The Drax Files contuinue to impress me and as usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, in this edition Draxtor talks to Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab and someone who appears to have been missing in action for a while, although I swear I saw that thief style avatar when I was wandering around Fantasy Faire. The only disappointing aspect of this interview is that Rod doesn’t wear an Aston Villa shirt to work, or even a Villa tie!
The interview opens with Rod Humble saying “Most People at Silicon Valley have no idea that Second Life still exists.” The interview is fascinating with Rod making some extremely encouraging comments (for me anyway) in terms of privacy. Unlike those who think we should all be using our real names everywhere we go, Rod sees the value of people having their own space in different environments.
Rod also talks of how he travels around with alts and that this gives him the chance to engage in different ways, ways that he wouldn’t be able to do if people knew he was Rod Humble. This relates to the previous point about privacy and it’s encouraging to see that Rod seems to get the importance of this.
We see Rod in walking into the Linden Lab offices and some of the staff in pose mode, some pondering, others in catalogue style poses, some typing away and pretending the camera isn’t there whilst keeping one eye on it, as you do! There’s talk of performance improvements, with Server Side Baking making an appearance and talk of improvements that will be rolled out this quarter that apparently we will really like.
We see footage of The Dwarfins cave, hurrah! Rod talks of how Second Life is a great platform for creativity and how the content is user created, which we all know of course but as hopefully people who aren’t yet Second Life users will see this, it’s important that the CEO of Linden Lab makes this point.
We see Occulus Rift in the office and hear how use of it is being made in Second Life.Rod also ponders that he’s amazed no large company has really tried to make a Second Life competitor, but he hits the nail on the head when he says “How do you compete with something you don’t understand?” There’s also that user generated content part, which scares companies.
Rod ends the interview by saying that the Second Life community gives itself a bad rap and this is something I agree with, I’ve been engaged with other communities where the vitriol is far more vicious than it is within Second Life and Rod emphasises this point by saying that he used to receive three death threats a day when he worked in the game industry as opposed to just one death threat ever since coming to Second Life. Yes it was a tongue in cheek comment but it puts things into some perspective.
This is a really good interview, as usual Drax gets behind the avatar but in this interview the major plus is hearing Rod talk, because there hasn’t been enough of that this year, although this means I’ll have to abandon my plans to write a Dio adventure game based on Rod Humble being missing!
Another home run, Drax. I sink they just keep getting better and better!