Content is Copiable, Land is Free, Long Live the Creators

The Second Life world is built of unintended consequences, and as such is a test bed for what comes next as the metaverse arises.

In New York, I scoped the booths and sat in on the workshops and listened to Sibley (or watched Sibley, is more like it, he has expressive hands) who gave the following presentation of the technical obstacles on the road to paradise:

Sibley argues that the broader economic incentive to participate in virtual worlds is a feedback loop which funds that next phase of development, and he identifies six buckets in which development needs to take place in order to plant the seeds for ever-increasing pools of “spend”. Now, Sibley’s talking here about the broader world – the marketers, Nikes, CSIs…and he glances over at the kid’s worlds where they seem to have a handle on adoption and navigation, but whatever little bits of code they’ve got under the hood will probably stay under there, Barbie isn’t going open source anytime soon, nor is Habbo, and don’t even think of calling up the folks at Disney or Nickelodeon for copies of their source code.

I’m not a techy, but I do see little bits and pieces of the puzzle, floating past, there’s no particular pattern to it all, it’s a bunch of mostly small companies spitting out solutions to some problem or other, and a few larger companies like Microsoft pontificating on what the Metaverse should be, which is a mirror world, but hopefully shinier with a proprietary operating system.

We Wander Around
So you have a bunch of people who, say, like to code, or make stuff, or maybe they just like to play games, and that’s how I showed up, I was looking to find out the Spore release date and somehow Second Life popped up in Google and there was something about “Your World, Your Imagination” so I came in for a visit, had no preconceived notions, and here I am. And where the people start to roam, the media starts to follow, especially if there are some flying genitalia or kid AVs or bank crashes or folks who made a million selling virtual land. The money precedes, it follows, it flows, it dribbles, it gushes, and all along there’s no real plan, we’re making this up as we go along, let’s put on a show!

The only thing is that as the range of choices grows, people start getting a little antsy, because someone comes out with a simpler tool, but it’s off on some other platform somewhere. Used to be you had the Maya and the Poser and the 3DS people off in one corner populating Content Paradise, and then you had the Google Sketch-Up folks who just like to doodle, and then you had the Second Life content creators who had the added benefit that they could sell what they made, and Philip Rosedale applauded these junior entrepeneurs: “On the other hand, Rosedale noted, running a small business in Second Life can be “a lemonade stand experience, and may be superior to other kinds of learning.”"

Pick Your App
So then the coders don’t like some of the code over on Second Life and start rallying around open source. And the content creators get better, or others want in, and so little tools pop up to bring different kinds of content in to Second Life, like Maya plug-ins and AutoCAD importers, and then someone figures out that OpenGL is also the way to get the stuff OUT, and where better to put it than over on RealXtend where a single sim can host 100,000 prims and it has meshes, and a really cool avatar management system, and now I’m wandering around trying to figure out where to spend my time – I was trying to sell houses but maybe the houses will be ripped off by a CopyBot, or someone will do a 3D print screen of my sim and I’ll next see it over on one of the OpenSims.

Meanwhile the money has followed, and it got tired of trying to find new Facebook investments, so you have Vivaty and Scenecaster and a bunch of other micro worlds, although they’re really living rooms, and there are warehouses of content that you can buy, give, take, click, link through to Google, share….well, the content is everywhere, and over at VastPark they’ve suddenly got 195,000 high quality builds for sale, you know, the rendered kind like Neptune, so now there’s a pool of content creators out there somewhere who don’t even need to set foot in the virtual worlds, they can fiddle around in 3DS or use the simpler stuff like TrueSpace (owned by Microsoft) or 3DVIA Shape maybe, doesn’t matter, content is ubiquitous isn’t it?

Lord Linden We Beseech Thee
But back to unintended consequences, because as Wagner James Au pointed out in his book, Second Life was built on them – decisions the folks at Linden Lab made that didn’t quite pan out like they thought they would, what with tax revolts and war zones and so on, and now they seem to have some sort of intention, it’s not entirely clear what, they’re either cleaning up for an IPO, or showing their Bolshevik stripes, or maybe they don’t have a plan at all…the guy in charge of pricing has some sort of mysterious target, and the person who’s looking after legal went out for a long lunch with the lawyers and decided it was time to get serious about trademark protection, and besides Philip is off meeting with National Geographic or trying to get a copy of Ray’s vitamin regimen.

But whether intended or not, now you’ve got the largest group of participants in this mapless development pathway to the metaverse sputtering and blustery, and whether you’re a blogger who’s not feeling so thrilled about trying to figure out how to get the little circle R to work, or you’re a landowner whose holdings were slashed by 40%, or maybe you’re just a user out for a good time and don’t GET that Havok4 is great because what you experience is a grid that’s groaning and straining and crashing and you never know if your friends list will load, or where you’ll end up teleporting to, and when you start getting TOO MANY USERS they cut off half the functions of the grid in order to “make it a more enjoyable experience for all”.

(Yeah, they PUNISH the world if too many people show up. Um. OK.)

The Massive Mall of the Metaverse
There is no metaverse.

But there’s lots of 3D spaces to go and hang out, and there’s more coming. Choice abounds. Looks like a metaverse, kind of…I mean sure, there’s more to build, and Sibley has his buckets, and some day we’ll all float through information streams and mirror worlds and our realities will be augmented and our avatars will be expressive and we’ll be able to buy cool toys and put them in our virtual living rooms and we’ll putter around on VastPark or we’ll open a little shop in Second Life and then we’ll go to work behind the IBM firewall and no one right now can clearly tell us WHY we’ll do all these things, just that some of them are more fun maybe, or that we’re going to save the planet because we won’t need to fly anymore, we’ll all meet in virtual boardrooms with links to Skype and the meetings will be twice as long and pointless as they are in real life, it’s what keeps the economy moving is meetings, so why not have more of them, we don’t have to worry about airport security anymore, and we can spend half the time fixing our avatar’s hair and adjusting the 3D camera so it can’t see that we forgot to shave this morning.

So Sibley is mapping out the technology road map, bless him, we needed the guidance.

And Linden is inviting everyone to play – it’s cheap enough now, everyone can come in and set up a sim, and if they can’t afford the main grid there’s some guy in his basement selling server space using Open Sim, and if they can’t afford THAT well, rental prices are going to drop and after all, you can still pay your tier by selling clothes or cars or what have you.

But hold on….because if objects are a commodity, or ripped off, or interoperable across worlds, or downloaded from TurboSquid, or picked up in a big juicy box of freebies, and if server space is so cheap that the notion of ‘developing’ a sim is almost meaningless, there’s such a glut of servers…then what’s my mental model supposed to be again for how all this makes any sense?

Because Second Life is supposed to be a user-generated world, right? And Linden seems to be saying “yes, user generated, and it’s the generation that’s the important part, not whether what you write, or how much money you make, or how many pairs of jeans you own or what it cost to get them that makes the difference – it’s all gonna be one big wide world of open source code and copiable content and it’s what you DO with it that makes the difference, although we’re placing bets that we’d better let the companies get a better track on participating, because a bunch of users is just, well, they’re just SURFERS really, you need the guiding hand of folks who are ORGANIZED, like IBM, to help make sense of your little board room with the crappy table, come on behind the firewall folks, it’s safe in here.”

It’s the Economy, Stupid
So now we’re back in the land of unintended consequences.

Linden changes land pricing. Linden gives a gut punch to the bloggers and businesses who use the Second Life brand to help promote themselves, and by extension Second Life itself. And in doing so, they interrupt the most important economy there is – the economy of ideas.

Land isn’t server space. You can talk all you want about the price of hardware or how the system for plugging in new islands will be automated, but land is an idea. It’s a metaphor and it’s a sign post. For some people, it’s very real money, but business is tough, and you can get swept up in sub-prime or you can swept up in a price reduction in Second Life, buyer beware and all that….it’s not just the financial impact that’s at stake here it’s the IDEA of land.

The Second Life trademark isn’t just a brand that deserves all the due protection afforded by law. It’s an IDEA. And the idea of the brand was embraced by a community of people and now they’ve been told that YOUR idea of our brand is no longer OUR idea of the brand, so shape up and redirect your domain and here’s a new little logo for you, do something with THAT idea.

Linden toys with going open source, because it’s just code. But open source as well is an idea – and over amongst the open sim folks, it’s an idea upon which other ideas are built, like worlds with no economies, or different governance models, it’s what you can do with the code that matters, not how protected it is.

So with all these little twists and turns down there in the mechanics of firewalls, and openGL extractors, and copyright protection, and land pricing, there’s a culture of ideas that’s being influenced, and the unintended consequence might be that for the people working through the IDEA of the metaverse, Linden is making itself irrelevant.

Because the metaverse is as much about culture, and collaboration, and the sharing and exploration of concepts as it is about server racks and crash rates. And I’ve come to believe that the culture bubbling up in the metaverse, whether in the soft young minds exploring Habbo Hotel or virtual Barbie, or the prim spinners drawn by Bettina’s joy and passion who are creating over on Rezzable a Garden of NPIRL Delights, is a lot different than the culture I’m used to.

And you fiddle with the mechanics, and you fiddle with the culture. You take away protection for objects, and the content creators will either head off where the content has greater protection or, just as likely, they’ll elevate their game, and in elevating their game will create their own little mini guilds with powers of their own, and the ability to take their work to whatever grid makes the most sense, because after all it’s a market place for ideas now, not for objects, and Linden doesn’t show a sensitivity to all that.

You fiddle with land, and you take away a touch point for progress. You take away the idea that there is a reward for starting with a blank slate and cobbling together a bunch of parcels and renting them out to people who are there to chat and hang out and who might also get swept up in the ideas of others.

Pack Up Your Suitcase, We’re Taking Our Ideas Elsewhere
It won’t be long before NPIRL, teaming up with Rezzable, will just slice the whole thing off and move to another grid. They’re not building objects or date sims over there – they’re building a guild of talent, and one day soon they’re going to just decide to pack it up, throw it on their own servers, and off they go – and where once the concept of land might have kept some of their guild on the main grid, land has become worthless, and objects are copiable, but they get the IDEA that it’s experiences that count, because Linden sure isn’t making objects or land much of an incentive. And the poor coders and open source geeks will wake up and look around and not understand how they’re left with these worthless servers that no one wants to visit.

They threw down some freebies, after all. They swiped some stadiums from Clever Zebra. Their stuff looks OK….so how come no one’s showing up?

Over at Metaplace, they’re quietly going about the work of making the technology and the mechanics of server space as invisible as you can make it. They’re going on the premise that it’s not the tools, it’s making the tools simple. It’s not the code, it’s in making the code transparent. It’s in creating a place where the best idea wins, and the best idea has rewards, and there’s an economy to support that.

In Second Life, the notion of land was part of an economy of ideas. And in some ways it’s great that it’s cheap. But in other ways, being cheap, combined with all the other unintended consequences makes Linden an irrelevant part of the dialogue for what happens in Second Life. The Metaverse is bubbling up, the coders can go off and play with Sibley’s boxes and open source, the residents of the world can get what they want for pennies, and it will continue to look a bit better and be a bit more ubiquitous, but without a bit of land to call their own, and to use as their own little “lemonade stand” they’re going to look around and wonder “now what” and they’ll look for someone who can curate experiences and open up their minds to one or two good ideas.

They’ll look over to Linden, who will be extolling some new piece of technology or the latest crash statistic, but that’s not much of an idea you can rally around, Windlight might look OK but that isn’t something you IM your friends about. And then they’ll track down the content folks who, long ago, realized that Linden wasn’t really supporting anything, it was just hosting stuff, and that the stuff is how things are put together to create communities and experiences and new ways of thinking and new cultures, and wherever THOSE people are, off they’ll go, no big deal – their little parcel of land is just the price of playing the game for a while, it wasn’t worth so much anyways, or if it was it isn’t now, and it’s FREE over there, and the ideas are better, and all I really wanted was to have some fun, or meet some cool people, or expand my mind a little, this metaverse is a blast….because I can go ANYWHERE.