Second Life by Linden Lab, the company I've worked for since 2004, turn 20 today [video] | Hacker News Reader

Second Life by Linden Lab, the company I've worked for since 2004, turn 20 today [video]

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130 pointscallumprentice82 comments

"Second Life is a social experience", A dude infiltrating a biker gang in Second Life, this is top notch Internet humor for me, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaTYFs380rI

Can also recommend, Daniel is my guilty pleasure.

It’s only a matter of time before he starts making content in the Metaverse.

(What? You’re telling me that the decades-old Second Life and Garry’s Mod are still more compelling than Horizon Worlds? But I thought they spent millions?)

>decades-old Second Life and Garry’s Mod are still more compelling than Horizon Worlds

If I’d have been in Zucks shoes I would have Skunkworked Horizon, don’t let any of it touch the rest of meta till it’s successful and hire the entire dev and design team from ModDB, GarysMod community, Roblox game makers, VRChat community and 4chan.

Because those are the places where the massively multiplayer extremely social experiences that captivate for decades are born, not the metrics driven social media timeline optimization set.

Don't forget players from anarchy minecraft servers. Most metaverse place right now IMO.

He could have literally funded a competition and made 100 games and then do a closed or open beta and let the audience choose with the budget he allocated to the metaverse.

I would argue that Second Life is, and has been, a type of Metaverse. People can even use VR headsets these days.

The original thing called "Metaverse", in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash from 1992, described users buying virtual land from a finite area and populating it with their own buildings, and creating their own Avatars. I'm pretty sure Second Life was directly inspired by the Metaverse.

Bowmaster Daniel [0] is probably the hardest I've ever laughed at any internet video. Like, all the way to tears during the "intruder" climax. That poor kid was so earnest, and it's so mean, but... damn if it isn't hilarious.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssr1PMSNvwk

Wow. Thank you for this. My daughter and I just laughed like lunatics.

The metaverse is in the brain

This is so hilariously bizarre to me. Does Second Life have no concept of attacking? So basically all one can do is stand around making verbal threats at little cartoon characters?

You can also threaten to make a flying dong.

The avatars don't have health points and the simulation lacks death mechanics like a traditional MMO.

Griefing is typically achieved by placing garbage objects (if permissions allow building) or making hideous, obnoxious, obscene, and/or performance tanking avatars and ruining the look of a space.

Avatars do have health points, and it's possible to get killed, but only in combat areas. Those exist, as games within Second Life. But ordinary residential, retail, and display areas have that feature turned off.

One of the better weapons.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxHXUHA7osc

I am entertained at how elaborate the detail of the weapon is, and yet the avatar is gripping the mag instead of the handguard.

Its second trigger is backwards.

There's a second trigger there for the grenade launcher, you can see this at ~1min.

This is a thing that people do irl

Regardless of the grenade launcher bit

Traditional MMO?

I was beta for UO, 1996 - but I find UO to be the founding MMO, for me... UO, was my golden era of gaming.

I only I knew what "UO" meant.

Ultima online, the first graphic MMO(precursor to that was MUD's: multi user domains).

Dark Sun Online [1] was released nearly a year before UO, and was a graphic MMO. UO was certainly better in most (all?) respects. Which is why it has an enduring legacy, but it was only one of the first, not the first.

Neverwinter Nights[2], is arguably a much earlier MMO, running from 1991 to 1997 on AOL.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Sun_Online:_Crimson_San...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(1991_vid...

Wow I never knew that. Thankyou!!!

I'll go crawl through those links, and thankyou for picking up my error :-)

Ran a NWN server from my house for a LONG time... from servers and racks from defunct tech-startups in the ~2000 down-turn.

Had an awesome setup in ~2001...

On pennies... I couldnt imagine running anything close here in the greedy-era.

Ultima Online, offered more freedom already in the 90s than most modern MMOs (of course freedom in gameplay doesn't necessarily mean "fun" for most players, but still UO pretty much invented the modern MMO genre, then WoW "tamed" and simplified it which made MMOs hugely popular, and in turn it was WoW - not UO - that everybody else copied).

Still the best MMO in my opinion, there is no better mage combat in any other games

Great Lord Taunt

HIDE

[enemy]

([attack])

Great lord Hide

(Dread lord unhide)

IN VAS FLAM [hide] - run

Sneak and Snoop chars waiting to loot...

VANQUISH.

Why does everything have to be about violence?

In the referenced video, one character had a pistol out, and multiple people made threats about shooting him, but never did. Hence the question...

It's not second life in the video, it's rust - a mmo like game with a survival theme

Second Life isn't about violence. It's about property rights. There are parcel boundaries, rent, property taxes, landlords, evictions, and neighbor disputes. It's very realistic.

Each property owner can eject anyone from their land. They can keep them out by banning them. They can even keep others from seeing avatars on their land, to get privacy. Communications from specific users can be blocked.

Being a jerk is local. It's difficult to be annoying for more than a 100m radius. The world is the size of Los Angeles. Space keeps everything from being in the same place. Jerks tend to get frustrated after a while, because the big world is ignoring them.

The combination of those two features means that the world mostly runs itself. There's no need for the army of low-wage goons armed with ban hammers both Meta and Roblox have to employ. The Second Life "governance" department is about half a dozen people. Mostly it deals with such land issues as oversize advertising signs.

This is what the much-touted "metaverse" of 2021-2022 was supposed to have, but nobody making metaverse noises ever got enough users to have those problems.

Now, there's another, completely different model. Improbable is, as of two days ago, demoing their metaverse system, MSquared. It seems sort of like Second Life, in that you can log in and build stuff. But the business model is totally different. Improbable has made the world work in a browser, with "cloud rendering". They support big crowds at low avatar resolution. They're thinking in terms of big performances, with big-name acts performing and users paying big prices to watch them.

The Improbable system is very expensive to run. The five games that tried to use it a few years ago all went broke. ("Worlds Adrift" was pretty good.) There's a connect charge, and a charge for every internal event. The rendering back end runs on NVidia GeForce Now, the service back end runs on Google Cloud, and there's a CDN involved, too. So the business model is that it's only turned on for special events. It's been used for Otherside, the Bored Ape Yacht Club's virtual world, which they turn on for demos for a few hours maybe twice a year. (Arguably they're just cooling out the marks who paid a total of US $400,000,000 for land in their virtual world.) It's not clear this is a viable business model. It's funded by Softbank. (Who else?) Maybe they can do Taylor Swift concerts with it.

I don't get it. He snuck into some guildhouse and... stood there? Why couldn't they just lock him out and ignore him?

Because roleplay.

I wasn't expecting to see Daniel(s) on here. A truly masterful troll.

(I also recommend Stimpee who is clearly influence by dnsl)

I found my job at Amazon Web Services through Second Life, back in 2007/2008. This is a detailed blog post where I described the whole experience [0].

My best line ever was when they said they were looking for a technology "evangelist". I replied: I built a church, I'm your guy! Of course I meant that I built the replica of the Church of Saint Francis in Assisi inside Second Life.

It was incredible back then. Now we're talking about the Metaverse again, but in 2007, 16 years ago, it was so early days.

Another fun facts: Amazon's PR was... annoyed at my blog post, because it didn't meet the company's guidelines. I can easily guess that at least tens, if not hundreds, of people, applied for a job at Amazon because of that blog post. I left Amazon in 2014, and now I can safely say that Amazon PR was a nightmare, and one of the main reasons why I left. I wasn't perfect, of course, but still...

[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...

Unlike almost everything else in the metaverse space, Second Life is profitable. One of the owners refers to it as a "cash machine".

Even Roblox loses money. IPO at $70, today $39. They spent too much buying market share.

Linden Labs only has 300 employees and a mostly rudimentary tech stack. I got to a final stage interview with them as a dev, and got the impression they were very down to earth. No leetcode questions, but some frank discussion of gameplay issues, ux they were trying to improve. I was struck by how much they knew about the game as a part of people's lives. They talked about players with mobility limitations whose entire lives are the game, and how important it was to support them. They're building an online bank to handle the flourishing ingame economy. People have full incomes from the game. It's hard to see these players uprooting to move to another platform, as much as someone might move cities IRL, just because someone built a nicer one, and abandon all of their friends and maybe their job.

Perhaps but Roblox looks like Einstein level engineering & business development when compared to the Metaverse, which cost half as much for 0% of the impact/name recognition/revenue.

They do have some impressive technology. Roblox isn't just blocks any more.

The Roblox CEO is a physicist. I met him in the 1990s when he had a tiny startup in an alley off 8th St. in SF selling a physics engine called "Working Model". It took a long time for Roblox to slowly grow. It's not a make-money-fast business.

Could you elaborate on the engineering / biz dev of Roblox?

All I've heard of it is from YouTube videos my kid watches, and I'd love to know more :)

I recommend checking out the twitter feed for their Chief Scientist Morgan McGuire and also explore how big a ratio they have plowed back into R&D over the years it's way above average. I remember him sponsoring NLP work two years ago saying it would be possible to write out a paragraph for the game you wanted to see and automate the build.

https://twitter.com/CasualEffects?t=YKJ5oJSfN0_BtpBI7FqrCQ&s...

See https://blog.roblox.com/

There's some impressive technology R&D. Their layered clothing system solves some hard problems. It Just Works, without the user having to fuss with mesh fit problems.

> "the Metaverse"

It's hard to be sure what you're referring to. By some definitions it includes Roblox (and Fortnite and Second Life). There's certainly no single "capital-M metaverse".

Maybe you mean "Multiplayer, persistent, VR"? VR Chat and Rec Room are doing pretty well.

Or maybe you mean web3 crypto stuff? Not doing so well.

Or maybe you mean "that thing that Meta built"?

Hard to know without you being specific

I meant "that thing that Meta built." Sorry about the confusion there.

Linden Lab had enough money from SL to fund and abandon several large projects (see: Sansar), and still not tank the company. SL at least at one point was a cash machine, and is still self sufficient.

What is it about Second Life that keeps popping back up every couple of years with people writing stories about it.

Yet, it gets hyped again and people go there and it's a fricken ghost-town. There is no there there. It's just a whole lot of nothing. Since it's inception, I've tried and tried and tried to see what it's about, and there's nothing there except built-then-abandoned things, tons of advertising, and no people.

A friend of mine was super into it for a while. All the people are hiding from new players. I had the same impression as you until my friend brought me to secret parties and stuff. But it has not kept my attention more than 8 hours in the last 20 years. I always wanted to like it, just didn't.

My favorite thing in SL years ago was probably the Rantmedia studio that was set up to do live radio shows (which were also of course distributed as podcasts). It tied in the live audience experience with the text chat, and made for some ability to directly interact with the hosts.

Now, admittedly I've seen much of the same thing achieved with an IRC channel, as the graphics didn't necessarily do a ton of heavy lifting, but it was still a fun ambience. Which is really what Secondlife was always good at -- making some atmosphere for your online chat groups. There's the ability to pull in streaming video or audio as well, to tie it all together.

But yes, it's just a framework. It's what you make of it.

If all the people are hiding from new players, how do new people get onboarded into SL without just getting bored and leaving?

Most do get bored and leave. It’s not for everyone. Most long time players would probably prefer no new players. It’s not anyone’s priority.

People. Connections. Friends.

There are plenty of people, but most are in their own little niche groups. I've been coming back to SL off and on since 2006 or so. I think mostly I like creating and building and scripting things.

Celebrated the birthday of Second Life with its founder Phillip Rosedale yesterday (pretty sure the 20th birthday was yesterday as that is what Phillip said).

He's doing a new thing to simulate effects of economies, especially around inequality, and trying to create a model system which would support UBI: https://www.fairshare.social/

Many PhDs were written about second life a decade ago. Wonder what the researchers are doing now. To me it hasn't changed in a decade.

Being faddists, they're probably doing something about AI at the moment, aren't they?

Just after finishing their crypto bender

It’s often only obvious some new technologies are a fad in retrospect. It’s hard to tell how they will be adopted, Second Life had a very enviable early growth curve.

Perhaps, but only if you can get the correct buzzwords in. Such "research" is rarely about the impact of the tech itself (although there are always people trying to actually apply it, e.g. as a teaching or therapy tool), but more a way to express some overall theory (or set of theories) in a different context, as if it were an observation that can validate the theory. So yes, they jump on fashions.

It affects other subjects too. I know people who've done a PhD "in" Harry Potter or Sherlock fan-fiction, but it's not about Harry Potter or Sherlock. After all, there's not that much to say about it, but they both started from some "theoretical" point of view, and then just wrapped those ideas around whatever observations they can make up about the subject.

AI seems difficult in that respect. It would need actual understanding. Without that, you can't really make observations about it the way you can make them about some book or a game. Otherwise, it stays restricted to checking a few dialogs with ChatGPT and commenting on that.

Here's an example from someone who did a PhD on second life about ... the MetaVerse. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-betterverse-note-div...

I bought my first graphic card only for playing SL

the last time I looked at Second Life a year or two ago, there was still no 64 bit Linux client, trying to connect to my old account quickly turned into some crazy obsolete library hell.. a quick look around and it appears to be the same situation.

Does anyone have any insight on how Second Life compares to VRChat? Seems to me that it's the modern day version of Second Life.

Are y’all hiring

I take it they actually started in 2003?

Let's math it: today, minus twenty years.

I got 2003

Might need to double check my math here but I came to the answer 2003

(I somehow misread the title as "I've worked on"--implying a kind of ownership--not "I've worked for", and apologize for the mistake.)

Was Second Life partially a money laundering scheme?

Asking this because I can't find any other explanation for people paying millions for absolutely nothing

There is a ton of money in virtual goods in games. Of course second life isn’t exactly a game.

Sony briefly tinkered with a SL clone with the PS3. Some sort of customizable social space where you could buy virtual furniture and stuff. I forget what it was called. It was a neat tech demo, but of course I would never have paid real money for anything.

SL for a hot minute was the Next Big Thing. Everyone was going to have work meetings there, and have virtual homes and participate in the virtual economy. To be honest, they were more successful than I ever thought they'd be.

PlayStation Home. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t anything close to SL.

Thank you. Yes, it had more graphical polish, but far less extensibility.

This many years later, it's become clear what sort of crazy next-gen platform will become our "second life". It's not something with a high barrier to entry like Second Life, or VRChat.

It's the ones with the least barrier to entry. Like Facebook or Twitter.

> Everyone was going to have work meetings there

I think we can give up on anything common from the real world happening in VR (including SL style 3D worlds). Why have meetings in VR when Zoom is better? Why shop for things in VR when Amazon works just fine?

No thread on SL is "complete" without mentioning that despite not having much in terms of gameplay in it, it managed to attract lots of "orphans" from Star Wars Galaxies - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Galaxies - specifically those who liked SWG for the non-combat elements, including social gatherings and roleplay.

All that plus tons of sexual content, of course.

I recall in 2008 or so visiting the local Nortel office, they had a whole fucking lab room dedicated to second life.

People pay money for all kinds of strange and/or intangible things. A rare McDonald's wrapper from the '70s where the logo has a variant hue. The right to have your name (or your company's name) on a stadium, or a college building. A limited edition pair of sneakers. And so on.

I did own some land in SL at one time. Why? Because building stuff in there was fun, and purchasing your own land was the only way to build permanent stuff and be assured others couldn't (easily) mess with it.

Presumably the original commenter wouldn’t accept the idea of subjective value or otherwise they wouldn’t have asked that question. Saying “I find value in it” is sufficient only for those who have bought the premise that value isn’t something up for them to decide.

People pay money to see a film at the cinema, yet they can't come back the next day to see it again for free.

People pay money for software, and cpu time, and storage space. That's what SL payments get you.

People give you money for your time, also intangible.

Worth pointing out here that OpenGrid does exist, and you can absolutely just spin up your own instance, if you want that building experience without paying (separately) for hosting. At this point you could probably run it on the same hardware as your client if you have a halfway modern gaming set up.

Of course, then you won't be tied into the Secondlife ecosystem. All depends on your goals there.

My mother was very into second life. She's a singer. There's venues inside second life and she had fans (lots of them actually) and did shows and had a tip jar - she was making money doing live performances - broadcasting herself singing in second life. And this was like 15 years ago. I got into second life because I don't live anywhere near my mother, so I made an avatar and went to some of her shows. It was pretty cool, honestly. I put a few dollars into Linden Labs to get some credits, and went shopping. I bought a virtual boat, a helicopter, jet skis, clothing (for my avatar), and all sorts of stuff for the avatar. I don't think it was all for nothing, I kind of got a kick out of it, at the time. There were all sorts of freaky things going on in second life. It's probably what "the metaverse" wishes it could be.

Genuinely cool story

I've been paying for Second Life for over ten years. I think it's been like 3-4 years since I logged in.

I'm not sure why I haven't canceled it. It might be a combination of sunk costs (spent a lot of time working on some scripts/objects) and the fact that I am not sure I remember how to log in to cancel anymore.

The most profitable subscriber type.

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