Yet more novel ideas

November is nearly upon us, that month when the world’s population of fictional characters is incremented by at least a million as aspiring writers across the globe sharpen their pencils and set to work on dragging the novel inside them kicking and screaming onto the empty page.  If you don’t take part each year in National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo, as we veterans like to call it – then you don’t know what you’re missing.  What else, after all, is there to do in this muddy, overcast month; this dour, humourless security officer of a month who beckons you in from the warm oranges of October only to keep you waiting in cold, windy dampness for what seems like an eternity before finally unhooking the rope which admits entrance to the delights of December?  In the UK, we try to liven up this bleak collection of days with bonfire night, supposedly once a celebration of a terrorist’s failure to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but possibly actually just an excuse to remember what being warm felt like.  In the US, the artificial bubble of enforced gratitude generated for Thanksgiving collapses so spectacularly on the day after that news coverage of the blood lust of Black Friday has now become important entertainment viewing the rest of the world over.  Anything to make the month pass more quickly.

But November novel-writers are oblivious to all of this.  Enshrined in their little cocoons of their very own make-believe, the only possible relevance of happenings in the real world to them are if these can offer any potential plot devices.  Time passes all too quickly when you’re trying to knock out 50,000 words in a mere thirty days, though this is not to suggest that there won’t be moments when you wish no-one had ever invented the concept of the novel or writing or language even itself, and that an impromptu world war would at least have the silver lining that it might spare you from having to think about any of these things ever again.

For the past couple of years in AVENUE magazine I’ve entertained myself (and, possibly, one or two readers) in November with a collection of potential storylines for Second Life inspired novels, that emerging genre of fiction across the surface of which I’ve vainly scratched away for the past eight years.  For my own amusement as much as anyone else’s, therefore, I humbly present yet another.

Lindependence Day.  The continent of Nautilus decides it wants independence from the rest of Second Life and manages to convince Linden to hold a referendum of its citzens.  The campaign is ferocious.  All attempts by the board of governors to persuade Nautileans to vote ‘no’ only seem to increase the percentage saying to the pollsters they’ll vote ‘yes’ – even Ebbe Altberg’s surprisingly emotional plea not to vote yes just because it represents a possibility to “kick the effing Lindens” has Yes campaign leader Nigelex Salmage claiming that the No campaign is falling apart.  In the end, even Philip Rosedale is wheeled out to make the case for ‘Better Together’.  Salmage is unperturbed; speaking with absolutely no authority whatsoever, he claims that an independent Nautilus would keep the Linden as its currency and that residents will still be able to access Torley Linden videos.  In the end, the reality of independence is brought home to the majority when several high-profile mesh creators start talking about relocating their skin factories to Zindra.

Project Really Interesting.  Comedy. A bunch of high-school nerds create the perfect female avatar and she comes to life in the real world thanks to a keyboard spillage during a thunder storm of something cutting edge (let’s say a memristor-graphene suspension) that one of the gang swiped during a school trip to the local science genius’s laboratories.  It turns out that the very same genius has been secretly plotting to take over the world and our heroes manage to put a stop to his plans through a sequence of contrived events that mostly require one or all of them to be naked accidentally.  A zany caper from start to finish; if this were a movie you could expect it to be advertised on buses during a holiday season.

The Amazing Second Life into Darkness.  In a not-too-distant future, the successor to SL is launched by Linden.  Marketed as a reboot rather than a sequel, ‘Amazing Second Life’ features planets rather than continents and sims, with travel between worlds a lengthy, complicated and expensive affair.  Whilst your initial rez point is officially described as random, it soon becomes clear that Linden are employing a formula which the company eventually fesses up to being derived from your Google search habits, your Amazon spending pattern and the number of times you’ve shared pictures of Grumpy Cat on Facebook.  Group identity being what it is, however, the revelation comes too late to prevent entrenched identities from forming and, within barely a year of the new metaverse’s release, two nearby planets go to war over a mesh body IP issue.  It is the first in a decade-long series of conflicts which historians later refer to as The First Virtual War.  Property is destroyed by missiles which initiate a virus chain reaction when detonated.  The real life media don’t know quite what to make of this, and the novel follows a young intern reporter as she travels around Earth to meet individually in real life the refugees from a virtual planet that’s been almost totally ravaged by the Primfluenza Virus.  Her journey takes her from a French Chateaux to a New York apartment to a bedsit in a Hillingdon council estate.  “It was terrible,” one refugee – a member of the German aristocracy – tells her.  “We were running around in panic because one moment everything was normal and the next it’s all vapourising before our eyes.  All gone, just like that.  All gone.  Everything.”  She then orders her butler to bring more tea and weeps silently for several seconds, telling our bemused protagonist, “You don’t know what it’s like.  You don’t know what it’s like.”

The Time Traveller’s Virtual Partner.  Within hours of meeting and falling in love in the metaverse, Wigander Sansom and Dostree Chan are astonished to find out that they’re communicating from different time periods.  Twenty-two-year-old Wigander is a full quarter-century ahead of the thirty-year-old Dostree’s 2018.  In 2043, it turns out, people have become nostalgic for the good old days of SL and the Ruth look is very fashionable amongst teenagers.  One of many self-proclaimed ‘retronauts’, Wigander was spending his time exploring the thousands of abandoned regions (preserved for posterity by Google as a tax-deductible expense) when he came across ‘Moonstand’, a sim of space-themed fairground rides which – unbeknownst to him – runs on a server which utilises experimental memory chips made from a memristor-graphene composite.  At first, the love-struck pair declare this barrier to the possibility of physical union as a meaningless triviality and rejoice in the universe finding a way to bring them together; a few days later, however, Dostree asks casually if Wigander can research 2018’s winning lottery numbers for her.  A month passes and Dostree becomes a millionaire many times over, but each meeting she has with Wigander sees his recollection of their previous encounters more and more degraded.  Throwing caution to the wind, she buys one last winning ticket, but when she logs in to celebrate with her love, Wigander is no-where to be found.  The reader is then told he was the son of the original winner of that final ticket, an unemployed writer who kept secret his fortune from his family by claiming all his money was from the sale of his Kindle novels.  Without that lottery win, he doesn’t feel able to ask for the hand in marriage of his girlfriend and Wigander is never born.  Dostree, of course, knows none of this; just when you think it can’t get any more heart-breaking, the reader is told how she looks sadly through her apartment window at the statue of ‘The Railwayman’, a newly erected tribute to her town’s local history and the very same statue which – not a hundred pages earlier – Wigander also was noted to look at through his window.  Yes, Wigander was Dostree’s son.

Red Prim Rising.  The Russians launch their own metaverse, Вторая жизнь созданных шахт (Second Life of Crafted Mines).  Derided by western governments, it becomes an overnight internet sensation and populated by millions of disaffected Americans and Europeans.  Everyone becomes friends and world peace breaks out.  Well, I can dream.

The continuation of division

How Second Life and everything else internet has failed us – or we have failed it.

Those of us old enough, wise enough or, essentially, unhinged enough to have seen between the cracks of this big brick wall we call ‘society’ will likely long ago have worked out that there’s no such thing as the new product that will make everything better; nor will there ever be.  The next new iPhone, we’ve realised, will not cure the world of ill and it won’t do a single thing for an individual that even the most ardent of Apple fanbois would select to look back upon fondly in his very last moment of life.  Likewise the next Xbox and the next PlayStation and whatever it is that Nintendo does next.  Likewise, in all probability, the Oculus Rift.  Likewise Second Life 2.

All of these next-big-thing bandwagons, we’ve realised, are essentially just the dressed-up treadmill of capitalism, the soap opera gift-wrap to the requirement that we endlessly buy things in order to keep everything (and everyone) working.  This is no big revelation anymore.  Even the machinery of capitalism itself no longer tries to conceal it from us; there is no need.  It turns out that most of us are no more turned off from buying things when the inner guts of consumerism are exposed than we are from eating bacon when we learn it comes from pigs.

How we love looking forward to our next big tech, just the same.  The rumours.  The anticipation.  The debates.  The reviews.  That we know (in the same way that know the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way round) that this is all just an endless loop and that this time next year it’ll be something else we’re looking forward to diminishes our enjoyment of it not one jot.  I’m not being cynical here: I enjoy it all as much as the next moderately IT-informed human being.  And I’m not saying either that no things created are transformational, just that they’re not really transformational enough.

The computer, for example, has been transformational; I still marvel at word processing.  The Internet has been transformational and I still marvel at email and the speed with which I can pull information from the web on just about any topic in a matter of seconds.  Perhaps the most transformational thing of all about the Internet, however, is the communication it opens up with other people.  It was inconceivable when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties that we would in the not-to-distant future be able to speak with people all over the world for as long as we wanted and for free – let alone video chat with them.  Even throughout most of the nineties this seemed unlikely.  Today, it is more-or-less taken for granted.

Second Life, in its admittedly rather clunky fashion – although I have no doubt this will be improved upon in its next incarnation – takes this one step further: In SL, we can actually do things alongside people who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away from us.  We can create together.  We can perform together.  We can watch things together.  We can shop together.  We can just sit together if we want to in a café or a living room or a town square or an open field and talk.  It is astonishing the boundaries that the metaverse enables us to transcend.

In theory.

If I could travel back in time to make a visit to my teenaged self and describe to him the world’s technology today, I wonder what he would say?  Let’s suppose I arrived in early November 1983 when, unbeknownst to most of us at the time, the world came within a button’s press of World War III.  Nuclear annihilation was something I thought about a great deal in those days and it sobers me to think that there are in all likelihood a great many parallel universes in which Soviet nerve did not hold out and the world really did end that week.  On 7 November 1983, Uptown Girl by Billy Joel was at number one in the UK music charts (incidentally, the first seven inch single I ever bought) and Islands in the stream by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton topped the US Billboard Hot 100.  In the news, a bomb was exploded by a terrorist group at the United States Senate (no-one was killed).  It was a Monday.  I would likely have spent the evening playing on my ZX Spectrum computer.  Can you remember what you were doing that day?

In truth, right then I was only just becoming aware of the nuclear threat and the likelihood is I was far more preoccupied with what was happening in Doctor Who than I was with world affairs (after all, the twentieth anniversary special, The Five Doctors, was just a couple of weeks away).  If the button had been pushed, I would likely not have understood what was going on (not that I would have had all that much time to digest it), which is probably how it should be for a twelve year old boy.  Even so, if a forty-something me from the future had turned up to talk about the internet and things like Second Life, I like to think that I would have worked out pretty quickly that a consequence of all that incredible communication potential had to be that people were finally managing to get along together.  Well, wouldn’t it?

But, in 2014, despite all these transformational advances well beyond the scope of what most of us who were around 30 years ago could have dreamed of, we’re still about as far away from that dream, it seems, as perhaps we’ve ever been.  As nationalism sweeps across Europe (the rise of the UK Independence Party in the UK is only one example of this), as Russia takes what many feel to be the first of many calculated steps to come in rebuilding the former Soviet Union, as the US is slowly torn in two by increasing political polarisation, as Islamic State – arguably the love-child of the Blair-Bush legacy – bring unspeakable brutality to the middle east, I’m waiting for the moment when people on big stages start asking the question, Why?  How has it come to this?  How have we not yet moved on from here?  Why have we not made some sort of progress when we have all this incredible technology?

It’s too easy to blame just the politicians.  As an inclusive humanist, I have long been waiting for the world leader who has the courage to explicitly make decisions based on the world’s interests rather than “this country’s interests” (whatever that country might be), but I’m not so naïve as to believe that such a person wouldn’t be voted out of power at the very next chance his or her electorate got.  It’s too easy to blame the people of the press, who sicken me on a weekly basis with their seeming quest to make us angrier and angrier and angrier; it is us, at the end of the day, who buy their newspapers and sustain this.  It’s too easy to blame parents.  It’s too easy to blame schools.  It’s too easy to blame capitalism.  It is all of these things together – and more – and the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts.

And yet, it’s really not so complicated.  All we have to do – all of us – is be better at empathising with others and exercising compassion.  That’s it.  That’s all we have to do.  Pretty much every single disagreement I’ve ever been witness to has involved one or both sides being unable to understand how the other is thinking and feeling. 

In recent months, I’ve become excited in my anticipation of yet another potentially transformational moment to be brought about by technology.  Over the last couple of decades, our knowledge of planets beyond the solar system has exploded: as of 1 September 2014, we know of over 1,800 worlds, with new ones being discovered at an astonishing rate.  We have the Keplar telescope to thank for much of this, a $500m NASA spacecraft that enables astronomers to identify planets when they move between us and their native star.  Like so many NASA missions, its operational life has already far exceeded its planned life expectancy and the data being returned has enabled estimates on the number of potentially life-supporting worlds in our galaxy (calculated from the percentage of solar systems which have planets of a certain size orbiting their sun at a distance which would expose them to a comparable amount of solar radiation to Earth – it turns out this is about 20%); currently, this number is thought to be in the billions.  This analysis has become increasingly refined and new techniques are being devised which will allow analysis of the atmospheres of these planets.  One such technique will enable astronomers to detect the presence of chemicals known not to exist naturally in the universe.  When the day comes that a world with these chemicals in its atmosphere is identified, we will have discovered proof of intelligent life on another planet.  There is a growing confidence amongst scientists that we will have this proof within the next twenty years.

Perhaps this discovery will be the catalyst that changes human thinking from ‘me’ to ‘us’.  For many years – perhaps decades; perhaps centuries – we won’t know anything about these civilisations other than that they exist.  We won’t be able to communicate with them (the distance will be far too great); we won’t know what the people of these planets look like or what they eat or how their homes are or what their art is like: we will only know that they are there.  We will only know that we are not all that there is any more.  We will only know that all of us on this planet are one thing – human – and that there are now other beings we know of who are not this thing.  We might finally start to identify with the people we previously hated.

And yet it’s so terribly lazy to pin all one’s hopes to a magic solution from a far-away place; as a writer, I can’t help but feel I’m just hoping for a deus ex machine to pop out of thin air and rescue us all, and that I should be shamed for the very thought by having my pencils taken away.  And even if it happens, it might in any case turn out to be no more transformational a moment in the long term than was the release of the Nintendo Wii; humans are incredibly wedded to their prejudices.

But something has to happen if we’re going to survive.  We can’t just continue with our them-and-us mindsets indefinitely and expect things to all work out somehow.  Every single time we call someone a jerk or take sides or add to the polarisation of a debate; every time we make it harder for people to rethink their positions and meet us (or others) in the middle ground, every time we collude with the idea that one side is right and the other is wrong, we only end up digging ourselves deeper and deeper and deeper.  It isn’t easy, but neither is it complicated.  I don’t really know how Second Life could help us build some of these bridges, but I still believe that it has the potential.  It’s not going to be a menu option, however, or a HUD you can buy on the Marketplace.  All SL can do is provide the opportunity. 

Whilst I’ve been writing this article, the former Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley has passed away.  Dr Paisley was a big man who, for many years, placed himself in an entrenched position over the future of Northern Ireland.  His later decision to fight for peace and share power with his former bitter enemies was a turning point for the Northern Ireland peace process and the key moment for which he is being celebrated now in the media.  Peace is never without pain, and Northern Ireland remains a stark example of this.  But peace is peace, and we have to fight for it.  If we don’t, the eventual alternative will be so much worse than whatever wounds we have right now. 

Could an office in Second Life 2 be the killer app that virtual reality is looking for?

Screenshot from 'Quantum of Solace' created by hwww.inventinginteractive.com.

Now that everyone’s panicking about the atomic bomb dropped by Linden last month when they announced their successor to Second Life (which, I’m now given to understand, has nothing whatsoever to do with competing in a suddenly rapidly expanding market and is just the next step in the company’s mission to screw residents in every last way achievable), I thought it might be a good moment to start thinking about the ways in which a ‘next generation’ virtual world could differ from the present one.

A new metaverse which works in broadly the same way as the present one – albeit with better graphics, less lag, and full immersion via the Oculus Rift – might sound like a good thing, but would it really capture the imagination of the masses?  A lot of us thought that 3D cinema was a new and amazing thing when Avatar was released a few years back, but when it came to buying a 3D TV, few people could really be bothered and Nintendo’s 3DS handheld games console – complete with its built-in 3D camera that would enable us all to record our moments in stereoscopy – completely failed to capture the public’s imagination (though, admittedly, not as much as the Wii U did).  If SL2 really is going to capture the attention of hundreds of millions of people rather than just millions of people, as Linden CEO Ebbe Altberg has recently claimed as its objective, it will need to bring with it something genuinely new.  The same is true of VR more generally.  In my mind, one such thing is objects with function.

Many objects in SL do already have function, but it’s an extremely limited function.  You can sit on a chair.  You can lie on a lounger.  You can open a door.  You can close your blinds.  Perhaps the most sophisticated functional object I’ve seen so far is one of those fancy television screens that links to channels showing old movies or which can play YouTube videos: it’s a method for watching something with someone, for sure, but it’s hardly bringing into being something that can’t be done outworld.  No.  The sort of function I’m thinking of is far more complex.

Just over a year ago, I was fortunate enough to get a short tour of future concepts being developed by IBM.  These included a facial recognition system for use in commercial environments (remember those billboards in Minority Report that changed when Tom Cruise walked past them to show him personalised adverts?  - that technology exists right now) and a remote control toy car that you can drive with your mind.  But centre stage for me was the big black table in the room with a surface that acted like a giant iPad.  If it had actually just been a giant iPad it wouldn’t really have impressed me all that much; what blew my mind was the way in which it was possible to manipulate documents on this thing: you could spread them all around you like pieces of paper, you could tap one to bring up a localised keyboard alongside it for editing; when you were done with it you just pushed it to one side for filing.  We’ve seen similar fictional systems to this in movies like Quantum of Solace and, more recently, The Amazing Spider-man 2; what I saw at IBM was nowhere near as whizz-bang as either of these, but it was real and – by God – it worked.

I’m particularly excited by technology such as this because for years I‘ve struggled with the concept of the ‘paperless office’.  I’ve been interested in computers for over thirty years now, but my enjoyment and knowledge of them hasn’t stretched so far to any acceptance on my part for replacing paper in my everyday work.  Sure, I use a PC to write reports and emails like everyone else, but the moment two documents are required for any particular job, I start reaching for the print button.  To give you an example, when I’m marking an essay I need to see both the essay itself and the marking grid I use: I could switch between them on my PC screen, but I dislike doing so intensely.  I want to see them side by side, so I end up printing both essay and grid, completing the latter by hand and then later typing it up.  It’s an inefficient way of working, I know, but it’s the best fit there is for the way in which I need to think.  For people like me, then, the interactive surface I saw at IBM represents a way in which the paperless office could actually happen.

But do I see such technology turning up in regular office spaces such as mine in the near future?  I do not.  The cost is likely to be prohibitive without a mass market to sell to and a mass market is likely going to be very difficult to establish when – quite apart from anything else – people are living in smaller and smaller spaces.    If 3D TVs costing hundreds of pounds were a difficult sell, I hardly imagine interactive tables costing thousands or tens of thousands of pounds are going to walk their way into people’s dining rooms.

But virtual reality might just be the way through which people like me could access this way of working, and at a fraction of the price.  I sit at my regular table or desk and put on my Oculus Rift and activate/teleport to my office in the virtual world: there I’m sitting at an interactive desk where I can spread all my electronic documents around me and work on them in the manner that suits me.  So what I feel through my fingers is the surface of my real life desk, but what I see is my interactive desk with all its documents and applications.  The system would of course be linked to a cloud storage account so that I can access outside of the metaverse the work I do inside it: swiping a document into a particular folder on my desk would store it in – let’s say – my Dropbox account, so I would then be able to bring it up in the real world on a PC or tablet.

There would be other benefits to working this way.  Rather than being an isolated room, my office in virtual reality could be connected to the virtual offices of all my co-workers so that we could use the interactive desks for meetings or joint working.  Whole buildings could be constructed in the metaverse for individual companies or organisations: buildings where people actually work rather than the business-themed dolls’ houses we see in SL composed of empty room after empty room.  Working from home would never have to be the solitary thing that it is now, where contact with other people comes in the form of emails and the occasional phone call.

Is current technology up to this?  I don’t know.  I’ve not had any experience so far of using a virtual reality headset, so it might be that my expectations don’t quite match the reality of this technology as it stands at the moment.  It might be, for example, that the graphics resolution isn’t quite so good that I’d be able to read the text on documents comfortably without enlarging it significantly or bending over to see it.  Also, in addition to the headset, some sort of device would be required for reading my hand and finger movements.  I know that the Microsoft Kinect is capable of reading body movement, but I don’t know whether it’s fine-tuned enough to do so sufficiently well to distinguish between different virtual key presses or to be able to keep up with my typing speed.  A system that constantly produced typing errors because it was only 99 per cent accurate would be infuriating.

Then there’s the creation of the document management software itself.  Whilst not beyond the scope of technology today (as I saw at IBM), this would be no small issue: it would effectively be the creation of a whole new operating system, the sort of thing it takes Microsoft, Apple and Google years to develop (and, in the case of Windows, still get wrong).  I say it wouldn’t be beyond the scope of technology today, but there I’m thinking of a system for use in real life: implementing such a thing in a virtual world would require an inworld scripting system light years ahead of what’s achievable with something like Linden Scripting Language.  And it would require lots and lots of processing power.

But this is future-gazing, and from the vantage-point of a period in time that’s not even yet the beginning of the virtual reality era.  Whatever does start to emerge next year, it will be certain to be improved upon quickly.  And it’s been acknowledged by the current architects of virtual reality that VR as yet has no ‘killer application’ concept that might make it a must-have rather than a novelty or niche interest.  The first ever killer app, incidentally, was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program (for the Apple II computer).  Can you imagine working life now without spreadsheets or any other the other killer apps that succeeded them, such as word processing software or email?

I realise you were probably hoping for something a little more exciting from the metaverse than yet another reworking of the way you use a word processor, but it might just be that one day you can’t imagine working life as possible without your virtual reality office.

Linden Lab announce a successor to Second Life

My thoughts on this announcement.


The breaking news yesterday on Wagner James Au’s always excellent New World Notes was that Linden Lab were first rumoured and then confirmed to be working on a successor virtual world to Second Life.  In a statement sent to the site, Linden said that the new, ‘next generation’ world will be “an open world where users have incredible power to create anything they can imagine and content creators are king.  [It] will go far beyond what is possible with Second Life, and we don't want to constrain our development by setting backward compatibility with Second Life as an absolute requirement from the start”  - meaning it likely will not be compatible with SL and any inventory you have will not transfer over (see my recent post on the finite life of virtual inventory here).  They do go on to add, however, that this “doesn’t mean you necessarily won’t be able to bring parts of your Second Life over, just that our priority in building the next generation platform is to create an incredible experience and enable stunningly high-quality creativity, rather than ensuring that everything could work seamlessly with everything created over Second Life’s 11 year history.”

Big surprise?  Not really.  I speculated earlier in the year about the coming age of virtual reality – which, let’s all take a deep breath and remind ourselves, could yet turn out to be as actually popular as 3D TV – and how this might give SL a boost in popularity because it’s essentially a free product out of the Oculus Rift box; part of my speculation was that whatever the take-up is, however, it will probably only be short-lived: Whilst SL’s various bolt-on upgrades over the years have undoubtedly improved its graphical appeal hugely, these are finicky things that require skill and experience to organise, and many newbie VR explorers, therefore, just won’t get the experience we know is possible.  Something better – and a great deal simpler – is needed, and SL will only endure as a popular VR virtual world experience so long as that alternative doesn’t exist.  If Linden don’t supply this then someone else will.

Other than reporting that the new world is only in its “very early” stages and that the company is “actively hiring”, Linden doesn’t give much information about the status of this project.  Potentially, it’s entirely conceptual right now (although it’s tempting to wonder if there is any flow of information between Linden and High Fidelity via Philip Rosedale). Whilst this likely means that the new world is potentially years away at this stage, getting the word out to SL’s core user base that something new is on the horizon might just help keep them loyal whilst other tempting products start to appear.  It’s ultimately a much wider user-base than this that Linden will want to attract, but long-term SL residents will include the skin-makers and the clothes designers and the furniture builders and the landscapers without whom any serious attempt at a user-content driven world will fail.

What I find most interesting about the statement are two things.  First, the use of the phrase ‘next generation’ suggests a new reframing of business at Linden.  Former CEO Rod Humble previously reframed the company’s work as making ‘creative spaces’, an ethos which resulted in a veritable tumble of products into the marketplace which were thought to fit this brief – dio, Versu and Blocksworld to name but a few.  Any of those that failed to turn a profit got swept away quickly and brutally when current CEO Ebbe Altberg took up the reigns (although Versu got a new lease of life recently following an outcry from fans of Emily Short when it emerged that her Magnus Opus for the interactive fiction platform, Blood and Laurels, was complete and unreleased) and with this new announcement we’re seeing Altberg stamp his mark firmly on what many of us have been feeling of late is a somewhat ailing franchise.  ‘Next generation’ is a phrase we’re used to seeing in connection with such markets as mobile phones and games consoles and mobile data networks, business areas we also associate with a large range of products.  The use of this phrase, therefore, signifies not just a step forward in technology but also Linden’s acknowledgement that we’re now moving into an era where they will face something they have never previously encountered: serious competition.  Over the eleven years of its existence, there have of course been a few alternatives to SL crop up here and there, but none have attracted anything like SL’s numbers.  This time, however, it’s different, and Linden’s experience in this field will not necessarily give it any more advantage in the approaching market than Nokia’s experience did when Apple popularised the Smartphone.  The question has to be, are Linden acting fast enough, or will they become yet another market leader that failed to respond in time to the developments in its own field?

Second, I find the phrase ‘content creators are king’ especially meaningful, and it gives me hope that Linden have actually tuned in to what has made SL, in its own words, “the most successful user-created virtual world ever.”  In a fractured metaverse of competing virtual worlds, content will become the new apps of this market.  As we have seen, time and time again – VHS versus Betamax, Blu-ray versus HDDVD, Windows Phone versus Android and iOS, to name but the headliners – content is what wins format battles.  I can think of no better combination for developing rapidly an attractive content base than straight-forward tools and an open system for user-generated content, and the means to make money out of it.  User-generated content has made SL what it is and any new virtual world product which fails to take into account this tremendous success – and which fails to put it at the very heart of its philosophy – is unlikely to make any long-term impact.  When you stop to think about it, user-generated content is what gave MySpace the edge over social networking pioneers such as Friends Reunited (anyone remember them?) and then Facebook over MySpace.

But what excites me most of all about this announcement is the sense of new energy it communicates.  Has Altberg managed to shake Linden out of its fatigue and re-inject some of the pioneering spirit we all miss from the old days?  I sincerely hope so.  Now needs to be a time of group huddles and fist-bumps and air punches and battle cries at Linden HQ.  If it all comes to pass as the pundits are predicting and VR really does become the Next Big Thing in the IT world (again – deep breaths – it might not), we will be faced with a whole range of competing worlds and experiences; the very notion that Linden wouldn’t be there with its sleeves rolled up and slugging it out confidently with the newcomers is alarming.  Second Life is an amazing product and its architects should be diving in to whatever is approaching: they have earned their place there.

I’ll reiterate now my (previously expressed) belief that the company has to rethink its policy on land if it’s going to achieve a mass-market appeal in its future ventures: content is great, but you need somewhere to display it and nothing roots you to a world more than having a home there.  Hopefully, these early days of the construction of ‘Second Life 2’ will include a period of reflection on what’s been learned from SL that will include such issues.

There is, after all, so much that has been learned.  SL always was a product ahead of its time, but that time is now approaching.  In years to come, we might look back on our current world as ultimately the testbed pilot that led to a metaverse as pervasive as Facebook, as inspiring as nature, as unifying as sport and music.  Get in there, Linden: no-one knows this business better than you do; make us the place we have all been dreaming of.

Inventory: Your own personal ticking time bomb

How one day you’ll have nothing to remember your Second Life by, and possibly the real reason for that terms and conditions update.

There are a couple of completely unrelated activities I’ve become involved in lately that have got me thinking about the stuff we hold on to.  The first of these, in chronological order, is the clearing out of my mother’s attic.  It’s a long overdue job and I’m approaching it slowly and methodically, going through everything one box at a time and sorting according to whether each item should be thrown out, scanned/photographed and thrown out, kept, or ebayed.  After four, hour-long sessions, I’m approaching the end of my first box and there must be at least fifty boxes up there (most of them much larger than the one I’ve nearly finished).  Many of the boxes haven’t been touched in over twenty years.

When I committed to this project, I did so with a somewhat heavy heart and only because I knew that it had to be done sooner or later.  Much to my surprise, however, I’m actually quite enjoying the task.  I’ve discovered all kinds of things that have brought back memories of moments lost or simply a recollection of the world as it once was through my then more innocent eyes.  Letters, photographs, Christmas cards, magazines, things my father wrote when he was alive, toys long forgotten; and so on.  It’s nice to occasionally reconnect with how things once were, even if only for a few minutes.

The second activity is far less wholesome for the soul.  I’m somewhat ashamed to say I’ve become addicted to the online game ‘Simpsons Tapped Out’.  Those of you familiar with this app for phones and tablets will know it involves creating your very own version of Springfield by saving up virtual dollars accrued through sending the various residents available on jobs; these dollars can then be used to buy land or construct buildings.  All well and good, but the game involves a lot of waiting around because these jobs can take anything up to twenty-four hours for residents to complete, as can building construction.  To get around this, you can speed everything up using the second currency of donuts.  But here’s the catch: donuts can only be bought using real money, and this is where EA Games, the makers of Tapped Out, make their return on the app.  Buying donuts is a temptation I’ve so far avoided, however there are clearly plenty of users who take this approach, since the game – free in all other respects – is reportedly a huge financial hit.

How is this relevant to my musings on stuff?  I went to a discussion forum a few days ago to find out what people were saying about a new set of quests that have recently been added to this game, with a whole new set of items than can be earned.  People were discussing these with some excitement, and one of them eagerly posted, “I’ve got them all already with some donuts I got bought for my birthday”.

It’s a funny old world.  I can listen to some truly dreadful news items with the most dispassionate of responses, but for some reason this really hit me.  Actually, anything concerning childhood innocence usually does it.  I once saw a really aggressive kid I knew taking a glimpse through a crack he’d found in the papered-over window over of a Santa’s grotto and the look of childhood joy on his face made me want to blub uncontrollably.  I assumed, you see, that this post had been written by a child (I might be wrong) and it upset me that for his or her birthday they had received something they would never one day be able to come across in their attic and hold and feel and smell.  One day, Simpsons Tapped Out will be an obsolete title and all these purchased items will be gone.  The game doesn’t work without a connection to the game server, and when it reaches the point, to quote Troy McClure, where it’s no longer profitable, that server will get its plug pulled and everything anyone ever ‘owned’ on it will vanish.

As it is also with Second Life.  Everything in our inventory – everything we think somehow belongs to us – actually resides on Linden servers which one day will get turned off.  Everything: every picture, every notecard, every outfit, every building, every piece of furniture you ever bought or made, every trinket and curio, every garden feature, every single hairstyle you’ve ever worn; one day, it will all of it be gone.  You do not own any of it.

Whatever you think Second Life is, it cannot last forever.  Whatever improvements are made to it, it will not in the long term be able to compete with new virtual worlds that aren’t built on an eleven year old architecture (happy birthday, by the way, SL).  Eventually, there just won’t be enough people buying land or paying tier or purchasing stuff on the marketplace for Linden (or whoever ends up owning SL, if Linden one day decides to sell it) to make money out of it.  Some people will definitively leave; others will drift over to new products and find their visits to the first ever virtual world less and less frequent.  Whatever.  Whether it’s a year from now or five or ten or twenty, that moment must inevitably come.  There are things we can export, such as pictures and notecards and any objects we’ve built ourselves, but more or less anything we’ve bought or received from others is stuck forever in our inventory, and the stuff we can take out the majority of us will probably never get around to moving because there’s just too much of it.  By the time we realise we want to keep hold of it because of the memories these things unlock, it will all be too late.

The more and more I think about it, the more I feel a pull towards the conclusion that this inevitable, unavoidable truth is the real reason – or part of it, at least – why Linden changed its terms and conditions regarding ownership of inventory last year.  Because we tend only to think in the here and now, this got misread as some sort of nefarious plot to make money out of our intellectual property.  I don’t think it’s that at all; Linden denied this and we’ve yet to see any evidence to the contrary.  But now that most commentators seem to agree that our metaverse is now entering its final age, anxiety at the labs over what rights people have to items in their inventories must have started to grow considerably.  Solution: let everyone know that Linden owns the lot so that if (when) they chose to extinguish it, then they have every right to do so.

What, if anything, can be done about this?  Experimentally, I’ve exported a couple of items I made in the past to InWorldz and it worked okay – textures had to be uploaded separately, but that’s doable.  InWorldz, however, isn’t all that different from SL as I understand it, insofar as it’s still one central organisation holding all the server space.  OpenSim would appear to be a much better long-term storage option, since (as I understand it) you can use it to run your own region on your own PC, rather than having to connect to regions online.  Still, this is only a solution for things you have actually made yourself, which in my case would be less than one per cent of my total inventory.  And even some of those are un-exportable: much of my own furniture, for example, uses all-permission sculpted elements I’ve bought such as mattresses and cushions; using these in my items is entirely ‘legal’, but, when it comes to exporting, just one of them in an item I've made will block the whole thing from being saved to my hard disk.

Perhaps, between now and the end of SL, someone will come up with some sort of magic tool – a deus ex machine to my prophecy of doom – that will allow the export and conversion of everything to some new virtual world we’re all emigrating to.  I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to know whether such a thing might be possible, but even if it is it’s likely to cause an outcry among sellers, who have been fighting the copybots for years.  It would probably get banned.

We should probably reconcile ourselves, then, to saving what we can while we can.  For my part, that will mean saving my snapshots to hard disk and maybe trying to take a few more pictures than I ordinarily do in the time we have remaining.  Regarding objects, the vast majority of my stuff is junk I no longer use and I suppose it won’t be the end of the world if it should all pass into non-existence.  Like so much stuff we get rid of in real life, pictures of it will suffice.  There are a few gems here and there, however, which I will really, really miss: the first home I built (it included cheap bits and pieces I picked up from dollar stores), my unbelievably cool 70s bed (not actually finished as a saleable item yet, but you simply have to see the furry leopard skin cover), the neck chain my best friend Dizi made for me from a maze design (carved into stone at a place in Tintagel) when I told her how much I liked it.

I would love one day, years from now, to come across these things in a virtual box in a virtual attic so that I can look at them for a while and enjoy the memories they evoke.

But I’m pretty sure that I won’t.

Second Life® Behaviours: Attendance

My first article on Virtual Writers World is about what people do when they attend SL events.  Actually, it's a cunningly disguised extract from My Avatars and I, but then I'm ruthlessly self-promotional like that.  Read the article here.