Music | Second Life Shrink

(Don’t) Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment

July 16, 2009 by johnny 1 Comment

Asia is far ahead of the West in the recognition and treatment of internet addiction. While we agonise over whether the condition exists at all, the authorities in the East are already taking action; the South Korean government has made tackling cyberaddiction a national health priority, and the splendidly-named Chinese Teenager Mental Growth Base of the General Hospital of the Beijing Military Area Command of the PLA has issued guidelines on “Preventing Network Addiction at Home” (to be read in conjunction with “Basic Principles for A Harmonious Family”).

Unfortunately I have been unable to track down a translated version of the Chinese guidelines, so I don’t know what they recommend, but apparently the treatment options don’t include electroshock therapy, since the Chinese Ministry of Health has just ordered a clinic in Shandong province to stop using the method to discourage teenagers from spending too much time on the net. As a report in the Wall Street Journal notes, the efficacy of the treatment was called into question by the fact that disgruntled ex-patients had chosen to register their dissatisfaction with the clinic by setting up an online protest group.

I do believe that internet addiction exists, though I think it is more useful to conceptualise it as an impulse control disorder than an addiction as such. In my, fairly limited, experience of managing the condition CBT is the treatment of choice, along with pharmacological therapy for any co-morbid mood or anxiety disorder.

I’m not sure that everyone would agree with that though…

Filed under Culture, Psychology Tagged with Addiction, Culture, Internet, Music, Psychology

Wind of Change

July 8, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

When Second Life Shrink was placed at 108 in ArminasX’s list of SL blogs a few months ago, I posted an entry that claimed that we were the blogging equivalent of tennis player Virginia Ruano Pascual. The implication was that we were, like Ms Pascual, relatively low-profile, but heavy hitters. The analogy was misleading in two regards however. We only made 108 on the list thanks to ArminasX’s idiosyncratic numbering scheme, which disregarded ties (so instead of 1st, 2nd equal, 2nd equal, 4th, it went 1st, 2nd equal, 2nd equal, 3rd and so on, even when there were hundreds of blogs on the same rank); a more conventional system was have put us at about 1200. Ms Pascual’s ranking of 108 referred to singles, but her grand-slam titles have all been in doubles, where she is the world number 4.

Despite this, it did look for a while as if our careers were on similar trajectories; while Virginia was winning her tenth grand-slam doubles title at Roland Garros in May, we were in the middle of a run of posts that saw our traffic hit new heights and our Technorati rating finally break into the top 1 million. (We’re currently at 751,289, which puts us in the most popular 0.6% of bloggers, if you believe the figures).

Since then though, not so good. Virginia did pretty well at Wimbledon last month, getting through to the semi-final, but we managed a mere three posts, and our hit-count, while not falling off a cliff, has been disappointing compared with previous months.

The main problem is that my star correspondent has gone off on indefinite summer vacation, so we’re a bit low on virtual-world reportage right now, since I do just about all my internet browsing from my iPhone these days, and they’ve not released a Second Life app yet.

I was beginning to think that we’d mined the Second Life seam to exhaustion anyhow. Sigmund Leominster posted a piece on moribund SL blogs last month, which made me think that everything that has been written about Second Life was some variation on one of two themes: “Look at this cool thing I found” or “Look how the anonymity of the metaverse allows people to delude themselves/behave badly/expose their unconscious”. We were definitely starting to repeat ourselves; it may well be worth taking a break from SL discourse until we think of something new to say.

I will try to fit in a visit to Zindra some time in the not-too-distant future, since we would have to turn in our SL blogging licence if we failed to form an opinion on that development, but I think that SLS will be taking a turn towards more general cultural commentary over the next few months.

And if that’s not a development on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then I don’t know what is…

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life, Statistics

Nothing to do with your Vorsprung durch Technik

July 2, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

As I mentioned before, I’m not really in the festival-going demographic any more, so when Glastonbury rolled around this weekend I settled down in my comfy chair to watch it on the TV.

It’s getting on for a decade since I last attended the festival in person, and, fun though it was, I can’t say that I miss the authentic outdoor experience all that much. It’s not that I have any bad memories of Glasto – every time I went the weather was pretty good, and I was never ripped off or anything – but latterly it began to feel like a lot of hard work, trudging around huge fields packed with alarmingly young-looking people, all for the sake of a distant glimpse of an indifferent performance by a band I was only half-interested in to start with.

I can count the festival performances that I remember with real excitement on one hand – Nirvana at Reading, the Pixies at T in the Park and the Flaming Lips at Glastonbury. There were plenty of other festivals that were fun at the time, but stick in my mind for reasons other than the music, like the people I was with, or the drugs we were taking.

So having my friends round to get stoned in the comfort of my own house is how I get the festival vibe these days. The BBC coverage of Glasto was pretty good, and when it got dull we could always put on a record. Watching Blur play their greatest hits on Sunday night was pleasantly nostalgic, a trip back to the great summer of ’95. I was never hugely into Britpop, to be honest. I did buy all the albums – Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Suede and the rest, even Sleeper, god help me – but I was more of an American alt-rock fan at the time. (I was deeply in love with Tanya Donelly for a greater part of the ’90’s). Parklife has aged pretty well though, and we all got up to dance around when Phil Daniels came on to do the title track. Know what I mean?

Filed under Culture Tagged with Culture, Music, Nostalgia

Off the wall

June 26, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

I don’t want to sound too disrespectful at this sad time, but I can’t help thinking that my most abiding memory of the late Michael Jackson will be of the time he appeared at the Brit Awards in 1996, and his Christ-impersonation was interrupted by a drunken Jarvis Cocker leaping on to the stage to expose his bottom. That event, or more accurately the public response to it, which was overwhelmingly in favour of Cocker, marked the point when the balance between those who saw Jackson as a talented entertainer with some charming eccentricities, and those who thought of him as a creepy weirdo who could sing a bit, shifted irrevocably in favour of the latter.

Filed under Culture Tagged with Culture, Music

Sunny Afternoon

June 4, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

The weekend just past reminded me that experiences don’t come much more immersive than sitting in the garden on a warm summer day, watching the bees buzz around the fragrant flowers, listening to the birds twitter, feeling the gentle breeze and enjoying the taste of an ice-cold beer.

This blog pretty much died a death last summer, and I can see the same thing happening this year. It took the US elections to shake us out of our torpor; there may be a general election coming here, but probably not before October, so that leaves a few months to fill in.

Both Olivia and I are too old, and too encumbered by adult responsibilities, to go to summer festivals any more, so we were thinking of checking out the Second Life equivalents, like the virtual Woodstock, or Burning Life, but, to be honest, they look pretty dull, so we’ll probably stick to our usual festival simulation – going to the park with some friends, a bottle of wine, a bag of weed and an iPod.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life

Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment

April 21, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

Bloomberg are reporting that Taser International Inc. have filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against Linden Labs, alleging that the sale of virtual copies of the corporation’s stun-guns in Second Life is damaging the firm’s reputation.

What’s interesting about this is that it is Linden Labs that is being sued, rather than the creators of the knock-off weaponry. Anyone who has ever shopped in SL will know that there are plenty of fake Gucci bags and other designer merchandise in circulation, but until recently there has been little incentive for trademark owners to go after the counterfeiters, since the chances were that they wouldn’t have enough money to pay any substantial damages.

That’s all changed now that Linden Labs has taken over XStreet, and, as Tateru Nino notes in her coverage of the case over at Massively, effectively become the retailer of the dodgy goods. Suddenly the lawyers have a profitable corporation in their sights instead of some penniless hackers, a corporation that will probably settle out of court to avoid the nuisance of ongoing litigation.

This could open up a whole new career path for SL entrepreneurs; virtual patent troll.

Whatever, here at SLS we’re still happy, happy, happy, all the time.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Law, Music, Second Life

Career Opportunities

April 12, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

Further to my last post, I’ve been doing some calculations based on the figures in M Linden’s “State of the Economy” report.

The survey quoted had 2645 responses, which is said to be 15% of business owners, so the total number of enterprises must be 17633. Of these, 64%, or 11285, report that they generate positive net income – 52% generate up to 20% of their total income from Second Life, 5% generate 20-40%, 2% generate 40-60% and 5% generate 80-100%.

If I was a statistician I could probably use this data, along with the US$100 million cashed out figure, to construct a model that would show how many people were earning the big bucks, but I’m not, so I’ll just engage in some idle speculation.

Let’s generously assume that when M says that “a good part of [the US$100 million goes] into Residents’ pockets”, he means that half of it does. That’s US$50 million split 11285 ways, or an average of US$4430 plus change each. But clearly some people are creaming off more than others. We don’t know what the top 5% (of the whole 17633) are earning, but, for the sake of the argument, let’s say they are fairly modest types, for whom US$50K is a good living, so the 881 of them collectively take home a little over US$44 million, or just about the whole pot. If we lump together the 7% (1234) who are getting 20-60% of their income (nobody seems to get 60-80%) and say they average US$15K, then that’s another US$18.5 million, which leaves less than nothing for the bottom 52%.

Of course statistics can be made to prove anything, especially when you just make up the figures like I have, but I would argue that, if anything, I have been too optimistic (from the point of view of a potential SL entrepreneur) in my assumptions. About a year ago Hamlet Au at New World Notes calculated that land fees added up to US$6 million a month, plus more for land sales, so it seems likely that much more than half of the US$100 million that is cashed out goes straight back to Linden Labs. In a more recent article Hamlet noted that a few of the top-grossing businesses were taking out more than a million US$ annually, so even in the top 881 there must be a heavy skew, with a handful of big earners and a mass of also-rans, and in the lower reaches of the economy the average income can’t be much above double figures.

None of this is necessarily a problem – I’m sure that most business owners see their SL enterprise as a self-financing hobby, and won’t lose too much sleep if it doesn’t make them rich. Linden Labs should perhaps embrace this spirit, instead of continuing to peddle the myth that there is serious money to be made (by people other than themselves that is). Statements like “In the current real-world economic climate, I think the additional income generated from a business in Second Life must be a welcome addition to our Residents’ personal budgets” (from M’s report) look at best ridiculous, and at worst dishonest.

Still, I guess “SL entrepreneur” just about beats making tea at the BBC.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Music, Second Life, Statistics

Girl from Mars

April 7, 2009 by johnny 1 Comment

After a prolonged gestation period, the virtual world of Blue Mars has started to recruit beta testers, and will, if you believe developers Avatar Reality, go live sometime in the summer.

The visuals, which utilise the CryENGINE2, certainly look pretty, and A-R are promising that users will be able to play without having to buy the latest graphics card, though they are keeping the details of the minimum hardware specifications a secret for now. Windows Vista is required though, so my old linux box definitely won’t work.

It’s claimed that the platform will be able to support thousands of simultaneous users in each region, which would be a massive advance on the paltry number Second Life can manage. It appears though that this will be done by a process of sharding, which I’ll admit I don’t really understand, except that it involves running separate instances of the same location on different servers, with new ones being spawned as necessary. I would have thought that this meant that if you had arranged to meet someone at a popular place then you might miss them because they were on a different shard, but there might be some technical way around this.

There will be a content generation system, but this will be limited to developers who have paid to sign up with A-R, leaving no space for amateur creativity. A central item registration system will protect IP rights, and, presumably, allow A-R to prevent the manufacture of the sort of things that have generated all those lurid stories about the perversity of Second Life. Some sort of virtual currency will exist, but ordinary users won’t be able to cash it out into real money.

So is Blue Mars a Second Life-killer? The graphics are a lot better, the scalability sounds attractive, and there does seem to be plenty to do. I can’t see too many current SL residents being tempted away though, since they would surely miss the freedom to produce their own content, and the potential, however illusory, for making some money.

Hard-core SL fans are unlikely to be the target demographic for Blue Mars though (but then, judging by Linden Labs’ recent actions, hard-core SL fans aren’t even the target demographic for Second Life). Avatar Reality will have their sights set on the corporate and educational markets, as well as new VW consumers who have graduated from places like Habbo and Club Penguin, and are more interested in the metaverse as a place to be fed entertainment rather than an outlet for their creative urges. These of course are exactly the clients who, we are told, represent the future for SL. If A-R are successful in stealing away this potentially lucrative business, they might just end up messing things up for those of us who do stick around in Second Life.

I was originally going to go for the obvious Bowie track as the title for this post, but I like this tune better.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Music, Second Life

Here comes the summer

April 1, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

March saw an increase in our traffic for the sixth straight month; our daily average is well ahead of what it was this time last year. There’s no great mystery about how we’ve done this; new posts are appearing much more frequently (helped by having two of us working on the blog now) and we’re making a conscious effort to include more links to relevant blogs, which does seem to be generating some return traffic. I’ve tried to raise our general profile by registering with Technorati (where our rating is a semi-respectable 2493137) and Blogged (editors’ rating 7.4, “very good”), signing up for a few Second Life blog rings, and leaving comments around the SL blogosphere; this has been less successful.

Even when we go a few days without a post we still get a steady flow of hits. I think that’s because we’ve been around long enough to build up a critical mass of posts, meaning we show up on most Google searches that include the words “Second” and “Life” somewhere, even if it is usually on page 3 or 4 (though we’re back on top for the “Second Life Shrink” query). Our two top posts this quarter have been Olivia’s pieces on Star Trek and Vampires, which I guess tells you something about what’s popular in the SL universe.

I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to keep the pace up, now that the days are getting longer and the attractions of summer beckon. We’ll see how it goes.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life, Statistics

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