At a party this weekend I had a conversation about Second Life. A bit more than a year ago that would not have been worth mentioning, because the media was enthusiastic about SL and I was working on a documentary about SL residents. Meanwhile Second Life has been declared dead by the media inside the traditionally narrow world of advertising. The discussion I had was with two people who had obviously worked for corporate clients on SL projects and were disappointed that things had not been working out the way they had expected. They thought the major problem was that there can only be some 60 visitors on one island simultaniously. “For web application we think in millions” one of them exclaimed. Apparently it had never occurred to him that millions of avatars on a 256×256 metre piece of land would literally step on each others feet and that for reaching large audiences like that the place metaphor was maybe not the right approach anyway.
I really don’t know how a professional in the area of web development can be that clueless. No one who had looked at the technology of Second Life could seriously believe that the platform was good for large corporation business. I was convinced all the time that all the advertising agencies and virtual reality developers knew that all along and just understood that they could use the media hype to rip off corporate clients. Which I of course think is a completely legitimate business strategy. After all it was a misunderstanding that an open economy in a virtual world means that it is a place for making business on a scale that goes beyond the level of small companies and free lance work. It was naive at any time to believe that, but of course pushing that mixup was very attractive for main stream media, since it made great stories.
I am not a very regular user of SL nowadays and I think it actually works quiet well for the sporadic user. I just participated in an art festival (New Berlin Artfestival) and I attended a couple of live events inside of SL. During the art festival the organizers invited people on a “Rundgang” where they discussed some of the works. I followed the conversation and was quiet impressed by the open discussion that would be quite rare in real world art. Of course much of it sounded naive for an art world resident like myself, but that just shows that people who would normally not attend art events or not feel comfortable and welcome there take the chance to attend such an event when the can send their avatar instead their actual body.
Last week while researching new possibilities for film making in SL, I found out about a modified SL client that allows lip syncing using the voice chat function that was introduced last year and that works very well. It seems to me that Second Life has become a more interesting place in many ways. This
morning I read an article on we make money not art that seems to support this view. In the well researched article Regine states that there is still a stable growth in registered and concurrent users. Apparently only boring corporate islands are abandoned. Something one often wishes for in the real world.
“…for reaching large audiences like that (millions) the place metaphor was maybe not the right approach anyway.”
I absolutely agree, second life is no mass media like the www, it could never replace it, like the print media made people think.