SecondLife Didn't Fail | Hacker News Reader

SecondLife Didn't Fail

pandodaily.com

134 pointsspatten83 comments

The first code I ever wrote, I wrote in Second Life.

The first interface I ever designed was for a HUD I built for the robot avatar I wanted to sell in Second Life.

The first time I ever heard the names Neal Stephenson or Charles Stross, it was in Second Life.

The first time I ever paid my rent based on work I had done entirely for and by myself, it was from selling hundreds of robots in Second Life.

I was 19. It was magic.

There's a substantial part of what I am today that I could not have become without what I learned from Second Life.

Yes, the developer tools are awful and the laggy experience can kill a lot of the fun. But fuck – I was selling killer robots to people and getting paid for it in what could become real money, somehow. Because that's how I wanted to use it. And it let me do all of that? Incredible.

This is entirely similar to my experience. I played when I was around 18 and created a hacky fix for skirts (they were an object attached to your body and when you sat down they would flow downwards still), this netted me a few hundred £ and started an enthusiasm for programming which has yet to stop. I still believe a 3D environment is one of the greatest ways to start learning object-orientated programming (due to the visual and tangible representation of your classes).

My first real experience with learning to program anything (other than tinkering with some BASIC as a young kid) was scripting objects in a MUD. This was, I guess, the mod-90's, text-only equivalent of SL.

You could even attach HTML to them and view said HTML by tacking the object ID onto the MUD's web site address. That's how I built my first web site; editing some markup attached to an object on a MUD server, over a telnet connection.

My next big step up was the mIRC scripting language. You could make GUIs!

I've been a Second Life player for about six years now, and there isn't a lot of crossover between the audiences of SL and here, so I thought I'd weigh in on the 'success' of the game.

Originally there was a a huge amount of hype about the idea of real world businesses opening up an SL presence as something of a "new frontier", as well as vistualised museums, art exhibits, music shows and so on, but these for the most part never got off the ground.

Second Life generally has two sides; the first is an incredibly commercialist (to the point of being fetishistic) sector, where the players that prefer to treat SL as a kind of gigantic virtual dollset can buy clothing, hair, skins etc for their avatars, and has the same kind of draw as The Sims games, except this is real money we're talking about. This in itself gives one type of businesses at least a good way to generate income; 3D content creators.

The other side of SL are the very large groups of people that play the game to indulge in some sort of alternative fantasy. There are massive populations of furries, Goreans, BDSM practitioners and so on, who again are usually quite willing to pay for content for use in role playing in the virtual world.

I originally joined because I was interested in the technology side of things (I read an article somewhere about players using the in-game scripting systems to create 'virus objects' which spread across the world, which I thought was interesting enough to merit checking out) but I stayed because I found I had inadvertently formed a group of friends, and I even ended up getting engaged (in reality) to somebody I met there.

In a sense, Second Life has thrived, but not as a clean, bright new frontier as originally intended, but instead as a kind of collaborative roleplaying framework for people whose tastes are not really catered for anywhere else.

Giving a voice and a space to people who have nowhere else sounds like a success and social good to me.

It might also explain why they have a loyal but ultimately niche userbase.

In my first year of college, I bagged my first programming job using the Linden Scripting Language. I spent the majority of that Summer working "in-world" as part of Trinity College Dublin's CRITE project.

There was some real prospects in this area in terms of educational value for children but unfortunately the questionable nature of most of SecondLife clienteles activities makes it impossible to allow Children to just wander around.

I spent a lot of time working with OpenSim, the open source version, which was very very buggy when I used it but it allowed you to run the server, and I had some experiences bringing it into schools. Unfortunately due to problems such as "Wow my man just lost all his clothes", we could not go through with it.

I found it a wonderful environment for learning, particularly for coding. Its a very hands on approach when you can set up a listener like

listener = llListen(1000)

and then set up basic events for when a certain thing was said. It had a lovely feel to the programming and I made my first real money on it as well. I made a set of playable bagpipes for some person online, he sent me $50 dollars on Paypal. I also donated a lot of code free of charge and even had my name included on someones PHD.

All in all, it was wonderful place to work when I was there.

If people from SL are asking themselves why it didn't grow more, here's my story:

In the past 5 years, I've spent about 5 hours reading and watching videos about SL. And yet I've never once downloaded and run the client. You know why? Because the whole gameworld is just too ugly.

There are many reasons for its ugliness. A missing lighting engine, that most of it is very empty, bad frame rate / low drawing distance, and also the fact that it's all made by the users and the majority of users don't have any taste.

I'd rather spend my time in WOW or Zelda, they appeal much more to my eyes. Or, you know, meet in real life.

There are beautiful places (or used to be, don't know about now), it was just not that easy to find them...

Of course people compare them to MMORPGs. They don't realize that the worlds in MMORPGs are preinstalled on their computer after a several GB download, whereas SL would update live.

Although thinking about it, with hard drives becoming cheaper and internet speeds becoming higher, why not build a second life where you aim to cache the whole world on the client? (Until it becomes as big as the whole internet with zillions of high res textures, then it will all fall apart).

Until recently, users and developers seemed to put a lot of importance on graphics that were as realistic as possible. I think SL seeks realism. But now, not so much. Maybe Minecraft has something to do with that, or maybe the saturation of beautiful unfun games.

I can sort of second this. I paid for a sub and let it lapse shortly afterwards. The akwardness of trying to do things, the ugliness of the world and the fact that my nieghbour made a huge sky-reaching tower covered in pornography and pictures of borat unimpressed me.

It was about 25% as cool as the hype.

At the moment SecondLife is miles of empty houses, casinos, and furries, it's pretty sad, but salvageable. First there needs to be zones with something like property taxes based on foot traffic over an area. This would incentivize change, and renovation of an area instead of static dead content that persists forever. Next the viewer client needs to be scaled down a bit. SecondLife is very much ahead of its time (advanced 3d modeling, advanced scripting of objects) the result is a lagged experience. Wonder why Minecraft took off? It's because building in Minecraft is simple, in SecondLife building is a pain in the ass. Again - way too advanced, no simple options for people. Anyways I hope someone eventually gets it right because SecondLife made the same mistakes AlphaWorld did and is meeting a similar fate. Im holding out on Carmack's 3d goggles to re-enter the metaverse and sword fight you guys.

Personally, I think the easiness of building in SL is its downfall. Users obviously do not care about polycounts and performance, and the FPS is very low as a result.

Also keep in mind sim costs are very high, which means sims end up abandoned when folks decide that the few thousand dollars per month required to maintain the contract is too much.....

Yep, it's probitively expensive to rent a simulator, no wonder projects like OSGrid get any support.

*prohibitively

ouch.

> Wonder why Minecraft took off?

Makes me wonder, how would a crossover between Minecraft and Second Life do?

Makes me wonder, imagine Minecraft with Lego IP.

Something like this? http://universe.lego.com/en-us/help/faq.aspx?id=359551

Can't see exactly how that played out, but it's obviously not active. I like how with Minecraft on 360, you just jump in and play. Would be a great fit - building with Lego blocks, just save and switch off your Xbox instead of packing up or stepping on bricks.

Kinda like blockland?

http://blockland.us/

Looks interesting, but I think you'd ideally have the familiarity of the Lego product else it looks like a cheap rip-off.

Minecraft on 360 is the experience they'd want to aim for. Buy, download, jump in and play. Seems like such a no-brainer to me. Wonder how Lego botched their Universe (mentioned by T-A) play?

It tried to grow too fast. That's the main reason behind all the emptiness. When the hype reached its peak, they couldn't sell enough virtual land, but now that the hype has died down they have an overabundance of land and not enough interest to fill it.

Any second life users here? Speak up please.

I've always found Second Life strange in that they claim million(s) of users and yet I've never met one. I've met WoW players, I've met EQ players, Diablo players, CoD players, Halo players, FF11 players, GTA players, etc etc etc. But I've never met a Second Life player. Just bad luck I guess?

I bet you have.

I'm not a second life player myself, but from what I've heard, a whole lot of it is based around sexuality that would be impossible, or at least not very acceptable (outside of the SF bay area, at least) in real life. I mean, if your thing is dragons or something, well hey, they can make that happen.

With a reputation like that, most people aren't going to be as 'out' about being a second life user as about enjoying 'modern warfare' or whatever, I mean, depending on local culture.

This sort of stealth is common in gender and sexual minorities. It can happen to people who are transgender. Lots of trans women have tales of being in a group of cis people and to conversation turning to how none of them have ever met a trans person. Or lots of (usually homophobic) straight people who think they've never met a gay person.

If there's a stigma or negativity attached to a thing, then don't use "I've never met anyone in $GROUP" as reliable data.

I've messed around in there, and I have a friend who built a rather elaborate Tron thing in there.

I am not one, but I know someone that was attached to a rather large group of players that even had parties happening in SL an the real life, connected via webcam. They definitely used it to the max.

EDIT: Just normal parties with people sitting around and chatting :).

Reading lsc's comment about the type of things SecondLife is/can be used for and then your comment about webcam parties makes for a combo which is hard to talk about in public.

Nice catch. No, they were on a totally different edge of SecondLive. I edited the comment.

I'm an active user of Second Life. I run a business in-world, which pulls in thousands of dollars a year.

Another active SL player. I just keep connecting because I made a group of friends. We still meet sometimes or keep contact outside SL.

I occasionally use SL to listen to a jam session at a Jazz club that I don't have much time to visit IRL: secondlife://Suisse/139/194/22

One relevant fact that's not mentioned in the story is how deeply SL can affect people. There's a significant portion that becomes obsessed with it to the point it takes precedence over their "real life"'s responsibilities.

I've read many a story of both "addicted" gamers and family members of gamers and some of them can be quite devastating.

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=second...

Some of those stories seem rather stupid, for example this one: http://playsquad.commongate.com/post/Second_Life_has_ruined_... (first one I clicked on)

Mother claims her son was diagnosed with Aspergers but now blames SL for him not having a normal life. Perhaps she should be happy that her son has found a way to be happy instead.

Edit: OK, I clicked on some more, most seem to be about infidelity in Cyberspace. Blame SL? I think not. Not saying that it's impossible to neglect real life too much, but if there wasn't SL, those people would find other ways to drop out.

You're just scratching the surface, don't be so quick to dismiss it. Most of those stories are too personal to post here.

Edit: Removed link to article about the wrong game (duh me).

That article does not even mention Second Life. It mentions WoW and Star Wars online in the last paragraph.

While I probably wouldn't blame that persons problems on the existence of games, it might be worth noting that MMORPGs like WoW are very different from Second Life. Todays MMORPGs are optimized for addictiveness - they have fine tuned challenges and rewards to make people play as long as possible (even the guild system apparently plays a part - if your friends play, you are also more likely to play).

In contrast to that, Second Life is not even really a game. It has no goals, no challenges, other than what you set up for yourself. So blaming SL for the damage MMORPGs have supposedly done to some people is misguided.

I ended up pasting the wrong link. I won't post others, as I said, the stories are too personal. If anyone is interested enough, they'll find them. Suffice to say that I have personally talked to people whose lives have been devastated by SL and they were powerless over it.

In a world where our interactions are ever more inauthentic, the virtual can seem more Real than the real.

Beside the grind, virtual worlds have managed to solve the deepest fears of human interaction, usually with the promise that you can reinvent yourself if everything goes bad. So they provide an outlet for Ambition. They also enable some sort of personal progress, some sort of real feeling of Change, which enables Love to take hold: people who are otherwise stuck in situations which they feel are beyond their power are enabled by this.

The question is not why videogames are so addictive. The question is why the real world isn't.

Unlike other video games, Second Life is full of actual people. Sure there is a screen and it is easier to self-select, but it is not virtual in the sense that most "addictive" video games are. Second Life addiction makes as much sense as claiming someone is addicted to the telephone, or to painting, or to Martha-Stewart-style homemaking.

The real world is quite addictive for a lot of us.

Want to elaborate on "inauthentic" interaction? Because that sounds like something the post office would say to imply that physical letters are more "authentic" than emails.

How are we defining a success and a failure here? Second Life is still around. They're not raking in millions, but AFAIK they're profitable, provide value to their customers in return, and occupy a dominant position in their market. In what way have they failed?

SL has always been a exceedingly poor technology implementation of an ill defined objective. It's pretty much a failure and an oddity.

Korean MMO's do it better. You can have your x-rated chat with digital paper doll avatars that will look as sexy as your credit card can muster in the cash shop.

The fact that huge swaths of SL is outright advertising spam is another reason to avoid it.

It's sad that companies are so often judged by their growth potential and not their static value. It's of course the investors that are making these judgments and not the players.

Indeed. Of course all companies eventually mature so that their growth potential goes down. The logistic sigmoid is remarkably hard to escape.

This drive for any business to continually grow (and this isn't a Valley specific problem) is a topic I could rant about for hours. From my understanding growth is necessary in public companies so shareholders can make a profit (assuming the company isn't big enough to issue huge dividends). What perplexes me is why people cared about SecondLife growing if it never tried to go public (beyond the initial investors caring).

I think (aiming for) growth is also necessary to offset risk. Naturally business will not be equally good from year to year. If you don't create surplus in the good years, you'll find yourself in trouble in the bad years.

Growth is like... the opposite of surplus.

How so?

Because any surplus saved for the bad years is money that could have been invested in further growth.

What fauldsh said, basically.

Imagine that you've got a bunch of VCs who have decided to give you millions and millions. Yay money. You now have a surplus, but you have not grown. To grow, you have to spend that money. That's the entire reason they gave you money. Goodbye surplus.

I played SL since 2006 and until 2009 or so, and I still keep up with it from time to time. I think one problem it has is that it tries to do a lot of things, and does none of them well. Building was fun for a while, but you hit a limit with what you can do with their in-world tools, and now they allow users to upload assets created in 3rd party 3D modeling tools (anything that can export to Collada format)

Users are slowly making SL better but it almost seems in spite of Linden Lab, not because of them (the improvement from LL are few and very far between)

I think its because SL is not growing wildly. Yeah, they generate $700M from the virtual economy, but what do they do with it? Without a focus on growing, there isn't as much of a focus on innovation. Plus, as the article states, they've tried a lot of things to get past the 1M active players number and haven't cracked it yet. This discourages them from trying anything expensive to stimulate growth, like improving building or implementing a more realistic physics engine to draw people into a virtual world that looks real and immersive.

Simply put, it looks like they're unwilling to take any risks to make significant changes to SL.

It's fair to say that Second Life didn't fail. It's profitable and has a large stable userbase. It definitely didn't live up to expectations, though.

From my perspective, the problem was that the entire architecture is built around simulating on the server. This makes servers expensive, creates lag, and entirely prevents a whole type of 3D environments - anything that requires lag-free responsiveness, like a first person shooter.

Imagine if people could create any kind of 3D game in Second Life. People would be using that instead of Unity/Unreal/other game engines.

Games are a potentially huge market, if Second Life had tied into that it could have grown its userbase tremendously. It had almost all the necessary technology - it just was structured in a way that you just can't do responsive games.

(Btw, why does the article use SecondLife without a space between the two words?)

I don't understand why the article talks about Secondlife in the past tense like it's dead. It looks like it's chugging along about as strong as ever

In fact, that seems to be the whole point of the article.

"SecondLife has 1 million active users" and "$700 million a year in virtual goods transacted" sound a bit strange together.

Users spend $700 a year in SL?

"$700 million transacted" double(triple, etc) counts most of the money. I trade you $1 you trade someone else that $1, that's $2 transacted.

Regardless, though, that means that the per user transaction rate is $700 per year on average - the incomes of people in a country also reflect multiple spends of the same dollar, which is why velocity of money is so critical to an economy and why free flowing credit is so important to make sure people and businesses keep spending even in the face of short term flow stop ups.

That's an incredible amount of spending per user, if true. Especially sine all of that money could be converted to real world cash with relatively little friction, unlike most in-game currencies.

Certain groups pay significantly more then that. My university, for example, maintains an island for a particular unit (which I'm currently taking, spending quite a lot of time in SL) and that costs them upwards of low 5 figures a year, and I know absolutely that it's not the only place like it in existence, nor is it the biggest.

In niche MMOs it's not unusual for users to spend over 20 real dollars/month on micro transactions. I don't know what an average multiplier in terms of in-game transactions would be but 3x doesn't seem out of the question.

I suspect that the vast majority of that is internal transactions, rather than real dollars entering or exiting the system.

Well, it can get really expensive if you really get into it. Owning land in SL is not cheap, and I've heard of some people who spend thousands every year owning land for a nightclub or retail space. I do wonder what the top tier of spenders actually spend per year on SL, though.

This is not succeeding:

"The problem — really the only problem, but a big one nonetheless — is they couldn’t ever find a way to make those numbers grow. Nothing they did worked, and Rosedale doubts that even early Facebook integration would have helped."

It has also stagnated technologically, since revenue can't fund a level of development that would open new applications or market segments, nor market such new capabilities.

Second Life is a spectacular and obvious failure. It isn't a game (but it attracted all the trolls and griefers a game would attract). It isn't anything in particular. If you go to the site, there is a question: "What is Second Life?" Follow the link, and play the video. Now tell me if you have an answer.

Actually, one reason it's stagnated technically because Linden Labs aren't nearly as good at UI design as they think they are and lots of users are on forked older versions of the client software that predate their last UI redesign and don't support new features. It got so embarassing that they disabled the ability for users to advertise what viewer version they were running.

Sad. I worked at linden from 06-08, and later, when I found out that Viewer 2.0 had been developed in secret and the source thrown over the wall after release, I was stunned by the lack of awareness about how upsetting this kind of behavior is for open source developers who were working on the previous codebase. Even worse is the fact that those developers are working for no pay.

Forks matter, and dilute the mindshare of the already small number of people that are actually capable of contributing to an open source project. I don't understand why there are so many companies (google with android, for example) who think it is ok to develop major new versions in secret and then just toss the code over the wall. It is hard enough to follow the changes to a large open source project, but at least keeping up with commits in real time as they happen makes digesting the changes easier. Lots of small bites to swallow spread out over a long time. With the huge source dump style, I would argue that it is basically impossible for even an extremely competent developer to understand all the changes, and the ramifications of all those changes.

Also, it's Linden Lab. Linden Lab. Not Linden Labs. That used to drive me crazy, I guess I shouldn't really care any more. :-)

Why do we see failure in a sustainable business that makes money.

Same reason we see a Baseball team that wins lots of games every year but never a world series as a failure.

More was promised / expected than delivered.

411 days ago, "The Failure Of Second Life": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2574795

The reason why SL doesn't grow is because of all those furries ruining the place for everyone else. I never knew what yiffing was until I went on SL. Had they placed a few curbs on it, their world would've been better for everyone.

A long time ago when I was just starting out at Activision we had some early virtual reality world pitched to us. Probably it was Knowledge Adventure Worlds which became KA Worlds that became I don't know what. Anyway, the guy pitching it said, "This will allow people to create their own entertainment."

The guy who ran the studio then-- Howard Marks-- said, "If people wanted to create their own entertainment we would have gone out of business a long time ago."

Isn't an opportunity to grow in the mobile space? I don't like to use Second Life in "desktop mode" but when I am on "mobile chill out mode" it sounds perfect!

It would be nice, given the thread, to hear experience of someone that makes money in SL. I watched the show about some guy that sells sex toys and was making seven figures. Wonder how hard it is to get there (I assume hard but would be great to hear some real users' opinion).

I think Second Life has failed. Sure, it lives, but in 9 years Linden Labs have been unable to make the client run any smoother or load any faster.

Who uses Linden Labs' client anyway? ;-)

To the downvoters: The fact is that among SL folks the clearest way you spot a noob is that they are running the Linden Labs' client. Everyone else is on a third party one in part because, well Linden Labs is better at many things than building clients for their system. The two biggest viewers seem to be Phoenix and Firestorm, probably followed by Imprudence and a few others.

Interesting. If "noobs" have an inferior experience because of the LL client, they will not come back. If the hope is for the community to thrive and grow, perhaps the existence and superiority of third party clients should be more apparent. Seems the nobody else commenting on HN was aware of this.

I think you are right about this. In fact I would say it is likely a major issue in LL not getting a much larger user base.

There are a couple big problems with LL's clients.

The first one is that while they are LGPL the range of supported hardware, particularly on Linux, is vanishingly small. This means for most systems, it might work or it might not. If you ask for help you get a reply like "your video card is not supported. Sorry."

Again, it might work and on Windows it often does. On Linux it is another story. Often it works until such a point as there is a minor update and then framerates drop to maybe 0.5 to 2. Again, unless you have an nVidia or an ATI card, you are on your own.

The other, third party clients (many of which are open soruce) are often better in this regard. I have never found that sort of problem to occur with a third party client though some of them have stability issues on some platforms.

I think LL more or less figures that since there are enough other open source clients for their network they really only have to do enough to get people started, but often this doesn't work. So I think that the poor initial user experience may be a big factor here, where it is a factor.

So which (if any) of these do you suggest for someone willing to give SL another look?

Imprudence has the best reputation regarding stability. It has been a while since I tried it though.

On Linux I have had the best luck with Phoenix. I found Firestorm to be unstable on each of my systems. There are some quirks relating to music/media tracks due to library versions the software was compiled against, but solutions are readily found there if you run into them.

Imprudence is outdated these days, unfortunately. You'll find that a lot of avatars and content don't display properly with it these days because of mesh upload and other new features.

I enjoyed SL for a while. Some ideas to get more users: make it easier to obtain a good looking avatar, and fix the clunky controls.

Just in case someone doesn't know. You can build your own:

http://opensimulator.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com