Cory O on Second Life

Cory Ondrejka also delivered a fascinating session, entitled Building Serious Games MMPS using Second Life.

My notes - again, NOT verbatim, very staccato (me, not Cory, who's a lovely speaker). Should give you a flavour of what he said, and what Second Life is about,which - from this insight - has given me a ton of experimental urges.

Cory Ondrejka
VP of Product Development for Linden Lab
BUILDING SERIOUS GAME MMPS USING SECOND LIFE

First point of note, Cory ran the whole presentation in-game, using Second Life's scripting to create in-game presentation tools... 

 Second Life is a digital world, no evil machines and no cybermage playground. It’s The Metaverse. SL is different from other MMOGs for a number of reasons:

Architecture: It has 700 CPUs, resulting in 44km2 of space being simulated. There are 2000 concurrent players online at the moment of demo’ing. All content is streamed from centralised servers. Everything you see ingame is user-created content. You need to have broadband. Atomistic construction is how you build things in SL. The basic construction atom is a geometric primitive: user-specified into a box, tube, cheese, sphere, etc. The viewer is a very thin and dumb client, streaming from the back end. Everything in the SL world today was built using the tools. A gun example: made of thousands of primitives with scripts and animations attached. Users simulated alien abductions which would happen randomly every few weeks to individual users. They built the aliens. They built the spaceship, the landings, the probes. The “I got abducted by aliens and all I got was this lousy teeshirt” teeshirts. You don’t get this kind of thing by planning. You just put the tools in the hands of the users, and it happens...

 Second Life offers connections with the real world: outbound with email, etc. Users are creating photoblogs with automatically updated pix. Trading sites. Someone made a phone client and people are trading stuff using their phones.

 Last month: 20,000 people using the product. 50,000 distinct items sold. 1million p2p transactions, $2m in internal economy.
Taking part: We’re not a subscription model. Players pay $10 up front, then it's free to take part from there on in. If you want permanence in the world though, you have to own land. We sell land to the users. You can buy as much land as you like. Scaling of needs, from small amounts for more casual players, to entire islands and such for the more dedicated.. 

Community: We found that older people are uniformly more likely to convert to SL. We’re just about equal male-female, unusual for a MMOG. The SL community is a very valuable asset! 

RL skills are translating into skills in this space: estate realtors, you name it. There are 7000 user hours per day spent creating. 3.5 user years per day! Sturgeon’s law says 90% everything is crap. But this scales. Of our 1300 items created daily, we get 130 really good items a day. This is growing too.

 Ownership: SL is different. In SL residents own their creations. Residents own the IP to everything they make. They can sell them for real $. People can make money in SL, that’s OK with us. Our EULA states this. 

Gameplay: There area no traditional RPG elements in SL. You do not level up. People are competitive about the metrics, but is it a game? We ask our community this occasionally, and it’s split about 50-50 either way. So what are people doing?

SL allows users to collaborate and teach each other. Learning scripting: it’s easy, you have immediate feedback, and other people are willing to help. People spread knowledge and do FAQs. SL really encourages this. As an example: skydiving classes, ingame. Players sell lessons and parachutes. Skydiving became a huge fad in SL for a while. Abbot’s Skydiving sells equipment and airplanes to go up in. An elevator to 4000 feet. Total freedom to create. A service.

 Another example of collaborative business: VERTU is a group in RL. They contacted the EFF and wanted to do a fundraise in SL. They raised 1700 bucks. Next month (for Charity X) they did 1900. Then for Hurricane Relief = 2000 US. People in these spaces recognise the virtual currency has value. Philanthropy, giving .. having an impact back on the RL is a real possibility.

Tringo, the current SL fad. A cross between tetris and bingo. Someone in SL wanted a fun social game to play ingame. He created Tringo. In the 3 months since, he’s generated the equivalent of 4000 US in Tringo. He just licensed the realworld distribution rights to Tringo to a mobile game company. Because SL lets him maintain the rights to his IP, he can distribute said rights in the real world, although apparently part of the deal is that he continues to manage the rights individually ingame.

 Virtual Hallucinations. Done by a medical doctor who built a place that looks sort of like a hospital. It plays voices from interviews with schizophrenics as you move around the environment. It recreates hallucinations similar to those experienced by schizophrenics: voices from objects, objects that don’t actually exist. There’s a survey at the end. Did this explain schizophrenia to you? Did you find this disturbing? He got about 700 survey responses (for free) so far. He took real-life doctors and schizophrenics families through.. it’s early prototype work, but it’s a very powerful direction for the game to go in.

 There are university classes in SL. University of Austin. Urban Planning students. If you have a class SL will give you free space and accounts to just let you in. Students almost always add to the world. We’ve had game designers, sociologists, anthropologists, etc. We’ve had a lot of research happening in SL. However we’ve asked researchers to please let us know if people are doing studies ingame to protect our players’ privacies.

 Disabled folk and help groups: Wilde Cunningham / June-marie Mahay. John Lester, founder of Brain Talk Communities, migrated Asperger’s patients and families to SL, where they can experiene a social interaction where they have control. John and June-Marie met ingame and they created Live2Give island. 16 acres of comfortable space, with educational material on cerebral palsy on display, and testimonials from those with CP. They’re trying to reach out to the broader community of sufferers and people who might benefit from these spaces. The group themselves are creating these spaces, we give them the tools.

Like the web, anyone can take part. This is the same, just in 3D.

 So what’s next? We’re starting to have shared collaborative spaces that everyone can have access to. What if you want to do experimentation with a business model? What happens if half the stuff in my store is licensed with Creative Commons? You can try it out ingame.

Collaboration. Realtime interaction in 3D. Can we use this to do distance learning, people ask? Don’t ask me, just go do it, you don’t need permission. Don’t go build a 3d world. Don’t go developing the content. Too pricey! Be lazy – there are worlds and communities waiting to help. 

 Social science research network: www.ssrn.com

TerraNova: http://terranova.blogs.com

http://Secondlife.blogs.com

http://Braintalk.blogs.com/brigadoon

http://Braintalk.blogs.com/live2give

 
Why are you so small?

We spent 11 bucks on advertising? Haha. We want to grow slowly. It’s a nice steady rate. No online world has ever grown like we do. Long gentle growth curve. We’re happy with this. We’re still building our technology.
 
If users can create and upload anything, haven’t you had a lot of legal trouble as a result?

Since we opened up our IP offering, we‘ve had TWO notices to take down, whereas everyone said we’d have thousands. You can upload textures of anything in SL. If you’re going to do user-created content you can’t approve everything that gets created. That does not scale. But if there’s a notice to takedown we comply.

 We have 44km2 of stuff in there. I don’t personally know what’s going on in there, and I never will. The user network will, though. There are groups of users inworld who are very ready for big, interesting projects…

Second Life.

 

Comments

[Jonathan]

It is partly-subscription. If you have land, then as well as paying to buy the land, you also have to pay 'rental'. The more land you own, the more you pay per month.

It's a very interesting place though. In a couple of weeks I pretty much completed an in-game Go game. Now I just have to find someone with land and spare prim allocation who might want to give it a permanent home :)

[Torley]

Alice! Way cool of you to put Cory's presentation up. A lot of insights which I wholeheartedly agree with.

I'm a Resident of Second Life and I have Asperger's Syndrome -- although I'm not on Brigadoon... yet. I have a number of communication difficulties and such offline, but on here, I feel a lot more free to express myself creatively using the tools I'm given. I tend to be an explorer-nomad social type, although I find it strange how I'm in this position (considering what an antisocial isolationist I *should* be, by all accounts).

Well, it's such a thrill to be in SL. 7-day trial (14-day if you go through MMORPG.com I reckon), nice people with mad skillz doing some tastily talented things, and just a lot of growth and progress on the timeline. I think that's the thing, like having a baby and seeing what your beautiful offspring will grow into (despite the emotional pains and terrible twos and all that over the years -- learning to drive would count too). It's all worth it because of the ultimately fulfilling experiences you get out of it.

And heck, it has a lot of smile factor.

I have a cute peppy blog primarily about SL, the URL's WWW.TORLEY.COM so feel free to check it out if it piques your interest... have a good one. =^_^=

[Alice]

Thanks Torley!
Hey, a little birdie tells me you're somewhat of an in-game celebrity...

A.

[Torley]

*blush*

Are you in SL, Alice? If not, why not? ;) *grins*

[Alice]

Ah, so many games, so little time! I'm currently up to my neck in Jedi trials in SWG and questing in WoW..
I can't put it off much longer though.

[FlipperPA]

Great summary! Thanks so much for posting it. Cory is a very neat guy... in fact, all of the Lindens (employees of Linden Lab, who makes Second Life) are wonderful folks. Feel free to look me up in world when you join, Alice!

Cheers,

-FlipperPA

[RODNEY]

I hate to play online games that costs money! CAN SOMEONE PLZZ GIVE ME A ACCOUNT :D

[csven]

very interesting read. thank you. and there's so much more...

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Game? What game?

Second Life is a collaborative environment and/or a virtual reality. Some people are calling it a MMUVR (spelled: "mover") - a Massive MUltiplayer Virtual Reality. Looking at Second Life as a game is like saying that the Web is for kiddies to write blogs. I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee did any presentations of his way-cool hyperlinking technology in game conferences and had people telling "wow, this hyperlinking stuff does really work well for games!" Yes, back in 1994 I remember playing Tic-tac-toe in HTML, and "early gamers" like myself thought that the technology wouldn't catch, despite being "multiplatform" and "adaptive to several screen sizes", which would be neat for doing games. Some of us were crazy enough to think that you could use HTML for doing serious stuff, like work forms online, to replace paper. Wow, were we laughed at! I remember silly stories of crazy people saying that they could interface with the library computer and have a Web front-end for people "around the world" to search the index. Kid stuff! What a laugh! Kids playing games!...

Well, this is precisely what I feel about Second Life. Just after a few hours of logging in and designing my avatar, I thought, so, where was the "game"? This was listed as a "3D game" at Apple's site. Where is it? I couldn't find it, and was slightly disappointed, so I wandered out to one of the public building sites and tried to do some creative work instead. Perhaps someone would explain to me sooner or later where the "game" was that everybody was talking about.

As you may imagine, that never happened. Sure, there are also lots of games done on the Web nowadays - but do we think of the Web as a "game platform" and tell to friends "I can't join the Web right now, I'm already playing too many games"? Sure, there are lots of games in Second Life as well. Jonathan, for instance, after two weeks or so of being online, designed a Go board from scratch. That certainly qualifies as a "game". There are some more. Some are very entertaining. Some are being ported to other platforms. But does it mean that being online in a virtual reality is "playing a game"?

I think I made my point. In my current line of work, I use SL as a platform for teaching people computer-related skills, have them develop their socializing skills, use it as a free (well, a really cheap) e-learning system with a virtual classroom, where I can do business presentations as well. Some days are hectic, running from meeting to meeting - but the great about it is that I don't physically need to move from my (real world) home. I do work meetings in SL. I have a way to do presentations, distribute flyers, keep records.

And when the work day is over, I go over to my favourite club to chat and dance to some great music, and generally hang around with friends. Sure, it's a wonderful way to "chill out"! I could play some games instead, if I were in the mood. Or visit an old friend for a chat. Or say hi to Torley, look what she's recently discovered in Second Life, and get amazed, as usual. :)

Hmm, the Web does not "give" me that. "Life" in "Second Life" sounds "too real" - after all, we're all humans, and we do similar things in Second Life as we do in this so-called First Life (but is there really a difference?). My "real world" customers, who are beginning to use Second Life as a new tool, certainly don't think like that at all. They just say "oh, so this is the new killer application in the Internet. Way cool. Finally we get a humanized interface, not those silly rectangular things on the desktop that a non-tech can't understand how they work". That's what Second Life is to them - a communication/collaboration tool. That's why they're willing to spend money in training, to get their staff acquainted with a new technology that appeals to them. And, of course, the price tag is incredible low, compared to multi-million dollar e-collaboration or e-learning or e-something tools out there, who work on 2D and on clunky web interfaces...

So to Rodney I can only say: wow, you get all that for US $9,95 (lifetime), and are you complaining? But if you're thinking that you're joining a "online game to play", you're choosing the wrong platform. It's wiser to download some free games from the Internet. There are really amazing ones, some are even 3D.

To Alice I can only say, welcome to a brave new world - but beware of what you may find inside! You'll probably understand it only when it's too late. For me, it was at a time, four weeks after joining Second Life, when I received a copy of Simcity 4 ordered by snail mail, which is still shrink-wrapped somewhere. There is simply no more free time to "play games" any more when you have something much more fascinating than "games" :)

[gdkjones]

I have to say that Cory has done a fabulous job of explaining or at least demystifying Second Life. It is a truly expressive environment for those who are looking for a way to create something unique for everyone to enjoy and it is also a place to play games if that's all you want. The thing is...sooner or later, regardless of how you see or treat the environment, a time will come when you just have to take a step back and say "WOW", where am I?
The potential of SL WILL catch up with you eventually I think, regardless of your original intentions for entering. It simply can't be helped. You WILL join clubs, you WILL meet people you love and equally those you loathe. In that respect it's just like the real world. The difference lies in the fact that you can represent yourself however you see fit through avatar manipulation, which instantly erases the "you're ugly" or "you're fat" syndrome which stops a lot of humans interacting with other humans. The upshot of all this is that people will like or dislike each other based on WHO they are and not what 1st physical impressions have been projected. The list goes on and the plethora of possibilities makes SL an impossible place to rate or judge. It quite simply IS; and that's enough for most people. No dissection is required because none of the why, how, or what's of the real world matter in here. It is truly a world removed and myself, like most SL inhabitants are truly thankful for it.

[Morgaine Dinova]

Gwyneth has summed up the current Second Life perfectly. It's an online virtual world, and whether one considers it an online game or not is more an issue of personal outlook and worldview than anything about SL itself. While the system does have clear technological limits, within those constraints the limit really is (despite the horrible cliche) your own imagination.

That is nothing compared to what's coming though. In addition to Gwyn's very practical use of SL, I look at it also as a precursor to the open metaverse that seems quite likely to emerge in the not too distant future.

Remember the original, closed, proprietary, and very inward-looking AOL that tried to create the impression that its managed environment was the only game in town, and that the Internet was merely a network by which one could reach it? Well, that's a pretty good description of the current Second Life too, except for one very important difference. Linden Labs are most definitely not inward-looking but seem to positively look forward to an open metaverse, whereas AOL of course had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept an open Internet (as did many other large portals).

When that open metaverse does finally materialize, Second Life can be expected to be just one more world that is part of it, although the Lindens obviously hope that theirs will be a major one. Be that as it may, one can certainly get a glimpse of the future by taking a look at SL now. For under $10 for life, that's got to a bargain as tools of clairvoyance go. :)

Morg.

[I'm not affiliated with LL in any way. In fact I give them a pretty hard time pressing for that open future.]

[Harald Korneliussen]

Sounds really cool. Of course, I am happy and have my hands full in my first life ATM, but I think I know someone this will appeal to...

Of course, when I read about a virtual world where everyone can create everything they like, and nothing is real, I have to think of C.S Lewis' description of hell in "The great divorce" :-)

[Jim Gleeson]

I suppose part of the question about what Second Life is can be a question relating to the computer itself, what do you use it for? I would be hard pressed to call it one exclusively without the other. As their are games in real life, there are games in Second Life. There are certainly game-like features to it.

There is a sandbox quality to it, similar to Grand Theft Auto and even Halo. You can shoot people too, if you choose to, but it just seems silly to do it since most people are not out to get you.

Also like first person shooters, there is an inventory you have, but the inventory can go on forever, and it includes some rather novel material as inventory. Your inventory to a great degree is yourself, your animations, scripts, clothes, body skins, are included in this inventory.

You can create things, this is where there is a divergence with traditional games. this is where it becomes more a virtual world. You can own land, get married, chat with whoever you want, buy and sell things, etc.

There is no goal in Second Life. But maybe that too is like real life, there is joy in the journey.

[Still Driving to the Shopping Mall ??]

Second life is more of reality than virtuality. Games are going to be only a small fraction of the virtual experience in the near future. Its like Reality TV to the online experience

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