I just finished Snow Crash, a novel by Neal Stephenson about the “metaverse.”
Welcome to the crowd, Fuzzy.
Shut up.
The whole reason I read this book was because the developers of Second Life, Linden Labs, cite it as their primary inspiration. If that’s the case, then they either didn’t read too closely or tried to do the wrong things too soon.
In a two-year-old blog post on Terre Nova, Mike Sellers argued that it is time to end our romance with the concept of a metaverse, a virtual reality world that can replace the Web. He argued that a virtual 3D world is a horrible interface for all the things that cloud computing now allows us to do. I couldn’t agree more. Even if Second Life wasn’t a buggy, unintuitive mess that can barely interface with the Web, computers currently lack the tools for an interface (like a smart, facial recognition camera) that would make a metaverse useful for anything besides entertainment.
But even the entertainment sucks. In trying to give its virtual citizens options for travel and creating virtual “land,” SL has destroyed any verisimilitude that would make a virtual world attractive and fun. Anyone can fly and teleport at will, so traditional or even fantastic forms of transportation and even transportation routes are rendered useless. Stephenson saw this problem and addressed it directly in his concept of a metaverse:
You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor.
Indeed, but the Lindens ignored this warning and proceeded to wreck any value of good, dramatic or practical design. They also decide to make selling virtual land their primary business instead of taxing transactions. As a result, they crashed the land market. Land is too cheap. Everyone has it and no one uses it. The sims of SL are ghost towns. No one is forced to stay in a limited space, so no one does, and there is no sense of community or interaction. There is no zoning, so SL mainland is a visual blight of sign farms and clutter. And so the teeming metropolis imagined in Snow Crash with its celebrity guests and hip advertising placement is all lost. With no way to control traffic or zone land, there is no way to create land value or encourage density.
Limitations on travel and creation are anachronous and stupid for a file sharing system. But they would go a long way to making online meetings more comfortable. Sellers is right that there is no need for a virtual world to replace the Web, but I think that there is a need for a virtual world to facilitate long-distance meetings and discussions. One of my favorite experiences in SL was attending Unitarian/Universalist services in a small, picturesque, open-air enclave with 20-30 other strangers on a private island away from the mainland. It was the closest SL ever got to challenging reality’s supreme grip on gatherings. But, so far, Linden has made the same mistake as the characters in Snow Crash – they underestimated the need for facial recognition.
And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita’s faces.
Most of SL’s users do not build sims, design or manage land. They use SL as a glorified chat room – the most advanced, detailed, customizable chat room ever. The first virtual world that manages to take us past the chat room, past the emoticons and pre-loaded animations, will make buckets and boatloads. Even a primative facial recognition program for a web cam, applied as real time animation to an SL avatar, would take the program leaps and bounds over its current state of maddening chat windows and tinny voices.
If Linden wants to transform SL into the premier platform for education and business conferences, as is its stated goal, then it needs to radically alter and improve its interface pronto. …or just keep their customers from talking to Zonja Capalini.
I could not agree more about ‘Juanita’s faces’ and think avatar improvements are long overdue. My personal favorite would be hand and finger joints and animations (so we could do amazing things like this), but that ain’t happenin’ not with the focus on business over creativity. Those running Linden Labs seem to be sending a clear message that this ain’t your Philip’s SL anymore, for better or worse. To be fair, they have important things like making money to consider above making a toy for creatives to use, which in many ways is a backwards way to look at it. The most frustrating argument to wage with any bottom-liner justifying SL, or any virtual world, for business is the importance of the avatar. Jaunita’s struggles for others to see that importance seem relevant more now than ever. But she did it anyway and everyone realized how key it was later. This is the same as business-types publicly denouncing the importance or relevance of avatar appearance only to secretly come to me or others and ask to help them with their hair/eyes/shape/clothes/shoes (and this has become a regular thing). Why can’t people just admit appearance and presence is core to any real collaborative, social activity–especially in a virtual world that focuses on immersion as the primary justification for 3D over 2D. Perhaps someday, until then, all we can do is play with what we have.
Great article! I am so glad that I am reading something like this now with several months of activity behind me in SL, as I can honestly take most of his comments with a grain of salt.
Gee, it seems that we can just ditch SL now and go to the virtual webct/blackboard cloud computing interface….not!
The author notes that he did have a sound religious experience with a Unitarian service of 20 to 30 attendees, but if he were jewish, then it would have been useful to him to go to the Jewish Synagogue in SL that I hear has over 1000 visitors each weekend in 2009 (up from 500 in 2007)(see this: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1196847275426&pagename=JPost% 2FJPArticle%2FShowFull). In a different article on the founder of this sim, several people interviewed said that they stopped going to synagogues or lost touch in RL, but that they so enjoyed the kiosks/displays of information at the sim that are packed with info on their religion, offering residents historical knowledge regarding religious customs, etc.
If he were to fly to Ohio University’s islands, he’d see 2 public islands with only a couple of visitors, and miss the other 5 private teaching islands hidden to him where they teach dozens of classes in SL weekly to hundreds of students. And this is only one university.
Regarding travel, a friend of mine who is an educator at Howard Community College recently bought me a “shark’s tail” and helped me join a “mer-folk” group….last weekend, I put on the tail and we both swam like mermen and mermaids do – it was so cool….if I tried this form of transportation/travel in RL, I’d drown! Merfolks even have a language called mermish.
Also, I suppose the author never attended a conference where hundreds of residents/educators gather in SL….I’ve now been to a half-dozen conferences in SL, and they can be as good if not better than what we attend everyday in the real world. And the money I spend on electricity I pay to power my computer wouldn’t take me one mile of gasoline to power my car or fuel an airplane!
I believe the Education Faire conference in SL had at least a thousand visitors last January.
Of course, SL is far from perfect, but when it comes to 3-D environments with helpful Linden support staff, nothing that’s out there today can compare – hands down!
Joe DeCristoforo
Asst VP and University Registrar
The University of Texas at San Antonio
I don’t think my blog has so much power :-) Anyway it’s very very true that SL as an education platform sucks big time: every remote student is supposed to have a top-of-the-line PC with a wonderful GPU, only to attend a class in which the same boring anims are repeated ad nauseam, then getting in the “away” state… Teachers have told me that it’s very discouraging to give their lectures in front of 15 avies, 12 of which are “away”… Oh well :-) Then when you want to make a presentation the textures take forever to load. And you can’t resort to an HTML page if you want to have live video of the classroom… Oh, wait, but if you want live video you have to by it to some external company and pay extra… All of it is very expensive. A single sim, and you’ll need one if you want to be sure not to be disturbed, costs US$ 295 +VAT, while a far superior solution from Cisco (i.e., Webex), costs only US$ 65/mo and WORS. Oh, and the Lindens don’t want responsibilities, because all they’re selling is “land”.
The only thing they are really interested in is your wallet. No same company would rise do what they’ve done to Openspace prices, https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/05/26/good-news-homestead-pricing-to-be-grandfathered-if-purchased-before-july-1st-2009 , and still brag that their target customers are “enterprises and educators”.
Bah! :-)
I like the general approach here, because you are correct that LL needs to reread Snowcrash. We’d be better off with something like “The Street,” though I don’t see how that would not lead us to more of a glorified MOO than we now have.
That said, there are several generalizations with which I take issue, such as “the sims of SL are ghost towns.” That depends on which sims. Some edu and RP sims–and I don’t mean adult RP–can be rocking out with avatars, depending on when you visit. Also go to some good live-music or arts events, and you’ll find peeps aplenty. Second, I don’t find the mainland areas as dreary as you have. The removal of egregious billboards has made them more attractive.
I’ve been in SL two years now, and one of my pastimes is a monthly road-trip in a vehicle. It’s laggy and sometimes crashy, but you get a much better sense of the “lay of the land.”
As for land, it’s intriguing that you take on LL for making it too cheap, when the majority of comments at NWN and elsewhere bemoan land as overpriced. I don’t know for certain, compared to other worlds with virtual economies. I own a small parcel and got it from a friend for 1L. I pay $5US in tier a month. Seems cheap for my own private sandbox.
The strongest response here–and telling for educational users–comes from Zonja. I’ve been lucky with my Mac in SL, but too many of my students, with less powerful Windows and Mac systems, get orphaned by upgrades. Linden Lab seems to have forgotten that many college kids come to campus with laptops, and one cannot just 1) go out and buy a new one on a whim or 2) drop in a new video card every year.
LL has focused too much on making the graphics gamelike instead of developing a second client for EDU users who are not digerati from the Bay Area. While the client is more stable these days, one still cannot back up inventory (without violating TOS) out of world, and that really pushed EDU users to consider OpenSim where we’d own the servers and the backups.