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Second Life
Ohio
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Long story short, I'm an editor working on a college textbook. I don't want to go into too many details, but one of the chapters is about communication in the workplace. I'm not the author, I'm the editor.
In the course of this particular chapter, the author has referenced Second Life a couple times and has described it as "Second Life, the online virtual world where people play using avatars (graphic representations of themselves) is starting to become a real workplace..."
So, I'm not familiar with Second Life. And the reason is because I've heard how lame it is. I don't want our book to be lame. I'm about to tell this author to get rid of Second Life references because they're stupid. But maybe I'm wrong. Can anyone more familiar with it tell me if its popularity is increasing? Decreasing? Is it even still relevant?
I know what Second Life is, I just don't think it's "cool" to be talking about it at this point.
This same author uses Star Wars Galaxies as an example of a popular online game so I think she's just off target on this whole thing.
In the course of this particular chapter, the author has referenced Second Life a couple times and has described it as "Second Life, the online virtual world where people play using avatars (graphic representations of themselves) is starting to become a real workplace..."
So, I'm not familiar with Second Life. And the reason is because I've heard how lame it is. I don't want our book to be lame. I'm about to tell this author to get rid of Second Life references because they're stupid. But maybe I'm wrong. Can anyone more familiar with it tell me if its popularity is increasing? Decreasing? Is it even still relevant?
I know what Second Life is, I just don't think it's "cool" to be talking about it at this point.
This same author uses Star Wars Galaxies as an example of a popular online game so I think she's just off target on this whole thing.
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Research into the gold farming / power leveling / account selling secondary mini-economy that WoW has created is a much better example of the point she's trying to get across.
It definitely seems like she's stretching to sound "current." I also am scratching my head as to how Second Life is relevant in a chapter on "communication in the workplace." I hope she's focusing most of the chapter on email, IM, and social networking sites.
SWG as a popular online game? No. It USED to be a popular online game. The definition of "popular online game" would be WoW.
I don't play Second Life but I am sure that it falls into the category of "popular online game" as well. How it pertains to communication in the workplace, I don't know but I am sure there are some Second Life players that can enlighten you. There have been quite a few reports on CNN.com about Second Life so that may be another place you can go for more information.
edit: Justin got there first...
If you're talking about MMO's, you pretty much have to talk about WoW. Simply comparing the subscription numbers should be enough to cinvince anyone of that.
Maybe the author's choice of has to do with the condoning of using real-world currency for virtual items? Once again, I know very little about Second Life, but the news blurb I read makes me think that there is a system set up for that kind of thing. In other MMO's, that's verboten (but it still happens, kind of a black market as Justin said).
While Second Life's popularity is arguably declining, it was and is a fascinating experiment. You can do things in Second Life that you can't do in other media. Musicians have given concerts in Second Life.
Grady Booch, a very famous software engineer, will give a talk in Second Life, and his rate for doing so is much less than his rate for coming out and doing it in person (not to mention the savings in travel costs). According to this article, IBM bought 50+ islands in Second Life, and IBMers have had business meetings there. I don't imagine that IBMers are given WoW accounts to use for business meetings.
Second Life also took the radical approach of establishing an exchange rate between real, hard currency and virtual currency. This means that you can buy virtual wealth with real dollars, and if you can convince people to give you virtual dollars, you can turn those back into real dollars. This means you can make legitimate money in Second Life if you can find a business model.
As far as I know, a select few have done this as a full-time job. Here is a Washington Post article about someone who made $60,000 one year designing and selling virtual items in Second Life. Certainly this person is an outlier, and $60K is lower-middle class wages on either coast of the United States, but you don't see this happening at all in other virtual worlds. (Others have made a business model out of virtual goods, but mostly illegitimately - e.g., WoW gold-farmers. Additionally, the economics there only work because of very cheap foreign labor).
Is Second Life going to become the next Facebook or Twitter, transforming how millions of users collaborate? Seems highly unlikely at this point. But did things happen in Second Life that were important, unique, and worthy of academic commentary? Absolutely.
The main thing I have to decide is, since this textbook will be used in 2010-2013, will people in 2013 be asking "What the hell is Second Life?" I just don't want it to sound dated.
Any discussion of, how shall I put this, "postmodern" business collaboration technologies would be remiss if it didn't at least mention Second Life. Honestly, the Second Life experiment is interestingly enough to warrant a nice 3/4 page sidebar discussing some of the issues I mentioned above.
I have actually written a college textbook, and there are many references in there to systems and technologies that were interesting, but not necessarily super-popular. The trick isn't to take out mention of these at all, it's to provide additional context. There are many very important systems that never saw use beyond the original Ph.D. student who invented them, but they may have played with concepts or features in a novel way that makes them worthy of mention.
I find it interesting that you're worried that your readers will be like "What the hell is Second Life?" Is this supposed to be a textbook or the latest catchy-title shelf-hogger at Barnes and Noble? Your audience here is college students. It's the textbook's job to explain what the hell Second Life is, why it's important, what novel things were done with Second Life, which succeeded, which failed, provide informed speculation on why those things succeeded or failed, and tell students what they can learn from Second Life.
Also, your textbook is going to sound dated no matter what in 2012 or 2013. It's not going to mention Gleepo, the world-changing collaborative technology that is going to take the business world by storm in the Spring of 2011.
It's not the content or the mention of Star Wars Galaxies or Second Life that's worrisome, it's how these things are presented. If they are tossed off in a paragraph extolling the virtues of business collaboration in Second Life or SWG without the above critical analysis, well, I just hope this isn't a trend throughout the writing...
Also, POOLS CLOSED.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Your argument is wasted because you don't know what type of book this is or what its audience is, and that's understandable because I didn't tell you.
I realize there's no way to write a textbook for 2013 in 2009. My question was, is Second Life even important now?
This is not (really) a book about technology. The book's topic is human relations. It's for community college and technical school students who are preparing to enter the workforce for the first time and don't have a clue how to work with people in an office setting.
The only reason Second Life potentially has anything to do with this is because one of the book's features focuses on technology and in this case, the author's chosen Second Life as an example of a technology that's letting people work non-traditional hours outside the office, so that students will be ready to encounter and deal with this type of thing when they get to their first job. I'm trying to determine if Second Life is the best example with which to illustrate this point.
The reason it gets media exposure is because there was hooplah a year or so ago about proposing new taxations laws on income generated by people who play Second Life for profit (of which there are several who pull in some serious bank).
As a game, it's very close to utter shit. As a social phenomena, it's basically Youtube for before Youtube was technically feasible.
If you are looking for a mainstream case of large groups of people trading/selling digital content (which is really all Second Life is), then I think The Sims would be a more appropriate case. But I don't know if Sims content actually goes for money.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Edit: It seems like a lot of responses are talking about whether Second Life is relevant as a game/business model versus as a technology that can be applied to the work environment and virtual interactions. OP, you are asking about the latter right?
It started losing interest when they shut down in-game casinos for in-game currency. That you could convert to real money, meaning they suddenly had some laws that applied to them.
Its a terrible example of working remotely. So utterly awful I don't know why it would ever be included in a textbook seriously discussing remote collaboration. It has a clunky interface (why do you need an avatar for sharing business ideas?), and it isn't streamlined at all (why would I want a zebra stripped zombie flying into a meeting?). In the future, I would be shocked if it served as any sort of inspiration for business software whatsoever.
Personally, I'd probably cull it, but I'm not an editor on the other hand. The idea will be antiquated and it isn't really relevant for the topic at hand IMO. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on with virtual collaboration, I just don't think Second Life is worth talking about in a serious way.
This man makes a crucial point. I referenced Youtube as a social phenom, but web video in general on conjunction with other web based technologies has already made and will eventually make a massive wave in online collaboration.
Second Life is like the hideous first experiment, and will be regarded with laughter in the future. The "game" part is incidental, if you view it strictly as a social tool, it's quirky and impractical at best.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
To the person above me, asking things like "why do you need an avatar..." well, you dont technically, but a lot of serious research done on avatars and virtual worlds suggests that using them helps people to actually feel closer physically to other people. You could strongly argue that a 3d space like SL would increase a teams closeness and togetherness if they were not all able to work in close proximity in real life.
If you think of it as a medium as opposed to just annecdotes it becomes much more relevant. Talking about flying zombie zebras and writing off SL would be like going to 4chan and concluding that web based forums would not be relevant for business communications.
Except I'd argue the majority of business communication has no need or value in the sort of persistent community building that an avatar would be helpful for. I don't see it as a big pull, at least in the near future and it almost certainly won't resemble Second Life anyhow if it does become reality. So why use Second Life as an example then?
Except in this case it would be like including 4chan in a textbook on using forums for inter-office communication. Well, not quite that bad since there have been some pretty ham fisted experiments by corporations in Second Life, but same basic point. If this were a textbook exploring the proliferation of niche cultures on the web or somesuch I could see the value of including Second Life in a text book. Including it in the context given by Ohio? No.
The best fictional analog I can think of for Second Life is the Moorecock Dancers at the End of Time stories- set in a fictional world where people have unlimited energy and as a result can live indefinitely and do or be anything they want, physically speaking. It's set in the dying of this culture, as most people have simply exhausted their imaginations and chosen not to exist anymore. The few remaining people are either so uncreative they exist essentially as before, just very pretty, decadent, and jaded, or so incredibly abstract that they don't make much sense anymore.
Secondlife, in particular, is reviled by many internet forums because a lot of people unpopular on the general internet use it to congregate - furries, goreans, macrophiles, other shit you don't ever want to google. But IMO that's kind of like hating IRC because you don't like people who play MUCKs. oooo lookit me I'm old. Those people also generally are actually pretty private, you can wander safely in public second life without getting your mind blown.
The value of second life depends on how you evaluate it. As a "Game," a thing for entertainment, it's not so good - but it has unique applications more linear and structured games don't.
However - many people doing something serious with second life don't use the public second life grid - they either buy private space in second life (how the game makes money en lieu of subscriptions) or buy Second Life Grid, which is like having a licensed and supported private WoW server. There's also OPENSIM, which is an attempt at an open-source second life compatible client/server. OPENSIM is actually really rad but you're getting into RISK Champion levels of geekiness to run it.
If you make a second life account and wander around, you will occasionally stumble onto something with Neil Gaiman levels of coolness and creativity - the kind of stuff that makes you go, "Oh, fuck, I'm a clod, I could never work in this medium, this guy's discards and throwaways are better then my end product"
but mostly you find The People That Ruin It instead. Cool stuff takes more brain and soul and work then lame stuff, and second life is ALL user created, so, like any musical genre or artistic form, it's, sadly, 90 percent poop.
But mushrooms grown on shit, and there are some cool things in second life. A lot of really bad-ass stuff has been done with it - there was a sensory exhibit on schizophrenia, like a funhouse you walked through that should you what it was like to have hallucinations, and people have done fascinating work with the scripting language - artificial pets, flocking experiments, one really bad grey-goo exploit that was technically a DOS but pretty cool...as a tool, it's an interesting tool. As an idea of what the general internet might evolve into soon, it's kind of neat. If you regard it as feature rich IRC, which is basically what it really feels like to use, it's great. The last thing I was working on in SL when I last got bored with it was a working TARDIS. At least, it would have felt like using a tardis - it was actually a moving teleporter in a phone booth, that teleported you to a fixed room, that had a door that was a teleporter to place you selected, which one use would destroy the old phone booth and build one at the new location. It had a lot of permissions issues with private property and area boundaries and I kind of got bogged down with it and then Dead Space came out.
It probably shouldn't be a whole chapter in a book on contemporary virtual spaces, though. I would have a chapter on non-competitive online communities, and mention second life as well as say, tHere, INVU, active words - there was a whole slew of second life lookalikes there for a bit.
I host a podcast about movies.
Heck, you could even discuss how guilds function like companies, with specialization, jobs, positions, applications... I think it would be much more effective.
Find themes, styles, and common concepts; but don't name names.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
No, it's not and this is an absurd claim to make for so very many reasons.
I'm pretty sure using any MMO as a way to make your point in a textbook is going to be laughable now, and in four years from now. Additional context, a related sidebar, maybe. Second Life has some historical importance but I don't think anyone would consider it particularly current or relevant.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Concerning your first point, I'm going to have to disagree. Maybe where you work it's not very similar. That hardly makes your claim universal.
To your second point, you're certainly correct.
I'm sorry, but "don't stand in the green shit" is not a job.
Replace "Don't stand in the green stuff" to "Avoid obvious potholes from prior projects you've been on" and "spam sunder armor" to "get me this report by Friday." Better?
Actually, it's much, much worse.
Second Life isn't exactly the perfect example of online social networking, but it's something that the media just loves to play with because it's something weird and netty that they can get their heads around. I don't think it's going to be relevant much longer, but as many posters have stated it was an experiment which yielded some interesting results.
Depending on the goal of your referencing Second Life, you could consider mentioning Eve Online. (If this is somehow related to online resources being comparable to real world assets.) Eve Online actually has an economist and a free market determined dollar to in-game currency ratio.
If the idea is just to mention popular online games, sweet jesus, drop SWG and mention WoW. Did this woman do part of her research eight years ago? If the goal is to mention the power of online networking, you should really focus more on video conferencing. Avatar representation isn't going to be a part of regular business for a long time (if ever). On the other hand, I have a job interview across the country via skype video chat next week. It'll save the company a great deal of money since they don't have to fly me out, and is exactly the sort of thing that companies should be looking into when they're trying to find resource saving applications of social networking.
Hearing about raid skills and their IRL relevance as "leadership" makes me want to have my assistant crumple a cup for me.
The books is about workplace communication. Second Life has been used in unique ways - for modeling and telepresence - that WoW hasn't. Second life and EvE also interesting economic models - they aren't the most brightly colored or momentarily popular MMOs, but as rungs in the ladder of virtual environment development, they are vastly more interesting and significant then WoW. Wow is just big and popular. What you're doing is like telling someone asking about the cotton gin they should write about tighty whities becasue everyone wears them.
Also, any discussion of "teamwork" or "large projects" or the management of in-game societies applies to any environment. Surely you don't think WoW has some sort of copyright on guilds, teams, associations, or large projects? If what you want to draw is an analog to work, check out a large SL scripting project.
I host a podcast about movies.