Companies Continue to Get a Second Life

PreacherTom writes "Reuters and CNET aren't the only players staking online claims in the virtual world of Second Life. Yesterday, Wired magazine opened their 1-acre digitized headquarters, complete with neon-pink sliding doors and a nouveau 50 person conference room. Businessweek takes a look at the new virtual offerings from Adidas, Toyota, Lego, and even Major League Baseball in their pictoral spread. 'We are this canvas that allows companies to do what they want to do in Second Life,' says David Fleck, Linden's vice-president of marketing. 'It mimics real life much more accurately.'"

Third Life

I'm waiting for the day someone opens up a virtual world within second life.

Third life, as it will be called, will be paid for with second life currency. Your characters use SL computers to connect to it, which then runs in a nearly full-screen window within second life (other people who don't play third life can even watch over your shoulder and stuff).

Um..

A bright, new shiny world, without all the problems of the real one? I feel this overwhelming urge to start a homeless character who will sleep in their bushes and pee on their steps.

If you want..

If you want to call this an "MMORPG" then it has much more freedom than any other in existance. You can literally create objects from nothing and make them ANYTHING you want -- we are talking 3dsmax anything.

But the fact is... this "game" is not fun and straightforward enough for most users (like me!) We don't all know 3dsmax!!

A game like WOW is sucessful because it has: defined goals, defined structure, and defined limits. People actually like that shit.

(The download for SL is only like... 30 MB for windows, 60 MB for mac if you want to try it.)

Some People...

... should consider getting a first life before messing around with Second Life.

Tried this out...several times...not worth it.

It was free and even THEN it's not worth it. Now I have about the quickest high-speed internet connection and yet it still just sits there for a few minutes downloading everything you walk or fly through. Go to a new place, it starts downloading again....forever.....

Ok, so I know it's not all just about how fast your connection is blah blah, but it's a major problem for me as it NEVER feels like you're in another world. It feels like what it is, bad artwork in a bad 3D environment. Fine, but the people that play must really be nice right?

Well, every place I go where I see on the map a lot of people have gathered usually end up just being either virtual prostitution or porn. Or worse, just people sitting in these chairs that generate for them 1 Lindon per hour or something. Just sitting. Or dancing....AFK people sitting and dancing. Wow, fun!

Also, don't know what the point is. It's a chat/social/networking thingy that's laggy and unreal. Ok, so basically a instant messenger with badly made 3D avatars that all look like nymphet women wearing very skimpy clothes that still look unreal. We're talking animations and models that are pre Everquest. I felt like I was in some world that was made 15 years or go or something.

It also didn't seem finished. It felt like a beta of something that was abandoned about 3 years ago and just barely hanging on.

I don't know...I just don't get it.

Playing games for a living.

Presumably there will be people logged in as the companies. Does one apply for a job as a second-life avatar?

Or is this like 90's web pages - companies know only they need one so you could make $100/hour as a "e-commerce consultant" playing with notepad.

Now I just need to convince my boss that playing my WoW pally is somehow an important part of the company...

Get a Second Life?

Okay, I finally checked out the Second Life client yesterday, and flew around looking for something to *do*. There were about two billboards per active person in the world. It seemed like a third of the buildings I flew past were little businesses to personalize your avatar or house or sell real estate, a third of the buildings were nightmarish personal constructions that looked like those paintings done by elephants in the zoo, and a third of the space was blocked off by barbed wire ("not on the access list, cannot enter").

It seems like the only way someone would think it interesting is if they are playing with people they already know, 100% of the time. There was no call to action. There was nothing drawing my attention as an activity. I mean, I have actually WORKED in the MMORPG industry, have played several games and have thought about online social spaces for years. I still couldn't get a handle on what Lindon expects people to *do* in Second Life, except of course to pay Lindon some actual money.

What am I missing?

Re:Get a Second Life?

I completely agree. I started my Second Life account, similiar to you, just to see what it was all about. This was in March or so. I also had heard that people were actually making money by creating and selling objects, and since I'm a coder, I thought that sounded like a fun challenge.

I spent some time in world, watching what people like to do. Mostly, this involved spending time in some sort of dance club, dancing and chatting. I noticed there are a lot of "mostly empty" casinos. Lots of extremely simple gambling devices, lottery type things, etc.

So, I made some casino games, based on real life games. I made some lottery balls with my own twist on 'em. I made some fun party game kind of things, and put them up for sale on a popular shopping website.

I never bought into the system, bought any land, etc. My total investment is $0... I have, on occasion, rented a store spot in a mall, or some floorspace in a casino to test a game, but that was all purches out of profit.

Now that I'm sort of over the kick, I rarely log into the world anymore. Even was I was more active, I never really "got it". I wasn't looking to make friends, chat, shop, or hook up, and their appeared to be nothing left. But I still get emails that my stuff sells, and occasional messages (that get routed to my email) if someone has a question about a product of mine that they've bought.

Since March, I've made about $500USD. Certainly less than minimum wage per hour of coding/testing that I've done, but getting paid for programming little games and having some fun is certainly a change of pace.

I've posted it before... In the real world, you simply cannot make up your own casino game, rent floor space at a casino, and see how it does. It's prohibitively difficult for most people to make clothing and sell it in a shop. However, in Second Life, it's almost trivially easy. I think this is the appeal.

Linden Lab advertising?

Is it just me or do you guys think Linden Lab is sponsering all these stories?

There have been at least a couple in a last few days on Slashdot and I have seen a few more other places. Feels like a giant marketing plan. I mean this is a hell of a lot of press for something with such a small online community. I think the general consensus about Second Life is "meh, kinda slow, kinda outdated, nothing to do, it has no point, boring".

I have tried it myself, it felt and looked pretty clunky.

Anarchy in the SL

Considering how many companies are pushing into SL, I wonder if or when players will start getting arrested or sued.

I'm asking this because there've been many "problems" with players in the past, some legitimate (like players creating a recursive, dissapearing object script that crashes entire nodes) some non-legitimate (like getting banned for objects or scenery "in bad taste"). In the case of the node crashing, some people actually lost "income" since there are players making money off of.

What would happen if people targeted specific companies or political candidates--such as Mark Warner, whose PAC has an office in-game--for griefing? What we do about copycat products, since early on many SL players used to grab textures from real world clothing (and cmon, American Apparel sells blank colored t-shirts)? And how would a company like Nike or Adidas respond if someone built something like, I don't know, a gigantic comedy sweatshop full of children working on an animated assembly right next to the big companies shoe promotion stores?

Snow Crash.

Have you guys read Snow Crash? If not go get it right now. It's exactly this. A novel well before it's time, hell, it was the book that started using the word Avatar as meaning your online self. "Games" like Second Life are all trying to emulate the Metaverse the way it was put in print in this book. This is just another example the road the online world is taking, and if you read Snow Crash you'll pretty much know where and what the end of that road is.

OK so can I play...

N. Korea?

I don't play the game - never have and never will - but the idea of companies setting up locations inside a game intrigued me. While I was RTFA - which was shortly after reading about N. Korea, all I could imagine was having someone 'building a bomb' and removing the stores. How do the 'stores' recover? Is it terrorism? Is there a 'state' that can sponsor terrorism? Do they have 'gangs' running the streets in the game? How about robbing banks? Are there pickpockets? I can imagine a bored 12 year old wiping out large swaths of land. (Don't look at me to do any of it. I am way too old!)

OK I am a little warped. ;-)

The whole problem here

Is it's apparently too much work for the average hack and slash player to find something to do in SL. As a very happily married woman, I have tons to do there that doesn't involve sex, gambling, and camping. And it wasn't that hard finding places that don't do those things. I explore a level or creativity I didn't even know I had, and as soon as I figure out how to build things in RL that compare to the beauty I produce in world (and without paying a dime!), I've discovered I have an artistic vision people will actually PAY for...now to learn carpentry and get some start up capital....why bother, I can do it in SL for free. I started off the same as you guys, and you know, it took me less than 2 days to meet the "right" people and figure out where I wanted to take this. Now, I have a huge amount of friends, I acclompish real things, that make me REAL money (something WoW never did), and am a contributor to an 8 sim land (which has NO sex, gambling, etc. Just some really cool people). All in about 6 months...I've played MMORPG's, and you know what I have to show for it? The geeks think I'm cool, that doesn't even buy me a cup of coffee. Stay at home mom with a paycheck? WHOOOT!