I wish a startup would learn from Second Life's issues and try to execute the original vision. I think Minecraft has proven the widespread appeal of building and inhabiting virtual environments other than the traditional MMO.
I don't know whether these things are doomed to failure, or whether it's just a matter of getting the rules right.
I had a look around Second Life a few years ago when it was at the height of its media coverage. And it was just filled with crap. There was nothing there except brothels and shops to sell you stupid clothes.
The most interesting thing I found was an attempted replica of San Francisco, but after riding around on a cable car for five minutes I remembered that I live near the real San Francisco.
I can't see any point in having a second life that is less interesting than my first.
I can't see any point in having a second life that is less interesting than my first.
That's what everyone building a virtual world has to think about: how to make the new world more appealing than the world customers already know. Most new online worlds become appealing by being more inviting communities than the generality of each user's haphazard subset of real-world meatspace. I'm enjoying Facebook much better than I expected to, because it is, well, filled mostly with my friends. I was surprised to see that the author's comments in the submitted blog post were largely about the bandwidth limitations on Second Life's graphical representation of its virtual world shown to users, rather than about the community formed there. If people like a community well enough, they will put up with a pure text interface--as I have seen in my own experience.
So the blogger's noticing that Second Life's owners would rather make money with willing users who deal with the current interface than spend a lot of money to upgrade the interface makes sense. But I'm not sure that I can agree that that is a "failure," unless the purely technical exploit of worldwide, interactive, real-time virtual reality would build some new kind of more appealing community.
Yes, I admit that despite having read the article before commenting, I nonetheless decided to reply to what I thought the article should have been about rather than what it was about.
Because really, who wants to pay real money to allow a bunch of polygons to get a new hat and a lapdance from a robot?
With due respect, hugh3, I don't think you looked very hard.
I quit SL a few years ago, because it just wasn't doing it for me, but even while I was still there, there were actually quite a few interesting communities with good design and some immersive role-play going on. You did have to look around and filter out a lot of crap to find things that were at all interesting, I grant that. But your assessment seems overly harsh.
I have about the same amount of experience with Second Life as you do.
My take at the time: Second Life might be better if the real estate were at least ten times more expensive. As it was, it felt like the Asimov's Naked Sun MMORPG, only emptier. Lots of ugly buildings, each in the center of a giant empty lot, with no real attempt to relate one building to the next -- why bother, when land was so cheap? And no people that I could find. I wandered around, even did a little flying, and then I finally found another avatar... and it was a sexbot. A very poorly programmed sexbot.
What is the original vision? As far as I can tell it was chatting with avatars that resembled real people. What does that get you? A few underpopulated pretty environments, lots of chat, and people having virtual sex with their virtual bodies (most likely because their RL bodies are not quite as appealing).
Basically, there is no compelling storyline beyond "present yourself as better looking as you are in real life." That's why vibrant virtual worlds are normally based around games, which have compelling story lines around which the social atmosphere grows, rather than simply glorified chat services (which in the opinion of many are worse than other chat services since they provide an additional unneeded function).
I never got into Second Life, but a coworker proposed crazy idea - Second Life is basically an editor! At the time we had to support Radiant for our games (I still do, a bit pain in the ass). But anyway - as crazy as it might sound, there are already tools/engines that would allow more than one people editing the world. Now with Second Life's ingame "editor" you wont be able to make an FPS, but it's not that far away.
So I installed just for the fun of it, played 15 minutes or so. But multi-player games never appealed to me (one exception is Heroes of Might and Magic hot-seat - it's real social multiplayer as people do take turns - especially fun when this goes for more than 24 hours, and everyone is pretty much drunk, smelly, some very tired, some can't stop laughing)
One idea I had is to create sort of a shared 'virtual-emacs' style 3d world where creating and doing new things was to write/execute functions (yes that's remote code execution).
I didn't feel up to putting enough time for something that probably only hardcore nerds would like though, so I didn't pursue it.
