Monetising SL 2.0

February 25, 2010 by Leave a comment

I feel that I should download the SL 2.0 viewer, just so that I can have an opinion about it, and join in the general excitement, but I’m finding it hard to get enthusiastic about what is, after all, just a gateway to the really interesting part of Second Life, that is the content and the community. When I first signed up to SL a couple of years ago I downloaded the alpha build of the Linux client, and I was happy with that until fairly recently, when the Lab started restricting which viewers you could log in with and it stopped working. I switched to the then-current version of Snowglobe, which I have had no major complaints about.

I’ve never been entirely convinced that making the viewer more user-friendly was the key to broadening SL‘s appeal. I guess the Lab did some consumer research that told them that the viewer’s rather steep learning-curve was contributing to SL‘s woeful retention rate, and I’m sure that the new version makes it a bit easier to get through the first hour, but I would have thought that keeping people on board for months and years would depend more on the nature of the virtual world and its residents than the bells and whistles of the client software.

Though maybe I’m overstating the importance of content. The BBC are currently running a series The Virtual Revolution (which you can watch online if you live in the UK), which is taking a look at the impact on society of the growth of the internet in the last 20 years. It’s necessarily broad, and there’s been nothing terribly surprising, but it’s still interesting, particularly the discussion of how Web 2.0 has been monetised. Services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter may get their user-generated content for free, but most of it is worthless junk. That doesn’t matter though, the theory goes, because as users post, search, rate and comment on all those videos, updates and tweets, they reveal a mass of valuable data about themselves and their social networks, information that can be profitably mined for targeted advertising.

One can’t help but wonder if the Lindens have some similar plan in mind. They have certainly been talking up the social-networking aspects of SL, with their purchase of Avatars United, and Wallace Linden’s suggestion that we should all link our real identities to our avatars. If they could find out all about us and our interests, they could turn that into a revenue stream, provided they could figure out how to serve up the ads in a way that wasn’t too annoying. Perhaps the much-touted URL-on-a-prim functionality of the 2.0 viewer is part of the Lab’s plan to sneak pop-up advertising into the virtual landscape.

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The Kid With The Replaceable Head

February 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

People who know how I dress would probably refuse to believe this, but I am a regular reader of the fashion pages in the newspaper, especially when there is some big event like London Fashion Week on. I don’t update my own style, such as it is, with any great frequency – an observer with only my wardrobe to go by would conclude that there had been no major developments in male couture since Richard Hell started wearing ripped T-shirts in 1976 – but I do like to keep in touch with the latest trends, so that when I meet someone new I can judge how much of a fashion victim they are.

LFW has of course been overshadowed this year by the death of Alexander McQueen. Fashion is by its nature ephemeral, but there is no doubt that McQueen was one of those designers who deserves to be thought of as a serious artist, and whose influence on popular culture went far beyond the catwalk. The tragic circumstances of his passing, with so much of his career still in front of him, only adds to the feeling that the world has lost a major talent.

Anyway, I mention this because I was reading an article about Swedish designer Ann-Sofie Back’s new collection, which apparently has been inspired by her experience working as a stripper in Second Life. Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to rate SL, or the virtual fashion industry, very highly, describing it thus: “Second Life is quite a shitty, slow game where nothing much happens, but people do make an effort with clothes, hair and make-up. The weird thing is, you have the chance to really create something fantastic – you know, with rabbit ears or you could be green. But most people want to look like Katie Price and Peter Andre, and wear clothes like people on Big Brother. It’s even more conformist than real life.”

I won’t pretend that I know enough about the SL fashion scene to say whether or not Ms Back’s opinion is accurate, though my limited observation has made me think that there is quite a degree of conservatism operating, with most of the items available being a variation on a few themes, so she may well be on to something.

The assertion that SL in general is essentially conventional does seem more counter-intuitive, when one thinks of the myriad of character types one meets around the grid. Sometimes outward rebelliousness masks inner conformity though, and the rules governing a subculture can be as rigid as any in more mainstream society. Someone needs to do some anthropological work among SL‘s Furries or Tinys or Vampires or whatever to see if this is the case.

Considering all this has led me to reflect on the way I have been leading my virtual existence, on the grid and in this blog, and how much I have used SL to break with convention and explore facets of my personality that I normally keep hidden. Sadly, I must admit that I haven’t really taken up the opportunity to reinvent myself to any great extent. My avatar looks pretty much like I do (or did 20 years ago at least), and my activity is a similarly unadventurous echo of the ineffectual political agitation and low-powered cultural and psychological rumination that passes for my day to day intellectual life.

You may think that the fact that, faced with the limitless possiblities for self-expression offered by Second Life, I have chosen to create an alter-ego that is at most a slightly polished version of my real self, is a sign that I have a dreadful lack of imagination, and you may well be right. I however prefer to recall the research in this area which suggests that it is the people with the lowest self-esteem who are most likely to idealise their virtual existence, and to conclude that my rather boring cyber-identity proves that I must be supremely well-actualised in real life, and that my personality has only a little room for improvement.

And talking of Richard Hell…

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O Superman

February 9, 2010 by 4 Comments

The JLU saga rumbles on, and has jumped from Second Life into the real world, on the way losing much of its lustre.

I may have exaggerated a little when I implied that the wannabe superheroes were some sort of virtual Freikorps, but they do seem to be doing their best to make themselves look like a thoroughly sinister outfit. Their latest stunt is to try to censor the Herald’s exposé of the secret JLU database by threatening the paper’s web host with the DMCA. The Herald, to their credit, are not taking this lying down, and have counter-filed a complaint charging JLU supremo Kalel Venkman with intentionally lodging a false DMCA report, which, I understand, is not a trivial offence.

(A side-effect of this process has been to reveal the real-life identity of Herald editor Pixeleen Mistral, who, rather impressively, turns out to be internet legend Mark McCahill.)

The whole story was quite fun when it was confined to the grid and the SL blogosphere, but I suspect it is about to become rather less amusing for the participants now that everyone is getting lawyered-up. A well-connected academic like McCahill can probably look after himself – I’m sure he’ll be able to hit up Lawrence Lessig for some free legal advice – but Venkman, who, the internet tells me, is really a technical writer from Los Angeles, may be having second thoughts about the potentially expensive escalation of hostilities that he has initiated.

Why has Venkman done this? He had a perfectly good role-playing scenario set up, with heroes and villains, intrigue and espionage, skulduggery and back-stabbing, confidential dossiers and secret deals, topped off with open conflict between the forces of good and evil across hundreds of worlds – all the ingredients for a gripping narrative, with Venkman himself right at the centre. He’s trading that for a dull tale of dreary lawyers exchanging dismal arguments in dusty courtrooms, a story that seems likely to end in unhappiness for Venkman and his lycra-clad cohort.

This seems to me to be a case of incomplete immersion, or perhaps over-augmentation; either way Venkman appears to have lost sight of the boundary between the virtual world and the real. The role of “Venkman” has become so important to his self-image that he is unable to see the Herald‘s story for what it is –  a chance to build on the mythology he has already established, an opportunity he should welcome – and instead regards it as a threat to his real-life identity, one which must be countered with a real-life action, regardless of the fact that such action risks destroying his existence, both virtual and real.

The story reminds me of cases we’ve covered before – the tale of another virtual superhero, Twixt, and the Stroker v. Linden lawsuit. Both of these involved people acting in ways that made no sense when seen in the context of the virtual world alone, but became more comprehensible when one thought about the interaction between virtual and real identities, particularly the unconscious aspects of the latter.

Is it possible to be a complete immersionist, to live one’s virtual life in total isolation from the conscious and unconscious influences of one’s everyday personality? Would such a thing be desirable? Probably not, for what is interesting to me about living a Second Life, and recording my thoughts about it, is the way that it casts light on corners of my consciousness that I may have been only vaguely aware of. While projection of real-life neuroses into the metaverse may be illuminating, I’m much less convinced that allowing in-world dynamics to leak out and influence one’s external behaviour can be anything other than harmful. This may be a lesson that Kalel Venkman, or at least his mortal alter-ego, is about to learn the hard way.

Because when justice is gone, there’s always force.

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Two Galleries

February 3, 2010 by 2 Comments

I recently spent some time wandering around The Leominster Galleries, a new project from Sigmund Leominster, of SL on SL fame. The space exists to showcase Siggy’s personal art collection, with three floors of permanent exhibits and a room for temporary shows, all floating in the air high above the Root Squared sim.

Siggy’s taste seems to be firmly rooted in the 19th century, with the work of William Adolphe Bouguereau particularly well represented:

Bouguereau is an interesting choice; a stalwart of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was acclaimed a genius in his day, but his reputation declined spectacularly in the 20th century, when his work was largely viewed as technically competent, but exemplifying the worst aspects of the ossified Academic style. He was entirely eclipsed by the Impressionists, a movement he had attempted to exclude from the Salon, and which he struggled to understand. More recently reviving the popularity of Bouguereau has become somewhat of a cause célèbre among conservative art critics, who see in his work an affirmation of traditional values tragically displaced (in their view) by modernism.

I don’t know if Siggy is making a political point with his picture selection, or if he just likes the sanitised eroticism that was popular in 19th century bourgeois circles. To be fair, the collection is not entirely composed of tasteful nudes in classical tableaux – there are some tasteful nudes in faux-Arthurian tableaux too, courtesy of the Pre-Raphaelites:

a fair representation of Symbolist works:

and a smattering of Surrealism:

The visit introduced me to several works I hadn’t seen before, since, I must admit, I usually hurry through the 19th century rooms when I visit the big galleries, so it was educational to a degree, but I do wonder what value was added by hosting the exhibition in Second Life, rather than, say, posting it in a blog. I suppose one could invite one’s friends around to make it a more social experience. The exhibits might perhaps be a little more interactive, with links to information about the artists and movements, and some explanation of the curatorial philosophy. The gallery design could be a bit less clinical too, since the modern aesthetic of the plain walls and light wood floor clashes somewhat with the cluttered hanging. A few chairs wouldn’t go amiss either. These are minor criticisms though, and the Leominster Galleries are well worth checking out.

A rather different artistic experience is on offer at The Primtings Museum, where they don’t hang the pictures on the walls, but build installations that allow visitors to place themselves into some iconic images:

(I’m pretty sure that I once sat in a real-life recreation of Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, but this was in Amsterdam, so it might just have been a drug-fuelled hallucination.)

There are dozens of works on display by various virtual artists, including our old friend AM Radio, who reworked David’s The Death of Marat, above. A full catalogue can be found on the Primtings website.

Surrealist paintings provide the inspiration for a large number of pieces, but, ironically, these are perhaps the least successful works in the gallery. The dream-like quality of Surrealism seems to be lost rather than enhanced by being lifted from the canvas and transformed into rather prosaic tangible objects:

I think for these sort of pieces to work they would have to be more immersive than just three dimensional representations of the paintings presented in a box. A sim-scale re-imagining of Un Chien Andalou perhaps, with the opportunity to slice up eyeballs and pull a piano full of dead donkeys around.

My favourite work at Primtings is this replica of Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living:

As befits conceptual art this works just as well in Second Life as it does in reality. The best part is that you can take away a free copy of the formaldehyde tank (though not the shark), and suspend yourself, or your loved ones, in it when you get home.

I did wonder a bit about the copyright status of these two galleries. I think Siggy should be all right, since the artists he features are all long dead, but Primtings might be on shakier ground if Hirst ever finds out they have been ripping him off, so you should probably take it in while you still can.

And finally – Johnny would have a fit if I mentioned Un Chien Andalou without linking to this.

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I Wanna Wanna get the New Model

January 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

I had never bought any Apple product before I got my iPhone last year; partly because I didn’t want to betray my open-source principles, but mainly because I was too cheap. I’ve been very impressed with the gadget, but I haven’t been completely converted to the cult of Jobs, and if and when someone comes out with a better smartphone I’ll probably switch, especially if it runs on Android or some other free OS.

I was intrigued rather than obsessed by the fuss surrounding the launch of the latest Apple toy, the already legendary iPad, but now that the details are public I have to confess that I am tempted to buy one, though there is absolutely no way that I could justify the expense, since I would only ever use it in the house, and I already have a desktop and four laptops of varying degrees of obsolescence lying around, as well as the iPhone.

What’s most attractive about the iPad is the promise of instant access to the web, allowing me to fill spare moments with casual browsing, much in the way that I use my iPhone now, but without the eye-straining tiny screen. I have a feeling that I will get one eventually, but I’ll leave it a while to see if any cheaper clones come out.

Or maybe I should just buy some more books, or start talking to people, or something crazy like that.

Here’s the horribly contrived (even by our standards) but musically impeccable video link.

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Just what is it that we want to do?

January 20, 2010 by 2 Comments

The answer to that is fairly straightforward – no need to formulate complicated transitional demands, or debate maximum and minimum programmes. We only need to think about the things that SL residents (or SL bloggers at any rate) are always moaning about.

A major gripe is the Lindens’ propensity to change fundamental aspects of the resident experience without involving the user base in the decision process, or at best engaging in some token consultation exercise. A second, and not unrelated, complaint is the belief that the Lab privileges some residents and businesses over everyone else, by uneven application of the Terms of Service, or commercial favouritism, aggravated by their reluctance to adequately regulate commercial relations between residents, most contentiously in the realm of intellectual property rights.

The steps needed to resolve these issues broadly correspond to two features usually associated with western liberal democracy; executive accountability and the rule of law. We can therefore formulate two central demands that, one might expect, would be supported by a majority of SL residents.

  1. An elected forum with the power of veto over major changes in Second Life.
  2. A robust judicial system operating independently of Linden Lab.

Obviously some of the finer details, like suffrage, will have to be worked out, but I think the basic concepts are enough to get the SL democracy ball rolling.

And when we’re done? Then we’ll get loaded.

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What’s up

January 6, 2010 by 3 Comments

M Linden has a “What’s ahead in 2010?” post over at the official SL blog site, and, as one might expect, it’s the usual “bigger, better, faster, more” stuff. What’s interesting is that amongst the questionable self-congratulation (the adult content changes were a big success apparently) and the borderline-delusional optimism (“Second Life [will become] a standard in business, education and government”) there isn’t a single word about introducing more democracy into the user experience.

This seems a strange omission, given that the Lindens are always keen to make out that the Second Life grid is just like a real country, with lots of landmass, millions of residents, and the GDP of Guinea-Bissau. They’re content to impose taxation, in the form of subscription charges, tier payments and the cut they take from L$ transactions, but representation is clearly not on the agenda.

Are we going to let them get away with this? Or are we going to draw up our own revolutionary roadmap? Watch this space.

[When I was composing this post in my head I was thinking that Bigger, Better, Faster, More! was the title of an album by The Sugarcubes, but I had it mixed up with Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week!; BBFM! is by the rather lamer 4 Non Blondes. Yet another sign that my brain is slowing up as the years pass by. Still, the lyrics of 4NB’s big hit are at least tangentially relevant.]

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Merry Yuletide

December 25, 2009 by Leave a comment

We’d like to wish all our readers a happy celebration of whatever strand of the ancient North-European mid-winter festival their particular faith community has appropriated.

Secular rationalists that we are, we tend to shun such displays of primitive superstition, but we do make an exception at this time of year, when any opportunity to ward off the depressing reality of the cold, dark days by eating, drinking and generally over-indulging must be seized with both hands.

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Virtual Bakumatsu

December 16, 2009 by 2 Comments

On the 8th of July 1853 US Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry anchored at Uraga Harbour near Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and presented officials with a letter from President Millard Fillmore, which demanded that Japan, which had been largely closed to foreigners for two centuries, open its borders to US trade. To show that he was serious Perry bombarded the harbour with explosive shells, and when he returned a few months later he found the locals willing to sign up to the Convention of Kanagawa, which established, among other things, minimal import taxes for foreign goods.

In the years that followed Japan was obliged to conclude similar treaties with other Western powers, and the influx of cheap imports plunged the country into economic chaos. The feudal order of the 250 year old Tokugawa Shogunate collapsed under the pressure, its demise speeded by military intervention by the US, France and Britain. It was followed by the Meiji Restoration, which laid the foundations for the modern industrialised Japanese state, though the remnants of feudalism were not entirely swept away until the defeat of the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877 (an event portrayed, with considerable artistic licence, in the film The Last Samurai).

I mention this because I can see parallels between the hierarchical society of sakoku-era Japan and the regime we know in Second Life. What commerce there is with the outside world is strictly regulated by the ruling caste, who either directly control the marketplaces, or take a hefty cut of transactions. In-world manufacturing is dominated by small-scale craft producers, and success in this field is dependent on acquiring mastery of relatively low-tech but somewhat esoteric skills. Borders are closed, there is no democracy, and the population lives and dies at the whim of their masters.

Like feudal Japan Second Life is threatened by a tsunami that may sweep away the present economic certainties. This peril does not come in the shape of a warship, but in the seemingly harmless form of mesh imports.

The plan to allow import of content created using professional 3D design tools like Maya or Blender was first announced back in August, and recent reports have suggested that it will become reality soon. The Second Life design market is currently protected by the fact that there is little incentive for professional digital designers to learn how to build with prims, since there is no application for the skill outside of SL. Once they are able to create virtual objects using the knowledge they already have it’s more likely that they (or the companies that they work for) will see SL as a way of making some easy cash. Existing SL designers will find themselves exposed to competition from a well-established industry, whose advanced products will make their painstakingly sculpted prim creations look hopelessly primitive, and their businesses will be unable to survive.

Will this opening of the market to outside competition be a bad thing for the average non-entrepreneurial resident? The quality of virtual items will rise, and they will probably be cheaper too, since production will be more efficient. The grid as a whole will survive, as the Lindens are sure to impose a healthy tax on mesh uploads to keep their revenue stream flowing. There may be less circulation of L$ within the world, as the dominant businesses are less likely to be resident-owned concerns, and would be extracting their profits rather than spending them on the grid, but this would just mean more real money would have to be transferred in to allow residents to buy stuff, which would also boost the Lab’s bottom line.

What might change is the nature of the SL experience. The idea that all residents have the tools at hand to create their own reality will fade, to be replaced by a culture where our avatars exist only to consume the products that are manufactured for us. Second Life, which seemed to offer an antidote to the alienation of capitalist society, will have become just one more expression of it. I guess this is progress though, and we can no more resist it than the Samurai could halt the march of modernity and expel the barbarians. We can only hope that this is just the first step in a process of proletarianisation of the SL population that will one day create the conditions for more progressive social change.

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Liberté, Egalité, Virtualité

December 12, 2009 by Leave a comment

There was an interesting story in the Herald this week, concerning Greg Drayman, a well-known figure around the SL auto-racing circuit I’m told, who found himself on the wrong end of a permanent banning order earlier this month, as a result of conviction on what seem like trumped-up charges. As one might expect Mr Drayman is not best pleased at this turn of events, especially since the penalty extended to the confiscation of all his virtual land and property, including the popular Kokopelli Raceway Park.

This act of Linden absolutism backs up my theory that social relations in Second Life are essentially feudal in nature, and that the conflicts that arise are analogous to those which drove the transformation of western society in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth centuries, culminating in the triumph of bourgeois liberal democracy. (An excellent overview of this period is provided by E. J. Hobsbawm in The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848).

What are the demands that must be met before we could be confident that injustices like those inflicted on Mr Drayman could happen no more? What concessions must be wrung from the Lindens to bring the political culture of Second Life into the Nineteenth century, never mind the Twenty-first?

If we take our cue from the liberal revolutionaries of the past we would campaign for basic democratic rights: universal suffrage, civil liberties and the rule of law. The Terms of Service should be replaced by a written Constitution (approved by referendum), a Legislature should be elected to write new laws as necessary, and day-to-day policy should be directed by an elected Executive, all overseen by an independent Judiciary. Some sort of land reform would seem to be essential too. As we have noted before SL land is distributed under a leasehold system; for capitalist social relations to really take hold there would have to be the possibility of owning freehold land.

These rights might seem unobtainable, since it is difficult to see how any leverage could be exerted on Linden Lab as long as they own and control the physical infrastructure of the grid. Any assault on the virtual Bastille could be repulsed by the flick of a switch, and cyber-insurrectionists liquidated just as easily.

There may be a technical solution to this though; it would involve engineering interoperability between the main grid and OpenSims running on non-Linden hardware. The key thing would be to allow SL residents to import into their inventories items created on external systems, preferably without the Lindens being aware of this. (I have no idea if this is feasible; I imagine it would involve hacking into the asset servers in some way.) Political dissidents could reside on democratically constituted OpenSim servers, storing their virtual lives safely beyond the reach of the SL authorities, ready to be transferred to an alt when they needed to visit SL proper. Nobody would need to have a premium account, unless they particularly wanted to lease land on the main grid, though there would be no real reason to do that if land could be bought outright on a non-Linden grid. Merchants could set up in the free zones, attracted by the lower tax rates and superior governance, which would give a them a competitive edge over businesses still paying dues to the Linden empire.

If enough people got on board with this, and if the rebels were able to stay one step ahead of the Lindens’ attempts to secure their borders, the Lab’s revenue from subscription and tier payments would dwindle, to the point where they would be forced to concede to democratic demands, as the ancien régimes of Europe were obliged to cede power to a triumphant bourgeoisie in the Nineteenth century.

Would this be enough to satisfy those of us with more radical aspirations? The situation might be akin to that in Russia after the February Revolution, with Liberals and Mensheviks trusting the bourgeoisie to complete the process of democratic reform, and Bolsheviks arguing that only a dictatorship of the proletariat could truly achieve the goals of the revolution.

It seems clear that a campaign for democratic rights in Second Life is long overdue, and that communists should play a leading part in such a movement (though in organisational terms we would have to maintain a separate identity within the anti-Linden struggle, to ensure we were in a position to oppose the liberal tendency to compromise with counter-revolutionary forces). It would be a big task, but I don’t think that it’s impossible. I have some more detailed thoughts on Party structure, programme, propaganda and tactics, but I’ll save them for another post.

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