Octavio LeShelle

Scheduled maintenance would appear to be the culprit...

The question as to the strategic economic direction of SL certainly remains open. Something has already been said about scale/design-once-and-mass-produce, the amusement/hobby motive, the discrepancy between in-world currency and RL forex, and meta-world technological/infrastructural commerce. The crux of the matter obviously lies in creating value in-world which would translate to RL monetary value. Apparently the current dynamics of SL in no way justify valuation of in-world artifacts remotely resembling that in virtual (gaming) worlds such as World of Warcraft. There the established homogeneous culture of the gamer target group seems to transfer value naturally to the RL (black) market. To achieve something similar the diffuse package which is SL would likely have to be strategically differentiated and reintegrated. This would mean highlighting select selling points to meet diversified market demands. For instance: - gaming sims could strive for interoperability/interchangeability with trend-setting, dedicated virtual platforms and/or create new experiences - sims modeling RL geographical locations or history could be made RL-mappable within a (mobile) mixed-reality (tourism/role-playing) concept - RL sports/recreation could be mapped onto SL à la Wii to augment training and enjoyment - sims providing virtual showrooms for development technologies could act as in-world, end user-friendly Rapid Development Environments Critical would be leveraging the generic and flexible characteristics of the SL platform to unity the offerings within a seamless user experience tantamount to a one-stop-portal-to-the-Metaverse...

From a use-case/usability point of view the merits of a mobile platform are ultimately not reflected in the degree to which it approximates the LAN gaming experience. On the contrary it takes the relationship between SL and RL in the direction of augmented and mixed reality. The inherent massively distributed-computing model would tolerate reasonable mobile client-side technological lag if the overall superimposition/integration of SL on/with physical reality is adequate. At the same time it would allow for client-server task redistribution (as suggested earlier with respect to client-side avatar implementation). LL's recent cooperation with Steam would in any case seem to constitute a flirting gesture to the gaming community. Of course in how far this would apply to augmented gaming remains to be seen and would be contingent on the envisioned business model.