Posted at Nov 13/2006 04:08PM:
matteo: The discussion has been extremely interesting and I wish we had more time to examine the inner and outer workings of Second Life and other virtual worlds. In this page I am summarizing some of the things we talked about. Please feel free to add/modify/expands what follows - it is a stream-of-consciousness, not an organized, structured recap, although I tried to reconstruct the discussion as it developed, there are several holes.

After the introduction, Howard Rheingold kickstarted the discussion suggesting that “unlike The Well [link], Second Life is not really a community, but a world. In fact – he said – is a highly social environment that motivates people to create stuff”.

In many occasions, Cory Ondrejka stressed that the users of Second Life tend to be much more creative than other virtual community, such as The Sims community, where only 1% of the users are also creators, or the game mod community (3% of creators vs. 97% of users, according to Cory). Cory mentioned that “66% of the Second Life users create objects within the digital space and 80% modify that content”. I find these percentages dubious and highly questionable. Moreover, the data is provided by Linden Labs itself. Question: Has anybody done independent research on creativity within Second Life?

Ralph suggested that the one of the reasons why there are so many creators in SL has to do with the fact that this space “is not a compelling consumer experience, that is, you need to do stuff because there is nothing else to do”. Cory was quick to reply that this does not seem to be case. He said that “the percentage of creators have been consistent since SL was launched - from 100.000 to 1 million users, the ratio of creators to consumers has remained constant. The truth is that the users of SL have cut back on other media, such as television, or even work, in order to create something within SL”.

Fred Turner suggested that “The Well is a social world that works in a highly functional networked environment – that aspect of The Well was consistent with the philosophy of life that can be found in the Bay Area”. Turner also said that he finds the same consistency in Second Life. Cory replied, somehow surprised, that “few people find Second Life very consistent”. Truth is: Fred and Cory were talking about two different issues. The former was referring to the ethos, while the latter was mostly referring to the aesthetics of SL. My experience in SL has been somehow limited, but I happen to agree with Fred. SL reflects many values that are embedded in the Bay Area. Something like this could have never been created in, let’s say, Milan.

Cory was quickly to point out that what really matters in SL is innovation, and innovation “happens at the edge of social networks. In Second Life, a different group of people meet, merge and interact”. Cory stressed the “physical element” of SL” “In SL there is this weird physicality imposed over you and you need to constantly merge with other people”

At this point, Erika suggested that traversing the spaces of SL is “akin to navigating the suburbs”, in the sense that in both cases we are confronted with heterogeneous spaces, a chaotic ensemble of styles and formats. Cory was taken aback by this analogy. He argued that while designing Second Life he was trying to recreate the feeling of a urban experience, “To me SL looks like New York. You’re walking through different neighbors and districts and you encounter so many different people, stores, buildings… In a city like New York you walk, whereas in a suburb you drive. Similarly, in SL most of the people walk all the time. We did not want to build a theme park, but a city. If I could, I would create a virtual Orange County and burn it down (laughs). The real question here is: how easy can you engage with these kinds of people that you encounter in the city? In suburb you do not really interact with anybody. In a city you have to, even if you’d prefer not to”.

This question lead to an interesting discussion on the nature of cities, both digital and real. Daniel mentioned that cities are traditionally more progressive than the countryside, and wondered about the demographics of SL.

Cory replied that “65% of the new sign-ups are male college students. However, women keep using SL for longer periods of time than men. Over the course of a month, the ration between male and female users is close to 50-to-50. The median age of the users is 33” Cory also mentioned a correlation between age and use of SL: “The older the user, the more time he spends in SL”. He also underlined that “good computers and broadband correlate with the demographics”. In case you did not notice, SL is a highly technological space.

Fred wondered about the user base of SL… outside of SL. Cory said that there have been at least two major conventions of SL users in the past few years. Linden Labs attended both and concluded that the gender/age split was consistent with the online data they collected. He also stressed the productive nature of SL: “There are more than 60 companies that create objects, buildings, and applications within SL and during these conventions, people were hanging out with these ‘professional’ producers. At the same time, these companies recruit workforce from the user base at these conventions - aggressively competing with each other”. There is a “virtuous circle” within SL: producers become better producers and users eventually end up working for them or creating new business.

Fred asked about the growing influence of corporations in SL and Cory replied that most firms are relying on these 60+ middleware companies to establish their presence in SL. “They build hotels, stores, and other structures, so that the users can use them. The corporations, on their part, can study how the users interact with these spaces, in real time”.

Ed asked about the dichotomy between work and play that seems so inherent SL (this is something that I have been investigating myself for a while now). Cory replied that Linden Lab is not willing to influence the evolution of SL: “We want to let SL develop and grow by itself, without an external influence, although there are things happening in SL that I personally find offensive, but we do not want to censor anything, we just want to let this world to evolve. The idea that there is tension between work and play is wrong – it is a legacy of the protestant ethics – SL fruitfully combines these two aspects. Work and play are fully integrated here: in the digital space, work becomes fun - so we do zoning in order to separate stuff that we don't like - commercial-free zone, mature zones, we want to give people features, technologies and stuff so that they can do what they like”

The discussion switched to the notion of identity in virtual spaces. Cory reminded the audience that “the very concept of identity is fluid, so enforcement from an authority like Linden Lab is necessarily weakened – there are no verifiable identities in SL”. At this point, Howard asked Cory about the role of Linden Labs. Cory replied that Linden Labs govern the “name space, the location space, the land we sell, the computer horsepower, the currency - all the world's transactions that uses the currency - in world instant messaging – although people can bypass that control if they want to – we also own the scripting language”.

Fred asked how do we make sense of social change in virtual spaces. Specifically, he asked if these spaces function as mere recreational tools or if they offer possible intersections for social action. Cory mentioned the fund-rising initiative organized by the American Society of Cancer Research, which was able to collect more money in SL than they would have raised in a mid-sized ‘real’American town in any given day. Cory expressed his surprise that “online worlds are not targeted for political activism”

Cory also explained that SL is very different from MMOGs. For instance, there are not phenomena like goldfarming in SL. “The kind of production that happens in SL is innovative and creative. Creativity is rewarded by other players. In Wow, on the other hand, repetitive, uninteresting tasks are rewarded, and this leads to goldfarming”. Cory also suggested that SL may prefigure a drastic change in the way we work today: “If labor moves into virtual worlds you can reduce the phenomenon of massive migrations – in a sense, SL is a ‘neater’ version of cultural imperialism. One can import his or her local culture and show it to American users in SL”. SL, in other works, might become a digital equivalent of a new collaborative, shared space in which people from different ethnic, social and cultural background interact. Cory suggested that “the two key terms to describe SL are horizontal and economy”. Horizontal, because the social network has no hierarchies, but is, by definition, rizomatic. Economy because SL has developed a sophisticated economic system not based on scarcity, but on sharing. SL might become what the net might have been: a read-write rather than a mere read-only tool. SL allows for both activities (read-only and read-write) whereas the internet 1.0 as we know it was rigidly read-only. This topic is discussed, among the others, by Edward Castroova in Synthetic Worlds [link]

Howard Rheingold reminded the audience that “building is not just about creating objects - participation is always social – participation means building bridges between people - thus social building might become more important than creating objects and artifacts at one point” and that might render SL even more interesting, especially to those who do feel the urge to construct ‘material’ objects in virtual spaces.

Michael suggested that Second Life is an "enhanced web experience", but once again, Cory disagreed. "The web - he said - is linear, sequential and relatively static, whereas Second Life is unpredictable, a-linear, highly interactive". The discussion ended with some comments on the use of voice within virtual worlds. Some participants argued that using voice would make the experience closer to reality. Cory noted that while a full integrated voice system will be soon implemented in SL pointed out that spoken words do not necessarily work well in a virtual world: "If more than one character is speaking at the same time, for instance, it is just impossible to follow the conversation, while in a real world conversation, human beings are very good at automatically select/exclude noise".