I’m a hetrosexual male, I need to make this clear before I go further with this post. However I’ve always found Shirley Bassey to be a great singer and in all honesty, she has a song that I feel is appropriate for Second Life users.
The thing is Second Life doesn’t advertise itself well, whenever I come to my own blog I see adverts for IMVU, I’d be much happier seeing adverts for Second Life.
However Linden Lab have decided to take a different course, and fair enough, they feel this will work. I’ve touched upon the reasons I’m not convinced in recent posts when I’ve talked about their lack of information and lack of blog posts.
However Second Life remains the place where people can have their world and their imagination, despite Linden Lab’s efforts to stop people doing this, removing the tagline was the first step in this but users rebelled and continued on their road of having their world and their imagination.
Ok, so some of our content may not be of professional quality, but the concept of trying to create that content is what makes Second Life great, we don’t need a pin plucked in that dream, Linden Lab need to absolutely encourage that dream.
We create our own spaces, we create our own dreams, it’s a wonderful concept, please spare us from the clinically clean and polished concepts of others and let us create our sims, our way.
Bravo and well said!
They might have one point, though.
“Your world, your imagination” actually works better when applied to OpenSim — where you can set up your own grid and it is, in fact, your world. You own it, the same way that you would, say, own your own website. (Whether you host it yourself, or someone else hosts it for you, your website is your own. If your hosting company goes down, you just move the site somewhere else.)
With Second Life, it’s not your world, technically speaking, it’s their world. They can shut down all or part of it at will, with no compensation.
(Some OpenSim grid owners operate the same way — Meta 7 is shutting down, for example, and the entire grid, all content on it, and all un-cashed-out currency reserves will disappear.)
Similarly, Second Life is quickly losing its distinction as the place to exercise your imagination. Given the high price of land — and difficulties making backups — OpenSim is rapidly becoming the best place to build. Many designers, for example, run private OpenSim worlds on their home computers where they can create objects with unlimited space to play on, then export those objects for sale in Second Life, or InWorldz, or Avination, or other closed commercial grids.
That doesn’t mean that Second Life isn’t a good world. Given its wide variety of content and activities, and the different ways people use it, you could easily argue that Second Life is the best general-purpose virtual world out there today.
But I’m not a big fan of their new slogan, either: “Escape to the Internet’s largest user-created, 3D virtual world community.”
Second Life isn’t an escape for a lot of people — who come there to socialize, to work, to learn.
And “user-created,” while technically true, is becoming less and less of a useful descriptor. People don’t arrive in Second Life, see vast spaces of undeveloped virtual land, and start building. That used to be the case, and it was exciting. But now you show up, and you have a choice of really nice starting avatars, plenty of stores to visit, lots of activities and events, a starter home — that sense of unlimited potential is no longer there.
Much of the content in SL has been created by professionals — professional in-world designers, landscapers, hair stylists, and architects. The guys may have started out as garden-variety users, yes, but with several years of building experience under their belts, they’re now pro’s.
Second Life is no longer the frontier. It’s now… whatever the opposite of frontier is. You can still find patches of wilderness, an undeveloped sandbox here and there.
Remember when AOL was a weird and scary place? It was “online.” Woo-ooo. And today, the only people who still have AOL accounts are grandparents. And it’s about the safest online destination there is.
Second Life is going through that transition now. It used to be a wild and open place. Now, it’s mature and civilized. It needs different branding, different sales pitches. Just maybe not the ones they’ve got now.