Virtual World Scarcity

So, what are scarce resources in a virtual world? These are the top ones I can personally think of.

Bandwidth

Hardware – CPU, GPU, Diskspace, etc.

Energy

Time (of both users and developers)

Skills (of both users and developers)

Scarce resources always have costs.

Update – Otenth has added “Imagination” and he is so right! Well, people are scarce resources in general. I guess People – their imagination, their time, and their skills – should be considered scarce resources.

What the Future Holds for Virtual Worlds

So well, now that LL seems determined to shoot both feet off at once, now what?

As an artist, I’m looking out for the future. Yes I am sticking tightly to my communities, Caledon and Winterfell. However, I am also looking to the horizon at new technologies. Whatever happens, I hope to help keep our communities together, to make their concepts last longer than Second Life itself if necessary.

Something that should be remembered. Change, often drastic change, is a defining aspect of the Internet. Altavista came out of nowhere to rival Yahoo. Then Google rose out of nowhere to displace Altavista and Yahoo from their dominant positions as search engines. All in the space of a few years. Yes, something else could come up and topple Google, too. It usually happens unexpectedly, straight out of the blue.

So expect the unexpected when it comes to the internet business, and keep your eye out for new players.

I’ve been around virtual worlds and online communities in both professional and private capacity since 1995. Before that, I was in retail management. In those 13 years of involvement with virtual communities, I’ve seen many rise and fall. Big claims made. Promises unkept. Companies that ultimately didn’t get it and got so very close by accident. So, forgive if I seem a bit jaded as an old lady in these realms – but when you’ve seen enough of them bust and disperse their communities across the net for seemingly no reason except hubris and greed, you learn to be highly sceptical of decisions by the corporate suits.

Seriously, I haven’t come across ANY executive suits yet who understand the massive complexity and unpredictability of virtual communities. Or even an honest admission that it’s impossible to understand or predict virtual communities and economies with any measure of reliability. The aggregate knowledge of the “collective” in a complex community is smarter than the suits, or any one person in that community either.

Is OpenSim the future? Maybe. Maybe not, though. I see a worrying disdain of the merchant and users in general amongst many of the youngsters in the OpenSim crowd. It will be the thing that kills many of these worlds – because a world that cannot thrive from an economy and its associated trade, will be superceded by the sheer efficiency of worlds that do thrive from it. Just like real life. Most people need to make a living and only have so much time to make enough money to live from – time is a precious and scarce commodity – and if the people creating the world and its communities cannot benefit enough in any way to make it worth their time, they will simply not provide the necessary help.

Sometimes time is offered for free, yes. And this is where the pleasure argument comes in. Some people offer their time to help because they gain pleasure from doing so. Exchange of time for pleasure is still an exchange for time, that precious and limited resource. If the people offering their time for free no longer find it pleasurable to do so, they will also stop. This can happen for a variety of reasons – most having to do with a scarcity of time overall. As the economy tightens, people will find themselves pressed for time to make ends meet. This will reduce the amount of time they can devote to doing something for free – they will be more motivated to use their free time to have a shot at making more money to simply survive, instead. They will weigh the costs and risks of the time devoted to the benefits gained.

That is real life, and most programmer kiddos with utopian stars in their eyes (and still living in their parents basement or from some sort of trust fund, I guess) don’t learn this inexorable fact of the nature of time and its relation to life, even virtual life, till they reach a certain age and realise that time itself is a limited and costly resource.

Time, and the inability to be paid for that time, is the reason so many open source projects are abandoned and/or just fail. To put it simply, their programmers had to get a job to put food on their tables and started devoting more of their time to such mundane and important activities like spouses and families. The programmers grew up.

So while I like the crowdsourcing aspects of open source, it is not the great savior of virtual worlds, in my jaded old lady veteran opinion.

Community can be a savior of virtual worlds. A virtual world is not interesting without communities. Devoid of people, a virtual world is just a lot of colorful graphics. Pretty, but ultimately a void. Empty of life and meaning. So the focus has to be on the users of these worlds. With a care to the individual users and their needs, communities can spring into life spontaneously on their own.

And yes, users are diverse. Above all, virtual worlds need to be flexible to cater to the diversity of its users.

So I will attempt a brief outline of what an ideal virtual world needs to contain:

• An expressive avatar that is deeply user customizable.

Avatars are a user’s self expression in the world, and will make or break your world completely. It cannot be stressed enough that avatars need to be deeply customizable, highly expressive, and flexible. This is an area most virtual worlds fail on in some degree or other.

• A flexible means to create.

Users need to be able to create the world as they see fit. They need a broad range of content creation tools to create everything concerning their avatars and the living spaces for the individuals of communities. This will allow a community to break up into divisions of labor on its own, and forge links of trade to other communities.

• A means to exchange.

Currency and ability to exchange user goods and services within the world for currency is important, while also maintaining user choice to exchange for free if they so desire. This will fully facilitate the divisions of labor that need to occur to make a community self-sustaining.

• A shared platform that can support a large number of concurrent users.

The communal space for the community needs to be able to scale – to support large numbers of users at the same time. The two important tools for this will be the virtual world and the communications systems. This part needs to be a client/server based model and decentralised to a large extent. Servers need to be paid for, so the “land based” selling mechanism of Second Life was a good innovation here, to distribute those costs. However, the communication tools are still highly lacking in Second Life.

And remember – those who control the servers own the community. It can be no other way. Private property all the way down the line. However, an enlightened company doing server rental would be wise to allow as much freedom as possible for those who actually pay for the equipment. After all, the more servers leased the more money they make.

• A robust communications system.

This can’t be stressed strongly enough. Instant messaging, group messaging, forum functionality, inworld notices, calenders, groupware functionality. Collaborative software must be stressed.

• The ability for the owner/s of that community to define and control rights on their own.

Communities need to be able to set their own rules and restrictions, and have the power in which to control undesired behaviour. Undesirable behaviour is not uniform between communities – they need to be able to define what is acceptable and not for their own particular group, and in which ways a behaviour may be desirable and in which ways it may not. This can be facilitated through various tools. Ability to assign different rights and abilities to different groups of users to both facilitate and restrict behaviour and communications when necessary – and to assign rights and roles in the virtual world environment itself, as well as a method to publishing the rules for that given community. What Second Life did right here was to allow people and groups to control their personal plot of land (their bit of server space) inside a larger estate/community structure with covenants, the ability to set managers at the estate level, and it continues to progress on group role tools for communication – but the tools are still lacking considerably, as well as a complete absence of group roles to both facilitate and restrict the use of voice and very limited ones for chat, which is necessary to prevent people from speaking out of turn at larger events and gatherings. To “open and close” the floor, as you will. You’d think someone there would have read Robert’s Rules of Order by now, but I guess not.

• An acceptance of normal human behavior and the need for occasional privacy.

This is something that most virtual worlds fail on, or do it to the exclusion of community creation. Utopian dreams fail, when they fail to account for human nature. Humans wish for private talks, meet and mate and do all those things in communities in their bedrooms as they always have for time immemorial. So admit it, and don’t try to simply outlaw it. Rather try to channel it into a more acceptable form of behaviour while maintaining community. There is a time and a place for everything, and that too.

Yes, there is a clear need for general rules to prevent harm to minors and innocents and a means for reporting abuse in these areas, but outlawing what humans do naturally in an acceptable way will simply fail. So, allow for the “pocket world”, which only allows a small number of people and cannot be “happened” upon easily in the wider shared world. This can keep highly personal chat and adult content where it belongs, in private. There’s more than one way this can be accomplished. Either through private spaces in the server model limited to a small number of people (this could be tied to a land parcel they own), or through a peer to peer private world solution, which is capable of sustaining a few individuals over a personal internet connection.

I’m sure there’s more, and this post is just a rambling of various points I feel are deeply important if a virtual world is to succeed. I’ll probably rewrite it again as an outline to be ever more clear, but I hope it gets a few salient points across about what virtual worlds need to have going forward.

HAI LL, Rent Us Servers pls, kthxbai

Well, we have the announcement now, and of course some great ideas on the lower end of the pricing scale. Homesteads.

However, Homesteads are still fairly useless for communities, and too expensive. It’s great for individuals though, and LL should sell them to private owners at the new price point directly. I think the pricing as an entry level midsim is fair.

Openspaces unfortunately are destroyed as a useful product for community building, it has not even returned to the old method of anchoring the sims (which was a good idea) and are too restricted to be of use to anyone who needs these sims for activities that require space over prims – such as sailing. Sometimes sailing events can put a heavy load on an open water sim for a short time. The big communities need to be allowed to own their own lag, and allow them to absorb the performance shock of the occasional event.

LL, you know the answer and we know the answer. Start renting whole servers to the large communities. That way we can divide a server up as we need.

Here are my thoughts for a “Community Server” product I propose:

Offer a more reasonable pricing for renting out a whole server aimed for communities – which will make it impossible for the subleasing of Homesteads and single sims to be competitive with. Ideally, set it to the approximate rate that barons on the Mainland get, but extended to a whole server. Around 800 a month tier fees, currently. There is room to wiggle here on the price – but most importantly it must make the subleasing of the Homestead product unviable for land barons.

Restrict these servers to community building – that is, all the sims must be connected to each other, no floating them out on their own. Why communities you ask? Well, communities are the magic ticket to a healthy LindeX. People who rent in communities are more loyal, longer lasting tenants. They spend more inworld, they build content businesses that provide products for others to buy. LL wants to encourage this activity for their bottom line.

ONLY offer this solution to established accounts – set at least a 2-4 full sim minimum before being allowed to rent a full server.

Set a minimum number of full prim sims to be used on the server – at least 1-2 sims have to be full prim.

So the results I aim for are:

Encourage community building, so that we have more content related business over the LindeX.

Solve LL’s performance problems by letting large communities own their lag and deal with it.

Satisfy large land barons while discouraging community unfriendly rental policies.

Be competitive with current and future Opensim offerings, which do threaten the stability of Second Life.

Yes, I Worry.

Linden Lab made a huge error in shifting a large portion of residents into Openspaces, through the initial low pricing and easy availability. Now they risk having a HUGE amount of overcapacity. They killed a big portion of their private and mainland land market and now they are sweeping out their customers who shifted.

Zee’s numbers of 44 percent growth of Openspace I think represented approximately that many customers who simply moved into Openspace and away from full sim living. That’s a hefty amount of people and we’re going to lose a significant number of them.

Mainland is a Boondoggle

Wikipedia on Boondoggles