second life

What is the grid?

The grid is not the matrix, that’s for sure, but you could be forgiven for drawing the comparison. Like the fictional Matrix, the grid is a network of computers designed to simulate a 21st century-like world in which people can live out their lives – buying and selling real estate, building toys and devices, going to nightclubs and malls, and even working for each other. The grid runs a world known as Second Life, and it’s a massively multiplayer online role playing …. er …. game? Not quite.

Unlike in games like World of Warcraft, there are no goals, no points, no levels, no lives. The makers tagline is “Your World. Your Imagination.” and that pretty much sums it up – you can do anything you like, limited only by the capabilities of the engine. This should be interesting, entertaining, and a little creepy. And often it is: but, still, like most online digital entertainment I’ve tried I found its appeal is complex and ever shifting.

What is it?

It’s easier to say what it isn’t.

It isn’t a crappy 3D chatroom like so many previous attempts I’ve seen. The Second Life engine isn’t going to be beating Doom 3 anytime soon but as you can see from the videos it can generate some pretty stunning scenes when given powerful hardware (alas, my old PC isn’t really up to the task). It requires broadband, and uses it, most of the time when exploring the world it’ll pull down data at 350kbps or more. The effect works well – modern 3D effects are combined with a world that streams in as you move around fast enough that it’s not distracting. You can quite easily spend hours just exploring the beautiful scenes people have created here.

It isn’t like a traditional online community either. For one, the demographic of its users is radically different to most online games – there’s a roughly 50:50 split of male/female players. There seems to be remarkably few cases of men pretending to be women or vice-versa, generally the gender of the avatar represents the users real gender. The age demographic is different too – there are many more players in their 30s, 40s, even retired people playing it. Compare that to your typical text-only chatroom or game like WoW and you can see why it’s remarkable.

This has the nice effect that people typically talk in full English sentences, don’t say “roflololol” every few seconds, and the topics of conversation are more interesting. It’s worth remembering SL just for that!

There’s a third aspect to the demographic – many of the people in-world are actually talented content creators in real life too. The qualifications for playing a game like WoW are basically zero, and indeed that’s one of its main advantages as entertainment. But because the Second Life engine lets you easily create quite advanced “content” (whether it’s worlds, avatars, or discrete objects) it attracts the type of people who enjoy doing it, often as a living. Many of the people in Second Life get their kicks from building things, not killing things, and as a result the quality of the content is stunningly high. After reading about the concept I expected the world to be littered with sucky amateur 3D models and buggy or boring scripts, but not so.

There is a 1st Life tab in peoples profiles, many of which are empty or say words to the effect of “I have no 1st life” or “I want to keep my 1st and 2nd lives separate”. So it seems the escapism aspect is a big draw currently. I’m pretty happy with my first life right now so this aspect doesn’t hold any appeal to me, but everybody goes through different stages in their lives and I won’t assume my life will always be full of cool people, interesting things to do and exciting changes as it is now. Maybe one day I’ll want a fantasy life too. Clearly, plenty of people do.

What isn’t it?

Now this is a tougher question. It’s not brainless switch-off entertainment, which is what I was actually looking for. I can create interesting digital content as I know how to write software, and my first creation in one of the sandboxes was a plywood trampoline which entertained people for a few minutes (seeing a 10ft tall robot bouncing around on a trampoline was funny!). But do I really want to? Or do I want to run around killing things/snowboarding? So far Second Life has fascinated me more than it’s entertained me.

Potentially, I haven’t really given it a chance. The entertainment in SL comes from several sources:

• Chatting to people. Because the people inside are usually pretty interesting, this holds up far longer than in other online games I’ve tried.
• Exploring. You can fly around the map, or use the built in Find tool to locate popular/interesting attractions. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, as the directories are spammed with tons of virtual casinos and Tringo zones. Tringo is a game that is notable primarily for being created first in Second Life and then making the leap to a real world Gameboy/phone game. Still there are quite a few sights to see.
• Building things. Well this entertained me for a bit, but I’m not much of an artist and do plenty of programming in real life. Also the LSL scripting language is pretty limited. The ability to open a network connection to an external server would alleviate a lot of the problems it has, but the facilities for this are crippled due to Linden Labs not wanting people to launch DoS attacks from their servers (scripts run gridside).
• Playing games. Oh yes. In a world where you don’t need to eat, sleep, or find shelter what else can you do? There are all kinds of games in the grid, the most popular seem to be gambling/bingo type games. I haven’t really explored this aspect of Second Life yet, but I’ve seen references to a lemmings clone, a few first person shooters, a board game and a Myst-type adventure game. I should probably try at least a few of these.
• Take part in the virtual society, for instance, taking care of newbies. One group runs an in world information service called InfoNet: this is a cross between the web and teletext.
• Earn money. I mean hard cash, in US dollars. The internal Second Life currency is Linden Dollars, which can be converted to/from US$. Some people, notably Anshe Chung (real estate) earn good money that way. The actual currency turnover is respectable for an online game, and the economy is inflation controlled. Linden Lab let you keep the IP rights to any content you create, in an attempt to encourage this economy.

So is it any good?

Yes and no. This sort of open ended world is obviously going to fascinate economists, socialogists and fiction writers far more than World of Warcraft ever will, and actually the bulk of my time that’s been taken up by Second Life so far has been spent reading about it on the web rather than actually being in world.

The main thing to realise about Second Life is that it’s not a game. It’s a platform. Expecting to be entertained by it is like expecting to be entertained by the web. Sure, you can while away a few hours “surfing” the web but that experience won’t keep most people coming back for more. What keeps people coming back is the cool stuff you can find there. When I’m bored, I don’t surf the web, I go to Slashdot or Fark because I know I’ll probably find something interesting or funny there.

Right now, Second Life has something of an identity crisis. If you go to the website, it’ll try and sell you on what a great world it is, and what fun the residents have. You then have to download the 20mb client, register yourself which means finding a name that isn’t taken (can be hard!), prove your identity using a credit card or mobile phone, go through the orientation island tutorial, and unless you want to feel like a muppet customize your generic man avatar.

So the barrier to entry is pretty high. The whole program and website is oriented around recruiting you to be a resident. You can’t just dive in, dive back out again. This is what you’d expect from a game.

But the actual experience is closer that of the web. You can browse around and find some really interesting things. I chatted to an artist in her self-built art gallery about her paintings, something I’d never have done in real life. But, it’s not really targetted. Once the novelty of surfing the grid wears off there isn’t much left to do.

To fix this, I think Linden Labs need to make links between real web sites and SL locations work much better. You can do it with the secondlife:// protocol today, but for a random web surfer who has never heard of SL this experience is pretty awful ….. there’s a lot of effort involved in getting connected and of course dialup users are already excluded anyway. It also doesn’t really scale. Browsing an art gallery with the artist next to you is amazing when there’s only a few people around. I can’t imagine doing the same thing with a site as popular as Amazon or Slashdot – the people there would be a bad thing, not a good thing.

The most compelling content is on the web and SL needs to leverage that. If I’m interested in ancient Rome maybe I start with a Google search, take a look at what the BBC has to offer, go to Wikipedia, branch off to a dedicated site from there etc …. now imagine one of those sites advertises a full scale 3D reconstruction of a Roman city, complete with bots to make it feel busy and at set times actors from a historical re-enactment society taking part to make it feel really alive. Now that is something I’d be interested in, maybe even willing to pay for. If I can click a link from that web page and have the Second Life client download in 2 minutes, drop me into the world and let me start exploring with no hassle then Linden Labs will be succeeding. Right now that’s just impossible.