Random Precision

The second ‘take-away’ observation from Virtual Worlds 2007 is related to the first.

Second Life is the place to be. The media companies offerings will be of strictly limited importance because they are so closed; the corollary of this is that the most open platform will be the one to watch, and the most likely to “win”, inasmuch as there will be a single winner. And that most-open platform is Second Life.

Now in theory, the open source platforms like Metaverse and Ogoglio are more open; what could be more open that Free-as-in-Free-Speech software?

But openness is a matter of policy, not technology or software licensing. You can build a walled garden with open source tools just as easily as with closed source tools. But because Second Life is a unified world rather than just a platform, the openness of the SL world is determined by the policies governing that world. And just as Disney and Turner define their worlds with a closed, locked-down policy, Second Life is an open society defined by the Linden policy of keeping the barriers to entry for creators as low as possible.

This feeling gelled for me when I was attending a presentation by several staffers from Electric Sheep. They presented their perspective — quite a valuable one — of developers at work in several virtual worlds, contrasting the capabilities and strengths of each. Whether it was what they intended or not, it seemed to me that SL hit just the right note: with texture and sound uploading without restriction and near-zero cost, and with 3D modeling available in-game (thus no need to buy an expensive package like 3Ds Max or Maya, or learn a user-hostile free tool like Blender), and a company policy that encourages unrestricted creativity and enterprise (so long as it doesn’t involve gambling or kiddie porn), SL seemed to be the most welcoming and fertile environment for creators and entrepreneurs.

As one panelist described, the other virtual world companies act like media companies: if you want to create something, you get their approval, and give them a cut. Linden Lab, by contrast, acted like a real estate company: if you want to create something in SL, they would sell you some land, then pat you on the butt and wish you well; no permission or profit-sharing needed.

Exactly as it should be.

Second Life’s technological base is a generation behind, it’s true; but it can be fixed. (In the mid 1990s, the web seemed kind of drab compared to the AOL walled garden; but we all know how that one turned out in the end. Technological advantages are fleeting.) But from an openness standpoint, SL has the other virtual worlds beat by a mile.

Conceivably, someone could set up a similarly open-policy world using the open source VW toolkits available; but then they would have to try to catch up to Second Life in the marketplace, to build a world and a community big enough and deeply invested enough to overcome SL’s mindshare. They would also have to solve all over again all the non-technological problems Linden Lab has had to deal with: creating and maintaining a micro-transactional currency system, sorting out the logistics and legalities of real-world money exchanges, arbitration of player disputes, a whole raft of liability issues, Proktastic trolling, griefers and DDoS attacks, and many more challenges we probably haven’t even heard about.

And Linden Lab’s lead is about to grow wider this week (though how much it will grow in the long term, I can’t say) as the audience of CSI:NY gets introduced to Second Life as the exemplar of what a virtual world is.

Thus, SL is the place to be, and will be for at least a few years to come.

Well, I’m back from Virtual Worlds 2007, and I have a few “take away” observations. To start:

The giants are coming! But so what? The “giants” in this case being big media companies: Disney, Turner, Viacom, et alii. At first, they seem threatening, ready to take over the virtual world space with the sheer amount of capital and audience size. But never underestimate a giant corporation’s capacity for stupidity; they are big, dumb, lumbering beasts without a clue about the real potential of virtual worlds.

The buzzphrase we heard from the media giants, so frequently we got sick of it, was “brand protection”: keeping the Disney/Turner/whatever name as unblemished and on-message as possible. And who are they protecting the brand from, one may ask? Why, from you and me, of course, with our critiques and our weblogs and our mash-ups and our ability to create our own content and our own narratives. We’re just not passive enough.

The Turner presentation was especially dumb. Their “virtual world” consists of a central setting based on their “Department of Humor Analysis” ad campaign (link has video with sound that plays automatically, don’t click it at work). In their VW, which was built using technology licensed from Kaneva, one watches episodes of their syndicated TV shows in settings based on the show. (The example we were shown was the Family Guy house.) Since TBS doesn’t actually own the property, we don’t get to interact with Family Guy characters (much less become those characters), or participate in (or, heaven forfend, contribute to) any original narrative based on the show.

Congratulations to them; they’ve used advanced virtual worlds technology to invent [drum roll] a new way to watch television. Oh, and you’re allowed to talk with other people about the television show you’re watching. Wheee.

I have no doubt Turner Media will be able to drive lots of people to their VW. I do doubt their ability to keep them there. This doesn’t even really qualify as a virtual world; it’s just a TV channel with a thin layer of virtual-world icing.

The other big-media presentations weren’t much better. The Disney “fireside chat” described a similarly top-down vision; apparently children crave a “structured experience” — and the Disney flak’s description of such, not materially different from the cattle-drive rides at the Disney parks, left the two educators we were sitting with frustrated and disgusted. There’s a big difference between structure as a framework to build on, and structure as complete lock-down control.

Anthony Zuiker’s keynote was different enough to be interesting. Unlike the other media giants, who are building their own walled gardens, the upcoming CSI:NY experiment will revolve around Second Life; users will have full-featured SL accounts, complete with the ability to create their own content, and the users will be invited to become involved in the CSI narrative, though not limited to that.

It’s a significant distinction, I think, that the other media giant activity seemed to be the product of corporate marketing department brainstorming, while the CSI experiment appeared to be driven by a single creative mind.

Now, I’m not wholly sold on the CSI business. The furries are still smarting from the rough treatment they got from the CSI franchise, and I’m skeptical that the presentation will be even vaguely accurate. (Since CSI episodes are by definition murder mysteries, I wouldn’t put it past them to use the old Matrix gimmick: that if you die in the virtual world, you die in real life. It takes a writer of the caliber of Vernor Vinge or John Varley to write a good suspenseful yarn about a virtual world without resorting to that silly canard, and very few television writers are that good.)

Still, Zuiker seemed wildly more clueful than the media bigwigs elsewhere at the conference; I’m hopeful that this experiment will be good for both CSI and SL.

As for the rest — well, why should anyone care?