Second Life Herald

by Idoru Wellman, literary cooking student

Amazon using sex to sell books?

Based on Amazon.com’s current listing of Edward Castronova’s latest literary effort as "Exodus to the Virtual World: Ho Online Fun Is Changing Reality", it appears the Second Life online escort service business really is having an impact on reality. Certainly a number of Second Life residents will concur, as virtual call girls and rent boys make literally thousands of L$ spacebux in exchange for their services - while presumably having fun at the same time.

Or is this an unfortunate virtual bait-and-switch caused by sloppy proofreading at Amazon? If that is the case, perhaps Mr. Castronova - a dedicated World of Warcraft player - might want to tear himself away from his game and mention to Amazon that they have his book mis-titled? Good luck with getting it out of the Google cache.

Does "The Slope of Enlightenment" mean "I Went to Webkinz?"

by Urizenus Sklar, at the Hypewatch Desk

Google trends shows that the SL Hype bubble continues to deflate while Webkinz pwns.

Theoretically, the Gartner hype cycle is supposed to go like this:

1. "Technology Trigger" — The first phase of a hype cycle is the "technology trigger" or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.
2. "Peak of Inflated Expectations" — In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.
3. "Trough of Disillusionment" — Technologies enter the "trough of disillusionment" because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.
4. "Slope of Enlightenment" — Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the "slope of enlightenment" and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.
5. "Plateau of Productivity" — A technology reaches the "plateau of productivity" as the benefits of it become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

Of course there is no guarantee in this that Second Life will rebound on the slope of enlightenment and enjoy the fruited plane of productivity. The curve is for technologies writ large, not for corporations. So is it possible that Second Life kicked in the door and other virtual worlds will reap the post-disillionment rewards? Obviously yes. The question is: Is this already happening? Could it be, as the above graph shows, that the real future of virtual worlds (the path on the slope of enlightment) is being blazed by flash-based kid games? I say yes!

But wait! Webkinz?? Surely you jest Uri! Well gentle reader, I'm glad you asked...

Unexplained avatar bans draw imperial frown

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

The Dr Dobbs Life 2.0 fall summit concluded yesterday, but was marred by what may become an international incident - Princess Manqo of Yaximixche's expression of pleasure at meeting virtual world experts is mixed with strongly worded warnings to event organizers about how to treat royalty - and commoners - if the goal of the meeting is a positive experience.

We learned of the royal displeasure in a press release from the Royal Press office of Yaximixche in which her royal highness Princess Manqo expresses delight in learning more of virtual worlds from experts such as Xconomy, Acceleration Studies Foundation (Ogoglio, Photosynth), Forterra Systems, SLBrowser, Gridocity, Linden Lab, Electric Sheep, Code4 Software, Sun Microsystems, Clear Ink, Eolus, Involve, ESC, AWA, IBM, libSecondLife, Croquet Consortium (Croquet video), Maya Realities, Borland Codegear, Tateru Nino, Multiverse, Pixeltrix, Questar, Intel, and Weather Channel.

However, the Princess also expressed grave concern at the organization of Dr. Dobbs/CMP’s event, saying the organizers were “more concerned in pleasing their sponsors marketing objectives rather than being good hosts by creating a unforgettable experience for visitors and potential customers. Some attendees had to use alternative avatars in order to continue in this event as the committee decided unilaterally that some questions or behaviours were not appropriate. Additionally, the committee did not provide any justification of avatar ban cases or simply they refuse replying to any request for explanation.â€

The Herald was shocked to learn that the Princess was asked by event organizers to refrain from wearing her own environment awareness non-for-profit tag because they felt "she was selling". This amazingly cheeky behavior is simply not how one treats royalty. The Herald calls on both Dr Dobbs and the Life 2.0 event organizers to issue an apology to the princess - lest an international inter-world conflict erupt. Metaverse wars have started over less.

Will SL be the first virtual world to fail?

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

WoW player Dave Ewalt says SL players are losers

The iMojo wire’s inter-world taunting alarm went off this morning - and with good reason. After sitting through a couple ads in the Forbes video clip here, and some blather about the Linden space buck economy, World of Warcraft player and Forbes reporter Dave Ewalt got my attention when he said it is “hard to find someone who isn’t a loser in Second Lifeâ€. Hmmmm - that certainly puts an interesting spin on things - and this is Forbes' second swipe at SL - is there a pattern here?

Mr. Ewalt somehow restrained himself from saying SL is like totally teh suxxor, but did mention concerns about sex, an SL bank run, sex, the gambling ban, sex, bad corporate builds, sex, and nothing to drive the Second Life virtual economy except cyber sex -- oh, and did I mention sex?

by Onder Skall

On my way home there’s this tunnel I pass through. It periodically fills with graffiti and then gets wiped clean. The really good graffiti doesn’t appear here. The good stuff ends up on a wall between two lanes of the highway that few but the most stalwart urban explorers ever see. The tunnel kind of serves as a clearing house for the city’s more amateur artists.

Today as I entered the tunnel I noticed that the city workers had been back, applying paint-thinner to all of the swear words and tags and additions of people’s initials “4evrâ€. They did a bad job this time around. While you couldn’t make anything out, there was still paint everywhere. The only thing they left alone was the pumpkin I took a picture of.

You know, I always did like that pumpkin. It’s pretty cool that they made the decision to leave it.

All of the excitement about user-created content that the Web 2.0 boom is bringing with it makes a lot of sense when I look at this picture. If we spend time somewhere, we want to leave our mark. It mostly leaves a mess, but sometimes it gives everybody a little shared moment. Who cares why, or whether that’s a good thing, it just is. We’ll break the law to do it if we have to.

It’s our compulsion.

Well, alright, maybe it's 6-4, as one MTV guy conceded. The ad people in the room, the suits, respond to control. And Viacom/MTV/There offer them control. There won't be any "flying objects," as Colin Parris, the IBM VP, delicately called the Anshe Chung flying penises problem. He's staying with SL because it's on balance a "value-add" for his company, and most important for the work force is the open-ended social networking for his employees. I asked him if he feared loss of worker productivity, distractability, and undermining of management authority by open-ended platforms. He reflected and said, no, on balance it's a value-add -- it's a plus. If he can bring people in India and England and the United States together to talk to each other with the innovation, creativity, directness -- and cost savings in airfares -- that he can in SL, that works. It works because he can keep parts of his islands hidden and locked down, however...and not every business is going to have the longevity, the technical skills, the endurance power and the pocketbook to hit the sweet spot of Second Life. Many aren't going to stick around if any one of those areas like "broadly offensive" and "undermining management authority" or "worker productivity" breaks down too many ways for them.

If you haven't been to There lately, maybe you'll be downloading it sooner rather than later. So far, at half-time here on the morning of day two at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference, it's the winner for the platform that can ensure advertising companies and media planners the space and the environment and the product placement they require. SL is for fun, for the intrepid, the experimental, the geeky. But if you want a quicker fix and a safer ride, There and everything associated with it is more likely to give it to you. That makes the intelligentsia angry. Spin Martin is Twittering that he doesn't like the virtual world platform makers and developers like MTV and There that say "we'll control the users". But as panelists are saying -- you make stuff open-ended, you get people making good and bad stuff. You can tell people to ignore the bad, but frankly, the customers don't want to have to keep stepping over the pile of penises to get to the good (which even in SL terms might mean *one* properly-placed penis, not a sim of them flying into your hair). It doesn't mean that experimentation and innovation won't keep on keeping on in platforms like SL...but it will not become the mass-use platform Philip Rosedale talks about when he says "I wanted to make it for everybody."

Prokofy Neva, Kremlindenologist

So I walk into the 55th floor of the Millenium Hotel and I see it...The Hair. Our Hero's Hair is Holding Up. Relieved, I shake Philip Rosedale's hand and ask him how he's holding up, but the message has already been telegraphed to me: gelled, sturdy, stellar, architectural -- thank you very much. Philip's hair, if it could talk, would describe what it's like being the Cat in the Hat holding up all those sims, a rake, a plate, a cake...So...how many sims is it now? He gives me a figure..it's different than the figure Joe Miller gives later, you know, I don't think they really know, it's *almost organic* this stuff and out of control. 7800?

If you can imagine it's possible -- Philip's hair is *even more amazing* than it was at SOP II and SLCC I, which is when I first was exposed to the construction. People in New York don't do that kind of thing to their hair. I mean, you just never see it. Walk around, look. So this is So California. And...it's like...so cool and perfectly constructed, with just the right amount of mix of "bedhead" and "tousled bad boy" and "mad scientist". Gazing out over the sterilized wound of downtown, I couldn't help thinking of that time Nikola Tesla shorted out lower Manhattan with some experiment on Houston St...Philip looks more than ever like he stuck his hand in the socket and still finds it interesting...

God and the weather (channel) in Second Life

by Jimbo Quality, on temporary assignment to the Herald spirituality extreme sports desk

Jimbo Quality and friend

[Editor’s Note: We had hoped feared that correspondent Jimbo Quality had been lost forever in his ramblings around the grid, until we received the following dispatch, scribbled on cocktail napkins and the backs of credit card receipts, on March 15. Apparently, Jimbo filed it in response to an assignment that was originally due in mid-February. When we politely but firmly inquired as to the delay, Jimbo grabbed his check and made for the door. "Lag," he said over his shoulder as he bounded out of the Herald offices. All we could do was wonder why he was wearing that helmet.
--Walker Spaight]

I was told to go find something spiritual in SL, and frankly the assignment had me stumped. I spent days weeks mulling the assignment as I camped in my favorite sleazy casino. Then, like a bolt of lightning, it hit me. Actually, that’s not right. The bolt of lightning hit some poor chick near me (see above), but it scared me enough to want to leave the casino.

Low-voltage shocks help internet addicts sleep better - Lindens prefer herbal tea

by Onder Skall

Kids: when your parents tell you to get off the damned computer and get some fresh air, you'd better. If not, they might send you to China for treatment.

When you arrive at the 'treatment clinic' you'll be locked in a cell, exposed to freezing temperatures, yelled at, and tazered. Oh I'm sorry, it's a clinic, so "tazer" is the wrong word. In a clinic we call it "electro-shock therapy" which, even though it's been discredited by every clinical study ever done as simply a good way to damage a person's brain, seems to be the cure for "Internet addiction".

In addition you're given therapy and lots of drugs. These are compulsory, of course, as the clinics all seem to be on military bases where your rights are temporarily suspended.

Blingsider, Tard*Star, New World Goats Notes are completely safe

by Bayesian TextBot

be very very afraid of games - and the Second Life Herald

Roderick Jones recently posted an article to Counterterrorism Blog entitled "MetaTerror: The Potential Use of MMORPGs by Terrorists". The article is primarily about Second Life, and on the whole compliments Linden Lab on creating a versatile and useful space. Of course, usefulness might not be a good thing:

"While the makers of Second Life (Linden Labs) pursue an admirable utopian ideal these metaverse systems can potentially also be used by those seeking to pursue a radical agenda."

Note: this presupposes that "radical" is a bad thing, but let's set that aside and really get to the heart of what Jones is trying to say:

"Streaming video can be uploaded into Second Life and a scenario can easily be constructed whereby an experienced terrorist bomb-maker could demonstrate how to assemble bombs using his avatar to answer questions as he plays the video. Using the decentralized organization effect, already successfully used by SL companies, the bomb-maker and his pupils can be spread around the globe and using instant language translation tools (available in the world) could be speaking a variety of languages. "

by Onder Skall

The BBC covered yesterday what the Herald covered last week- "Project: Top Secret" has launched in an effort to build a user-created MMO. As a trade-off for being a bit late to the party they were able to provide us with an overview of how many signups they've received.

At this point there are 20,000 signups, with an expected total of 100,000 by the time they close things off. Numbers like that are sure to attract headhunters trying to fill a quota, but it means a bit more than that. The music industry is notorious for ripping off artists simply because they can - after all, everybody wants to be a star. Now, with this many people vying for a finite number of positions, will the games industry suffer the same fate? Some feel that it has already.

In this same article David Perry is quoted as saying: "We are not doing this for fun; this is a professional game we are trying to make. It's a business." So much for doing what you love. There was a time where the difference between a good game and a great game resided solely in the passion of the people behind it. Perhaps those days have passed.

As far as the hope that this was an effort to discover some shining stars or for people to showcase their talent, two other quotes seemed to stand out:

by Onder Skall, courtesy of Second Life Games

Let me start this off by stating that I have no interest in the “world vs. platform†debate. It’s boring and played out, so don’t you dare try to draw me in. What I’m trying to do here is answer the simple question:

Where are the best candidates as viable alternatives to Second Life?

In order to answer this question, I’ve come up with the three things that in my opinion make Second Life irreplaceable at the moment. Since these are entirely formed from my little brain, we’ll call them “Onder’s Big Threeâ€. They are:

1. Cash transactions must be easy and readily accommodated flowing both into and out from the system.
2. Users must be able to create unique content and retain some form of ownership over it.
3. The fabric of the world itself must be possible to affect. IE: land ownership, room decoration, or some other content that remains viable even when the player who created it is logged off. (â€Pervasive†is the word I’m groping for here…)

by Onder Skall, courtesy of Second Life Games

After several hours we realize that there is just no way to kill each other here. My hatred for that bastard Rudy is as strong as his for me, but hatred alone won’t settle this. We quit blasting each other with useless push guns and look for a way to die in the SL world. The next thing I know, we’re staring at each other across a scripted Russian Roulette table.

“So, this is it. It ends here,†Rudy growls.

“Looks like it.â€

Rudy and I don’t agree on much, but neither one of us likes alt accounts. Whoever dies here would be out of SL for good. Our feud has spanned the metaverse from way back in LambdaMOO, all the way through Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and a half-dozen other worlds. The original reason forgotten by us both, we’ve given each other hundreds of excuses over the years to wipe the other guy out.

by Fiend Ludwig

According to Nick Yee, of Stanford University, and his colleagues, Second Life, and by extension other virtual environments, is an ideal place to test paradigms of real-life human social interaction. In the paper The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments, Yee asserts that:

Overall, our findings support our overall hypothesis that our social interactions in online virtual environments, such as Second Life, are governed by the same social norms as social interactions in the physical world. This finding has significant implications for using virtual worlds to study human social interaction. If people behave according to the same social rules in both physical and virtual worlds even though the mode of movement and navigation is entirely different (i.e., using keyboard and mouse as opposed to bodies and legs), then this means it is possible to study social interaction in virtual environments and generalize them to social interaction in the real world.

Although it sounds plausible on the surface, Yee's conclusions are based on a raft erroneous assumptions. Of the five variables that Yee observed during avatar interaction - gender, interpersonal distance, mutual gaze, talking, and location - only interpersonal distance and location can be accurately measured by simply observing avatars while they communicate.

For all of the others, Yee has missed the boat entirely. Observations were made in-world by research associates who used a script to collect data. He reports, "When triggered by a designated key press, the script would collect the name, Cartesian coordinates (x, y), and yaw of the 16 avatars closest to the user within a 200 virtual meter radius. The script would also track whether the avatars were talking at that given moment. The script would then store the information as a text file." This text file is called a 'snapshot' in the study. The snapshots were then analyzed to isolate dyads (pairs) of avatars who were talking to one another. No indication is given whether the snap-shotted avatars were asked whether or not they wanted to participate in this study.

Special to the Herald, by Onder Skall of Second Life Games

It started with a couple of friends sitting at the kitchen table. Doc Boffin and Jaladan Codesmith wondered what it would take to create a kick-butt card combat game for an MMO. A deck of playing cards, some masking tape, a magic marker and a lot of imagination later, and a new game was born. This was the very definition grassroots gaming.

The game's first Second Life incarnation was called SIMCombat and didn't involve any graphics at all. The numbers were all handled through basic dialogue boxes, and the animation took the form of a slow-motion turn-based combat. When HUDs became available in 2005, Doc and Jaladan wanted to bring more graphical elements into the game. The cards that they had used at the kitchen table lent a tangible quality to the game. The problem was, neither one of them could really draw. If they were really to do a proper launch, they needed an art guru. Plus, they faced a key challenge: Would the game be fun?

Happily, Doc and Jaladan accomplished their mission, and in early 2006 a game was born that in its simplicity, sophistication and compulisve replayability would rival that pink elephant of Second Life gaming, Tringo.

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

it hurts me to shock you when you answer incorrectly

While this may not be news to some of Second Life’s residents, researchers recently learned that administering imaginary electric shocks to a virtual reality characters creates significant distress for those applying the torture treatment - much as was found in earlier experiments with actors portraying the victims of the shock torture.

Mel Slater, a virtual reality researcher at University College London recently published a paper describing a virtual re-enactment of a 1960s experimental finding that people would administer apparently lethal electric shocks to a stranger at the behest of an authority figure. In the updated experiment, the recipient of the electric shocks is a VR character - yet the actions and responses of the experimental subjects was much the same as apparent torture to a real person.

Viral marketing experts may not be immune to viral blogging

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

When Rik Riel cast a bogus blog entry into the metaverse blog-o-sphere last night claiming the Internet naming authority ICANN would be regulating names and addresses within virtual worlds - was he hoping to catch a marketing/new media expert? If so, December 13th was Rik’s lucky day as Daniel Davenport of THINK Inc - an interactive marketing agency - took the bait with this post at his “think d2c media: direct to consumer†blog.

Rule one for aspiring Second Life pundits burnishing their credentials by linking and quoting exciting new metaverse developments in the blob-o-sphere -- read the comments on the blog posts you quote - on the chance that someone is trolling for the uncritical.

The perils of punditry are clear after visiting Rik Riel’s blog where the headline screams “ICANN announces it now controls the virtual world as well as the web†and a faux press release - complete with a picture of internet saint Vint Cerf proclaims that the group managing web address/names will now be registering addresses and names for objects and avatars in WoW, Second Life, and other games. *cough* *cough* *cough*. Of course, the comments lead one to believe that things may not be so simple - or perhaps April 1 came twice this year.

Morgan "LEWIS" McLintic to cover RL with spinning ad-cubes?

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Morgan McLintic is loved

Feeling the need for perhaps just a wee bit more soft and fluffy press coverage, Linden Lab recently sent some love to Morgan McLintic of the LEWIS public relations firm - Mr. McLintic is leading a new LEWIS/Linden Lab PR operation. In his blog, Morgan says SL is a fine thing that “touches a range of disciplines from entertainment, to education, to marketing, to non-profits, to the media itself in a very immediate and intimate wayâ€.

Fair warning then. Touching “the media itself in an very immediate and intimate way†suggests the press should avoid wearing X-cite genital attachments on our avatars at media events. Or did I misunderstand? Better safe than sorry - I’ll send word to Reuters, the SL Bling-Zeitung, and other metaverse media outlets.

The BBC is in production on an hour-long television documentary on massively multiplayer online games, and they're looking for subjects to interview. If your avatar is "more like you than you are" -- or even if you're just a noob -- get in touch with them and maybe you too can appear on British television. The film will be broadcast in the UK around January or February of next year as part of Horizon, the broadcaster's "flagship science documentary series," according to the Beeb. Full details and contact information below:

In Newsweekly ("New England's Largest GLBT Newsletter") is running a story on an appalling new "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on the part of Blizzard Entertainment where gay- and lesbian-friendly guilds are concerned (linked from BoingBoing the other day).

Apparently, a member of a World of Warcraft guild advertising itself on the Blizzard forums as "GLBT-friendly" (though also specifying it was not GLBT-only) received a warning notice from Blizzard recently saying company admins would have banned her from the game but were feeling magnanimous that day. When the player protested that there must be some mistake, Blizzard responded that no, the mistake was hers, for inviting discrimination from Blizzard's obviously victimized player-base: