108: Thinking about the model

An interesting article came to my attention the other day and it got me thinking. The article is here, about a casual gaming convention; "a gathering of the designers and money-power behind mobile gaming's pedlars of color-matching, fruit-slicing, endless-running, top-down conquest-a-thons." Since the article is titled A dismal appraisal of casual gaming 'crap' and a dire warning, you may well imagine that it is not too complimentary about casual gaming.
     The article, by Colin Campbell in Polygon, quotes a presenter as saying, "If we look at casual games in 2015, what's out there is mostly crap. It's three or four game principles. We use different characters, we use different sounds, we use different setups, but it's all the same thing." As a casual consumer of casual games -- oh, who am I kidding, I play the damn things daily via Facebook -- I agree. There's racing, solitaire, simulations, and various sub-types and crossovers. All of them are free to play, but the game's purpose seems to be to induce you to spend money on it (and/or to recruit your friends to play the same game).

     You're thinking, so what does this have to do with Second Life?
     Well, it's no secret that sooner or later -- probably sooner -- Linden Labs will come out with its sequel to Second Life, which I'm calling "Second Second Life" or SSL until we find out what they're going to call it. It will possibly be based around Oculus Rift; it might have all kinds of technological innovations and new ways of doing things, and it will be very different from the Second Life platform with which we're all familiar.
     I'm expecting that what will happen is that, when SSL begins, some of us will make the transition and some of us will stay with SL, and there will be a lot of bitching and moaning about nearly every aspect of this you can imagine and some things I haven't thought of yet. Some people will also enter the SSL modality out of curiosity and stay there, and some will taste and leave, just as it is with SL today.
     Second Life is what's called a "free-to-play" game. If you want to arrange your affairs in such a way as to do it, you can stay in Second Life without buying anything ever, or having any Lindens. This seems rather regrettable in terms of nightclubs, where that would be like enjoying the banquet but having forgotten your wallet when it comes time to tip the server. And you'll have to change your (free) clothes and rez your (free) acquisitions in public places. It's barely doable.

     Where Linden Labs makes its money is in a couple of ways. Some people use the subscription model and opt for a Linden house on a little land with a few prims; they pay Linden Labs directly. Some people don't subscribe, but purchase Lindens via LL and spend them on Marketplace or in stores inworld. Linden Labs earns money via the sale of Lindens and indirectly from merchants who list on Marketplace or rent land to erect stores. And some people rent entire sims, have a relationship with Linden Labs that includes a concierge, and become an embedded part of the economy.
     There are other models of gaming. Colin Campbell makes the point in his casual gaming article that it's all about analytics, data, marketing, and customer retention. I have to think that Second Life scores pretty high in terms of customer retention when you have a situation where a few customers become a part of the virtual economy. Analytics and data are what Linden Labs won't share with us, and marketing is those damn banner ads LOL.
     What I'm wondering about is, when considering Second Second Life, how will Linden Labs introduce people to it -- using which model? As I said, I play casual games through Facebook. If someone were to adapt my experience with a hidden-object game called Pearl's Peril to Second Life, every fifteen minutes I was in Second Life, I'd receive a notecard that said "If you're enjoying this experience, why don't you open a Premium account and ask all your friends to join you?" This would cover your screen until you clicked "Delete". Yeah, that's the casual gaming model in free-to-play situations.
     I'm not seriously suggesting that that would happen, by the way. But if you're thinking that Linden Labs is merely going to migrate to an Oculus Rift platform and screw you out of your entire SL inventory -- well, yeah, it probably is. But LL will also take the opportunity to examine its model and see if they can tweak it to their benefit without losing revenue.

     The article quotes EA boss Andrew Wilson as saying, "As we look to the future, we believe a very big part of that player base will expect a free-to-start experience. When we look at film, television, music, books, very often there is this free trial notion that actually on boards new players, new listeners, new readers, or new viewers into a service."
     "We're actively looking at how we could offer that type of experience to our players, console and across other platforms. From there, it really comes down to, do they make their next step in terms of a premium download, a micro-transaction in a free-to-play type environment, or a broader relationship through a subscription?"

     As I understand this statement, a micro-transaction is what happens when I buy a bathing suit on Marketplace or rent my land for a month. Subscription is Premium membership. And I'm not sure precisely what a "premium download" is in terms of Second Life, but I suspect that Second Second Life might equate it with Oculus Rift.
     I'm not bitching and whining, at least not yet. I've committed sufficiently to Second Life that I spend more than it would cost me to have a subscription, although I have no use for the perks that come with a Premium account. If I have to pay the equivalent of a Premium account fee for access in SSL to Oculus Rift, well, I suspect I would do that. I'm just hoping that there is a difference between the people who create MMOs like SL, and the people who create marketing plans for Pearl's Peril or Candy Crush.

064: Ello, Ello?

Well, apparently I'm not one of the cool kids yet, at least as far as Ello is concerned. They sent me an invitation to join (thanks to my RL friend Moffatt -- dude you rawk!) but the code just didn't work. Nevertheless, I have high hopes.
If you are not one of the cool kids either, Ello is the hot new site that's going to replace Facebook, at least among people who don't want to use the name

on their birth certificate for social media. And so far that seems to be a lot of drag queens -- Jackie Beat was how I heard about this in the first place -- anyone who's got or has had a stalker, people who want to be known by a name they've chosen rather than the one they are legally entitled to, people with professional names (PeeWee Herman comes to mind) and ... and of course,

everyone in Second Life who isn't really truly allowed by Facebook's rules to have a social media presence in the name of their avatar but wants one anyway.
So right now all the cool kids -- well, okay, this cool kid is waiting for Ello to come out of beta so I can sign up for real. I'd like to have a social media presence as my av ... and I know that a lot of SL residents have had problems

with that, and would like to ditch Facebook as a result. (For instance, my friend and fellow resident Bock McMillan -- check out THIS great rant!) Ello promises no advertising, you can call yourself anything you want, and they apparently don't care if you put pictures up of nearly anything at all. Unlike FB, which I think would delete my avatar's account merely because it's there, let

alone if I put up pictures of taking a leak.
I think Ello is not necessarily going to be the Facebook killer that people might be expecting, but I do think that it's a very welcome sign that FB is not the be-all and the end-all that it once was. I'd like to relegate it to the part of my life that plays hidden-object games -- FB is very good at providing those! -- and keeps in touch with my high-school girlfriend. And

then I can use Ello, or some other service that isn't constantly trying to inundate me with advertising, and if I want a wider range of services, I'll buy it from them, as they suggest.
I'm very much looking forward to having the opportunity to see all of my Second Life friends on Ello, just as soon as they let me have an account! And then we'll all have a venue in which to agree that

Facebook has -- jumped the shark.
Oh, the pictures? I take a lot more snapshots than I publish, believe me. This was a photo shoot I did for fun at a place that offers various backdrops, props and poses whose name escapes me, for the moment.  Ostensibly it was to see if I could get better at arranging camera angles, but really I just wanted to be a supermodel for a while. Enjoy!

042: Normcore -- yes and no (mostly no)

Normcore first came to my attention as a fashion meme a while back. It's hard to pin down exactly what people mean by it; opinions vary. Some people suggest that if you're dressing normcore, you look like a tourist in your own city; weirdly mismatched clothes, kind of like all that's left clean in your suitcase at the end of a two-week vacation, comfortable athletic shoes and a kind of "I chose these clothes and I don't care" vibe. But then there's people who insist that the selection of the clothes themselves is what's important, and point to Jerry Seinfeld's "dad jeans" and bland oversized button-downs as being the optimal normcore choice for either sex; a kind of deliberate removal of any fashion vibe from your outfit. Some people think of it merely as "anti-fashion" and their idea seems to be that you buy ugly utilitarian clothes, like white nursing clogs and off-brand knock-off meshback baseball hats, and make them into outfits with bland ordinary clothes like cheap white T-shirts and inexpensive jeans and K-Mart fleece hoodies.

I gather that this trend started in Manhattan, where hipster kids decided to mock the tourists who invaded their trendy neighbourhoods -- by buying poorly-fitted jeans and ghastly oversized T-shirts from faraway unhip touristy destinations, and laughing with each other over $9 Americanos about how charmingly horrible they looked. I expect this would have died out quickly as being a waste of money, if nothing else, except that New York Magazine got hold of it and did an article. Unfortunately I think what happened is that the columnist conflated two things. One was the mocking hipster kids, and the other was something that happens to all of us; being seen in clothes that don't necessarily express your personality but utilitarian necessity. Sometimes you just need to run down to the store for a loaf of bread without checking to make sure that you're wearing the right number of rubber bracelets and that the sleeves of your Armani jacket are zhoozhed up enough to show them. And that's when the Patagonia fleece that your cousin gave you two Christmases ago comes out of the closet because it's handy and raining. Dog-walking clothes; heavy jeans with big functional pockets, off-brand black sneakers that you bought for $6.79 in a factory outlet store because when they get dogshit on them, you toss them. Or, as Bette Davis said in Cabin in the Cotton, "Oh, this old thing? Why, I only wear this when I don't care what people think of me." The columnist took the hipsters and the utilitarian dog-walkers and put them together and normcore had a name and a presence. And a philosophy that immediately broke into a dozen schisms.

When I first got interested in normcore, I went looking for it in Second Life on Marketplace. And the most interesting thing I found, the thing that fascinated me immediately, is that there is nothing.  N-O-T-H-I-N-G. As of 7 AM SLT on July 20, 2014, not a single item on Marketplace has a description containing the word "normcore". Now, I just thought that was pretty amazing. I mean, this is Second Life, dedicated to the proposition that there is no nuance of clothing, hair, makeup, shoes, shape, and skin that is too tiny and subtle to put into the fatpack. You can dress like a football player or an ancient Roman matron or a large-breasted German shepherd, but most especially you can dress like any page from the most recent issue of American Vogue if you know where to shop. (I once bought a gorgeously textured and painstakingly accurate SL reproduction of a Jean-Paul Gaultier puffy about three months after it had been seen on the runway, and it was marked down; I guess the cool kids were on to other seasons.) If you Google "Second Life + normcore", you get this clever and funny blog post and a few other people talking about it, and that's it. The blogger walks you through the main schisms complete with hashtags like #seinfeldcore, and all in all I don't think she is seriously suggesting that anyone in SL actually try to dress normcore. In an environment like SL, that is a bubbling cauldron of fashion innovation far beyond the abilities of mere humans, no one is trying to sell me normcore. And that's really interesting.

I'm open to discussion, but I presently suspect that the very fact that SL is a bubbling cauldron of fashion innovation is what makes it anti-normcore. Part of it is a kind of retailer's paranoia that says, "OMG, if we encourage them to wear ordinary clothes, they'll never buy anything new again!" Well, no. Perhaps in RL, although mostly what brings that situation on is advancing middle age, but not in SL. SL is where people go to find out not only what they might look like in a copy of that MiuMiu day dress but to pay the financial equivalent of the cost of a stick of chewing gum to have the experience. There is a financial impetus to bring the copy of the MiuMiu to the SL retail level, whereas no one is exactly clamouring for a digital knock-off of a pair of grey Kmart sweat pants. And when you add in that, really, there is no such thing in SL as running down for a loaf of bread, and you can change your outfit to be perfect by clicking a button, and that rain, snow, and dogshit will never impact your clothing choices -- normcore is never going to catch on in Second Life unless it's a three-week thing and then on to the next. There's no physical reason for it to do so and it's much more fun to make your av sexy and attractive than dull and ordinary.

There is one positive thing I took away from all this. A lot of the philosophy that surrounds normcore is hard to follow and some of it is quite contradictory. (Again, I think it's about the split between the mocking hipsters and the functional dog-walkers.) One piece of the philosophy I did find sensible and useful, though. In RL, if you're out and about in a $14,000 couture white leather jacket by Proenza Schouler, it's unlikely that you'll agree to take part in an impromptu game of touch football. RL high fashion can set you apart from "ordinary people" if only for the reason that you can't run in heels, and in general by embracing high fashion you rule out ... well, you can't participate in things around you as readily. This is something I see all the time in Second Life; we're surrounded by fascinating artworks and technical achievements that would be impossible in RL, and we can't spare the time to visit them because we're too busy dancing, shopping, and fucking.

So here's the idea that I found to have a SL application:

Normcore was about dropping the pretense and learning to throw themselves into, without detachment, whatever subcultures or activities they stumbled into, even if they were mainstream. "You might not understand the rules of football, but you can still get a thrill from the roar of the crowd at the World Cup."

In RL, if you're dressed normcore, you can have fun doing something without worrying if you'll ruin your expensive jacket. In SL, that's not an issue -- but our detachment can frequently keep us from enjoying fascinating things and people around us. If dressing normcore in RL helps people drop the pretense in SL, I'm for it. But just considering normcore as a philosophy has helped me drop my own detachment and do more fun things in SL, and I recommend that approach to you.

033: Second Second Life: No freaking out required

Well, the big news on Friday afternoon from Linden Labs was that they're working on a new "next generation virtual world". I don't think anyone should be surprised at that; it's their business. The part of the press release that everyone is freaking out over is -- "[W]e don't want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start."

Judging by reaction in the blogosphere, and a couple of random comments I heard last night while I was out shopping, that announcement means that Second Life will be shutting down in about 20 minutes, and every cent you've ever spent on stuff in SL is now completely wasted, and, and, and -- the sky is falling.

For crying out loud, RELAX.

My friend Eddi Haskell has summed it up very well at his blog, found here -- and his post is called "Much Ado About Nothing", which is perfect. He makes four very good points that you really should read for yourself. But what it boils down to for me is, SL technology is open source and Linden Labs is still making money by running SL -- so I don't think SL is going anywhere soon. If Linden Labs sells it off, someone will pick it up (and personally, I'm thinking that Facebook has pretty deep pockets right now, and it's kind of a natural fit with their business model). Firestorm will continue to support a viewer as a third-party provider, I think.

And honestly, did you think Second Life was going to last forever?  This is, to me, just like the transition that I've lived through between VHS and DVD. Yes, I had to replace movies that I owned in VHS format, but the DVD format is a lot better and easier to use. I'm betting that once Linden Labs approaches the question of creating a virtual world with today's technology, with the extraordinary graphics that we've all seen in other games, and, yes, even with the potential addition of Oculus Rift to the mix, we will be happy puppies. The technological leap might cost us all time and money, but I'm thinking that it will be like the early days of SL all over again -- covers of magazines will bring thousands of newbies into Second Second Life, as you might call it, and the experience that we've all gained in our years in SL will pay off big-time in SSL. We'll all be able to start consulting services teaching people about the equivalent of Slink feet and l'Uomo mesh bodies and custom AOs, because we've already mastered the art of surfing the technology waves that pass through SL every so often.

So look on the bright side! Frankly, although I'm sure we'll be able to play in SL for a long, long time, I will probably be enthusiastic about leaving it behind and moving to SSL. We'll be getting a better environment in which to do the same things we like to do. And we'll be the only people who have experience at using that kind of environment. I can't say I'll be delighted if I have to throw away a lot of virtual clothes and furniture, etc., but I wasn't happy about throwing away a lot of VHS tapes either. It's a part of life. And I can't wait to see what they come up with!