Colwyn
06-08-2006, 04:32 AM
The Capn Lubs Second Life, in all its absurdity on The Flogging Will Continue (http://thefloggingwillcontinue.com/?p=9)
Second Life has been built and operated more like a religion than a consumer-oriented business. I like to joke that Philip went up the mountain and came down with stone tablets describing how to build ‘The Metaverse’. Indeed, when I’ve seen him speak, he likes to refer to these immutable laws.
I’m reluctant to flippantly recite the sacred scriptures, but grossly paraphrasing some of them might yield; ‘It must be 3D’, ‘There must be contiguous landscape’, ‘Thou shalt not Teleport, thou must walk to where thoust would go’ (this one just got scrubbed, which is an encouraging sign!), ‘There must be arbitary code runneth over on the server’, ‘There must be physics runneth over on the server’, ‘ ‘Thy business model must be based on real-estate as a limited resource’ and so forth.
...
My suspicion is...that Linden has evolved to their currently business model via subscription and found it to be lucrative, so they’re sticking with it. I believe, however, that it will hamper significant adoption in the long-haul as it puts the emphasis on the wrong aspect of things. Of course my opinion here is influenced by my belief that the physical, landscape-based metaphor has absolutely nothing to do with how people will want to interact with ‘the metaverse’, and that 3D is an attribute, like the colour blue, not a requirement for satisfying player experience.
Source: Broken Toys (http://brokentoys.org/)
Second Life has been built and operated more like a religion than a consumer-oriented business. I like to joke that Philip went up the mountain and came down with stone tablets describing how to build ‘The Metaverse’. Indeed, when I’ve seen him speak, he likes to refer to these immutable laws.
I’m reluctant to flippantly recite the sacred scriptures, but grossly paraphrasing some of them might yield; ‘It must be 3D’, ‘There must be contiguous landscape’, ‘Thou shalt not Teleport, thou must walk to where thoust would go’ (this one just got scrubbed, which is an encouraging sign!), ‘There must be arbitary code runneth over on the server’, ‘There must be physics runneth over on the server’, ‘ ‘Thy business model must be based on real-estate as a limited resource’ and so forth.
...
My suspicion is...that Linden has evolved to their currently business model via subscription and found it to be lucrative, so they’re sticking with it. I believe, however, that it will hamper significant adoption in the long-haul as it puts the emphasis on the wrong aspect of things. Of course my opinion here is influenced by my belief that the physical, landscape-based metaphor has absolutely nothing to do with how people will want to interact with ‘the metaverse’, and that 3D is an attribute, like the colour blue, not a requirement for satisfying player experience.
Source: Broken Toys (http://brokentoys.org/)