidey's maximum speed could be,
so we can adjust the levels - some of the levels he had to do some quick
missions, and pop-ups were never allowed (it was considered bug).

~~~
zach
I worked on True Crime: Streets of LA which had similar streaming gameplay and
also worked on Blizzard's upcoming next-gen MMO, so I know a bit about this as
well.

All those considerations you mention are true (and I remember them fondly),
but I think the problem here is that whatever budgets are imposed on player-
creators are not adequate. As I think the author implies, the problems are
authoring guidelines and asset design.

I don't even know if there are texture, vertex or other budgets imposed in
Second Life, but I can tell you for sure that they were a big part of art
creation in True Crime. The areas like Hollywood Boulevard with lots of
recognizable buildings were really taxing on those budgets, but they made them
work. Without those guidelines, even experienced artists can overshoot the
mark.

Ideally, within Second Life, these creative limitations can be integrated into
the game, so that it gets increasingly expensive to claim a large amount of an
area's graphical resources.

~~~
malkia
Hi Zach! I miss the luxoflux bunch (I had to help briefly on the first True
Crime with the xbox audio, and we pretty much stole all the QA from you guys
for Spiderman, which I think is what killed TC:LA (not enough testing))

I really don't know when comes to creative decisions (I'm very bad at that).
At the end of the day I can only say we can stream this much and this much
(say max 1 stereo stream for music, 6-7 mono voices occasionally, and rest for
streaming geometry,t exture).

So part of all this was adjusting, testing to get it right. This is what the
author misses - user provided content would never get the same amount of
testing, as there is simply no money behind that. For that reason they should
limit themselves as much as possible. But I'm begining to go into waters I've
never been (never worked on MMO, so what the hell do I know :))

Cheers! I think we met, or at least said Hi couple of times, when walking by!
(I'm still at Treyarch)

~~~
zach
Oh yeah, Malkia! I'm sorry I didn't recognize you, big guy. Jeff Lander was so
thankful you came in, he wanted to kidnap you to keep you at Luxo! You were
great!

Yeah, we had some crazy QA requirements for True Crime. It blows me away that
there were parts of the map maybe only driven through a few times (we didn't
have the resources to do that many complete drivethroughs - 240 square miles
is just so big). We have so many "glitch videos" on YouTube I think it
autocompletes the word glitch after our game's name!

But that's very true - the iteration was a huge part of the process and of
setting those limits.

I couldn't imagine us not being able to go back to an artist and tell them it
was chugging. I know some other studios did this thing where anytime the frame
rate dropped below 30fps they put a bright red border up! We did fine with
just a graphical meter and some really talented environmental artists.

That's another thing - the folks who made our environments got increasingly
better at delivering stuff under our budgets, because they were constantly
getting feedback about it. Without that, you just can't get the best quality.

------
ChuckMcM
As others have pointed out, the article's title is linkbait. The actual
article says:

1) Second life lets people design levels.

2) This gets very expensive in bandwidth a high draw levels.

3) This makes it 'unplayable.' (aka a failure)

Clearly its not the case that its unplayable since a lot of people play it.
Also the geometry / texture issue is huge when moving from place to place, but
manageable when you're in one area. Thirdly the big draw for second life seems
to be weird sex acts which are probably mostly mental anyway.

It is one of the few attempts at creating a Metaverse. As the author points
out there is a tremendous asset management problem if you try to stream
everything from the server. It could be improved.

Given modern disk drives I'm sure you could cache locally pretty much
everywhere you went with some lookaside cache code to invalidate local copies
when meta-data indicated an update. The author alludes to something like that
by asking for a better architecture.

Now it would have been a bit more interesting if it was written from the
perspective of "this is what it does well, this is what doesn't work for me"
and then go on to speculate or do the math on how one might improve it.

I was looking that the NoSQL dB space as a metaverse management plane. It
could work although everyones view of the world would only converge, not
instantly be the same. You could use something like MongoDB, it would be read-
mostly for geometry. Back when I designed a castle building MMO (never shipped
sadly) the textures were fixed (all clients had them) but you could paint them
on different geometries. It reduced the bandwidth requirements to sending
around vertices and a texture vector (id, origin, u and v vectors). It would
be fun to code something up like that with the Unreal engine.

------
Bud
This is a pretty lame comment. All he talks about is flying around randomly
through the game with a very very large draw distance set.

Um, yeah, of course that maximizes issues with loading textures. Obviously.
It's also not remotely close to the average game-playing experience in SL.
It's not representative.

------
api
The whole virtual reality idea has been completely destroyed for me by a
couple things. The simplest of these is:

why impose a 3D real-world access model on an N-dimensional random access
memory system?

I mean, that's what the web is. I can jump from Wikipedia to CNN to Reddit
without _walking_ through MSNBC and 4chan to get there.

The whole idea is wonky and bizarre when you really think about it. If you
want 3D with an excellent frame rate, go for a walk.

------
rdtsc
One line (one slider move) fix for him -- reduce drawing distance to less than
512m. This is also suggested as the first comment to his blog.

He basically cranked up the drawing distance until everything is grinding to a
halt and decided to complain about how everything is grinding to a halt.

I guess there could just be a simple fix for this, benchmark the PC and the
connection and don't let users crank up the distance to unplayable levels.

------
JoachimSchipper
One possible solution would be server-side rendering (that is, sending
rendered images to the client instead of assets): I still think it sounds
completely insane, but there are lots of companies that claim to make it work.
Since second life is not exactly top of the line, this ought to work.

------
Joakal
What's the appeal with Second Life to garner such fame from media like the BBC
investing in it? [0]

[0] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4766755.stm>

------
edtechdev
I don't know that I'd call it a failure

But many in education are switching over to OpenSim (open source clone of
second life) since it's free to host your own server and more hackable:
<http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page>

Some examples are at <http://www.sciencesim.com/wiki/doku.php/start>

------
zarify
I always found the appeal of Second Life pretty low until I went to a workshop
last year on post secondary teaching, and was at a session on preparing people
for the workplace as well as different forms of training (mental health care
was one of the main examples). They used Second Life quite heavily in
simulations for their learning programs, and it really looked like a fantastic
tool.

------
mcantor
You have lied with statistics! The top chart goes from 0% to 50%, and the
bottom goes from 0% to _5%_. Edward Tufte _frowns_ , sir!

~~~
sbierwagen
The author here:

I know, I know! The graphs are auto-scaled by windows task manager, since
they're designed to be a UI element, not to be compared between sessions like
I did.

 _However!_ In this case I have lied with graphs in a way that _benefits_ the
victim, since, in the context of the article it implies that SL can use much
more bandwidth than it actually does, which is a good thing!

Eh? Eh?

~~~
mcantor
The Bureau Of Statistical Chicanery And Related Ballyhoo has reviewed your
appeal and, based on the extenuating circumstances you described, has chosen
not to revoke your blogging license...

... FOR NOW! ( _dramatic reverb_ )

------
elmindreda
Second Life is not a game, just like the Web isn't a game. They are
platforms/media where, in some places, people have made games.

------
regehr
It's an early version of the Matrix. Code representing werewolves and vampires
will be reused in subsequent iterations.

------
scotty79
Doesn't SL do any p2p transfers?

------
drivebyacct2
This is a really disappointing take on Second Life. I don't know that it's
more or less accurate than the truth, but I hope the author is wrong. I hope
that the technology simply isn't there or that the infrastructure is simply
lacking.

------
Duff
Perhaps if Second Life found a way to incorporate Bitcoin, they could attract
some press again. Maybe IBM would hire an economist to create a virtual IMF,
backed by Bitcoin reserves.

