2009 predictions review

Twelve months ago we published our ten predictions for 2009. Below is the report card on them.

2009: how accurate was our crystal ball?

Prediction 1: OpenSim grids will bleed Second Life users – this may seem a very obvious prediction given the growth of OpenSim grids, but what I mean here is that the exodus will be obvious. It won’t be a migration that will affect Second Life’s viability (other issues may achieve that), but there will be a solid, committed population of OpenSim users choosing those grids over Second Life’s one. Put another way, new users will see OpenSim grids as an equal option to signing up to Second Life.

Pass – the growth in adoption of OpenSim has certainly grown and at the expense of Second Life. People aren’t abandoning Second Life for OpenSim en masse but there’s plenty of content creators and educators dividing their time between the two environments. Here’s one small example of that switch.

Prediction 2: Virtual worlds will appear as normal daily life in TV / Movies – To date, most appearances of virtual worlds in TV and film are either documentaries or as a central part of an action / geek film. US comedy The Office and CSI have both featured Second Life but essentially in a sensationalistic way. 2009 will see more insertions of virtual worlds into daily life scenes in shows. A disclosure here: I’m particularly confident on this one as I’ve had the pleasure of helping out on a film project that features a virtual world in a day-to-day context. More on that in the first few months of next year.

Pass – We were up front that this was an easy prediction due to our then under-wraps involvement with Beautiful Kate.

Prediction 3: There will be a net increase in Australian business in virtual worlds – Second Life won’t see any significant growth in Australian businesses entering Second Life and there may actually be a decrease. The gains will come in worlds like Twinity, customised worlds created on platforms like VastPark and possibly even some entry into enterprise worlds offered by entities like IBM and Forterra. Any increase will be driven by the increasing awareness of virtual worlds as a cost-effective business collaboration tool.

FailThe withdrawal by Telstra from Second Life significantly reduces the level of overt Australian business presences on that platform. That said, the level of interest in virtual worlds has grown, albeit only slightly. The gains have come around collaboration and meetings. Most of the growth in interest hasn’t translated to dollars invested, but that’s on its way. Aside from Second Life, no specific platform is gaining significant traction locally from a business viewpoint.

Prediction 4: Virtual worlds will remain a political no-go zone – Australian political parties have had zero presence to date and it’s extremely unlikely to change in 2009. Any planning being done by the major parties for the 2010 Federal Election is unlikely to extend beyond services like YouTube and Twitter. Things may stretch to sites like Barack Obama’s Change site, but forget anything 3D.

Pass – As predicted, there’s no momentum politically with virtual worlds in Australia. Why? You’ll find out in coming weeks when we release our virtual worlds policy paper.

Prediction 5: Metaplace will be a game-changer – Metaplace’s simple, web-based interface combined with some impressive content creation tools will ensure a launch with impact and significant growth. There’ll be some obvious poaching of users from services like Habbo Hotel but also from content-creation havens like Second Life.

Fail – We couldn’t have got this one more wrong given Metaplace has announced its closure. Closures are expected in a competitive environment but this one was a real surprise.

Prediction 6: Virtual sex will lead to legislation – Linden Lab’s gambling, ageplay and banking clamp-downs were an early start to the reality of increased regulation and governments worldwide are increasingly scrutinising virtual world activities. Sexual exploits (aside from ageplay) have remained unregulated. For better or worse, this won’t remain.

Fail – no significant legislation has eventuated, although the proposed Australian internet filter will likely cover ageplay-related content, but that legislation hasn’t passed as yet.

Prediction 7: Australian Universities will fall further behind in incorporating virtual world training tools – Australia has some leading lights as far as virtual world and education go, something highlighted by AVWW 2008. In the wider university sector, US and UK universities are integrating virtual world training simulations in a range of areas including health and engineering. Australian universities on the whole haven’t begun thinking about this in a widespread way, even with the talented educators putting the case locally. 2009 will see the gap widen further as key universities overseas start to demonstrate significant education outcomes.

Pass – Australia has continued to lag, although the cohort of innovative educators involved with virtual environments has continued to grow and some impressive outcomes demonstrated (one example here). The lag to date comes from governing and funding bodies rather than at the grass roots level. That said it appears to be ending with some excellent, Australia-wide proposals in the works in regards to virtual worlds and tertiary education.

Prediction 8: Second Life will remain a frustrating experience – the announcement of standalone servers may prove this prediction wrong, but 2009 is unlikely to show an enormous improvement in the Second Life user experience. The user interface will certainly improve and the stability of the platform may improve exponentially. The ongoing frustration will be the same issue that’s plagued Second Life to date: regular, crushing lag. This is one prediction I’d particularly like to be proven wrong on. A sub-prediction here too: the Teen grid will continue to decline and may even close altogether.

Pass – Teen Second Life is likely to be merged into the main grid, there is somewhat of a decline in user concurrency in Second Life and although some user interface improvements have occurred, the main improvements are yet to be seen. Things are still looking very positive for Second Life overall, but the evergreen usability challenges remain.

Prediction 9: Growth, growth, growth – every metric and market research report points toward ongoing growth in the number of people spending time in virtual worlds. The new entrants will assist this growth but the incumbents will also grow. Habbo Hotel will most likely retain is dominance in raw numbers but children’s worlds like Barbie Girls, Hello Kitty Online and Club Penguin will provide an enormous userbase as well. Add to that the promising growth of Sony’s Home and you can see this is a safe prediction, but worthy of a mention.

Pass – As we said at the time, it was a no-brainer. In June 2009 the estimated number of virtual worlds users was around 186 million by one forecaster and it’s certainly grown since then.

Prediction 10: Virtual Goods will boom – the interest from business in virtual goods as a money-maker has accelerated significantly in the past six months in particular, and 2009 will see that continue. Second Life has been a leader in that aspect, followed closely by children’s worlds and gaming worlds. Goods will get more sophisticated, with much more real-world marketing efforts behind them. 2009 may also see some virtual goods out-rank popular real-life items in terms of sales and revenue.

Pass – driven by social games on platforms like Facebook, there’s been an explosive growth in the use of virtual currencies to purchase in-game goods. One industry study found that virtual currencies were the most traded virtual goods during 2009.

Seven out of ten correct isn’t too shabby, although there were some fairly easy wins amongst them. Our 2010 predictions will be published in the coming week. In the meantime, what are your thoughts on how 2009 played out compared to how you thought it would?

Alter Ego on SBS, and thoughts on vocabulary, identity, truth and perspective

wolfie-alterego-smlSo, here I am, watching the Alter Ego documentary on SBS. Indeed, it is still running at the time I am writing this. I’m not really quite sure what I expected. Not the usual sense of regretful chagrin that I’d expect at a documentary on Second Life, because Writer/Director Shelley Matulick is basically a good sort.

Nevertheless, the emotion that most comes to the surface right now is one of frustration.

“Real world”, “virtual world”, “real”, “fake”, “virtual” terms and prefixes are thrown around with little consistency, and make me wince or cringe.

It’s not really anyone’s fault, exactly. The users presented on the program lack the vocabulary to clearly express their experience. They obviously have a firm emotional and instinctual grasp of it, but not the conceptual vocabulary to clearly explain it to others.

For the part of the viewer, the average non-virtual-environment-user, well, without enough first-hand experience or a few doctorates in philosophy it’s really hard to absorb the concepts. Until we take our lives online in a decisive sort of way, we don’t really give much thought to core issues like identity or the fundamental nature of humanity – issues that remain relatively intractable after thousands of years of thought by the best minds that our species has to offer.

With such vast conceptual gulfs, how do you convey the obvious?

Good luck trying to explain it to someone who doesn’t have the common experience of a different perspective. Remember in Sesame Street, they had a number of animations that explained communication? One figure with a series of coloured shapes in their head, and as they spoke, the other person wound up with similar coloured shapes in their own head.

What we lack is a vocabulary to express the colours and the shapes. I tell you that there’s no difference between virtual identity and non-virtual identity.

In interviews with the BBC, I was often asked “What is the difference between virtual identity and real identity?”

The obvious and correct answer is that there isn’t any difference. If that doesn’t make sense, then it’s because you’ve misunderstood the nature of identity itself, rather than the nature of virtual identity.

It’s simple, it’s obvious, and if it doesn’t convey the proper concepts to you, then as a message it’s wrong, even if it’s the truth.

This is why the parable (παραβολή) was originally developed – sometimes a fictitious story can convey more truth than the factual one. If simpler truths cannot be grasped, metaphors, analogies and parables need to be employed. Rectitude is not only in possessing the truth, but in effectively sharing it.

Virtual environments, somewhat paradoxically, tell us more about the nature of our ordinary mundane world and selves than actually living it, because in order to grasp the nature of something very large or very close, you need perspective.

If you’re paying attention, a year of using a virtual environment will teach you more about humanity, identity and gender than 30 years of actually experiencing those things first-hand. If you’re not paying attention, though, it may teach you nothing at all.

Surfing the virtual world hype

Riding the hype wave of a new technology with a “world-first” isn’t exactly unusual. We’ve seen this a lot with Second Life, right?

But there’s actually other, more interesting lessons to be learned.

Firstly, the newspapers and magazines don’t really check if you’re first, so if you want you can just copy what someone else is doing. This happened a whole heck of a lot. If anyone actually does ask, you just slice it more finely. “First by a Fortune 500 company”, “First by a West-coast marketing firm run by octogenarian teachers”. Slice it finely enough and you can pretty much always claim a world first – and by golly, they do.

There were, from memory, four national embassies that opened in Second Life. Each claimed to be the first one (presumably using the slicing technique above, or just not doing the research). That brings us to the second technique, the one that gives you the most PR bang for the least buck:

Don’t actually do it. Seriously, this is a proven strategy.

Write and issue your press-release, outlining what amazing world-first you’ll be performing – then don’t follow through. By the time that peak of the hype cycle wore off, nobody noticed that you actually didn’t. Instead it became a fait accompli. Everyone more or less assumes that you did do it.

Assorted media pieces still refer to pizza-deliveries, programmes and concerts by famed celebrities that never actually happened, but the writers just assume that they did.

There’s your return-on-investment right there. All the hype, and none of the work. All you have to do is hit the timing right on the cyclical hype.

There’s a whole lot of businesses and organizations using Second Life in various ways. Many of the ones that you can name from media-coverage though, never actually did. However it didn’t apparently actually harm their PR efforts at all.

Anyone want to bet that this won’t happen with future virtual environments?

Virtual worlds as lawn mowing

lowell_mowingthelawnAlthough it’s mostly a throwback to the mid to late 20th Century, there’s still a significant cohort of Australians who associate mowing the lawn with the ‘Aussie lifestyle’ (I hate generalisations, but bear with me). There’s no shortage of people who still dream of owning their own land, on which they can inflict the weekly spring and summer routine of mowing the lawn. Last weekend I had the opportunity to do some lawn mowing, and it occurred to me that for widepsread adoption of virtual environments to occur, the in-world experience needs to be a lot more like mowing the lawn. Keep reading to see a metaphor beaten within an inch of its life.

Experience

Lawn mowing, like any experience, is for most people a combination of sensory input that creates a memory. For the person cutting the grass, it’s everything from the smell of the mower fuel, the noise of the mower, the physicality of starting it up and pushing it, the visuals of the enviroment you’re partially decimating and finally the odour of cut grass.

It’s no surprise there’s heavy research into the development of interfaces that integrate the senses as part of the virtual world experience – it may not be a must-have for effective interaction but it will ensure it gets as real as possible for those wanting the richest in-world experiences. The day I can smell petrol fumes as an avatar is when I know the revolution has occurred. Whether that’s a good thing is another lengthy argument.

Achievement

Ask any devoted mower of lawns and they’ll confirm one of the big rewards for their activity is seeing the chaos of long grass turned into a controlled, neat expanse. Yes, it’s a maddening perspective for a lot of people and there’s a lot of fence-sitters (like me) who enjoy seeing the neat results but like the unruly option as well. What underlies the mowing fetish is the sense of achievement of physically pushing a machine around that makes a difference to the look of your abode (and no, I will not divert to vaccuum cleaner metaphors as well). Gaming worlds have had this nailed down beautifully for years, and I can vouch for the fact World of Warcraft have polished that nail to a dazzling sheen. Social-oriented worlds like Metaplace and Farmville also have some pretty well fleshed out achievement systems. This is one aspect where the lawn mowing analogy comes into its own: we’re quite happy to push or ride the mower around the same circuit week after week, year after year if there’s a reward. Ring a bell, MMO grinders?

Ownership

Unless I have no choice, I don’t want someone else mowing my lawn. Sure, I’m happy to do someone else’s if they need me to, but it’s my lawn I’m passionate about and I want everyone to respect that and to also enjoy their green patch in their own way.

Virtual environments are struggling to come to grips with how best to achieve harmony with content ownership – you only need to look at this week’s Burning Life content theft issue in Second Life to see the ongoing challenges. There are still a lot of individuals quite happy to bring their plough over univited and rip a large channel through your prize turf. Part of the answer is governance and law enforcement, but the larger challenge is inculcating an acceptance of content ownership and rights across the entire virtual worlds sphere. Sure, the majority of us have that respect, but I’d wager there’s more plough-toting avatars than real-world equivalents.

Usability

If you’re lucky enough to own a lawn mower manufactured in the last 10 years or so, you’ll know how well they work now. Startup tends to be a breeze, they’re lighter to push around, emptying the catcher is easier and the days of choking on exhaust fumes are pretty much over. Most virtual environments are better than a 1954 Victa but most are still essentially 1988 models. They work fairly well but are heavy on the resources and make for a frustrating experience if used for long periods of time. To flog the analogy to death, there are still people who collect or even use old mowers, and the same applies to virtual worlds. Niches are good but the better model is always going to attract the bigger support.

The Last Word

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably had enough of the lawn mowing analaogy. But whether it’s that or another human experience like first love, the smell of freshly baked bread or the birth of a child, the point remains the same. We all want a lot more out of virtual environments and we’re likely to get it eventually. The trouble is, by that time I may be old enough that I’m yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

Make your predictions: Philip Rosedale’s next venture

Linden Lab Chairman (and former CEO) Philip Rosedale has let the Second Life community know he’s scaling back his day-to-day involvement with Linden Lab’s operations to focus on both his Chairmanship and a new venture. Not surprisingly he’s coy about the new venture, so it’s a perfect juncture for some speculation and hyperbole.

Fire away: what do you think the new venture is likely to be?

I’ll start off with both a conservative and a radical suggestion:

1. Conservative: a new business-centric virtual environment spin-off is created, that in no way leverages off Second Life.

2. Radical: Philip becomes CEO of an oil company to transition it to a renewable energy startup.

Over to you!

World of Warcraft: the ‘crack’ myth

firemage-sept2009Before I question some of the hyperbole floating around the mainstream media over the ‘World of Warcraft is like crack’ story, I have to make a disclosure. I do play World of Warcraft and am in fact a Level 80 Fire Mage. Snigger all you want, but there’s dozens, if not hundreds of you reading this that play WoW too, and you love it. More on that later.

The latest iteration of the ‘WoW as Crack’ story, finally picked up by the mainstream Australian media, is that a UK-based psychiatrist is asking WoW’s creator Blizzard Software to cough up some money to assist counsellors who want to get to know the game better. The theory is, once they understand what it is they’re dealing with, they can tailor interventions better. As a health professional myself, it actually makes a lot of sense. Without knowing the environment a person with a problematic behaviour interacts with, it’s difficult to fathom their motivations or triggers for what they are doing. Blizzard Software, not surprisingly, haven’t made a comment on the issue. They’re not about to trumpet the need for counselors to be embedded within their game, even though there have been some significant individual examples pop up here and there.

Some would argue Blizzard, or any game creator, aren’t under any obligation to assist the proportion of their clientele who play at harmful levels. Others will claim there’s as much a duty of care as say a tobacco company may have to its customers. The reality probably sits somewhere in the middle. It wouldn’t hurt Blizzard to fork out a few thousand dollars to assist health professionals trying to get their head around why a teenager or adult wants to spend 16 hours a day undertaking raids or quests. As a corporate citizen it’d give Blizzard some credibility and let them influence the agenda of how big the issue really is. As a proportion of its more than 11 million users who pay US$12.99 per month, truly addicted users would only make up a tiny percentage. Add to that those who compulsively play (there’s a difference) and you have a bigger population but still far from the majority. There’s no doubt there are people whose lives are seriously damaged by addiction to massive multiplayer games – it’s just that they’re well and truly outnumbered by those who’ve found a whole new social outlet or those exploring the learning opportunities.

Which brings me back to those of you who play WoW: next time you log in, type “/played” in your chat window and be dismayed or amazed at how many days you’ve been a Troll Shaman. I put in around 25 days of time per year in WoW, which probably makes me borderline compulsive. That said, I’ve substituted 2-3 hours per day of Australian Idol and Rove for an activity that requires strategy, socialisation and hand/eye coordination. How is that undesirable behaviour?

Linden Lab founder and CEO give a glimpse of Second life’s future

mlindenDaniel Voyager has tweeted the keynotes from M and Philip Linden at SLCC 2009. You can view M Linden’s 104 presentation slides here.

Key tweets from Daniel that interested me in particular were:

1. Philip Linden

There will be lots of change. The prairie where we are now can become New York City

Hmm, interesting perspective. Some people actually like living on the prairies – this has the smell of progress at expense of lifestyle all around it. I do see the point but it’s an unfortunate metaphor.

Things are changing extremely rapidly and the impact will be revolutionary not evolutionary

Extremely common corporate speak that pretty much says the same thing as the first point.

Try and understand we’re at the very beginning, we’re going to have to weather tremendous change

See points one and two above – I’m waiting for the ‘duck and cover’ lecture.

We are at the very beginning. We’ll not like all the changes. It is inevitable. Try to work with us, let go a bit

I get the picture Philip, I really do. How about some vision behind the revolution warning system? To be fair, I’m sure he said a lot more than what Daniel was able to Tweet, but there’s still a lot of ‘worlds in crisis’ talk.

To scale large, we need: More decentraliztion of services. But we have “right napkin drawings”

I’m giving the benefit of the doubt on this one, assuming he means the bright, radically changed future in store. If he meant that the ongoing organic growth of Second Life is still reliant on good ‘napkin drawings’, then I hope some people at SLCC in person threw things.

2. M Linden

We’re coming out of the trough of disillusionment. In the middle of a top to bottom renovation

The Trough of Disillusionment – that has to be a movie or album title if it isn’t already. Snap it up while you can! Or was it the title of the focus group report after the introduction of Jar Jar Binks into the Star Wars franchise?

We’re at SL 1.0 heading to 2.0. We probaly need to get to 10.0 for billion users

Hard to argue with this. That said, I think the game will have changed so irretrievably in the next few years that the idea of Second Life having a billion users may be just a little fanciful in what’s likely to be one big field of competitors,

SL will bring more of the web into second life and more of second life into the web

Absolutely – it’ll be how embeddable Second Life is that really determines its ongoing success.

Overall, there’s not a lot surprising in the details: you’d expect a CEO and Board member to cite the need for ongoing good growth, a commitment to innovation and an upbeat assessment on the future. With the cynicism meter lowered a little, it’s fair to say M Linden has overseen some improvements in the usability and stability of Second Life. Add to that the ongoing good growth in the number of residents and the overall economy and it seems the revolution may happen. Whether it’s a bloodless one is yet to be seen.

VastPark ‘vs’ Second Life: is it really a contest?

vastpark Serge Soudoplatoff is a French entrepreneur and VastPark investor I had the opportunity of spending a morning with on his recent Australian visit. He has written an interesting piece comparing Second Life and VastPark from an IT architecture viewpoint. There’s not a lot to disagree with, but I do wonder whether VastPark is going to gain the momentum it needs to ensure its arguably superior architecture gets the widespread adoption it may deserve.

It’s an increasingly aging comparison, but it’s like the VHS vs Beta days – in the end it comes down to popularity and in that respect, VastPark currently isn’t in the game when compared to Second Life. The test for the underdog is to secure that first big win in market share – it’s a strategy I have no doubt is being explored by VastPark in parallel with the very methodical approach to development displayed over recent years. Not that it should be a linear competition: it’s the ability for any company to offer a highly interoperable platform that’s likely to have ongoing success.

Additionally, I don’t believe VastPark see themselves in the ‘keeper of the world’ role that Linden Lab occupies. In that respect, Metaplace is probably a better comparison, with the end-user purchasing a world and using the supplied tools and plugins to create. Second Life certainly has content creation at its core, but Linden Lab also run the ‘government’ and economy, with the myriad of ramifications that has. VastPark will no doubt have it’s own terms of service, but I’d be surprised if they don’t have a different focus than Linden Lab’s.

Without wanting to sound like a fence-sitter, both VastPark and Second Life have incredible things to offer. Hopefully both will provide key components for an ever-improving virtual worlds experience. The only certainty is that neither will do it on their own.

Man vs Second Life: a tale of disenchantment

A month or so ago, we featured a machinima called Man vs. Second Life, as our Machinima of the Week. It was a notable piece of humour and well and truly deserved the more than fifty thousand views it has received to date. Here is it in case you hadn’t seen it:

A little over a week ago, the creator of Man vs. Second Life, Hugity, posted a follow-up on YouTube to announce his departure from Second Life. What’s fascinated me with his near seven minute video is the mix of thoughtful insights on his creation mixed with some very judgmental comments about Second Life and furries in particular. His disdain for those who are regularly involved with Second Life is obvious and he looks forward to developing his career in “real video production”. Here’s the response in full:

What’s your take? What points do you agree with and what do you see as misinformed views?

Proposed ISP filtering allows surveillance of journalists, citizens, politicians

Should Senator Conroy’s proposed ISP filtering come to fruition, it concentrates extraordinary powers on whoever is to actually run it. It allows the surveillance of the Internet activities of Kevin Rudd’s children, the journalists at News Limited, or the government’s perceived political opponents (or its own members), or of anyone.

At will. Without cause. Without warrant. Without oversight.

Whether or not you agree with the filtering plan’s goals, this one thing should give you pause: your web-browsing history, and the web-browsing history of every Australian is available to some as-yet-unknown party, from the moment mandatory ISP filtering is switched on.

Sure, the contractor who provides the filtering service, and who maintains the systems will doubtless have all sorts of NDAs. But if someone in Rudd’s family browses porn from The Lodge, for example, then there’s considerable potential for leverage and extortion, because the contractor could obtain that data at will, even if government officials themselves could not, by law, obtain it.

Because filtering systems are logged. Filtering providers are, in fact, very keen on logging. Whether a request is blocked or allowed, the fact of it is recorded. Filtering providers use it to assess how well the system is performing. Individual user addresses are at times monitored from the logs, and some of that data is processed by humans to identify new things that should be blocked, or to see how people are attempting to defeat the filtering.

Whoever is providing and controlling the filtering gains unprecedented political power. Want to know what the journalists at a particular newspaper are up to? Scan the logs for their network addresses and check out what they’re reading on the Web. Ditto for other politicians. Or for anyone of interest, from parliamentarians to cleaners.

The potential for abuse here is absolutely appalling.

All you have is the word of people that these secrets won’t leak or be abused. Won’t they? The preliminary filter lists have already leaked, and contain quite a number of things that are far beyond what we’ve been told would be there. Our trust has already been violated even during the trial phase.

It’s only a matter of time before someone uses this data for their personal or political advantage.

And we, as a nation, are making it all too easy for that to happen.

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