147: Project Sansar -- good news, bad news

By now you may have read other articles by Second Life bloggers about Project Sansar, which is Linden Labs' code-name for its project for VR headsets like Oculus Rift. Ciaran Laval's is here -- he seems to have a good grasp of what's being talked about, as usual -- and the original article in, of all places, Variety is here. Both are well worth your time.  There's one point on "instancing" that Ciaran Laval understands a lot better than I do, and I think you should read what he has to say about it.
   It seems clear that the Lindens will be tinkering with the economic structure of the new virtual world: "Land in Second Life is quite expensive," said [Ebbe] Altberg. Trade, on the other hand, is barely regulated. Linden Lab now wants to lower real estate taxes and increase sales taxes, he explained, to make it easier for people to pitch a tent in its virtual world." I'm not sure of all the ramifications of this, but it seems as though the days of the land baron will be coming to an end; creation of things like clothing and hair will possibly be focused in the hands of fewer designers since the economics will make it more difficult to sell one's work.

   But there will definitely be a place for the hobbyist creator, I think. "Linden Lab's goal was to turn Sansar into a WordPress for VR, allowing enthusiasts and big brands alike to build VR experiences without spending tons of money and man hours on custom programming ..."
   They're going into beta now; 1.0 could launch by the end of 2016. I think it's finally time to start looking into buying myself an Oculus Rift headset and getting ready to make a change.
   And the bad news? Buried in the last paragraph. "Altberg said that Linden Lab isn't pre-populating the world with ready-made experiences or things ported over from Second Life. Instead, it's betting on its users to start shaping their world. 'It's gonna start from the beginning," he said."
   So -- I think I just cut my virtual clothing budget in half, if not more, and I'll be putting that money in a mayonnaise jar towards an Oculus Rift headset. Why bother buying virtual items you will only use for a little while? Take it from me, this is the loudest bell you've heard yet that signals the "end" of Second Life (although I suspect they may continue to support it, or even give away its code to anyone who wants to maintain the servers; it's still economically viable).
   I'm excited. A little bit sad at hearing the first ring of the death knell for Second Life as it currently exists, but actually looking forward to what's coming down the pike.

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.

055: Wandering around Enscharys

I've been trying to broaden my spectrum a little bit and have wanted for a while to do a new kind of post where I walk around a place and take pictures and find out what's going on, to bring it to my readers. I get a lot of hints from my fellow bloggers but ... it doesn't seem very useful to investigate stuff that other bloggers have already done thoroughly and better!

So I decided to get recommendations for places to visit and started with a source that seemed to be what newbies might encounter: the Second Life Destination Guide, monitored and managed by the good folks at Linden Labs. The Destination Guide is helpfully divided into a large number of different categories, depending on what you might think is fun. Almost at random, I selected "Castles & Ruins" and, from the nine entries there, picked Enscharys. (Here's the SLURL.) I picked it because the description sounds a bit intriguing:

This white castle stretches far above the clouds and towers over an elaborate landscape. Can you unlock the clues to discover an ancient elven secret?

Sounded to me like that might be some sort of game.  I like what they used to call "adventure games", so ... off to Enscharys. Well, I arrived and -- it's certainly pretty, but for the life of me I can't figure out if this is indeed a game at all, let alone how to play or even get the slightest clue of what might be going on.  Whatever that "ancient elven secret" is, it's still a secret as far as I'm concerned.

Most of Enscharys is taken up by an extremely tall white castle; you can try the stairs, but believe me, you'll be wanting to use the teleport discs found at every location. The stairs take forever and have no guardrails; if you get going a little fast, you'll find yourself falling a long, long way and pretty much have to start over. Guess who did that?

The castle seems to be composed of minaret-like towers, most of which contain rooms with individual functions; the queen's boudoir, a throne room, planetarium, alchemic workshop, a spa, and many others. Now, these rooms are certainly well-designed. If someone said, "What do you think an elven spa might look like?" there wouldn't be much need
to go further than Enscharys to find the correct furniture; sort of a mixture of Art Nouveau and ... well, there's no such thing as "elven", but we have good reference material in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, etc.  It might not be obvious, mind you.  If you were plunked in there and asked to identify the architectural and decorative style, I think

you'd say Art Nouveau a lot more often than elven. But since I had the word "elven" in my head, it was all good.
Now, when I was considering this as a potential adventure game -- well, the way you play traditional adventure games is, when you enter a room, you run your cursor over everything in sight and if you get the idea that there is something here

you can push, or pull, or take, or open, or move, that's what you do. Well, I was really diligent in the first room to which I went. I was slightly less diligent in a few
subsequent rooms, and soon gave up. There were two reasons. One is that I didn't find a single thing that I could push, take, or open; the other is that every single piece of furniture, every

fixture and lamp, every bush and tree, are all for sale. And when you run your cursor over them, they cheerfully announce what they are and how much they cost.
I will be honest and say I had a mixture of disappointment and understanding about this. I was disappointed because although I hadn't actually been promised

a game, I thought I was going to get one. (Frankly, there still might be one there; I was just too tired of sorting through the "for sale" signs to keep looking.) But at the same time I do understand. This castle looks like it was an enormous amount of work; apparently all the furniture was designed and created for this location, and it represents a huge

and wide vision. Honestly, the thought of creating an entire elven castle and then populating it with furniture and plants and putting those things into rooms with functions -- I have nothing but respect for that kind of vision. And what can you do with an elven hot tub or bench or throne room once you've created it? I would certainly be trying to recoup some of my

investment in time and thought by selling all the stuff. I'm just a little disappointed because I thought I was getting a game and a scenic beauty spot, and I got a scenic beauty spot in the form of a gigantic furniture store.
However -- as you can see from the pictures -- this really is a scenic beauty spot. Every location is a great place to

take a picture or two, and I kind of wish I had a fall-back Legolas outfit with a set of elven ears and a nice tunic; I would have felt a little bit less like I was spoiling the view. But I'm not really the elven type ... so I had to settle for being the out-of-place gym rat in the beautiful elven castle.
There are definitely some good photo

ops, though. If I was a beautiful young woman with elf ears and a long flowing gown, I would probably arouse different emotions in the ladylike pose I took on the Queen's bed than "Get those dirty sneakers off the embroidery, you big lummox!" Indeed a handsome/beautiful elven avatar would find plenty of places to take great pictures here, and I

definitely recommend it if you're looking for elven photo ops. Or to buy an elven hot tub.
I have to say that most of the disappointment I felt here was my own fault, but this was a learning experience and I have definitely learned something. Primarily, the information you get from

the Destination Guide is not truly descriptive or necessarily accurate; second, I shouldn't have been surprised that someone wanted to sell me furniture and decor in Second Life.
I hope you like the rest of the pictures. The ground level of the sim also contains a few buildings from other design schools, Japanese/Chinese historical

buildings. I particularly liked a kind of elven shrine that had some nice poses built in and, if there hadn't been another couple of people wandering around, I might have stripped off and done some "art photography" <grin>.  Maybe next visit!

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!