Putting Second Life in Perspective

Disclaimer: the trivial fact that I level some harsh criticism against the U.S. should not detract anyone reading this from looking at my suggestions about Second Life. If you can’t handle such heresy please do not continue: go do something else. Yes I am a virulent critic of the US, yes I do not live in the US, yes I still have the raw nerve to write US critical articles (which are, by the way, not “anti-american”), yes I want to see sweeping societal, electoral and economical changes in US society, no I will not aim for those changes by fomenting violence or terrorism (what, are you an idiot for thinking such a thing), YES, I positively loathe the segment of US society that even now supports the policies of Dick Cheney.

Get over it.  A few billion people outside the US feel the consequences and pain the US is causing even if they drink coke and eat cheeseburgers. Thousands literally die as a consequence. Yes, US policies (and spasms) have damning consequences for a few billion humans. Yes, many nonamericans feel literally “betrayed” by the US between 2000 and 2008.  Yes – Bush and Cheney and co belong in prison.

Ok, back to business.

I do not think in a linear fashion, which may be a euphemism for me being a chaotician.That’s ADHD for you – my predisposition often leads me on diffuse tangents in statement, action or thinking. The last year I have been thinking a lot about Second Life, especially about why so many people that tried it hate it with a vengeance.

As Gwyn pointed out perfectly the chance ‘a random user’ adopts SL as a regular medium of self-expression is a bit of a mystical choice.  But still, I wonder – what features can Second Life change to make it become more easily adopted by users out there?

Right now a small number of people use it with regularity, and most potential users look at it once, and walk away.

Clearly, I am not a visionary. Because I think Second Life is for losers who cannot achieve anything or pursue meaningful relationships in their first lives.

Right!

I won’t dwell on the interface of Second Life , other than that it is inadequate and clumsy and needs sweeping changes as soon as humanly possible. Take for instance this silly issue of movement and speech.  I use the WASD keys to move around – when I use mouse and arrow keys these ae just too far apart – so I constantly say sentences like WWWWWWWWWWWSSSDDDDDDAAAWWW to people. Or I jump.

This need improvement fast. I suggest creators of the interface read Dan Saffer as soon as possible.

I equally won’t comment on (demand) including in the client .. ‘a standard universal Animation Override’  that steers all character movements and animations (it would be a very good idea). This shouldn’t be a worn prim in 2009 – that’s dated and impractical.

AO functions belong in the inventory. In fact I urgently suggest Linden Lab implements a new section in the Inventory (“animations”) with subdirs labelled  “walk” or “stand”, just like in any ordinary ZHAO. Better still, any user can throw in dozens of animations in these directories (rather than the normal limits) and somehow (through depositing appropriate scripts in these directories) select on categories of animation, such as “flirty” or “playful” or “businesslike”.

It is possible (some “smart” AOs already do simple variants of this, by fusing ‘walk” and “collison” into a new animation state called “bump into”) to have characters fall over when someone or something bumps in to them. Right now it’s all left to the programming talents of people making AOs, in the somewhat constrictive environment of LSL, and LL can do better by creating a smarter access to animations. Like I said, I think off playing things in a smart portion of the inventory – say, I have these sexy stands, so I create a sub-directory of standing poses, and when needed, I click and activate that – and the client (or some script) selects what I need, without me finding a way through a maze of menus. If rockstar can do it smooth with Nico, why can’t we with our avis?

However!

What I do fret about, is an apparent lack of greater vision with Linden Lab, a sort of lackluster ‘patch the dinosaur’ kind of attitude. In the old days LL was probably engineering a world with purpose and direction – this isn’t the case anymore. I think LL is playing catchup at all levels, and it is not doing a great job. Correct me with arguments if I am wrong!

Take for instance the whole extremely distasteful discussion about sexual content in Second Life.  From the way I see it, Linden Lab wants more clients – a greater likelyhood that whenever someone, anyone tries SL he or she keeps using it.   That won’t happen when so many people are alienated by aspects of Second Life. The brand name has become tarnished by the somewhat more “dynamic” styles of selfexpression of some users.

Personally, I think the idea of griefage is a deeply fascinating phenomenon, and it will certainly emerge as protest statement any time a virtual reality (..) mixes anonymity with the tools to create scripted carnage.  There are many people out there in the world with reason to feel angry, frustrated, bitter or just rebellious, and once you don’t have a cop with mace, tazers, arrest and ‘institutional sodomy torture’ hanging over your head, many people feel entitled to rip loose.   This will be a problem for other virtual realities as well, and the more repressive, conservative, corporate, authoritarian, paternalistic and restrictive a VR is (I am thinking of Disney VRs  here) the more damage griefing will do (or will attract).

This is a harsh lesson for all corporations who hope they can control and restrict content - you never will succeed.  In essence, people moving into this arena will need a new kind of tolerance.  You have to smile and let it go when griefing occurs.  Right now the idea is unthinkable for the generations raised on “knight rider” and ‘dancing with the stars”. We have been brought up with the tacit assumption that if ever something is too bad, a judge will come along and lambast any crap, or some convenient uniformed authority figure comes along and get rid of the buffoons.  In Virtual Realities you cant enforce moral codes, let alone define them.  Even sony, our beloved pope of xenophobic content controller, learned that lesson the hard way.   I say – the corporations will be learning this lesson over and over well into the 2020s.

That is why I say I think Linden Lab is being overly cautious, by “effectively ghettofying” adult (X rated) content into an isolated region. Their plan is to allow only users with either (a) verified accounts or (b) a registered credit card in those places. Good luck with that guys!

It is my position as a (how shall I call this?) “zeitgeist sympathizer” that the current corporatist, US-centric, unrelenting marketbased capitalist, moralist paradigm we are in is ending.  In a few years we will see the collapse of “the entertainment industry” , triggered by a sharp decrease in advertising revenues. Guess how that will happen.  Kids now aged ten will in five years have all but stopped watching television. Or commuting to school.

Especially with the issues raised by the implications of resource depletion (which is a far bigger issue than peak oil in itself) and environmental decay we need alternatives to our current career and education choices. First and foremost, oil is on the way out fast, and with it a whole generation of corporate predation.  As will “american-style’ corporatism. I don’t know about many of the people reading this blog (if any) – if I look at the US, especially as an outsider, it strikes me as a rather terrifying place.  For people like me the Neocon crowd and people like Leon Kass stands in stark oppositon to everything I hold dear. I know, I know, the US is a big place (some say “schizofrenic in its diversity) and most people are far better off than anyone at any time in human history, but still, there are elements at work in US society that are scary as hell, especially for someone like me with all these transhumanist ambitions.

UPDATE: CLICK THIS LINK

The presidency of Bush stands for many americans as a bitterly divisive and painful period. Quite a few americans, the types I call “The Stubborn 20 %” still support that paradigm. I call that “collaboration”, “enabling’ or even “treason’.

Worse – this same right wing demographic is effectively holding a gun to the head of the current presidency  – “go any more socialist leftwing and we’ll push up the righteous anger knob a notch“.  I think it is easy for mercenarial organizations like Fox to stir up lone nutjobs into “taking the manner into their own hands”, whatever the cost. This goes hand in hand with “entitlement tantrums” such as global warming denial (“the american way of life is not negotiable”).

(Incidentally, the name of Blackwater has quietly been changed to Xe! Now there is a name to fail at googling)

Dangerous game of chicken indeed!

Linden Lab is moving ahead with a product that is bound to clash with established interests sooner rather than later, and as such LL needs several things – a bigger user base. – more income (more people spending money). – more dedicated and outspoken (and credible) users. But most of all – corporate clients.  I suppose the best avenue for LL is to become as inexpendable as internet itself, so when some rightwing nutjob seejs to start a witch hunt, the rightwing nutjob will lose his shill 30 silver support base.  In germany authorities were close to an outright ban on Second Life because “it might serve as platform to vector pedophylia”, and Linden Lab can not afford being in such a precarious position.

Linden Lab can not afford to be held at the mercy of Neocon Neoludites or Evangelical xenophobes or authoritarian moralists.

If the wrong president is elected in the emperial capital, wham  you are one foot in an anti-rationalist theocracy, and wham your multimillion dollar company might find itself cut off from economic traffic because some semi-senile senator saw a penis during a presentation.

What is worse, there is a consistently irrational minority in US society (again – the same nutty 20%) that doesn’t like all that newfangled big city stuff.  These people don’t negotiate or barter or appease – and they do nothing but hate, resent, protest against, teabag and wave the flag.  I can see a sudden flash in the pan event, a ‘bullseye special’ on fox, and you’d have the 20% in uproar,hurling burning tires into the Linden Lab lobby.  These people have a strong innate predisposition against stuff like Second Life, and the tiniest incident may incite them to start regarding this as unmitigated societal evil.

Somebody seriously needs to intervene in this game and end it, this is fucking ridiculous. What a monstrosity filled with time wasters. The rest of the world is laughing at you America.

Right now, from what I understand (and I may have missed a few blog posts) Linden Lab created a new continent and is busy transplanting existing structures and busineses from the old continents and onto the new one. It is like going through a garden with a hoe, ripping out a specific set of plants, and replanting them “down the street, out of sight“.

I regard this as setting a slightly unsettling precedent – Linden Lab more or less appropriates the moral authority to restrict its clients to self-express.  So LL isn’t a phone company or internet provider anymore – the operable paradigm now is a book store, or maybe even a theatre.  It will take action, bar some venues, restrict access, place locked doors and post disclaimers.

That is a problematic step – because if LL concedes it takes steps (and claims to possess the moral authority) to protects some clients against the expressions of other clients, who knows what people will complain about next? Remember, Second Life is an international game…  if it gets adopted by Americans, Europeans, Russians, Australians and maybe the Japanese – that’s one thing. Those all fall heavily under the pax americana. But what about southamerica (with a massive catholic demographic) – or the Middle East (nutcase mullahs!) or China (nutjob authoritarian elitists who have the nerve calling themselves communists)  … that is some really big business, and if SL starts making a dent, you have to be careful with these people.

I can give you all a few examples – what about a store on SL that sells Cannabis? Is that immoral? Illegal? Globalist? Enough reason for the US-based ATF to raid Linden Lab and “take away their servers for closer inspection” ? How about alternative religion – militant islam. Right now SL is not very suitable for a bunch of rabid muslims to start peddle a worldwide sharia – but on the other hand, scientology could do some nice business here, given but a small amount of additional tools. Same goes for extremist political organizations. Russian Nashi. European populists and one issue parties.  But equally problematic would be a bunch of dutch explaining the merits of liberalized euthanasia, take in appointments for abortions (including cheap plane tickets), or how you inject heroin most safely.  How about a spot where hugo chavez preaches several hours per day against a list of top one hundred wall street companies?  What if people start listening to Hugo?

What if attendance levels in SL, and societal penetration becomes so big that you start seeing some really vicious discussions?

Right now it is still very tame – but once the italian fascists arrive, or the creationists start setting up dioramas and dinosaur petting zoos, or when someone opens up a place to order pizzas via SL with a side order of cocaine, or when people start explaining that the genocide didn’t happen and why, or Chinese officials opening up shop in Second Life selling kidneys for transplant to rich westerners?

If LL now says – hey, we host the spaces in Second Life, we are saying we are NOT a utility company, nor like the water company or the phone company – we are a book store and we make arbitrary selections to benefit our public relations image and corporate strategy – which content will they be forced out next?  And how easy is it to hold Linden Lab hostage to public opinion or mass hysteria? – anyone can sue SL because it doesn’t uphold some inane local standard.

Equally so it can be asserted LL has now become the worlds most prolific pimp – if you want access to the adult regions you have to either have access to a credit card (I still hate those uniquely american inventions) or be age verified.  Well you know what that means, right? SL is showing the world a polished up image, but it controls the gate to the secret kingdom of virtual porn.  That can surely be interpreted as pimping !

All  this is not well. Virtual worlds will expand.  Jamais Cascio (and his pals) categorize the emergence of these ‘virtual worlds’ along four main avenues:

1- Augmented Realities

2- Mirror Worlds

3- Lifelogging

4- Virtual Worlds.

I am personally very sure that we will see the emergence of an industry bigger than gaming, cinema, music, TV and porn combined with these four ones.  By 2020 we will have as much people in 3D virtual worlds (with extremely easy to use, intuitive 3D interfaces!) as we have in the intertubes right now.   The question which then remains is – will Linden Lab be the ones hosting those, or will they become a footnote in computing history.

Loose Sand

The above image depicts the total land mass of Second Life in june 2009. That is 27,483 regions.  I see some measure of problem with it. Sure, I thoroughly appreciate all the expression and sincerity and fun people have, but that’s the small percentage of people that “get it” and sign up.

My objection is, it is a giant mess.  Right now each such little square is a sim, no bigger than 256 meters in size. You can’t make sims bigger than that because of bad choices in the base architecture of Second Life. When in 2001 Linden Lab started making decisions on the basic architecture of Second Life they made some pretty startling decisions that will be haunting us for years to come. Second Life cannot grow beyond the current sim size. It has severe problems growing beyond a set number of prims per sim. There are absolute ceilings in terms of servetr capacity and bandwidth. Don’t ask me for specifics, I am just parrotting people who know what’s up, and if it’s all true, Linden Lab will get stuck in the mud within several years. Beyond that point Second Life can only add more 250 meter sims, ad infinitum, but it will never ever be able to compete with anyone substantially leapfrogging their ass into the 21sty century.

They seem to think they can.

It may be just my opinion, and nothing more than that, but I feel the small size of sims is inherently wrong and a grave long-term threat for this particular incarnation of the metaverse.

The problems lie in part with prim scarcity.

Last week, when I was at a meeting, one Jack Linden responsed to some of these concerns, when I tried to mention some concerns “maybe you need to look at opensim“. Thanks Jack, great vote of confidence!

Anyhow… where was I?

People who rent land more often than not build ugly buildings, because these users are scarce on prims.  As a result Second Life does in most part look pretty repetitive and unappealing.  Because investors are struggling to break even, they construct spartan malls or land deals.  The result is that a new structure will look, on average slightly less beautiful than one next door. And if your neighbours poop out a revolting mall, what exactly is your urgency to make your building any more appealing?

Sure, in the paleoSLera of 2004, 2005 and 2006, when second life was still “a pretty pioneering idea” all this muck deemed was acceptable.In 2006 even Amsterdam looked pretty cool (it looks like cardboard junk right now). In the now you cant get away with that shit anymore.  People try, and they simply make less income in SL when they do. As a result large swaths of salespeople are often trying to cut corners, botting, griefing competitors, stealing IP content and changing it just enough to sell it without questions, and assorted other party tricks. And STILL, despite this mucking about, SL looks barren and desolate to noobs giving it a try.

Remember “the era of the great corporate fuckup?”.  Those were the days. Somewhere 2005, 2006 busineses flocked to SL. I was there, personally humiliating the executive idiot running the show in name of John de Moll, and I told him “you think you can manage this? Forget about it, you need a paradigm shift you can’t even conceive of“.  I was more or less proven correct and a year, two years later those same “we want quick and easy results” corporations left, are still leaving, after they found their sims empty, barren and depressingly unvisited.  All that effort was like Coca Cola and Nike and Endemol printing half a billion full color folders and dumping it from boeings, smack in the middle of the sahara.

Technology is changing the playing field

I constructed a small rendition of the San Marco in 2006, and it is still used.  I am a notorious prim monster,  and even though it was OK in 2006, when seeing the shots for assassins creed 2 I wallow in shame.  When I mention this as a concern people say “you have wrong expectations of SL”

Why exactly? I studied game design for a year, I studied the variables and data transmission rates. Why cant you stream this in a way that looks like a game??

Sure, AC2 is a game, created by a large tribe of professionals, but even then, the sheer magnitude of the cities in AC1 was so *huge* it was stunning me. Why can’t Second Life even come close to such a performance?  I mean – if you have resources, you can do this. Sure it costs tens of millions, but so does the typical hollywood blockboster these days – and I sure get a lot more satisfaction from Assassin’s Creed than I do from the warmed up digitally rendered corpse of Ahnold.

I think it is extremely profitable and very rewarding to create a MMORPG in the style of Assassins Creed (or Crysis, or FarCry2, or GTA4, or Fallout3, or Silent Hill) – with diverse classes other than “assassin’, with a good storyline, with player created  content, with a city editor, with a virtual economy.

There is a difference between “open” and “locked off”. You have these “locked down” MMO games – like WoW. I do not think those have much of a future. And on the other extreme you have open environments, like Second Life, who may have the future if they remain appealing enough, and succeed in grabbing enough repeat-loggers and addiction value to keep reinvesting.

Some pretty fundamental changes needed

So – What could Linden Lab do to improve upon the world, or at the very least create the preconditions to allow its users to make the world more appealing?

1. an additional 3D object plugin.

Second Life has worked great on prim sculpting and creation, but I do not see this work indefinitely.  We are arriving at the end of what you can do “with just 15K prims”, even though adding sculpties was a godsend. Is LL going to choke up graphics engines with new fireworks, like … shadows? … better physics? …flexible sculpties? …client-based sculpty generators?  I think that’s all great, but not enough.  SL needs a library of quality objects.  And a big one at that.

How big would a library of recognizable objects be – objects ranging from huts, hovels, a dozen brand cars, street furniture, some normal furniture, acme kitchenware, a few roads, railroad tracks, ruined towers, a bridge, whatnot.  These things need to be rendered – but I am not (yet) suggesting LL allows users to start creating this content. The point is rather that this stuff gets downloaded to the client in advance (weekly library updates) at a rate of about (makes a crude, unfounded guesstimare) a gig per month.  I am not making any suggestions, but *sneeze*sketchup*sneeze* the market offers several interesting options.

I say, implement a plugin or feature in Second Life, no later than six months from now, that allows the rendering as physical objects that have been constructed and textured in 3DS or Maya, or a similar accessible tool set. This can be done … and it has been implemented to a degree by several of the opensource clients. I am not sure but I believe RealeXtend can depict Sketchup models.  This is a crucial improvement to the capabilities of second life.

2. create a download library for objects created by select content producers.

SL needs a benchmark.  It may come down to *some* level of standardization, but if new users have immediate access to a library of chairs, cupboards, doors, stone walls, castle towers, spiral stairs, gas stations, rusty pipes, skeletal prisoners, glowing magical crystals, liferafts, M16 assault rifles, hats – you name it – and a library of hundred times as much variety from Xstreets – you cant lose.  New users will be far likelier to adopt Second Life.

I am talking a wide range of iconic objects, from various historical styles, rendered as physical 3D models. Have a look at the object library in a game as as Crysis – these should be cars (scripted to drive in a consistent manner),  small houses, concrete pillars, rusty pipes, bridges, lights – anything. From a range of historical styles. With credible textures. How big would such a library be? A few gigabyte – well within download ranges for most SL users.  Again, I am not saying that every SL user should be allowed to arbitrarily add structures – you let professionals do that. Then Linden Lab makes cash by trade in these objects, as well as the select content producers. And you can make for instance a car manufacturer pay to have his new model car included in Second Life.

3. overhaul the client interface.

Go to a place where they store old people. Pay these people for their (considerable) stress. Make them play Second Life. Watch anything they do and say by closed circuit video camera.  Record capilary dilation of the so-called blush respons, fluctuation of the pupil, and involuntary dilation of the iris.  Then look at where these people freak out. With the current client, this is often and considerable.

I get the client.  But my friends, who are avid gamers, laugh at me and mock me when I (still) say SL is pretty interesting. They point to the interface and they mock me some more and invariably I can’t get any ride and I have to walk home, because of all the incessant mocking.

4. a procedural tool to create plants. (and animals?)

Include in the Second Life client a generation tool to create trees, shrubs and foliage. Note – this doesn’t have to be (or should involve) full models. in an ideal world you “open up the flora menu, select a place on earth (with more added all the time),  and paint plants over the area with your mouse stroke.   Whats recorded (and transported over the net) is just a flat color region marking the presence of a certain category of plants at the designated spot in the sim.   I can alocate a mixture of corsican/mediterrean shrub with african trees, a few japanese trees mingled in for variation. Just allow a land owner to designate “I want some type 12d low foliage and shrub there – and then have it fractally generated.

Two clients will then depict slightly different plant and tree structures, but the nett effect will be the same – a more credible, living environment. Characters will be able to walk through the shrubbery – but will be impeded by actual trees – but only type of tree and position will have to be send over the internet. The rest is just generated client side, and looks better depending on sophistication of the client plugin, available graphics card and client settings.

Make these plant generators tweakable and stretchable, so you can add new plants and environment categories – not just the predictable tropical island, or ewok forests – but (eventually) exotic alien foliage as well.

4b. Client-based weather and atmospheric effects? Adjustable Physics?

And finally, the big gamechanger:

5. Endless Land

In my opinion, second life must get rid of its current constraint of 250 meter sims as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, since SL architecture, hardware limits and internet speeds disallow all too ambitious landscaping architectures, LL must be practical and economical in this regard – and good news, there is a way to do this.

Linden Lab will have to implement a new, additional server architecture, with slightly different rules. This wonderful new hardware infrastructure doesn’t (wouldn’t) deal with sims – but it will deal with avatars, avatar position and avatar depiction.  Let’s describe current sims as being gems in a crown – the crown itself, the precious metal, is the new server augmentation – the old sims are the gems.

Envision if you will, a huge cartographic map,  a continent, probably several times the new SL continent of corsica over.  This is just like a regular boring old height map, but with better textures.  Initially I would suggest having Linden Lab constructing this wondrous new continent, and then allow sim owners to move to (and away from if need) this new continent. When an avatar stands somewhere in this new virtual space what he sees is endless land. Depending on settings he will see trees rendered as far as miles in the distance. He may spot the telltale signs a sim is allocated here… and there… and he may or may not decide to travel to any sim he spots in the distance.  The inbetween land, Let’s all it LIMBO for now, would be natural landscape, plants – and some sparse structures. Mostly. But it might also be generic cityscape.   It isn’t exactly difficult to procedurally generate cities. Best of all, I wholeheartedly recommend making this content something that is stored on the client side. On hard disks.

Main difference, the altitude (landscaping) map is set and (until edited) immutable – you cannot change the surface geometry (much) – so you have a friggin huge surface map generated with a fractal tool, and edited by a cartographer to be as exiting a stretch of land as you can manage. I am thinking land miles in size, with mountains, canyons, rivers, coastal regions, volcanos, barren steppes, lush forests. If I were to make an estimate, I’d say no less than fifty by fifty kilometers. You can litter sims here and there, in the most sexy geographical context you can envision. What is even better, you can isolate sims in this manner, and allocate them in a manner that is consistent.

Next thing Linden Lab could or should do, is fill in this land with some prerendered (and standard) structures, like bridges, roads, ruins and endless plants, as far as the eye can see. The client would be able to render most of this – so when in a client standing on a cliff somewhere, overlooking the land, even someone with an old PC should be able to look at landscaping features several tens of kilometers away.  The way trees would be rendered, the graphics quality of features, that is subject to slider bars but it would not include any arcana.

Linden Lab would then take the responsibility to created specialized or themed regions – a large land mass with a Gorean, middle earth, fantasy medieval quality. A post-apocalyptic country where variants of “world of darkness” or atomic armageddon landscapes can be located. An actual modern 21st century city, again littered with the various models you’d see in a whole range of games in existence. It doesn’t need to  look or play as magnificient as GTA4 right now in 2009 (or Crysis. Or FarCry2. Or Oblivion), but it should most certainly approach those levels of graphics quality “a few years from now”.

This whole idea would instantly solve most of the “adult themed” issues SL seems to suffer from – just create a continent or shore or whatever, where you can run adult busineses.

So what would you get?

Lets take an example. Here you have a place I come a lot, called Extropia Core.  It incorporates 3 discrete sims,  and even though it comprizes excellent architectural design,  it has started suffering from a serious feel of constriction.

You may see my concern – despite the efforts of its creators it is a closed-off postage stamp. People teleport in, but there is no wider sense of world.  And I think addressing this constraint would be a strong incentive for more people to stay in SL.

The solution would change very little about existing sims – they’d still be 256 by 256 pieces of primmed real estate, and none of the existing sims would have to be changed or relocated (unless they wanted that) to the new super-continent. What you’d get is a giant land mass divided in squares of 256 by 256 meters, of which customers would be able to buy select parts. Avatrs would now be able to walk off sim – into the Linden operated limbo. In that limbo they would be unable to rez prims – just walk, enjoy the scenery, encounter other avatars.  The in-between land would just be the oyster in which sims would be embedded, serve as backdrop and as greater canvas. It would allow for substantially more diverse yet a lot more themed experiences.

Creating the supercontinent would be a labour of love – something taking months, even with simple editing tools. All terrestrial landscapes should be there, which is nothing very unique (blizzard does it with a space about as big as Manhattan island).  Players who want to own land would select themed region and type of land, say “medieval historical” and “western european landscaping”, opting for a spot in a mountainous region.  This would serve to boost land speculation – because everyone would love to own that delicious little spot along the river, or have access to that amazing view of the volcano.  It would bring allow for LL to create detail dioramas in the inbetween land – such as a caravan for travel between cities, or a steam train taking literally an hour (real time) to make a full voyage through a stretch of land – or monorails, roads, airplanes, teleporter hubs and what not.

This raises the explorability of the land a great deal.

This new way of organizing sims would change nothing about the existing server architecture woes -sims are still 256 meter in size, but they would allow Linden Lab to set standards in quality – nobody wants to build a crap sim with hideous mall fungus if they are looking outside the sim and seeing a rather detailed 3DS generated model of a warehouse, an old movie theater and a rusty shipyard.

Plus it would create a new market – buying and selling of modeled objects.

But one appealing feature cannot be underestimated -  as Jamais Cascio has made abundantly clear for anyone who was paying attention – virtual realities must and will evolve into something that is far bigger than the current postage stamp pocket miniverses.  Google Earth is showing us some of how this will look. Second Life as it currently exoists is paralyzed to compete with any potential competitor, not with its awkward and stifling 256 meter sims. You cant offer a commercial service that attracts real world clients and consumers and housewives into realities that are impossible to navigate, counter-intuitive, small, require months of playtime to develop an even remotely acceptable avatar. To most average johns and janes out there, Second Life is an intolerable device.

Yet we all know, at least if you have been paying attention, that in a couple of years these worlds will, one way or another, become manipulable, explorable and interactive in augmented realities, game realities, virtual realities, social spaces, functional simulations and as 3D computing environments. In other words, ten years from now hundreds of millions of people will be

1- want to press buttons they see in a virtual reality, or pick up things without having to thing or having to navigate a crap-ass interface

2- want to have a look and see whats beyond that hill over there (I mean its there, right, why cant I go there??)

3- click on a piece of menu I clearly see hovering on my coffee table, and expect to interact with it in some fashion.

4- run away from zombies to a safe building and not expect to fall between a sim crossing

5- visit the virtual chat space of a friend and enjoy a movie there together.

6- have the data analyst cobble up a 3D graphic representation to explain to us in intuitive terms what is happening

Second Life can be there, but Linden Lab must get to work.  It isn’t just “doing not enough” when it doesnt meet any of these challenges, it is potentially fucking up a reality we as users have invested literally years and (in many cases) thousands of working hours in.

I know, if Second Life fails, all LL employees will have wonderful resumees and they’ll all move on to greener pastures – but many people in SL won’t have that luxury – they will be severed from property and avatar that will have an increasingly powerful meaning to each of us.

That won’t happen if the competition needs to build on the hard-won insights LL is now generating and is left competing with a steadily expanding Second Life.  Envision, for example, what is happening with Google Earth right now. Google is guaranteed to stumble into 3D sketchup rendered cities, a world full of potential content and real estate. Within 5 years. Linden Lab must be so succesfull, so advanced, so ahead of the curve and so easy to use that somewhere in ten years Google will kindly ask Linden Lab if they’d care to have their sim render a version of the above in a layer of Google Earth.

Think about that possibility. Because it sure as hell is not impossible.

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