Second Life, but First in Hype

Posted on October 20, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 14 Comments

From the often amusing Matt Mihaly comes this corker of a description about Second Life’s latest OMG METAVERSE!!1! press outing:

Second Life, that nefarious den of copyright infringement, nerds having chatsex, and the neverending search for the next trivial public relations opportunity, saw hasn\’e2\’80\’99t-been-hot-for-years musician Ben Folds attend a \’e2\’80\’9claunch party\’e2\’80\’9d for his new album recently. Almost two dozen people attended. That\’e2\’80\’99s right, two dozen. Just think of the impact! Why, if only half of them buy his album, he\’e2\’80\’99ll have sold twelve albums!

I’m not QUITE as cynical as Matt; while he sees Second Life as solely a platform for launching press releases and buyout offers, I see it as also keeping Terra Nova busy!

Edit: The acerbic UK tech tabloid The Register apparently caused Daniel Terdiman of CNet to “sever his ties to Linden Lab”. Said tie: a reference given by Linden’s Philip Rosedale on his resume. Apparently Second Life isn’t the only online medium given to breathless publicity over not much of anything!

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  • http://forge.ironrealms.com Matt Mihaly

    Actually, to be fair, I recognize that Second Life is quite entertaining for a lot of people, if far far less people than MMORPGs are entertaining to. It’s just that the SL cheerleaders never want to talk about that (they seem to view entertainment as somehow inferior to whatever else goes on) and both Linden and the cheerleaders constantly hype nebulous “business” opportunities, which are, of course, almost completely nonexistent for all about a handful of people.

  • http://ve3d.ign.com/ Apache

    I dunno, two dozen is pretty good!

  • http://midnight-guild.org Mist

    To be honest, two dozen people probably looked like a lot more considering 20 of them were dressed up as hot horny goth chicks.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

    By contrast, a hell of a lot more people showed up to watch The Gorillaz play “live” inside Habbo Hotel when Demon Days was coming out.

    (At least, it looked like a lot through the screenshots of SA goons doing the latest Geno invasion that day. More than two dozen got banned!)

  • tazelbain

    Second Life’s Tech is not strong enough for this. For this to work you’d need be able to handle thousands of people. To even begin to work you’d have force everyone into the same low-poly avatar which would go over like liver ice cream.

  • TPRJones

    Not necessarily; I can think of a couple of ways to easily “polycast” the performers to multiple zones at once, essentially having dozens of seemingly “intimate” events happening at the same time to serve a large total crowd without killing a server to do it.

    It’d be better if Linden Labs could rework their architecture into something more efficient, but large events aren’t precluded by it.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Expecting Linden Labs to be able to do anything meaningful with their technology seems like a waste lately. This is only one month following their credit card database getting hacked.

    Before long, the only groups that will be interested in playing it are 1) game designers (and wannabes) who want to use it for prototyping, 2) sexual deviants of all stripes, 3) random nonsexual but just as deviant Internet hooligans and 4) a rapidly diminishing segment of otherwise normal people who might like to avoid getting corrupted by any of the above three groups.

  • http://tidehorizon.blogspot.com Tide

    So why did MattM delete his original post? That’s almost worth wondering about more (?).

    SL is an interesting sandbox, but curiously it’s not for people under 18 years of age (people who usually are connected with playing games). I don’t spend any more time in itm because frankly its technology is not stellar. If you want to tinker with 3d virtual worlds there are better tools out there. But I realize there’s an immediacy with publishing that SL offers crafters. Some of the creations there are unique, but like a lot of the Web, a lot of them are also mediocre and derivative. That’s not a “slam” that’s just my opinion but I think it’s true. There is furthermore the fact there are parts of SL that are also just excessive and vulgar. And that is is turning people off more strongly and wondering about the marketing SL just can’t stop. Personally I think it’s because they’re cash strapped and looking for more VC cash and to flip it.

    In any event, what is not arguable is that they over estimate their scalability tremendously. You can argue like on TN till you are dead in the face about the proprietary or appeal of certain kind of content. Regardless, their platform needs improving. I refer you to Lum June 6 and the original CNET article.

  • http://vengeance.parryfive.com Axecleaver

    The reality of user-defined content is that most of it is crappy. A whole world of user defined content? No thanks. The only way that could work with more than a marginal audience is with heuristic selection tools like Amazon or netflix uses, that watch me play, decide what I like, and bubbles that stuff to the top.

  • http://www.heresy.com Bob

    HA! HA!

    Teh Terra Nova Crack is teh Funny!

    :)

  • http://emprint.livejournal.com Russell

    Linden’s hype machine seems to be the only thing getting MMOGs in the news lately besides the occasional half-assed “addiction” story.

  • IanB

    Funny, although too bad it happened to Ben Folds. He doesn’t deserve the snark from the original link.

  • TPRJones

    A whole world of user defined content? No thanks.

    Well, it’s not for people looking to see other people’s good content. It’s for people that want to make their own crappy content. Just like the early days of the internet, when everything was vanity pages. No one really wanted to look at any of that stuff except for the people that made it.

  • http://endie.net Endie

    In their defence, the SL refeerences are way down (and WoW refs way up)