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3D and kids: we just don’t know

January 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

One of the more interesting issues over the past year has been around 3D at consumer level. Whether it’s 3D TVs or handheld 3D gaming, there’s a significantly ramped up debate on potential issues around the technologies. An example is this story covering Nintendo’s warning on excessive use of its 3DS handheld gaming device. The company has rightly been transparent, even if only to cover future potential legal liabilities, in its desire to frame the level of use of such devices.

There’s exactly one fact in the debate over the impact of 3D on kids and their development: we do not know in any way, shape or form what that impact is. An educated guess would be that excessive use could have a harmful impact and that in well-structured settings some use of 3D environments could actually be beneficial. However, until there’s a solid body of evidence supporting either of those claims, everything else is theorising or spin. That is likely to be the case for a number of years yet, as building the research body on top of the great work to date is a huge task. It’s an even bigger task given the tendency for most 3D environments to be closed shops owned by large companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

In the meantime expect lots of hype and probably an equivalent amount of hysteria. For those interested in the area, an interview I conducted with Andrew Campbell from the University of Sydney’s Prometheus Research team eighteen months ago is still very pertinent in addressing the complexities of the area.

I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on the likely impacts, both positive and negative, of the seeming diffusion of 3D devices in the home.

Filed Under: General News, General Tech, Health, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Virtual worlds predictions for 2011

December 31, 2010 by 22 Comments

It’s time to get out the crystal ball again. I thought I’d take a slightly different approach this year by tackling ten fairly broad themes and identifying appropriate specifics under each. I tried to cover all of the main issues though the field is so large now as to ensure any roundup like this won’t be complete.

Hopefully there’ll be a better success rate than last year. As always, would love to hear your thoughts on what you see occurring during 2011. If you’ve got your own set of predictions, either post them in the comments or provide a URL and I’ll link it at the bottom of the post.

The predictions:

1. Second Life

It’s fair to say that Linden Lab had a mixed year during 2010 with Second Life. 2011 is likely to be even more turbulent. I’m not going to fence sit on this one too much: the next 12 months will see Linden Lab finally sold to a big tech player based in the US. Whether it’s bought out or not, expect some more significant user-interface improvements but an overall decline in number of hours in-world per user. That decline will be driven primarily by diffusion as dedicated content creators, educators and long-term residents increasingly spread out to OpenSim grids, Blue Mars etc . Second Life might see an increase in concurrency, coming from the more casual / social users attracted by an easier to use interface. That seems to be Linden Lab’s strategy anyway. Oh – and legally compliant gambling will be provided in-world by Linden Lab.

2. OpenSim

The safe prediction here is ongoing growth, but beyond that it’s a pretty murky picture. Consolidation is one of the clearer trends: a handful of grid providers will probably hold some dominance, with a skew of smaller / solo grids running. Hypergrid protocols are ever-improving, but for wider-adoption the larger providers will play a key role assuming they can keep delivering good service with a growing userbase. So overall: continued growth and emergence / consolidation of larger grid provders.

3. Blue Mars

Over the past year Blue Mars has been continuing to evolve and has picked up a cohort of Second Life content creators. Assuming the funding keeps coming in, that growth is likely to continue although it’s doubtful that 2011 will see Blue Mars reach full launch and if it does, expect a slow but promising level of uptake by new users. Unless Second Life has a major stumble, Blue Mars won’t be in its league as far as content or user numbers during 2011 – 2012 may be a different story though depending on how things pan out with both camps.

4. The casual phenomenon

The casual worlds like on platforms like Facebook will continue to fragment. Numbers will continue to grow but at a much slower rate. Fatigue with the limitations will also grow as people debate the merit of these worlds versus more traditional casual games (think Bejeweled etc). Not surprisingly there will also be a lot of underperforming worlds that close – exacerbating the fatigue with the genre from more experienced users.

5. Media and societal acceptance

The coming year will see increasing focus on how we interact in virtual environments. The Microsoft Kinect is already receiving a lot of attention, and the media are likely to latch onto the theme of improving physical activity whilst highlighting the odd case of severe addiction/injury. Nothing new there really – the difference over time however is the growing acceptance that these developments need to be incorporated into society’s thinking on a range of issues. Key educators and policy-makers have known this for years but that widespread acceptance (if not understanding) is certainly taking a big step during 2011.

6. Government

The momentum with virtual worlds at the US Government level is significant, driven primarily by intertwined military and health-care needs. Beyong that 2011 seems a pretty arid zone on the government side. Although there are potential cost-savings in the longer-term, most European governments aren’t in a financial state to invest heavily in ‘cutting edge’ work. In the Asia-Pacific I’m always surprised at the lack of overt work in the area and don’t expect 2011 to be any different. On the home front, the national political scene is favourable only from the viewpoint of the National Broadband Network rolling out. Government 2.0 initiatives are at a fairly early stage and virtual environments aren’t playing any active role in that anyway at this stage.

7. Browser-based evolution

Like it or not, people want the ease of a browser-based virtual world without losing too much of the complexity. This year will see that trend continue with some good new options emerging. Using Second Life as an example, development is well underway both at Linden Lab and externally. What you definitely won’t see this year however is a browser-based experience as good as the standalone offering. That’s well over 12 months away but it is coming.

8. Gaming Worlds

2011 is actually a huge year for MMOs. The key event will be the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). We’ve been following it pretty closely and so far it’s looking like it’ll be successful. There’ll be a lot of talk about SWTOR being a World of Warcraft killer. That’s a lot of hyperbole (for 2011 at least) but expect it to pick up a very significant user base in a short time. To be more specific, by end of 2011 I’d expect subscriber numbers to be sitting between two and three million minimum.

World of Warcraft itself will see fairly steady or slightly declining numbers maintained by the recent Cataclysm expansion, with continued dominance of the market for the coming year.

9. Business

Absolute status quo: there will be no increased level of traction with business beyond some further acceptance of virtual meeting solutions. The ROI equation for business till isn’t clear enough, making adoption of virtual worlds technologies an exception to the rule. Good research (see Point 10 below) will be crucial for this to change.

10. Research and Development

The number of virtual worlds research projects will continue to increase, with a particular focus on areas such as simulation and the neuropsychological aspects of virtual reality. The simulation research will be pivotal in building solid cases for business, non-government and government adoption of the technology. In an environment where more and more human services professionals are needed in an ageing population, simulation makes huge sense and will be a key driver in the medium term.

___

So what say you? Let the debate begin.

Filed Under: Australian News, General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

2010 virtual worlds predictions review

December 21, 2010 by 5 Comments

It’s that time of the year again: looking back over the predictions made a year ago and seeing how right or wrong we were. We managed 7 out of 10 correct in 2009, so let’s see how it goes:

Prediction 1: OpenSim will continue or even improve on its growth trajectory – the momentum will continue, although a handful of larger grids are likely to have the lion’s share of that growth, with all the challenges that go along with it.

Pass – this has very much come to pass,and to some extent the growth challenges haven’t been major at this stage due to the number of grid options out there.

Prediction 2: Australia will have its first government funded virtual environment – a proposal is already underway to see this come to fruition. Education will be the focus, but the foresight of the proposal’s facilitators is likely to ensure it involves business, education and government in a collaborative partnership.

Fail – the proposal has stalled and although there’s a dedicated cohort of people still working at this, it certainly didn’t reach fruition during 2010.

Prediction 3: Closures – it’s not a desirable prediction to make, but unfortunately it’s also a fairly safe one. There’ll be company and/or platform failures. Some may be bought out, but like Metaplace in the past week, there’s going to be some outright shuttering of some environments. I have some specific ones in mind but don’t have the data to support naming them specifically as being on a ‘death watch’.

Pass – once touted as a Second Life competitor, There.com unfortunately closed its doors.

Prediction 4: Intellectual property disputes – The Eros vs Linden Lab action is likely to be resolved during 2010 and it will generate a large precedent in regards to virtual goods. Linden Lab will probably defend the action successfully, but the playing field will still have changed considerably.

Fail – the Eros case isn’t resolved as yet, so any precedents are far from established. Expect that to occur in the next few months though.

Prediction 5: Integration – Whether it be Second Life or Habbo Hotel, the level of integration between virtual environments and social media services will increase. Whether it’s a Facebook Connect sign-in or the ability to Tweet from Second Life, that functionality will move from the plugin / add-on phase to core architecture more commonly.

Pass – the Facebook connect option is spreading like wildfire, Linden Lab have done a lot of work this year in integrating logins between their web properties and Second Life itself, and the Twitter option is well and truly alive in Second Life (one example).

Prediction 6: ABC in Second Life – I don’t have any inside knowledge on this, and I really hope I’m proved wrong, but I can’t see the ABC continuing to fund its Second Life presence beyond 2010. For the past year, the majority of the activity on ABC Island has come from its tight-knit community, with support from ABC staff. With the burgeoning ABC Online continuing to grow, there’s always the risk that the Second Life component will be squeezed out. Please, prove us wrong on this one.

Fail – I’ve thankfully been proven wrong on this one so far.

Prediction 7: The mandatory ISP filter – If the legislation passes during 2010, there remains a real possibility of adult content in Second Life and elsewhere falling foul of the filter. There were some gob-smackingly naive acceptances of Linden Lab’s claim they’d heard nothing about being affected by the filter and therefore were not concerned. There’s a chance everything will be fine but given the blacklist isn’t defined, nothing is certain at this stage. Our prediction: Australia-specific verification mechanisms will need to be put in place for Second Life and other environments where content creation occurs.

N/A – The legislation is far from finalised so this prediction is neither right or wrong. More on that in the 2011 predictions next week.

Prediction 8: Taxation of virtual goods – 2010 will see the United States further formalise taxation arrangements in regard to virtual goods. I doubt the Australian Tax Office will make any substantive rulings in the coming twelve months.

Fail – If any further formalisation has occurred, it’s not been announced. The global financial crisis will have played a role there as well.

Prediction 9: Gaming worlds – 2010 is going to see the largest MMO launch since World of Warcraft: Star Wars The Old Republic. It won’t eclipse the incumbent but it will become the solid number 2 player in the short-term, with all bets off in the longer term. The second half of 2010 also sees the launch of the next World of Warcraft expansion, called Cataclysm. Head-to-head clashes in the MMO industry don’t get much bigger, and it’ll make for some fascinating times.

Fail – Star Wars the Republic is slated for an April 2011 release 😉

Prediction 10: Social games – this year saw social games like Farmville take off in a big way. There’ll be some significant fatigue from users with these platforms, but there’ll also be further innovation to make them more engaging and with easier integration of virtual goods without the spam-like accompaniments that plague people’s Twitter or Facebook timelines. Overall: continuation of exponential growth, albeit not at the same level it has been the past six months.

Pass – the growth has continued with some much needed Farmville alternatives. There’s been the fatigue factor which has led to some improvements.

___

Four out of nine (factoring in the non-applicable NBN legislation) isn’t a great result this year! I can claim it’s been a turbulent year for virtual worlds, and that’s true, but overall I’ve made the mistake of expecting progress too soon.

Over to you: what’s your take on 2010. Has it been disappointing, surprising or just plain evolutionary?

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With:

Second Life and gambling: reversal on the horizon?

December 9, 2010 by 1 Comment

A blast from the past..

Tateru Nino never fails to have her nose to the ground on Linden Lab developments. Her latest scoop is in relation to gambling, with her in-depth post alleging a return to gambling on the cards for 2011. Essentially a partnership with a gambling company is potentially under consideration by the Linden Lab board.

If this does come to pass, it’ll obviously engender some debate. For me such a decision would be a further clarion call from the Lab on its absolute commercial focus now. The improved ability to segregate adult content makes gambling more viable from a legal compliance perspective, but there’ll still be no shortage of challenges. It still seems a little sad to me that new educators are now going to be paying full price for space whilst there’s potentially going to be growth in gambling presences. Seems a little too much like the physical world to me. What are your thoughts?

Read Tateru’s full story.

Update: Pete Gray, Linden Lab’s PR Manager, has dropped me a line on the issue:

In 2007, we enacted a ban on gambling in Second Life to ensure our platform remained in compliance with applicable US laws. Those laws remain in place, and we will of course continue to follow all applicable state and federal laws.

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm: lessons for virtual worlds

November 30, 2010 by 5 Comments

A Cataclysmic Westfall

I’ve covered my experiences with World of Warcraft a couple of times here, and I’ve now been playing for more than three years. Even if you don’t play, you may have heard that Blizzard Entertainment are about to release the third expansion / fourth instalment for World of Warcraft, called Cataclysm. It’s a fairly standard formula now for MMOs – release an expansion every couple of years to keep current players interested, draw back some of the player base that may have already left, and ideally drag in a bunch of new players. Cataclysm is likely to do all of those things, but on top of that I’d argue it’s caused an interesting phenomenon: a fairly widespread sense of loss. It’s also I believe set a new standard in transitioning to a new expansion. Let’s look at both issues in a little more detail.

The loss

This expansion involves a continuation of the WoW storyline whereby Deathwing causes an enormous amount of geographic upheaval on Azeroth. Think tsunamis, earthquakes and the like. There’s now water in a lot of places where there were villages / encampments / quest zones. There are now gaping chasms in areas, including key cities like Stormwind. It’s very exciting to explore all the changes, but that’s also where the sense of loss kicks in. Over the past three years, I’ve become attached to a lot of areas in the game, and I’m actually not happy that some have changed. Take Gadgetzan for example – one of its key striking features was the fact it was in the middle of a desert. Now it has water right at its eastern wall. Although I never would have thought so, I miss how Gadgetzan used to be. Like any loss, over time I’ll incorporate it into my experience but I’ll still remember what it used to be like.

Is it a life-changing loss? No – not even in the context of my character’s life. It’s more the jarring sensation of a new visual in place of three years’ experience. Expecting permanence in a virtual world isn’t reasonable, but it does happen to be a very human trait, as is a reaction of anxiety to change. It’s not a new issue by any means for virtual worlds, but this is one of the bigger examples. Once the full expansion hits the servers on December 7th, the scale of the changes will be fully apparent. I’m sure no-one will need counselling on their loss, but there’s certainly some interesting further research potential.

The transition

It’s a common story-telling technique: build tension over a period of time prior to a major event. Blizzard have done this with each of their expansions (although I felt the pre-Lich King one was a little half-baked), and the Cataclysm lead up has been no exception. I’ve really enjoyed the storyline over recent weeks and loved the feeling of crisis in Stormwind as the changes started occurring. Aside from the rightfully expected story transition, I’m equally impressed at how they’ve managed the technical transition to the new content. From what I can gather, essentially all of the content for the expansion is likely sitting on your hard drive now, with your license key purely unlocking it on the 7th. Additionally, a lot of the smaller new content can already be explored, helping to build excitement when it’s all revealed. Finally, the staged download of the new content works well, with background downloading as you play. Again, none of it is specifically surprising but the implementation has been relatively smooth and Blizzard deserve kudos for it.

The sum-up

On the gaming side of the virtual world equation, the means by which end users are hooked into the product are extremely well established. When an MMO is around long enough that people are emotionally affected by changes to it, you know they’re probably getting a few things right. Less rigid environments like Second Life, Blue Mars, OpenSim grids and the like, can only translate such lessons to a certain extent. What they can mimic 100% is integrating the technical side of things with the user’s experience. That hasn’t changed in decades but it seems there’s still a lot of catch-up being done in that regard.

Filed Under: Gaming Worlds, General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Original content versus fan content

November 26, 2010 by 9 Comments

With studios and publishers flinging infringement notices around about fan-based role-playing environments online, it’s worth looking at the situation from another perspective.

After all, why not just create new, original theme properties rather than basing role-play environments on popular books, movies and television shows? Why do so when official gaming environments already exist in some cases?

Well, there’s a number of reasons. Creating a fleshed-out themed environment that isn’t just a rehash of something that already exists, is actually really hard. It’s time-consuming, requires any would-be gamer to learn a lot about your specific property (which means endless amounts of documentation, lore and history needs to be written), and you generally start out without any real support. How does a gamer even know they’ll like your theme – as a non-profit effort, your advertising options are limited, and you may never attract a large enough following to make all of the effort worthwhile.

By contrast, plugging into an existing theme is easy. There’s always a wealth of pre-existing material to work from. DVDs, books, movies, fan-fiction and more. Everyone already knows whether the theme is to their taste, all the information they could wish for is widely available, and the only matter for their consideration is whether they like or dislike the software on which the environment is running, the rules and the management. Even grabbing the smallest fraction of an established fan-base can make you a huge hit in role-play circles.

When it is embraced, it can work very well indeed. I used to participate in a particular Star Trek MUSH online. Among the players were a handful of members of the crew, cast and writers for the series. It was fascinating seeing story elements from that game appearing later in later seasons of the canon television series.

That’s perhaps an almost ideal symbiosis, but all of that was happening without the knowledge of the rights-holders who probably would have shut the arrangement down punitively, had they become aware of it.

These days there’s now a Star Trek Online MMOG, but dozens of Star Trek role-play environments still exist online, and new ones still get created. Why is that?

It’s because the ‘official’ environments don’t offer the role-playing versatility and opportunities that many online, fan-created role-playing environments do. You can take your pick of game-systems. You can even find environments without any coded game-systems, simply relying on the creativity and fair-play of participants – essentially limiting play only to what players are jointly willing to agree to.

White Wolf’s World of Darkness is perhaps the single most popular role-play setting online over the last couple of decades. That property has become a part of CCP, the makers of EVE Online who are now working it up into an MMOG.

What will happen to the hundreds of role-play environments online that operate under the World of Darkness rules and/or setting? Will CCP’s lawyers come after them as the game gets closer to release? Will they only get shut down if the World of Darkness MMOG fails to attract enough usage? World of Darkness games are – traditionally – rather light on scripted game-mechanics, and trend towards humans creating their own stories and performing their own dispute-resolution, aided by administrators – a model which I do not see CCP necessarily indulging in.

A World of Darkness MMOG might simply not appeal to the tens of thousands of WoD gamers already playing in virtual environments today, and that could well put CCP on some awkward public-relations ground if it chooses to protect its rights – rights for which many millions of dollars have been spent already.

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, User-generated, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

Is Linden Lab up to the job of keeping younger teens safe in Second Life?

October 3, 2010 by 5 Comments

In some ways the decisions surrounding Linden Lab’s closure of Teen Second Life, and the plans for its teen users represent an almost perfect microcosm of Linden Lab process.

There’s the decision to close Teen Second Life, apparently made without consulting with … well, anybody at all. As a part of this, older teens (16-17 years old) will be migrated to the adult grid along with their elders, but under some restrictions that remain a secret at present, despite now being just a few weeks away.

There’s the much better decision to allow younger teens (13-15) to be allowed a form of restricted access to Second Life, in order for a number of worthy education, community and support programmes to continue. A decision which appears to have been grudgingly granted at the behest of programme providers, and which doubtless would have surfaced originally, if they had only been consulted.

Now it remains to be seen if Linden Lab can carry this off. A mix of teens and adults in Second Life can be a potentially volatile mix from a public-relations and media perspective. Reducing the risk of potential scandal will require the utmost care and attention-to-detail from Linden Lab as they prepare to migrate users.

Fortunately, most of the code required for younger teen users appears to already be a part of the grid systems, and has been mostly successful at keeping Teen Second Life and Second Life largely isolated from each-other so far. There’s certainly some expressing doubts that Linden Lab will be able to competently meet the challenge, as many feel that those levels of care and quality-assurance exceed the organisation’s capabilities.

The plan with younger teens is to restrict them to the estates of a sponsoring organisation or programme. Each of the younger 13-15yo teens will be signed on with a particular group, and allowed no access beyond that group. Adult members of the organisation will keep estate-controls tight, allowing only approved and authorised adults access. Additionally, younger teen accounts would not have access to the new Second Life marketplace on the Web.

Now, that’s good, but clearly it isn’t enough. Teens in Teen Second Life have thus far had much greater protections than this, being protected from messaging by adult accounts who weren’t currently logged into the teen estate (a very limited privilege), and unable to be sent content by adult accounts from outside of the teen estate.

Under the new system, adult accounts in the sponsoring group would clearly be able to bring content into the sponsoring estate from the broader grid of Second Life, or (while in the estate) give content to or instant-message a younger-teen account in their sponsored group. These are fine. What about instant-messages or inventory transfers from adult accounts outside of the sponsored estate, however?

If those were to be permitted, any teen could be sent prurient account or sexually harassed by any adult or prankster with a throwaway account who wished to do so. That’s a media scandal in the making right there, and there’s certainly a minority of people in the world who would choose just such tactics to cause one.

As I said, of course, the code exists now to prevent this inappropriate crossing of estate boundaries with respect to contact with younger-teens, if it is appropriately planned, carefully adapted and diligently tested, and if Linden Lab has even thought to do so.

The question is, is Linden Lab up to the job of keeping younger teens safe in Second Life?

Update (Lowell): On top of the Teen grid decision, Linden Lab have now announced a cessation of discounted pricing for educators purchasing full regions on the main grid. It’s hard to see a result other than less nuanced education projects as pricing forces them to Homestead and Open Space regions. More on this later.

Filed Under: Education, General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds

The ins and outs of Intel’s OpenSim scaling

September 14, 2010 by 3 Comments

By now, you’ve probably read about Intel’s experiments in boosting the performance of open-source Second Life workalike OpenSim to very large numbers of users – or at least very large numbers of users compared to a traditional Second Life simulator.

You may have seen the video, if not, it’s here:

All of this, ultimately, is apparently going to become an open part of the OpenSim codebase.

Unfortunately, the potential utility of this is a bit limited. It works fine for ScienceSim, at present (albeit it is considered more of a demonstration than a practical system right now), but the possibilities of deriving large benefits from it if you’re not already a well-heeled organisation are actually a wee bit limited.

The system uses a ‘distributed scene-graph’ technology in a form of computing sometimes referred to as distributed- or cluster-computing. The distributed scene-graph slices the simulation-space up into optimal chunks, based on workload, and parcels out the workload to other servers, while keeping processing in lockstep so that no part of the simulation races ahead or falls behind. Here’s Intel’s Dan Lake’s slides on how it works.

The very first barrier of this solution then is hardware. You need a number of capable servers, and the simulation could wind up limited by the ability of the slowest server to cope with the load.

On the other hand, the same cluster can deal with a number of simulators concurrently, so long as things don’t get so busy as to overwhelm the hardware cluster.

The biggest issue, really, is bandwidth. The servers need to shovel a quite astonishing amount of data between them, and the cluster as a whole also needs to be able to deliver bandwidth to every client with a viewer.

If each viewer has its bandwidth slider set to no more than 500, then we’re looking at up to 500Kbps of data for one user. Ten users is up to 5Mbps, the 500 users shown in the video potentially runs up to 250Mbps. Many Second life users will tell you that 500Kbps for the viewer doesn’t exactly yield a snappy response when things get busy, so the peak bandwidth loads back to individual viewers could potentially be much higher.

So, what we’ve got here is a great technology, and a solid step forward in virtual environment simulation, but for practical uses it is limited to very-high-speed local networks, or to companies for whom the costs of hardware and high-capacity network connections are not really much of a consideration.

Filed Under: General News, Op-ed, Open Source, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: ,

One click can make all the difference

August 20, 2010 by 4 Comments

Linden Lab is cutting the Second Life Community Gateways programme from August 19 (giving Community Gateway operators just 18 hours notice of the pending termination). If you haven’t been through the Second Life orientation lately, you might not even be clearly aware of what the programme is.

The idea was simple enough. Since the Lab didn’t care to have a full-time employee doing the necessary work on new user orientation, a variety of groups who thought they could outdo the Lab were presented as optional starting areas for new users.

Not everyone was right. Even compared to the standard orientation experience’s very low bar, some of the Community Gateway experiences apparently “stank on ice”.

Some did okay though. There used to be a Google spreadsheet circulating around with various specifics of the CG programme, though I lost the link some time ago. What struck me is how small a number of the total pool of new signups took the Community Gateway option.

Indeed, according to the Lab, many gave up on the Web-site when presented with the choice of going to a Community Gateway or taking the standard orientation experience.

Think about that for a moment.

Presented with the choice, many users chicken out and we may never see them again.

Weekly Second Life signups for week 32, 2010 It’s certainly popular wisdom that 30% of new users don’t actually ever log in. I don’t know if that’s still true now, five years later, or not. I’m not sure if that’s a figure that the Lab would really be all that keen to share lately. There’s between ten and twelve thousand new Second Life signups every day, but it doesn’t seem like more than a couple of hundred actually make it through the proverbial first-hour.

In what seems like a startling digression, there’s an interesting balancing act I can tell you about in writing for the Web. It isn’t really all that startling a digression, as you’ll notice in a moment.

Articles with more than one part are obviously preferable from a page-view perspective. More page-views means more advertising dollars, so if you want more advertising dollars then you want more page-views.

Simple, you think, I will break my article up into parts! Each time the user clicks through, that will be another page-view!

But it isn’t so easy. A lot depends on who you are, who your audience is and what your article is about, but a good rule of thumb is that 25-30% of your readers won’t click through to the second page. 25-30% of those that do won’t click through to the third page. And so on.

It’s easy to watch that process from the Web-traffic logs, and get solid numbers, and they’re numbers that remain surprisingly consistent. It isn’t even as if you’re asking the user to make much of a choice. It’s just “click the link for the next part.”

So, yes, the Lab – while criticized at the time for it – was definitely right to shorten the number of steps in registration. Every click (and every choice) between the start of registration and actually turning up in Second Life with a prefab avatar you’re losing attention, and thus bleeding out audience.

That’s why the whole Second Life viewer in a browser keeps coming up over and over again, hiding software downloads, updates and installs from the user and all of that. For now, the Lab is going to just use its own orientation system, presumably until they follow-through on announced plans to eliminate that as well.

Eliminating even one step could cause a massive jump in retention, if it is done right. Just reducing the number of clicks and choices willy-nilly and without planning isn’t necessarily going to improve matters. You might get more people actually logging in, but who are simply unprepared for the welter of possibilities that the virtual environment then presents to them.

Filed Under: General News, Metrics, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds

Linden Lab CEO starts to turn the ship

August 15, 2010 by 4 Comments

For Second Life residents, this time of year usually generates a lot of interest due to the Second Life Community Convention. There’s no shortage of that interest this year given the tumultuous year to date and the return of Philip Rosedale to the CEO role. In a fairly relaxed presentation, Rosedale laid out Linden Lab’s plans for the remainder of this year and into 2011. Some of it he’d covered previously in communications on the official Lab blog and in-world, but there was also plenty of new information. Highlights included:

  • A rebuttal of press and resident perceptions that Linden Lab are financially challenged, emphasising that the Lab have been profitable “for years” and that they remain on a “stable footing”
  • An outline of the strategy-setting process undertaken on Rosedale’s return to the CEO role (not surprisingly there was no substantive comment on the previous CEO or layoffs) – the aim is now to make Second Life “Fast, Easy and Fun”. There was an admission that currently the platform isn’t meeting those aims on a regular basis
  • The tactical plan for delivering the faster, easier and more fun Second Life involves:
    • a “back to basics”  approach to identify fundamental flaws in user experience and to fix them – lag being the biggest target.
    • a focus on “winning back the lead” that involves further innovation in-world around content creation, with the promise of software updates as often as weekly, to deliver a much-improved Viewer in addition to background improvements
    • working on “the economy” in a way that ensures growth and makes digital content delivery easier – removing the ‘box on the head’ syndrome that new residents can experience
  • Specific improvements promised by end of 2010:
    • Fixing latency of group chat and problems with region crossings / teleports
    • The time from logging in to being able to effectively use Second Life will be improved by a factor of two
    • Reducing crash rates further
    • “Markedly change” the number of avatars per region – the actual increase isn’t being committed to at this stage, but the intention for 2011 is to deliver “big, big jumps”
    • Controls on avatar complexity in order to help deliver the previous four points
  • A second list of longer-term commitments:
    • Second Life mesh-based content now that bandwidth and highly complex prim constructions make it an option performance-wise (a beta-version will be available for testing by year’s end)
    • A more sophisticated naming system including elimination of the surname restriction and further name customisation options
    • Background downloading of Viewer update
    • Teen Second Life is officially on schedule for termination, with 16 and 17 year-olds allowed to access the main grid given the clearer boundaries around adult content
    • A nod to the iPad as a potential Second Life delivery platform

You can watch the full 45-minute presentation plus all the follow-up questions below – it’s worth listening to the Q&A session as it covers key areas like Search problems, interoperability :

The take-home message from the presentation? Philip Rosedale is certainly back in the company with a vengeance, and the announcement of the roadmap and proposed changes is encouraging. That said, the Teen Grid closure and avatar complexity controls are likely to generate significant debate.

Rosedale said himself in the presentation that delivering the promises is what counts – there’s been no shortage of promise previously, with some of it delivered. The ratio between the two needs to get to 1:1 for Second Life to have a fighting chance of long-term survival. The most encouraging aspect is that Linden Lab’s CEO seems to understand that this is likely the last big strategic route change they can make before concerns on Second Life’s viability become an urgent issue for the company.

Over to you: what stands out for you as the positive and negative aspects of the Lab’s proposed direction?

Filed Under: Business, General News, Op-ed, Virtual Worlds Tagged With: , ,

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