Creator-centric

[Phil Deakins]

I wonder what Ebbe means when he says that SL2 will be creator-centric rather than the land-centricness of SL1. Those are my words of course, but they are an accurate reflection of what he said. I just can't remember his exact words.

LL's income from SL is mainly from tier - land. I wonder if he's planning on the main income being from creations in some way, with much lower tier if we can buy land in SL2 They make some income from marketplace sales so they are already into earning from creations, and I wonder if he intends to make a lot more from them. Maybe a much higher percentage of sales, or maybe some other way.

Has anyone had any thoughts on what he might mean by it?

[Aethelwine]

I wouldn't read anything more in to it than the obvious observation that for it to work and be a success it will need 3rd party content and that they no they need to encourage that.

[Qie Niangao]

I read it to mean that LL realizes, finally, that they're charging way, way too low a commission on Marketplace sales, compared to the industry standard of app stores. I would expect (and hope) to see those go from 5% to about 30%.

At that point, they'd probably also merge in-world and web commerce (search, sales, listing, etc.) and collect the same commission either way. They should have done that when they GOM'd SLExchange, but the imbeciles running commerce at the time were just lucky to have a place to come in out of the sun.

[Phil Deakins]

And you don't think he means that land will be cheaper - tier specifically?

If he does mean upping the commission on sales the way you described it, AND reducing tier a helluva lot, then I'd be for it.

 

Side note: Jack Linden actually pushed for lower tier before they sacked him - not because of that though.

[Qie Niangao]

I do, very much so.

I suspect, however, that "land" will be a somewhat different product than what we've come to know. Or maybe just a wider variety. Actually, I have no idea what I mean by this, it's just a sense I get from how extraordinarily cagey everybody has been about Land -- but that spooky secrecy started years ago, on the night of long knives when Jack and his boss were simultaneously terminated.

[Phil Deakins]

LOL

If we will be able to buy land in SL2, and if it works very similar to how it works now (monthly tier), then I sincerely hope they change it to much much smaller tier steps. Actually, I can't imagine them not making much smaller tier steps because it's been cried out about for so very long.

[ChinRey]

I've already quoted his words in another thread but here they are - a bit abreviated:

" For the next generation platform, we think a little bit differently from the beginning.  We more or less think of the creator as the primary customer, as opposed to the consumer, if you will.

... (lots of words omitted)

give the experience creators the tools to attract audiences into their experiences from the outside world."

 

As to what it means... well, I think it's obvious what Ebbe has in mind, he wants all kinds of creative people to come to the new SL and build wonderful works that other people can come and enjoy. Great idea if you ask me. (It's important to note that he's talking about "experience creators" wqhich isn't really the same as what we usually mean by "content creator".)

But please don't ask me how it can be achieved.

Take a look at the current SL from that point of view. Imagine you've come up with his great idea of a new online game and you need a host for it. And let's for the sake of argument say that the game actually can be done with the relatively limited user interactivity SL can offer. That means you have two choices, you can rent a sim from LL or you can rent a server from a regular hosting company. Here are some figures:

 

SL:

• Startup fee: 1000 USD
• Monthly fee: 295 USD
• Visitor/customer potential: 0-20/day
• Earning potential: 0-100 USD/month
• Lag: medium to high
• Downtime: 0.5-2 %

Other host:

• Startup fee: 50 USD
• Monthly fee: 50 USD
• Visitor/customer potential 0-10 000/day
• Earning potential: 0-10 000 USD/month
• Lag: low to medium
• Downtime Less than 0.01 %

These figures are'nt exact of course but they are clsoe enough to illustrate how far off SL currently is when it comes to experience creation.

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

LL's income from SL is mainly from tier - land. I wonder if he's planning on the main income being from creations in some way, with much lower tier if we can buy land in SL2 They make some income from marketplace sales so they are already into earning from creations, and I wonder if he intends to make a lot more from them. Maybe a much higher percentage of sales, or maybe some other way.

Has anyone had any thoughts on what he might mean by it?

---

Obviously, land tier will have to be drastically reduced at some time. In essence what you actually do when you buy a sim from SL, is rent an internet server - a server with some special software yes, but still, it's a server. LL simply can't maintain a price level five times regular market price forever.

I'm not sure switching the load over to the content creator is the right thing to do though. I mean, the average serious builder or scripter or animator spends perhaps two or three hours a day creating and about the same filling in all those forms you need to upload it to MP. With a bit of luck you can earn perhaps 50 U.S. dollars a month from it - maybe even as much as a hundred! That's OK cause you don't really do it for money, you do it because you love creating. But if LL suddenly demands a larger share of that little income you do have from your hobby ... well, it son't take much before you just give up and find something else to fill your spare time with.

Edit:

Qie Niangao's reply appeared while I was writing mine:

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

I read it to mean that LL realizes, finally, that they're charging way,

way

too low a commission on Marketplace sales, compared to the industry standard of app stores. I would expect (and hope) to see those go from 5% to about 30%.

---

They can't. If LL increased MP commission to 30%, sellers would simply stop using it.

Besides, you can't really compare MP to a professionally made "industry standard" app store. Both the service level offered to the sellers and the earning potential is much, much lower and LL really has no choice but to compencate for that with lower commision rates.

[Theresa Tennyson]

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

I do, very much so.

I suspect, however, that "land" will be a somewhat different product than what we've come to know. Or maybe just a wider variety. Actually, I have no idea what I mean by this, it's just a sense I get from how extraordinarily cagey everybody has been about Land -- but that spooky secrecy started years ago, on the night of long knives when Jack and his boss were simultaneously terminated.

---

It's worth bearing in mind that the land model of Second Life was originally intended for a completely different animal than what Second Life is today. It started out as a small, interconnected area used by a limited number of subscription-paying users, some of whom were accessing it on dial-up connections. There was no in-world economy and the objects in the world were childishly simple and had no real-world value.

At that time, someone decided the best way of handling the physical "world" was the "simulator" - a server doing physics calculations for each of a series of discreet, fixed chunks of land, with users connecting to the simulator that represented the chunk of land they were on at any given time.

However, when you look at what Second Life became, that system is horrifically inefficient. Even empty regions need to be simulated constantly and a region with one avatar in it uses the same resources as one with forty to eighty avatars in it, with more than eighty avatars in that region being effectively impossible. Any given region needs to have a potential connection to tens of thousands of other regions and each new region increases the potential connection needs of all the others. As anyone who travels the Mainland knows, moving from one region to another is always an iffy proposition and there really isn't any way to solve this permanently for everyone - imagine all the times you've been browsing the Net and any given web site has a delayed response. This is the same thing that happens moving from one region to another in Second Life but the data requirements are far more complicated than the average web site.

People who have been calling for Second Life to reduce tier in the current world say that it will pay for itself with more people buying more regions but everything I've seen suggests that the Lab would rather do anything but add regions to make money. The economy of scale is reversed and having more regions is less efficient than having fewer.

With a new platform the Lab can try other ways of simulating the world that would be much more efficient as far as infrastructure needs, which would allow them to reduce prices. With the current platform? Never going to happen.

 

 

 

[Nova Convair]

If SL2 will really be new -  then there will be no land as we know it. No parcelised sims. That means everything and the whole business model will be different.

You'll have to pay for the server and computing power that you need to for your creations. There is a market too so LL will want to get their share.

If that means that creating stuff will become expensive then LL will shoot themselves in the foot. Do I invest money and take a risk for things I do in my free time for fun? Only a very limited amount.

So we'll see how that creator-centric is meant and how the whole business will turn out. For me it's too early and I have too few infos to make speculations. I hope that LL has a plan and a clue - I have my doubts in their abilities on that sector.

[Phil Deakins]

I've been unable to find where Ebbe said that SL2 will be creator-centric rather than land-centric. The first part is easy to find but I haven't found the second part. I did find this though:-

"Subscriptions, sales tax, property tax, feature unlocking, storage, transaction fees, utility bills...lots of ways...all I've said so far is that the property tax is too high (everybody agrees) and that I think sales tax (non inworld for example) is probably too low. "

Which more-or-less says it.

In starting the thread, I was wondering if there were other ways in which LL could make creators, or creations, their main source of income. But then he may not have meant it as anything to do with their income. He may simply have meant that SL2 will concentrate on being super-good for creating stuff - focussing on making it great for creators so that the creations will bring people in - making creators their main customers, as he puts it.

[Perrie Juran]

You could say it's on my list of questions I'd love to ask.

We keep hearing Ebbe say "Creator-centric."

I keep wondering if he doesn't mean "Merchant-centric."

Because SL has always been at its heart Creator-centric:  "Your World, Your Imagination."

Land is a necessity and still the most solid investment there is.  Because everybody needs land.  To use land as a loss-leader to get people to buy Merchandise would be very risky.  I would love to see lower tier.  And if tier was lower maybe I would spend more on Merchandise..  But that is a big maybe.

The other side of this of course is the number of people who are getting a "free ride" here.  What is the actual percentage of people who log in and either own or rent land?  My guess is it's very small.  It's been discussed before, that as a land owner really I am supporting these peoples presence in SL.  I would not consider shifting some of the cost to them an unfair thing.  And the only way to do it is through a "prim tax" in some form if you want the new world to be free to enter.

 

[Phil Deakins]

My comments are in red within your quoted post.

---

ChinRey wrote:

I've already quoted his words in another thread but here they are - a bit abreviated:

" For the next generation platform, we think a little bit differently from the beginning.  We more or less think of the creator as the primary customer, as opposed to the consumer, if you will.

... (lots of words omitted)

give the experience creators the tools to attract audiences into their experiences from the outside world."

 

As to what it means... well, I think it's obvious what Ebbe has in mind, he wants all kinds of creative people to come to the new SL and build wonderful works that other people can come and enjoy. Great idea if you ask me. (It's important to note that he's talking about "experience creators" wqhich isn't really the same as what we usually mean by "content creator".)

I agree. He's looking to make SL2 a place where experiences, rather than mere objects and collections of objects, can be created. Perhaps Linden Realms and the new Experience thing were always to do with it - trying things out in SL to iron out any bugs, and to find out how to improve them.

But please don't ask me how it can be achieved.

Take a look at the current SL from that point of view. Imagine you've come up with his great idea of a new online game and you need a host for it. And let's for the sake of argument say that the game actually can be done with the relatively limited user interactivity SL can offer. That means you have two choices, you can rent a sim from LL or you can rent a server from a regular hosting company. Here are some figures:

SL:

• Startup fee: 1000 USD
• Monthly fee: 295 USD
• Visitor/customer potential: 0-20/day
• Earning potential: 0-100 USD/month
• Lag: medium to high
• Downtime: 0.5-2 %

Other host:

• Startup fee: 50 USD
• Monthly fee: 50 USD
• Visitor/customer potential 0-10 000/day
• Earning potential: 0-10 000 USD/month
• Lag: low to medium
• Downtime Less than 0.01 %

These figures are'nt exact of course but they are clsoe enough to illustrate how far off SL currently is when it comes to experience creation.

If you mean a system whereby SL2 can include servers/sims/regions that are hosted on non-LL servers, they won;t do that, because they face the same insurmountable problem that they faced before - people TPing to non-LL servers

with their stuff

.

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

LL's income from SL is mainly from tier - land. I wonder if he's planning on the main income being from creations in some way, with much lower tier if we can buy land in SL2 They make some income from marketplace sales so they are already into earning from creations, and I wonder if he intends to make a lot more from them. Maybe a much higher percentage of sales, or maybe some other way.

Has anyone had any thoughts on what he might mean by it?

---

Obviously, land tier will have to be drastically reduced at some time. In essence what you actually do when you buy a sim from SL, is rent an internet server - a server with some special software yes, but still, it's a server. LL simply can't maintain a price level five times regular market price forever.

From what he said, land will be cheaper.

I'm not sure switching the load over to the content creator is the right thing to do though. I mean, the average serious builder or scripter or animator spends perhaps two or three hours a day creating and about the same filling in all those forms you need to upload it to MP. With a bit of luck you can earn perhaps 50 U.S. dollars a month from it - maybe even as much as a hundred! That's OK cause you don't really do it for money, you do it because you love creating. But if LL suddenly demands a larger share of that little income you do have from your hobby ... well, it son't take much before you just give up and find something else to fill your spare time with.

I'm not now sure that he meant that their main income would be from creators rather than land. He probably didn't mean it as a comment on where their main income would come from.

---

 

[Phil Deakins]

---

Perrie Juran wrote:

You could say it's on my list of questions I'd love to ask.

We keep hearing Ebbe say "Creator-centric."

I keep wondering if he doesn't mean "Merchant-centric."

Because SL has always been at its heart Creator-centric:  "Your World, Your Imagination."

Land is a necessity and still the most solid investment there is.  Because everybody needs land.  To use land as a loss-leader to get people to buy Merchandise would be very risky.  I would love to see lower tier.  And if tier was lower

maybe

I would spend more on Merchandise..  But that is a big maybe.

The other side of this of course is the number of people who are getting a "free ride" here.  What is the actual percentage of people who log in and either own or rent land?  My guess is it's very small.  It's been discussed before, that as a land owner really I am supporting these peoples presence in SL.  I would not consider shifting some of the cost to them an unfair thing.  And the only way to do it is through a "prim tax" in some form if you want the new world to be free to enter. 

---

I'm now leaning to the idea that he didn't mean the phrase "primary customers" as anything to do with LL's income. I'm leaning towards the idea that he meant where the main focus would be. As for income, from what I found and quoted, I suspect they are looking at lower tier, if that's the land model they choose, and "taxes" (commissions) on all sales, and higher than they currently are on marketplace sales.

[Qie Niangao]

---

ChinRey wrote:

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

I read it to mean that LL realizes, finally, that they're charging way,

way

too low a commission on Marketplace sales, compared to the industry standard of app stores. I would expect (and hope) to see those go from 5% to about 30%.

---

They can't. If LL increased MP commission to 30%, sellers would simply stop using it.

Besides, you can't really compare MP to a professionally made "industry standard" app store. Both the service level offered to the sellers and the earning potential is much, much lower and LL really has no choice but to compencate for that with lower commision rates.

---

Doesn't matter, really, whether they charge a lot in sales commission or land fees. Whatever the mix, it has pretty much the same depressive effect on the economy, and the same disincentive to participate. If folks are spending a fortune on land, they won't have as much left to buy creations, even if there were no sales commissions at all. (Yeah, there's the freeloader problem of non-landowners, or the flip-side: folks like me who rarely buy anything that's not land-related, and the specific "tax" rates incentivize different expenditures and experiences. Currently, for example, land revenues are eroding as folks shift towards relatively underpriced content. So there's some effect, but the overall "tax" rate matters much more than how it's apportioned between "property" and "sales" or whatever.)

(Oh, and folks couldn't avoid the 30% commission. Note that I mentioned unifying in-world and web commerce. Any means of accepting new content into player inventory would involve that 30% fee, as would any other L$ transaction.)

[Qie Niangao]

---

Nova Convair wrote:

If SL2 will really be new -  then there will be no land as we know it. No parcelised sims. That means everything and the whole business model will be different.

---

I see this often. People say it as if it meant something, so I presume it does, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what.

If it's supposed to mean what it seems to imply -- that there'd be no geographic model at all, and/or that users would abandon their mammalian nesting instinct in favor of a sort of distributed Blender with a Skype plugin -- well, I think the userbase for anything like that wouldn't be worth a weekend's coding effort.

If "no land as we know it" means something deeper, I sure wish somebody would explain it.

[Qie Niangao]

---

Theresa Tennyson wrote:

However, when you look at what Second Life became, that system is horrifically inefficient. Even empty regions need to be simulated constantly and a region with one avatar in it uses the same resources as one with forty to eighty avatars in it, with more than eighty avatars in that region being effectively impossible. [...]

---

Yeah, I recently speculated somewhere about the prospects of turning the sharding and the corresponding simulation "sideways" so that spatial interactions among simulated entities always require little communication events, rather than the simulation being strictly isomorphic with space. That seems possible, but I don't know how common it is, nor how easy.

It's very true, however, that the current approach is inefficient -- but especially now (and especially on the Mainland) as the "population density" of avatars to land has thinned so dramatically. The effect seems a strangely, steeply nonmonotonic function of price: if recurring Land costs are too low, folks will own too much of it without worrying about putting it to effective use, so avatars will be thin on the ground. On the other hand, if land is too dear, folks won't be able to afford it and most of what exists will sit empty -- which pretty much describes Mainland these days.

One thing, though: they could make "sim idling" more complete if they could move running sims among computing hosts. That would be difficult with the current implementation, I'm sure, but not impossible given enough time and effort... and a very reasonable requirement for a new platform.

[Drongle McMahon]

The two things that stuck in my mind while reading this latest transcript were "experience" and "scalability". I think there is a realisation that in a system that will scale to the sort of size they want, LL cannot be involved with direct interaction with the end-use, the "customer". Instead, they will only deal with middlemen, the "Eperience creators". These will be much fewer than those we currently call creators. I think this elite of experience creators, the only users interacting directly with LL, are those who will be the object of the "creator-centric" strategy. The business of LL will be to provide infrastructure, and, while there may be cost-covering charges for that service, the real rewards for LL will come from "sales tax" on the services that the experience providers sell.

The experiences created will be as diverse as the imagination of the experience-creators. The ways way they monetize their expriences can be equally diverse. Some may choose to offer an experience analogous to mainland; anarchic access to building tools with avalable resources according to "rent" paid, with commercial activities of all kinds allowed. Others may offer dazzlingly garish casinos with myriad "games of skill", with nothing to do but pull the handles of games machines. Another may offer combat worlds, building limited to simple barricades, all ammunition paid for. My favourite will offer the challenge of survival in the face of an aggressive self-sustaining ecology, with limited avalable tools, decreasing admission cost for each day of survival, dangers active when youaren't there.Whether a land renting model exists or not would be up to the experience creator.

An end-user might participate in as many of these experiences as he chooses to. They would be connected only by single points of entry and exit, keeping the overall interconnection complexity of the system low. The complexity of internal connectivity would be under the control, and the responsibility of, of the experience creator. Inventory could be tranferred (but not all usable in all experiences). All transactions in all experiences would be in linden currency, ensuring the sales tax could be collected.

So what would be the role of the present creator/merchant class in this heirarchy? The popularity of this mode of participation, for both the creators and their customers, should ensure that some experience creators would provide experiences in which this can continue. Indeed, competition should mean that environments more conducive to these activities would emerge. The disappearance of the direct relaionship between the lindens and the end users would be a loss, but it is surely a necessary one if the new world is to grow to the sort of size that must be the aim.

 

[Vivienne Schell]

"Has anyone had any thoughts on what he might mean by it?"

I think Altberg does not know what he´s talking about there. It´s just another blow of hot air. As everything else he announced so far. Basically, each and every SL customer is a content creator and content of SL. So, what the hell can be more creator-centered as SL is?

[Vivienne Schell]

"If "no land as we know it" means something deeper, I sure wish somebody would explain it."

That´s an nteresting question, and I think that Altberg hints at something in the transcript (while disqualifying it by the well known "we still think about everything", of course).

Quote: "We still have to think about whether we want to have multiple name spaces. Like do you have to ‑‑ if you come to different experiences, do you have to register all over again or can you have the same tea across now? For now we're saying you can have the same identity across all and communicate across all and have a social network across all. .... But I think it will be a lot easier in the future with where we make it easy for people to have their users, sort of have direct access into a particular experience or set of experiences. Where they can more control the messaging and how ‑‑ what the experience for those users are."

Not sure, but this sounds like an adoption of the oooooold IBM hypergrid model, which certainly is anything but "next generation" (he, he). But on a hypergrid there is no "land" maintained by Linden Lab, but different hosts running different "experiences", which may or may not include "land". Just a thought.

[Nova Convair]

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

---

Nova Convair wrote:

If SL2 will really be new -  then there will be no land as we know it. No parcelised sims. That means everything and the whole business model will be different.

---

I see this often. People say it as if it meant something, so I presume it does, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what.

If it's supposed to mean what it seems to imply -- that there'd be no geographic model at all, and/or that users would abandon their mammalian nesting instinct in favor of a sort of distributed Blender with a Skype plugin -- well, I think the userbase for anything like that wouldn't be worth a weekend's coding effort.

If "no land as we know it" means something deeper, I sure wish somebody would explain it.

---

Just read about "Hifi" which was mentioned in the context of SL2. There is a good example:

Imagine a city which is held in a serverspace - you enter a building and switch to the serverspace that contains this building - you go to your apartment, open the door and enter the serverspace that contains your apartment.

Switching serverspace is like sim crossing But if that will be noticeable then LL should drop everything and leave the work for the pro's. How a serverspace is implemented and hosted is a technical question. The network behind that world will surely be more complex and much more advanced than SL.

- You will have to pay for the serverspace for your apartment.

- There is no need to run that space if there is nobody in your apartment. But the city of course will still be there - if someone is in. So there is no need to keep everything running when nobody sees it.- There is no size. A serverspace can be an apartment - a city - the little cat NPC that wanders through the world - an area in space with the size of a lightyear? hehe - you'never know whats possible.

I don't know of course If thats the goal of LL or within everyones imagination but I consider anything below that level as "steampunk".

[Drake1 Nightfire]

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

 

Has anyone had any thoughts on what he might mean by it?

---

At this point and time I don't think THEY know what they mean by it. I think they have a few base ideas as to what this new world should be like, aside from that they have zip.

[Pamela Galli]

---

Drongle McMahon wrote:

The two things that stuck in my mind while reading this latest transcript were "experience" and "scalability". I think there is a realisation that in a system that will scale to the sort of size they want, LL cannot be involved with direct interaction with the end-use, the "customer". Instead, they will only deal with middlemen, the "Eperience creators". These will be much fewer than those we currently call creators. I think this elite of experience creators, the only users interacting directly with LL, are those who will be the object of the "creator-centric" strategy. The business of LL will be to provide infrastructure, and, while there may be cost-covering charges for that service, the real rewards for LL will come from "sales tax" on the services that the experience providers sell.

The experiences created will be as diverse as the imagination of the experience-creators. The ways way they monetize their expriences can be equally diverse. Some may choose to offer an experience analogous to mainland; anarchic access to building tools with avalable resources according to "rent" paid, with commercial activities of all kinds allowed. Others may offer dazzlingly garish casinos with myriad "games of skill", with nothing to do but pull the handles of games machines. Another may offer combat worlds, building limited to simple barricades, all ammunition paid for. My favourite will offer the challenge of survival in the face of an aggressive self-sustaining ecology, with limited avalable tools, decreasing admission cost for each day of survival, dangers active when youaren't there.Whether a land renting model exists or not would be up to the experience creator.

An end-user might participate in as many of these experiences as he chooses to. They would be connected only by single points of entry and exit, keeping the overall interconnection complexity of the system low. The complexity of internal connectivity would be under the control, and the responsibility of, of the experience creator. Inventory could be tranferred (but not all usable in all experiences). All transactions in all experiences would be in linden currency, ensuring the sales tax could be collected.

So what would be the role of the present creator/merchant class in this heirarchy? The popularity of this mode of participation, for both the creators and their customers, should ensure that some experience creators would provide experiences in which this can continue. Indeed, competition should mean that environments more conducive to these activities would emerge. The disappearance of the direct relaionship between the lindens and the end users would be a loss, but it is surely a necessary one if the new world is to grow to the sort of size that must be the aim.

 

---

I dont know much about games but if ppl want those kinds of "experiences" arent there a plethora out there in game land?  

 

McLuhan talks about hot and cold media -- ie sort of like interactive and passive.  By interactive I mean, like playing dolls, where you, the end user, supply the plot, the script, the structure.  By passive, I mean, you enter into some environment totally designed by someone else. 

In SL we have both now. I for one have zero interest in any kind of game environment, and I suspect that is true of most of my customers. What we want: to play dolls. 

[ChinRey]

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

I agree. He's looking to make SL2 a place where experiences, rather than mere objects and collections of objects, can be created. Perhaps Linden Realms and the new Experience thing were always to do with it - trying things out in SL to iron out any bugs, and to find out how to improve them.

---

The Experience thing is not ecxactly new. I think the beginning dates all the way back to when they built Pyri Peaks and the Linden Realms were very much made speicifically to introduce and beta test the concept. But yes, the fact that they've suddenly picked up this long abandoned idea now seems to indicate they're planning to use something simialr in SL2.

 

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

If you mean a system whereby SL2 can include servers/sims/regions that are hosted on non-LL servers, they won;t do that, because they face the same insurmountable problem that they faced before - people TPing to non-LL servers

with their stuff

.

---

Actually at least one big landowner in SL run their sims on their own servers today. But that's not what I meant. I mean, if you want a virtual world for you own game or other "experience creation", why bother with Second Life at all? Why not simply rent a server and build your own little virtual world for your game? Second Life today doesn't really have anything to offer those experience creators Ebbe wants as the backbone of SL2.

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

I've been unable to find where Ebbe said that SL2 will be creator-centric rather than land-centric. The first part is easy to find but I haven't found the second part.

---

It's from an NPC meeting he attended. Transcript here:

http://nonprofitcommons.org/content/video-and-trancript-july-25th-community-discussion-ebbe-linden

(Link was first posted in another thread on this forum by Parhelion Palou.)

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

In starting the thread, I was wondering if there were other ways in which LL could make creators, or creations, their main source of income.

---

Maybe but first they have to make SL2 a realistic source of income to the creators.

---

Theresa Tennyson wrote:

It's worth bearing in mind that the land model of Second Life was originally intended for a completely different animal than what Second Life is today.

....

At that time, someone decided the best way of handling the physical "world" was the "simulator"

...

However, when you look at what Second Life became, that system is horrifically inefficient.

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Well said, Theresa. I don't think i'ts possible to scrap the sim concept completely but it can certianly do ewith some update. One possible solution would be to have separate servers for the relatively static parts of a build and for things that move (avatars, vechicles etc.)

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Nova Convair wrote:

You'll have to pay for the server and computing power that you need to for your creations. There is a market too so LL will want to get their share.

If that means that creating stuff will become expensive then LL will shoot themselves in the foot. Do I invest money and take a risk for things I do in my free time for fun? Only a very limited amount.

...

I hope that LL has a plan and a clue - I have my doubts in their abilities on that sector.

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I agree with you Nova, except I think there is a real chance they can do it. Actually, right now I'll give them about 60% chance of success.

The biggest challenge they face right now, is that they don't have any content creators in-house. That is there are nobody on the team that can provide that viewpoint for them. The moment focus shifts from technology to content, LL is really at a loss and they desperately need to find that experience somewhere.

[Perrie Juran]

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

<snip>

The experiences created will be as diverse as the imagination of the experience-creators. The ways way they monetize their expriences can be equally diverse. Some may choose to offer an experience analogous to mainland; anarchic access to building tools with avalable resources according to "rent" paid, with commercial activities of all kinds allowed. Others may offer dazzlingly garish casinos with myriad "games of skill", with nothing to do but pull the handles of games machines. Another may offer combat worlds, building limited to simple barricades, all ammunition paid for. My favourite will offer the challenge of survival in the face of an aggressive self-sustaining ecology, with limited avalable tools, decreasing admission cost for each day of survival, dangers active when youaren't there.Whether a land renting model exists or not would be up to the experience creator.

An end-user might participate in as many of these experiences as he chooses to. They would be connected only by single points of entry and exit, keeping the overall interconnection complexity of the system low.

</snip>

 

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Very interesting and thoughtful.

There is a whole school of thought, maybe you could call it a Philosophy, about what a Virtual World is. It is all based on a premise that when we log in, whether it be a simple text based service or a 3D World such as SL, that we all have a presence in Cyber Space.

We all know that Snow Crash was a major inspiration for SL.  But the VW in Snow Crash primarily duplicated the Real World, really very much as we see in SL.

But Snow Crash is not the only book.  Tad William's Otherland Series has a Virtual World that follows much more like what you have described. 

About a year ago I stumbled on this, Online World Timeline.  It is kind of fascinating to see how we got to where we are today.  This timeline does end in 2002, but it's not hard to fill in the blanks since then.

This is also another interesting read on the subject:  http://www.vwtimeline.com/

[Qie Niangao]

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Nova Convair wrote:

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Qie Niangao wrote:[...] If "no land as we know it" means something deeper, I sure wish somebody would explain it.

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Just read about "Hifi" which was mentioned in the context of SL2. There is a good example:

Imagine a city which is held in a serverspace - you enter a building and switch to the serverspace that contains this building - you go to your apartment, open the door and enter the serverspace that contains your apartment.

Switching serverspace is like sim crossing

But if that will be noticeable then LL should drop everything and leave the work for the pro's. How a serverspace is implemented and hosted is a technical question. The network behind that world will surely be more complex and much more advanced than SL.

- You will have to pay for the serverspace for your apartment.

- There is no need to run that space if there is nobody in your apartment. But the city of course will still be there - if someone is in. So there is no need to keep everything running when nobody sees it.- There is no size. A serverspace can be an apartment - a city - the little cat NPC that wanders through the world - an area in space with the size of a lightyear? hehe - you'never know whats possible.

I don't know of course If thats the goal of LL or within everyones imagination but I consider anything below that level as "steampunk".

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Oh, okay. So "no land as we know it" is really just an implementation detail about sharding scalability, not a fundamental change that removes all geography from the virtual world, which is what I've been taking to mean "land" and which seems to me so essential to any virtual world worth visiting.

I'm not even a purist about "land" being limited to perfect 3D continuity, precluding portals or anything. So as I hinted in another post, I'm certainly not worried about the details of how space is simulated, as long as it is.