Second Life Shrink

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

Internet addiction update

March 21, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

In my last post on internet addiction I mentioned a few of the treatment options available; in a new development the Capio Nightingale Hospital in London has started offering a Young Person Technology Addiction programme. This is as far as I know the first specialised therapy programme for IA available in the UK, though I’m sure there are other people like me who are interested in the subject, and have been seeing cases as they come up in our routine work.

The Capio programme offers inpatient and outpatient therapy, and is only available privately, though I guess it might be possible to get it paid for by the NHS via an extra-contractual referral. The therapeutic model they are using seems to be a mix of CBT, IPT and behavioural interventions. I did train in IPT a few years back, but I’ve only ever used it in depression, so I don’t know how effective it might be in IA, though, now I think of it, it does seem likely it would be useful in cases where lack of confidence in interpersonal relationships is an issue. It’ll be interesting to see if they publish any outcome studies.

Filed under Psychology Tagged with Addiction, Internet, Psychology

Big Star

March 19, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

Well this is sad news; Alex Chilton died earlier this week, at the tragically young age of 59, just days before Big Star were due to play a reunion gig at SXSW.

I came to Big Star via Teenage Fanclub, who were heavily influenced by the harmonies of the Memphis-based band. Thirteen, the Fannies 4th album, is named for this classic Big Star track.

I’ve not listened to #1 Record for a while – although it came out in 1972, in my mind it’s associated with the mid-90’s, when I had it on a lot. I’ll get it out and enjoy some good memories – just a shame I’ve been reminded of them in such sad circumstances.

Filed under Culture Tagged with Culture, Music, Nostalgia, Obituary

Falling into the chasm

March 18, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

It was reported yesterday that Facebook had overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the US last week. The social networking site gathered 7.07% of total hits (up 185% on last year), marginally ahead of Google’s 7.03%.

Pundits are suggesting that this is an indication of how people are increasingly using the internet in a different way – instead of searching for information, the theory goes, we are now looking more for social connections.

As we’ve noted before, this type of thinking seems to be driving Linden Lab’s corporate strategy, as they try to market Second Life as a social networking application. They clearly have some way to go to compete with Facebook though, both in the raw numbers – FB has a user base of 400 million, and concurrency of up to a million, against SL‘s figures of 18 million and 80,000 respectively – and in terms of cultural penetration. Major newspapers are still publishing articles that assume that the majority of their readers will never have heard of Second Life, while Facebook references can be found even in traditionally conservative media like legacy comics.

Grace McDunnough posted an interesting piece (illuminating comments too) on the Lab’s marketing strategy a couple of days ago. Referencing a recent Harvard Business School case study, which itself draws on Geoffrey Moore‘s influential 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, Grace concludes that the educational market is a bust, the “adult” market is an embarrassment, and that content creators are being slowly sidelined. What does this leave? A 3D chat service, or, as Grace puts it, “playing house with paper dolls”.

This rings sadly true to me, and seems a terrible waste of the platform’s potential, but I guess there’s no arguing with market forces. It seems that the early adopter community (in which I count myself spiritually, if not strictly speaking temporally) is going to find itself increasingly marginalised. We can only hope that the Facebookisation of Second Life turns into a complete fiasco, M. Linden gets his cards, and a more enlightened management goes back to the original, steady (if limited) business model of taking money from people like me, who are willing to pay a few bucks a month to live out the life of the mind in a virtual world.

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with Economics, Internet, Second Life, Social Media, Statistics

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