Business
When I joined SL, there was one big thing that it was
renowned for and two that it wanted to be renowned for. The one big thing it was renowned for was
sex, which Linden ended up moving onto its own continent and adult sims,
causing huge controversy amongst residents at the time. For example, enormous helicopters came to
airlift entire adult clubs across the sea – some still with dancers in them –
resulting in three venues being lost at the bottom of the ocean in a series of “unrelated”
in-flight accidents. Actually, it wasn’t
that controversial, but you’d have been forgiven for thinking so at the time.
The first of the two things it wanted to be renowned for
was business, by which I mean RL companies establishing an SL presence. I’m still not entirely certain how it was
that Linden actually visualised the manifestation of this idea. What exactly was there that a car company,
for example, could achieve in the metaverse?
Were they expected to bring products to the SL market such as officially
licensed versions of their RL creations?
Were they expected to promote their RL business through inworld sales
reps and SL freebies? I’m fairly certain
I must still have an old Mazda hatchback in my inventory from this period;
thinking of it now brings back a fuzzy memory of a gleaming showroom in a
pristine sim – spoiled only by newbies zooming and bumping around in their free
Mazdas. I might be wrong, but I think it
possible that a constant stream of simulated fatal road accidents just outside
the store wasn’t quite the image the company had been hoping for in the
metaverse. It might not have been Mazda,
by the way – there were quite a few car companies in SL back then.
Then again, the very same question – what were they
expecting? – could probably have been asked of the web back in the days of its
early expansion prior to the dotcom boom.
Companies practically fell over each other back then to throw themselves
onto that bandwagon, with little actual strategy as to what they were going to
do on the web once they got there. Much
the same could be said today for the continuing stampede of businesses to
Facebook and Twitter. Does anyone
actually follow these organisations for reasons other than a Like getting you
some sort of discount voucher or extra levels in Angry Birds? Is there anything other than simple raw
exposure to be gained from establishing your business there?
I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that simple raw
exposure was about the only bit of the SL business boom that was actually
worked out. In came organisations like
Vodafone, Sony, Mazda, Renault, Mercedes, Coca Cola, the BBC and Calvin Klein,
lured by Linden’s seductive talk of SL as the ‘3D Internet’. The rhetoric was all about developing new
ways of “interacting and developing our relationship with our customers”, but
really this was just another stampede of organisations wanting to be part of
the Next Big Internet Thing. The details
of what they were actually going to do could be worked out once they’d opened
their nice shiny building with their logo on the front: basically, a website
made 3D.
But Second Life didn’t become the Next Big Internet
Thing; once that was obvious, all the businesses left.
Education
The second of the two things SL wanted to be renowned for
was education. There was a lot of talk
about this back in 2007, with a number of universities signing up and
establishing virtual presences, encouraged in part by the reduced tier Linden
was offering at the time for educational organisations. I’m not unduly bothered by the departure of
business, because I see that only as a consequence of SL’s mainstream
popularity: if SL were to become big one day, the businesses would return in the
snapping of a finger; no-one’s really the worse off for their absence and it’s
not like they attract new people to the metaverse. But the failure to establish SL as a worthwhile
platform for learning is an enormous shame.
Unlike business, it’s not
hard at all to imagine how education could work in the metaverse. In the real world, training sessions are
hampered by two key logistical and financial factors: venue and travel. For sure it’s a swings and roundabouts
situation: no-one would deny the benefit of being in the physical presence of a
skilled trainer for a teaching session, but if that trainer happened to live on
a different continent to you and attending a session run by him or her in
Second Life would cost you $50 instead of the $1000 you simply couldn’t afford
on travel and accommodation, wouldn’t that be an acceptable compromise?
Obviously, SL isn’t the only
way in which online education can be achieved.
There’s a staggering number of educational videos to be found on YouTube
these days, from filmed speeches to custom made animations: many of these are
excellent and I think it would be true to say that the earnest learner has
never had it quite so good. But teaching
has always held interaction close to its heart and this is the unique selling
point that SL has – had – to offer online education. When you’re in a class you get the
opportunity to ask questions. The
teacher gets to gauge from your questions your understanding and can modify his
or her strategy. As an RL trainer myself
from time to time, I often find myself branching off – pulling up completely
different slides from those I’d originally intended to talk to – because a
question from an attendee reveals something I need to explain better.
And learning, let’s not
forget, is a social experience. The
conversations we have with our fellow learners help us to make sense of the
material we’re hearing. No YouTube video
gives you the opportunity to whisper in the ear of classmates who are hearing
the exact same thing as you are at the exact same moment.
Second Life is now marketed
by Linden as a ‘shared, creative space’.
In one respect, that’s fine: I’m certainly not going to undermine the
value of creativity. But most of the
education institutions have gone now: it’s an opportunity missed and a lesson
not learned.
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