Second Life: Death by a Thousand Cuts
I spend just a little bit of time in Second Life, after having been invited in-world in 2008 for Burning Life, the recreation of my beloved Burning Man. I would love to say that time spent there has been an unabashed pleasure, but that would be a lie.
It’s not the inhabitants, nor the software, but the company which created and administers Second Life, Linden Labs. Each time they create new policy for the virtual world it seems completely ill-advised, poorly considered, and calculated to benefit a small minority while discouraging a great majority from continuing to pay LL monthly rent for homesteading.
I’ll take myself as a somewhat representative example: I rented space from a landholder, which was affordable, and had a size I liked and the ability to host complex built items; the “prim(itives) count” of a parcel of land determines how many primitives – combined into wonderful things – can be placed thereon. LL decided to completely revamp the pricing structure for those landholders, and an exodus occurred. That was thirteen months ago. I haven’t paid rent since.
I give back to the community in any way I can. In Second Life I’ve built a number of structures, like nomadic tents, furniture, like chairs and tables in a fusion Japanese style, and furnishings, like tatami mats in various sizes with the traditional grass textures in both green and beige. For the longest time I gave these away for free. Lately I’ve been charging L$1 (or about 2.6 cents) per item, just to have a trickle of income for the occasional item I want to buy.
LL now proposes to do away with all freebie items from their web-based storefront and to charge L$99 each month per item. The erstwhile reason is that free items clutter up their search engine and tax their computing resources. The sad truth is their search engines, both in-world and on the web, have been neglected and are just one step up from useless. And with other companies hosting terabytes of search data, blogs, and other not-for-cost offerings, the computing resources story just doesn’t wash. The upshot of this terribly short-sighted, stupid decision is that I, and hundreds of other programmers and crafts-people have removed their items from the storefront, depriving new arrivals (and old-timers) that quintessential experience of shopping for free, outfitting their avatar as they become hooked on the virtual experience.
With each decision Second Life becomes less engaging and less compelling. It’s a sad thing to see a company work so hard to drive themselves out of business. Very sad.
[Note: there's nothing posted here that I haven't told Philip Linden face-to-face in meatspace. So I feel I've done my small part, although in the face of pressure from big business in-world I'm afraid it's all for naught. It was nice while it lasted.]
