Some ramblings I made in a discussion about Second Life (SL) - the virtual reality game - on the This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The iDC list started a discussion into Second Life because it is of current interest to many people doing media-research and "hyped" by the media due to the monies sloshing around in the game.

The discussion got a real bost when ...

Ricardo Dominguez wrote:

Virtual terror strikes Second Life

Haha, funny! But SL-terror is hardly very brutal, especially if one compares it with the stuff in the link of my response:

"SLLA bombings have been viewed by Linden as "mock terrorism" done in fun to catalyze debate about the in-world power structure."

Let's hope the "populations" response will not be the integration of elements from games like: http://www.waronterror.de/

After some more discussion emails, a general collection of ideas and analysis developed. For example ...

Michel Bauwens wrote:

I say we need strategies which work with the passion of the peer producers, that take them seriously (does not assume they are dumb and unaware of exploitation).

To which I had to add:

In response to this very good analysis, I want to throw in an comment about the technology dependence of these strategies (aka, I am a technologist and can respond best in those categories).

What has arguably worked best in the past are systems that require a minimum of technology for the individual participant - allowing them to "plug in" easily. A good example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia allowed people to contribute with "just a browser" - even the text based "lynx" browser works. What's more, the interface was designed so that one didn't even have the hurdle of "logging in" - just click the [Edit] button and type. The servers and software that run Wikipedia were similarly "minimal" at the onset and only needed to be expanded when traffic grew due to the popularitly (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia).

Going back to the strategy argument: the simple fact that a system such as "Wikipedia" can run with these relatively modest hardware requirements helps greatly to keep the system operational through individual support and donations only - thus keeping it a relatively "corporate and ad-free" zone. Currently the Wikipedia system is run on about 100+ machines which are mostly caches. Now if we compare that to the 4000+ machines of SecondLife mentioned on previous threads - about 20 times more - it is easy to see why a system like SL is only viable in a "for-profit" scenario.

One conclusion that one can draw from this observation, is that systems operating at the high-end of technological capability such as SL are not very viable to be open (although that can change over time, as technology becomes better). This is similar to and extends the arguments about our digital divide: access to the Internet requires a certain amount of $ leaving behind the part of the world that has only 2cents. Access to a Virtual World requires requires even more $$$ further skewing the economics of "free and participatory".

Getting back to a strategy: What has to happen to facilitate a truly open virtual world? I think is likely best done as a massively connected distributed-computing system - a fragmented amorphous "Matrix" with minimal central server requirements similar to some of the P2P networks in existence today.

I could envision an open collaborative effort where participants contribute not just give their "labor" and their presence but also some bits and bytes form their harddrive, the idle CPU cycles of their screensavers and some connectivity to provide the resources that make up the VR in the first place. Thus what would be needed is a software that allows participants to contribute "Micro-Matrices" to the whole pool. I could see this being build out of existing OpenSource software; Linux as the base to get the hardware to go, building on networking technologies such as BitTorrent and Tor (http://tor.freehaven.net/), enabling grid computing similar to distributed.net, adding creative tools such as Gimp and Blender, supporting existing document technologies via OpenOffice like apps, providing communications via HTML, JXTA (http://vop2p.jxta.org/), H.264 and Jabber protocols.

Such a software might actually challenge the "Operating System + Deskop" metaphor sold by Microsoft and Apple. What if operating a PC means actually "plugging into a virtual world" in an equally give-and-take manner. If this would take hold, it might help free the Internet from the stranglehold of the "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line" (ADSL) economy: the A means that most current broadband connections are too slow for uploads, disallowing individuals to operate servers effectively from home, hence inhibiting technologies such as the ones described above.

While at this point in time such a software or developments are more Fiction than Science, keep in mind that Nintendo is probably working on it. ;-)

.. Andreas

This article also appeared here: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/andreas-shiffler-whats-wrong-with-second-life-part-2/2007/03/09

The discussion went into a direction of the US-centricity of the SL design and world.

Ana wrote:

... the US (where almost 100 procent of computer games and online
worlds are created)

To that I felt I had to respond.

Not really 100% ...
- Take the EGDF for example, a federation for European developers representing 500 studios and about 15K people (http://www.egdf.net/).
- Longest-running MMORPG is developed CCP in Iceland (http://www.eve-online.com/).
- Most popular MMORPG World of Warcraft is published by Vivendi in France with a large development team from Europe
- In sheer numbers, Japanese made titles for consoles probably outnumber PC games. In the Asian category of MMORPGs we have Final Fantasy XI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XI) for example or Legend of Zelda for the Wii.


BTW, unrelated to this: I found the Bartle Test of player personality (http://www.guildcafe.com/bartle.php). I am an Achiever 66.66%, Explorer 60.00%, Killer 33.33%, Socializer 40.00% - what a schizophrenic personality in a game I seem to be. I wonder what the statistics would say about the SL population as a whole - this would be an interesting experiment to conduct in SL.


On the Second Life front, here are some of my latest experiences:
- My character "magically" changed from a man to a woman. Since the the general outfit looked similar and once does not see oneself from the front, it took me a while to recognize that. Maybe a Linden-script-virus I ran into ... quite a surprising event.
- Starting from a search for "newbie", I ended up in a slow-loading store where one can get free L$'s from an "ATM" by giving away your personal information to advertising scammers or signing up to a dating service for L$123 a pop.
- I randomly teleported into an area that ended up having lots of poor quality nude images for sale. Quite a reflection of the Internet at large.
- I was force-quit the game when the client crashed suddenly after half an hour of play.