Second Life Shrink

Liberal Renaissance

April 16, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

It has been a beautifully clear day today; no sign in the blue skies of any of this volcanic ash that is blanketing the country. It’s slightly unnerving to think that a big chunk of our transport infrastructure can be paralysed by invisible dust high above our heads. Maybe this will give a boost to the idea that we should give up going out of the house, and do all out travelling in virtual worlds instead.

Back on the ground, the media is digesting the performances of the main party leaders in last night’s televised election debate; there seems to be a consensus that, while nobody landed a knockout blow, Gordon Brown did as well as was expected (that is, not very), David Cameron’s vague promises of change were unconvincing, and Nick Clegg stole the show with his honest straight talking.

The positive reaction to Clegg is interesting; he and the Liberal Democrats have made much of the fact that they are willing to spell out in detail exactly how much pain we are going to have to endure to get the economy back on track, while the other parties promise to cut the deficit but don’t want to scare us by revealing what that might entail. The Lib Dems are banking on the hope that the respect they win from the electorate by treating voters as responsible adults who can face reality, and not children who have to be shielded from the truth, will outweigh the aversion caused by the cuts they are proposing. The initial poll results might seem to back this up, but I wonder if people really are ready to be that stoic, and if over the course of the campaign there might be a swing back towards the “Trust us, we’ll sort things out, you don’t have to worry” message coming from Labour and the Tories.

I found the event more illuminating than I was expecting. There is a tendency on the left to characterise the main parties as differing only in the degree of their support for capital, and it is true that on one level the debate was three rich white men arguing over how hard they have to hit the workers to make sure there is enough money left in the state coffers to keep the bankers happy. However the bulk of the electorate don’t look at things this way, and for them it would have been clear that their day-to-day lives over the next few years are going to be significantly different if the vote goes one way rather than another.

My personal assessment is that Brown did enough to plant seeds of doubt about how grim things could get under the Tories to start people thinking that perhaps five more years of Labour, or a Lib-Lab coalition, might not be so bad after all. There are still three weeks of campaigning, and two more TV debates, to go of course, so everything is still to play for, but the election isn’t going to be the Tory landslide that looked inevitable even a few months ago.

Filed under Politics Tagged with Politics, TV

Like Pompeii (or Herculaneum)

April 15, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

The skies have been unusually quiet today, as the ash plume from the volcano below the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland has spread over northern Europe, closing UK airspace to commercial aviation.

This evening the sky has turned a deep red. Those of a superstitious nature might take this as a positive omen for the left in the coming elections, but it may take more than intervention from Loki to swing things towards Labour. Perhaps the picture will be a little clearer after the leaders’ TV debate tonight.

My first thought for musical accompaniment to this post was something by Ash, but that seemed a bit obvious, so here’s something appropriate by the B-52’s.

Filed under Culture, Politics Tagged with Culture, Music, Politics

Virtual world voters shunned

April 14, 2010 by johnny 6 Comments

Back in 2008, during the US Presidential Election primaries, all the Democratic hopefuls had a Second Life presence of one sort or another; Hillary Clinton and John Edwards had virtual campaign headquarters, and there were several “Obama for President” resident groups. The GOP were slower to embrace SL, though eventually a couple of Sarah Palin avatars made an appearance.

I had expected to see the current UK elections stir some interest on the grid, but all I could find was this rather disappointing “Election HQ“, which consists of nothing more than a few balloons and a malfunctioning noticeboard outside an empty store:

There is a “Conservative Party Supporters” group, with a grand total of 3 members, led by one “ToryBoy Horatio”. Potential members are greeted with a jolly “Well hello fellow Etonians and the rest of you rabble”, which makes me think that this might just possibly be a parody rather than a serious vote-gathering enterprise.

It’s said that about 7.5% of SL residents live in the UK, which, out of active users, would amount to around 75,000 potential voters, a not inconsiderable constituency. The fact that none of the major parties has felt it necessary to establish a Second Life presence may say something about the how the platform’s profile has declined in the last two years.

Or perhaps they are are just wary of meeting the same fate as John Edward’s virtual campaign (as described in Peter Ludlow’s brief history of griefing in the metaverse).

Filed under Politics, Second Life Tagged with Politics, Second Life

Taxing issues

April 11, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

My prediction that the election campaign would be “exciting” was perhaps a little optimistic, but the focus has been on the economy, as I was expecting. The debate so far has centred around the issue of National Insurance levels, though this clearly is just a proxy for the real divide between the main parties, which is on the level of short-term cuts in public sector spending that are needed to stabilise the economy. My sense is that Labour are doing better than expected in the early exchanges, since they seem to have more credible numbers, whereas the Tories are rather unbelievably claiming that the £6 billion they need to cover the cost of not raising NI can be found through “efficiency savings” that won’t have any detrimental effect on services.

There have been comparisons drawn with Ireland, where the government have severely reined in public spending, thus reducing their deficit in absolute terms, but with the result that the economy has shrunk even faster, meaning that the deficit is now actually bigger as a proportion of GDP. This would seem to suggest that the Labour strategy of (relatively) gentle cuts in UK government spending is the right one, or the least wrong one at any rate.

However Labour’s reputation for general economic competence has obviously been undermined by the fact that they led us into the recession in the first place, and the voters’ desire for change may be enough to carry the Tories into power. There have been some signs that Labour may try to play up the class element of the debate, which I would have thought would be the way to go – “No Cuts, Tax the Rich” would be a good slogan – but they have just promised not to increase income tax, while leaving the door open for a hike in the regressive VAT, so I don’t hold out much hope of a sharp shift to the left.

It will be interesting to see the effect that the televised leaders’ debate this week has on the polls. I like to think that the UK electorate is completely focussed on the issues, and is too smart to be distracted by presidential-style personality contests, but I expect I will be proved wrong about that.

Finally, the most amusing story of the campaign so far is that of Stuart MacLennan, the (now ex-) Labour candidate for Moray in north-east Scotland, who was forced to resign after the papers reported that he had made various offensive comments about political opponents and his prospective constituents on Twitter. I would have thought that the first thing to do when standing for public office would be to delete your Twitter feed, since the last thing you want the voters to know is what is really on your mind.

Filed under Economics, Politics Tagged with Economics, Politics, Social Media

Never Mind the Bollocks

April 8, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

Another week, another of the icons of my generation’s popular culture has passed away. This time we’re mourning Malcolm McLaren, self-mythologising father of British punk.

I’m sure that there will be plenty of obituaries published over the next few days, so I’ll just link to McLaren’s most famous protégés in their finest hour.

Filed under Culture Tagged with Culture, Music

Electoral outlook

April 7, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

As widely predicted Gordon Brown has set May 6th as the date for the UK General Election. The campaign promises to be the most exciting since Labour came to power in 1997, since there are significant policy differences between the main parties, and it is far from clear who is going to win.

I expect that the main issue will be the economy, specifically the speed and severity with which public spending needs to be cut to bring the deficit under control, though all the mainstream parties are agreed that cuts must be made. As a public sector worker I have a keen interest in this of course, but even those not directly employed by the government will feel the negative effect of reduced services.

While our sorry excuse for a democracy does entitle me to cast a ballot, I, like a large part of the population, live in a constituency that is not going to be closely contested, so my vote doesn’t really count for anything. As with the US elections a couple of years ago I will be reduced to blogging ineffectually from the sidelines.

I, and my like-minded comrades, may be unable to greatly influence the outcome of the wider election, but we should be able to use the increased interest in politics generated by the poll to do some community organising, with a view to getting ready to oppose whatever cuts may be on the way. The problem is that the electoral process, while theoretically an expression of the population’s ability to control the executive, is in practice a demonstration of the illusionary nature of that power, and this tends to have a demotivating effect.

Still, these are interesting times. The financial crisis has caused a lot of people to question the nature of our economic system, in a way that hasn’t really happened since the end of the Cold War, which opens a door for progressive politics. The left may not make a huge impression in this election, but we can plant some seeds for the future.

Filed under Politics Tagged with Politics

Second Life demographics – a brief review

April 5, 2010 by johnny 3 Comments

We received a rare response to our last piece, from T Linden himself no less. True, T had descended from Olympus to tell us that we were wrong about everything, but still, some attention is better than no attention.

Anyway, one part of his comment caught my eye – “Second Life is a diverse community”. This is a sentiment that is often heard around the SL blogosphere, but how true is it? I did a quick review of the literature to see if there was much evidence one way or the other.

There are three metaverse-related publications that I read regularly (or semi-regularly) – the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking and Game Studies – but I couldn’t remember ever having seen a quantatative study focussing specifically on the demography of SL in these journals, and sure enough nothing turned up when I searched their archives. A further search through the biomedical, psychological and sociological databases that I have access to drew a similar blank. The closest thing to a scientific study on this topic that I could find is this piece of work presented back in 2007 on the SL Survey blog. The Second Life wiki does have a page entitled “Demographic Studies”, but this is marketing data rather than academic work.

There are quite a few studies that look at other MMORPGs; three that are often cited are Griffiths et al (2003) Breaking the Stereotype: The Case of Online Gaming, Griffiths et al (2004) Demographic Factors and Playing Variables in Online Computer Gaming and Yee (2006) The Demographics, Motivations and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively-Multiuser Online Graphical Environments. Yee’s study is particularly impressive, drawing on data gathered from over 30,000 players over 3 years in his epic Daedalus Project.

The earliest qualitative work that I’m aware of in this area are the case descriptions of MUD users (who were mostly also psychotherapy clients) in Sherry Turkle‘s 1995 book Life on the Screen. A work focussing more on interpersonal and group dynamics is John Suler‘s 1996 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, particularly the section covering his in-depth study of the early graphical MUD The Palace.

More recent qualitative studies include Yee (2006) Motivations for Play in Online Games, Bessière et al (2007) The Ideal Elf: Identity Exploration in World of Warcraft, Hussain and Griffiths (2009) The Attitudes, Feelings, and Experiences of Online Gamers: A Qualitative Analysis and Williams et al (2010) Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs. Good qualitative work dealing specifically with Second Life is harder to find; in fact I couldn’t find any at all. [Update: There is a good qualitative study; I had unaccountably overlooked Coming of Age in Second Life by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff.]

This brief review is not terribly systematic and certainly not comprehensive, but, having read these papers, as well as some of their references and citations, and a load of other work that I haven’t mentioned because it seemed only tangentially relevant, I feel I can hazard a qualified opinion on the question of diversity within the Second Life population, the qualification being that my impression is an overview based on a general familiarity with the source material rather than a rigorously evidence-based analysis.

SL residents may well vary along several dimensions, such as age, gender, nationality, education level and occupational status, but I suspect that a cluster analysis would resolve this seeming heterogenicity into a much smaller number of discrete groupings. Furthermore, I think that below this apparent diversity there may well be a large degree of psychological similarity; in other words, although residents may be different in terms of the demographic categories listed above, when one looks at their internal mental functioning they may have much more in common than one might expect.

If this last proposition is true then it should be possible to draw up a psychological profile of a typical Second Life resident, and to devise some sort of scale that would measure how likely it is that a subject would take to the SL experience, then see if that correlated with any particular personality types. I’m not aware that anyone has published any work like this, though I may well have overlooked it.

I’d be surprised if Linden Lab didn’t have a psychologist on their staff researching this kind of thing, since it would be very useful for marketing purposes, but I guess they wouldn’t want to put it into the public domain.

I have some ideas about the psychological features that one might expect to find in an average Second Life resident, and I’ll expand on these in a future post.

Filed under Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Psychology, Second Life, Statistics

The Linden Principle

March 24, 2010 by johnny 2 Comments

Towards the end of last year the BBC aired a documentary on the Great Banking Crisis of 2008, which featured various bankers, government ministers and officials recounting the emergency meetings where the decision was taken to nationalise large parts of the British financial system. The Royal Bank of Scotland, once one of the most successful institutions in the world, had, by late 2008, been reduced by an ill-advised expansion strategy to a virtual basket-case, and was only hours away from total collapse. Faced with the prospect of millions of citizens waking up to find their accounts frozen, the government called the RBS management into the Treasury to finalise the details of the deal that would eventually see the state acquire 84% of the bank. During the course of this meeting, officials realised that Fred Goodwin, RBS Chief Executive, seemed to have only the flimsiest grasp of the trouble his bank was in, believing that a modest cash injection would be enough to stabilise things. Goodwin retired shortly afterwards, with a generous pension, leaving the taxpayers to contemplate the lesson that, as Chancellor Alistair Darling ruefully noted, when it comes to running banks it’s a good idea to hire people who know what they are doing.

We tend to assume that, when someone reaches a position of responsibility, this must be as a result of some rational process that evaluated their competence for it. However we are often faced with evidence, like the poor decision making that led to the financial crisis, that contradicts this, and suggests that other, unknown factors must play a part in the selection of our leaders.

Laurence J. Peter, who died in 1990, is best known as the author of the Peter Principle, which states that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” Workers who are good at their jobs are promoted until they are in a job they can’t do, at which point they get stuck. Since big organisations tend to find it difficult to get rid of people, eventually every position will be filled by someone who is incompetent to manage it.

I was thinking of all this when I read about Linden Lab’s latest marketing wheeze; an advertising campaign that seeks to dispel a supposed “Fat Naked Guy in a Basement Anti-Second Life Meme” by showcasing the attractive people behind selected avatars. This seems to me to be wrong-headed on so many levels that it does raise doubts about how well the Lab management understand their own product and what makes it attractive to their paying customers. One only has to google “Linden Lab incompetence” to come up with plenty other examples of Lab strategy that have proved unpopular with the resident community.

On the other hand, Mark Kingdon has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, and years of experience in senior management, whereas I am an embittered loser with a blog (though, I must point out, reasonably slim, fully clothed, and currently resident above ground). Who would you trust to run a successful company?

Filed under Economics, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Economics, Financial crisis, Psychology, Second Life

On good authority

March 23, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

Technorati are once again listing Second Life Shrink, and, I’m glad to say, seem to have recognised our influence by giving us an authority score of 112 (our previous best was 4), and an overall ranking of 57,472 (the highest we managed under their old system was 751,289).

I’m not sure why we suddenly seem to have become more authoritative, since we are, by and large, just posting the same rubbish we always have. We have been getting a few more incoming links, notably one from the Alphaville Herald last month referencing our analysis of the JLU story. We did get some increase in traffic on the back of that, though less than I was expecting, more of a blip than a surge.

I suspect our authority will prove to be transient, since Technorati claim that their rankings are calculated over a much shorter period of time than under their old system. I don’t know if ArminasX is planning to update his SL blog list, but if so I hope he does it soon, while our figures are still good.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with Blogging, Statistics

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