Linden Lab is building a spiritual sequel to Second Life | Hacker News Reader

Linden Lab is building a spiritual sequel to Second Life

gamasutra.com

41 pointsRed_Tarsius31 comments

I'm currently making my living on a game that's hosted within Second Life, http://mossms.com. I used to work for Linden Lab. It's good to see them trying to move forward. I've long felt like the people there mostly don't understand Second Life, what draws people to it, what makes it special, or what it could be. There's a future in virtual worlds, but I'll be very surprised if that future is brought to us by Linden Lab. They've been kind of adrift for a few years. Maybe they'll get their groove back!

I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on what this future for virtual worlds would look like. The entire notion of Second Life has perplexed me. Perhaps you could write a blog post about Second Life, the issues with Linden Lab, and your vision.

I was a hardcore Second Life player for a few years.

It's a chat room with a built in 3d building and scripting language.

Or at least that's what it was most days to the people I played with.

Laika is right. It's a chat room with a 3d sandbox.

That read as a press release a la Paul Graham's "Submarine" article. I've been a member of Second Life for about seven years now, and for all its original promise, its dying. Soooo slowly, but it is. I doubt it will actually fold for many years to come, if ever, but the rosy picture in this release sounds more like a desperate PR move than anything.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

All the article really says is that they are beginning to build a successor to Second Life. Do you dispute this?

One must look behind the release. It's not as if there's some kind of deception here, but more "Wait, if their main game, their bread and butter is in great shape, why are they releasing a direct successor instead of improving the main?"

It is a valid question.

Second Life is truly dying - I've been there on and off for ten years.

If not through Linden Lab's horrible mismanagement, through simple attrition as there simply isn't anything to do there anymore. The novelty has worn off. We're well past the days when a well scripted game gets ported outside of that ecosystem and turned into a Gameboy title[1]. We're well past the days where someone can make a ton of money selling virtual land[2].

The value proposition isn't there anymore. The starry-eyed excitement that surrounded both Linden Lab and the player base when the world was in its early days has been replaced by cynicism and apathy.

I'd say rebuilding the game with what they've learned in mind is probably the only way to shake things up. Hence the upcoming sequel.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tringo

[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/eb/AnsheChung_Bus...

From a business point of view, Second Life is a huge success. Just in the last few years, it's been massively profitable. Hence why Linden Labs has been able to fund so many new projects at once (I think they are working on four new games now?)

So, saying that it's "dying" is overstating things a bit. They found their niche (whatever the hell niche they are serving), and there's little motivation to change.

The article mentions that it could be a reference to High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's new project. However, it couldn't be that, because Hi Fidelity is totally open source, and the article also mentions that this world will be closed source.

SL could be using High Fidelity code (it's permissively licensed), we can't tell. But yeah, I assume these are separate things. There are lots of next-gen virtual worlds platforms, 1 or 2 more is not that surprising.

Spiritual sequel to SL, so this time the flying dicks are to be worshipped?

If a joke about the spiritual thing was needed, I would have worked in the second life angle. Looks promising.

I still can't get why people waste life in virtual worlds.

The same reason people "waste life" watching TV, playing video games, drinking alcohol, and hanging out with friends. Not every minute of every day need be productive, Mr. Serious!

Escaping from a shitty real life. Overworked and underpaid? Clinically depressed? Cut off from social contact? You can leave it all behind and step into a fantasy where you are beautiful, live in a comfortable place, and where there are people who will actually talk to you. Do it long enough and your entire social circle lives online.

From what I recall one of the groups that seemed to be heavily represented in Second Life was stay-at-home mums, who were obviously limited in how much they could go out and socialise in the real world.

It also lets you find groups of people with similar interest. Like furries.

Do you get why people build model trains or play golf or go skydiving? None of these are very productive uses of your life, but people do them because they are enjoyable (to them — if you stuck me on a golf course, I would definitely not feel like I was doing something enjoyable).

I take it you don't believe that all utility curves are ultimately arbitrary.

I still can't get why people waste life on hacker news.

Neither I :) Personally, I use HN for finding [good] leads, which pays off.

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