“Ten years ago, the Internet was the Wild West: you could barely go anywhere on the net and not hit a sex site,” Heider said. “Now, the Internet has really calmed down and become more mature as a medium. My kids can surf the net and not hit sex sites as easily.”

Right now, however, “Second Life is still the Wild West ,” Heider, who only shows Second Life to graduate students and not his undergrads, said. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff on there, a lot of sexual content.”

Heider said that the progressive influx of corporate sponsorship in Second Life has helped give the virtual world more stability.

“I think as Second Life exists and becomes more mature, the wild stuff will become less mainstream. There’ll be a tipping point where the wild stuff like sexual content will lose its novelty.”

Martinez also drew an analogy between Second Life and the net’s early days (of which companies like Bizooki need to take heed):

“You could go to a chat room and chat with a bunch of random people (in the early days of the Internet ),” Martinez said. “But not too many people wanted to go online and chat with a bunch a people they didn’t really know. That’s just not something that the average person would find consistently appealing.

“When AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) came along, people were able to talk more with their own friends and create buddy lists, which gave chatting more widespread appeal.”

Barefoot alluded that Second Life may have to make a similar leap towards user customization in order to become more popular and relevant.

“To me, (Second Life is) more like MySpace: people with like-minded interests about a particular thing,” Barefoot said. “I do think that if someone comes along and builds a better Second Life …then yeah, somebody’s gonna eat (their) lunch.

“Very few Web sites or technologies last more than five years.”

Unlike the Wild West, one of the concerns about Second Life is that there is no “public space” for denizens to use, according to Heider.

“If I were in Nashville at the state capitol, I could go give a speech in public space,” Heider said. “There’s certain public spaces in every public community we can think of, and there are freedoms of speech and expression.”

However, in Second Life , every piece of space in the virtual world is owned. “99.9%” of the land, according to Heider, is user-owned and built, and the rest is owned by Linden Labs .

As a result, questions have arisen about First Amendment freedoms. As of a year ago, only two Second Life “islands”, “Colonia Nova” and “Neufreistadt” , were democratically-controlled.

“One ‘elf’ (avatar) was banned in the game for protesting about freedoms,” Heider said.

Perhaps the single biggest obstacle facing the long-term growth of Second Life concerns the mainframe’s current technical glitches and need for more bandwidth due to the virtual world’s recent exponential growth.

“I think if they really want to be a big deal, they have to solve some fairly significant technical issues in a small amount of time,” Heider said. “I think a good, conservative estimate is that there’s 4-5 million people in a technical world designed for 500,000 people.

“The technical problems…seem to be getting worse.”

Barefoot stated, “You can only gather 70 people in one place at one time. Once you get enough people in one place, it gets too slow and people go away.”

Despite the corporate influx, Barefoot maintained that a marketing-related problem facing the growth of Second Life is that the current engine governing the physics of this virtual world layout is so outdated, users can only inhabit one sparsely-populated region at a time before taking a “portal” into another region.

In other words, the current “islands” in Second Life are not integrated enough for corporations to market to an audience big enough to turn profit; like everyone else, advertising avatars can only travel one region at a time and must market to populations too sparse to sell enough business to offset the advertising dollars these corporations are spending. Nevertheless, many of these companies, such as Coca-Cola and the NBA, keep plugging away in Second Life anyway .

“They want to be cool, they want to be hip, so they get involved in Second Life ,” Barefoot said.

Gambling businesses were also dealt a crippling blow by Linden Labs on July 26, when the company announced a ban on Second Life in-world gambling. Some of LL’s objections were that a lot of these games were copies of casino games.

“It’s hard to tell if the gambling ban is going to affect the economy or not,” Au said. “It will affect the value of the Linden dollar and the economy slightly. There’s a lot of casinos that were making a lot of money, and the countries with the most active users were in the Cayman Islands; a lot of people were filtering money into offshore banks.

“You’ve gotta think at least 10 percent of the users in Second Life gamble, but I’m not seeing a big dip in users.”

Some other current technical problems exist: How effective are the search options? How accessible is the Web from Second Life ? According to Heider, “not very.”

“(Second Life )’s not perfect and it doesn’t give you full functionality,” Au said, “but once the Web is fully accessible, it will become all those things.”

Traditionally, the macro social pattern for online employment has been to go to a site like Monster.com or CareerBuilder and post your resume, some things about yourself, what you’re looking for, etc.

In theory, the idea was that employers were going to work in conjunction with these sites and scour the resumes and miscellaneous info of their registered users increasingly more. In fact, it may even have worked for a time when the dot.com revolution was still en vogue around the turn of the millennium.

In reality, what you are essentially doing now with these sites is throwing a deliberately polished and packaged draft of who you are down the drain.

You waste several of your precious hours (Time=$$$, right?) every day, usually in painstaking obsession, one after another, carving and buffing customized presentations of who you are, complete with resume, cover letter, three references, a portfolio and a rectal exam, to coldly discriminating employers who have to sort through 6,783 different applications for their sole listing: “Corporate chum-scrubber.”

Maybe the dude with the Oxford degree will land an interview.

In reality , the result of the initial online employment prototype has been a systemic, gargantuan glut of information for the employers. In reality, such a basic networking system without giving a human face to all interested parties was permanent Web gridlock waiting to happen. In reality, the paradigm must be changed .

During times of such ineffective online job-searching gridlock, who you know is the only thing that matters. It is here where Bizooki is working to make its mark in easing the career gridlock of the rising generation of young professionals.

Many schools and work places have cordoned off access to sites like Facebook and MySpace because of their serpent-like lure to waste time in which you might otherwise be producing. Producing …for them!

In reality, sometimes your brain just needs a break. Studies show that you should take a five-minute break for every 20 minutes of actual work. How often in the daily grind do you get to take time for yourself and connect with someone or something that doesn’t remind you of your indentured working obligations?

“In my life/why do I give valuable time/to people who don’t care if I live or die?” Morrissey of The Smiths once wrote.

Bizooki aims to be a massive part of that change , a haven for you not only to be able to escape and talk to like-minded young professionals (and even more open-minded older ones) but to give those of you who refuse to be defined as “just another resume” a human face and a network of people who will respect you for who you are.

And hopefully, the more you are allowed to spread your wings for those interested in the tapestry of your total package, the more quickly you will be able to find and make opportunities in which you’ll thrive, personally and financially.

According to Heider , the primary Second Life audience is adults between the ages of 25 and 35, of eclectic races and genders, with heavy international consumption (which coincides with Bizooki’s target demographic ). As of a year ago, there were roughly 8 million registered Second Life accounts, but Heider estimated that with a likely number of multiple account users, there were probably between 4-5 million active users in the virtual world.

One of the generic debates raging on about Second Life is does a technologically-progressive concept like this virtual world add or detract from society ? More succinctly, does it offer yet another productive outlet/option for people to communicate or does it serve as another distraction in the way of leading a productive life?

“I’m not a big believer in the addictive effects of media,” Heider said. “The assumption that always goes with (Second Life ) is that (users would otherwise) be doing charity work and reading good novels, but it’s (usually) the same people who are watching Jerry Springer at home.

“I think (Second Life ) allows people to become socially connected in a way they wouldn’t be otherwise. It’s like anything else; people lived without physical contact with the outside world before there was an Internet.”

Au agreed that Second Life is “definitely…an avenue for people who are unable to socialize in a standard way.” He estimated that 10 percent of active users have some sort of handicap and that some of the most popular members of the virtual world have Asperger’s Syndrome , since “they tend be very socially empathic.

“People have these opportunities to flourish (on Second Life ) that they wouldn’t necessarily in the real world,” Au said. “You often have to have the right connections in the real world in order to succeed.

“Then you find out about some of these (Second Life success stories): …There’s this soldier who came back from Afghanistan with his kneecap blown off who is able to supplement his income by running a successful Second Life casino…There’s a nightclub called Wheelies and it’s run by a paraplegic .”

Au also said that many of his former Linden colleagues and employees have left the company to set up their own businesses within Second Life . While the profitability of Second Life business is debatable, many users seem to view the virtual world and the expenses that come with being a member as an escape that eclipses anything else they might be doing.

“I think for most (users), it’s the same reason they spend eight dollars on a movie,” Heider said. “The first few months of my research, I’d tell people that it seemed like they were spending a lot of money in Second Life , and people would respond that the $30-40 a month they spend in here is what they normally budgeted to see movies, so instead of spending $8 three times a month to see a movie, they buy land and houses.”

Heider said that other than general socializing and virtual sex, one of the main preoccupations in Second Life is shopping.

“There’s probably a shopping center for every five human beings on Second Life ,” Heider said. “I could buy a new shirt for 50 Lindens (a quarter in real money)…I could live a totally macked-out life in Second Life for 30 bucks a month.”

Barefoot and Martinez seemed to agree that Second Life attracts a specific kind of consumer and that the medium ultimately allows a new avenue of expression for people.

“A person who enjoys Second Life would find it appealing for whatever reason because it’s (probably) someone who normally has trouble with social interaction in real life,” Martinez said.

“I don’t think that Second Life has any (social) implication one way or the other; I don’t think some normal teenage boy that would otherwise be an All-American or captain of some sport would all of a sudden become a shut-in recluse because of Second Life .”

Barefoot added, “I feel the same way about someone spending too much time in Second Life as someone who spends too much time watching sports or playing World of Warcraft … I guess it’s all good in moderation as long as you don’t spend your entire life on them.”

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Second Life is that this metaverse , or one like it , could set the tone for the future of online media convergence.

“I think (Second Life )’s going to be very important to the Internet in the next five years or so,” Au said. “There’s an argument that something like Second Life will be the next Internet. The web has only been commercially in use since about 1995. There are a lot of things you can’t do on a 2-D web that you can do on a 3-D web.”

What things, you might ask?

“What’s new about Second Life for architects is that they can build a building,” Heider said, “and then see how people congregate with the space, how people walked through the building.”

Au added, “If you want to buy furniture for your house and look at configurations of what it looks like and how it will fit in your house from different angles.”

Martinez noted, “If I wanted to go to the Second Life version of amazon.com and literally go around and browse a virtual bookstore, that would be neat.”

Tech consultancy company Gartner, whose “Hype Cycle” has measured Second Life adoption, has predicted that 80 percent of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011. While Martinez doesn’t really care to use Second Life himself, he said he can easily see something like the virtual world becoming the next phase of media.

“The more (a product) enables the average person to do something they’re already doing but (makes it) easier, then more people will get them. It’s about convenience.”

Au added, “It seems like people are developing more stuff (on Second Life ) to engage with the outside world. The software is open source, so there’s already an access program from Second Life to the Web that a teenage kid made…and there’s a program to access Second Life through your Nintendo Wii.”

Second Life has already gained enough mainstream popularity for an international press service, Reuters, to set up its own “bureau” for the virtual world with an embedded beat reporter, Adam Pasick , who spends four hours a day there finding unique stories and covering the world’s business angles.

“It is really fertile ground for reporting,” Pasick said in an interview with Reuters. “There is so much change going on. (Second Life ) is growing at 20 percent a month.

“There are so many interesting questions about how a virtual world behaves. There is a lot of reporting to do where the virtual world meets the real world.”

Heider added, “When you go see a movie, you start empathizing with the main character, so you kind of become the main character. Second Life is similar because there’s all these things that happen, except that you write the dialogue and you decide what’s going to happen next.

“I can watch an episode 100 times and it’s always going to end the same way, but in Second Life , it’s never going to end the same way.”

As a self-anointed history buff, I’m always fascinated when I hear labels given to different generations. From ‘The Lost Generation’ of the early decades of the 20th century to ‘Generation X’, the somewhat illusory distinctions separating these groups of human beings, who just happen to be born into different sets of circumstances, baffles me.

Most specifically, I selfishly balk at the exalted status so freely given (and immortalized in Tom Brokaw’s book ) to ‘The Greatest Generation’, the group of Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and completed their coming-of-age during World War II. I asked a fellow history buff, my father, “Why are they so deserving of that title? What did they do that we couldn’t do?”

“Well, it’s just because of the extraordinary circumstances they were put through and overcame.”

It’s not that I feel this generation didn’t earn their meritorious title…but where’s the respect given to those of us not thrust into such infamously soul-hardening situations? How would we have responded?

Our parents, the ‘Baby Boomers’, had their share of excitement, too. From Woodstock to Wall Street, they witnessed several major American socio-political assassinations in the ’60s (including a pair of Kennedy siblings and several of our greatest African-American civil rights leaders ), either fought during or protested against the psyche-destroying madness of Vietnam , and ultimately began raising us during the fiscal boom of Reaganomics.

Once again, just like their so-called Greatest Generation predecessors who eventually enjoyed the peace and prosperity of the ‘I Like Ike’ ’50s , the Baby Boomers subsisted on a steady diet of tumult in their upbringing only to land smoothly and safely into a bed of complacency in the ’80s .

Enough with the history lesson. For years, pop culture aficionados and sociologists have equivocated in how to label our generation. I’ve heard ‘Generation Y’, a cutesy moniker which backhandedly suggests we are an irrelevant addendum to ‘Generation X’ . I’ve heard ‘MTV Generation’, which merely infers that we’ve spent all our time being raised by popular television.

As the years have gone on, it has been pointed out that we’ve also been raised congruently with the popularization of Web technology (1995-), post-9/11 societal fallout, and the advent of Pokemon…how flattering. Predictably, suggestions for the generations that will reach the ‘real world’ over the next decade or so include original titles such as ‘Generation Z’, ‘Generation I’, and the ‘LG Generation’ .

Saddled with the peacetime legacy of complacency passed down to us from our parents and grandparents, many of these labels suggest our generation is a nondescript collection of lazy, unenlightened halfwits who can’t find anything better to do than use our parents’ money to buy our next XBox 360 game or post whatever we’re doing Friday night on YouTube. Aren’t you sick of that assumption?

But while some of the older generations who are currently in power have failed our generation with a record-low economy and job market, many of us Generation…Whatevers have been growing up hand-in-hand with media technology integration, helping to push the envelope of what the most efficient and trendy forms of communication are in a progressively global free market economy.

And now as the traditional job market of paper resumes delivered by handshake and a personal reference is crumbling as more and more jobs are simply being eliminated to cut costs, a new digital job market, one in which Bizooki hopes to be one of the few good shepherds , is on the rise.

Why? Because in a exponentially-accelerating technological vacuum where the traditional powers-that-be are almost powerless to predict market trends and/or please investors from one quarter to the next, the generation that has come of age consuming each soon-to-be-defunct technological gadget or soon-to-be-expendable phone or instant messaging service should be the generation that ultimately creates the new and lasting revenue streams.

And it’s poetic that our generation will be in charge of these decisions because, as things stand, it is the biggest challenge our age group will face. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” and as the value of our undergraduate degrees and even our graduate degrees continues to be diluted, each of us is going to have to scratch and claw to meet the right people to partner with in an arms race of ideas. Who you know is, once again, more important than it ever has been, as the resumes for employers to sift through on sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder becomes so overwhelming and monotonous that they stop sifting through the gluts of information altogether.

And suddenly, all that time that you got yelled at for spending on Facebook and MySpace, on Second Life or Skype doesn’t seem so worthless anymore. The like-minded geeks you’ve always been searching for, both locally and far, far away, are now your biggest allies as you try to both make ends meet and chase your idiosyncratic dreams. Bizooki is the next step.

In the past few years, there have been web programs similar to Second Life which have flourished at times. However, much of the reason Second Life has grown , according to those interviewed, is that this world offers a level of freedom that the others (up until only recently) don’t.

“ It’s a distinct thing to understand because Second Life is all user-created content,” Au said. “Some of the land and houses were created by the company, but 99.9% of everything you see in there is created by users. ”

Heider added, “People would go to The Sims Online and they would create their own little role-play that EA did not want and people did it anyway. But Second Life encouraged those same behaviors…a lot of people came to Second Life from The Sims Online and There.com because they felt there was more freedom in Second Life .”

Linden Labs also lets Second Life users keep the intellectual property rights to whatever they create inside the virtual world.

Second Life celebrated its fifth birthday in late June , although it has only started to garner the majority of its registered audience in the past couple years. Though a toddler in human years, the virtual world has already been around long enough to make a significant impact in many careers and in the way people interact worldwide.

Don Heider, who has been researching Second Life for three-and-a-half years for his forthcoming book Living Virtually: Researching New Worlds (Release Date: September), originally stumbled across Second Life in the Austin-American Statesman while on faculty at The University of Texas.

“As a social scientist, it blew my mind,” Heider said. “It’s like the world’s biggest Petri dish…a very interesting social experiment.

“There’s no goal, there’s no game. It just exists to create and socialize…Any social scientist would like to put 100 random people on an island and see what they’d do, and this is what (Second Life ) was.”

Wagner James Au , whose Second Life alter ego is Hamlet Linden , also studies many of the sociological aspects of the virtual world. The co-author of Second Life: The Official Guide blogged for Linden Labs and freelanced stories for other publications from SL ’s early days until he left L.L. in Feb. 2006. Though he has been busy working independently on the Making of… novel (See: last Everywhere post ) since then, Au said he typically spends “anywhere from a few hours to 20 hours” a week logged into Second Life .

“From a social engineering standpoint, you can rate people, either through their behavior or their avatar behavior,” Au said. “Instead of going around killing orcs, you just go around being yourself.

“It’s always been a job for me, the most fun writing time I’ve ever had, but what made me stay was the unlimited amount of creativity that people are allowed to bring into the world. Also, the way people rip off each other’s creativity and feed off each other.”

Darren Barefoot , a Vancouver-based blogger/marketing entrepreneur currently living in Malta, founded a Second Life satirical site called Get A First Life . Though his parody sounds somewhat condescending, the longtime technology writer is an admirer of the pioneering technology and format that Second Life uses.

“The enticing thing for me was everything was built by the users,” Barefoot, who has followed Second Life since shortly after its launch, said.

However, Barefoot, an admitted gaming connoisseur, hasn’t found the Second Life experience entertaining enough to make himself a regular of the virtual world.

“I have tried it twice,” Barefoot said. “Like some other online games, the first time you get it, it’s like a virus; I was inoculated against it.”

Part of the reason Barefoot has lost interest while using Second Life is that there are no objectives.

“Anyone can play a game like World of Warcraft . It’s superbly fun to play. I haven’t found that (level of fun) in Second Life yet.”

L.A.-based Andres-Luis Martinez, founder of Hollywood blog Glitterfish.com , shares Barefoot’s interest in objective-based gaming and subsequent ennui towards using the Second Life format. He registered a year ago and spent “no more than half an hour” playing Second Life after downloading all the software.

“I couldn’t really figure it out,” Martinez said. “It was difficult. I didn’t feel like talking to other people. It was hard to get into for me. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do once I got there.”

Martinez said he lost interest shortly after creating his character and landing on the “orientation island” where first-time users are introduced to game controls and walk around until they are comfortable entering the real Second Life community.

“I guess just the learning curve of figuring out what I was supposed to be doing or where I was supposed to go or how I was supposed to meet people was too hard. I lost interest because it didn’t have that much appeal in the first place and it was too hard to figure out so I just quit.”

]]> http://bizooki.com/blog/2008/07/15/bizookipedia-virtual-worlds-first-impressions/feed/ http://bizooki.com/blog/2008/07/10/bizookipedia-virtual-worlds-influences/ http://bizooki.com/blog/2008/07/10/bizookipedia-virtual-worlds-influences/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:05:27 +0000 henry http://bizooki.com/blog/?p=17

One of the most direct influences for Second Life and programs like it, according to Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, is the concept of a “metaverse”, an idea pioneered by “cyberpunk” author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash that describes a “user-defined world of general use where people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.”

Don Heider , associate dean and associate professor of the College of Journalism at The University of Maryland, thinks that chat rooms from the Internet’s early days played an even bigger role in the development of programs like Second Life than video games.

“In terms of the way graphics and avatars move, games like World of Warcraft were more directly influential,” Heider said, “but early in the history of the Internet, people would log onto the Internet and use MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon, Domain, or Dimension) as gathering places to talk about things like Dungeons and Dragons.

“(These were) multi-participant bulletin board chat rooms where people would come together and interact that just used text but described their environments in such a detailed and complex way. I think these chat rooms probably played more of an influential factor, set more of a historic precedent than any of the current MMO RPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games).”

However, the evolution of video games also played a large role as well, especially since many of the technological-social concepts in Snow Crash were not practically applicable upon the book’s release in 1992. Around this time, computer game series such as SimCity (The Sims series) and Civilization were starting to gain popularity for their strategic PC simulations of urban and anthropological development. Early role-playing video games, such as the Final Fantasy series , were also evolving.

Fast forward to 2006, when Second Life ’s popularity started coming into its own: MMO RPGs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest were firmly established as revenue staples of the gaming community, the city-building simulations initiated by SimCity had evolved into The Sims Online life simulation series (a format similar to Second Life ), and Internet-reliant, social interaction tools such as Myspace, Facebook and Skype were revolutionizing the way that humans network and communicate.

In many ways, a concept like Second Life was the logical next step, in that its own functional media convergence combined many of the cutting-edge graphic gameplay interaction of the MMO RPG’s with the social networking/communicative potential of MUDs, Myspace and Facebook. “A chat room with physics,” as Heider called it.

While Heider has downplayed the infrastructural influence of video games on Second Life (in part because it’s not a game, per se), SL embedded journalist and author of the recently released The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World book, Wagner James Au , disagrees.

“Those (video games) are all kinds of inspirations, in part,” Au said. “There are a lot of similarities in the user control of the environment. A lot of the developers at Linden Labs were (previously) either gamers or people from the gaming industry.”