Is Second Life's Libertarian Experiment Over?
Katherine Mangu-Ward | February 14, 2008, 10:31am
The virtual world Second Life announced yesterday that certain kinds of billboards will be restricted--those deemed to be "harassing behavior or visual spam." Second Life blogger New World Notes charts the rise and fall of virtual world libertarianism: "Philip Linden has memorably said he's building "a country" in Second Life. That country is beginning to look less like Amsterdam or Las Vegas, and more like Denmark or Singapore."
New World Notes chronicles the world's "experiment with laissez faire society" thusly:
in 2005, when a landowner began peppering the world with ugly billboard towers, Residents protested. However, the Lindens generally refused to intercede. "It's not for us to decide the relative merit of construction in Second Life," Community Manager Daniel Linden told me then. That hands-off stance has apparently changed. The same could be said of other libertarian principles, like legalized gambling, unregulated banking, and permissible sexual extremes.
In 2006, for example, Philip Linden refused to intercede against Ginko, the SL bank with a high rate of return, which many Residents accused of being a Ponzi scheme. That same year, in response to Residents protests against age play (i.e. simulated avatar-based pedophilia), Robin Linden said it would be forbidden "[i]f this activity were in public areas"-- implying that it was still permissible in private. Casinos and other gambling institutions, of course, were rampant over the land.
But then the regulations started kicking in:
The reversals started last year, continuing into this one. Age play and other vaguely defined "broadly offensive" behavior was universally forbidden in May 2007. Gambling was prohibited in July 2007. Unregulated banks were banned this January. This February's prohibition against "ad farms" was preceded by the debut of a Linden Department of Public Works, also overseen by Jack Linden, "all about improving the experience for residents living on or visiting the Linden mainland." Of course, some of these decisions were at least partly motivated by concern over real world laws, but the pattern is still hard to miss. The Lindens are restructuring the mainland into a communitarian society it once was in 2003. Expect more prohibitions to go into effect soon, also aimed at curbing other libertarian externalities-- bot farms, for example, and camping chairs.
Ah well, at least Michael Gerson will be happy.
csven | February 14, 2008, 7:17pm | #
@Joe
To answer your question "who gives a shit":
1) researchers at Amazon (who are conducting tests linking virtual worlds to their e-commerce system)
2) the people behind eBay (who were early investors)
3) IBM (which is heavily involved in numerous activities including the one I linked to in my previous comment)
4) Cisco (which has been heavily promoting this technology and will benefit greatly from hardware sales as a result)
5) Google (which is reportedly working on a mirrorworld and will likely link it to local advertising)
6) Microsoft (which just bought Calagari to help spark user-generated content for Virtual Earth)
7) Dassault (which besides supplying aerospace has announced an effort to create a "3D Flickr" and has partnered with MS on VE)
8) Siemens/UGS (which is reportedly working on their own virtual world PLM... Product Lifecycle Management... app)
9) the Chinese government (which is now pouring a *ton* of money into virtual world commerce technology)
10) Technology people like Mitch Kapor (the guy behind Lotus and angel investor to some well-known tech start-ups)
11) MTV (which is investing heavily in virtual worlds; they have several custom ones already)
12) Consumer goods companies (which are trying to find ways to *engage* consumers now that television ads aren't providing enough bang for the buck)
13) Educators (who are perhaps now the largest segment of virtual world adopters; including Harvard)
14) Engineers (who are beginning to find uses for simple planning exercises and see future potential in 3D simulation)
15) Architects (who are already using virtual worlds for pre-vizualization and other activities)
16) The physically impaired (who can operate on a more level playing field inside a virtual world)
17) Soldiers stationed overseas (who use this tech to virtually visit their families back home)
18) Military psychiatrists (who have been using this technology to successfully treat PTSD)
19) Indie musicians (who actually report earning more money performing virtually than playing local establishments)
20) People like me (who hope to develop niche products in conjunction with virtual sales, which is an increasingly lucrative arena)
Need more?
@Egosumabbas
My interest in this 3D tech revolves around product development as it reminds me of CAD systems from 15 years ago.
Enki-2 | February 15, 2008, 10:42am | #
Bah. SL is, and always has been, geared towards developers and creators. As such, it is not a game, nor would it ever make a decent game. But that's alright, because it was never meant to be a game, and personally, I don't like games anyway.
SL was modeled after the Metaverse concept in Snow Crash, in which there is a virtual world that is used for socializing, prototyping, and commerce. Sure, SL currently doesn't have all the really neat-o features of the Metaverse in the book, but it still fits the bill decently. For a company who keeps running things for years without any major payment level changes even though they have not yet broken even, who has made their software open source quite possibly only because they needed a way to get rid of the crappy, unreadable code made by cheap outsourced labour, they have done a decent job.
Personally, I run my company out of second life, and I'm not alone. IBM and Sun have both invested lots of money into SL, building networks of islands consisting mostly of offices and conference rooms, so that they can do conferences across the web in real time without the shoddy non-3d, barely-interactive, non-intuitive elements of pure text chat or mailing lists or *gasp* phone conference calls. Even video conferencing doesn't do as good a job as second life, believe it or not. Google is reportedly looking into it, and Amazon has already done some work with it.
I'll admit, it's not FPS-quality. However, the difference between SL and a game is precisely what makes this quality important. In WoW, there are a very limited number of ways that someone can look, and thus you have a lot of people who are indistinguishable. That's okay, because mostly you're just killing them. In SL, it's possible with the standard tools to make yourself look like anything from a very realistic simulacrum of your real life form to a realistic simulacrum of your WoW Orc avatar, to something no one has ever seen before, and that's not including custom AV shapes. This is important for social communication, role playing, and certain business things, and also for the ability to easily recognize a given person. So what if the graphics are a little dithered? By the way, if you run the linux alpha, the lag is far less than if you run the windows stable or the OSX stable. I don't know why; when I ran the linux alpha, I was using a card that wasn't even supposed to be supported on the linux alpha, and the same card on windows was rejected. All the same, I *would* like a new MMUVE that has different principles than SL, but it's not the lack of game elements that is the issue for me -- it is the fact that you are bound to a simulacrum of earth's physicality.
