7 ms·

Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life

68 points by antiviral 3y ago

antiviral 3y ago
Points from the article: - At its height in the early 2000s, Second Life attracted only around a million monthly users, a fraction of the number enjoyed by some online video games (the makers of Fortnite claim a consistent 80 million) - The population skews middle-aged and around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  > around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult. Oh no that's really sad :-(
  - zargon 3y ago
    If you mean it's sad that their real world interactions are difficult, then yes. But it's great that these people have a virtual world they can go to where they can have social contact and express themselves without as many of those limits.
    - yoz 3y ago
      Thank you for so concisely explaining Second Life's most positive and important impact that is, due to its nature, also one of the hardest to demonstrate. I worked for Linden Lab for over five years and yet I didn't fully appreciate this until after I left. The things that make Second Life interesting to me - such its programmability, economy, wildness, diversity along more axes than you can easily imagine, and sheer unpredictability - make it, in my eyes, the most interesting thing on the internet. But those attributes only discuss its value by talking in technical or monetary terms. The most important question is: why does Second Life matter to people? The most important answer comes via the massive number of people who can enjoy a Second Life in ways that their First Life, for whatever reason, doesn't allow.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
christkv 3y ago
Meta could have save itself a bunch of money by just buying second life and running a separate instance to test all their ideas.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  No, they couldn't. Second Life is a bizarre, organic creation that nobody wants to repeat in the shape it exists. It has lots of porn. It has furries. It has goreans. It's almost entirely built by a dedicated and very fickle community. It has a marketplace on which you can buy hundreds of varieties of a penis. Pretty much nobody besides Philip Rosedale wants to repeat that (and he tried with High Fidelity, which now still lives on as open source forks, including the one I'm part of). That's because no sane company wants that tricky mess on their hands. They want something nice and fluffy that won't scandalize grandma, not SL, where people made a special client that restrains the user, for BDSM applications. Pretty much every sanitized clone of SL flopped because all that weirdness is what gives it its charm.
  - christkv 3y ago
    I was thinking about the tech not second life itself.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      The tech has been copied and improved on multiple times. But it's the community what makes it interesting.
      - Animats 3y ago
        Yes. That the society works, and has worked for two decades, is fascinating. A few things help with stability. There's a fully open source clone, Open Simulator, and sizable grids which use it. The number of users is not huge, but it's large enough to offer an alternative. This keeps Linden Lab management from getting too uppity. Landowners have considerable power over what people can do on their land, but no power outside it. This distributes authority. It removes the need for the armies of minimum-wage goons armed with ban hammers that Facebook and Roblox employ. Second Life has a "governance" department. It's tiny and rarely seen. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. The annoyance radius of a jerk is about 100 meters, in a world the size of Los Angeles. Somewhere in Second Life, a few people are probably being jerks right now. They're mostly being ignored and will probably give up. There's no way to spam to the whole world. Nor is there any way to advertise to the whole world. This kind of stability is rare online.
zargon 3y ago
Rosedale suggests that one reason virtual worlds are not as popular as they have been hyped is that people have difficulty "embodying" a virtual avatar, projecting themselves into it. I have no problem with doing that, but I'm a Second Life user. It does seem somewhat plausible. First-person video games avoid that requirement. But there are also plenty of third person games too. Another thing he says is that pure consumerism fails on virtual worlds because people want to create. I actually think this might be part of what has made SL a niche interest. At the very minimum, an SL user must "create" their avatar through combining a plethora of commercially available avatar components. A typical avatar consists of 10 to 40+ different pieces bought separately from different creators, a long with customizing the 50 or so shape sliders. Avatars aren't a single fixed mesh like in other worlds. This makes people watching super interesting because every avatar is unique and indivudialized. But you can't just grab a pre-made avatar and call it done without looking like a "noob", and I think this is actually a hurdle to wide adoption.
- seydor 3y ago
  To be clear, few people in SL are building worlds because its too expensive. Most people spend on avatar clothing and such, and that's what they do most of the time
ng12 3y ago
> But he fears that most of the companies working on such a project have missed one essential component of lasting success: the fact that people are as much creators as they are consumers. “There isn’t as yet any evidence that people want to have a purely consumptive entertainment experience in social virtual worlds,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any evidence in human history that you can get a billion people to just kind of sit there and veg out, watch stuff. You can’t get to the kind of usage levels that metaverse brands want to get to with a consumer non-participatory experience.” I think this is the money quote. Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves just to consume content and engage with brands.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  Yeah. I spent quite a lot of time in SL - I had an art gallery where I showcased my RL photography and interacted with the visitors when online. My avatar was a sort of steampunk soviet artist manic pixie dream girl, just for the Lulz originally but eventually I really liked it. I had zero interest in interacting with brands. It was much more fun to go to a public space and sit there coding using the in-world dev tools - making something like a radar that sent alerts when people visited your parcel of a land, or a comedy UAV, and then explaining what you were doing to a journalist or psychology student or vampiress or predator or similar. [Edit] added details as they came back to me, many years later
  - khedoros1 3y ago
    I spent just a bit of time. I remember building a jetpack suit and learning just enough of the scripting language the I could make flames come out when I flew around. I worked on it on some kind of free-build island. There was a machine in the background that looked like it took in a constant stream of cows at one end and spat out meat at the other end. And it was always a toss-up what you'd find in people's little plots of land. Beautiful Japanese garden? Beautiful sex dungeon? Who knows!
- spamtarget 3y ago
  It appears that modern internet companies fail to understand that a "brand megaphone" is not a desirable product for anyone, except brands of course. The internet is sick now.
Dig1t 3y ago
I have been wondering for a long time why someone hasn't made a better Second Life. I think Second Life is awesome, and I would love to play a game like it. My problem with SL is just that the game and its interface feel so janky. It has horrible graphics and the interface is weird. It's just not fun to actually do anything in the game. If someone made a better version, with good graphics and a decent user interface, I think it would be way more successful.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  People tried, including both Linden Lab (Second Life company), and Philip Rosedale on his own. The official follow-up to SL from Linden Lab was Sansar. Built from the ground up to be much prettier and faster than SL. But it kinda sucked all the charm from it. Sansar is a very static environment where you build the world in an editor, then people walk around in it. Meanwhile, SL has a full blown in-world content creation and script editor. Sansar flopped, got sold, and these days still exists: https://www.sansar.com/ https://www.sansar.com/ Philip Rosedale left LL, and made a new company which got very confusingly named "High Fidelity". This was a SL 2.0 of sorts, much more in the spiritual vein of Second Life. Also better engine than SL, better performance, and better scripting. Unlike SL it's a distributed architecture. High Fidelity was... weird. The architecture was like the most hardcore people from some deeply political place like the GNU project (it's Apache licensed, I mean more in terms of ethos) got together to make the least monetizable architecture they could. Content is hosted on any HTTP server, servers are run by anybody who wants, and there's no lock-in whatsoever. It horrified content creators. And so it didn't make any money. High Fidelity still survives as Open Source projects, I'm part of one: https://overte.org/ https://overte.org/
  - RobotToaster 3y ago
    >The architecture was like the most hardcore people from some deeply political place like the GNU project (it's Apache licensed, I mean more in terms of ethos) got together to make the least monetizable architecture they could. Content is hosted on any HTTP server, servers are run by anybody who wants, and there's no lock-in whatsoever. It horrified content creators. Sounds awesome.
waif 3y ago
The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. It's about buying into the metaverse, buy your plot of land, buy your sneakers, buy your new hairstyle, buy your emote laugh animation. Every possible interaction is monetized. It's baffling, like why would anyone want to spend time in a dystopian capitalism simulator. VRChat seems to embrace the pure spirit of the thing, from what I can tell as an outsider. People are free to express themselves and be creative, making their own avatars and worlds from scratch if they want. It seems like a wacky hangout space, the whole point is to not have constraints. Trying to turn it into anything beyond that seems like it would fail. But then again, I also don't understand why people drop thousands of dollars on Fortnite skins. I don't feel out of touch with tech, but this I simply do not get, at all.
- Animats 3y ago
  > The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. Most of the hyped "blockchain" metaverses never went live. All hype and NFT sales, no 3D metaverse at all. Of the few that did go live, Decentraland has 111 users in world right now,[1], Somnium Space has about 1 (yes, one)[2]. Sandbox doesn't have a public counter, but one source says 616 users in Q4 2022.[3] There are people just selling parcels on maps, such as Upland. Otherside, the world from Bored Ape Yacht Club, has run two live demos for a few hours each, but they're just demos of Improbable's technology with some of their game art. There was supposed to be a third demo in Q2 2023. We're coming up on the end of Q2 2023. They raised US$400 million selling land, and the SEC is investigating. Reality: blockchain based metaverses did not happen. [1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/ https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/ [2] https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Somnium+space https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Somnium+space [3] https://beincrypto.com/mana-has-379-active-users-sand-has-616-stepn-only-has-1/ https://beincrypto.com/mana-has-379-active-users-sand-has-61...
wudangmonk 3y ago
Step 1. Build at least 1 decent mmo. Have an off-game hub where people can interact and show off stuff they collected in said mmo. Step 2. Keep adding more games and activities, boom! Metaverse. Facebook went all in with VR and social interactions but who cares about any of that when you give users no reason to use it. You need the GAMES first otherwise why would people want to be in a glorified version of a zoom meeting?. This stuff is obvious and yet they keep wasting billions on this cart with no horse in sight.
- jasonjamerson 3y ago
  This is essentially Tim Sweeney's plan to evolve Fortnite into the metaverse.
  - gtop3 3y ago
    It's also the described metaverse evolution in Ready Player One, which is six years older than Fornite. It felt like an obvious and pre-existing idea when Ready Player One was published, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear about older incarnations.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Tron? Not quite the same, in that Flynn didn't enter voluntarily and it's explicitly unexpected for a human to enter, but the merger of games with a virtual world is there.
- acomjean 3y ago
  I always think about Fortnite, witch besides the game has concerts and film festivals. Fortnite creative I think is about building things on your island. You can make and share your own games and Now they have "unreal engine light" (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) so making custom games/experiences is becoming a thing. Tim Sweeny talked about building the Metaverse from a game at the last Game Development Conference. He talked about it not being linked to one company, but I'm not sure where it was going.[1] (8 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ84b-v1DE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ84b-v1DE https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/23/23652928/tim-sweeney-interview-epic-games-fortnite-metaverse https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/23/23652928/tim-sweeney-inte... My partner plays, and there is a lot of voice chat that makes it social...
julienchastang 3y ago
I saw a Second Life demonstration at the Sun Microsystems booth at the 2007 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Reno, NV. As I recall, I was in a sort of virtual conference room. I was amazed and blown away and thought to myself, this is obviously going to be the Next Big Thing. I'm glad to see Second Life is still active. Also the Guardian article is a bit long, but really quite good if you have time to read it.
qznc 3y ago
Isn’t Roblox the modern Second Life?
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  no.
AmenBreak 3y ago
Second Life had legs from the start. Unlike Zucc’s Metaverse. BTW did he pay Neil for the use of that word?
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  No. But then again, Neil didn't pay Tim May or Eric Hughes for the use of "Cryptonomicon."
retrocryptid 3y ago
One point the author could have mentioned, which provides some context is Linden's original CTO, Cory Ondrejka wound up as Facebook's CTO way back in the 2010 time frame. When a number of us were laid off from Linden Lab in 2010, quite a few landed at Facebook. During the 2010's Facebook was positively lousy with former Lindens.
JakeAl 3y ago
Manticore games' Core is still the best implementation I've seen, sans expensive and soon to obsolete headsets.

68 points by antiviral 3y ago

Points from the article: - At its height in the early 2000s, Second Life attracted only around a million monthly users, a fraction of the number enjoyed by some online video games (the makers of Fortnite claim a consistent 80 million) - The population skews middle-aged and around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult.

sdfghswe 3y ago
> around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult. Oh no that's really sad :-(
- zargon 3y ago
  If you mean it's sad that their real world interactions are difficult, then yes. But it's great that these people have a virtual world they can go to where they can have social contact and express themselves without as many of those limits.
  - yoz 3y ago
    Thank you for so concisely explaining Second Life's most positive and important impact that is, due to its nature, also one of the hardest to demonstrate. I worked for Linden Lab for over five years and yet I didn't fully appreciate this until after I left. The things that make Second Life interesting to me - such its programmability, economy, wildness, diversity along more axes than you can easily imagine, and sheer unpredictability - make it, in my eyes, the most interesting thing on the internet. But those attributes only discuss its value by talking in technical or monetary terms. The most important question is: why does Second Life matter to people? The most important answer comes via the massive number of people who can enjoy a Second Life in ways that their First Life, for whatever reason, doesn't allow.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

christkv 3y ago

Meta could have save itself a bunch of money by just buying second life and running a separate instance to test all their ideas.

dale_glass 3y ago
No, they couldn't. Second Life is a bizarre, organic creation that nobody wants to repeat in the shape it exists. It has lots of porn. It has furries. It has goreans. It's almost entirely built by a dedicated and very fickle community. It has a marketplace on which you can buy hundreds of varieties of a penis. Pretty much nobody besides Philip Rosedale wants to repeat that (and he tried with High Fidelity, which now still lives on as open source forks, including the one I'm part of). That's because no sane company wants that tricky mess on their hands. They want something nice and fluffy that won't scandalize grandma, not SL, where people made a special client that restrains the user, for BDSM applications. Pretty much every sanitized clone of SL flopped because all that weirdness is what gives it its charm.
- christkv 3y ago
  I was thinking about the tech not second life itself.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    The tech has been copied and improved on multiple times. But it's the community what makes it interesting.
    - Animats 3y ago
      Yes. That the society works, and has worked for two decades, is fascinating. A few things help with stability. There's a fully open source clone, Open Simulator, and sizable grids which use it. The number of users is not huge, but it's large enough to offer an alternative. This keeps Linden Lab management from getting too uppity. Landowners have considerable power over what people can do on their land, but no power outside it. This distributes authority. It removes the need for the armies of minimum-wage goons armed with ban hammers that Facebook and Roblox employ. Second Life has a "governance" department. It's tiny and rarely seen. Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. The annoyance radius of a jerk is about 100 meters, in a world the size of Los Angeles. Somewhere in Second Life, a few people are probably being jerks right now. They're mostly being ignored and will probably give up. There's no way to spam to the whole world. Nor is there any way to advertise to the whole world. This kind of stability is rare online.

zargon 3y ago

Rosedale suggests that one reason virtual worlds are not as popular as they have been hyped is that people have difficulty "embodying" a virtual avatar, projecting themselves into it. I have no problem with doing that, but I'm a Second Life user. It does seem somewhat plausible. First-person video games avoid that requirement. But there are also plenty of third person games too. Another thing he says is that pure consumerism fails on virtual worlds because people want to create. I actually think this might be part of what has made SL a niche interest. At the very minimum, an SL user must "create" their avatar through combining a plethora of commercially available avatar components. A typical avatar consists of 10 to 40+ different pieces bought separately from different creators, a long with customizing the 50 or so shape sliders. Avatars aren't a single fixed mesh like in other worlds. This makes people watching super interesting because every avatar is unique and indivudialized. But you can't just grab a pre-made avatar and call it done without looking like a "noob", and I think this is actually a hurdle to wide adoption.

seydor 3y ago
To be clear, few people in SL are building worlds because its too expensive. Most people spend on avatar clothing and such, and that's what they do most of the time

ng12 3y ago

> But he fears that most of the companies working on such a project have missed one essential component of lasting success: the fact that people are as much creators as they are consumers. “There isn’t as yet any evidence that people want to have a purely consumptive entertainment experience in social virtual worlds,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any evidence in human history that you can get a billion people to just kind of sit there and veg out, watch stuff. You can’t get to the kind of usage levels that metaverse brands want to get to with a consumer non-participatory experience.” I think this is the money quote. Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves just to consume content and engage with brands.

KineticLensman 3y ago
Yeah. I spent quite a lot of time in SL - I had an art gallery where I showcased my RL photography and interacted with the visitors when online. My avatar was a sort of steampunk soviet artist manic pixie dream girl, just for the Lulz originally but eventually I really liked it. I had zero interest in interacting with brands. It was much more fun to go to a public space and sit there coding using the in-world dev tools - making something like a radar that sent alerts when people visited your parcel of a land, or a comedy UAV, and then explaining what you were doing to a journalist or psychology student or vampiress or predator or similar. [Edit] added details as they came back to me, many years later
- khedoros1 3y ago
  I spent just a bit of time. I remember building a jetpack suit and learning just enough of the scripting language the I could make flames come out when I flew around. I worked on it on some kind of free-build island. There was a machine in the background that looked like it took in a constant stream of cows at one end and spat out meat at the other end. And it was always a toss-up what you'd find in people's little plots of land. Beautiful Japanese garden? Beautiful sex dungeon? Who knows!
spamtarget 3y ago
It appears that modern internet companies fail to understand that a "brand megaphone" is not a desirable product for anyone, except brands of course. The internet is sick now.

Dig1t 3y ago

I have been wondering for a long time why someone hasn't made a better Second Life. I think Second Life is awesome, and I would love to play a game like it. My problem with SL is just that the game and its interface feel so janky. It has horrible graphics and the interface is weird. It's just not fun to actually do anything in the game. If someone made a better version, with good graphics and a decent user interface, I think it would be way more successful.

dale_glass 3y ago
People tried, including both Linden Lab (Second Life company), and Philip Rosedale on his own. The official follow-up to SL from Linden Lab was Sansar. Built from the ground up to be much prettier and faster than SL. But it kinda sucked all the charm from it. Sansar is a very static environment where you build the world in an editor, then people walk around in it. Meanwhile, SL has a full blown in-world content creation and script editor. Sansar flopped, got sold, and these days still exists: https://www.sansar.com/ https://www.sansar.com/ Philip Rosedale left LL, and made a new company which got very confusingly named "High Fidelity". This was a SL 2.0 of sorts, much more in the spiritual vein of Second Life. Also better engine than SL, better performance, and better scripting. Unlike SL it's a distributed architecture. High Fidelity was... weird. The architecture was like the most hardcore people from some deeply political place like the GNU project (it's Apache licensed, I mean more in terms of ethos) got together to make the least monetizable architecture they could. Content is hosted on any HTTP server, servers are run by anybody who wants, and there's no lock-in whatsoever. It horrified content creators. And so it didn't make any money. High Fidelity still survives as Open Source projects, I'm part of one: https://overte.org/ https://overte.org/
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  >The architecture was like the most hardcore people from some deeply political place like the GNU project (it's Apache licensed, I mean more in terms of ethos) got together to make the least monetizable architecture they could. Content is hosted on any HTTP server, servers are run by anybody who wants, and there's no lock-in whatsoever. It horrified content creators. Sounds awesome.

waif 3y ago

The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. It's about buying into the metaverse, buy your plot of land, buy your sneakers, buy your new hairstyle, buy your emote laugh animation. Every possible interaction is monetized. It's baffling, like why would anyone want to spend time in a dystopian capitalism simulator. VRChat seems to embrace the pure spirit of the thing, from what I can tell as an outsider. People are free to express themselves and be creative, making their own avatars and worlds from scratch if they want. It seems like a wacky hangout space, the whole point is to not have constraints. Trying to turn it into anything beyond that seems like it would fail. But then again, I also don't understand why people drop thousands of dollars on Fortnite skins. I don't feel out of touch with tech, but this I simply do not get, at all.

Animats 3y ago
> The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. Most of the hyped "blockchain" metaverses never went live. All hype and NFT sales, no 3D metaverse at all. Of the few that did go live, Decentraland has 111 users in world right now,[1], Somnium Space has about 1 (yes, one)[2]. Sandbox doesn't have a public counter, but one source says 616 users in Q4 2022.[3] There are people just selling parcels on maps, such as Upland. Otherside, the world from Bored Ape Yacht Club, has run two live demos for a few hours each, but they're just demos of Improbable's technology with some of their game art. There was supposed to be a third demo in Q2 2023. We're coming up on the end of Q2 2023. They raised US$400 million selling land, and the SEC is investigating. Reality: blockchain based metaverses did not happen. [1] https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/ https://decentraland.github.io/catalyst-monitor/ [2] https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Somnium+space https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Somnium+space [3] https://beincrypto.com/mana-has-379-active-users-sand-has-616-stepn-only-has-1/ https://beincrypto.com/mana-has-379-active-users-sand-has-61...

wudangmonk 3y ago

Step 1. Build at least 1 decent mmo. Have an off-game hub where people can interact and show off stuff they collected in said mmo. Step 2. Keep adding more games and activities, boom! Metaverse. Facebook went all in with VR and social interactions but who cares about any of that when you give users no reason to use it. You need the GAMES first otherwise why would people want to be in a glorified version of a zoom meeting?. This stuff is obvious and yet they keep wasting billions on this cart with no horse in sight.

jasonjamerson 3y ago
This is essentially Tim Sweeney's plan to evolve Fortnite into the metaverse.
- gtop3 3y ago
  It's also the described metaverse evolution in Ready Player One, which is six years older than Fornite. It felt like an obvious and pre-existing idea when Ready Player One was published, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear about older incarnations.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Tron? Not quite the same, in that Flynn didn't enter voluntarily and it's explicitly unexpected for a human to enter, but the merger of games with a virtual world is there.
acomjean 3y ago
I always think about Fortnite, witch besides the game has concerts and film festivals. Fortnite creative I think is about building things on your island. You can make and share your own games and Now they have "unreal engine light" (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) so making custom games/experiences is becoming a thing. Tim Sweeny talked about building the Metaverse from a game at the last Game Development Conference. He talked about it not being linked to one company, but I'm not sure where it was going.[1] (8 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ84b-v1DE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQ84b-v1DE https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/23/23652928/tim-sweeney-interview-epic-games-fortnite-metaverse https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/23/23652928/tim-sweeney-inte... My partner plays, and there is a lot of voice chat that makes it social...

julienchastang 3y ago

I saw a Second Life demonstration at the Sun Microsystems booth at the 2007 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Reno, NV. As I recall, I was in a sort of virtual conference room. I was amazed and blown away and thought to myself, this is obviously going to be the Next Big Thing. I'm glad to see Second Life is still active. Also the Guardian article is a bit long, but really quite good if you have time to read it.

qznc 3y ago

Isn’t Roblox the modern Second Life?

retrocryptid 3y ago
no.

AmenBreak 3y ago

Second Life had legs from the start. Unlike Zucc’s Metaverse. BTW did he pay Neil for the use of that word?

retrocryptid 3y ago
No. But then again, Neil didn't pay Tim May or Eric Hughes for the use of "Cryptonomicon."

retrocryptid 3y ago

One point the author could have mentioned, which provides some context is Linden's original CTO, Cory Ondrejka wound up as Facebook's CTO way back in the 2010 time frame. When a number of us were laid off from Linden Lab in 2010, quite a few landed at Facebook. During the 2010's Facebook was positively lousy with former Lindens.

JakeAl 3y ago

Manticore games' Core is still the best implementation I've seen, sans expensive and soon to obsolete headsets.