Another thing Second Life got very right was the use of spatialized voice chat. That means you're not just able to look out of your avatars eyes and see who's in the room and who is currently talking (WebEx or Skype can do those), but you hear with your avatars ears too - so you can tell which direction the voice is coming from, which is very powerful when mixed with an avatar. You can tell speakers apart better and you can even turn your virtual head when you hear someone speaking from one direction and focus on them. It's a much more natural way of communicating than just mixing all the audio inputs together, and allowed me to associate voices with people (and their avatars) much better. Plus, if you can be bothered to learn the editor, you have some pretty powerful collaborative 3D modeling tools right there with you, which are handy for quick illustrations.
The problem that Second Life is solving, that is "how to have a shared experience with someone when you're not physically close", is actually the same problem that a lot of MMOs are solving in some form or another; see this article [1] for a great example.
The subtlety lies in the fact that MMOs are games, and that Second Life tried to tackle the problem by being more of a "lifestyle" application; sure you could play games, but you could also read content, talk with people merely for the sake of talking, and so on. The point was that content in Second Life would be mostly created by 3rd parties.
In other words, while MMOs offer a shared experience by being the content consumed by the users, Second Life positioned itself more as a platform for content that would be consumed by users all over the world. Second Life is the city, 3rd parties are the shops and businesses and movie theaters and so on.
It's a noble cause, and we are far from having solved that problem yet (as any couple in a long distance relationship will tell you). However, I don't believe we will solve that problem with software, but rather with interaction embodied in physical objects (which is an extremely recent field). For example, see [2] for a great example of what that could be (there is another, older project I have in mind that involves beds, lights and webcams but can't find any links right now).
If you're interested in tangible and embodied interaction, the academic TEI conference is the best place for that- sadly it's an ACM conference, which means you need an ACM account to access the paper archives, but you can easily access the proceedings index (for example for TEI2013 [4]) and google the PDFs from there :)
You're right about MMOs. But what's missing there is the opportunity to do anything or many things. In an MMO, you can only do one thing -- play the game. And that's fine, and millions of people are happy doing just that. But it's not a general-purpose tool.
Back in the early oughts I spent maybe 30 hours over a couple months exploring 2L. Ultimately I got bored and stopped returning because there was nothing to _do_ there: it was a non-game game, an un-gamified life that was a paper-thin emulation of "1L".
Things they got right: a way of building and dressing your avatar that was simple, comprehensible, yet extensive. In one afternoon I made an avatar that was a reasonable facsimile of actual me, round-faced gray-bearded professorial type, I even found a leather-elbowed sweater to wear. In another afternoon I made a muscular mustachioed dwarf.
Also well-done: their system for crafting persistent 3D objects. For professor me I made rose-colored glasses, transparent pink lenses (alpha channel) in a delicate gold frame, and easily had the avatar "wear" them. For the dwarf I purchased a gaudy axe but made an elaborate gold armband.
Once you'd done all that, you could buy property and build quite interesting buildings on it, but that needed a degree of OCD-like persistence I didn't care to invest because the reward for all this was zip. Building a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks would be somewhat more rewarding as you'd have the tower for your mantel afterward.
I would posit that you don't "go to" Second Life and look for something to do, any more than you "go to" a city with no plans and no friends and look for something to do there. Second Life is a place to meet up with people, and do things with those people that you would just as well do in reality, but can't (presumably because they're spread out all over the globe.) It's a place, not an activity.
I knew Second Life very well. In 2007, I built a perfect replica of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi [1], met with Philip Rosedale in San Francisco, and almost cried when he told me: "This is the most beautiful building I've ever seen in Second Life.".
I was very critical of Second Life at the time: I thought that most people were using it in the wrong way, and that the "gold rush" would soon bring problems.
However, I've been lucky: I found my job through Second Life. You can read the story here. [2]
Comparing World of Warcraft to Second Life is like comparing Monopoly (the board game) to Lego blocks. The former has definite, artificial rules and objectives, the latter is an open-ended kit. To put it another way, the former is like living in someone else's imagination, the latter encourages you to use your own imagination. Or:
WoW = paint by numbers
SL = paints and a blank canvas
It seems clear why WoW has more users: most people believe they have no creative ability (sadly).
Or people understand how fleeting digital creations in someone else's sandbox are. Or people just create in the real world and are looking for something else.
As a software developer I wouldn't play SL because I create all day. I don't want to play a game that requires the creativity I am out of for the day. Sometimes it's fine to paint by numbers.
Your first point is right on. In the early days, Linden Lab's executives always said that SL would eventually be 100% open source, client and server, like the Web (and Linden Lab would just be one of the hosting providers). But they never open-sourced the server code, so people who thought SL would become "something like the Web" (i.e. not controlled by any one company) became disillusioned. I'd definitely put myself in that camp.
Your second point explains you, but not why the population at large (most of which is not doing anything creative at work) prefers to paint by numbers when not at work.
See also: Cloud Party, which is basically SL in the browser, thus solving many of the problems SL has at the moment. Cloud Party plus WebRTC is gonna be real, real interesting.
As someone who grew up reading cyberpunk scifi and saw how excited people got about things like VRML I am amazed that there aren't more environments like Second Life.
I think however that people have been using things like World of Warcraft in a similar way though.
I never understood how little interest or actually how much hostility there was towards SL by people younger than me.
I would like to build something a little bit like SL (but with less virtual sex obviously) using webgl and webrtc scripted in JS.
Because in SCIFI novels the VR is there as a interface to facilitate the use. It was the interface. It's much more practical to plug you brain and have VR and actions than to sit at a desk and slowly type commands and read them out.
SL is just there for the VR, it's useless. You have the worst of both worlds. It's like saying "why the replica of Paris in a vegas cassino does not get the same amount of visitors that real paris get?"
I always found projects like Croquet/Open Cobalt and Wonderland fascinating and wondered why haven't seen more widespread usage. The idea of being able world hop through immersive environments created (and run) by other people is singularly impressive.
You mean like posting images of lolcats and memes is a perfectly legitimate use of a discussion website? Also, doing things other than virtual sex is also worthwhile, and for that there has to be "less than" 100% virtual sex, all the time ^^
Perhaps because it is distracting and overwhelms other useful uses of a social space? A characteristic it shares with other compelling areas of deep human interest such as politics and religion.
To expand on this: in IRC, most social channels get overrun with two things really quickly if there aren't rules against them: sex (including public roleplay), and talk of increasingly addictive illegal drugs. Unfortunately, that means that people who are interested in discussing things other than sex and drugs are made to feel uncomfortable, and end up leaving.
IRC's solution is that each IRC network is pretty much a world full of communities, so it's not hard to find a sex/drug-related community to talk in, and one can participate in both communities at the same time.
The problem with translating that to "virtual world" type spaces is that generally, since one has an a single avatar that can only be in one place in the world at once, one can't interact with multiple communities at once.
Thus, some significant amount of people spend significant amounts of time in the sex and drug communities, and the other communities end up being overshadowed, and eventually leave the world. Niche communities can never develop in the first place, as they'll never reach the critical mass of people in the same place at the same time.
I'm kind of surprised no MMO/3d immersive world has been successful on consoles or (more importantly) mobile, yet. It seems like a pretty natural thing.
I guess VR of some kind of (Oculus, or Meta, or Glass, or something better than any of these) will be the ultimate platform for this. You could pretty much implement the peak of 1980/1990s standalone-VR-using-$5mm-rigs with $1-2k in equipment now, and make it networked.
I was kinda repelled by second life when it hit the news as basically a gold rush. People getting rich buying and selling virtual property seemed weird to me.
A company I used to work for had a building in SL in about 05. We were encouraged to use it for meetings for about a week then never heard of it again...
They didn't get the demographic right -- MMO games have done that. There's WOW, there's even Minecraft as a more successful example. Niches to be sure, but that's how this sort of thing works -- you find your niche and push it to them.
I played with that platform a bit for its possible use in education. I was blown away by what it provided so many years back. SL I think is one of the best digital life environment still out there. What I would have hoped for is that there was a DL (Digital Life) along with SL (Second Life) where users would use their real names and real like avatars. Would have been lot more fun for teachers to be meeting their students and people meeting their friends in this environment knowing who they are. I think SL limited themselves by this little restriction.
I took a class a few years ago where we were required to play Second Life. At one point we had an entire class meeting in the Second Life world instead of the classroom. It was interesting. It was really just a regular lecture though, but instead of looking at my professor in real life I was looking at an avatar of him. There wasn't really any benefit provided by SL in this case but I could imagine some more stimulating situations.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Surrogates http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/. Forget mobiles phones, Secondlife needs some sort of conciousness hookup.
You would think that with all the retro cache a SCUMM-based MMOW would have, that someone would try to stand that up again...i bet a lot of people don't even know it existed. I wonder what standing a Club Caribe server up would involve?...
I seriously doubt SL would have been (more) successful by having a client in the mobile space. If that is what the author really thinks then there is no takeaway from this article.
I'm no fan of Second Life (As an academic who writes about videogames, if I hear one more paper about Second Life I may go crazy) but I do think that if there was a good phone client for Second Life I could see people just staying logged on the whole time and messing around with it while they were in meetings or class or something.
I think a large part of why social networks have desperately failed to reproduce the sense of togetherness has something to do with the state of the internet at large.
I used to play AstroMUD in the 90's and grew close enough to the community that when I stopped playing in college and started 5 years later, there were people who still remembered me. For some reason, that sense of community never transferred to the graphical mmorpgs (for me, anyway). Instead, the gaming community grew more and more toxic and I've since cut all ties with that part of the internet. Something similar happened with the progression from IRC to public chatrooms and livejournal to facebook.
The only real pattern I've been able to see in all this is one of inclusiveness. MUD, IRC and (the early years of) livejournal were hard to use for normal people. It artificially restricted the user base. The restricted access increased the value of the interactions therein. The threat of a ban also carried more weight, since getting another IP wasn't as easy in those days as it is today.
The theory is still kind of half baked and I'm not sure if I can focus it into a service that will reward people for maintaining a smaller, more intimate online network instead of the sprawling thing we have today.
I think the pre-social network Internet had a more homogeneou userbase: more text driven, more verbose, more learned, more, shall we say, "hackery". Or whatever. But there was a distinct property to that userbase that you don't get in the mainstream.
I think a lot of it has to do with the bar for entry: "RTFM" requires both reading and a manual. Anyway, half baked theory.
I think once facebook, and the more "real identity" networks came around, that "natural" communities got destroyed. I was thinking about some of the friends I had made when I was 13 that I still occasionally talk to, that I have never seen pictures of or even heard speak, that I had met online.
Back then groups were formed over interests, and the interests itself could be very niche, but the people you met were also interested in what you were interested in. It was like a self selecting group of uber-friends. The only step in relationship building was really "oh you like thing? I like thing too." Relationships then were really about shared-interests.
However once facebook rolled around cyber communities became more like digital archive of real lives. You don't friend someone on facebook because they had a similar interest with you (most of the time), you friend people that you had some in-life experience with. Now internet relationships are now really about shared-experiences.
Another way to look at it is if imagine you went to a bar by yourself, and everyone else in the bar came alone. You might imagine eventually people would group themselves by similar interests (although certain human dynamics might lead people to group with other people visually similar to themselves.)
In the post-facebook era its the same setup, but this time everyone bring 8-12 of their high school friends. Your high school friends may have not been had as much deep rooted interest in AstroMUD, but they are generally all-around ok people. At the end of the day you are really only together because you went to the same high school, and weren't assholes to one another.
If the "feeling of togetherness" is the product, then social networks have succeeded where 2L failed, if we use market acceptance as our measure of success.
It boils down to the question of what makes one feel "together" with another person? With the success of social networks like Facebook and Twitter as proof, many people find a common expression of sentiment typed-out and displayed on a shared-view in a timely manner is sufficient to engender feelings of togetherness with other people.
What 2L brought to the table was the virtual environment. While many people find that online gaming brings a strong feeling of togetherness, I would argue that this feeling is driven largely by the common purpose present in most games. It doesn't matter whether the game is an MMORPG, or a shooter like Battlefield 3. The game provides the purpose, and the gaming network provides the social conduit. This doesn't mean you can't have deep and meaningful relationships through these networks; just that the game provides the impetus.
With Facebook and Twitter, the common purpose exists in the real world, which makes the virtual reality of 2L redundant. Most people simply don't need it to feel connected while watching a TV show, finishing their run, lounging around reading online, or attending a concert.
Just having a client in the mobile space wouldn't have done it. It's more than that. SL was made for a world in which the desktop computer was people's primary computer. Now, smartphones and tablets are people's primary computers, and SL doesn't adapt well to that experience.
