Business week piles on SL feeding frenzy

As if Second Life wasn't getting enough press lately, Business Week has this article that goes into more of the teething pains that advertisers are experiencing setting up shop on the virtual wide web (tm).

There are some pretty breathless numbers in the article:

The three-year-old Web-based world has more than one million "residents" who spent $9 million in October on virtual land, products, and services. And while advertising's traditional outlets are losing eyeballs, so far this year the population of Second Life has increased 995% -- a growing potential consumer audience for marketing messages.

The part that I thought most interesting was the author's interpreation of Philip Rosedale's (CEO of Linden Labs) definition of Second Life:

But Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, says the supporting technology is continually advancing. "Second Life is improving in resolution and functionality at the rate of Moore's Law. The real world isn't getting better by the day." Rosedale views Second Life not as a multiplayer online role-playing game, like World of Warcraft, or in the same category as Will Wright's forthcoming Spore, which allows players to design their own species. Rather, he sees it as a new social-networking platform, like MySpace (NWS ). (emphasis is mine)

SL is certainly not a game in the traditional sense of the word. No keeping score (other than money I guess but that's just like First Life, right?), no 'levels' and no bad guys... unless you count the growing vandals that continue to be a problem for SL.

The article can be found here.

Second Life's back-end

As Virtual worlds come and go we're still figuring out how to build (and probably more importantly) scale these things.

There's an interesting article over on the O'Reilly website that has an interview with Cory Ondrejka and Ian Wilkes of Linden Labs regarding their back-end db experiences and their plans for the future.

Check it out here.

Virtual Travel

What is a virtual world?

Do the simulated economies of on-line virtual worlds allow modeling of real economies?

The author of this paper thinks so. In the course of asking the question, normal issues of definition arrives one of them being "what constitutes a virtual world? The author outlines five specific attributes that I'll paraphrase below:

1. Interactivity
2. Persistence
3. Mass
4. Multimedia
5. Productivity
   

Interactivity: It's accessed remotely (i.e. by an internet connection) and simultaneously by a large number of people, with the actions of one person being visible to, and affecting the actions of, other people.

Persistence: the virtual world continues to exist whether anyone is using it or not; it
remembers the location of people and things, as well as the ownership of objects

Mass: this attribute refers to both the virtual world having achieved mass-market ( large number of users) and the physical meaning of mass, i.e. ‘weight,’ it's bound by physical rules such as impenetrability, gravity, etc.

Multimedia: each user interfaces with the environment through an avatar, or inworld physical manifestation, using multiple sensory inputs such as graphics, text, and audio; however, this need not necessitate a first-person interface. Thus, textbased environments such as multi-user dungeons (MUDs),5 while they may encourage economic behavior as well, are not considered.

Productivity: each user has the capacity to contribute to the type or number of goods and services within the environment, either through offering specific services to other users, combining resource goods to create other goods, or through retrieving resources from environment-generated phenomena. Since chat-based environments would not produce the kind of economic behavior sought—productive behavior—they would be excluded.

Over all, I generally like the list. It's only the last item, productivity, that I have trouble with. In order for a virtual world to be realistic or enjoyable, I'm not sure that that its citizens have for other members of the virtual world. I suppose that at one level coming into a virtual world to only be a consumer (i.e. purchasing services or objects created by others) adds to overall productivity as it brings money into the virtual economy that allows other members to be productive.

What do you think the attributes of an online virtual world are?